PARIS, Dec 1 (AFP) - French gay activists who favour safe-sex practices are warning of growing complacency over AIDS among homosexuals, and cite popular "backroom" clubs which offer anonymous sex with multiple partners as a particular source of danger.

Gay militants and health experts have expressed concern at official figures released last month which showed that the fall in the number of deaths from AIDS in France has slowed down markedly, along with a sharp rise in the number of people discovering they are HIV-positive only after AIDS symptoms appear.

"For the past year we've been having to fight against 'relapse' -- the refusal to use condoms -- because we don't want to go again through what happened 10 years ago, when the AIDS epidemic was at its peak," Emmanuelle Cosse, president of the gay rights and AIDS prevention association Act-Up, told AFP.

The association has been vocal in its criticism of the increasingly popular sex-club backrooms that allow visitors to engage in group sex in conditions of anonymity and where protection with condoms is regarded as an optional extra.

Act-up, organisers of a demonstration in central Paris marking World AIDS Day Thursday, has campaigned for condoms to be distributed free to visitors to the backrooms, but with what it regards as limited success.

Moreover the association has been accused by radical groups of "attempting to criminalise homosexuals" with its warnings about the resurgence of contamination by the human immune-deficiency virus (HIV), an Act-Up spokesman said.

Breakaway groups with names like Grenades Sexuelles have called for a boycott of Thursday's Act-Up rally.

The rise of the backrooms, of which there are around 50 in Paris, has highlighted the long-running "pleasure vs. protection" debate around the AIDS issue and the tendency of many gays, particularly young ones, to assume that the fall in the number of AIDS-related deaths through improved medical treatment means that the epidemic has been defeated.

Among the most militant advocates of hedonistic sex is the gay writer Guillaume Dustan, who told the daily Liberation: "The problem with condoms is that it prevents you from having a normal sexuality. ... Act-Up tells us 'You're HIV-positive, you must wear condoms till the day you die.' Well I say no. Sexuality means fusion. We're not going to give it up, we've already got AIDS."

Gerard, an employee of the fashionable backroom Le Depot which receives an average 1,000 visitors a day, told Le Monde: "AIDS doesn't interest anyone any more. There's no information about it. For the younger generation, AIDS is a thing of the past."

But for Cosse such language is totally irresponsible. "We're having to start all over again, explaining to 20-year-olds that you can still catch AIDS and that bare-backing -- unprotected sex -- means taking an incredible risk," she said.

Figures just published by the French Health Watch Institute (InVS) showed that 47 percent of new AIDS cases over the past two years had only learned of their condition once they had fallen ill.

Moreover, in one quarter of the cases, people who knew they were HIV-positive had not bothered to seek medical treatment until symptoms of illness had appeared.

In France up to 120,000 people are believed to be HIV-positive, with between 35,000 and 39,000 having died of AIDS-related diseases since the epidemic erupted in the mid-1980s. The number of deaths per year fell steadily during the 1990s but has begun to stabilise.

The fight against AIDS was slow off the mark in France but the country is now at the average level within Europe, with proportionally more AIDS sufferers than northern countries such as Britain but fewer than Italy, Spain or Switzerland.

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