Please view this video first
I can’t believe stigmatisation and internalised homophobia like this still goes on, and we need to have a dialogue about it! However, my own experiences as a 61 year-old with HIV, and a disability who used (note tense) gay dating sites tells me we do! We no longer have the shared experience of the 80s & 90s, so ignorance keeps on rearing it’s ugly head! Both the gay and HIV communities should be ashamed of themselves. The lessons of the past have quickly been forgotten!
This year I “celebrate” 33 years of being HIV+ (yeah, cheers, thanks). It doesn’t take a brilliant mathematician to work out the percentages – I have spent over half my life with this dubious honour. This is not braggodocio, me looking for a chest to pin a medal on, or leaning my head forward for a pat. This has also included a brush with AIDS – not to be confused with HIV, despite the still incorrectly used AIDS misnomer to describe someone with HIV. For those who think that just because I am walking around it has been an easy road, or similarly think that now, thanks to drugs, my life is a dream…think again. Every single day is a challenge, not so much something I dwell on daily, but certainly live daily.
Over those years I have seen stigma and discrimination of pretty well every variety – reluctance of governments to fund in the early day; religious intolerance, including a call for segregation and for internment camps; hospital staff refusing service to those with HIV; the incident with young Eve van Grafhorst (if you don’t know of it, look it up); social stigma; advertising scare campaigns; HIV denialists (while thousands drop dead around them); the deathly silence of many world leaders (mainly US presidents); ignorance and misinformation on every level. Personally, I have experienced workplace discrimination and bullying both as a gay and a HIV+ man. As the mother in the above video states, if this was cancer you would receive nothing but sympathy and support. But as soon as you say HIV, people back off, and the implication is that you are dirty, a sexual deviant. After all this time, and the misnomer that it is a “gay”disease with its prominent creep into the straight world at about the same time – can’t have them as scapegoats, can we! – one would have thought that all the misconceptions about HIV would have been pretty well eliminated. Well, I’m afraid not!
Even now, on Gay dating sites you eill encounter many instances of people adding labels like “clean” to both their profiles, and sexualpartner requests! The insinuation is that if you have HIV, uou are domehow “unclean” or “dirty” – and it has nothing to do with me having a shower! Ironically, the profiles making this request don’t seem to think that the same language applies to them. Let’s face it, if I don’t disclose my status, you are going to be none the wiser…no I, for that matter! I have to take your word for it as much as you have to take mine! You haven’t really made any sort of a point, have you!
But apart from the degrading insult, it shows a huge gap in the education of the person posting – almost criminal, if they are Gay! For at keast the last decade or more, it has been pretty well acknowledged that if you are HIV, taking meds, and have an undetectable viral load, you are not going tomoass HIV on. The latest research http://mobile.aidsmap.com/No-one-with-an-undetectable-viral-load-gay-or-heterosexual-transmits-HIV-in-first-two-years-of-PARTNER-study/page/2832748 indicates that after two years into yhe latest study, chances of transmission are, to date, zero!
I hate condoms, and haven’t worn one for decades. Back in my pick- up days, I deliberately seeked other HIV+ guys, as within that circle unprotected sex was a norm, of more recent times I have used sites like BBRT – a barebacking site – for sex. At least on this site there is no foubt about what you get. If I had to ge honest – and the same would apply to the HIVphobes from the other sites – you have a getter chance of picking up a garden-variety STD than HIV…something that is conveniently overlooked!
Perhaps rather than education – which to-date has got us absolutely nowhere – people just heed to get some manners…and a life!
Tim Alderman (C) 2015
timalderman 