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I’m in a bar in Soho. A message flashes up on the plasma screen on the wall behind me: “Tom, I want to nibble your biltong.” A guy leaning against the banisters makes a show of putting his mobile phone away while making eye contact with a cute blond boy at the bar. Cute blond blushes. Soon, they’re smooching in a corner. How Tom’s biltong fared that night I don’t know, but I can guess.
This is London’s gay scene in a world without Aids. Since treatment for HIV became available in the mid-1990s, Aids has all but evaporated in rich countries. Annual deaths among gay men in Britain have crashed from a peak of over 1,162 in 1994 to just 153 in 2007. “Aids? I’ve never met anyone with Aids,” says Tim, an engineering undergraduate who’s sitting under the plasma screen, nursing a nasty pre-mixed drink. When I ask how many of the guys around us might be infected with HIV, he looks shocked. “That’s not a nice thing to talk about. I don’t know, 4 or 5 per cent?” Actually, the government estimates that around 9 per cent of gay men in London are HIV-infected, against 5 per cent elsewhere. But we’re not looking at all gay men in London. We’re looking at guys in a pick-up bar at 1am on Friday night; I’m probably the only person here who will leave without being propositioned. Many of the men eyeing each other up are in their 30s; they’ve had plenty of time to get infected. My guess is that 25 per cent of the men in this room have HIV, possibly a lot more. In 2006, 2,640 gay men were diagnosed with HIV—making up nearly two thirds of the total diagnoses of HIV infections that were acquired in Britain.
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