The epicenter of AIDS and HIV has moved from the urban centers of New York and San Francisco to southern states like North Carolina and Georgia.

According to the CDC, the 17-state southern region from Texas to Washington D.C. not only has more residents living with HIV and AIDS, it also has the ugly distinction of being the only area in the country with a significant increase in infections (9 percent). And worse, the CDC says the South accounts for 40 percent of people estimated to be living with AIDS and 46 percent of the estimated number of new cases.

How did AIDS migrate from Sodom and Gomorrah to Aunt Pittypat’s porch?

First, the South has the highest concentration of the group most likely to be infected: African-Americans (they now make up 53 percent of all infections nationally). The South also has the highest concentration of another group most likely to be infected: poor people.

But there’s something more. A context that amplifies these and other demographic factors: the Southern culture of politeness and indirectness.

One of the most effective ways to stop the spread of HIV is to know if your potential sex partner has it. Sexual behavior changes dramatically with that knowledge. It’ll either prevent you from having sex with him or her in the first place, or severely limit what risks you’re willing to take.

But unless he volunteers it, the only way to know if your potential sex partner has HIV is to ask. And that’s a question Southerners think is too rude for words.

My ex-boyfriend Brad was born in Kentucky, schooled in Louisiana and a past resident of Georgia. He is now a clinical supervisor for the Center for HIV Educational Studies and Training in the Chelsea area of New York City. Brad agrees, personally and professionally, that the Southern tradition of avoiding difficult conversations has contributed to the South’s rise as the capital of HIV.

When he moved from Atlanta to New York Brad noticed a vivid difference: “Southerners almost never ask or volunteer their HIV status, while New Yorkers won’t shut up about it.”

Unlike Brad, I do not have the privilege of saying I’m from the South, only the honor of saying I live in it. I’ve had plenty of chances to move but I’ve stayed for 17 years. I’m too enamored by the southern trait of minding your manners.

I remember my first experience with southern indirectness. I was in a hot, stuffy class waiting for the teacher. I was about to blurt out “I’m hot, somebody open up a window,” when I heard a guy say, “Is anyone else warm? A breeze would certainly be a welcome addition.”

The charm of the euphemism is everywhere in the south. You can’t pour a bourbon around here without spilling it on a euphemism. Where a northerner might ask why you’re so damned angry, a southerner would say, “Who licked the red out of your candy?”

Sometimes the habit of indirectness goes beyond charm into the absurd. Take my friend Durrett. He and his two brothers are gay. Every year they take their boyfriends to Mississippi and have Christmas dinner with their mom. They’ve never come out to her and she’s never asked why they keep bringing guys home instead of girls. Six men, a mom, a meal, and no mention of the obvious. It perfectly captures the paradox of the South: love, warmth and silence.

Unfortunately, silence is the shortest distance between social grease and spreading disease.

Southerners are indirect because they place great value on kindness. They do not believe in offending people and they see being explicit as offensive. There’s a tradition here — if you can’t be kind, be vague.

Problem is, you can’t be vague with a plague. You have to be what Southerners find abhorrent: blunt and direct.

In Gone With The Wind, when Aunt Pittypat is informed the Northern army has entered Georgia, she practically has to be carried into her house. “Yankees in Georgia!” she exclaimed. “However did they get in?!”

Now, as the realization sets in that HIV has invaded the South, its inhabitants are asking the same question. And true to form, they’re being too polite to stop the rising infection rates. The very thing that makes the South worth living in is what’s making so many of its people die. The South, ever mindful of its manners, is killing itself with its own kindness.