Posts Tagged ‘barebacking’
You can always go… Downtown!
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
She is brushing a crimson polish onto her nails with breathtaking speed, all the while trying on pairs of high heels to match her fingers, the color of blood, and yet she still has the presence of mind to patiently answer my questions.
“We ain’t Nero fiddling while Rome burns, hon,” she is saying, puffing on her fingers to quicken the seal. “We are the party here. We’re setting the fire!” The other entertainers in the cramped dressing room hoot in agreement.
She is large, even by drag queen standards, and her make-up is a Technicolor explosion that makes little sense until she reaches for an enormous blond wig that dominates her dressing table. She pulls it over her head — utterly smooth terrain that a receding hairline has laid bare — and is transformed.
“She’s baaack …” she giggles in the mirror. “Betty Lou Overdue is back at ‘cha! Missed you, girl!” She poses and vogues to herself.
“So Betty,” I say, “how long has the club … been so exclusive?”
“Oh, lemme see now …” She grabs her compact and starts to brush her face again, like one of those Victorian paintings that has one masterwork on top of another. “When was it they pretty much announced there weren’t gonna be no cure? Like we didn’t figure out that one on our own. Five years ago? And then, well, things just happen on their own. People figure out their place, I do believe.”
A recorded overture begins outside the room. Applause erupts.
“Take a peek for me, hon?” she asks, and I step through the dressing room doorway, just backstage, and discreetly part velvet curtains. The cabaret room is a mass of men, all talking, drinking, laughing. Cigarette smoke, like London fog, hovers above their heads. They happily anticipate the end of the overture with more drink orders and dashes to the john.
And without exception, according to Ms. Overdue, every one of them is infected with HIV.
“You’re up or down,” Betty Lou had told me sternly, when I had first arrived and brought up the three-lettered term, “so forget the HIV word, hon. If you managed to keep away from it, you’re up. You caught it? You’re down.”
“But what about people who could still get it?” I had asked her. “It’s not as if this is a static thing.”
“Honey, it’s so static my dress sticks to my panty hose. New boys that get it just aren’t sticking to their own, like the nice boys here. They’re all humping, no doubt, but they’re carrying on with each other, you know? Hell, let ‘em be.”
I finished surveying the crowd and returned to the dressing room. “Packing them in, Betty,” I say. “So, tell me more before the show gets going.”
“Like what?” she asks. She samples feather boas from a stack in the corner.
“Condoms?”
At this, a thin black drag queen stops lip syncing to her mirror and leans over in my direction.
“Oh please, darlin’,” she says. “I’ve got more latex in my cheekbones then I’ve seen around here in four years.”
“But what about new strains? Multiple infections?” I look back and forth between them, their faces blank beneath Crayola colors. “Jesus, Betty.”
Betty reaches to an intercom by her table and presses a button. “Larry? Hon, mix that overture into the long version. I need time. Gotta tinkle.”
Groans can be heard among the performers. Betty Lou doesn’t blink.
“Shut up girls,” she says. She fixes her six inch eyelashes in my direction. “Look here, friend. You’re down too, ain’t that right?”
“Yeah,” I respond.
“Then welcome, baby.” Her expression changes and something more severe emerges. “But you cut the pissy propaganda with the ‘multiple’ this and ‘new strains’ that. You think I’m stupid?”
“But it’s downright…”
“Fatalistic?” she shoots back. “Think I don’t know what you wanna push on us? Maybe these men got low self esteem, how ’bout that? Or they’re all freaked from their friends dyin’, you think that might be it, Mr. AIDS know- it-all? Huh?”
“If they were educated about –”
“Like they don’t know. You don’t think they know about mixin’ strains? Like they never heard of the things you’re talking?” She makes an aggressive stab at her face with a powder puff and stands up. “Well baby, you are welcome to tell them that playing around might be — could be, can’t be proven but may be — dangerous. Tell them about the viral soup they’re cookin’, baby. You think it’s dangerous? I think it’s just delicious.” She leans over and wraps her boa around my neck and pulls me close. “And hon,” she purrs into my face, “they can guzzle it from a Snapple bottle for all I care.”
