or did you miss the part about him calling homosexuals human petri dishes?

The way you phrase that makes it sound way worse than the original, I think you misunderstood him. Here is the relevant part of the text you refer to:

One of my all-time favorites involved a New York City public health official talking about AIDS and homosexuality. He wasn’t saying anything generally verboten – he wasn’t pointing out that homosexual men are nature’s Petri dishes. He said this: the health department had previously estimated the number of homosexual men with AIDS in the Big Apple by doing a survey of the AIDS rate among gay men and then multiplying by someone else’s estimate of the prevalence of homosexuality. He announced that further work indicated that although their estimate of the frequency of AIDS among homosexual men in New York seemed correct, their new estimate of total cases was down by half. One of the (sharper) reporters asked ” So, does this mean that according to your new estimate, there are only half as many gay men in New York as you previously thought?” The hapless health official said “Yes, that would follow. “

He was giving this as an example of an offensive, perhaps even derogatory phrasing of something true (the higher STD rates of homosexuals etc.) that would be forbidden to say and that we would expect someone to get into trouble over. Then he contrasted it with the plain statement based on very hard to dispute reasonable inference that is apparently enough to get someone into trouble. Enough trouble to pressure them into publicly proclaiming something rather absurd.

After a week or so, he had to give a press conference. He said ” I said A. there are only half as many cases as we thought, B. We had the percentage of gay men infected right C. But I never said that there only half as many gay men in New York as previously thought. “

He had been forced to publicly renounce arithmetic.

In general he does not shy away from using controversial examples or poking fun of social norms, he nearly always speaks in similar tone, so this is not a "nasty" setting for homosexuals in particular if that is what you fear. He is quite the jerk when criticizing any position he thinks is wrong. But I'll be honest, it generally makes him a better writer. See this piece for example of his style.