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This current pandemic has got me thinking: As a gay man who is too young to have experienced the peak of the AIDS epidemic, I still know that the Reagan administration ignored the crisis and that asking gay men to practice abstinence was an unreasonable request. However, I’ve never understood why so many gay men apparently continued to have open relationships during the peak of the epidemic rather than being safer by seeing only one person at a time. It seems like whenever I watch documentaries or movies about famous gay men who lived through that time period, at least one partner in a relationship contracts HIV, develops AIDS and dies. But no one ever discusses the elephant in the room that if at least one half of couple contracts HIV, the couple most likely wasn’t monogamous. I’m not bringing this up to condemn open relationships. Rather, my objective is to understand why people didn’t change their behavior to minimize risk when they knew HIV/AIDS was a potentially deadly sexually transmitted disease and that having multiple sex partners only increased their chances of contracting the virus. I can’t help but think that many of these gay men would still be alive had they temporarily practiced monogamy. Thoughts?