If you know anything about the history of the AIDS epidemic then you know it is all tragedy, principally because of the homophobia of the global leadership of those awful years long past. While the homophobia remains, access to care has greatly improved over the years, such that people like one of the subjects of this story, who is only 19 years old, can hope to live a long and fulfilling life like their HIV- peers.
Peter* who I’ll refer to as P henceforth), who contracted the virus at 18, proves that you can live a life filled with explosive joy with your HIV+ diagnosis even beyond what your HIV- peers can dream of, in the way he talks about it, and the way he pursues pleasure with an intentionality for safe sexual practices.
“One hill I will die on is that it is safer to have sex with someone you know is HIV+ upfront than it is to have it with someone whose status you can only guess,” he said sitting next to me in the parlour of the 2 bedroom I share with my cousin, “and nothing beats safe sex when it comes to attaining pleasure.”
I had invited him for a hookup 2 weeks after we met on Grindr, and a week after we went back and forth about what to expect. We connected on our love for marijuana and binging on Netflix, so I a sense our hookup was what you could call Netflix and Chill, but it became something deeper, nay spiritual one smoked blunt later.
He had wanted to tell me something midway through a very passionate make out session.
“I am poz,” he said between gasps as we came up for air mid French kiss.
Poz is a popular slang for HIV+, so I immediately got it, yet my response was one of questioning curiosity. I nodded okay and asked, “Alright?” Waiting for him to explain why sharing this felt necessary mid kiss.
“It is just something I like to share with people I really like,” he replied with a coy smile. I felt honoured to be liked already, and awed at the ease with which he shared this thing. I chucked it to his being GenZ, because my late Millennial ass would have lied to God about it on a first hookup.
The GenZ-Millennial divide in the ease of talking about everything and anything is an established fact, even more so it seems when it comes to the topic of HIV/AIDS.
Exactly 3 years before I met P I had met N. N is my age mate and shared similar developmental realities of irrational fear around the subject of HIV/AIDS that was the hallmark of most of our millennial upbringing. Stories filled with hoaxes about how HIV was developed in lab rats and introduced to Africa for population control and the like. Thanks to our onboarding on the internet we unlearnt a lot, yet, we still carry residuals of these stories like as not.
N had been HIV+ when we first met. I didn’t know, and rightly so because people living with HIV/AIDS don’t owe anyone a revelation of their status upfront or for any reason other than what they decide. He will tell me a few years later after I had an HIV scare and long after we’d had sex (safe in every sense) multiple times. He told me to enunciate what will come to be associated with P forever in my memory, that statement about how much safer it is to have sex with someone you know is positive.
Advances in medicine mean that there are now drugs available that prevent infection if taken accordingly, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), which means that someone with a lover living with the virus can have double the protection – using PrEP and a condom for instance – if they wish it.
N’s delay in telling me about his status didn’t take much from the pleasure of our coupling but it reinforced my belief that millennials approach this conversation more tentatively than GenZ do.
That day, after I reassured P that we are good because not only did I have condoms and lubricant in abundance at the ready, I was also on PrEP, we went on to have the most amazing sex. A rematch was inevitable and we had many of those in a 6 months relationship.
As we mark World AIDS Day, I share this to remind us all that while the way to end AIDS is deeply rooted in destigmatizing the conversation about HIV/AIDS we can’t get there if we don’t accept the truth that knowledge frees us all.
The future is better for free access to knowledge as more GenZ arm themselves with the confidence to seek protection for themselves and their lovers. Therein lies the equity we need t end HIV. Posterity will remember us kindly if we follow their lead.
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