HIV negative gay men hear a lot about what they should be doing (or not doing), but rarely about what they are doing well. They have had to plod along, making the best choices they could to remain negative, fearing every blood test, and often watching friends become infected with HIV.

Clearly, HIV positive people are subjected to daily stigmatization and prejudice, from the workplace to the dating pool. But this isn’t a contest. Considering this blog site is devoted to living joyfully with HIV, it’s probably about time that I sent some love toward my HIV negative brothers (and sisters).

Finally, do me an important favor. Please share this video with an HIV negative friend you care about. Let them know you appreciate the choices they are making. I speak from the perspective of a gay man, but everyone could use a little encouragement!

Meantime, my friends, please be well.

Mark

PositiveLite says Mark later wrote about this post with the following words: "Oh man, did this one ever get me into trouble. Here I thought I had such a great idea, doing a video to praise an encourage HIV negative gay men for staying that way, and acknowledging the fact that, in many ways, their struggles without HIV are harder than mine with it. Oops… this video offended just about everyone, mostly for a perceived sarcasm in my delivery. I’ll let you watch and decide for yourself."

You can read what people said about this video when it first aired here .  And while you're there check out the rest of My Fabulous Disease, Mark’s incredible one-of-a-kind blog.

Feeling victorious over AIDS only takes your self esteem so far; there’s no HIV medication to fight wrinkles.

Oh wait, there is. I had facial injections last year (and showed you the process) to alleviate moderate facial wasting, and it fixed me right up. Then I got padded butt shorts for those occasions I wear my beloved 501’s and I want to feel more confident. And let’s not forget the testosterone my doctor prescribed years ago that has kept a youthful bounce in my step ever since. If this is all strictly for HIV treatment, Joan Rivers is a long term AIDS survivor.

Last year I created a video posting about the battle between my gratitude for aging and my vanity, and I’ll admit it might be the funniest five minutes on my site. As my 50th birthday draws nearer, it’s a good time to give it another look. I discuss bars, boys, butt pads and Donny Osmond — something for everyone! Consider it the re-edited, younger looking Director’s Cut of a golden oldie.

Meantime, “Aging and HIV” appears to be the hot topic of the day. Conferences and workshops on the topic abound, and as the patient population considers their unexpected Golden Years, concerns about the long term effects of HIV infection and the impact of decades of medications are increasing. And then there’s the emotional implications.

“Aging is a challenge for all of us. But, for gay men living with HIV it is even more complex,” says Dr. James Masten, author of the book Aging with HIV: A Gay Man’s Guide.   “This war has utilized all their emotional resources and few have had the time to consider the challenge of aging.”

Well, not so fast. I make time to obsess about aging. But please continue, doctor.

“Research has found higher rates of depression, lack of social support, and reduced quality of life among middle aged and older people living with HIV. Adapting to aging with HIV can become complicated when emotional issues such as HIV-stigma, internalized ageism, unresolved grief, or survivor guilt impact one’s ability to care for oneself fully in the present.”

So I suppose I should live in the present and stop posting videos I made over a year ago. Seriously, these issues have the ring of the same emotional minefields I’ve been navigating for the last twenty years. But I’ll check out his book for any tips he might have on advanced age. And avoiding jowls.

Meanwhile, research on HIV and aging is being released left and right. The sum of this research seems to suggest that we’ll be more frail in our older age, have a tendency for more loss of bone density than the average person, and about twice as likely to have cognitive issues .

You can check the links yourself, but the news is a lot better than I would have guessed. I had expected people with HIV/AIDS to be waiting en masse for liver transplants by now. Remember, too, that people with HIV/AIDS are more likely to smoke, to have a drug abuse history, multiple sexual partners and other STD’s… basically, as a group we’re Heavy Metal Bad. The fact research suggests we’re more likely to be frail or forget our own phone number makes perfect sense to me.

So, take your vitamins, stay active and get a bone density check.

PositiveLite says: Catch much more of Mark S. King at home on his own website My Fabulous Disease.

