Dangerous Ignorance In The City Attorney's Office

 

Seattle City Attorney, Ann Davison, doesn't know the difference between HIV negative and undetectable. Normally, I'd say, "So what. Plenty of people are surprisingly ignorant when it comes to HIV terminology. But an elected official in such a seat of power who chooses to conduct investigations on innocent people over an angry and misguided tip from someone claiming (falsely) that he had been intentionally infected by a friend who he said was supposed to be negative, is a danger to any citizen of this city living with HIV. 

In case she reads this post, allow me to illustrate the difference, because the distinction matters immensely. 

A person is HIV negative if they have never been infected with the virus. This means there are no virus copies anywhere in their system, and there never has been. These people have the option of taking Truvada or other medications once daily to prevent HIV infection through sex. 

HIV attaching to a lymphocyte

When an HIV-positive person taking Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) daily is successful at suppressing the amount of virus in their bloodstream to a level so low that it becomes impossible for them to transmit the infection to others through sex, those people are considered HIV+/undetectable. 

The virus isn't gone. The few copies that remain travel into the nooks and crannies, mostly inside lymph nodes, and become dormant. They lie there in wait for an opportunity when the medicine is no longer around to suppress it, sleeping until they can wake and resume making copies of themselves using helper T-cells from our immune system as the building blocks. This is why adherence is critical and why remaining undetectable has always been my goal. 

The CDC considers an undetectable status, meaning there are fewer than 40 copies of the virus per mL of blood, to be untransmittable. This is the basis of the U=U campaign aimed at educating people like Ann Davison so they understand risk factors accurately. 

I have been HIV positive since 1993. For the vast majority of those years, I have remained durably suppressed or undetectable - same thing. Since day one, I have been upfront about my status with every partner I've had, despite the rejection and stigma that accompanies such an admission. It's in all my profiles on Grindr, Scruff, and Sniffies. I have never hidden my status. Not ever. As is the case with any long-term survivor of HIV, there are occasional "blips" where viral load spikes unexpectedly above the level of detection. It happens through no fault of the patient. This is what happened to me in the fall of 2023. 

A white blood cell infected with HIV

That year in September, I got a viral load that was "detectable" at 63 copies per milliliter of blood. This is still considered to be durably suppressed. The CDC and WHO consider any viral load below 1,000 to carry a risk of transmissibility effectively negligible.
63 < 1,000. Do the math, Ann.

If you are going to send investigators in to haunt a person's life for years, invading
their privacy day and night, holding embarrassing conversations about the subject's weight, hygiene, eating habits, and masturbation schedule, at least know which people among your constituents present a credible risk of spreading HIV. Because when you get that basic factor wrong, your whole basis for an investigation goes right out the window.

But you don't let a little thing like that stop you, do you, Ann? Even when your own investigator reads you a list of reasons to call off the investigation and leave me alone, you shut him down, reminding him he is a City Employee and as such will do whatever you tell him to do. Not very good managerial style, but hey. You do you.

I guess if it's no longer about whether your pal (my former friend turned ridiculous enemy) actually became positive through my intentional transmission, then I guess it must be a personal grudge now. I imagine it must be pretty humiliating to realize partway through an investigation that your target is medically incapable of the crime you are trying to pin on him. Add to that the bonus of the subject catching on to your game and listening to your investigators talking about him from their hiding place nearby. That's got to be salt in an already embarrassing wound. So you direct them to keep monitoring and to find probable cause sufficient to get a warrant and arrest me. Disregard the protests of the man on the ground who has seen firsthand my innocence. What does the truth matter when you've got a crusade to finish?

I suppose this is why Seattle PD's records department can't seem to fulfill my public records requests in a more timely manner. I have requested records of police reports, body worn video, dash camera footage, investigation notes and basically any artifact available in connection with me going back as far as April 2024 that still have not been fulfilled. The first bunch was held so long that some of the records met their retention deadline and were deleted despite my open request for them. Did you make a call and instruct those city employees to drag their feet as long as they could? I guess we'll see, won't we. Another batch of released files is due 12/31/25.

