Thank you for a timely call-out of this insidious linking of “monkey pox” and the gay male community. (Shades of Mediaeval Times, should we just throw in the towel now and call ourselves ‘lusty wenches’ and refer to STIs as “the [insert rival nationality here] disease”?)

If there was a time when we did not need another straw on the camel’s back of gay men’s culpability for, it seems, just about everything, this is the time. (It’s a funny old world, isn’t it, when teaching kids about queer sexuality or supporting trans teens in their desire to be their authentic selves is seen as a greater threat than unrestricted access to firearms. But don’t get me started.)

I’ve been piping in my small, shrill voice from my corner for at least a decade now that there would come a time when our North American blindness to the realities of life for queer folx in the wider world would explode in our faces. QAnon, with its surfacing and normalizing of the myth of gay men as predators (“groomers,” that hideous term), and the criminalizing of queer in Poland, Russia, Hungary and the US are the first detonations. I don’t doubt that those of malicious intent will leap on this latest public health crisis and exploit it.

And now back to my corner, to work out exactly how to push back against the ignorant and the media-illiterate using the very things they disdain: facts, common sense and evidence.