I was hoping you were going to mention monkeypox as an example of systemic shaming. As soon as I started hearing about it, I started educating myself as much as possible hoping to leverage my AIDS activist experience in framing communication.

In an Act-Up-like spirit of frankness, I wrote an educational article about what we know so far and what we need to do to protect ourselves. I copied a lot of language and phrasing directly over from how we used to talk about AIDS, while acknowledging that monkeypox is not killing people in North America and Europe and is not likely to.

But two of the major LGBTQ publications who often print my stories declined the monkeypox story. The editors, queer people who aren't old enough to have lived through the AIDS crisis, were focusing on only one piece of the shaming problem, external stigmatization.

Monkeypox is just a virus, they told me. Since it can infect anyone, it would be irresponsible to fuel stigmatization by writing an article targeted at gay men.

They're not wrong about the stigmatization problem, which is at root a shaming problem, and they're not wrong that it really IS up to public health authorities to make vaccines available ... and so on and so forth.

However, they are a little bit wrong to downplay the reality that monkeypox really is concentrated (and almost exclusively) among young gay men who go to certain kinds of circuit parties and big clubs.

So the people most at risk need to be most empowered by education and information. That's what we learned during the AIDS era, and it seems like we're kind of forgetting it already.

The empowering message would be: This is what monkeypox is, this is how you know you're infectious, and this is how you can take measures to stay safe —even in the absence of necessary action by public health authorities.

The shaming message would be: Don't ever go to circuit parties. Don't have sex with guys you meet at big dance clubs. Don't talk about how monkeypox primarily infects young gay men.

Guess which message is predominating right now, even in big LGBTQ publications?

Not the first one.

This isn't perfectly analogous to the shaming in Chicago, but I see similarities.

I also see really difficult challenges because of people outside gay communities who want to impose shame even in the presence of really good, really responsible messaging. That's what my editors were worried about, and again, they're not wrong. Not entirely.