An amusing discussion came up on a forum site I've recently joined. Someone was asking if HIV is still the death sentence it used to be and this turned into a general discussion about the virus. It raised some interesting thoughts for me among it all.
Primary among the arguments seemed to be the matter of disclosure, where lots of guys who said it should be the responsibility of the positive guy to always disclose to their partner to give them the choice to manage the risk they were willing to take. There seemed to be an assumption that positive people wanted to expose people to risk, which doesn't seem to be my experience. A few guys were saying they'd never knowingly have sex with an HIV+ partner, which makes me wonder how quickly they abandon condoms with a partner who assumes himself to be negative, bearing in mind that a third of gay men with the virus don't know they're carrying it.
There were also (assumed) negative guys talking about how they like to have unsafe sex with a partner after they've been together a while. It's funny. If I knew then what I did now, I would have been so incredibly strict about safer sex, irrespective of how much I loved someone, irrespective of how high I was, irrespective of how long I'd been together in an assumed monogamous relationship.
Sure, I'm living with it now, but I kick myself for not having had the sense to avoid it and would never want to think I might infect someone else.
1 comment:
I have had a similar condundrum come up with me in the past few months...At a bar, I hooked up with a couple, one of whom I knew to be poz. I was really, really drunk, and they took me home to their bedroom. They never disclosed their partner's status to me and they didn't know that I knew. Eventually, after fooling around for a while, I realized I wasn't sober enough to make the right choices, and I stopped things (by running out into the woods naked and lying in wet grass, which is better than sex anyway).
I still feel conflicted-- on the one hand, I think they had a responsibility (magnified by the fact that they were with a drunk boy) to inform me of the dude's status and let me make my own choices. On the other hand, I should be responsible for my own health too (and perhaps live by the maxim 'assume everyone you are with is poz').
I still don't know how to reconcile these things...
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