This Gay Week 11: AIDS Survival, Gen Z Sex, and Queer Politics

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/12/21

Karel Bouley is a trailblazing LGBTQ broadcaster, entertainer, and activist. As half of the first openly gay duo in U.S. drive-time radio, he made history while shaping California law on LGBTQ wrongful death cases. Karel rose to prominence as the #1 talk show host on KFI AM 640 in Los Angeles and KGO AM 810 in San Francisco, later expanding to Free Speech TV and the Karel Cast podcast. His work spans journalism (HuffPost, The Advocate, Billboard), television (CNN, MSNBC), and the music industry. A voting member of NARAS, GALECA, and SAG-AFTRA, Karel now lives and creates in Las Vegas.

Karel Bouley reflects candidly on surviving the AIDS crisis, honouring friends lost to HIV/AIDS while tracking new immunotherapy research and global funding gaps. From Las Vegas, he links U.S. political neglect, including the absence of a World AIDS Day proclamation, to ongoing stigma and Project 2025’s influence. In conversation with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, he ties falling Gen Z sexual activity, AI “lovers,” anti-social media, and conservative backlash to rising loneliness, toxic masculinity, and new “lavender scare” anxieties. Alongside sharp humour, he celebrates queer culture, from bear subcultures to award-winning BDSM biker cinema and UK trans health initiatives that resist erasure.

Karel Bouley: It’s gay week again, with Scott Jacobsen from Canada and Karel here in beautiful Las Vegas, where it was 37 degrees this morning. We’re going to start with AIDS, a subject near and dear to my heart since I survived the crisis. Tomorrow, December 6th, I have a new single, I Dance Because, with 12 remixes—count them. It was written because I have lost so many friends to HIV/AIDS that every time I dance to oldies, I cry because I remember all of those that I have lost.

I was looking up some AIDS info. First of all, we have to remember that AIDS—the United States did not issue a presidential proclamation for World AIDS Day on December 1st, which Madonna has denounced and called reprehensible and ridiculous, as did many people in the world… We have to remember that every two hours in the United States and every 45 minutes globally, somebody still dies of HIV/AIDS. So it is not cured. Protease inhibitors are a significant advancement that are saving lives, but they are not a cure. And PrEP is great, but getting it to people now, with Donald Trump’s cuts, has become more challenging in recent years due to reductions in some federal HIV-prevention funding streams and the end of the national PrEP access program. Again, it is not 100%.

The first big news about AIDS this week was that, for the first time since the inception of World AIDS Day, the United States did not participate in it, once again showing the homophobia and the power of Project 2025 that it has on the White House. It was denounced by many people, including Madonna, as cruel, ridiculous, or unnecessary. But of course, this is a White House that does not care. Meanwhile, the rest of the world did care and does care, and they commemorated those we have lost in Australia by reading the names of those lost.

It was very powerful. They read the names of Australians lost to AIDS. It was a powerful and impactful movement. They did this on their national television; it was not just at some little event. That was very powerful.

There was also news out yesterday from the University of California in San Francisco about long-term HIV control. They are looking into existing immunotherapies and combinations. One of the things that AI is really doing for us is allowing us to take different existing therapies for things that we might have never thought of combining—but AI thinks of it and does—and something comes out of it. We are hoping, again, that this would be a long-term treatment, not a cure. We were hoping for a cure, but this is not a cure.

On December 1st, World AIDS Day, Nature published this trial, which relied on a collaboration with a dozen pharmaceutical companies and other partners in HIV research. They offered a proof-of-concept showing that the approach could work. And that approach combines experimental immunotherapy agents with existing ones. Seven out of ten participants kept the virus at undetectable levels—because that is what we are hoping for in treatments—for at least six months after the trial, which is promising news.

As we know—or maybe you do not know—the problem with HIV therapies is the blood–brain barrier. As with a lot of therapies, we have to cross that barrier because HIV hides out in the organs. They can cleanse the blood of it, but it will still be there in the brain, kidneys, and liver. So they have to make sure they have a drug that can traverse the blood–brain barrier. They think these immunoretrovirals are a good way to do that. We will see where that research goes.

It is promising that, even though Donald Trump has cut so much in AIDS research, global HIV research spending remains substantial, and other countries are still pouring money, resources, and time into it. And they are making advances like this trial, which came out on World AIDS Day, December 1st, from the Department of Medicine at UCSF San Francisco and was presented at the World AIDS Conference in Australia. So that is very, very exciting from the world of AIDS. What’s happening, AI lovers, if you’re one of those students? Well, you know, and this goes to Gen Z, which I feel very sorry for. Are you Gen Z? 

