From Wikepedia: “Newfie (also Newf or sometimes Newfy) is a colloquial term used in Canada for someone who is from Newfoundland.”

I’m sitting with Tom, better known as newfiebear, over a coffee at the Second Cup on Toronto’s main drag, Yonge Street. The place is pretty crowded, and I’m wondering what eavesdroppers might think of a conversation potentially full of references to gay sex. But Tom’s an open man, seemingly with few secrets.  And that includes his HIV status.  “Do ask, do tell” is his approach to life – and to sex. So there seem few worries about the folks just feet from us hearing.

Tom, who I think probably is more comfortable with newfiebear, the handle on his various profiles and the man behind newfiebear.net     – more on that later – is a tall, friendly, 48-year old. He looks younger.  Professing to be shy, he hides it well, smiles easily and laughs a lot. He’s the kind of heart-on-your-sleeve guy you feel instantly at home with. I like him at once.

His story?  He moved to Toronto from Newfoundland 14 years ago and in 2004 became HIV-positive. He took it badly and turned to substance use and after a really bad experience tried to commit suicide. After a spell in rehab, he turned things around and started to educate himself and learn everything he could about HIV, volunteered at different AIDS Service Organizations, ending up at the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT).

Through all this “I developed a website for men who have sex with men – I don’t like labels” he says “to help stop people from contracting HIV and STIs. I’m from the bear community and I wanted to have a website for gay men like myself and especially for the bear community where if someone is looking for sexual health information, community support or is living with HIV or if someone is having a hard time with substance, it’s all in one place. So there is lots of information on the site and also community support links, mostly for downtown Toronto, but the information I post about – there are links to a lot of information sites like TheBody.com and PositiveLite.com -  is global. I also have an email where people can ask me any questions at   This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .  I get a lot of global visitors. I get about 1,500 hits to my main page each week.”

Newfiebear.net’s home page gives more clues to Tom’s welcoming personality. “Good day” it says under a photo of the Newfoundland landscape with a cuddly looking bear in the corner. “Thanks for visiting NewfieBear.net“ with a chatty reminder to put your clocks forward this past weekend. “This site is a free information base for all men who have sex with men regarding sexual health, community support, living with HIV and external Information inks . There are also some links regarding sexually adventurous men who are into some kinky sexual acts.” Clearly this newfiebear has a wild side!

His page for people living with HIV comes with a multitude of links – about smoking, about disclosure, about STIs but also comes with this delightful header: “WARNING. There are people in the world that will try and prevent you from spreading your wings. Be strong and move forward. Believe in yourself!”

Tom is a graduate of GPS (Gay Poz Sex) of which he speaks enthusiastically and about which we have written here. GPS is  a confidential, group-based, peer-led program that supports HIV-positive gay and bisexual men in making choices related to their sexual, mental and physical health. Says Tom “It’s an excellent course, I would recommend it to anybody who is HIV-positive.  It’s not just about condoms, but all the different aspects of sex, your fears, substance use, harm reduction, etc."

I asked Tom how GPS helped him personally. “It actually helped me on my own quest for personal self care. I also wanted to have more sex.”

“Did It work?”

“Oh yes, I actually had more sex. It opened up more communication.”  Tom launches in to how it helped him develop his recipe for sexual compatibility, starting with the three-minute coffee chat . “It’s now five”  he says with a grin, talking about his preferred way of screening potential mates that hinges on his “do ask, do tell” policy. So if you want to get frisky with newfiebear these days, expect to be asked not only about your status, but your STI history and more. “Don’t get me wrong” he says on his website. “Online hookups work for some individuals.  All I am saying is my experiences chatting with guys online are a lot different and are much more successful face to face.”

Following GPS, Tom participated in a new program G=MC2, (Gay Men Creating Community) a gay men’s validation series of workshops.  It's a six week program “all about how we can validate ourselves and others.” Again he says “it changed me for the better”.

Tom also has a thing about smoking and his website links to the UK GMFA Quit Smoking page for gay men and Tom's own video page features newfiebear talking about what stopping smoking has done for him, including increasing his sex drive. (He raises an arm in the video to illustrate improved erections). Since quitting cold turkey not long ago, after almost a lifetime of heavy smoking and six failed cessation attempts (“it was very hard at first” he says) he has started a small support group for people in the process of quitting who meet once a week. “There are five people in the group and three of us – myself and two other guys – have not had a cigarette for 61 days. What helps us is that we talk about our triggers and how we overcome them.”

