Posts Tagged ‘serosorting’
The Man That AIDS Forgot: Safe Sex Architect Richard Berkowitz
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010
The New York City of 1979 shown during the opening minutes of “Sex Positive,” the documentary now available on DVD, is awash in gay sexual liberation. Male couples strut their stuff arm in arm, sporting biker jackets and cocky mustaches and bulges in their denim that strain credulity (no fashion era has ever screamed “gay porn” like this one). It’s an almost quaint snapshot, in retrospect, taken just before the arrival of a major buzzkill in the form of a murderous pandemic.
Cruising amid the happy sleaze was gay S/M escort Richard Berkowitz (pictured, right), the man who would quickly and unwittingly become known as the “self hating enemy of gay people.” And all because, the documentary contends, he tried to save their lives.
Today, Berkowitz remains in the apartment where he once entertained masochistic clients (the hardware they once dangled from is still in evidence in the doorways), and during our recent interview his emotions ranged from joyful gratitude to angry resentment, all displayed with an engaging but steely force of will. Here is a man still trying desperately to be heard and understood.
“I’ve been smeared, censored and attacked over the years, as evidenced in the film, by gay men who either don’t like me or don’t like sex workers, or people into S/M, or anyone who questions AIDS orthodoxy,” he said.
And here is why. In the early 1980′s, as AIDS deaths mounted but before the HIV virus had been identified, there was no known cause for the mortality. Was there a single, possibly viral culprit, as gay activist Larry Kramer and others believed, or was there a collection of factors having to do with the promiscuous gay lifestyle, as Berkowitz suspected?
Berkowitz based his views on talks with his physician, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, and another Sonnabend patient, singer Michael Callen (pictured, left), all of whom were ready to vocalize something heretical: the promiscuous lifestyle of gay men was contributing to the emerging epidemic.
“Everything Michael and I said and did in regard to AIDS came from Sonnabend,” Berkowitz tells me. “Callen and I knew nothing about science or sexually transmitted diseases when AIDS began. Sonnabend taught us how to educate ourselves, and Michael and I tried to teach that to gay men.”
Dr. Sonnabend had a medical practice in the heart of the ultra gay Chelsea neighborhood, and he had made a connection between some of his gay patients’ propensity for the fast lane and their risk for developing AIDS symptoms. This seemingly basic fact wasn’t easy for the trio to disseminate.
In 1982, Berkowitz and Callen wrote an article in the New York Native entitled We Know Who We Are: Two Gay Men Declare War on Promiscuity. In it they claimed the New York gay scene — bars, baths, drugs, poppers and all — had birthed the growing epidemic, and only through behavioral change could it be contained.
This infuriated gay intelligentsia like Larry Kramer, who believed that both freshly minted gay pride and mainstream assimilation were threatened by Berkowitz’s talk of queers as bath house sluts. :He felt promiscuity was too dangerous to talk about in front of straight people,” Berkowitz says today. “But Callen and I said ‘fuck straight people, gay men are dying and AIDS is preventable.’”
The film’s tag line, “What if you knew a deadly epidemic was coming, and no one would believe you?” is a stretch, considering Berkowitz wasn’t the only one worried about the gathering storm. Most every gay bar patron at the time shared his sense of dread, and it was clear to Kramer and others that a public health crisis was at hand. The question was how to address it.
Berkowitz and Callen addressed it by writing, under the supervision of Sonnabend, the 1983 pamphlet “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach.” It is widely considered the invention of safe sex as we know it today, and uncanny in its detailed instructions of avoiding transmission through bodily fluids.
And it turned out that Berkowitz and Kramer were both right: the HIV virus was identified later that year and is now considered the single cause of AIDS, while the guidelines Berkowitz outlined to prevent transmission remain valid. “I was wrong to dismiss there being a new virus that was central to AIDS,” he now says. “There are still people who won’t forgive that.”
Such inescapable sadness hangs over “Sex Positive“ — all those dying men, all that existential confusion — that the arguments between the opposing schools of thought seem secondary. After the film revisits the third or so public television debate between Kramer and Berkowitz/Callen, one wishes they’d just shut up and do something.
And of course, they did. Kramer not only wrote searing, groundbreaking theater such as “The Normal Heart,” he was also among the founders of ACT UP and The Gay Men’s Health Crisis. His status in gay history is iconic. Callen became the gay face of AIDS, singing at events, writing for The Village Voice and appearing in the film Philadelphia before his death in 1993.
The intervening years for Berkowitz (today, right) have been less kind. The film outlines his descent into drug abuse, and even his old ally Sonnabend describes Berkowitz as becoming “useless” for a time. Berkowitz resents the portrayal and has no interest in contrasting his life with that of Callen, who now has a New York City health center bearing his name.