I can't wait until I have an opportunity to face you in court and look at your face when I show the judge my hard, unimpeachable evidence of my durable suppression since 2020 right on up through this past Tuesday. I'm envisioning your head exploding or at least plumes of cartoon steam gushing forth from your ears. Keep it up, Ann. But try to learn something along the way, ma'am. It's kind of your job to know this shit.

HIV & Depression

 How Long-Term HIV Survival and Depressive Episodes Go Hand-In-Hand

Living with HIV for decades turns time into something strange. The urgency of the early years eventually fades, but the virus doesn’t. It just settles in, like a roommate you never invited and can’t evict. The crisis slowly becomes routine, and routine becomes its own kind of prison. That little pill that keeps me alive is both my miracle and my mirror—every morning it reflects back the part of me I’d most like to erase. I swallow it with water and a wince, a daily ritual of gratitude and resentment in the same breath.

What people don’t always see is that long-term survival comes with a quiet, grinding grief. I outlived the panic-era headlines, the funerals, the whispered “Did you hear…?” phone calls—but survival has a body count, and sometimes I feel like I’m standing on top of it. Survivor’s guilt isn’t just a dramatic phrase; it’s the heaviness you feel when you realize you’re still here while faces you loved live only in old photos and half-faded memories. You start to wonder why you were spared—what cosmic math decided you get to grow older with this virus while others never had the chance. The world moved on to new scandals and new crises, but my body never got to move on from this one.

Then there’s the stigma that doesn’t die, it just evolves. It lives in the awkward pause when I disclose my status. In the way some people say “Oh… thank you for telling me,” like I just handed them a ticking bomb instead of a piece of my truth. It’s in the dating apps where you either brand yourself with three letters—HIV—or play this exhausting game of timing and disclosure and risk. Even in 2025, with PrEP and U=U and all the science in the world, there are still looks, still questions, still people who treat you as a walking warning label instead of a whole person.

Sex, for me, isn’t a minefield of disclosure anymore; I took that part out of the equation a long time ago. My status is right there on every profile, in plain sight, so anyone who can’t handle it can quietly move along before we ever exchange a word. It’s a kind of harm reduction for the heart: I don’t have to brace for the awkward pause, the panicked unmatch, the “sorry, I didn’t realize…” message. But there’s a quieter cost to that system too. I never see the rejections—I just feel the absence. Fewer messages, fewer replies, conversations that die on the vine. You can’t prove it’s because of those three letters, but you feel it anyway. It becomes easy to see yourself less as a person who happens to have HIV and more as a filter people are silently passing or failing before they ever bother to meet you.

Over time, that kind of invisible sorting seeps into the bedroom, even when I’m with someone who does show up, who does understand U=U, who doesn’t flinch at my status. My body still remembers years of being treated like a risk instead of a partner. Desire gets tangled up with self-consciousness, with side effects, with the sense that I’m a “safer choice” only because I’ve turned my sex life into a disclaimer-first operation. It’s not that I’m afraid to be honest; it’s that honesty has taught me exactly how conditional other people’s desire can be — and some days my libido responds by just shutting the whole system down.

Depression doesn’t just drain my mood; it interferes with the one thing that’s literally keeping me alive. When I fall deep into an episode, basic tasks turn into impossible mountains. Getting out of bed feels like a negotiation. Feeding myself, brushing my teeth, taking a shower—those start to feel optional. The pill bottle on the nightstand stops looking like hope and starts looking like a judgmental little witness. On the worst days, I just roll over and let the hours pass, doses slipping by untouched. It’s not always a dramatic “I want to die.” Sometimes it’s just a quiet “I don’t care what happens to me right now,” and that indifference is its own kind of danger.

That’s what scares me when I finally surface: how easily survival can start to unravel in those stretches. If I miss meds for long enough, HIV stops behaving like a managed chronic condition and starts becoming a real threat again. The virus I work so hard to keep caged gets a chance to wake back up. Then the shame hits: You know better. How could you let this slide? That shame folds right back into the depression, which makes it even harder to pick the pill up the next day. It becomes a loop—virus, pill, depression, avoidance, more risk—and it’s terrifying to realize how quickly that loop could become deadly if it goes unchecked.

