GMFA likes to pretend that it represents all gay men. But we have long said that in reality the organisation mainly attracts and caters to a small sub-section of the most extreme.
The problem for organisations like this is that their duplicity always ends up being exposed by their own hand.
GMFA surveyed 1,000 readers of its own FS magazine (or as we call it FFS Mag, because that’s we tend to say when we read it). One question was “have you ever got an STI from an unfaithful partner?”. 26% of the men surveyed said yes they had. That is 260 of the total 1,000 respondents.
Consider that for a moment… During their life an incredible 26% of GMFA’s respondents had not only been cheated on but had caught a sexually transmitted infection (STI) as part of that. We wonder what percentage had simply been cheated on?
These are gay men who are involved in an abusive lifestyle and abusive relationships.
GMFA asked which STI the men had caught and here are the answers:
31% – GONORRHOEA
29% – CHLAMYDIA
27% – CRABS
12% – SYPHILIS
10% – GENITAL WARTS
9% – HIV
4% – HERPES
3% – SCABIES
2% – SHIGELLA
1% – HEP A/B/C
1% – HPV
12% caught syphilis. That’s 31.2 men out of the 260 who caught an infection. And remember this was under very specific circumstances: caught from a cheating partner. What percentage of those respondents (and GMFA readers as a whole) have caught syphilis under all other circumstances?
According to figures from Public Health England (PHE), in England in 2016 there were 5,920 syphilis diagnoses. This was a 12% increase on the previous year’s figure (5,281) and a 97% rise on 2012 which saw 3,001 diagnoses.
PHE says the cases were “mostly” associated with transmission in gay and bisexual men, and other men who have sex with men (MSM). So we would guess that at least half of all cases are amongst gay/bi/MSM.
If you reckon that 3% of adult males may be gay/bi/MSM we calculate that as about 635,000 adult men in England with perhaps 3,000 diagnoses of syphilis a year.
Although GMFA respondents could have been infected with syphilis at any point in their life while sexually active, we think that 31.2 incidents out of 1000 respondents just from a cheating partner is an extremely high rate.
Some of us here at Gay Men Against PrEP are ancient and the worst thing we’ve caught in 35-40 years of gay sex with all partners under all circumstances (using condoms of course) is chlamydia and perhaps only one time.
These GMFA stats aren’t “normal”. But perhaps they aren’t surprising from an organisation that is eager to “destigmatise” and remove shame from being an irresponsible disease-spreading “slut” and which has undermined condom use over the last 15 years, leading young men to believe that anything other than bareback anal isn’t proper sex or “intimate”.
Don’t get sucked into the world of these toxic organisations. Or you could well end up being another syphilis or HIV statistic at the hands of an abusive partner.