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Gary Carnivele
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Russian men face 20 years in prison after being accused of gay sex by neighbour’s kids
Two Russian men were arrested after being reported by a neighbour for allegedly having gay sex.
The neighbour made a police report claiming that her young children had seen the two men, Timur, 21, and Daniil, 22, through a window pouring water over each other and “doing something resembling sex”, as reported by Baza.
The two men were detained and prosecuted under the Violent Acts of Sexual Character act. If found guilty they could face anything from 12 to 20 years in prison, as a child under 14 witnessed the alleged sexual act.
However, the mother has since tried to retract her statement.
Timur and Daniil told police that the children misunderstood what they had seen. They explained that they had undressed because they were fixing a burst pipe in the bedroom.
The two men affirmed their heterosexuality and one mentioned they had a girlfriend. According to Baza, when the mother confronted the men they were “very adequate and nice” and now she wants to “make amends”.
She now wants to retract her statement to the police as she “did not expect things to spiral out of control in this way”.
But it may be too late as Timur and Daniil have been sent to a pre-trial detention facility for two months.
Russia is notorious for its hardline, anti-LGBTQ+ laws.
In 2013 Russian president Vladimir Putin signed into effect his notorious ‘gay propaganda’ law banning any “promotion” of “non-traditional sexual relationships” among minors.
The hateful measure has been used to clamp down on LGBTQ+ advocates, prevent kids from accessing inclusive literature and stop minors from watching LGBTQ-themed content on streaming platforms. In July, plans were announced to extend the law to adults.
LGBTQ+ Russians face violence and persecution, with reports of Russia sending gay men who have escaped “gay purges” in Chechnya back to Chechen police.
Supporting LGBTQ rights is good for business and the right thing to do
In communities across the United States, LGBTQ+ people and their families are facing a growing number of significant barriers to equal rights and protections. In 2022 alone, at least 30 states have introduced anti-LGBTQ+ bills, with a majority targeting transgender and non-binary youth, on top of continued anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and bias in various states across the country. Despite progress toward equity and inclusion, the LGBTQ+ community is increasingly struggling for equality and basic human rights.
I’m truly concerned for members of my community, given the impact these actions are having on our mental health and wellbeing. Several of my LGBTQ+ colleagues and colleagues with LGBTQ+ family members have expressed fear for themselves and their children. Some are scared their transgender child will be taken from them and placed in foster care. Others feel they might be personally prosecuted for seeking gender affirming care for their child. Many are worried they’ll need to move to a different state just so they can continue accessing essential forms of health care.
I feel lucky to work for a company that opposes discriminatory actions that could harm our employees, customers, and the communities where we do business, and has equally advanced policies, practices, and benefits to support our LGBTQ+ workforce. It comforts me to know my employer supports a society that serves all Americans, including the LGBTQ+ community. But not everyone has the same assurance when they go to work.
Now more than ever, LGBTQ+ equity and inclusion must be a business imperative. Business leaders must use their voice to condemn the hate, bias, transphobia and homophobia that sadly exist in our communities. We also need businesses to take meaningful and measurable action in promoting and advancing inclusion for the LGBTQ+ community year-round, not just during Pride month. While it starts with inclusive benefits, policies and networks of support, this commitment requires businesses to lead with the values of acceptance and belonging in every decision they make. It’s only then that your LGBTQ+ employees, customers and communities will truly feel included and equal.
Since the first LGBTQ+ Business Resource Group at JPMorgan Chase was created in the 1990s, many, like me, have worked hard to make our company a place where LGBTQ+ employees feel they can be their authentic selves when they come to work. Last year, we strengthened this commitment by creating the Office of LGBT+ Affairs, a full-time, dedicated team focused on advancing equity and inclusion for LGBTQ+ employees, customers, clients, and communities. It’s my sincere hope that we don’t see our efforts slowed down by attempts to threaten the rights of people for who they are, whom they love or how they identify.
Vietnam Adopts Global LGBT Health Standard
Vietnam’s Health Ministry officially confirmed on August 3, 2022, that same-sex attraction and being transgender are not mental health conditions, Human Rights Watch said today. The decision brings Vietnam’s health policy in line with global health and human rights standards.
Vietnam’s new directive states that “the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization (WHO) have confirmed that homosexuality is entirely not an illness, therefore homosexuality cannot be ‘cured’ nor need[s] to be ‘cured’ and cannot be converted in any way.”
