One of my best friends was recently diagnosed with HIV. Since college he’s been on an unending sex conquest, hooking up with countless guys he meets online to engage in risky activities. My concern is that he doesn’t seem fazed by his HIV diagnosis and says he has no intention of giving up his online sex crusades. I worry about his mental and physical health, but also about his seeming willingness to infect others just to satisfy his sexual appetite. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t disclose his HIV status to potential partners, and barebacking is what got him into this mess in the first place.
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Would you be friends with a guy who went out at night and mugged little old ladies? Or a guy who beat his girlfriend? Or a guy who ran around raping people? Of course not, HMDTRT, because you’re an ethical person and ethical people don’t hang out with violent, abusive assholes. So why on earth are you wasting your time with this guy? Knowingly exposing other people to a potentially fatal disease is an act of violence, and there’s just no excuse for it.
Speaking of new HIV infections, an apparently deadly strain of the virus surfaced in New York City last week just in time for Valentine’s Day. This new strain doesn’t respond to the antiretroviral meds that hold most infected people’s HIV infections in check and, even more worrisome, appears to induce a rapid progression to full-blown AIDS. The new HIV strain was discovered in a New York City man who told health officials he has had sex with hundreds of men in recent weeks while using crystal meth. Nice. The news about what could be a deadly new stage in the AIDS epidemic broke less than a week after public health officials began warning about a rare form of chlamydia known as lymphogranuloma venereum, or LGV, that’s spreading among gay men. Symptoms of LGV include a painful, bloody rectal infection, genital ulcers, and exploding lymph nodes in the groin. Six cases of LGV have been confirmed in the United States, all among gay men, and most of the men infected with LGV reported having multiple sex partners and engaging in unprotected anal sex.
Ana Oliveira, the executive director of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, was more receptive to the idea. “We find ourselves at a time where the idea of holding people accountable, of building consequences into behavior choices, may be needed to help change the paradigm,” Oliveira said. “We certainly appreciate the element of justice in your idea. It could act as a deterrent, and that would be helpful. The difficulty is that it would be impractical to implement. It would require some kind of a determination process, and the pitfall would be a lot of he said/he said situations.”
