Sitting in the doctor’s office I can barely believe my ears. In front of me is one of the hottest men I have ever met. Looking at me with his bright green eyes, his shirt tight across his perfectly toned chest, shoulders and arms, telling me I’m HIV positive. It’s a double shock because outside of the implications of the disease it’s also an immediate exclusion from permanent residency in Australia. My world is slowly collapsing around me. I’m trapped in a glass lid coffin, watching the dirt shoveled down until the last glimpse of daylight disappears.
I snap out of this daydream, my hands clammy with perspiration and my chest tight, as the oldest practicing doctor on the planet calls my name and shows me into his consulting room. He brushes past the results, bored with my presence and going through the motions for the residency application.
Half an hour later I’m standing on Cavanagh Street. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I’m negative. I can start living.
Out of the whole experience it has been my friends’ reaction that surprised me the most. People were surprised that I was stressed about the test. Remember, I come from a country with a much higher infection rate than Australia’s, so I was at higher risk six months ago. Nonetheless, I have found the attitude to HIV infection here one of indestructibility. The stereotypical: “
it can’t happen to me.”
Perhaps my understanding of HIV is different to the average gay man’s. I have been living with it since before I tumbled out of my designer closet into the HIV riddled Cape Town Gay Scene. The man who introduced my parents to each other died a number of years ago from AIDS (he contracted HIV from his lover of many years), I have several friends living with it in Cape Town, including one of my exes. Also friends who contracted it in the early, scary days before there was even an antibody test, and have been lucky enough to survive.
Some of my friends were sluts and scene queens, placing themselves in situations of risk where infection was inevitable. Some are highly intelligent, educated career driven men with everything you have always desired. Others were drunk one night and made reckless decisions, and still others were just unlucky. The “one in a million” infection from a blowjob.
Yes, it does happen.Still others are straight. A friend of mine cheated on his wife while on a business trip in Johannesburg, and he and is wife have had to sit their kids down and explain to them why mommy and daddy are dying. It’s not a gay disease and although that sounds cliched my experience has been that that perception persists. It is purported, and I believe it, that in Cape Town, the infection rate amongst straight people in my socioeconomic category is higher than for gay people.
A friend recently said to me “it’s meant to happen to skinny drug taking, Oxford Street Queens who are out every night with another man - not to people like me.”
That’s the reality.More surprising than the belief they are invincible, is the lack of understanding what HIV is all about. The perception of an immediate death sentence persists, and people seem to want to climb into their biohazard suits and handle positive people with tongs. Despite the reality that it is a horrible, incurable disease, most infected people can live without medication for several years, and on medication possibly long enough to outlive
you. What is more important, despite any implications of the disease, is that they remain people and should be treated as such.
I started chatting to a guy online a few weeks back. His profile made it clear he was positive, and during our conversation he asked me whether I would sleep with someone who was positive.
That’s a difficult question. I have never been faced with the choice. My human instinct recoils but my mind says yes, I would.
After all, there’s no more risk in protected sex with someone you know is positive than protected sex with a stranger you just picked up at a club.
