via My Fabulous Disease, by Mark S. King
Fast forward to today, and HIV positive gay men are as open as ever about their status and their sexual preferences (setting aside, if we can for the moment, the increased stigma and discrimination facing HIV positive people of all stripes who disclose their status these days). And those sexual choices may not include HIV negative people at all, thank you very much.
Last year I taped a tour of a sex club that hosts a monthly “Poz4Play” party, and sat down to interview Bill, the party’s disarmingly unflappable host. In this video blog (the video, above, is PG rated but the language is explicit), I revisit the tour and get an update from Bill about the strong reaction to the original video, which includes a frank conversation on barebacking, the risk of other STD’s, and serosorting.
What about herpes, other STDs?
ReplyDeleteThey're helping increase the lethality of the virus. There are variants of the AIDS virus. Making opportunities for the stronger variants to survive. If you trade variants then those that are stronger you give more environments to cope with and the stronger more lethal ones gain a stronger foothold. When people with them go out they spread them around making it more lethal. Each of these things are a burden on your immune system. There's a variant that comes along like the straw that breaks the camel's back and your immune system collapses because of that little assault. In a perfect world where none of these people had sex with uninfected people it wouldn't be a problem. But the chances are that's what happens and we continue to have a self inflicted epidemic like this. Is there some mysterious force? You could say that it's sexuality. That means you have no control absolutely. We know that cultural conditions can put an end to certain kinds of diseases. That almost seems to be negated by this particular group of people.
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