“The Vietnamese Health Ministry’s recognition that sexual orientation and gender identity are not illnesses will bring relief to LGBT people and their families across Vietnam,” said Kyle Knight, senior health and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “LGBT people in Vietnam deserve access to health information and services without discrimination, and the Health Ministry’s new directive is a major step in the right direction.”
Vietnam has made some progress on LGBT rights in recent years, Human Rights Watch said. In 2013, the government removed same-sex unions from the list of forbidden relationships, but the update did not allow for legal recognition of same-sex relationships. In 2015, the National Assembly updated the civil code to make it no longer illegal for transgender people to change their first name and legal gender, but the revisions did not create a legal gender recognition procedure.
In 2016, Vietnam, while a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council, voted in favor of a resolution on the need for protection against violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The delegation made a statement of their support before the vote, saying “the reason for Vietnam’s yes vote lay in changes both in domestic as well as international policy with respect to LGBT rights.”
However, as Human Rights Watch documented in a 2020 report, factual misunderstandings and negative stereotypes help fuel human rights abuses against LGBT people in Vietnam. The belief that same-sex attraction is a diagnosable, mental health condition is pervasive in Vietnam. This false belief is rooted in the failure of the government and medical professional associations to effectively communicate that same-sex attraction is a natural variation of human experience.
Researchers have written that Vietnam never officially adopted the initial position of the WHO, which introduced a diagnosis for homosexuality in 1969. Since the homosexuality diagnosis appears to have never officially been on the books in Vietnam, therefore the government never officially removed the diagnosis, as many countries around the world did when the WHO declassified it in 1990. The government’s treatment of homosexuality as deviant behavior, combined with prominent medical figures promoting this view, fueled the widespread belief that same-sex attraction was pathological.
Pervasive myths about homosexuality have an impact on children and youth. “There’s a lot of pressure on kids to be straight,” a school counselor in Hanoi told Human Rights Watch. “It’s constantly referenced that being attracted to someone of the same sex is something that can and should be changed and fixed.”
The anthropologist Natalie Newton wrote in a 2015 article that, “Vietnamese newspaper advice columns have also featured the opinions of medical doctors and psychologists who have written about homosexuality as a disease of the body, a genetic disorder, hormonal imbalance, or mental illness.”
International health bodies and a growing number of national health authorities and health professional associations around the world have issued policies to affirm that sexual orientation and gender identity are not illnesses, as well as LGBT nondiscrimination policies. These include Thailand’s Public Health Ministry, which stated in 2002 that “persons loving the same sex are not considered mentally abnormal or in any way ill.” National health professional associations in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and India have affirmed that position and supported nondiscriminatory health rights for LGBT people.
The Health Ministry issued the following instructions for all medical centers across Vietnam:
- Enhance information propagation and dissemination so that the medical doctors, staff, and patients at medical examination and treatment centers have a correct understanding about homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender people.
- While administering medical examination or treatment for LGBT patients, health workers need to ensure gender equality and respect to avoid discrimination and prejudices against these groups.
- Don’t consider homosexuality, bisexuality, and being transgender an illness.
- Don’t interfere nor force treatment upon these groups of patients, if any, it must be in the form of psychological assistance and performed only by those who understand sexual identity.
- Enhance internal review and inspection efforts for medical examination and treatment centers and practitioners to ensure compliance with the professional codes in medical services according to the law.
The directive follows a civil society-run petition that garnered more than 76,000 signatures and a letterfrom the WHO’s Vietnam office confirming that the “WHO firmly holds the view that any effort to convert the sexual orientation of a non-heterosexual person lacks medical justification and is morally unacceptable.”
“Vietnam now joins the growing number of governments around the world affirming that same-sex attraction and gender identity are both natural variations of human experience,” Knight said. “Vietnam’s Health Ministry has boosted fundamental rights with this directive, and LGBT people now have increasingly firm grounding for expressing themselves without fear of negative reactions.”
Gay & bi men reduce sexual partners to fight monkeypox exposure
The spread of monkeypox is causing men who have sex with men (MSM) to reduce their numbers of sexual partners, according to survey results released this week by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC’s survey found that 48 percent of respondents had reduced their number of sexual partners, 50 had reduced their number of one-night stands, and 49 percent reduced the amount of sex they had with men that they’d met through hookup apps, The Hill reported.
