This from the latest New York Times monkeypox update, which notes that “the number of monkeypox cases” reported to the New York City Health Department “has tripled in the last week,” and confirms that “nearly all of them” are in “men who have sex with men.”

Expert disagreement about whether gay men should be asked to cut back on anonymous orgies, or whether they should bang on untroubled by these novel anal pustules,

… peaked when the health department issued an advisory last week suggesting that having sex while infected with monkeypox could be made safer if people avoided kissing and covered their sores. Several officials at the agency were outraged, saying the agency was giving misleading and even dangerous health advice, according to several epidemiologists within the department and a review of internal emails.

The advice on safer sex was not medically sound, said Dr. Don Weiss, the director of surveillance for the department’s Bureau of Communicable Disease, in an interview. He believes the department should advise those at risk of monkeypox to temporarily reduce their number of partners, saying, “We’re not telling people what they have to do to be safe.”

Alas, the good Dr. Weiss is but one voice, and as such he is no match for the towering idiocy of the public health establishment.

[T]he agency in a statement Monday argued against such an approach. “For decades, the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community has had their sex lives dissected, prescribed, and proscribed in myriad ways, mostly by heterosexual and cis people,” the statement said.

The city’s response to monkeypox is grounded in the science and history of “how poorly abstinence-only guidance has historically performed,” the statement said, “with this disgraceful legacy in mind.”

I get that I’ve made this point about four times now, and I’m sorry to be monotonous, but it’s such an outrage, I am going to type it all over again:

These very same public health assholes criminalised going outside and closed playgrounds and did everything in their power to dissect, prescribe and proscribe not just the sex lives, but the entire social existence, of millions and millions of people. But now the mere suggestion that promiscuous gay men knock their promiscuity down a few notches, to reduce the prevalence of uncomfortable buttrashes in their own community, is somehow beyond the pale? I still think we haven’t properly internalised, how extreme and crazy mass containment was. New York City could outright criminalise anal sex and remain well within the precedent established by lockdown insanity.

[S]ome epidemiologists say an aggressive response now — while transmission is predominantly limited to gay and bisexual men — could prevent the virus from becoming endemic in New York or reaching a broader swath of the population.

Some public health experts say that many gay men are likely to reject advice that could be seen as discouraging or stigmatizing gay sex. These experts say that such advice shifts blame onto gay men for the outbreak and could lead them to view public health authorities with distrust.

What about not mere advice, but legislation, which directly forbids and stigmatises not only gay sex, but the everyday social interactions that are a crucial part of being human? Why is that totally fine, if we can’t even ask gay men to take elementary precautions?

“Telling people not to have sex or not to have multiple sex partners or not to have anonymous sex is just a no-go, and it’s not going to work,” said a longtime AIDS activist, Charles King, who is chief executive of Housing Works, which provides housing and social services to the homeless and those affected by H.I.V.

“People are still going to have sex, and they’re going to have it even if it comes with great risk,” he said.

The chances that our longtime AIDS activist and homeless shelter administrator also bitterly opposed lockdowns are roughly zero, I’d say.

But there may be a middle ground, some experts said, noting that urging people to temporarily reduce their number of sexual partners or avoid sex parties where they might have multiple partners is not the same as a message of abstinence or monogamy.

“Name the risk factors and behaviors and give people options,” said Dr. Dustin Duncan, a epidemiologist of infectious diseases among sexual and gender minority groups at Columbia University.

He offered an example: telling people they could reduce their risk of getting monkeypox by “having one consistent casual partner as opposed to multiple people” seemed a reasonable message at the moment, he said.

That sounds extremely sensible. In fact it sounds just like March 2020, when all of our governments outlined the known risks of SARS-2 infection and let everybody make their own decisions, and when instead of closing restaurants they advised everyone to stick with their local pubs.

Dr. Weiss said that asking people to change their sexual behavior — even if just for a month or so — was the most potent weapon available right now for reducing monkeypox transmission. … He has at times suggested the Department should promote short-term abstinence, a relatively fringe position. …

“If we had an outbreak associated with bowling, would we not warn people to stop bowling?” he wrote.

Emphasis mine.

We just got through an outbreak “associated with bowling,” and shutting down bowling – along with schools, offices, restaurants, and everything else – was the first thing we did. Anal sex, though, is more important than all that stuff. Anal sex is the most central rite of the Western democratic liberal order. The GAE doesn’t need your kids in school, the GAE doesn’t need you to pay taxes, the GAE doesn’t even need you to work. Somehow, though, the GAE does need anal sex. Without anal sex, the GAE will shrivel and die.