In 2008 I decided, after a period of singledom, and following a short, interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful relationship that I would poke my nose over the parapet and look for a new boyfriend.
I was living in Doncaster at the time. I have to be ruthlessly honest about the place. It is a ditch. It also has a problem. Because it is so awful people don't stick around if they can help it. People with brains, talent or creativity leave for more promising lands. There were several reasons I stuck it out as long as I did - some good, some not so good, but I called it The Armpit Of England, and the one and only gay pub was the nasty boil right in the middle of it.
I did try twice to meet Mr. Right in that gay pub. To my credit, I didn't seem to have problems attracting suitors, it's just they were either a) hideous b) alcoholic c) conversationally limited to discussing Girls Aloud and/or Jordan d) bisexual (read: married) e) excruciatingly camp, in a non-natural way. The same people abounded when I went the one and only time to Doncaster Gay Pride, which was so soul destroying I actually wept when I got home. It was every gay and lesbian tired old cliche rolled into a carnival of gone-off beer drinking - simpering Nellies dancing around their man-bags and butch dykes grimacing with cigarettes clenched between their teeth. It was like fun without the fun.
So in my tentative scan of possible love on the horizon, I turned once more to Gaydar, which wasn't exactly "fresh" at that point either. But because I hadn't been on it for so long, and once I reactivated my profile, I started to get messages. Gaydar is quite explicit in listing people's preferences. One of them is a displayed preference informing the viewer of another person's profile whether the profile's owner prefers safe sex or unprotected. I vividly recall the first time I checked my messages and I had around fifteen unique respondents. All but one said they preferred unprotected sex.
This came as an enormous shock to me. The last time I had used Gaydar had only been a few years prior, and it was far, far more common to see on people's profiles that they were listed as preferring "safe sex". Something had changed.
This is why it came as no shock to me to read today that the number of men choosing to have unprotected sex with other men rose 26% between 1990 and 2010, according to the Health Protection Agency and University College London.
The terrifying cull of thousands of gay men that occurred in New York, San Francisco and London in the early 1980's, when AIDS wasn't even called that - it was called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and the ravaging effects it meted out on the bodies of previously fit, virile young men were utterly devastating. I'm old enough to remember those images, even though I was a young boy. The bravery of those ill men who were willing guinea pigs - who ingested, there is no other word, poisons, in the hope that the either cure or retardation of the progression of HIV into AIDS could be brought about. It was because of those gay men that knew they had no hope, but gave what little of their life they had left to further research into the very first effective drug therapy that slowed the evolution of HIV.
If we fast forward into the era when combination therapy began, this is when HIV was no longer viewed as a terminal condition. It became a chronic condition. But this is not to say that people do not die from HIV/AIDS. Some never find a combination that works. Men who have been reinfected several times can develop super strains that are immune to all combination therapies, and their prognosis is poor. This is what is so frightening in these statistics. It seems hard to compute, but many men have sought out HIV positive men, "Bugchasing", in the erroneous belief that if they are HIV positive they will receive the entire suite of disability benefits. Things are very different now. Unless you are ill from HIV, or your blood counts have pushed you into AIDS, you are deemed fit for work. Yet this practice is quite widespread. It seems an awful indictment on an individual's lack of self esteem to wantonly give themselves a lifelong chronic, potentially life-threatening illness.
What is important to note here is the word "choose". This isn't about forgetting to wear a condom in a drunken stupor, or after a night clubbing when you've both had Ecstasy and you're not thinking clearly. It's an informed choice, and that's why it's so worrying - over a quarter of gay men are choosing to have unsafe sex.
What this tells us is there is no fear around HIV/AIDS. That it is seen as something you simply pop a pill for, and you just get on with your life. But, as someone who's partner is HIV positive I know this is not the reality. Because people are not factoring the massive side effects from the medication which leave you exhausted, that cause you to gain weight, and the real symptoms - the constant colds, the immune system that's completely dependent on you remembering to take medication like clockwork on the dot X amounts of time every day. And the worst thing is the fear. Maybe my partner doesn't worry as much as me, but I'm constantly worrying that he is ok, that he's going to be ok. Maybe he worries more than me.
There is nothing to be gained by regressing to the scare tactic adverts of the 1980's - but the male gay scene needs shaking, because it's sleep walking into a catastrophe. They have forgotten that there are absolutely no guarantees as far as medication is concerned. And the more unprotected sex they have, and should an individual get reinfected and reinfected his chances of successful treatment recede dramatically each time.
We should all be allowed to live the lives we choose, but I think of those men in 1982 and 1983 who had no hope, and died in abject agony whilst a pioneering and tiny group of scientists and chemists dosed and injected them with the most awful drugs - the prototypes of the combination therapies that keep all those who have access to HIV drugs alive today. Part of me feels that we, as a gay community owe it to those men to contemplate why these drugs came to be - for what purpose. I think we could all benefit from reflecting on their true value, and more importantly on how we value ourselves as living breathing humans, partaking and interacting in this complex world.
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