From the outside, it just looks like I’m “having a rough week” or “in a funk.” Nobody sees the small, lethal math happening in my bedroom: missed pills, skipped meals, a body quietly absorbing every choice I’m too numb to make. Long-term survival is sold as lab numbers and adherence charts, but for me it’s also this constant fight not to let the darkness talk me out of basic self-care. The same daily pill that gave me a future back can become the first thing I stop reaching for when the future feels too heavy to hold.

And yet, here I am. Still taking the pill. Still doing the laundry. Still paying bills, going to work, flirting on good days, hiding on the bad ones. That’s the darker side of survival no one prepared me for: not the drama of dying, but the discipline of living. Waking up again and again to the same virus, the same bottle, the same history, and choosing—sometimes reluctantly, sometimes angrily—to keep going. It isn’t inspirational. It isn’t neat. It’s just real.

At The Precipice Once More

 LOOK OUT FOR THAT FIRST STEP. IT'S A LULU!

I'm really trying hard to have a more positive outlook. Truly! But I can't seem to stop tripping over huge reminders that taking two steps forward will ultimately land you three steps back. It's like just when one awful thing resolves itself, there's no time to even celebrate that small win before its mutant cousin pops up with a chip on its shoulder looking to double the awful you just finished tidying up. 

A major development in my ongoing saga of the mysterious "investigation" that has haunted me for the last two-and-a-half years finally came to fruition this past
weekend, and there are two ways of looking at it. Either these nosey nellies calling themselves "investigators" finally did some elementary investigating and uncovered the truth, which, surprisingly, they shared with a certain former friend whose raison d'etre for the last couple years has been to shout "Shannon's a murderer!" from the mountain tops. The alternative view, and the one I'm actually inclined to believe, is that he and his gal pals got creative and put on one of their now famous scripted performances wherein the former friend gives a stellar performance as a decent human being just long enough for me to swallow the act and buy into the ruse. 

Not this time! Fool me thrice, and . . . well, shove it where the sun don't shine, I guess. Trust is a resource I now guard more tightly than China on rare earths. He killed off my former default setting, which was to trust people completely until they give you a reason not to. Ah, but it's for the best really. There are just way too many people around who look for simps like that and suck 'em dry before they use up that free trust and then bounce. I'm done with those guys. 

Either way, it represents a milestone for me, and it felt like a huge weight was about to be lifted. I could actually feel myself ready to rise, to lift off and glide toward a better future. Nah-ah! No, sir. Get your fat ass back down here in the dirt! Pigs don't fly, big boy! 

Because this troupe of assholes, er. um, actors playing at investigating are incapable of talking to one another at a volume lower than 120 decibels, especially when the whole gang is on speaker phone or Zoom, I got to hear the universe winding up for the next kick to my nuts. I might have been cleared by these jokers of having ever been a murderer or a terrorist, but because they have been invading my privacy for going on three years now, they've managed to make a list of lesser gripes that the Head Cunt in Charge seems intent on pinning on me with a warrant, even though this bitch and her chums are personally responsible for irreparable damage to my life and for the loss of what was a very important relationship for me. 

Bitch has zero empathy and no sense of shame at all. A decent person, upon learning they were completely wrong about something so terrible would reflect on their actions and the impact they had on their target during the course of their mishandled blunder of an investigation and think, "Hmm. I fucked up, and this guy was really hurt in the process. That's on me, and I'm gonna leave this dude the fuck alone. He's earned a break, surviving me and my around-the-clock surveillance as well as he did." And then they would tuck their tail between their legs and shuffle off quietly into the sunset. 

Not HCiC. She see's her errors as inconsequential and focuses on saving face instead of giving grace. Her priority is to find something, anything that will justify the HUGE expense she's racked up with her fruitless and baseless three-year crusade to catch a killer that never existed. What a fucking bitch. 

Even her fellow investigators were taken aback by her gall. One dude, who I actually think is pretty cool, stood up to the twat for a good many hours yesterday, arguing from a place of accountability and sympathy that there was no way in hell there should even be a discussion about sending me to jail after what they did to my life. He's right! 

