Honesty and Policy

The guy I've been seeing most of this year is moving out to Australia in a month or so, so he's been having medicals and such like to check he's healthy enough for them to take him without considering him an unnecessary expense for the country. He's in the middle of all of those checks at the moment, but what irks me is that after having reconciled myself to the thought that there's no way I could have followed him because of my HIV status, they don't do blood tests for students. I couldn't afford to be a student for two years, but it once again reflects the bizarre double standards about HIV. The prejudice seems to be against disclosure, rather than HIV status, because if they were worried about the impact on public health in Australia, they'd test everyone for HIV when applying for a visa and a recent court appeal in the country decided that HIV is not an excessive public expense because people generally need no looking after, just a couple of appointments a year, other than that, it's the medication that costs money and that's a different matter.

Still, he's going and I have no choice but not to go if I'm honest. Same as America, where it seems that the thing they want to keep out is honest people with HIV. It's fine to cross the border if you lie. America turns you out for carrying medication for your infection, but they do nothing to check if you carry the virus when you're visiting.

If I'd not tested this time last year, chances are I'd have had no idea that I have the virus, so I'd move freely in and out of countries without ever thinking if there was something to hide. If I didn't know my status, would I be aware of just how important safer sex was when I have sex? Perhaps not, which would have meant an even greater risk to people in the countries I visited.

My freedom of movement is not, it would seem, restricted by my HIV status but by my honest and for taking the decision to test for the virus. Having decided to test means I've lost my freedom of movement, made myself sick with worry more than once and now seems to have lost me any hope of keeping a relationship that got off to a really good start going.

I mentioned my frustration on an internet forum recently and someone answered that surely I could understand countries not wanting to incur risks to public health or the need to maintain expensive medical conditions. Understanding their rationale doesn't make it any easier to know that those restrictions now apply to me.