“Do people dismiss the Beatles’ music or Robert Downey’s acting because they were using (drugs)?” he asks. “The only thing I ever wanted was not to die before I had lived a full life and finished what I felt the universe had put me here to do. With “Sex Positive,” I feel I’ve crossed the finish line. I got my happy ending.”
Perhaps not entirely. The safe sex guidelines he created were co-opted by public health officials and quickly sanitized to make them palatable to a general audience, and Berkowitz regrets his “skewed portrait” in the documentary. “The movie shows me in relation to the safe sex debate and my battle with addiction. But my 54 years add up to much more than that! I just regret being pushed out of safe sex discourse, because I had something to contribute.”
He hopes to contribute again. His 2003 book, “Staying Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex” is back in print, and he wants to keep speaking and developing his web site and blog. It may help alleviate the fact Berkowitz struggles financially, living on disability and handouts from former clients.
“It would be nice to have money, but I’ll take being alive over cash,” he says. “Riches come from having a purpose in life.” Moments later, he betrays his complicated thoughts on the topic. “I’m dismayed by comments in ‘Sex Positive’ that I didn’t do enough. I did a lot, and it’s not like anyone ever paid me!”
Thanks. Credit. Payment. After days of being haunted with sadness by viewing “Sex Positive,” the reason for its melancholy spell struck me. There could never be enough thanks, for Berkowitz or unknowable others. No one can quantify the payment due. How could the efforts of so many ever be calculated? How might proper credit be dispensed?
Whether it was Berkowitz outlining safer sex guidelines or countless men and women caring for dying lovers, valor was impossible to measure during what felt like the end of the world. Few may ever know the bravery of Berkowitz, or Callen, or Kramer.
Or me. Or you.
And with HIV rates rising among gay men again, “Sex Positive” underscores how much work, how terribly, frighteningly much, there is left to do.
Tags: aids, culture, gay, hiv, politics, research, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in Books and Writings, Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, Prevention and Policy | 5 Comments »
Live Video Chat with Mark S. King Scheduled
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
This Wednesday, June 30, at 2:00 PM EST, I will be the featured speaker on an online “Webinar†seminar, hosted by Wellsphere, a partner of TheBody.com. Meaning, if any of my video blogs have ever made you want to talk, argue or scream back to me, this is your chance. It’s an interactive experience!
The seminar I’m leading is called “Living with HIV/AIDS Today: Emerging Issues,†and I will be chatting live on camera for about 30 minutes and then taking questions and comments from a chat room. That’s where you come in! Just come attend this event online, and hopefully we’ll get to interact with one another.
You don’t need a web cam to participate. Just follow these simple instructions. So mark your calendar, and thanks in advance. It should be fun to “meet†some of the people who post on my blog or otherwise tune in!
TO ATTEND:
Click here to go to the sign-up page (this is like registering for the seminar). It’s easy and free. The Webinar Channel is www.justin.tv/healthcentral.
If you would like to ask questions during the Webinar, you’ll need to do a quick sign-up for an account on the host site, Justin TV, on the site. Again, free and easy.
See you there. In the meantime, please be well.
Mark
Tags: aids, culture, gay, help others, hiv, physician, recovery, research, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease, News, Prevention and Policy | 3 Comments »
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 »
How the Denver Principles changed AIDS (and health care) forever.
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
You must know this, because it matters. Because it has already changed your life and you probably don’t realize it.
It was 1983. Just a year prior, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome became the fearful nameplate for the murderer of gay friends and lovers. The virus that caused it, HIV, had only been identified a few months earlier. Amidst this atmosphere of unremitting grief and fear, a group of activists met in Denver as part of a gay and lesbian health conference. Among them, a dozen men with AIDS. (And among their number, the inspirational Michael Callen of New York City, pictured at right, and Bobbi Campbell of San Francisco.) They were about to do something that would change our response to AIDS — and health care in general — forever.
As the conference drew to a close, the activists asked to address the attendees. Rather than having a report presented about the state of the AIDS crisis, they wanted to speak for themselves. If the word “empowerment” hadn’t yet been a part of the health care lexicon, it was about to be.
The group took turns reading a document to the conference they had just created themselves, during hours sitting in a hospitality suite of the hotel. It was their Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence rolled into one. It would be known as The Denver Principles, and it began like this: “We condemn attempts to label us as ‘victims,’ which implies defeat, and we are only occasionally ‘patients,’ which implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others. We are ‘people with AIDS.’”
The seminal moment in AIDS activism is arguably those few minutes, when the principles were outlined by these brave “people with AIDS.” Identifying themselves as such, that alone, was startling at the time. How could they not be seen as anything but victims of an arbitrary and cruel killer? But they would have none of it. And they did not stop there.
They outlined 17 principles that covered everything from health care decisions to civil rights to sexual conduct. And their impact on all of us is so obvious today it can easily be taken for granted. Please honor their service and read on.
