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Sexual Panner Choice in Injecting Drug Users
sexual partners of IOUs and an indication of their variability over
time.
These data indicate that proportional percentage of sexual contact in
Australian IOUs is obtainable. Sexual partners are clustered about
heterosexual contacts, with there being a tendency for male IOUs to
have more IOU heterosexual partners in the data on the last sexual
contact, but this being reversed for IOU status for the second-Iast
sexual contact. This reversaI of IOU status of partner did not occur for
the female respondents, where for both the last and second-Iast sexual
contact, heterosexual partners were more likely to be IOUs. This could
also possibly reflect a greater certainty about regular as opposed to
casual partners. These data suggest that the evidence for female IOUs
being more likely to have IOU sexual partners is supported, but that
the situation is mu ch less stable for male IOUs. Certainly the clear
distinction between male and female IOUs in terms of proportional
percentage of IOU partners which has been made in previous work is
less clear in the second-Iast sexual contact, suggesting again that, at
least in this sample, while there is a tendency for male IOUs to have a
lower proportion of IOU sexual partners than females, the difference
is not of great magnitude. This is supported by the significant
difference between both males and females for last and second-Iast
sexual contact proportional percent ages, which suggests more mixing
of IOU and non-IOU contacts that previous evidence would suggest.
The lack of bisexual contacts being noted by any respondent suggests
that either bisexuality is not coron or is not coronly recognized
or discussed. This has implications for recognition that partners may
have had both same- and opposite-sex partners and suggests that it is
not likely to be considered or suspected. In particular, it is interesting
from an examination of Tables 1 and 2 to note that the sexual
orientation of same-gender sexual contacts has been labelled as
heterosexuaI. This is particularly interesting as it suggests that the
respondents labelled their sexual contacts on a binary classification
system, probably according to the sexual partner's predominant or
previous apparent sexual partners. These data suggest that this
population may not utilize the concept of "bisexual" and consequently
that HIV education campaigns which emphasize risk of bisexual
contact may not have much impact. The concept of "bisexuality" may
have more practical significance to behavioural epidemiologists than
the general population. As bisexual contact may be a major risk for
transmission from the subpopulation with male-to-male contact to
women, this has serious implications for spread of HIV.
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