The announcement in June of rising HIV rates among local gay men should have come as no surprise to Fred Swanson, executive director of Seattle's Gay City Health Project. After all, the bad news had been preceded by six years of similar bad news: Since 1997, rates of STDs such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia had been climbing sharply among local gay men--a sure sign, public health officials warned repeatedly, that HIV rates were also likely on the rise.

As the head of Seattle's only gay men's health organization, Swanson should have heard those warnings. Which makes it rather strange that last week, two months after the rise in gay HIV rates was announced, Swanson's statements to the Seattle Gay News indicate that reports of rising HIV rates came as a surprise to him.

In an article headlined "Is Seattle AIDS Prevention Failing?" the SGN quoted Swanson defending his agency against charges of failure, with Swanson saying, "[HIV] rates all of a sudden, we're finding out, have changed--and this is new information." The implication being that you can't fault Gay City for not combating a problem it didn't know existed.

New information? All of a sudden? The fact that gay HIV rates were almost surely rising had been talked about here for years. Newspapers wrote articles about it. Health officials issued warnings about it. This spring, before those earlier warnings were proved correct, Hunter Handsfield, director of STD control for Public Health--Seattle & King County, told me gay HIV rates were "almost certainly" climbing.

So why did the leader of Gay City seem so surprised? Swanson didn't respond to two requests for comment. But there seems to be two possible answers: Either it's just one more example of bungling among Seattle's gay community-health leadership (another example: David Richart, education director for Seattle's Lifelong AIDS Alliance, told me just before the rising rates were announced that he thought HIV rates were declining). Or perhaps Swanson's story is a cover for something worse than bungling: failure to act in the face of an obvious, growing threat.