Last week, after HIV Edmonton's AIDS Walk for Life the Metro newspaper ran the unfortunate headline "Walking for those who cannot." The poor article that followed equated HIV with death and failed to illustrate that in the nearly 30 years society has been living with HIV much has happened, including the introduction of universal precautions, activism around global health and equality and quality-of-life improvements for people living with HIV while overall new infection rates have dropped. While there is still so much still to do, in the grand scheme of things when it comes to AIDS, we are winning.
A week earlier on gayedmonton.com's cruiseboard, a lengthy thread was started by a man living with HIV looking for love and tired of guys using his HIV status as a cop out for why they can't have sex or get into a long-term relationship with him. In the subsequent posts people debated viral load, undetectability and transmission of HIV. Running through the posts are guys' honest admissions that they are afraid of sleeping with dudes living with HIV and the frustration over the misconceptions of HIV. What is never made clear is that people living with HIV can have fulfilling sex lives with both people living with and people living without HIV.
It is often lamented that the public has grown apathetic around HIV and AIDS. But as the two incidents reveal I think we are all actually overwhelmed. We are stuck in antiquated ways of thinking and we don't know how to move forward. At the heart of the problem is the foolish higher standard of scrutiny HIV is held to over any other aspect of the human experience. Why do we expect HIV to make more sense than any other aspect of being alive? We will be better off when we accept HIV as part of our lives the way we accept airplanes, cancer, Fruit Loops, the Rolling Stones and any number of other things. There will be less stigma and discrimination related to people impacted with HIV, and we will move on to see HIV not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something that is part of us.
In this coming age gay men can be the leaders in this paradigm shift. As it has been scandalously reported out of proportion, there are gay men who want to have HIV. While one may disagree with their desire it does herald a different way of looking at HIV.
Right now almost everything one consumes around HIV is based on the premise that no one wants HIV, and that we should avoid it at all costs. What this very tiny group of men illustrates is that the belief that HIV is bad is not a universal truth. For some HIV provides a way to create bonds, family and identity. While I am not encouraging this line of thinking, I think it is terrible to ignore or dismiss it.
Other gay men living with HIV credit the incurable fatal virus with saving their lives, stating that due to the reckless ways they were living before they knew they had HIV—often as a way of dealing with heterosexism and discrimination—getting news that they were positive was a wake up call for them to value life.
HIV is in our shared system so it will continue to circulate, at least into the foreseeable future, be it in poorly written articles or in our blood. This is nothing to be afraid of—it is something to know. It is too late to think we can curb HIV from existence—that moment passed when systemic discrimination was selected over proactive and decisive leadership. What we need now is helpful, frank, compassionate, informative conversations with space for questions so we can move forward to respect and understand we live with HIV. We love, have fun, escape, feed our babies, inject, give birth, cope, fall off wagons, fall in love, trust, thrust, gamble, search, ache, hope, receive close our eyes and sometimes we emerge with nary a scratch, sometimes not. HIV does not make sense, but there is value in HIV.
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