Link to Sex Puts AIDS on Deadly Taboo List

“The whole face of sex needs to change or this is never going to stop,” Jeff Dalton is saying with an urgent, serious tone to his voice, leaning forward to speak his words straight into my face.

Jeff Dalton, computer consultant and step aerobics instructor, a head turner on the streets and in the gym, says he’s had a lot of sex. Women love him, and he loves them back. He’s 27 years old.

“The way it is now, you slip between the sheets, do your thing and then pretend nothing happened,” Jeff says. “Well, a lot happens.”

Like the decidedly unromantic, say the transmission of a virus that kills, say HIV.

Jeff Dalton has it. And chances are excellent that one day he’ll also have full-blown AIDS.

Only now you look at this guy and you think, “Wow.” You see what other women see, the face, the body, the charisma, the laugh. The Magic Johnson thing.

You think that Magic was supposed to destroy the stereotype about people infected with HIV and then you think about why that hasn’t happened.

That will get you angry, and it will get you scared.

It leads you to consider the millions of people who confuse their ignorance about AIDS with some sort of personal vaccine, like the ones who write or call me to say that the perverts brought it on themselves, that God is just doing a little housecleaning, is all.

You think about the others who’ve been carrying around HIV, knowingly and otherwise, and passing it along. They don’t tell because it’s not cool--and because their truth is more terrifying than most.

Denial, the shrinks call it. “Virus denial,” says Jeff.

And then you think about sex.

Too bad about this sex link, really unfortunate. Too bad that we are so hung up about what we coyly call the birds and the bees that we seem willing to die with a smirk of agony on our faces rather than talk straight about sex.

Too bad that mysterious equates with romantic. Too bad that protected sex translates to calculated sex, which comes off as cheap. Too bad that “spur of the moment” can mean Russian roulette.

Jeff Dalton is heterosexual, by the way. So is college student Joe Orellana, who just turned 23, and Tamara Lindley Brown, 32, married and the mother of a 22-month-old son. All of them, gathered at Tamara’s house in Costa Mesa the other day, figure they picked up HIV through sex.

Each of them has gone through his own private torture since, the mind warps and contortions that can paralyze you if you let them, and each of them has come out, smiling mostly, on the other side.

They’ve become close friends and even formed a social group. “Positively Straight,” they call it. About 100 Southern Californians came to their party last fall, most of them HIV positive and most of them straight.

Jeff, Joe and Tamara are talking publicly about all this because too many people are still whispering. Yes, it can be embarrassing, even humiliating. Not many people go around talking about herpes, or syphilis, or venereal warts.

Tell someone you have HIV and they think you’re handing them your sexual history on a sheet. It’s not that way, of course. But with HIV, that’s what people think.

They think that you must be gay, or that you’ve had sex with someone who is, or they think you shoot drugs through dirty needles or walk the streets to turn tricks. Even the so-called innocent victims--the ones whose sexuality isn’t “an issue”--often feel compelled to let people know.

Reality update: The latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, which include cases reported through September of last year, lists heterosexual contact as the third leading cause of AIDS exposure, behind sex between males and intravenous drug use. The gap, while still wide, is narrowing every day.

Among AIDS patients who are between 13 and 25, the ratio of those who contracted the disease heterosexually versus those who picked it up through homosexual sex is one to five. Break that down to teen-agers only, and the ratio is one to two.

Some AIDS activists say that such statistics really shouldn’t matter, that it’s a shame people fixate on how someone’s contracted the virus. They worry about litmus tests that separate the “good” patients from the “bad.”

I do too, but this shame looks to be with us for a while. And the real shame is the one that is killing us.

As long as human sexuality remains a dirty secret, AIDS will continue to claim its victims, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Information is power, even if that information makes us squirm.