Our conversation keeps returning to sex. Tom isn’t shy to talk about his own sexual strategies. He serosorts, in other words preferring to have sex with poz guys. “Ever since the legal issues about disclosure came out, I’m kind of worried about that.  I don’t want to deal with that.” He’s not a fan of barebacking though. “I’m actually using the second generation female condom. It gives you the sensation of barebacking. I’m HIV and I don’t want to catch anything else. Being HIV is enough.”

I asked newfiebear if disclosing to guys results in rejection sometimes.

“Oh yes, lots of times. It’s their choice, it happens. You are going to get to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet your prince. And I’m still going through the frogs.  But you have to be proactive. Sometimes I feel bad about it, but I have techniques for dealing with it.  I’ll go to High Park and walk around and talk to the squirrels.”

The conversation is drawing to a close, and I have to go. Our neighbouring tables seem either unaware or unphased by the frank discussion we’ve been having. Or perhaps they hear talk about barebacking, improved erections and female condoms everyday here.

In any event, one thing is clear as we say goodbye; sharing is what newfiebear is all about, and it's his passion, whether over coffee in downtown Toronto or globally, via the world-wide web. 

Check out his website here. 

Follow newfiebear on twitter at @NewfieBear_net.

This article first appeared on ConnerHabib’sBlog here. Republished with permission.

You can follow Conner on twitter at @ConnerHabib

Why do porn actors kill themselves?  Who is responsible?

Whenever a porn star – especially a gay porn star – commits suicide, theories show up, and people act very, very certain about them.  Arpad Miklos, who was as much as a porn “star” as anyone can be in a time when we are hyper-saturated with porn, killed himself on February 3rd, 2013, at the age of 45. As usual, many people felt sure they knew why he committed suicide, without much evidence. It was drugs, it was studios not treating him well, it was the feeling of dehumanization, it was the vague but all encompassing “porn industry” that did it, it was the feeling of being hollow, it was his loss of validation after being a star for so long.

I can’t claim any special knowledge about his death, I didn’t know him very well. We met in passing on a set; he’d just finished a scene, and I was about to start mine. He was huge and handsome; I’m not saying anything new. If you met him, you were impressed by his smile and his body and his presence. Looking at him almost made you feel a sense of unbalance in the world, like his handsomeness and flawless physique were proof of some deep inequality between people. But then you’d forget that feeling and be drawn back into the intense attraction.

He gave me a kiss and his phone number and asked me if I’d like to spend time with him later that night. My scene ran over schedule, and I was exhausted, so I told him I couldn’t meet. We communicated a few more times over the years by text and phone, and that was that. I mention all of this to say: I don’t know his motivations or who he “really” was. We kept passing through each other’s lives without ever truly meeting.

But others who knew him even less than me flooded twitter, wrote articles, posted to facebook about what had happened. The theories appeared as soon as the news did. It was immediate, like flies to a corpse. Theories arrived before grief, before honor and love and the experience of loss. When a gay porn star dies, instead of an outpouring of grief, what we are usually witness to is a buzzing.

All of this is to say that not even death can trump many people’s confused and hostile attitudes towards porn and porn performers. That is how deeply injured we are as a society when it comes to sex, exuality, and love.

***

It’s natural to turn events like suicide into cultural concerns.

Tragedies are supposed to pose questions to us – the feelings of discomfort that sadness brings can create meaningful action. But these actions are always most effective when we don’t bypass grief and compassion to get to them. Unfortunately, the people that make up the largest group involved in porn – the viewers and consumers – may not understand what it’s like to be a performer or to work for a studio. The porn industry remains obscured by unexamined attitudes towards sex. So compassion isn’t always available.

There’s a general confusion for outsiders about performer motivations for making porn, how much money they make, what happens during a shoot, what health and safety precautions are in place, how a scene is organized, what it feels like to be a crew member and more. The result is that a monolithic image of “gay porn star” and the “gay porn industry” is formed.  But unlike ideas of other industries – banking or agriculture, say – people’s perceptions are colored by a broader societal confusion: a difficulty in thinking and communicating clearly when it comes to sex and desire.

