I’m negative and I’ve had sex on multiple occasions with people I know to be HIV+.

Frankly I would rather have sex with someone who knows they’re poz, is getting treatment, is healthy and is focused on protecting me than have sex with someone who doesn’t know their status and who doesn’t care about their partner.

Recently in my personal life I’ve come across a number of presumably negative people who deliberately avoid having sex with people who are HIV+.  I try and avoid generalizing but these people are ALWAYS ignorant about the stigmatizing effect this has on my other friends with HIV.  These same HIV-a-phobes are also unaware that given how many people they’ve slept with, statically they’ve probably already had sex with a poz person who simply lied or is unaware of their status.

With all the stigma around HIV it’s no surprise that, guess what, people with HIV lie about their status because of all the fear and ignorance they face in their dating life because of it.

So why this sudden diatribe from me?  Gay blogger Trevor Hoppe has posted an essay about “serosorting,” the practice trying to only sleep with those who share your poz/neg status and how 1) it doesn’t decrease your chances of getting HIV and 2) the harmful stigmatizing effects it has on people you care about with HIV:

I was having drinks with a friend of mine — we’ll call him Patrick here — this weekend when the subject of having sex with HIV-positive men came up. “Oh, I would never have sex with an HIV-positive guy,” he casually remarked — as if such a thing were already obvious. I was shocked not just by Patrick’s statement, but also by the categorical bravado in his delivery. To have sex with HIV-positive men, as he went on to explain, was to expose himself to unnecessary risk of infection. I’ve been replaying this conversation again and again in my head. How could he be so outrageously calculating in his coolly expressed exclusionary strategy? Today I want to spend a few moments reflecting on these kinds of statements, because I think many people would uncritically read them as legitimate prevention strategies. I will argue here, however, that in reality that these kinds of strategies that are totally bankrupt in terms of actual risk reduction. Moreover, what I think this kind of statement actually tends to do is not actually promote any real reduction in risk, but rather to reinforce and reproduce harmful stigma against HIV-positive people.

Continue reading the rest of the essay at Trevor’s website here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 11:08 am and is filed under HIV / AIDS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.