Scientists are pretty sure that HIV crossed the species barrier from monkeys to humans sometime in the 1930s in the Congo River Valley —not because somebody had sex with a monkey, which ahem, how to put this delicately?

We know the species of monkey from genetic analysis. We know those monkeys are very small, like the size of large house cats. We also know that penetrating a monkey would not have put someone at risk for contracting the virus. The monkey would have had penetrate a human for transmission risk to become significant. These housecat-size monkeys are not supersimians in the penis department, however. So, well ... forget that idea.

The reality is that lots of people in the Congo River Valley hunted and ate the monkeys, especially during times of crop failure, and the 1930s happened to be a time of particular famine and hunger.

Butchering a monkey to prepare it for cooking would require plunging hands into bloody tissue, a perfect recipe for viral transmission. So scientists presume that's what happened.

But the sex story, which just won't die, is a better way to bash gay men. Sigh.