And btw, Mark didn’t include a link to the padded underwear he referred to in the video, available from Butt for You (love that name!) but it’s here, along with an image from their website.

 . . . and grief subsided and lives moved on. But make no mistake, there are heroes among us right now.

My brother Richard smiles a lot. He has an easy laugh. But there was a time, years ago, when he held a poisonous drink in his hands and begged his dying lover not to swallow it. A time when Richard held the concoction they had prepared together and wept.

Emil couldn’t wait. He took the drink from Richard quickly, because the release it offered was something more rapturous than the appeals of his lover of thirteen years.

It was Emil’s wish to die on his own terms if living became unbearable, a promise made one to the other. When that time arrived, however, Richard wanted another moment, just a little more time to say, “I love you, Emil,” over and over again, before the drink would close Emil’s eyes and quietly kill him.

Richard has a charming store in my hometown today, where he sells collectibles and does theater in his free time. The drink was consumed over twenty years ago.

There were people who displayed remarkable courage then. People who lived and died by their promises and shared the intimacy of death, and then the world moved forward and grief subsided and lives moved on. But make no mistake, there are heroes among us right now.

There is a shy, friendly man at my gym. There was a time when his sick roommate deliberately overdosed after his father told him that people with unspeakable diseases will suffer in hell. My gym friend performed CPR for an hour before help arrived, but the body never heard a loving word again.

There is courage among us, astonishing courage, and we summoned it and survived. And then years passed. We got new jobs and changed gyms.

There was a time when old friends called to say goodbye, and by “goodbye” they meant forever. When all of us had a file folder marked “Memorial” that outlined how we wanted our service to be conducted. When people shot themselves and jumped off bridges after getting their test results.

There is profound, shocking sadness here, right here among us, but years went by and medicine got better and we found other lives to lead. Our sadness is a distant, dark dream.

My best friend Stephen just bought a new condo. He’s having a ball picking out furniture. But there was a time when he knew all the intensive care nurses by name. When a phone call late at night always meant someone had died. And just who, exactly, was anyone’s guess.

Stephen tested positive in the 1980s, shortly after I did. A few months after the devastating news, he agreed to facilitate a support group with me. We regularly saw men join the group, get sick and die, often within weeks.

Watching them disintegrate felt like a preview of coming attractions. But Stephen was remarkable, a reassuring presence to everyone, and worked with the group for more than a year despite the emotional toll and the high body count.

There is bravery here, still, living all around us. But the bravest time was many years ago, and times change and the yard needs landscaping and there’s a brunch tomorrow.

There was a time when I sat beside friends in their very last minutes of life, and I helped them relax, perhaps surrender, and told them comforting stories. And lied to them.

Jeremy lost his mind weeks before he died. Sometimes he had moments of sanity, when we could have a coherent conversation before his dementia engulfed him again. It was a time when you were given masks and gloves to visit friends in the hospital.

He was agitated with the business of dying, and told me he couldn’t bear to miss what might happen after he’d gone. I had an idea.

“I tell you what,” I offered, “I’m from the future, and I can tell you anything you would like to know.”

“OK then, what happens to my parents?” he asked. I thought it might be a distracting game, but Jeremy’s confused mind took it very seriously.

“They went to Hollywood and won big on a game show, so they never did need your support in their old age,” I answered. He barely took the time to enjoy this thought before his hand grabbed my wrist, tightly, almost frantically. He pulled me closer.

“When …” he began, and a mournful sob swelled inside him in an instant, his eyes begging for relief. “When does this end?” There was an awful, helpless silence. His eyes beckoned for a truth he could die believing.

“It does end,” I finally managed, although nothing suggested it would. “It ends, Jeremy, but not for a really long time.” He digested each word like a revelation, and slowly relaxed into sleep.

There is compassion here, enough for all the world’s deities and saints acting in concert. Infinite compassion for men who lived in fear and checked every spot when they showered for Kaposi sarcoma, and for disowned sons wasting away in the guest room of whoever had the space. But we get older, and friends don’t ask us to hold their hand when they stop breathing, and the fear fades and I bought new leather loafers and the White Party is coming.

