I think the creepy man of the year award is going to go Zuriel Roush of Spokane, Washington. Mr. Roush is being charged with sexual assault for knowingly exposing one man to AIDS. The man who called the police on Mr. Roush is married, and now also has AIDS.

According to the Seattle PI, Spokane health officials now believe that up to 80 people may have been exposed to the virus through sexual encounters with Mr. Roush since he was diagnosed last fall.  No one knows for sure yet how many of those partners have been infected or if any of them have unwittingly exposed others to the virus and officials believe that many of the "victims" will stay anonymous because a majority of them did not know or perhaps not even recognize their sexual partners.

Mr. Roush professes to regret his actions, saying, "t's kinda' messed that I didn't tell anyone." Seriously? He may have signed the death sentence (or at the very least life imprisonment) for 80 people and he thinks it is "kinda messed up." I said the same thing when I didn't do the dishes the other day. I'm no psyhologist, but I am willing to say that his behavior seems "kinda" pathological.

For more words from Mr. Roush, please check out the video here. He claims to have met many of his sexual partners "at parties" or online. Health officials claim that he also cruised parks for his partners. In the video, he guesstimates 5-10 partners, but according to the research done by the health department, the number is pushing 80. That is a big discrepancy, folks.

The Spokane health department has some recourse, which is to order a "cease and desist" order to prevent the man from knowingly infecting more people. My question is: unless the guy is behind bars (and maybe even more-so then), how can a "cease and desist" order to stop having sex really be enforced? What is the responsibility of society to protect men from unsafe partners when they themselves are willingly having unprotected sex with strangers? And if society does have a responsibility to prevent this, what should the consequences be? A permanent condom glued to the man's penis would be nice, but of course, would not work in reality.

In his column, Savage Love, Dan Savage often advises HIV positive men to be honest with their partner about their status and encourages them to join HIV positive groups as a way to meet new men for support, relationships, and/or casual sex. I think if the city has a large enough HIV positive population, this really makes sense. However, I am not sure if this would apply to a smaller, and more conservative such as Spokane.