"How do we establish a firm foundation for harm reduction outreach - for bears and for the gay community in general? "

A decade ago, obesity, in my view, was the greatest health challenge facing the bear community. If someone were to ask me to offer my view today, I'd have to say it's HIV/AIDS. And I would give the same answer regarding the overall gay male population. Sounding the alarm is something we all need to be doing.

Sounding the Alarm Again: Bears and AIDS

By: LAWRENCE D. MASS, M.D. in Gay City News

The bear community has provided a needed and appreciated haven for gay men like myself - middle-age and overweight men not inclined to do drugs and not particularly comfortable in other gay subcultural niches, such as the black/white party circuit and the leather world. One bonus of being a bear was that it seemed less AIDS-risky, perhaps because we didn't frequent venues and networks where the greatest spread of HIV was taking place.

In particular, not many of us had exposure to or experience with the recent waves of designer drugs and with crystal, virtually all of whose users are under 30. You just didn't see these drugs in the bear world - at least not early on, before the mixing up of the old guard of bears with younger men, many of them more comfortable in mainstream social scenes as well.

So it never seemed incongruent that bear magazines in the old days didn't feature ads for HIV/AIDS meds the way gay mainstream publications always have. For one thing, the bear zines such as American Bear, for which I wrote my "Bears and Health" column for nearly a decade, featured soft porn - a deal-breaker for pharmaceutical advertisers.

The epidemic, in fact, was never much of a presence in bear consciousness or writings, although bear events have often been AIDS fundraisers . Still, in my columns I did from time to time focus on AIDS, expressing concerns that we bears were deluding ourselves about the risks and prevalence of HIV among us.

More recently, the bear world has begun a healthy conversation about bears who are poz - in published bear profiles and online chatrooms, among other venues. Several prominent gay community bears - such as Andrew Sullivan and Les Wright, an early and consistent historian of the bear community - have been open and self-affirming about being poz themselves.

So what's my beef? Well, the bear world has become a center of circuit party events, and those celebrations, like other circuit parties since their inception, condone (tacitly or otherwise) unsafe sex.

Read the rest on Gay City News.