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: No. 

Bouley: Because if you are, I feel sorry for you. No? Okay. So I’m 63 years old. And my song I Dance Because is rooted in when I used to be out all the time, dancing with all of my gay friends in the clubs. And, of course, I got a friend in trouble once when I asked about his body count.

His new boyfriend was with him, and he thought, yeah, but what’s your body count? And I said, well, mine’s triple digits, possibly four digits. And he didn’t want to answer. So we will address the fewer one-night stands and more AI lovers. 

So, I feel sorry for Gen Z as I’m here talking to Scott Jacobsen. He’s talking to me for the Good Men Project, which I really want him to tell us about one day as he traverses the world for his journalistic endeavours. And I’m a little jealous. When I was a journalist, we had no budget to go anywhere except to the coffee room, but he’s in DC as we speak. So you’re not Gen Z, so what are you? Gen Y, Gen X? You’re not Gen X.

Jacobsen: I’m a millennial.

Bouley: You’re a millennial? Jesus, I have shoes older than you. But anyway, they did a survey, and this is a great segue from an AIDS story because when AIDS came around, it was really like the music stopped. Suddenly, those of us who were going out to bathhouses, going home with people whose names we might have gotten before we left the house, maybe not. I can’t tell you how many times I would be like, Oh yeah, that’s the hot guy, what’s his name? Oh, Jack Daniels, I don’t know.

Now, because of the lockdown, two Trump presidencies, because of COVID, monkeypox and everything else, Gen Z is grappling with love, dating, and the bedroom. They’re having fewer one-night stands. They are talking to AI lovers. I don’t know how that even works, but okay. ChatGPT has many things, but it’s not sexy. d politicians, parents, and influencers are all asking about the love lives of Gen Z —and, basically, what they’re getting back in today’s day and age—and this is across the world, by the way, not just the United States—is that young people aren’t having much sex.

And that’s very interesting. Birth rates are declining. So this isn’t just a gay thing. But I will tell you, the notion or the stereotype of the gay man as promiscuous has really died with my generation, Gen X and Baby Boomers, because the new generations—Millennials, Gen Y, Gen Z—they aren’t being hoes. They are really not going out and having as much sex as we did. I feel sorry for them. As George Michael said, sex is natural, sex is good. Not everybody does it, but everybody should.

Not that I’ve had it recently. I’m 63. I don’t want to sleep with a raisin, because that’s what men my age look like to me—little wrinkled-up raisins. And there’s nothing more cliché than a 63-year-old man with a 35-year-old. If I were rich and perhaps Madonna or Cher, yes, I’d be screwing every dancer around. But they’re not. Gen Z is not. And the other thing about Gen Z that’s very interesting is they’re not classifying their sex as gay or straight.

If you parse out some of the details of the article, it shows that they’re a little more fluid with their identification of whom they’re having sex with. Thirty-two percent in 2023 of high schoolers said they had had sex. That is compared to 47 percent in 2013. So back in 2013, almost half of high schoolers had said, Oh yeah, I’ve had sex. And how many of those lied? We don’t know.

But now it’s down to only 32. Less than one-this would be nice news for parents—less than one-third of high schoolers have said they’ve had sex. A survey conducted by the Kinsey Institute in partnership with the sexual wellness brand Lovehoney found that one in four Gen Z adults aged 18 to 24 have not had partnered sex yet. Now I don’t know what they’re saying—partnered—I’m not really sure. Like, how do you have sex without a partner?

So I, you know, I mean—but maybe you could enlighten me on that, Mr. Millennial. How do you have sex without a partner?

Jacobsen: I guess that they mean they’re in some type of—rather than a sense of there has to be a body there, right? There would be a lot more… it would be a logical possibility otherwise. Do you think part of this is tied to social media technologies?

Bouley: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and thank you for bringing that up. In the era of more connections, I read a remarkable article last night about how we are in trouble—we are in big trouble. And it said, Welcome to the age of anti-social media. And the article was about how the more we gravitate toward online life, the less we engage in human interaction.

Yes, you’ve got to have human interaction to have sex. At least my day did. Maybe you can enlighten me about that. But there’s also a lot of angry guys out there. And if you look at the statistics, 18 to 24, one in three Gen Z men, 18 to 24, have reported not having sex, so if 33 percent of men 18 to 24 aren’t having sex, it explains a lot of the upset people on the internet.

