I ask, you tell

When talking about HIV disclosure, it might benefit everyone to zoom out and think outside of the "HIV paradigm" for a change and focus instead on overall wellness. A bit of wordsmithing might help, too, if we swap out "HIV disclosure" for "STI info exchange". All this talk of HIV disclosure often leads to folks not discussing anything else besides HIV and that fails to address the big picture of both public and individual health. There is a middle ground here.

We all know the danger of stigmatization. We all know the desire to reduce new infections (hopefully, of any kind). If we bear this in mind at all times, all parties will be focused on their own personal health promotion. There is no reason that folks who believe they don't have HIV shouldn't be considering the broader concept of wellness and protection. Ditto for folks who know they have HIV.

Condoms help prevent HIV, but focusing on condoms as the sole source of our safety and protection fails to address the fundamental processes of how we make our choices and what motivates our decisions. The overwhelming majority of my clients have used a condom in the last 12 months. These are the same folks that have also decided in the same period of time to have anal sex sans condom. Asking someone the last time they had sex without a condom, and asking someone the last time they felt they likely put themselves at risk during sex, will often yield two distinctly different responses.

Condoms are not protection incarnate. Condoms are a form of protection. The sooner we (publicly) acknowledge that reality, the sooner folks can focus on making sure they are always using some form of protection, regardless of condom use. Condoms are effective at preventing many STIs; however, they don't provide 100% protection against herpes and syphilis. Furthermore, if we allow people to go on having oral sex without condoms with the mindset that they're having "unprotected sex" because they're not using condoms, we also enable them to stop thinking about protection outside the "condom box", such as a broader conversation about STIs in general and a discussion with partners on their personal sexual health promotion plans.

This is dangerous.

Equally dangerous is the mindset that HIV-positive folks have no other sexual health concerns now that they're positive. This is probably why we're seeing such large numbers of poz gay men with gonorrhea. They're not using condoms because they've had it drilled into them that condoms are (primarily) for preventing HIV, and if they're serosorting and only sleeping with other poz guys, they no longer have to concern themselves with "safe sex".

Safe sex is informed sex. We all make different choices when we have different information. We must encourage folks to figure out what information matters to them. I hope we rise above the ethical quicksand of "HIV disclosure" and embrace an idealistic reality that folks make good choices when they have good information. Folks need to be more conscious of decisions regarding their sexual health and have a set of criteria for what informs those decisions. These criteria should be developed by the individual, acknowledging their agency and ability to navigate their desires rationally, on their terms.

Get tested (for everything) and get talking.

"Desire won't die…"

I've been mulling over the concept of desire's construction for years now. When I look back on my own notions of beauty through the years, I'm struck most by how much more pleases my palate now, and how many more colors I have on my palette to paint a picture of what I desire. In short, with increased experiences, the space required to house my tastes has become quite palatial! (I couldn't resist a bit of wordplay.)

The question of "Where is the line between taste and unjust discrimination?" comes up often when discussing the intersections of sexual attraction, gender, age, and race (amongst other things). To better address what we all seek to gain from the answer—chiefly, to be (reciprocally) desired—I think another way to frame the question is: "How do we personally stand to benefit from examining how we construct desire?" If we each take the time to thoroughly investigate what concepts we're attracted to on a fundamental building-block level, we can then perform an appraisal of another individual based on their embodiment of those concepts we find attractive.

Perhaps an analogy would help to clarify my point (and I do have one): the politics of sexual desire are akin to the politics of affirmative action. The latter seeks a localized remedy to the systemic symptoms of a society plagued by prejudice, rather than confronting the cause of the illness. Masking symptoms might make us feel better, but we're still sick and "Band-Aid" solutions aren't enough to staunch the bleeding. Just as it would be a mistake to police racism solely through legislature without some social discourse on what forces drive race relations, it doesn't help to focus on sexual discrimination without (and, I daresay before, as well) discussing why we like who we like.

Consider an employer that elects to only hire applicants from a particular group. Before having a charge of "groupism" leveled against them or considering themselves "groupist", it would help for them to identify what qualities they're looking for in an employee. By adjusting their focus to zoom in on the parts that create the composite whole they desire, they'll have the chance to pinpoint those qualities outside the group they were previously limiting themselves to, thereby increasing the pool of desirable applicants and allowing them to skim more cream from a substantially larger crop.

Paring my attraction to ("biological") men down to its base components offered me the opportunity to seek out those elements I find desirable in as many people as possible. I discovered that my attraction was not to men, per se, but to the nebulous construct that is masculinity. This led me to pursue the root of my desire in folks that, theretofore, I had written off for not belonging to the group stereotypically possessing the quality I found so appealing, such as transdudes and even women.

Going beyond the bounds of what society had set for me to be attracted to as a gay man, boundaries that I myself had unthinkingly adopted, was liberating in many senses. It freed me from the bland limitations of only consuming what I'd been served by the media, and eventually freed me from a binary gender identity as well. Somewhere in the process, it also opened up my eyes to experiencing qualities I admired in people with a gaze looking from outside the arbitrary checkboxes of "masculine" and "feminine".

For all the benefits that I have gained through action inspired by introspection, the (ongoing) process is not without challenges. However, I can joyfully say that, for me, eating the fruits of my labors outweighs the toil of tilling the field. In short, if more of us ask ourselves the question "How do I construct desire?", we're likely to find that we find a lot more attractive. Casting a wider net benefits everyone. How wide the net might be is, of course, a personal choice, and through the casting the fisher might be surprised at what eventually ends up on their plate, pleasing their palate.