In the end, what matters more than the intellectual debate over how best to bring down rising gay HIV rates is this: which policy gets the public cash to implement its ideas.

Last week, for the first time in its history, Gay City Health Project found out that it will not receive any public HIV prevention money for the next two-year funding cycle, which begins in 2004 and runs through 2005. Instead, more than $2.2 million in federal, state, county, and city funds meant for HIV prevention among local gay men will go to other organizations.

Those organizations--which include Lifelong AIDS Alliance ($700,000), the University of Washington ($300,000), and Seattle Counseling Services ($475,000)--were judged by a panel of local health leaders to have better ideas for combating rising gay HIV rates than Gay City.

Alonzo Plough, director of Public Health-Seattle & King County, says the funding decisions are not a judgment on Gay City, which has recently come under sharp criticism for being too permissive in its approach to gay men's health.

"Every year, it's the quality of the proposals that are on the table compared with each other," Plough says. "These are not statements about an agency's overall reason for being."

That's Plough's spin. But consider the facts: Gay City is the area's largest gay men's health agency. Its stated mission is HIV prevention. Last year it received more than $178,000 in public HIV prevention funds, which accounted for roughly two-fifths of the organization's operating budget. To give such an agency no HIV prevention funds for the next two years is a statement.

The funding proposal submitted by Gay City, according to officials involved, "tried to do too much," and was expensive and vague. It proposed a media campaign, outreach in gay bars, community forums, and curriculum-based group interventions, but it did not explain, for example, what the curriculum in the group interventions would be. In the reasons given for the denial of Gay City's request one hears a strong echo of a criticism raised months ago in The Stranger--that Gay City isn't really pushing the one thing that would be most effective in slowing the spread of HIV: behavior change among sexually risky gay men ["The Immoral Minority," Eli Sanders, June 5].

"In a tight funding environment," says one source familiar with the decision-making process, "[the decision-makers] felt they could not fund interventions without a strong behavior-change component."

Gay City did not respond to a request for comment on the decision.