…to burn them to a crisp

“The HIV thing is a real danger, to be honest. It's taking his ending to an extreme, yes, but it was still a very real possibility at the time. Will himself likely wouldn't have slept around, as that's not what he was looking for, but there's no accounting for the men he would meet and what their histories would be. People weren't exactly forthcoming about having HIV, if they even knew they had it.”

This is in the context of OP having previously stated that Will meeting up with a guy in a bar has troubling implications because gay bars in the 1980s were invariably anonymous hookup spots (OP tried to soften this by saying that all bars facilitate anonymous hookups), and hooking up anonymously is high-risk behavior for contracting HIV. And OP is invoking so many stereotypes and making so many logical leaps and conflating so many things that I’m not even sure where to start, but I’m going to try:

Because gay bars have generally/historically been sites of casual/anonymous hookups, this particular fictional gay bar (in a TV show season that has offered a very anodyne portrait of gay experiences) is supposed to make the audience think of drunken anonymous hookups. It doesn’t matter that the bar looks like a cute, low-key neighborhood spot, with no scantily clad patrons or lascivious dancing or visibly intoxicated behavior, or that Will clearly knows the guy and could have initially met him anywhere.

If Will goes to a gay bar where dudes are hooking up on the premises (or taking it back to their apartments? Is that bad, too?) with any amount of frequency, then he must be doing the same thing. A gay bar can’t possibly serve people who want to meet casual sex partners and people who just want to drink and hang out.

If Will has casual sex, he can’t meaningfully mitigate the risk of contracting HIV or other STDs by using a condom or engaging in lower-risk sexual activities or getting tested or only sleeping with partners who agree to get tested.

In 1989, gay men in New York City were, as a rule, not aware of their HIV status. Nothing had happened to increase awareness or testing or activism since the early 1980s, even in a location where gay people had more opportunities to be organized and educated than in most places.

Gay men who knew they were positive for HIV, as a rule, concealed it, not just from employers or landlords or other people who had no business knowing and would discriminate against them, but also their sexual partners (also gay men).

Because Will expresses an interest in “dating” rather than “making out” with Mike (his best friend and long-time crush) as a sixteen-year-old in 1987, he would never be interested in something more casual as a young adult meeting lots of new people in a new city.

Everyone with whom Will could have a romantic/sexual relationship in NYC is sexually suspect. There are no young gay men just as inexperienced as himself. There are no guys who have experience but are forthright and responsible (otherwise, they wouldn’t be having sex with more than one person in their lives!). Everyone has had more sex than him and they’re incredibly cavalier about it.

HIV is something you catch from a stranger you meet in a bar, not a boyfriend you meet in a coffee shop.

There are other leaps in logic that are less offensive. (Because Will is shown in a bar, that implies he doesn’t experience romantic fulfillment before age 21, as though he couldn’t have a fake ID or that couldn’t be his second or third or fourth boyfriend as a young adult. Will is shown “leaving his loved ones behind,” as though he’s the only one of his friends to leave for college and his brother’s not in the same city and his mom doesn’t move closer.) And I don’t think OP literally, consciously believes most of these things; instead, their (largely justified) disappointment in the show is leading them to over-egg the pudding and say things that are in truly poor taste. But it strikes me that, within this framework, there’s no satisfactory way to depict Will having a romantic/sexual with anyone he meets as a young adult outside of Hawkins.