Demons, Ghouls and Gay Men with HIV

by Dr. Justin Varney
Read more of his work on LifeLube here

As Halloween swirls around us, I find myself pondering some of the discussions and debate about researching social sexual networks of gay men and attempts to shape and separate risk networks.

It is a fact that there are more gay men living with HIV within particular sub-sections of the gay community, although it is worth remembering there are gay men with HIV living in almost every part of the community.

As treatment for HIV has improved, the demographic of gay men living with HIV has changed and now a large proportion of those living with HIV are in their late thirties and forties. Similarly HIV is more common in some populations of gay men of color and gay men from certain parts of the world.

But does this mean that we should highlight these groups and dissuade men who are currently HIV negative from having sex with them? Creating two separate social sexual networks would retain sexual activity within each circuit but make crossing over a social taboo, like two separate train tracks where the passengers can wave at each other from the carriages but never mingle.

A purist public health perspective might argue that this would be an appropriate intervention, separating the infected from the uninfected in a form of social quarantine, but this is the same kind of rigid approach that has damaged our community in the past and led to the damaging publicity around Patient Zero and the concept of blame and the ‘bad’ gay which has left deep scars in the gay communal psyche.

This approach also denies the reality that some sexually transmitted diseases such as genital warts are more common amongst younger gay men which caries an association with anal cancer and as HIV treatment improves, is this a higher risk to people’s life expectancy?

I would argue that when we have sex we all make a risk assessment. For some this is based on an informed educated best guess, for others it’s a stab in the dark, but we infantilize gay men if we deny their ability to make rationale choices in the face of a 27yr old epidemic.

Following the decimation of middle-aged gay men from HIV during the 1980’s and 1990’s, we are only just learning the value of intergenerational interaction between gay men, sometimes sex is involved, sometimes it isn’t. But as we slowly have rebuilt gay communities and networks in a new world where people with HIV can live an almost normal lifespan, we need to encourage interaction between our diverse communities and build bridges, not destroy them.

There are enough goblins, ghouls and demons out there, and enough people who would paint gay men with these labels as well, so lets not add any new ones….


Did you read Justin's recent - If I don’t want to suck your dick, am I discriminating against you?