On May 24, the gay dating app Grindr, in partnership with local health agencies, displayed a monkeypox warning to users across Europe Brooks suggested in the press briefing that similar warnings may soon be coming to US users. On May 23, John Brooks, head of the Epidemiology Research Team in the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention, made an explicit appeal to gay and bisexual men in a news briefing. When this link became clear, health officials responded swiftly. A gay sauna in Madrid may also have been a major transmission site. Many of the men affected seem to have contracted monkeypox at events that were initially reported as “ raves” but were in fact a 10-day gay pride event in the Canary Islands and a five-day fetish festival in Belgium. When news broke that monkeypox appears to be disproportionately affecting gay and bisexual men, Jih-Fei Cheng, associate professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Scripps College, thought: “Here we go again.” For Cheng and many others, the association of an emerging infectious disease with gay and bisexual men starkly recalled the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, in which little was known about the condition beyond its impact on the queer community – an observation that led to its being called “gay cancer” for a time.Īs of May 27, about 300 cases have been reported in the US and Europe, and many countries have reported that all or nearly all of these cases have been in gay and bisexual men. Though the possibility of sexual transmission can’t yet be ruled out, skin-to-skin contact can easily explain infection patterns, said infectious diseases expert Kartik Cherabuddi.It is spread through skin-to-skin contact. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that monkeypox is spread specifically through sex, or through gay sex in particular.As of May 27, about 300 cases have been reported in the US and Europe, and many countries have reported that nearly all of these cases have been in gay and bisexual men.This association recalled the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when what we knew of the condition was limited to its impact on the queer community.When news broke that monkeypox appears to be disproportionately affecting gay and bisexual men, Jih-Fei Cheng, an associate professor at Scripps College, thought, “Here we go again.”.
A section of skin tissue harvested from a monkey infected with monkeypox virus, seen at 50x magnification on day four of rash development in 1968.