There's This Guy...

It's interesting how you can tell yourself that HIV is just one of those things about which you shrug and get on with life, knowing that you've got it and, chances are, you always will have it, but the thought of passing it on terrifies me. I know a couple where one has it, one doesn't, and they don't use condoms most of the time. We had a threesome, you see, and it really disturbed me to watch them taking risks, but ultimately it's not my business to intervene. Or was it? I honestly don't know what the right thing to have done would have been.

Nothing I can do about it now, and I can't live other people's lives for them. Still, it was odd to see someone wanting to expose themselves to an illness just to show they cared for someone, or for whatever logic he wanted to apply. Either way, I wouldn't want to be the one who placed him at risk.

Serodiscordance in a relationship is something that would be a challenge for me. There's some way in which fluid exchange is considered a mark of trust and intimacy, that after a while of being together you make a joint decision to stop using condoms. That seems to be the pattern in gay relationships - and others - that I've had and have heard talk of. It's a way of showing your partner that you trust that they're not taking risks with anyone else; a way of building a degree of physical proximity without the barrier of a condom. I hadn't really thought about it until now it looks like I'm dating again. There's not any way I can really hope for that kind of symbolic act with someone who doesn't share my status, and even then, medical advice would be that I shouldn't bareback unless I know I have the same strain of HIV as my hypothetical partner.

This is assuming that monogamy is sought in a new relationship, which I would want.

When I have had sex with guys and not known their status since I've known mine, there've been a few times where I get a psychological block and can't reach orgasm if I'm doing something that is penetrative, particularly in the couple of instances where they and I've not had a conversation about status first. Of course, they then think I'm an amazing lay, going for hours, but it's fear that stops me from enjoying it, stops me from letting go.

I can only assume that the fear of transmission would be more acute within a relationship. My viral load's not insignificant and that plays on my mind. I'd be frightened for the health of a partner who wasn't infected and I'd also worry that there would be an element of pity in their attitude towards me. I'd hate to get ill and need looking after, but it's a very real prospect (for anyone, mind you) and I'd rather there wasn't that worry.

But, of course, love doesn't come with an antibody detector built in, and I would like to think I couldn't stop myself from falling for someone just because of differential HIV statuses.


Tags:
Serodiscordance, Romance,HIV,Safer Sex

You Either Got It Or You Ain't

Had another good realisation yesterday while talking to a friend of mine. The people I'm closest to at the moment and to whom I feel the most affinity aren't HIV+ men. I'm spending wonderfully good quality time with friends from the last few years, rather than gravitating towards the seroconverted. That I'm not needing that sense of fraternity, that consipiracy of sinners can only be a good thing.

Although I keep this blog and I write elsewhere about HIV issues, I am relieved that I'm not feeling like the virus in me has turned me into some other species any more, that I'm an alien among men when I go outside, that I don't feel it is something for which I have to apologise. It's certainly a reckless injury from which I will forever carry a scar, but the face I see in the mirror naturally now includes that cicatrix, that keloid. It's something I have in my life, but it is not my life and I'm hoping never will be.

I realise, though, that when I want to, I still use HIV as a mask for other issues in my life. I come home exhausted and upset after a long day at work. It's not the AIDS, it's the workload. I get nervous and frightened about the effect my HIV status might have on a new potential romance. It's not the AIDS, it's the butterflies in your stomach. Silly boy, blaming the AIDS. Whatever next?

Time to try to stop using this as an excuse to avoid tacking more immediate issues. Blaming everything on the AIDS is like spending money to tackle climate change that's coming in a hundred years rather than looking after poor people today. You may well feel worthy for being green, but if you want a better world, get your hands dirty now and tackle the more immediate problems.

A Diet of Lexical Items

Just had a bit of a creative spurt this morning and thought it would be good to let you see the fruits of my labour. Few things to talk about this week, first of them being that my mood's picked up a lot since the first half of the week, when work stress and Valentine confusion seemed to make everything seem very muggy, how impending deadlines felt impossible and cheering up seemed utterly implausible, I'm now actually in a really good mood.

I met up with the guy who has lost his job because of disclosing his serostatus and was very impressed by his optimism about the whole thing, how pragmatic his approach has been to the virus and how little he worries, trusting in the doctors to maintain his current good health, how readily he took to the medication, asking what on earth the people who complain about the medication have got to justify it when he had a couple of days of feeling ill then felt great on the tablets. No annoyance at having to take them, just a shrug of the shoulders and, "Well, that's how it is now."

I would that I had talked to him the moment I was diagnosed, then I'd know to question the soul-searching and the anxieties I've held since finding out my status. Still, were it not for the catalyst of the diagnosis, I might not have embarked on the road I've followed, becoming single, concentrating on my creativity, getting back into photography as a daily practice, defining my politics more defiantly and generally diving headfirst into all kinds of strange scenarios. Through my obsession about the virus I've learned a lot, I've met new people, experienced some strange scenarios I might not otherwise have seen played out in front of me.

However, the flip-side of it all is that it's made me intellectually lazy about reading my emotions. When I'm anxious about being lonely, I translate it into fretting about weight loss or night sweats, neither of which are a problem any more. When I am nervous about meeting someone new, I proclaim my fears about disclosure and serodiscordance. It's lazy thinking, really, getting involved in online arguments about barebacking, becoming the voice of the people for HIV positive people when really I could just leave well alone, knowing that no-one ever changed their mind thanks to the internet.

Knowing which battles to fight is important, as is recognising when you're dwelling needlessly on things you can't change and worst of all is worrying about things which may well not come to pass and remaining anxious about conditional clauses.

