Though you make excellent points we should all think about, I could make the counter argument that these ads are doing exactly what public health authorities and HIV/AIDS advocates say is best practice — specifically targeting at risk populations with messages about access to effective treatment and prevention.
Because while it's true that HIV can infect anyone ( viruses don't care), demographics in the United States really matter when it comes to the HIV epidemic.
For example, a straight white woman in the Northeast is vanishingly unlikely to contract HIV even if she has sex with multiple partners every week. The reason is that HIV is not circulating to a significant degree among people she might choose to have sex with.
If we go to the opposite extreme, a black man in Georgia who has sex with multiple partners every week would be vanishingly unlikely to remain free of HIV. That's not a moral judgment or anything to say about sex, it's just the reality that HIV is circulating more among Black men who have sex with men in the Southeast than just about anywhere else.
The current public health strategy to effectively eliminate HIV circulation, which is actually a very reasonable goal and something we could accomplish within the next few years, focuses on targeting at-risk groups with education and treatment, either pre-exposure or post-exposure.
Get at-risk people treated with antiretrovirals so they can't acquire HIV or can't transmit it if they already have it.
If we can do a thorough job of that, we can strangle HIV circulation almost as effectively as with a vaccine. In some major metropolitan areas, we've already largely accomplished that.
Effective education means sex-positive messages, a lesson we've learned well over the decades. When you use the word sodomy, that implies moral judgment, and I'd suggest that really isn't helping.
I'm not saying the people who make Biktarvi are altruistic, but they do seem to be following the spirit of public health guidelines that have been drawn up in cooperation with AIDS advocates and activists, a large percentage of whom are Black and gay.
