His Growth, Their Gain, My Loss

On the subject of HIV stigma and the impact it has on those it touches, I am not naïve. It's safe to say I've encountered it firsthand a time or two. And I've had 26 years during which to observe how many different ways HIV stigma feeds into other facets of my life. I've seen how stigma based on ignorance feeds fear and results in rejection, discrimination, and even violence. The moving parts of that basic machine may vary from facet to facet, but the function they carry out when in motion is the same. Ignorance is the root of the problem, and one that, much like the retrovirus in question, wreaks havoc on those things that might otherwise be its undoing.

Ignorance can inflate the fears of a person or group of people beyond what most would consider rational limits. It supercharges a person's fear by highlighting all the unknowns and filling them up with terrible possibilities.

I'll give you an example.  A person is never taught by a trusted, credible source like the CDC, that people living with HIV who maintain an undetectable viral load are essentially unable to transmit the virus to a partner. As far as this person understands, based upon whatever sources of information he's had up until now, an HIV-positive person is leaking virus all over the place if they bleed or ejaculate on or inside an uninfected partner, thereby transmitting the virus to any person they share a needle with, have unprotected sex with, or give birth to. In this world he inhabits, people living with HIV are forever one mistake away from infecting those HIV-negative people with whom they interact.

That's a frightening prospect! It discounts the fact that adherence to a regimen of antiretroviral medication therapies can lower the virus' presence in one's body to such a level as to be undetectable by the tests designed to detect it. It ignores evidence that PrEP and TasP have been proven to be 99% effective at preventing new HIV infections between  serodiscordant partners who adhere to their daily medication routines.

These missing facts remove an aspect of comfort and reassurance from the overall picture of HIV in his view of it, and it leaves gaps in his understanding of HIV that are then easily filled with musings, ponderings, misinformation, and the unknown, each of which can ignite fear.

My very close friend, who you might guess from the fact that my entire blog has been dedicated to him, now comes into this story. Since we first me, he has shown that there some gaps in his understanding of HIV and about the risk involved in various sex acts with an HIV+ partner. There would be a statement here about how the virus did this when the body did that and then something else arrives and does this other wrong thing, and he knows, because it came from someone's story retold about their uncle's former lover's old maid, or some such convoluted string of citations and sources.

It was clear that he experienced a certain amount of nervousness or anxiety during sex with me, but I didn't have the heart to ask him about it, thinking he was already trying so hard to hide it so that I wouldn't feel judged or feared, even if somewhere deep down inside he was judging or fearing being with me just a bit.

He was very polite and always respectful whenever we discussed my HIV. He was curious to hear firsthand details about how the virus operates, how it can and cannot actually be passed between partners, and about how effective PrEP and TasP are at preventing HIV from infecting him. I shared my experience and knowledge, addressed some of the ways that stigma had negatively impacted me, and corrected those parts of his knowledge that were ill informed and misleading. He accepted those facts and experiences into his world view and has begun to build a new understanding for himself that now has less room in it for ignorance to breed and nurture fear.

My good friend is now taking Truvada as PrEP, and he now has less anxiety about having sex with men who have HIV if he feels he can trust their claims of being undetectable. I am proud to have been a part of his new expanded view of the facts surrounding HIV, and I am happy that he now carries less anxiety about having sex without using condoms. I want him to feel safe when he is safe and to enjoy the experience without being concerned about becoming infected. 

That being said, I would be lying if I said I wasn't also grievously hurt by his lessened worry and concern. Given the state of our relationship, following what was a transformative and  devastating weekend, it is quite clear that sex between us is no longer a good idea for either of us. It hasn't been completely ruled out as a future possibility, but even then there are likely to be complications for both of us if we continue having 1-on-1, intimate, meaningful sex with one another.

He would be pushed closer and closer toward feelings of romantic love and obligation toward me, which he steadfastly declares he does not want for himself at this point in time. Having spent the last two decades in one relationship or another, he wants to give himself the space to feel what being beholden to no one but himself is like. He says that he doesn't want any relationship with any person right now that is close enough for them to be hurt by his actions, deeds, or words. He wants to have only those friendships that he knows can be maintained with minimal effort and could be ended without hurt feelings or dramatic separation. 

For me, having sex with him would weaken my resolve to turn off the feelings that were causing me so much pain and him so much anxiety. It would be too easy for me to regard it as love making, which would make me susceptible to a resurgence in romantic feelings and a desire to win his love and commitment. Those things are simply not available to me at the moment whether I like it or not. So I can't let myself consider them as factors in the relationship I manage to salvage between us. I have to lock those away in order to move forward without constant pain and emotional trauma.

Dealing with all of that is already pretty complicated. Now consider this:

The man with whom I was falling in love, who harbored a number of fears and reservations about how to have sex with me when we were still having sex, is now more comfortable having sex without condoms with HIV positive people -  except for me. It seems that my being such a temptation for him to begin to view me as his boyfriend has won me the great honor of NEVER getting to be his boyfriend, and the added bonus gift of getting a front row seat to watch him evolve beyond the fears that plagued him during sex with me into being able and indeed a bit more than willing to engage in more and more bareback sex with a now widening range of possible partners free of such fears or concerns.

What a fucking fucked up mind-fuck I have created here. Fuck my life. Fuck all of these fears. Fuck his worries and fuck my broken heart and fuck all the fucking suspicions and jealousies and betrayals and fights and separations. And fuck me for fucking myself thusly. FUCK. How am I going to pull this off?

Surely, one day in the not-too-distant future, I will be able to look back on this absurd collection of painful experiences and laugh. I will have figured out how to move forward and I'll be less impacted by the memories I'll then have of the time I am chronicling right here, right now, and the comedic element inherent in these ever increasing misadventures in adult friendship will be made delightfully apparent and nostalgic in my melancholic recollection of it. 

These things have to be true if for no other reason than that I am paying so richly for some kind of relief with a currency made of tears and anguish and emotional earthquakes that keep shaking the foundation upon which my sanity rests. The hurt I am depositing into eternity's' First National Bank of Karma is surely going to secure for me that small future luxury or else it has all just been a waste of time and a regrettably unnecessary injury upon my future happiness.