Kurt, a twenty-four-year-old Arizona man with HPV, lives in the kind of community where everybody knows everybody — a fact that makes dating with a sexually transmitted infection difficult. "Women have been interested in me, but I've just blown them off, even when I've been extremely interested," he says. "These women are always within my circles, and the possibility of people close to me finding out scares me to no end."

So he turned to dating websites that cater specifically to people with STIs. "It gets the monkey off your back right away," he says. "I can feel comfortable getting to know someone and not be thinking, 'How am I going to tell her?"

Problem is, Kurt hasn't experienced this liberation.  He hasn't met anyone he likes through these services, and hasn't had sex — or even a date — in several years.

Dating websites for people with the same STI seem like a natural niche, one that includes PositiveSingles.com, H-Date.com and the genre's warhorse, MPwH.net (Meet People with Herpes), which was founded in 1997 and has more than 70,000 active members. Newcomer PositiveFriends.com has a photo-editing application that allows you to upload photos which obscure your identity, zooming in on just your tattoo or your eyes. Another new site, VDdate.com, feels a bit rickety with its use of outdated terminology like "venereal disease," but its presence reinforces the point: many STI sufferers are opting out of the general singles population and sticking to their own private dating pool.

Or ghetto, depending on who you're talking to. "Creating specific internet-dating sites for persons with STDs tends to perpetuate stigma by separating them from the general population," says Jeffrey D. Klausner, M.D., director of STD Prevention and Control Services at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. "This isolation suggests that those persons are different and not normal, requiring exceptional means to meet other partners."

"Your self-worth is taken the minute you sign up for one of those sites. You're reduced to believing that you're confined to finding a mate afflicted with the same STI as you," says John Jackson, who co-founded the social-networking site Club462.com as an alternative to the dating-by-niche approach; it is openly inclusive of people with STIs. "The reality is that most people will accept you the way you are, once they know you," he adds, citing three cases of negative-positive romance sparked on his site.

This is not always the case. Jackson recalls showing his brother an STI-dating site as an example of what he didn't want to create. His brother's response: "I guess infected skanks need a place to go, too."

We're supposedly living in an era of sexual enlightenment — BDSM has become pedestrian, furries garner yawns. Yet many people with sexually transmitted infections still feel like members of a second-class citizenry. Blame it on our obsession with health and cleanliness: for many people, a significant other with herpes doesn't mesh with the ideal yoga-and-pomegranate lifestyle. Unlike most other illnesses, STIs are regarded as distasteful, even disgraceful.

This, even though STIs are more common than ever. Calling their spread a "hidden epidemic," the CDC estimates there are 18.9 million new infections each year. At least half of the sexually active population will contract HPV at some point; eighty percent of women will have it by age fifty. Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) is at 1.6 million new cases a year: one in five adults, whether they know it or not, has herpes right now. After a precipitous drop, HIV diagnoses have been climbing slightly since 2001. It's estimated that nearly half a million Americans are living with HIV or AIDS.

And these are just the people who know what they've got — viral STIs are sometimes asymptomatic and frequently go undiagnosed. Statistically, your date is more likely to carry a sexually transmitted infection than to share your astrological sign.