With that, Betty Lou Overdue stalks out of the room and onto the stage. The overture ends and a tribal roar ensues at her entrance. I leave the dressing room and slip into the crowd. The air is moist and thick with smoke and jubilation and body heat.
“Welcome, my babies!” Betty Lou cries, and they respond with more cheers. “Welcome to our sick little show!” An enormous neon sign appears above her, the name of the club, blinking in a gaudy, hypnotic red. “DOWNTOWN,” it says, of course. The cheers are raised another notch. Betty Lou basks in it. “We gonna get down, that right boys? Then let’s get some while the gettin’ is good!” A golden oldie whirls on and she launches into it, two hundred jubilant men at her feet.
I awake.
I roll over and find a dry spot on the sheets, trying to sleep again, feeling haunted by a nightclub. I drift back, and the trumpet strains of an old Petula Clark song reverberate through my head, reminding me of the looking glass through which I’d fallen, inviting me to return.
————–
I wrote this fifteen years ago, but was afraid to publish it online. The whole concept seemed perverse, or at least too bizarre to be taken seriously. But since then, “Serosorting” (HIV positive people seeking sex partners who share their status) entered our lexicon, and has been written and debated, and this story felt… almost quaint in it’s depiction of a serosorting horror show… don’t you agree?
Tags: aids, barebacking, culture, drag, recovery, Recreation, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in Books and Writings, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease | 1 Comment »
HIV Plus Magazine: It’s Just Sex?
Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Sure, you’re HIV-positive, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be having — or don’t deserve to have — the most amazing sex life possible.
This story just hit the stands in HIV Plus Magazine, and I am featured as a profile subject. The writing by Benjamin Ryan is rock solid, and I especially appreciated how sensitive he was about issues of “reclaiming” sexuality after years of drug use.
We (gay men in recovery like me) can get cavalier or just plain giggly when it comes to negotiating a sex life again after getting clean, but in fact it’s a hard and perilous road. “Finances and romances” tend to lead addicts back to drugs again more than anything else, and for those of us who used sex as a side dish to meth, getting our heads screwed back on right ain’t easy.
It’s a thoughtful piece and I hope you’ll check it out.
Tags: barebacking, culture, gay, meth, recovery, Sexuality
Posted in Living with HIV/AIDS, Meth and Recovery, News | No Comments »
Locker 32, your room is ready… to be hosed and sanitized.
Monday, April 26th, 2010
THE LAST TIME I went to the gay baths, some years ago, I stepped in poop. Actually, more like a pile of poop, because it crept up between my toes for a horrific second before I realized what my bare feet had stumbled across.
I made the grim discovery while standing in the private room of another customer there, making small talk. While I had hopes of more meaningful communication, my plan was cut short when I stepped forward and directly into the offending dung heap.
Lurching back and out of the door, I limped quickly in the direction of the wet area, walking on my heel, dirty toes splayed upwards. As I negotiated the crusty terrain of the carpeted hallways, there occurred to me many questions.
Whose poop was that? How did it get there? Should I go back and tell the guy I stepped in it? Did he know there was poop in his room? Was it his poop? Did he want me to step in it? Was it a poop trap?
The episode spoiled whatever momentum my evening may have had. Later, sitting in the lounge area — same men, same towels, but with smoking and less sex — I began doubting my choice of sexual venue.
In most big cities, there exist two options for the baths: the one your friends will confess visiting and is therefore somewhat acceptable, and “that nasty one” on the other side of town, about which they admit no further knowledge.
The choice is simple for me. I generally pick the nasty one faster than you can say “locker 32, your room is ready.”
But sitting there adjusting my towel — it was one of those thin, modestly sized towels made for a kid with a 30-inch waist and the inability to perspire — I realized that, at the very least, bringing flip flops to the place might have been a good idea. It was the kind of planning that escaped me when I responded to such an impulse.
