Black women currently have the highest HIV infection rate of any demographic in America, despite the fact that women don’t transmit HIV to other women; Clay and Damien bluntly laid the blame on closeted, “on-the-low” men who engage in high-risk gay sex, contract HIV and other STDs, then bring those diseases back into the straight dating pool when they sleep with women. They argued this hidden pipeline is the real reason the numbers look the way they do, and extended it to the broader dating scene in places like Rankin County, where the pool is so small and interconnected that one infected person hitting the bars can spread something incurable to dozens of others in months, turning casual hook-up culture into a silent epidemic.