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Bleed Like Me: Positively Sexy and Adamantly Protective

Bleed Like Me: Positively Sexy and Adamantly Protective

After many years of resistance, I was inspired by some small-town travel to finally download a few gay social-networking apps. I decided to be as blatantly upfront about my HIV status as I could and, to my surprise, these small town guys didn’t seem to mind.

For an even larger surprise, a couple of guys asked me to come top them … bareback … and to please cum inside. When they confirmed they were indeed HIV-negative and not bug chasers, I felt more baffled than ever. And that’s when these gentlemen informed me of The Partner Study. I hadn’t heard of this yet, but according to them, it meant that an undetectable poz partner undergoing anti-retroviral treatment has never transmitted the virus — bottom or top — to another person in the first two years after infection.

For those unfamiliar with the study, as I was, this research was done by the National Institute for Health Research and partnered with many other organizations around Europe. They enrolled couples, both straight and gay, where one partner had HIV and the other partner did not. The main rules included that the poz partner had to be on anti-retroviral treatment and the couple did not use condoms
100 percent of the time.

After two years, and out of more than 700 couples, not a single person contracted HIV from his/her partner. Without a single viral contraction, this information was nothing less than gigantic news. And the Grindr guys were right: this included participants where the poz partner did ejaculate inside the negative partner, both vaginally and anally.

But as a friend of mine always says: “People trust the headlines, not the details.” This seems to be more true than ever as I watch people take this information and run in hundreds of directions with it. As we learned from my gay app suitors, many guys were already tossing condoms out the window. To them, the proof was in the pudding (or, in this case, the semen).

While I am so insanely excited by these study results, I do worry that we are putting the cart before the horse. We shouldn’t be discarding our condoms just yet. Such studies give us valuable information, but that information should lead us to new questions rather than stone-cold conclusions. Now is not the time to give up on safer sex, but rather to figure out how to reframe it in the face of this fantastic information.

I have been outspoken about the fact that HIV-positive people who adhere to treatment and remain undetectable are not the ones putting others at risk of exposure. In an ironic twist, these people are probably keeping everyone else safer. More often, the bigger risks come from people who say they are HIV-negative but are mistakenly carrying the virus. And it is estimated that about 20 percent of positive people aren’t even aware they have HIV.

In fact, a couple occurrences in The Partner Study reflected this very scenario. Two study participants actually did contract HIV. However, they confirmed that the virus didn’t transmit from their poz partner, but rather from being sexually active outside their relationship with people of unknown HIV status.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. While all study participants adhered to medications and kept a viral load of less than 200 copies per ml, this doesn’t accurately reflect poz life for everyone. In my time as an HIV advocate, I have often met others who struggled to adhere to medications and lost their undetectable status. While most I know are great at adherence, there are those who can let it slip.

Then, of course, there is the fact that other STIs continue to exist outside of HIV. Hepatitis C and syphilis are still fairly prevalent. I also think about the time when HIV and AIDS didn’t exist. It caught the world completely off guard and so many people died. As long as we are freely sharing bodily fluids, we run the risk that a new, even scarier virus could one day emerge.

The Partner Study has given us incredibly valuable information. It shows that sex between positive and negative partners, with the strict presence of medications, is even safer than we thought. But in the end, to eliminate all other means of safety is still a risk.

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