"Some worry that a condom may signal that they are worried about the other man being infected or even signal that they themselves are infected," he said. He tries to strengthen his patients for situations when they are tempted not to use protection. Werner Becker, who heads one of Germany's largest gay practices. Love, lust and alcohol are the most dangerous obstacles to protection against HIV, according to Dr. I even wonder what my death is going to be like. It is important to recognize that HIV is still a real problem for gay men, in the context that gay men are still getting infected. "And now I ask myself every day how life is going to continue. "When I got the positive result of the second test I was absolutely crushed," he said. He said he was completely unprepared for the bad news that would leave him wondering what he could still achieve in his life. Thomas said he and his partner were faithful and practiced safe sex at first, but stopped after they fell in love. But this topic is not discussed over dinner - no one wants to talk about it." "You meet your friends for a drink after work, and then maybe, you go for dinner. "You know it’s there, and you do think of it, but you don’t talk about it openly," he said. Like Michael, Thomas, who also did not want his last name published, grew up hearing about the dangers of HIV in the media, but unlike older gay men, he never met anyone who was positive - let alone ill with AIDS - and felt it was something that happened to other people. "They think they don’t have to protect themselves because HIV is not an issue. "There are these images in the heads of young gay men that HIV carriers are 35 and older, wearing leather jackets and a beard, and that you don't need to worry about anyone who doesn't fit this cliché," Knoll said. Some 45,000 of the 40 million people living with HIV around the world are German.Ĭhristopher Knoll, a psychologist at Munich's AIDS-Hilfe, an HIV/AIDS support center, said more gay men are being infected because they no longer consider the disease a serious threat. Almost 60 percent of new infections were among homosexual men. There are about 2.2 million children infected with HIV around the worldĪccording to a report from the Robert Koch Institute, the federal government's disease control center, 1,164 Germans were infected in the first half of 2005 with the virus.