And I really don’t want to equate this, but I kind of am. It also explains some of the mass shootings. Because let’s be real: young men—when you’re 18 to 24—you are meant to have sex. Your hormones are raging. And if you’re not having sex, those hormones are going to manifest some other way. And this explains the Andrew Tates of the world. I think it explainsthe toxic masculinity that is out there right now because—

Think now with Gen Z women. Women under 30 are more likely to be in a relationship than men under 30. Amazingly, women under 30 are more likely to be in a relationship than men under 30. I wonder who those women are in relationships with. Maybe other women.

Jacobsen: The speculation has been that they’ve been dating for a while. That’s been widely speculated. One speculation I haven’t heard—I mean, let’s just say one: they’re dating older. Two: they’re dating other women. Three: they could be sharing men.

Bouley: Well, I don’t share my man, so I would. To your point about other women, 20 percent of Gen Z women are Republican, 20 percent of women, and 38 percent of men. However, Gen Z, who identify as LGBTQ, the number between men and women is remarkable: 32 percent of women identify as somewhere on that spectrum, queer, lesbian, bisexual, whatever it might be. Eighteen percent of Gen Z males say that they’re LGBTQ. That’s a large number, by the way. Back in my day, it was like one to two percent. But it’s amazing—the gender gap—that at 32 percent, like one-third of women admit that, yeah, I could be with a woman. Eighteen percent of men in this survey, which I’m reading—this is from The Guardian.

So 63 percent of men under 30 are single. That’s compared with only 34% of women under 30. So you’re right. They’ve got to be dating someone or doing something, because if 63 percent of men and 34 percent of women are single under 30, they’re obviously dating someone. Thirty-one percent of women identify somewhere on the gay spectrum, with only 18 percent of men, which might explain the difference in the relationship gap. Women are more open to relationships with other women than men are to relationships with other men.

Conservative policies lead to the fear of sex. Some women’s sex lives have been adversely affected by recent conservative political triumphs. On social media, the raw emotion of Trump’s election quickly became clear. Talk of a “4B movement,” which I’m not quite sure what that is. I’ll have to look that up. Maybe you know what the 4B movement is. I don’t know.

Jacobsen: There are four B’s in the Korean language that all start with B, and they mean something to the effect of no marriage, no men, no children, no sex, as long as South Korean women.

Bouley: There should be a fifth thing there: no fun. Politics is affecting the sex lives of Gen Z, and particularly conservative politics. Non-monogamy is on the table, but Gen Z does not seem to be taken with it as other generations, which is very interesting. Gen Z is most likely to say they prefer monogamy as a relationship style—23 percent. Boomers: 12 percent. So my generation is a little more open than younger people. I’m not one of those. I can’t do open marriages or open relationships. I dated a bi guy once, and I tried not to get jealous about the women he went with—and I got jealous.

They’re not having—yeah, I did say bye to the bi guy. First-date sex can be a no-no with Gen Z as well, more so than Gen X, Millennials or Boomers. And of course, if you’re a gay man, you have sex before the date because you don’t want to waste a good date on someone you’re not going to get laid by. That’s really the truth. Older gay men—dating is great.

But it appears that younger gay people are opting for a different way. They’re opting for get to know you first and then have sex, which might explain why they’re not having enough sex. Meanwhile, in good entertainment news, there is a movie coming out that I just can’t wait for, because I’m a biker. I’m a motorcyclist. I have been for almost 30 years. It’s called Pillion. Well, the BAFTAs, which are the British Film Awards, have a cousin called the BIFAs. Those are the British Independent Film Academy Awards.

And Pillion, the movie’s name, cleaned up at the BIFAs. It won almost every major award. Alexander Skarsgård, the hunk from True Blood and others, is in the movie, and it’s kind of a comedy, but not really. And it’s about gay bikers into S&M.

Now, how they’re going to release this in polite culture, I don’t know. But they are, and it’s getting huge, huge awards at the British Independent Film Awards. It basically swept in and took everybody by surprise. It won Best Film at the BIFAs in Britain. So that was just really stunning for a film about gay bikers and BDSM.

It’s adapted from the Adam Mars-Jones novel Box Hill. It picked up Best Debut Screenwriter for Harry Lighton, as well as Best Costume, Best Hair, Best Makeup, and Best Film. It’s gotten four-star reviews from The Guardian and from almost every other European media outlet that has reviewed it. And so that’s good news. We have a gay film about gay BDSM, and it’s actually cleaning up. We have yet to see what it will do in America.

America tends to be more prudish, but we’ll see. The last film we had that came out, centring on the gays and creating a huge amount of controversy, was Al Pacino’s Cruising. There is a new Russell Tovey movie out by the way —like Cruising, starring Al Pacino —and it’s also winning awards—another fun piece of news out of Ireland.

