Gay Men

While women may have achieved a grim parity with men in contracting the AIDS virus worldwide, experts in the United States remain concerned about the disease's rebound among young gay men. Today's epidemic has not brought the devastation seen in the 1980s and early 1990s, when AIDS cut a swath through the gay community. But health officials and activists say they are alarmed by high rates among gay teen-agers and young adults - some of whom were not alive during the urgent safe-sex campaigns of those days.

LOOKING AT THE NUMBERS, Dr. Emily Erbelding realized she had an outbreak on her hands: 26 cases of syphilis among gay men in Baltimore in the first half of this year. The reports were surprising because overall cases of syphilis in Baltimore had declined drastically due to an aggressive campaign by the city Health Department. In 1997, Baltimore was ranked No. 1 in the country in syphilis cases. Not anymore. But Dr. Erbelding and her boss, Dr. Peter Beilenson, knew that the cluster of cases among gay men could quickly evolve into an epidemic if left unchecked.

BARCELONA, Spain - The vast majority of young gay and bisexual men in the United States who were found to have the AIDS virus in a recent study were unaware of their infection, according to results reported as the 14th International AIDS Conference opened here yesterday. The rates of awareness among minority gay men ages 15 to 29 in the study were staggeringly low. Among those studied, 90 percent of blacks, 70 percent of Hispanics and 60 percent of whites said they did not know they were infected with HIV, the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

On a carefree Sunday night on Eager Street - near a "June 27th is National HIV Testing Day" billboard - a blue sedan pulls over. The driver, who looks like a middle-aged weekend golfer, asks a pedestrian if he could borrow a safety pin. A safety pin? The driver says they put cheap zippers in pants these days, then motions toward his own zipper. He smiles, a smile not seen on any golf course or theater. Male hustling is alive and well in Baltimore. On the 20th anniversary of the start of the AIDS epidemic, hustling apparently hasn't changed.

The resonant grumble of hollow plastic wheels on the pavement of 33rd Street meant Tiwanna Fields was hitting her stride. One arm pumping, the other pushing a tricycle carrying the 19-month-old son of a friend, Fields was hard to miss along the home stretch of yesterday's 14th annual AIDSWalk Maryland in Baltimore. Her T-shirt bore the names of more than two dozen event sponsors. Her voice filled the air as she called to friends ahead. "This walk means so much to me," said the 33-year-old Comcast human resources recruiter, who lost a close friend to the disease.

Twenty years after AIDS began to ravage a gay population that was in the midst of a sexual revolution, researchers are reporting an alarming rise in infections among a new generation of gay men in the United States. They are becoming infected at a rate similar to that seen in the mid-1980s, when the epidemic was reaching its peak and killing thousands, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The trend is highest among young African-American men, who are acquiring the virus at four times the rate seen among gays of all races.

The fearless documentary "Paragraph 175," which screens tomorrow night at the Baltimore Jewish Film Festival, explores gay life in the Third Reich with a unique, sensual rigor. Filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman combine survivor interviews with archival materials, arriving at an audio- visual impressionism that superbly balances tenderness and horror. "Paragraph 175" is named for the part of the German penal code condemning "an unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex, or by humans with animals."

Somewhat disingenuously, a character in "The Broken Hearts Club" remarks that it's about time someone made a film about gay men that treats them as something other than AIDS victims, friends of AIDS victims or best friends to gorgeous women. For that's precisely what this film is, a slice-of-life where being gay is a fact of daily existence, not an excuse for existential dilemmas or grand tragedies. Dennis (Timothy Olyphant), is a West Hollywood photographer whose inseparable group of friends includes the darkly handsome Cole (Dean Cain, Superman on TV's "Lois & Clark")

A 25-year-old Baltimore man who admitted attacking two homosexual men - killing one - because he thought gay men were "evil," was ordered yesterday to spend the rest of his life in prison. Gary William Mick was sentenced in Baltimore Circuit Court to life in prison plus 30 years for attacking a local dentist and murdering Christopher William Jones, 37, a New Jersey man attending a pharmaceutical conference in Baltimore last year. Mick bludgeoned Jones to death at the Admiral Fell Inn in Fells Point.

The story of gay politics in the 1990s has been, in large part, a tiresome Oedipal drama. Parent-ally alienated gays have acted out their unresolved adolescent rebellions in public. It wasn't always so. Once upon a time, the gay rights movement was about rights, not arrested development. As Martin Duberman related in his social history "Stonewall" (1993, Plume, $14.95), the movement began in 1969 when a group of queers in Greenwich Village fought back for the first time as police raided one of their bars, the Stonewall Inn. Before Stonewall, gay life had been a clandestine affair involving constant police harassment and even frequent arrests of bar patrons.