I've indulged myself a lot with this blog, and let out some deeply skewed thinking which I attached to the virus which hasn't even really done anything to me yet. Not directly, anyway. Sure, I had night sweats sometimes, only badly very infrequently. Generally, I need an open window and a lighter quilt, I think. It's not seeing the wood for the trees to let this damned thing define me.

Yeah, sure, I'm writing about it, but this isn't me, and no matter what percentage of my blood it occupies, it isn't my main defining feature and I should stop letting myself be the token nigger in conversation. Not today, anyway. No, today, I'm quietly optimistic about the future that could unfold in front of me, looking to my creativity for my inspiration, not some microscopic parasite in my blood. A breath of fresh air to have a day where I'm not picking at scabs, but properly considering my options for what's to come.

Yeah, I'm okay and things will work out just fine.

Valentuesday

Ever have those mornings when you look at yourself in the mirror when you're brushing your teeth and wonder what on earth it is that people seem to see in you when they tell you they think you're hot, that you've got a great body, that you're funny, clever and witty and what you see is some haggered man getting older a little faster than he'd like not seeing the brilliant sparkle other people say they see in his eye, but a slightly lonely, slightly frightened, slightly hollow expression that can disappear in a flash when he feels other people want to see him smile?

I wish I could be flippant and say, "Me neither."

I guess today is the kind of day when this sort of thinking is inevitable. A day when we celebrate relationships and love and hey, you can't help but look at your own situation. So here I am once again struck how I always seek to go to extremes in life, how it's never good enough to be the same as the people around me, to have a normal, quiet life, how when I have that I deliberately disrupt it so I can have the stimulation I need to keep me going.

I recognise that life is about ups and downs, but my wheel of life seems to be a yo-yo and I wish I could be happier to have those quiet moments when nothing much is going on, rather than everthing being apex or nadir. Vertex or vortice. At the gym today, picking up and putting down heavy things for an hour just seemed like an utterly futile exercise in wasted time, so I ran for half an hour and then did some yoga, realising my stress levels were escalating. I started doing some breathing meditation, counting my breaths and sitting in the lotus position while people grunted and sweated around me, trying to lose myself in the flowing river of now, but probably looking like some gaunt twat sitting on the floor.

My weight's down again, seeing that I was below 87kg really sent my anxiety rocketing. I was 98 kg last Summer and I was much stronger than I am now. Now, I'm fitter, I do a lot more work at the gym, so the strength I have is useful. I eat better and my health is good, even if stress at the moment seems to make me crave cigarettes for that little tiny act of self-destruction that consumes five minutes each time.

You can't do anything about the past, and regret is the only sin that has meaning, but to look forward, perhaps I should accept that if you chase rainbows, you find thunder.

It's how I live, it's what I have become. A fugitive from history, burned by lightning, soaked by rain.

Speaking Up

A while ago, I was talking about finding out that there's countries that won't knowingly admit someone who is HIV infected. Now I'm being presented with the interesting challenge that in a few months, my work might want to send me to countries that are listed as having a policy of refusing people at the border if they either disclose their HIV status or are found carrying HIV medication on them.

I don't really know how to handle this. A similar project came up in a country where there are no issues with HIV at the border, but I was passed over for this assignment on the grounds that they need me in London at the moment because I know the job better than other people. I'm not sure I entirely believe that but they've promised that the next major international job goes to me. At the very least, it means lying on my visa application. If, however, the acupuncture doesn't pay off and I'm on the wrong side of the CD4 Poverty Line when I go to test next, then there's the possibility I either have to attempt to smuggle medication in with me, arrange a drop-off from a sympathetic local HIV charity like they do in America or go without medication when I'm immune compromised and entering a country I've not been to before, so for which I wouldn't have an acquired immune response anyway.

Hopefully, though, I'll be healthy enough in the numbers game to avoid that being a problem and I won't be faced with the tricky scenario of making a decision between not disclosing and risking deportation or disclosing to my employers and risking losing the international projects and perhaps my job completely. I have an online friend who recently came out to his employers about why he was suffering from seemingly chronic fatigue. Within a day he had a letter on his desk telling him that they were restructuring the department and didn't need him any more, despite taking new staff on two days later to do a similar job and no-one else losing their jobs.

It stinks that we even have to think about these things. Isn't it enough that we have to deal with living with this infection?

Strains of HIV Infection

Medical research seems to indicate that HIV seems to have mutated since its original incarnation as a mere human immunodeficiency virus that sometimes later becomes a sydrome in which the acquired immune system becomes deficient, but now has changed into a whole range of different strains.

Type 1 Infection: Fuck-It HIV.

This type of HIV infection is characterised by spending 12 hours in a row dancing in nightclubs. Night Sweats very heavy, but more to do with drug use than anything from The AIDS. Rates of concurrent infection with various STIs are very high, as are degradation of the septum and the rate of IQ loss tends to be more rapidly obvious than any change in CD4 count. Impotence very common, but it's normal to take drugs to counter the effects of drugs you've already taken if you have this type of HIV. Transmission rates very high, levels of guilt very low, on the grounds that anyone having sex ever should know that men with FIHIV fuck around like maniacs, so it's their problem.


Type 2 Infection: Holland and Barratt HIV.

At point of diagnosis, HABHIV patients immediately stop smoking, drinking, drug use and burgers. Common symptoms include cycling to work all the time, taking more multivitamin tablets than they'll ever take on combination therapy, no carbs after six, no McDonalds food, Molton Brown eye balm every day and an annoying propensity to start thinking everyone, irrespective of their health, should live according to their ridiculous diet plan and should feel guilt and angst for eating tomatoes. Looking after yourself is healthy, kids. Body dysmorphia is not.

My Cock, The Sword of Damocles

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.