So, bears, for those of you who don’t know, are basically gay, hairy men who have not seen Ozempic—who stay away from Ozempic. It appears that Ireland has the world’s highest bear population. So if you want to bear hunting, go to Ireland, according to Grindr. I would not have thought of Ireland. I would have thought maybe some cold nation like Scotland, where the men are bearded and burly. But no, it is Ireland, according to Grindr.

Grindr did an “Unwrapped.” And I know a lot of people are getting theirs. Did you get your music unwrapped? Do you stream the music? How do you listen to music?

Jacobsen: I stream it on Spotify, but I don’t know the unwrapped option. Where does that go?

Bouley: Well, you should be getting it if you’re a Spotify member. They send it to everybody who’s signed up. And it’s basically your year in music—it’s what you listened to. Last year, I listened to 92,000 minutes of music. In the United States, I was among the top 5 percent of listeners for European superstar Emeli Sandé.

Based on anonymous, aggregated user data, the Grindr Unwrapped report for 2025 says there are more bears in Ireland than in any other country. And of course, the bears are a subculture in our culture. It’s really weird how gays split up. There are bear bars and twink bars and pretty boy bars—we call them circuit bars for circuit queens because of the party circuit, the White Party. You know, there’s a party circuit: Provincetown, all of that, P-town. And so bears are actually a subculture, but they have really and truly caught on.

So I guess I have to stop making my joke that bears are just gay men who have given up on hygiene and won’t use Ozempic, because it appears they’re very popular. So, all right, we’ve got a couple more stories to go here from your coffee shop perk. Hold on just a second. That timer is seven minutes and thirty seconds.

Here is something good out of the UK: a free health and wellbeing kit for trans and non-binary people will be launched. So, as we see governments pulling back on supporting trans people, it is so nice to see that in the UK, they’re offering free health and wellbeing kits for trans and non-binary people. Because there’s a war going on with trans people and…

It’s an international war. As we know, in many African nations, they’re killing trans people, outlawing trans people, jailing trans people. So it’s nice that we’re seeing the UK actually saying, no, we are going to help trans people with a health kit—a toolkit created by ANME, A-N-M-E. It focuses on UK-specific health care. Ireland’s health system also lacks trans inclusivity, resources, and funding. So members of the UK Trans Health Care Forum are trying to bring this kit to Ireland as well and other nations, so that trans people can have some resources to help them either transition or help them after they have transitioned. So that’s some good news.

Bouley: So… matches your guess. That’s a second lavender. Have you the dirt? Have you heard the dirt—have you heardthe dirt about Eurovision?

Jacobsen: No.

Bouley: So the gays have claimed Eurovision as our own, because let’s be real, it’s pretty gay. It’s the competition that gave us ABBA. So Ireland and several other nations are not going to compete in Eurovision because Israel is being permitted to compete. Some feel Israel is continuing a genocide against the Palestinian people, and they should suffer some repercussions.

And so Ireland and three other nations have said they’re not going to compete in Eurovision 2026—not because of a stance on LGBTQ issues, but because Israel has been allowed to participate. And they really feel that the biggest violator of human rights right now is, in fact, Israel. And that’s very, very interesting.

Also, Hugh Wallace from Ireland passed away. I met Mr. Wallace. He was a gay presenter there in Ireland, very, very well known. And he passed away. I’m sorry—he was an architect and TV star; let’s not negate what he studied. But he was openly gay, and he passed away, and the tributes from across the UK are pouring in. He did Home of the Year, The Great House Revival, and My Bungalow Bliss. So he was like their Property Brothers here in the United States. And he’s passed away, and the world is outpouring love to him. And that’s another positive story to see, because he was very beloved, and the tributes are showing, with tributes from many countries worldwide. And it’s nice to see that he has, in fact, been so beloved.

I had a Russia story. 

This is under a children’s gaming platform, Roblox. That’s interesting too, because one more context is systematic state policy. And I note that the stuff about using video games as very subtle and easily accepted forms of delivery for various pressures on the end, but on the LGBTQ—this, I think, would be right in line with that in terms of their anti-LGBTQ policy. So I think we saw, of course, some other stories where their model of anti-LBGTQ is being taken into account for other countries that wish to bend this sort of line of threat. It was aligned with their state policy on sexual and gender minorities.

