Ma! 1991

 
   

Bridging the H|+/- A

Of all the things that separate gay men
from each other, few have had as much
impact as the one most recently introduced:
HIV status.

The men’s community has been di-
vided into two worlds, each with its own
reality: seropositive and seronegative, with
those who don't know their HIV status
ﬂoating in between. Without realizing it,
we often deﬁne ourselves and others in
those terms. In the process, we create a gulf
which gets expressed in countless ways,
from the crude rejection of HIV+ men to
more subtle variations on how we interact.

Of all the areas where the gap exists,
none is more prominent than sexual prac-
tices. Even some of the most educated and
safe-sex-conscious HIV- or I-IIV-unknown
gay men will become irrational when it
comes to the question of sexual activity by/
with HIV+ men.

Some believe that no one who is HIV +
should be sexually active at all, while oth-
ers are adamant that, even when practicing
safer sex, an HIV+ person has the obliga-
tion to disclose their status to every one-
night stand or trick. Others say that they
would never have sex with a person they
knew or suspected to be I-IIV-positive.

While many seronegative men put the
onus for disclosure on those who are sero-
positive, men living with HIV are fre-
quently critical of the way some HIV-nega-
tive men handle safer sex. According to one
friend with HIV, ‘'1 start out intending only
to do things that I consider safe, but they
push the limits, and want to do things that
make me afraid I'll infect them. I'm left with
deciding between telling them my status, or
letting it happen."

In all the discussion critical of sero-
positive men who have unsafe sex, rarely is
the other consenting partner considered to
bear equal responsibility for his own
health. If the point of practicing safer sex is
that you have to assume that your partner
may be HIV-positive, why should the
ground rules change when you find out that
one actually is?

Yet things sometime go to the other
extreme - some seropositive men are so
conscious of the risk of transmission that
they insist on more precautions than proba-
bly necessary to "protect" their partners.
Some have even decided only to have sex
with other men with HIV, or to become
celibate. One man I know insists that his
HIV-negative partners wear latex gloves

when they give him a hand- job - a counter-
erotic idea if ever there was one.

The issues are not limited to having
sex with each other. Even the simplest
parts of friendship can be challenged by the
HIV split.

Most men who learn they are serone-
gative disclose their results casually, with
an understandable amount of relief and
happiness. Yet that disclosure may put an
HIV+ person in the same social circle in an
even more difficult position as he struggles
with his own more difficult issues of when
and whom he will tell of his own status.

Deciding to tell someone that you are
HIV+ involves a great deal - putting trust
in that person, taking on some degree of re;
sponsibility for helping them deal with the
results, and hoping they will be supportive
of you in appropriate ways.

One complaint voiced by many sero-
positive people is that once their status is
known, seronegative friends start to view
them vastly differently. "Even though I'm
quite healthy, I get the feeling most of my
friends are already starting to say goodbye,
and they are shutting down their emotional
involvement with me because they think it
will be easier for them when I finally get
sick" says one HIV+ man who has told
many of his friends. Another expressed
that "I'm handled with kid gloves all the
time, like my friends are afraid to get angry
at me or hurt my feelings."

Another seronegative friend put it just
as clearly: "At this point, if I were starting
a friendship with someone and I found out
he were HIV+, I would probably back off.
I've already buried too many friends, and
I'm not up to going through all that again if
I can avoid it."

Talking about other people's HIV
status is another area where the gap be-
comes evident. Rumors about test results
travel quickly; confidences aren't always
kept; and speculation is common place. It
seems to me that most gay men I know,
both HIV+ and HIV-, keep a mental list of
who they know who is positive, who is
negative, and who is questionable.

This gossip can quickly fall to the
level of total trash: on more than one occa-
sion I've heard the word "slut" used in
conjunction with such speculation,
coupled with such moral pronouncements
as "I wouldn't be surprised if..." and "Do
you know how many people he slept with
in the last few years..." .

Sometimes the gossip really goes be-
yond acceptable limits: information told in
conﬁdence to a friend should not be shared
with the whole bar the next night; disclosure
of the identity of people who may have been
seen during a visit to a doctor's office is
inappropriate; and rumors started simply
because someone was seen leaving an
AIDS service organization's office simply
throw up more walls of distrust.

The supportive networks that people
with HIV have built can also, at times, be
seen as exclusionary. One AIDS activist
from another state once told me that he was
"tired of people with HIV who acted as
though they belong to some special club that
I can't join. It's like they want a Medal of
Valor for what they're going through, as
though none of the rest of us are going
(continued on next page)

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