Interesting. I was in grad school in SF when AIDS hit. One of my favorite classmates, an incredibly handsome young man, was one of the first in the city to die. Everyone in class wondered whether we’d be next because we didn’t know what it was or how it was spread.
The girls in the class were relived when we learned it was spread by gay men.
In Subsaharan Africa is was spread by heterosexual truckers using the prostitutes on their routes.Many practiced anal “sex”. Anal “sex” whether hetero or homo is gonna be better at spreading it than “vanilla” sex.
So your female classmates were not completely out of the woods.