The publication noted that local public health officials have been hesitant to suggest that people practice sexual abstinence as a key approach to avoiding possible exposure, noting that the strategy may be ineffective even though the federal government championed it during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s.
There are just over 15,000 cases of monkeypox in the U.S. as of Monday, according to the CDC. However, infectious disease experts think this number is likely an undercount. President Joe Biden declared a national state of emergency for monkeypox in early August. The World Health Organization (WHO) also declared monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in late July.
Both the New England Journal of Medicine and WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus have said that the epidemic has mostly spread amongst MSM. Accordingly, the Biden administration has rolled out pop-up vaccination sites at queer events like Atlanta Pride and New Orleans’ Southern Decadence.
However, one report suggested that the high case numbers among MSM may have to do with the fact that queer men seek medical treatment more often than heterosexual individuals.
The recent increase in cases nationwide has revealed the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have enough vaccine doses available to meet public demand. To help stretch the current reserve, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved the vaccine to be administered intradermally — that is, into the skin’s superficial layers — rather than through its usual subcutaneous method which injects the vaccine into the fat and connective tissues between the skin and muscular layers.
The intradermal method could stretch the nation’s vaccine supply fivefold and has been found to be effective when vaccinating against rabies and polio.
However, some LGBTQ individuals have criticized the government for what they say is an inadequate response to the outbreak.
“I’ve been really disappointed in our leaders, especially those who were in office during the onslaught of the AIDS crisis, like President [Joe] Biden and Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi,” nonbinary Queer Eye reality TV star Jonathan Van Ness told USA Today.
“Once again, we’re seeing too little action taken until the situation has ballooned out of control,” they added. “If nothing changes, we’ll continue to experience failures like this response, which has been plagued with too few tests, lack of access to treatments, inadequate vaccine supply, and ambiguous guidance.”
“In many ways, I believe it’s been fueled by homophobia and transphobia,” Ness said. “When an outbreak affects mainly men who have sex with men, some portion of our elected legislators will have no incentive to act… which is obviously messed up because people’s lives are at stake, and there are queer people in all 50 states.”
Families in Need May Receive $500 a Month Through New Relief Program.
| A new guaranteed basic income program is investing in family households to access $500/month for 2 years. This money is unrestricted COVID Disaster Relief and it is not taxable income. Eligibility:PregnantParent/Guardian of a child younger than 6Income at less than 185% of the Federal Poverty LevelImpacted by COVID-19Applications will be available 09/01/2022 online and at these locations: Community Action Partnership Community Baptist Church Corazón Healdsburg Petaluma People Services Center La Luz Center Child Parent Institute River to Coast Children’s Services West County Health Centers Funded by Sonoma County ARPA and the Cities of Santa Rosa, Petaluma, and Healdsburg. More information: yguzman@first5sonomacounty.org 707-200-7924 [Image description: Light blue flyer with a round photo of two adults and two children on the upper left, and the program details summarized above in black text with blue headings. The First 5 Sonoma County and Pathway to Equity logos appear at the bottom. The image on the right above is in English and the image on the left above is in Spanish.] ****** ¡PROXIMAMENTE! Este nuevo programa piloto de asistencia en efectivo está invirtiendo en familias para acceder a $500 mensuales durante los próximos 2 años. Este dinero es ayuda para desastres por COVID sin restricciones y no es ingreso imponible. ElegibilidadEmbarazadxAdultx responsable de un niñx menor de 6 añosIngresos de menos de 185% del Nivel Federal de PobrezaImpactadx por COVID-19Las solicitudes estarán disponibles el 01/09/2022 en línea y en estos lugares: Community Action Partnership Community Baptist Church Corazón Healdsburg Petaluma People Services Center La Luz Center Child Parent Institute River to Coast Children’s Services West County Health Centers Financiado por ARPA del condado de Sonoma, y las ciudades de Santa Rosa, Petaluma y Healdsburg. Más información: yguzman@first5sonomacounty.org 707-200-7924 [Descripción de la imagen: volante azul claro con una foto redonda de dos adultxs y dos niñxs en la parte superior izquierda, y los detalles del programa resumidos arriba en texto negro con encabezados azules. Los logotipos de First 5 Sonoma County y Pathway to Equity aparecen en la parte inferior. La imagen de arriba a la derecha está en inglés y la imagen de arriba a la izquierda está en español.] |