This confusion is generated by many factors, most importantly by social and cultural institutions that have historically leveraged sex as a way to control people (I address some of those forces here, and will write more about them in the future).  Because these forces create pressure and guilt around sex, when someone like Miklos, who had sex publicly, kills himself, people tend to think he was sad because of his public sex life.  They don’t focus on the fact that he was trained as a chemist nor do they ask what his relationships were like or if he was generally happy. Instead, a knee-jerk reaction links his sadness with porn.

People want to know: How was porn involved in this death?

This isn’t a totally unfair question, but when left unrefined, it’s not a good one; it’s misguided at best, damaging at its worst. Aside from not taking all the other factors of Miklos’s death into account, it’s misguided because it’s not nearly a deep enough or complete enough question. It focuses too much on the performer as victim and not enough on sex in society, nor how the porn viewer receives porn and thinks about porn performers, or how sex is legislated, or what our unquestioned assumptions about the “porn industry” are.

The porn performer is, in general, not a victim. This image of the performer as starting porn because of bad circumstance or compulsion is largely a lie (perpetuated, in part, by confused critics of porn). Part of this false image comes from the idea that porn performers just “fall into” porn or that they’re “discovered” by unscrupulous studio moguls with big, villainous mustaches. But the majority of would-be porn performers now approach studios, not vice versa. They’re seeking porn work for different reasons. Some of those reasons are aligned with the performer’s heart and integrity, others are not, but almost none of the reasons merit the label “victim,” at least not for deciding to be in porn.

The result is thousands of healthy, thoughtful, happy porn performers in gay and straight porn that haven’t killed themselves. And their ways of enacting being a porn performer are very different. There are performers that make one movie to try it out. There are porn stars who make a career out of it like Miklos did, appearing for years in different movies by different studios. There are performers who shoot scenes with their boyfriends and post them to XTube; there are performers who wish they could make more.  There are people who long to be in the porn industry but can’t break into it, or are too afraid to start.

Many (though not all) have other jobs: Along with porn stars who are also escorts and personal trainers, I know gay porn stars who are lawyers, farmers, doctors, meteorologists, and artists. Some don’t have much overhead at all because they live with their parents, who know what they do and are proud of their children.

While there may be some vast archetype that encompasses all porn stars, there’s no such thing as a typical “gay porn star.” We’re all different.

So sadness and mental health problems are not an industry epidemic – that perception is inaccurate, as is the notion that porn stars don’t have any other skills or feel compelled to do porn out of a lack of options.  Such statements simply aren’t true.

Of course, some performers do have mental health problems. Some are suicidal, some are drug addicts. The same is true for lawyers, farmers, doctors, etc. who are not porn stars.

If we strip misconceptions away, we still have a question of porn and mental health before us. But it appears in in a refined version, a version that makes sense. We can ask ourselves, what are the specific pressures of being in gay porn?  How can we make those pressures less of a burden?

***

None of the pressures that face porn stars are exclusive to porn – many of them face mainstream actors and athletes, for example. One of the main problems is the constant inflation and collapse of a performer’s ego.

Once, after shooting a scene for a studio I hadn’t worked with before, one of the staff enthusiastically invited me to the “family.” He told me how great I’d done and how excited he was to work with me again. I was in a towel, exhausted, and happy to hear the news. We were interrupted by a phone call. He answered and entered into an urgent sounding discussion with a performer on the other end. The studio just couldn’t hire him, the employee said, for the rate he wanted. Then he relayed to the performer, studio by studio, how much other studios were paying.  It was significantly less than I’d been paid for work that day. I felt a little sad for the other performer, but didn’t think much of it. I became friendly with everyone at the studio, and we’d talk outside of work, too.

Months later I was the performer on the receiving end of this conversation. Another staff member of the studio had warned me that I was “fat” and that I was asking for too much money. My appearance hadn’t changed since they’d last hired and praised me. If anything, I was more toned. I explained that I was only requesting the same rate they’d always paid me. He went down the same studio-by-studio list, detailing rates, saying that everyone was paying less now. But the rates he quoted were incorrect. I knew that now, because I’d worked for everyone on his list, appearing in a scene for one of them just a week ago. It was a canned speech, created to dock performers’ pay.