The guys who thoughtfully prepare for their bathhouse visits always impressed me. There they sat in a private room with the door slung open, with their own fake leather sheets on the mattress, a jaunty scarf draped over the bare light bulb, porn playing on their large screen laptop, with perhaps a scented candle flickering seductively on the plywood night table.
It made me hate to enter empty-handed, without bringing a Viagra for the host or a covered dish.
And yes, I know the baths can heighten risk for sexually transmitted diseases, having been an AIDS educator for a number of years. Safety and discretion are key, even if the battle has become a uphill one. “The clap” has become so popular again they should call it “the applause.”
Back in the lounge area, a man entered and paused in front of me, cocking his head back and forth like he was trying to look up my skirt. I pulled the towel across me more securely.
Even in bathhouses, I never exposed myself unless it was time for “The Big Reveal.” I was feeling depressed and a bit surly after my foot incident, so it was most definitely not the time.
“How you doin’ tonight, man?” he asked. You had to give him credit for persistence. I’m sure my feet smelled like poop.
I looked up at him with tired and sarcastic eyes. “I used to design public health campaigns for sleazy queers who go to bathhouses and have ‘multiple partners.’” I made great big quotes in the air with my fingers for emphasis. “Now I’m sitting here in a shredded towel that barely wraps around me, at what? 3 a.m.?”
He shifted his weight away from me and had an expression like he’d just snorted stale poppers. I was undeterred.
“I’ve become my target audience. How depressing is that?”
He looked in either direction, a little helplessly, like waiting for a cop after a traffic accident. Finally he met my impertinent stare. “Well—” he offered, “I do think they, uh, have bigger towels at the front for a dollar more.”
The reasons for my retirement from the baths are many, so let’s just say it doesn’t mix well with my recovery from crystal meth addiction. That, and I always left with athlete’s foot anyway.
For the more adventurous among you, a little advice: should you approach an open room with lighting so dim you can’t make out the occupant inside… trust his judgment.
(This is a revised version of a column that first appeared in The Washington Blade in 2006.)
Tags: aids, barebacking, culture, gay, Sexuality
Posted in Books and Writings, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease | 6 Comments »
Mr. Atlanta Eagle talks leather, crystal meth and HIV.
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
Chandler Bearden’s smile is creeping through the phone during our call. I’ve just suggested that his winning the impressively sexy title of Mr. Atlanta Eagle 2010 might be a boon to his sex life, but he’s laughing it off.
“Just because I won a title doesn’t mean I’ll change my standards when it comes to sex,†he’s saying, in the casually cool voice of a handsome, single 31-year-old who has the world by the tail and doesn’t even know it… yet. But might the hotness level of potential partners, I insist, be rising as well? “Past title holders tell me it’s bad for your sex life,†Chandler demurs, “because there’s so much work to do before Chicago.â€
Ah, Chicago. That would be the International Mr. Leather contest (IML), the annual pilgrimage of outrageously hot, kinky men from around the globe, who descend on the windy city for a long Memorial Day weekend of exhibitions, sexy shenanigans and, of course, the contest itself.
Chicago is the next stop on a journey that began for Chandler in early April, when he strutted in three categories (bar wear, fetish wear, and your basic jock strap) to win the Eagle title. It might be easy to dismiss the event as a pageant with a kinky streak, but the leather community also prides itself on good stewardship in the gay community. The current reigning Mr. IML, Jeffrey Payne, (on left in photo, with Chandler and Mr. Atlanta Eagle 2009, Alan Penrod) founded the SSC Fund, which benefits sexual rights advocates and services for the hearing impaired.