  [En español abajo]First 5 Sonoma County invites families to join a Work Group focused on better serving children and families through a coordinated home visiting system. The Work Group will lead implementation of strategies in one of the two priority areas, which are expanding culturally relevant services to underserved areas, and increasing the home visiting system’s capacity and efficiency. The Work Group will meet online each month, from August or September 2022 until June 2023. Each Work Group will have 9 members. Each home visitor and parent will receive a $1,250 stipend for their participation in the Work Group. Please complete this interest form by Wednesday, August 24th: bit.ly/home-visiting-work-groups [Image description: White text against a purple background reading “Join a First 5 Sonoma County Home Visiting Implementation Work Group!” above purple text against a lime green background in the lower part of the slide containing the link above and response deadline. The image on the right above is in English and the image on the left above is in Spanish.] ******* First 5 Sonoma County invita a las familias a unirse a un grupo colaborativo enfocado en brindar un mejor servicio a lxs niñxs y las familias a través de un sistema coordinado de visitas domiciliarias. El grupo colaborativo liderará la implementación de estrategias en una de las dos áreas prioritarias, que son la expansión de los servicios culturalmente relevantes a áreas desatendidas y el aumento de la capacidad y eficiencia del sistema de visitas domiciliarias. El grupo colaborativo se reunirá en línea todos los meses, desde agosto o septiembre de 2022 hasta junio de 2023. Cada grupo colaborativo tendrá 9 miembros. Cada visitador del hogar y padre recibirá un estipendio de $1,250 por su participación en el grupo colaborativo. Complete este formulario de interés antes del miércoles 24 de agosto:bit.ly/home-visiting-work-groups[Texto blanco sobre un fondo morado que dice “¡Únase a un grupo colaborativo de implementación de visitas domiciliarias de First 5 Sonoma County!” encima del texto morado sobre un fondo verde lima en la parte inferior de la diapositiva que contiene el enlace anterior y el plazo de respuesta. La imagen de arriba a la derecha está en inglés y la imagen de arriba a la izquierda está en español.] |
On Marsha P Johnson’s birthday, remember her true legacy of Black trans joy in resistance
Marsha P Johnson, born 24 August, 1945, holds a special place within the LGBTQ+ community for her larger-than-life spirit and trans rights activism. She was instrumental in the 1969 Stonewall riots which kickstarted the modern fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the US.
Along with Sylvia Rivera, who was also a key part of Stonewall, she established their landmark STAR organisation in 1970 to help homeless trans youth and other marginalised groups in New York City. She also was one of the founding members of the Gay Liberation Front.
Elle Moxley is founder and executive director of the Marsha P Johnson Institute. She say that Johnson has been “claimed by many people” over the years, but ultimately she was person who “belonged to herself… no matter how many people put a saint narrative or a heroic figure around her”.
“Marsha lived homeless for a majority of her life, faced the rejection of her community and was someone who was bigger-than-life,” Moxley told PinkNews.
Despite this, Johnson worked hard to create change during her short life (she was found dead in the Hudson River in 1992, aged 46).
“I think having that kind of impact that she had while she was alive is why we are still saying her name,” Moxley reflected.
“Marsha has been a roadmap to how one can be an activist but also how one can still belong to themselves.
“And there’s a community of Black trans people globally who need to be able to say: ‘Someone else took the journey that I’m currently on, and I have a roadmap’.
The Marsha P Johnson Institute was founded in 2019 to defend and protect Black trans people, in response to the murders of Black trans women. It is abolitionist, seeking “a world free of war, police brutality, and political corruption”. It works to eradicate systemic, community and physical violence, while also uplifting, supporting and empowering the community.
Moxley describes how Marsha P Johnson spent just as much time “in and out of jail and courtrooms as she did at protests”.
She says this part of Johnson’s life is not as widely celebrated, mirroring the experience of Black trans women today.
“We have a lot of work to reconcile around race, class and gender globally,” Moxley says. “The more we can understand the impacts of colonisation globally, and work to provide reparations to all those impacted by bondage and enslavement, we’ll have a different reality.”
Moxley adds that Johnson’s legacy means the the institute is not just fighting “on behalf” of the community, but for themselves, as it is led by Black trans people.
In many ways, Moxley says they are fighting for their ability to live a “fulfilled life”, much as Johnson did.
