The photo of a naked man covered with tattoos flashed onto the screen. Professor Simon Rosser’s hand hovered above the computer mouse.

“Hot or not,” he asked, looking just a little sideways at me.

“Not,” I said. Click.

Up came another. A rear view of muscled butt cheeks. Simon looked at me again, his little gold earing glinting in the fluorescent light of his office.

Professor Simon Rosser

“Hot or not?”

“Hot.”

Up came another picture, the description of which is not fit for a family blog. Again, the sidelong glance, his finger poised to click.

“Hot or not?”

“NOT!” Click.

I swear he was enjoying this. What was a middle-aged heterosexual woman doing looking sexually explicit photos with a middle-aged gay man in the middle of a work day? Oh yeah, that’s right. I’m a reporter. My friend and colleague Connie Nelson, who does the Inside Out home video feature for startribune.com, always starts her snippets by explaining how she’s a huge snoop and her job gets her into some the best houses in town.

Well, I’m a snoop, too, but my job gets me into some different kinds of places altogether. The thing about snooping in new places is that you sometimes learn something about your self. Rosser, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s school of public health, spent an hour or touring me around, Sexpulse, a prototype he’s developing for a new on line HIV intervention web site for gay and bisexual men. Then he turned to me. “You notice,” he said, “you’ve been here just a bit and it’s gotten much easier to talk about sex.”

He was right. It had gotten easier. (It would be easier yet if it was just the computer and me.) And that’s his point. The HIV epidemic that is growing at a rate of 12 percent annually among young gay and bisexual men will never slow down unless we start talking about sex. That’s also true for the rising rates of all sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies.

Back in the 1980’s when HIV/AIDS was at it’s peak there was a saying: “Silence equals death.” It’s just as relevant today.

Dr. Gary Remafedi, an expert on HIV and adolescent health at the university last week said, “we have to confront the realities of human sexuality. Burying our heads in the sand and pretending that people don’t have sex is not the solution.”

To read more about the web site and the growing rates of HV in gay and bisexual men, click here.

 Do you talk about sex? With your kids? With your partner? With your friends?