The truth is simply this, and no one will convince me otherwise: My most courageous self, the best man that I’ll ever be, lived more than two decades ago during the first years of a horrific plague.

He worked relentlessly alongside a million others who had no choice but to act. He secretly prayed to survive, even above the lives of others, and his horrible prayer was answered with the death of nearly everyone close to him.

To say I miss that brutal decade would only be partially true. I miss the man I was forced to become, when an entire community abandoned tea dances for town hall meetings, when I learned to offer help to those facing what terrified me most.

Today, the lives of those of us who witnessed the horror have become relatively normal again, perhaps mundane. We prefer it. We have new lives in a world that isn’t choking on disease.

But once, there was a time when we were heroes.

(I was honored to receive an award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association for this piece in 2007. I produced the accompanying video some time later — think of it as a “DVD Extra.” Feel free to share this with friends)

PositiveLite says: More from Mark S. King on his own must-read blog My Fabulous Disease.

The idea that HIV positive people still want sex is as old as The Denver Principles, the 1983 manifesto drawn up by gay men with AIDS that demanded “as full and satisfying a sexual and emotional life as anyone else.” The document also stated that people with HIV/AIDS have an ethical responsibility to share their status with others.

Fast forward to today, and HIV positive gay men are as open as ever about their status and their sexual preferences (setting aside, if we can for the moment, the increased stigma and discrimination facing HIV positive people     of all stripes who disclose their status these days). And those sexual choices may not include HIV negative people at all, thank you very much.

Last year I taped a tour of a sex club that hosts a monthly “Poz4Play” party,   and sat down to interview Bill, the party’s disarmingly unflappable host. In this video blog (the video, below, is PG rated but the language is explicit), I revisit the tour and get an update from Bill about the strong reaction to the original video, which includes a frank conversation on barebacking, the risk of other STD’s, and sero-sorting.

Sero-sorting, or limiting sexual partners to those who share your HIV status, has become the de facto prevention technique for many gay men with HIV. Research indicates that the tactic may have value in containing the spread of HIV, but as you might guess, it isn’t so effective when it comes to HIV negative gay men who attempt to serosort amongst themselves. People who claim to be negative are often wrong, misinformed or simply lying. HIV positive men who claim to be positive are less likely to be wrong about that fact.

On an important side note: is avoiding HIV enough? Research indicates that poz-on-poz sex is much more likely to include barebacking (unprotected sex), and that means the potential of pitting a sometimes compromised immune system against other sexually transmitted diseases. If the idea of catching gonorrhea simply makes you feel nostalgic, what about (the far more dangerous) Hepatitis C? A recent study  found that 75 percent of new hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections in HIV-positive men occurred in those with no history of injection drug use (IDU) – the more typical transmission route for HCV. Barebacking is the suspected culprit.

Everywhere on the gay hook-up radar, positive men are asking, telling, and sero-sorting. “Disease free, UB2” in online profiles is being countered by the cheeky “HIV positive and plan to stay that way, UB2.” Meeting sites are engaging in some serosorting of their own by offering poz dating and hookup options.

And over at the gay barebacking porn company Treasure Island Media (TIM), director Paul Morris has named it “the year of living positive (sic),”  with a series of videos featuring openly HIV positive actors. While one might appreciate Mr. Morris’ enthusiastic wish that everyone “fuck freely and without fear,” he’s a little light on the real-life implications of such a lifestyle.

I exchanged e-mails with Paul Morris in an attempt to interview a real-life couple he just re-signed to exclusive bareback video naughtiness. The couple includes an HIV negative top and a positive bottom, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to educate gay men by going “behind the scenes” and speaking to these two actors in a way that focused on their real life and didn’t demonize them.

Paul was complimentary of my blog and confident that his actors would communicate with me if I would e-mail my questions to them. I did so, and my queries included: how big an issue was HIV to them? Did one worry for the other’s long term health? Was the positive partner on meds? How did they handle feeling judged by those who disagreed with their bareback porn star habits?