She says it’s always an honour to mark Johnson’s birthday because she gave herself “permission to be visible, outspoken and honest”.
“We continue to celebrate Black joy because so much of what exists today around the LGBTQ+ community would not be possible had Black joy not been part of the resistance,” Moxley says.
“We’re honoured to be able to celebrate and say ‘happy birthday’ to Marsha, because it gives us the ability to say happy birthday to so many more people, and that’s the bigger picture about Marsha’s legacy and the legacy of Black trans people.
“They were alive. We are alive.”
Moxley adds it is important to embody Marsha’s spirit and legacy year long as society “only expects that Black trans people are supposed to die”.
Sadly, violent deaths within the community are all too frequent and such occurrences have only increased in recent years as an ‘epidemic of violence’ sweeps the nation.
At least 25 trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming people have died by violent means in 2022, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The majority of these were Black trans women.
“We do not know how to honour Black trans people while we’re alive,” Moxley says. “That’s something we wrestle with every single day at the institute.
“What I’m sure many Black trans advocates across the world wrestle with is: I do this on behalf of my desire to be alive and subsequently by default of that, all these people get to benefit from my advocacy – but they do not know how to honour me.
“They do not know how to respect me and how to have grace with me when I’ve perhaps had a bad day or made a bad decision.”
Florida schools announce plan to out LGBTQ+ students in line with Don’t Say Gay law
Sarasota County teachers in west-central Florida must now out their students if they come out as LGBTQ+ to them under new guidance.
The district released new guidance ahead of this school year to align with the state’s Parental Rights in Education bill, known to critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Pupils must now have their parents’ or guardians’ permission to use a different name and pronouns at school, according to a memo sent to teachers and administrators, per Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Students will have to request the change to school staff, who will then notify administrators and school counsellors. When the young person’s parent or guardian gives consent, they must have a meeting with their family, school counsellor and administrator to complete a “Gender Support Plan”.
If they don’t receive permission, the young person will have to be deadnamed and misgendered by staff.
“If a student tells us that (they) are gay/gender questioning/trans, etc, parent must be notified,” the guidance says.
Sarasota County includes 62 schools with more than 42,000 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The new policy is a dizzying shift from the country’s previous view on LGBTQ+ pupils, where schools left it “up to the student, and the student alone, to share her/his/their identity”.
Board members did not vote for the 2018 policy to be scrapped. Instead, district officials say the change was done to comply with the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill and will be under review for several months.
But School Board members are divided about the new policy.
“The change is a win for parents, students, teachers and allows for the integrity of our public education institutions to be restored,” Sarasota school board member Bridget Ziegler told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Ziegler advised that outed students who feel unsafe seek help from district officials that report to the Florida Department of Children and Families.
School Board officials clashed on the new guidelines during a 10 August workshop, with one expressing unease at what little protections schools will now offer queer students.
School Board chair Jane Goodwin said she opposes the new policy.
“We’re at a precipice in not being able to support students as we have done in the past, which I thought was done in a good way, in a kind way, in a thoughtful way, in a way that protected students and kept them safe,” she said in a statement.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1557 on 28 March. The legislation bans public schools from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade, or through the 12th grade if deemed “age-appropriate” by parents and guardians.
The backlash was swift. The White House, Disney, Hollywood celebrities and countless LGBTQ+ campaign groups called out the bill for robbing queer children of their childhoods.
Critics have expressed fears about the vagueness of the bill’s wording, given the state has not issued standards on what exactly is “age-appropriate”.
Since silencing classrooms, Florida has already found a new target, In just days, a ban on trans Floridians using Medicaid, a public health insurance programme for low-income people, to obtain gender-affirming healthcare will come into force.
Judge blocks Utah’s transgender sports ban for being discriminatory
A state judge just issued an injunction against Utah’s new transgender sports ban, allowing transgender student-athletes to continue to participate in school sports.
Third District Judge Keith Kelly ruled on Friday that the state can’t kick transgender girls out of girls’ sports because the new law harms them by taking away educational opportunities and increasing stigma against trans kids.
The ruling comes in a lawsuit brought by the families of three transgender students this past May who argued that the sports ban was “based on unfounded stereotypes, fears, and misconceptions about girls who are transgender. It is not supported by medical or scientific evidence.”