I just started my work study job last week, and the drama going on all around me is putting me in very real danger of losing my financial aid. I'm taking three classes this quarter, and I'm on a collision course with utter failure in at least two of them, because I've been so consumed trying to figure out if and when these assholes are going to come for me. If I fail even one, my financial aid gets pulled for next quarter, which means I can't attend school or work study. If I don't attend school, I have to start repaying student loans, without which I can't pay rent. Without school, I no longer qualify for SNAP food benefits. Without those, I don't eat. It's like I said, two steps forward. . .here they come.

But, nah. Fuck them. I gave my friend all my support, my love, my loyalty, and in return I earned his betrayal, his lies, and his crusade to punish me for embarrassing him. I did everything I could to protect him, and he wants me in jail for failing to do that. It's so fucked up! He wants an apology I have not been given an opportunity to give him, and because it's so late coming his way, he's beyond angry. He's nuclear. He's lost all reason. There is no getting through his wall of hatred to his gooey Tootsie-roll center. He's lost to me, and in becoming so lost, has become a danger to me. 

His Obsession With Me Is Absurd

From The Shadows A Coward Watches

AI-generated Illustration of my stalker harassing me from the shadows.

It may be the most ironic thing I have ever witnessed in my life. For the last three mornings in a row, two of which I had to spend away from home just to get away from it, I have heard my former friend in the vicinity of my new apartment barking orders with such angry intensity at the investigators who are still watching me around the clock. He not only knows where I live, but he and his pack of peepers clearly have a base of operations nearby from which to spy on me. 

Now, I want to remind my readers that this is the same friend who two years ago cut off all communication with me, told me to leave him alone, and even went to such ridiculous lengths as to file a false petition for a protective order to silence me from collecting a debt owed to me by him. And now, he can't seem to get enough of me. 

While this hypocrite gnashes his teeth and barks orders at his team of spies, insisting they find a way to arrest me, he engages in the very behavior he found so intrusive and violating when he imagined it being done to him. One would think that someone wanting nothing to do with me would put as much distance between us as possible. Not my former friend. He may be a coward, too afraid to face me after all he has done to punish me for humiliating him over 2 years ago, but he's a wily one, staying just close enough to intrude on me without being seen.

I have no idea where he lives. I don't know if or where he works. Since he was evicted from our former building for nonpayment of rent for two years, I've kept a low profile and have not tried to find out anything about him or his whereabouts, because I was just hopeful that I could finally put that horrible man out of my life for good. But not him. He has kept tabs on me and has been watching my every move since 2023. 

So, it seems I may have to take a page from his playbook now and file my own petition for a protective order. The fact that he is clearly on the property where I live so frequently with no business here other than to harass and stalk me, coupled with the fact that he has a license to carry a concealed weapon and owns a gun, has me very concerned for my safety. I'm going to ask Seattle Police Department to help me request an Emergency Protection Order with mandatory weapon removal to protect me from any violence my former friend may intend to visit upon me.

I tried to be a good sport. I forgave his debt to me. I have maintained the no-contact status he so badly wanted even after the order expired, except to send him certain documents related to tax and legal matters I was obligated to send to him. I want nothing to do with him, because he was such a duplicitous, abusive liar who ended up stealing a great deal of money from me when I needed it most, negotiated in bad faith while cooperating with a ridiculous investigation under the presumption that I was guilty of terrorism. He's a moron, but he's a damned good actor.  

Since I have heard you making snarky references to my posts, old friend, I know you are monitoring my blog and social media. Let this be my final warning to you. Leave me alone. Stop monitoring me. You have no business anywhere near my home. 

You CHOSE to leave me with hundreds of unanswered questions and to lead me to believe in a feigned friendship you invented to deceive me. You didn't feel obligated to fill in any blanks to make life more bearable for me, and that's your fucking prerogative, asshole. 

But you don't get a say in how I fill in the blanks for myself. I'm entitled to know about the things going on around me that have direct impact on my life, and I will do whatever I have to do to answer the questions your cowardly ass left me with. 

If I see you around my apartment, I will confront you. Neither of us wants the awkwardness of having to look the other in the eye or speak a single word to the other. I despise you, and I want nothing to do with you. Be gone, you hateful, vindictive little backstabbing bitch. And take those idiots you call investigators with you. They clearly suck at their job, and there's nothing to fucking see here.