I recently took a five-day trip to New York City, which you may remember from the news as the place where all the things happen, or as the setting for the gay prostitution film
Midnight Cowboy.
And during my time in that greatest of cities, my only safety concerns involved getting mugged, a homeless Dustin Hoffman trying to befriend me, and being in the same quadrant of the United States as Gladstone.
Never
once did it occur to me to shield my genitals at all times from a vast miasma of air-borne junk diseases.
What a fool I was.
The linked study has found that a full quarter of NYC residents have Herpes. Not STD’s in general;
just Herpes. They tried to run a study on how many people had Gonorrhea and Crabs, but renting warehouses large enough to accommodate the corresponding bar charts became cost prohibitive.
And so it seems the myth of the chic New York socialite sipping champagne as their limousine deftly navigates a grid of steamy Manhattan streets en route to a penthouse cocktail party has been shattered. Or at least become swollen, red and itchy.
Now all that “I heart New York” merchandise I bought has taken on a seedy, unclean feel, as if I should have worn condoms on my hands while purchasing them. Which is to say, I’m glad I did.
Even my memories of the trip have been tarnished. For example, while in New York we met and hung out with the members of