Chandler has an obvious respect for that kind of community involvement, and he doesn’t hesitate when asked about the issues close to him. “I’m an HIV positive man in recovery from crystal meth addiction,†he offers. “I came from the street, literally, and I’ve been clean for three years. I think I can offer my experience, my strength and my hope when it comes to helping others with similar problems.â€
Fair enough. But isn’t much of the leather/fetish scene based on an element of danger, and pushing boundaries? Might that contribute to drug abuse and alcoholism in that community?
“There could be an element of truth to that,†says Chandler. “But I believe it tends to be blown out of proportion. I myself like to find new edges, but I have to be sure I am physically, mentally and spiritually safe throughout the experience.â€
“I’m not an advocate, like, ‘I think people should sober the fuck up.’ But I am saying that safer sex requires sobriety. If you are pushing limits, you need to have your faculties so you don’t cross them. You can’t always make wise decisions when you’re drunk. I’m not at all interested in having sex with people who are high.â€
My own trip to IML in Chicago, years ago, was a lost weekend of drugs and sex, during the worst of my active addiction to meth. Is Chandler ever tempted to tap someone on the shoulder and tell them they’re an addict or alcoholic?
“Not really,†he says. “When people tried to tell me my life was going down the drain, it didn’t work. I had to come to that realization myself. Being the man I am today is enough of an example, for anyone who is looking for one.â€
Chandler is also an advocate of “full HIV disclosure,†and his reasons are personal. He had a longtime sexual partner who never disclosed his HIV positive status and eventually, Chandler believes, infected him.
“I don’t have a preference regarding the status of my partners today,†he says, “because I know what I need to do to stay safe. There are also other diseases out there, so I want to protect myself from them as much as I protect someone else.â€
The fundamental issue, for Chandler, is one of trust. “There must be trust in order for these fetish or leather scenes to happen safely. And each partner must be honest about their boundaries and be able to really communicate that.â€
Was Chandler speaking about the rules of fetish-themed sex, or simply outlining values – trust, honesty, communication – we can all follow for our health and well being, sexual and otherwise?
The question is pointless. For Chandler Bearden, it’s all the same.
Tags: aids, barebacking, culture, gay, hiv, meth, recovery, Sexuality
Posted in Family and Friends, Gay Life, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease | 13 Comments »
Has my AIDS crisis ended?
Sunday, April 18th, 2010
A few weeks ago I spent the day at the Florida AIDS Walk, and it was striking how different it was from the Walks I attended years ago. Smiling faces, racial and ethnic diversity, baby strollers, and most of all a feeling of happiness and celebration. That’s progress, right?
But when I speak of the AIDS “crisis mentality” being over for gay men like me, I’m treated like a heretic. I don’t mean to disrespect those who are suffering, or for the devastation that AIDS clearly continues to wreak on much of the world. But please, hear this: I lived through the 1980′s. I went to weekly funerals and lived in daily, mortal fear for my life. Friends stayed in my guest room on their way to hospice care, or simply died before making it that far. That was a crisis state, my friends, and I’m no longer living in it. The crisis, as I have known it, has passed.
In this episode of the My Fabulous Disease video series, I chat about this post-crisis mentality with Rep. Barney Frank, arguably the most powerful gay man in America. His measured response may surprise you.
The evidence of this perspective among other gay men is everywhere, for better or worse. My friends are more likely to give to the Human Rights Campaign than the local AIDS Walk. HIV tests are a casual, albeit unnerving, clinical habit among HIV negative men. And the choices gay men are making regarding safer sex, barebacking and serosorting suggest they are making those choices out of pragmatism, not mortal fear. Even the illusive HIV bug-chasers of urban legend are fading from consciousness and into the internet ozone.
Certainly we shouldn’t decrease HIV prevention efforts (for those reactionaries ready to take offense at my honest observations). But one thing I learned from my years designing prevention campaigns for gay men: our tolerance for bullshit is pretty low. Prevention advocates can’t keep screaming “the sky is falling!” to gay men for whom HIV/AIDS has become normalized, or at least far less traumatic.