Bouley: Well, you know, Russia’s going rogue. They’re trying to distance themselves from China, which is why Putin is in India. And they’re really trying to become the world’s superpower. And so they’re trying to reduce their reliance on China and other countries. So they’re kind of going rogue. But certainly, they are tripling down on their anti-gay rhetoric. And it is dangerous because it might influence game makers’ decisions. I was playing a game—I used to play games. Are you a gamer?

Jacobsen: Used to be a gamer, but it’s been 20 years now.

Bouley: Yeah, I used to be a gamer. I’m not anymore. But there was a game—and I forget—it was very, very popular. And it was one of those games where you could make choices. Like at the end of a scene, you could choose to go this way, choose to go that way, choose to go with this person or choose to go with that person. There was a scene in the game where your hero goes to a bar. He’s a male hero, and he goes to a bar, and you can choose to go home with another man or another woman. You can choose. And so they built it in the game, where you can choose to go home with the bartender. And I found that it was very cool—and he was hot for a video game.

And I’m just worried that with Russia doing this, game manufacturers who have now been very pro-LBGTQ in, like you say, subtly putting it in their games—not being overly overt but putting it in there in a subtle way—they may decide to pull back because I imagine Russia is a pretty big gaming market. So we’ll see. Or maybe they’ll do two different versions of a game. I don’t know.

But I do know that it’s in line with what Russia is trying to do. In Vladimir Putin’s mind, if you make all these laws, if you stop disseminating information, if you take all the gays off TV, if you take them out of video games—in his mind, then you won’t have any gays. That’s stupid, for lack of a better, more succinct term, but that’s how he thinks. It’s like a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil sort of thing.

If you don’t see it, if you don’t hear about it, if the option’s not there, people won’t be gay. Well, that’s, you know, stupid thinking, but that’s his thinking.

Jacobsen: He’s compared himself—for one of those legacies—to be something like Catherine the Great and Peter the Great. For instance, your president, Donald Trump, is stuck in an early-20th-century tariff mentality when it comes to economics, finance, and global trade. Putin’s probably stuck in the late 19th century in terms of self-perception and what he wants to leave as his legacy. 

Bouley: And not having these people around. Donald Trump is not into anything these days. Dozy Don is not into anything these days. The people around him are leading Dozy Don because all he wants to do these days is sleep. He’s falling asleep. I don’t know if you saw—you were travelling—he fell asleep at the cabinet meeting.

He fell asleep while negotiating peace between the Congo and Rwanda. He was dozing off. So I’ve named him Dozy Don now because he is… So I don’t think he’s paying as much attention to all these things as people think he is. I think it’s the people around him, the evil people like Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller, and, you know, all of these other people that surround him. I don’t know who surrounds Putin to make him so anti-gay.

Because I really—a lot of times I think that the homophobia that nations express does not necessarily come from their leaders. I don’t think Vladimir Putin stays awake at night worrying about gay people, but I think people around him do. And so I think that people who have their ears, you know, tend to tell them how to dictate—like with Trump. Trump was pro-gay at one time. He was fine with gays. He was waving a gay pride flag that said “Gays for Trump.” But he was okay with gays in his first round. Now he’s not, because he found it was financially more advantageous for him to be not.

And I think that’s the way it is with other countries. I think at the moment it’s financially advantageous for the pendulum to be on the anti-gay side. And I believe when it becomes more financially advantageous for them to be on the pro-gay spot, they’ll go wherever the money is. And if Vladimir Putin thought there was a ton of money in accepting gays, he’d hold a pride festival.

Jacobsen: Any final thoughts for this day?

Bouley: No, except you’re in Washington, DC. While you’re there, could you put in a good word for us gays? We could sure use it. Well, I know you’re a staunch advocate and ally, so if you can put in a good word for us, maybe leave a rainbow flag somewhere on your journey—you know, just stick it in the White House inbox or something. But don’t get arrested. You’re from Canada. You’re a white immigrant, so I don’t think ICE will be tackling you, but be careful because you’re not from America.

Jacobsen: No, they were very nice to me this time. I’ve only been interrogated once, and it was for four and a half hours—and that was at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel this summer. 

Bouley: Only once. So I haven’t been interrogated for 4.5 hours by anyone. I was going to bring up that speaking of government, and we only have a minute. Still, there is a lavender scare in America again, and that’s a term that came out of the fifties.

If you watch the show Fellow Travellers with my future husband, Matt Bomer, there was a lavender scare where the government actually sought out gay people and kicked them out of government jobs. They’re doing that again. And so, if you see anyone on your journeys, don’t out them, okay? Because they’re all very afraid for their jobs right now. 

Jacobsen: Yeah, it’s going to be a precarious three years.

Bouley: And that’s this gay week. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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