Judge Kelly agreed that they were likely to win their claims and said that the law is causing harm by “singling them out for unfavorable treatment as transgender girls.”
News of the injunction comes just after Utah High School Activities Association (UHSAA) representative David Spatafore said that the organization had been receiving complaints from some parents who argued that a “female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough.”
In one case, the complaints were made by the parents of the second- and third-place finishers in a sport (Spatafore didn’t state the sport or the age group to protect the students’ privacy) against the winner of the event. The UHSAA had to investigate the winner and found that she had always been identified as female in her school records so she was judged to be cisgender.
“The school went back to kindergarten and she’d always been a female,” Spatafore said.
“Quite frankly, this is new ground for us,” he said. “I’m not going to say that we have it down pat, because I have no clue. I don’t think any of us in the office have a clue if we have it down pat. What we want to do is we just want to try to do our job.”
Jenny Roe, a 16-year-old volleyball player, is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. She was diagnosed with gender dysphoria at a young age and received puberty blockers.
She qualified to play school sports under the UHSAA’s previous guidelines but was blocked by the new law.
“My last season playing volleyball was one of the best times of my life. I loved my teammates, felt part of something bigger than myself, and finally had a way to socialize with friends after being cooped up during the pandemic,” she said in a statement. “This law devastated me. I just want to play on a team like any other kid.”
Judge Kelly’s injunction allows transgender girls to participate in girls’ sports “only when it is fair,” which will be determined by a commission created by the state legislature.
Monkeypox: ‘Mounting evidence’ suggests current strain can be sexually transmitted
New research suggests the strain of monkeypox involved in the current global outbreak is predominantly sexually transmitted.
As of Wednesday (17 August), there have been more than 35,000 confirmed cases of monkeypox across 92 countries and territories since the beginning of the outbreak in April 2022, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Most of these are among men who have sex with men.
In the earlier stages of the outbreak, experts insisted there was no evidence that monkeypox was a sexually transmitted virus, and that it was mostly transmitted by skin-to-skin contact, but mounting research is suggesting otherwise.
On Sunday (14 August), Dr Jeffrey Klausner of University of Southern California and Dr Lao-Tzu Allan-Blitz from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard published an essay explaining why they believe the virus is largely sexually transmitted.
‘Mounting evidence’
In their essay, which has been submitted to a scientific journal for publication, the two experts admitted that the issue is still up for debate, but listed several reasons for the “mounting evidence that sexual transmission is the most common mode of transmission” of monkeypox.
It claims people most at risk of contracting monkeypox is the same demographic at risk of contracting other sexually transmitted infections, for example those “attending sex-on-site venues, multiple recent sex partners, and condomless receptive anal intercourse”.
Secondly, studies from the UK, the US, Italy and Spain have documented initial lesions “occurring at the genitalia, rectum, and oropharynx”, indicating that these locations are where the virus first entered the body.
Lastly, research has shown that monkeypox DNA can be detected in bodily fluids like semen and saliva. Last month, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) recommended using condoms for 12 weeks after recovering from monkeypox because of the discovery.
But, the authors add, calling the outbreak a sexually transmitted infection is “double edged.”
“The stigma surrounding sexually transmitted infections in gay men and other sex with men limits healthcare seeking and partner-notification behaviours directly subverting our primary means of outbreak control – namely, early identification and behaviour change in infected individuals.
“Furthermore, such stigma can fuel further homophobia, particularly in areas without human rights protections for individuals who engage in same-sex relationships.
“Conversely, failure to appropriately identify and disseminate to the public the predominant mode of transmission will likely perpetuate behaviours that are driving transmission.”
Other experts have spoken on the topic.
Dr Paul Adamson, an infectious disease specialist at the UCLA School of Medicine, told NBC News: “At this point, I’m not sure we can say it is primarily the sexual transmission and not the skin-to-skin contact that also occurs during sex that is contributing to the most transmission during this current outbreak.
“However, emerging data seems to suggest that monkeypox might be more efficiently transmitted sexually.”
He also suggested that the scientific community may be slow to accept monkeypox as a predominantly sexually transmitted virus because of how it has historically been transmitted in countries where the virus is endemic.
“Historically, the primary mode of transmission of monkeypox was through skin-skin contact, though there might have been some suggestion of sexual transmission in prior outbreaks,” he said.
“It takes some time and additional data to overturn our understanding of transmission.”