They demanded that physicians see their patients as “whole people,” and provide “accurate information.” They believed their opinion on their care should be awarded equal weight, and this was revolutionary. The next time your doctor consults you about a change of medications or whether a diagnostic test may be required, you can thank The Denver Principles.
They asked “all people” to fight against discrimination in the workplace and in housing, which was a tall order in 1983 that wasn’t realized for years. Nevertheless, today AIDS is covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act and you can thank The Denver Principles.
Astonishingly, they even advocated for “as full and satisfying sexual and emotional lives as anyone else” for people with AIDS. Imagine that, at a time when a new blood- and sexual contact-driven disease was in full bloom, a group of people suffering from it wanted sexual rights. Amazing. And yet today, if you are HIV positive and disclose your status to potential partners without feeling like a diseased pariah (or you have observed sexual evolution, like serosorting and sex clubs for positives), you can thank The Denver Principles. For that matter, if you’re HIV negative and negotiate sex with partners of any stripe, you can thank the Principles for believing that we all deserve a satisfying sexual life.
A clear line can be drawn between how all of us participate in our own health care decisions and The Denver Principles. It has influenced the doctor/patient relationship in every disease category, benefiting millions of patients.
Last month, longtime activist and POZ Magazine founder Sean Strub (left) delivered the keynote speech at the Campaign to End AIDS’ 5th Anniversary event. He devoted his remarks to the historic importance of The Denver Principles and announced a plan to create a Denver Principles Empowerment Index that will hold AIDS groups accountable to the people they serve.
Sean knows a thing or two about accountability. When I worked for various AIDS organizations through the 1980′s and 90′s, we shook in our boots each year when POZ Magazine produced their chart outlining which of the country’s AIDS organizations met certain criteria. The chart rated things like financial transparency, the cost of fund raising, and how many HIV positive people served on the Board (for which, by the way, you can thank The Denver Principles, which demanded people with AIDS “be included in all AIDS forums.”)
The Empowerment Index that Sean and others are creating (he’s open to input) would chart similar criteria for AIDS organizations and other health care providers, by measuring the degree to which their clients feel empowered and involved in their own decisions. It would tangibly rate things like fund raising, transparency, HIV+ representation and the delivery of services.
So the Denver Principles live on. A list of profound basic rights were outlined during the dawn of this epidemic that continue to have an impact on us today. I’d like to thank Sean Strub for reminding us, through his words last month, of the amazing journey and profound importance of this document.
Tags: aids, culture, gratitude, hiv, physician, politics, research, serosorting, Sexuality
Posted in Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease | 1 Comment »
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 »
We’re AIDS walking “post-crisis.”
Monday, March 29th, 2010
While attending the South Florida AIDS Walk yesterday I was struck with the obvious. These walks just aren’t what they used to be, and neither is the HIV/AIDS crisis. In fact, “crisis” is hardly a word to describe it anymore.
This isn’t simply about the fact that, for white gay men like myself, the horror of AIDS has abated and treatment successes have prolonged life. It’s about the world we live in (culture, politics, money) having moved on. The media is so bored with the topic that they responded with a big yawn to two groundbreaking stories this year: a man in Berlin had HIV eradicated from his body (yes, he was “cured”), and for the first time a new vaccine showed promise in clinical trials.
When a gay man has a little extra money in his pocket, he’s more likely to give it to a political candidate than an AIDS agency. He’s more passionate about ending DOMA or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell than making free HIV testing available. And when he sleeps with someone, he’ll make his decisions about protected sex based more on who’s positive and who’s not, rather than a mortal fear for his life. Funding used to be plentiful, if not always truly enough. But today AIDS service organizations are in real danger of cutting services as fundamental as HIV testing.
Take a good look at this picture to the left, if you can. When was the last time you saw a friend in this condition? For me, quite some time. That’s progress.
If we accept the fact that science has improved things for those of us with HIV, we must accept the residuals as well. As an aging AIDS activist I must accept not only my good fortune for having survived HIV infection for 30 years, but that younger gay men aren’t that interested in what happened to me a generation ago. Neither are they particularly interested in absolute safer sex messages like “Use a condom every time,” which hasn’t been followed since we were attending funerals for dead friends every weekend. (To watch my point made through pitch-black comedy, check out “AIDS: We did it!” on YouTube.)
If messages about HIV are to remain relevant (and hell, I suppose that includes me as well), then our credibility hinges on reflecting the truth as our community knows it to be: unprotected sex is common, STD rates are up, gay marriage is sexier than condom use, and anyone who is pushing outdated safe sex models looks like an old man with a rake yelling from his front lawn.
Tags: Aging, aids, gay, hiv, politics, research, serosorting
Posted in Gay Life, Living with HIV/AIDS, My Fabulous Disease | 4 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 »