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When I was in college­ longer ago than I care to admit­ one of the jokes in circulation involved how to form a [fill-in-your-to-be-made-fun-of group] firing squad: "Well, first you stand in a circle..." the punch line went. It's an apt metaphor for how the gay community is handling the barebacking brouhaha.

For anyone who's been in a cave for the last year, barebacking is the trendy term for fucking without a condom. It is increasingly used to refer to unprotected fucking done deliberately, as opposed to an accidental slip-up (though human sexual urges involve such a complex tangle of conscious, unconscious, and semi-conscious motivations that a clear demarcation between the "deliberate" and the "accidental" is a dubious construct). It's become a huge and growing controversy, with gay writers of all political stripes weighing in.

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What is striking about this dialogue, if it can even be called such, is the level of venom and plain inaccuracy involved. Facts, logic, and reason have gone out the window as gay writers who ought to know better shriek in righteous indignation, hurling accusations in all directions. No one side in this debate has had a monopoly on over-the-top rhetoric; the zip-it-up crowd and the sexual liberationists have been equally guilty. I could fill an entire magazine with examples, but as illustrations I'll limit myself to a couple of recent essays by usually level-headed writers.

In the February 4 issue of Boston's Bay Windows, syndicated columnist Mubarak Dahir penned a furious rant about "responsibility," a trait he finds lacking among both men who bareback and AIDS organizations [ASOs] that don't roundly condemn them. Dahir condemns "the nonchalance the study [showing increased rates of unprotected fucking] has received among gay men" and "the atmosphere of self-indulgence that we as gay men have fostered over this issue, largely out of the sense of not wanting to offend some skewed sense of political correctness." He flays an unnamed AIDS organization for attempting to discuss the issue in a non-judgmental way at a recent public meeting. An appalled Dahir reports that an official of this organization said to him, "We simply give our audience the information and let them make their own informed choices."

That an ASO might treat gay men as adults capable of making grown-up decisions is too much for Dahir, who writes in horror: "Huh? It's judgmental to say that unprotected anal sex in the gay community is irresponsible and deadly and should stop? Fine. Call me judgmental. I say it is irresponsible to say anything else."

In fact there are plenty of circumstances where, as best we know, unprotected anal sex is neither irresponsible nor deadly. Though HIV-positive men are sometimes warned to avoid "re-infection" with more virulent or drug-resistant strains, the actual data are far from conclusive. Many reputable scientists believe reinfection happens rarely, if at all. Two HIV-infected men can look at the existing information and quite reasonably decide either to use condoms or not; to label such a decision "irresponsible" is offensive and wrong.

Similarly, a monogamous, HIV-negative couple can thoughtfully and rationally make a similar decision. In a follow-up essay­ devoted mainly to denouncing the "onslaught of hate mail" the previous column provoked­ Dahir lays out the reasons two HIV-negative lovers should stick to safe sex. He makes a good case, but reasonable people can and do make different choices. Why are we in such a hurry to call each other "irresponsible"?

Meanwhile, seemingly inhabiting another planet entirely, is Eric Rofes, author of the recent book Dry Bones Breathe. Where Dahir calls AIDS service organizations irresponsible for refusing to condemn those who have unprotected sex, Rofes­ in a column published a few weeks after Dahir's­ rails against those same groups for being too judgmental. He blasts them for "churning out crisis-based press releases" discussing recent evidence of increased rates of rectal gonorrhea and unprotected fucking. To Rofes, such AIDS service organizations "patronize and defame gay men," "divide gay men into good and bad," and portray young gay men in particular as "dumb" and "self-destructive." Rofes wants so desperately to believe that the recent bad news isn't real that he concocts baldly implausible explanations for it. Maybe those rectal gonorrhea cases are happening among HIV-infected men having sex with each other. Maybe the increase in unprotected fucking is happening because men are calmly assessing the risks in the sorts of situations mentioned above.

But there is a substantial pile of data, including several studies presented at last summer's World AIDS Conference in Geneva, showing that many of those having unsafe sex are doing it with partners of different or unknown HIV status. And last year, Aid Atlanta reported a near-doubling of the percentage of men newly testing HIV-positive at its clinic.

The bad news is indeed real, yet Rofes accuses the ASOs of "willful misreading of epidemiological data." Indeed, he apes Dahir's rush to pin the blame on fellow gays­ in this case the people running those ASOs who have dared to speak the unpleasant truth. They "treat us with contempt," Rofes writes, and yet the only example he provides is an out-of-context quote from one AIDS lobbyist, not a prevention person. The lobbyist had the temerity to say that some gay men have become "cavalier" about AIDS­ a judgment that can be confirmed by reading some of the comments quoted in Rofes's own book or by a trip to almost any sex club.

What Rofes and Dahir share is a rush to blame other gays for whatever they see as wrong, whether it's "irresponsible" non-judgementalism or an invented crisis. But in their hurry to form a circular firing squad, both are missing the big picture.

That some gay men are letting down their guard about HIV­ or are even becoming "cavalier" about it­ doesn't mean they are irresponsible. It means they've been paying attention to the misleading hype they've been fed by the mass media for the last three years. What is occurring is an entirely natural and predictable reaction to being bombarded for years by "Lazarus" stories and the-cure-is-here headlines being touted over and over again by Newsweek, CNN, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

And it's not just the mass media. In January, the San Francisco Department of Public Health ran full-page ads in the local gay press promoting a new program to help people with HIV return to work. The ads divided HIV-infected people into two categories: those who "want to go back to work," and those who "don't want to go back to work." The notion that some people with HIV can't go back to work because they're too sick didn't even rate a mention from the alleged guardians of that city's health.

The gay press, usually a voice of sanity when the mass media lose their way on AIDS, has been of little help. A recent national survey of the gay press showed that from 1996 to 1998, coverage of HIV/AIDS dropped by half, subliminally reinforcing the notion that AIDS is no longer a big deal. Improved treatments have altered the course of the epidemic in ways that are simultaneously obvious and not yet fully understood. It is imperative that the gay community be able to discuss what those changes mean for AIDS prevention in a calm and open-minded way. The first victim of a circular firing squad is rationality­ our greatest lasting resource in combating both HIV transmission and AIDS-related hysteria. Let's work to take better aim. **