Yes, we must do something about new infection rates among young gay men. I just don’t believe the answer is to play “boo!” with a monster they have lived with for their entire lives. Our young brothers deserve a more intelligent, thoughtful approach than that.
Tags: aids, barebacking, culture, gay, hiv, physician, politics, research, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in Family and Friends, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, Prevention and Policy | 7 Comments »
Choose one: always “safer sex” or always tell your HIV status?
Thursday, April 15th, 2010
Once again, the HIV disclosure debate has heated up among prevention advocates, the media, and front-line sexually active men and women just trying to get laid. It all boils down to this: should sharing your status be morally mandatory, or does having protected sex let an HIV positive sex partner off the hook?
This time, Olympic equestrian Darren Chiacchia finds himself in the center of the controversy, and his liberty hangs in the balance. In late January Chiacchia was arrested by Florida’s Marion County Sheriff’s Office after a former sexual partner accused Chiacchia of exposing him to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Mr. Chiacchia, who pleaded not guilty in February, faces up to 30 years in prison under a Florida law passed in 1997 that makes it a felony for people with HIV to have sexual intercourse without informing their partners of their condition. His trial is scheduled to begin in June, his lawyer said.
Nowhere in the charges does it stipulate that Chiacchia has unprotected sex with his accuser, who has not revealed his own HIV status. What if Chiacchia had always practiced safe sex with the accuser. Would that have been enough?
HIV disclosure laws, which exist in 32 states, are largely born out of ignorance and fear, equating the body fluids of an infected person to a lethal weapon and some even wrongly attributing HIV transmission to saliva (just ask the HIV positive man serving 30 years in Texas for spitting on a police officer).
Ignorant lawmakers aside, I can no longer in good conscience engage in sex with someone who doesn’t know my status. Let’s just say it lowers the anxiety level. But I am in the relatively privileged position of having strong social support, and I don’t fear repercussions from others learning of my status, as many people do. For many like them, their understandable fear prevents them from disclosing. So in the absence of disclosure, I believe protecting your partner by practicing safe sex every time qualifies as “doing the right thing.”
Further muddying the waters is valid new evidence that HIV positive, compliant patients may not be able to transmit the virus at all, if they have had a undetectable viral load and have been on medications consistently. In other words, there may be a pistol in my pocket, but it isn’t loaded, my darling.
No wonder sex partners, even after disclosing their status, are making a variety of choices sexually. Poz partners seeking out other poz partners exclusively (see my video blog on serosorting), negative “tops” partnering positive “bottoms” without protection (with risk estimated at 1 in 2,500), and even couples, as outlined above, that include a positive partner without a viral load making a choice to have unprotected sex.
If you’re ignorant about safer sex guidelines and believe that you should be informed of a partner’s HIV status before you agree to kiss them, you’re too stupid to be reading my blog. Please find out more from reliable public health sources or quietly return to your Miley Cyrus CD and put off sex indefinitely. Lady GaGa has a point, after all.
The details in the Darren Chiacchia case are too sketchy to conclude if he knowingly put his accuser at risk, or if he used protection. More will certainly be revealed if the case makes it to its June trial date without a plea bargain agreement.
I choose to disclose my status but I don’t want laws imposing it, especially when they’re enforced to play “gotcha!” with past sex partners rather than being based on rational public health policy.
Tags: aids, barebacking, culture, gay, hiv, politics, research, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, Prevention and Policy | 2 Comments »
Did the Bareback Time Machine kill Chad Noel?
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
Among the many online condolences to the family of Chad Noel (“Jim and Bonnie, so sorry to hear of the loss of your son…”) are glimpses of the boy this young man was, while growing up in the ironic hometown of Laramie, Wyoming (where Matthew Shepard lived and perished). Noel, 25, died last month, reportedly of AIDS-related complications.
“I remember him playing with me in my pretend kitchen and being one of the only boys to not pick on me,” writes Kendra of her gay adolescent friend on the Laramie Boomerang’s online obituary page. “Chad was my Senior Prom date, it was truly one of the funnest nights of my life,” adds Rebecca. Reminiscences of his smile and humor abound in posted comments under his one-sentence death notice.
