Many gay men have criticized the CDC’s recommendation because they fear a slippery slope. They point to the history of HIV/AIDS and how government authorities pathologized gay culture—and gay people—as aberrant and shut down bathhouses, including the Everard Baths, which Mayor Ed Koch ordered closed in 1986. As a gay man and a historian of infectious disease, I know about the harm that comes when public policy becomes infused with homophobia. Yet protecting gay men from discrimination and stigmatization today does not require public-health officials to tiptoe around how monkeypox is currently being transmitted. Drawing imprecise historical parallels between Williams’s day and ours—or between HIV and monkeypox—adds confusion to an already contentious public-health crisis, and it makes the straightforward decision to simply refrain from high-risk sex far more politically fraught than it needs to be.

Two years ago, public-health officials urged the public to stay home to stop COVID-19. But some agencies have become so wary about advising sexual abstinence of any sort that they won’t even tell men with symptomatic monkeypox infections to avoid sex for a few weeks until they recover. Officials in New York and elsewhere have suggested, as a harm-reduction measure, that sufferers cover up their lesions during sexual activity. (In many patients, those sores are excruciatingly painful and are in locations that are difficult to cover.)