SAN FRANCISCO - Jeff Getty flips through his sailboat’s log book, a registry of 300 people he took out on San Francisco’s bay to help them forget, for a moment, they were infected with AIDS. Nearly all of them succumbed in “the first big die-off,” which he somehow survived.

“It’s actually a chronicle of the epidemic,” said Getty, who was infected in 1980, before anyone knew what AIDS was. “Young people today, they don’t have log books of dead people and walls of pictures. They don’t see, and this is the tragedy.”

Like other older gay men who have seen countless friends die in the 20 years since “the gay cancer” was first reported, Getty is furious that infections are again on the rise. With new drugs now extending lives and making the disease appear treatable, too many HIV-positive people are having promiscuous sex, and too many uninfected gays think they’re not at risk.

“I think people just got too giddy. They called HIV potentially curable, and with that language, they minimized the disease,” said Dr. Tom Coates, 55, director of the AIDS Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. He began researching the disease in the early 1980s and later tested HIV-positive himself. “If we’ve learned anything from this disease, it’s that the virus always fools us.”

In San Francisco, where the disease once ravaged the country’s most densely populated gay community, years of progress have been reversed. Recent studies show the rate of new infections has more than doubled in the past four years.

Nationwide, gay and bisexual men now have more HIV infections than any other group, accounting for 40 percent of all new infections and 60 percent of new infections among men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

To Getty, these statistics are outrageous. Getty was infected through unprotected sex at a time when he didn’t have the advantage of knowing there was a disease lurking in the form of sex that could overpower his immune system.

He couldn’t foresee that the handfuls of drugs and injections he now takes every day would leave him with chronic diarrhea, bone marrow failure and so little energy that he can’t climb stairs or sail his boat at age 43.

“If you get HIV-infected now, you don’t have a future. You don’t have the rest of your life, and you shouldn’t think that you will,” said Getty, who began drug therapy in 1995. “People are walking around thinking, ‘Oh I’ll just take a pill a day until I’m an old man and everything will be fine.’ This is not diabetes. I would love to have diabetes. Compared to HIV, diabetes would be a picnic.”

But Getty has always been a fighter, getting thrown in jail for protesting against pharmaceutical companies, throwing a coffin on a hospital lawn to demand organ transplants and even infusing baboon marrow to try to strengthen his immune system.

Within a year after the CDC issued its report on June 5, 1981, that five gay men had come down with a rare case of pneumonia, San Francisco appropriated $490,000 for research, care and prevention - the nation’s first money for AIDS.

“Ask yourself how or why - they didn’t know anything yet. It was a blip,” said Shriver, who tested HIV-positive in 1989. “The only thing I can come up with as an answer to that is that these were our neighbors. These were our friends. These were San Franciscans, for Christ’s sake.”

At the onset of the epidemic, community organizers distributed condoms at gay bars and pushed awareness through posters, fliers and word of mouth. Panic and a sense of hysteria about all the deaths brought changes in sexual behavior - at least for a while.

“Testing, for a lot of gay men, was understood to be the norm. They knew what they were supposed to do as a gay man in San Francisco,” Shriver said. “The community norm now is not to use condoms anymore.”

Vincent Wright, 39, admits he practiced unsafe sex until testing positive four years ago.

“I remember thinking at the time, ‘Well, if it happens, it happens,’” Wright said. “I wasn’t scared. I’m African American, and at the time I don’t think I was working. My future didn’t look that bright, so what’s one more thing?”

Another problem plaguing blacks is that many men who have sex with men do not identify themselves as gay, Wright said. That mentality also increases infections among heterosexual blacks.

Black and Hispanic gay and bisexual men are now the group most at risk, making up 52 percent of infections among men who have sex with men, the CDC reports.

The numbers take Getty back to his sailboat’s log book, where many of the names represent black AIDS patients from Oakland in the early years of the epidemic.

“All these people in this book that died - that I saw and then I heard the memorial service or I heard that they died - these were vital, living human beings,” Getty said. “I’ve been at the end of a terminal illness for my entire adult life, and that really changes the way you think about reality.”