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In terms of what's going on right now with monkeypox, let's say I've not been paying attention,

do you mind giving a sort of brief overview of what's going on and sort of where this assertion

that monkeypox is not a gay disease needs to come in in order to

counteract that. So, you know, as I said, monkeypox is a virus in the pox virus family, just like

smallpox is. And it's largely been confined to rest in Central Africa for many years,

which sporadic outbreaks around the rest of the globe. Over the past few years have been sort of more frequent larger

outbreaks in Nigeria, but never really a real true multi-country outbreak in Europe and

North America and Australia. And what we saw is over the past, over a month or so,

that we've seen, you know, first a few dozen, then a few hundred,

now over 1,000 cases of monkeypox across Europe, North America, Australia,

and I think also some in the Middle East in Israel.

And it's largely followed sort of the

route of transmission through close physical contact. That's how it's transmitted. It's not a sexually

transmitted disease. But it's followed sort of the social and sexual networks of gay men worldwide.

And the reason to say that it's not a gay disease or to raise the issue

of stigma and discrimination and the possibility of physical or verbal violence for people,

because we know what happened when President Trump talked about the China virus, is that real

physical violence was acted out on Asian Americans across the country.

So the reason to bring it up often and early is because we need to deal with this as a public health crisis, but also sort of pull back a little bit and realize that the political

context of infectious disease among gay men is always going to be used as a way to

scapego to us and to denigrate us.

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