Oy! It's Thursday morning and I'm at work at UNC's computer help center and I figured, hey, what could be a better time to post my first real blog entry?

I've long resisted the blog movement - but finally my technocrat urges gave way and here I am. I want this to be a blog that's not just my rants and raves about the day-to-day things in my life - though you can be sure to hear bits and pieces of that - but also with some analysis and, hey, why not some thought-provoking material?

Today I'll just start off lite. Eric Rofes just posted an article on Gay.com about the recent rise in unprotected sex and methamphetamine use in gay men accross the nation called "The Condom Backlash". In it, he critiques the public health campaigns of the past 20-30 years or so, and argues that maybe gay men are just so burnt out from all the fear-based education that they've been numbed to its message.

I've thought quite a bit about this lately - what's causing this recent rise in unprotected sex and HIV infections? It's troubling - the number of new infections had been on the dramatic decline since *1996* until 2003. As a gay man who has grown up in the South, I can say that my sex education was clearly not adequete - I learned through my own research on the Internet at a young age.

This might seem to contradict Rofes' message about being inundated with anti-sex sex campaigns - but he's coming from an environment based in San Francisco, not North Carolina. But, still, I'd like to end this first short entry just considering his argument:

We have been "educated" to death. Under the rubric of "safer-sex," and "HIV prevention" we've been told what to do and what not to do, shamed and guilted incessantly. We have been messaged and marketed a million times. We have been directed, instructed, commanded, suggested, harangued and manipulated -- all by people who believe that if you tell people repeatedly what to do or not to do with their sex, they will comply.