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Young heterosexual men seem to be the most blase about the disease. "Men just can't get it through their skulls that they could have caught AIDS from a woman," says Michael Brown, an AIDS specialist in Long Beach, Calif. "Men have a strong denial going on," comments Mark Saginor, assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCLA. " 'Somebody else will get it, but not me.' Or, 'She's so nice. There is no way she can have it.' "
Some middle-class whites think AIDS only infects gays and poor minority- group members. "People believe that the higher the cover charge at a bar, the less likely they're going to run into AIDS," says Anna Gomez, 29, in South Miami's Parallel Bar. Says Playwright (Torch Song Trilogy) and Gay Activist Harvey Fierstein: "It's very hard for straight people to understand what the hell this is. The ugliness of the disease is that every stranger has it; everyone you like doesn't have it."
Active bisexuals are one route of viral transmission to the female population. In 1984 Free-Lance Writer Alexandra Wolf, 41, met a charming man in Hollywood. "We hit it off really well," she recalls, deciding at the time not to use any sexual precautions because "it's not a risk-free world, and I'm going to take the chance." After four encounters, he confessed he was a bisexual whose previous lover had died from an AIDS-related cancer. Ten months later, tests confirmed that Wolf had the live virus in her bloodstream.
"We see a lot of married men come in this bar," says Jason McCoy, 30, a bartender in an Atlanta gay bar. "They're part of the afternoon cocktail ; crowd. They come in, talk, fool around and then leave. I doubt many of their wives suspect anything at all." Dooley Worth, a leader of a Manhattan discussion group for women exposed to AIDS, says men do not like to admit their bisexuality: "If a relationship is really rotten," she advises the group, "change the assumption that there is another woman. It may be a man." Aurele Samuels, a researcher working with Dorothea Hays, a nursing professor at Adelphi University on a study of wives of bisexual men, believes that to most women "bisexuality is an unacceptable truth." Their soon-to-be published research indicates that 80% of wives of bisexual men in the sample were ignorant of their husbands' gay activity.
The problem of bisexuality is especially poignant in the world of the arts and entertainment, where sexual exoticism in general is more tolerated than in society as a whole. Virtually every arts institution has suffered its losses, and the community is on guard. "Anyone who's dating in the fashion community worries," says a lingerie model with the Ford agency. "You just don't know." Before engaging in sex with a man, she dates him five or six times, and, in an effort to protect herself, asks for a complete sexual history and finally insists that he use a condom. O.J. Elledge, a former National Ballet of Canada dancer who is now a counselor to AIDS victims, has seen a "dramatic change in approach to sexuality" among performers. "There is a lot less playing around. It's not the way it once was." But Ty Granaroli, 27, a heterosexual corps de ballet dancer at American Ballet Theatre observes, "Straights feel very secure. That's a mistake."