Little did Rebecca know that her date would quickly become gay porn actor Donny Price (why is everyone who does a porn film a STAR?). Very quickly, in fact. He was only 18 years old when he made his first video for a studio specializing in scenes of unprotected sex (known as barebacking).
And now, seven years later, the young man is dead of AIDS. How very 1985.
Certainly it couldn’t be as simple as this. There must have been co-factors, such as his refusal to get tested, perhaps, or take HIV medications. My experience with addiction makes me suspect crystal meth abuse, a raging epidemic of its own among sexually active gay men. An overdose, maybe? ( The Noel family was awaiting autopsy results when the obituary appeared last week.) Something, anything that would explain how a young man would put himself continually at risk for a lethal virus without accessing potentially life-saving treatments, and all the while flaunting his disregard in front of cameras for the carnal delight of others.
Already the online debate on barebacking and even serosorting (seeking out sexual partners who share your HIV status) has been reignited. The fingers of gay activists and public health advocates are being waved, pointed and poked over what prevention technique has failed and which gay cultural defect is to blame.
Has my gay community longed for a pre-AIDS sexual reality so desperately that treatment advances have swept us back to a time when unprotected sex was without horrific consequences? Has porn made barebacking such a fetish that “use a condom every time” can’t compete with oily close-ups of condomless sex? Have advocates like me treated risky behavior among gay men with kid gloves, too easily attributing unsafe sex to “a search for intimacy” or a “post-AIDS mentality?”
Barely legal age, Chad Noel bought into it all. He’d never known a world without HIV and yet it was invisible to him, unacknowledged by his sexual choices or perhaps mocked by them. He was screwing in a time machine and partying like it was 1989. He died like it, too.
Chad was just out of high school when his fatal sexual destiny was set into motion, so the online condolences are primarily from classmates. The messages read like yearbook autographs, some from boys but mostly girls to whom he was kind. “Lost boy goes home,” signs Morgan. Chad was adrift indeed, perhaps unknowingly, in the confusion of sexual maturity and decision making.
Nothing in his short life, and no one it seems, led him to safe ground.
Tags: aids, barebacking, gay, hiv, meth, recovery, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, Meth and Recovery, My Fabulous Disease | 4 Comments »
Tracking the elusive “bug chasers” of HIV
Sunday, April 4th, 2010
“I (have) always hated any suggestion that AIDS was a gift. A Mercedes is a gift.”
– Mark S. King, “A Place Like This,” pg. 180
I must admit my belief that bug-chasers are an extremely elusive and exotic form of pervert that aren’t as much seen as talked about. For the mercifully uninformed, “bug chasers” is a term describing, now hold on to your lunch here, people (typically referencing gay men) who are on a deliberate hunt to become infected with HIV.
They have other snappy monikers (they are gay, after all), for themselves and their (partners in crime?) cohorts, such as “gift seekers” and “gift givers.” “Bug parties” were whispered about for a time, always “a friend of someone I know” having attended some sexual soiree in which a negative partner had unprotected sex with a group of HIV positive partners. And you thought Tupperware parties were retro(virus)!
And now for the truth as I believe it to be: this is all complete bullshit. This is sexual urban legend of the highest degree, fueled not by facts but by a perfectly human search for a fantasy taboo to cross. In other words, for sexed up gay guys who need a jolt of something darkly sick to get their putter fluttering because their meth-fueled fantasies are running on empty. True, there was a flurry of psycho-fantasy about seroconversion years ago (and even a controversial documentary, “The Gift,” about the practice), but by and large I believe this has been over-hyped.
Certainly, and as always, there are more scholarly papers on the psycho-social co-factors associated with gay men who wish to become infected, mainly along the lines of “poz guys get more attention and better health care and fund raisers and wile away their days at the gym…” These simplified views of poz life actually have some traction, but as walking near-death experiences from the 80′s like me can attest, we’re very much back in the world of the living and have bills to pay again, just like the rest of you.
