Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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The San Francisco Examiner - August 26, 1999
Ilene Lelchuk of the Examiner Staff
Users of the America Online chat room SFM4M - San Francisco Men 4 Men - who logged on Wednesday said they received anti-gay messages filled with profanity and death threats.
"I logged on at 7 a.m,. and rather than have a nervous breakdown, I logged off," said Jay, who declined to give his full name because he feared more harassment.
Jay, a 34-year-old Web page designer in San Francisco, said he forwarded the worst messages to AOL officials.
AOL spokesman Rich D'Amato, who was not aware of the on-screen attacks, said AOL has a Community Action Team that can monitor problems in chat rooms. "Any kind of personal or community-directed harassment would violate AOL's terms of service," D'Amato said.
The flood of anti-gay messages followed publicity surrounding the San Francisco Health Department's attempt to track a disease through cyberspace for the first time.
The department launched its computer-age campaign after a few men tested positive for syphilis and told health officials that they met their last partners in SFM4M.
The Health Department wanted to warn other chat room users about the syphilis cases, but the participants are virtually anonymous and known only by their screen personas. AOL, following its strict privacy policy, declined to release names, phone numbers or addresses without a court order.
So health officials paired with PlanetOut, the largest online service for gays, lesbians and bisexuals. PlanetOut has spent the last three weeks in the chat room warning users about the outbreak.
And their campaign is working, said Jeffrey Klausner, director of the Health Department's sexually transmitted diseases division. The number of men who visit city clinics for testing has doubled.
Eight men who met their recent sex partners in SFM4M tested positive for syphilis. A ninth infected man said he met his partners on an Internet relay chat room, or IRC.
Three of the San Francisco men also reported that they tested HIV positive, Klausner said.
Although the number of cases is small so far, the implications are big. Klausner said a syphilis outbreak could have a major impact on San Francisco's gay community because the disease causes genital sores, which increase the victim's likelihood of contracting and spreading HIV.
In the SFM4M chat room Wednesday, visitors discussed the Health Department's campaign, the resulting publicity and the flood of homophobic on-screen attacks.
"It's kinda sad that (the chat room) has that bad rep now and (the publicity) really makes gay people look like dogs in heat," wrote one man who declined to identify himself.
Tom Rielly, founder of PlanetOut, said that he isn't surprised by the anti-gay messages now hitting the chat room.
"But I don't buy into the argument that because (the public health campaign) might shed an unfavorable light on the gay community that you shouldn't talk about it all," Rielly said.
Among Rielly's critics are David Pasquarelli of Act Up San Francisco, whose group questions whether HIV causes AIDS. Act Up placed an ad last week in the Bay Area Reporter warning that the "syphilis scare is an anti-gay lie" and that a handful of cases doesn't constitute an outbreak.
"Their alarmism is demonizing gay sex . . . ultimately fueling violence against gay men," Pasquarelli said.
But Klausner defended his campaign.
"The role of the Health Department is to use information it has to protect the health of the public," Klausner said. "We weigh very seriously the decisions to issue health alerts to medical providers and to the community at large." Cases of syphilis - a bacterial infection easily treated with antibiotics when detected early - are at an all-time national low. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention targeted the disease for elimination.
In San Francisco, 17 cases of recent infection were reported during the first six months of 1999, compared to 25 cases reported during the same period in 1998.
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