If you value your sexual health there are a few places in the country that you might not want to live. Atlanta, Baltimore and Washington DC are a few. All of those cities have insane amounts of people walking around with STDs or HIV/AIDS. If you have to visit any of those places remember that they are all strictly B.Y.O.J (Bring Your Own Jumpoff).

Shannon L. Hader, director of the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration in Washington actually told the Washington Post that her city has a higher AIDS/HIV rate than parts of West Africa. If you think about that, that’s insane. Every day it seems like we are hearing about how much AIDS is ravaging Africa. We even have well known campaigns such as Product (Red) which focuses on bringing money to Africa to fight AIDS. All the while we have cities hear in the states putting up bigger numbers.

So how did Washington and other cities with a largely black population get such high rates? Many people attribute the high number with the number of men living on the “down low”. Appearing to live heterosexual lives while keeping secret homosexual relationships. “Experts” on the down low lifestyle say that many of these men not only have trouble admitting their true lifestyle to friends and family but have trouble admitting it to themselves. Thus they rarely use protection while with men because they don’t want to seem prepared to do something like that because that would be admitting to themselves that they are indeed gay (or bisexual). So to make a long story short they get AIDS from their male partners and then give it to their female partner. Unfortunately sharing does not always mean caring.

I’m not going to site here and say that being gay is wrong or whatever because I feel people should be able to live their lives how they want but the number of HIV/AIDS cases in largely black communities shows that there is some seriously irresponsible behavior going on here.

[MSNBC]