Trust me here, the bug chasing fantasy has a very limited shelf life. You can only live it out… once. And so it exists primarily right there, in their dirty little heads or as online taboo chatter for guys who aren’t capable of becoming newly infected any more than your cherry can be popped twice. Consider bug chasing a classic form of sexual Darwinism. The odd breed tends to die off, making bug chasers the, yes, DoDo birds of the late 20th century.
I’ve been in the company of guys whose heads have wandered off in that direction. Those who entertain this notion typically fall within two categories: poz guys who are lying about being HIV negative because they are fetishizing the virus, and guys who were negative “the last time they checked,” meaning, they’re not. And no, I’ve never indulged someone’s wish to get “pretend infected,” thank you.
But hey, hold on, because if you’re a pervy poz guy looking for viral assault you’re still in luck. April is National STD Awareness Month, and there’s a dazzling array of infections and diseases to choose from. Chlamydia, anyone?
Tags: aids, barebacking, gay, hiv, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease | No Comments »
“The Clap” is becoming The Applause!
Wednesday, March 31st, 2010
After living with HIV infection for nearly 30 years, the thought of acquiring an STD like gonorrhea makes me feel… nostalgic. But my flip attitude may be put to the test by a recent report at the Society for General Microbiology’s spring meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland.
According to Catherine Ison, a microbiologist with the Health Protection Agency in London, the multi-drug resistance of the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhea is threatening to make the STD (which can infect not only the male and female genital regions, but also the mouth, throat and eyes) hard to treat. “The current drugs of choice, ceftriaxone and cefixime, are still very effective,” Ison said in a statement, “but there are signs that resistance particularly to cefixime is emerging and soon these drugs may not be a good choice.â€
Untreated gonorrhea can also lead to serious problems in both sexes and can spread to the blood and joints — a potentially life-threatening condition. Pregnant women can pass the disease onto their fetuses leading to blindness, joint infection, or a life-threatening blood infection in babies, according to the CDC. The disease can cause infertility in both sexes.
Although gay men may not be as concerned about fertility, imagine if you will the sharp, burning pain sufferers experience during urination. Now imagine it won’t go away because drugs can’t treat it. And then your eyes and joints start acting up.
It’s another great reason for sexually active gay men to consider condoms, even as the “crisis mentality” of AIDS diminishes. That’s life: just as we get an exotic horror show like AIDS in check, some Golden Oldie like the clap reminds us we’re never really out of the woods.
Tags: barebacking, hiv, physician, Sexuality
Posted in Gay Life, My Fabulous Disease | 2 Comments »
My interview on serosorting for HIV Plus Magazine
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
This month HIV Plus Magazine ran an article on serosorting, or the process in which people limit their sexual partners to those with the same HIV status (I’m quoted as part of the piece). As you might imagine, it’s a controversial practice and hardly perfect. But what risk reduction technique IS? Condoms break, abstinence is a fairytale and people lie about having HIV or haven’t been tested in ages.
Where this risk reduction technique does work, in my opinion, is when dealing with HIV+ gay men seeking other poz partners. At least in this scenario, no HIV negative person will become infected. This isn’t particularly new — poz gay men have been “organically” serosorting for years (I limited dating to other poz men because I couldn’t bear waiting for an HIV negative boyfriend to get his test results every few months. My current partner is positive.)
Last month I took a tour of a gay men’s sex club that hosts a monthly Poz Party. It’s all on video in one of my blogs, including an interview with host Bill from Poz4Play.com, who talks to me about serosorting, barebacking, and HIV disclosure.
By the way, Benjamin Ryan, the writer of the article, was a balanced, levelheaded interviewer considering the touchy subject matter, so kudos to him.
Tags: aids, barebacking, gay, hiv, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in Books and Writings, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News | No Comments »