Note to self: do not attempt to “get real” with bareback porn studs or their handlers. I never heard from the actors, or another peep out of Paul Morris. His silence betrays his grandstanding on the topic (his own press release gleefully refers to him as “universally reviled,” which would look great on his name tag at the next Gay Erotic Expo). Or, perhaps Paul Morris really does know his audience, and figures they’re uninterested in his stars once the DVD is back in the sock drawer.

It’s also possible Treasure Island Media is just distracted with appealing their recent $21,000 fine by California OSHA for, among other things, not developing procedures for things as basic as Hepatitis B vaccinations. Maybe the Oscar winning song is right, and it really is hard out there for a pimp… or for a porn empresario.

Please be well,

Mark

PositiveLite says; for much more of  award-winning writer Mark S. King, catch him at his regular home My Fabulous Disease, where an expanded version of this story first appeared.

Letting the HIV fitness and nutrition expert  take over my kitchen seemed like a good idea at the time. I turned fifty over the holidays (after living with HIV for over half my life, I’m ancient in AIDS years), and my body is… changing.

I need to pull myself together. I did quit smoking a year ago – perhaps my greatest health achievement, aside from getting clean and sober – but while resting on my laurels, my laurels got hungry. Today, I’m hauling at least twenty extra pounds.

In this video episode of My Fabulous Disease, watch Nelson ransack my refrigerator and explain why my eating habits aren’t doing me much good. He offers some really simple tips for developing a healthy diet, and I’m putting them to use already.

In my upcoming video episode, Nelson and I hit the gym for a workout and then the grocery store for a lesson on shopping properly (did you know about “staying around the edges?”). I assure you, if I can try keeping up with this guy, so can you.

I was lucky to get some time with Nelson, considering he’s been busy with his own web site about fitness and supplements, as well as promoting his new book, Testosterone: A Man’s Guide . But after I cozied up to him during the recent HIV Cruise Retreat in the Caribbean (I was the MC and he was a guest lecturer), he promised to visit my kitchen and help jump-start my fitness overhaul.

Wish me luck! I promise to take Nelson’s advice to heart, by eating better and making my grand comeback to the gym – although this time, I’ll watch the weight lifters from afar and stick to the cardio machines.

And how are your resolutions coming? Do you diet to lose weight or take it off slowly through exercise? Isn’t it a gas (and a miracle) that people with HIV/AIDS like me are working to stay in shape for the long run? Irony is awfully popular these days.

As always, my friends, please be well. xo

Mark

PS Can you read the weight scale at the beginning of the video? It reads “216.4? Ouch. But I want this documented, because I hope to change, if not my weight, then my shape. Stay tuned. Mark

PositiveLite says: this was actually part one of a two part series with Mark and Vergel. We published part two here.  

And for more of Mark S. King go to his own blog My Fabulous Disease here.  

Treating My Facial Wasting is the first video below. After dealing with facial lipoatrophy (wasting) and seeing it so evident in my videos, I decided to do something about it by visiting Dr. Gerald Pierone in Vero Beach, FL and being treated with injections of facial fillers. Facial wasting and fat displacement are common side effects of both HIV infection and the medications used to treat it (originally appeared on The Body, March 25, 2009)

Treating My Facial Wasting: An Update is the second video appearing below. Told more from the perspective of Dr. Gerald Pierone, this video takes you along on my third visit for facial fillers to treat my wasting (lipoatrophy) with Sculptra and Radiesse. Hope you’re not afraid of needles. (originally appeared in The Body, Feb 2, 2010)

You can read more of Mark S. King in his blog My Fabulous Disease here. 

PositiveLite says: you can learn more about facial fillers, including financial assistance plans for those qualifying, here.  Oh - and Mark is right. If you don't like seeing injections, there are parts of both videos which will be a bit icky.  But persevere if you can as there is a ton of information to be had here.