Why was someone who I thought was my friend lying to me? The first answer that comes to mind isn’t quite right: money. Such a simple answer doesn’t explain why we couldn’t have had an honest conversation about money, rather than one coupled with insults and constructed to intimidate me in to accepting less.

Another time, I saw a hopeful newcomer come to the set for some preliminary casting photos. A director photographed him, and gave him many encouraging words when they were done. When the aspiring performer left, the director started complaining about how fat the guy was.

“What a fucking slob,” he said in front of me and the other performers hired for the day. Everyone was quiet.

“Did you tell him he wasn’t ready?” I asked, finally.

“No, he should have known,” he said.

There’s a fear among many performers that what we hear from employers is not reflective of how they actually feel, and this fear is, at least in part, justified by stories like these. I’ve heard these complaints echoed again and again by other performers.  On top of this, like many entertainment-related businesses, porn studios are extremely busy but often disorganized. Not hearing back from a studio in a timely manner after initial emails or calls creates a flashing anxiety; is it because they’re ignoring you, because they forgot, or are they simply, reasonably, busy? Until you learn how to navigate it, all this puts you in a weird split state. Are your employers your smiling and nodding friends or are they harboring thoughts about you that they’re not expressing?

Again, this isn’t a complaint confined to the porn industry – it’s a problem with many American business models, where honesty and forthrightness are not properly valued. But in porn, it’s compounded by the fact that these concerns mix into performers’ anxieties about their bodies. Every porn performer I know has at least some fear of how the public will receive our bodies or how “fat” or “skinny” or “small” we look, even though we may not be fat or skinny or small by any means (and if we are, that brings in a separate set of societal issues). This situation isn’t made any better by unscrupulous internet commenters and bloggers, who are happy to leave the cruelest comments they can think of under photos of our naked bodies.

***

Seen in this light, working in porn has a healthy aspect and a dark shadow.

Porn is healthy for a performer to the extent that it allows him to detach, rather than immerse himself in his body.

***

Porn offers an amazing opportunity to think about your body. You have to think about how it looks, what food to put into it, what exercises to do to refine it, how to relax it, how to take care of it.  You even have to consider that other people may not like your body, no matter what you do. Your dick might be too small (or too big!) for them. They may not like your face or think your abs are undeveloped. In porn, you have the opportunity to hear these complaints and to love yourself anyway. It’s very freeing if you can achieve it. When you can think about your body, you create a loving distance from it, a detachment. It becomes an honor to have a body when you know it’s only an aspect of your being.

One happy and surprising side effect being in porn has had on me is that it’s loosened up my response to societal standards of beauty, allowing me to see who I actually find attractive. Before porn, I found myself having a reflexive response to men with huge pecs and six pack abs. If a huge guy walked into a bar, I (along with a lot of the other patrons) would turn instinctively to look at him. Maybe I’d compare myself or other guys at the bar to him. After being paid to have sex on camera with men like that, the feeling has totally left me. Sometimes I’m still attracted to men who fall into society’s standard of beauty, but it’s not reactive. Being in porn, being detached from my body, has helped me see the real contours of my desire and attraction, rather than conforming to what I’m told to think is attractive.

The same detachment is what allowed me to hear from the studio owner that I was “fat” and not breakdown, or to read mean-spirited comments on blogs, or to resist the command to do steroids from another studio worker. My body is linked to my worth, but it’s mine, after all. I’m a caretaker for my body. The more detachment I get from it, the more clearly I see that. I can feel this way most of the time now, but I still dip into the shadow every once in awhile.

The shadow side is that, as a porn performer, you can begin to completely identify with your body. You can think it’s who you are. You can stumble off to the gym and onto the set and through parties and bars, cutting off your mind from other aspects of experience. When you’re in this immersed state, an internet commenter or mean-spirited blogger or tactless industry employee calling you fat can feel devastating.

This is problematic enough, but it becomes crushing when you start to believe that your body is all you have to offer. While I think most arguments about objectification are shallow, I also notice how porn performers can limit their own freedom and destroy their happiness by equating their bodies with their worth (and their worth with how much people are willing to validate their bodies by paying to film them.)  This is where a cliche comes from, the one where the ex-porn actor says desperately, “But porn is all I know!” How to perform on camera is never all anyone knows, but being in porn creates the possibility of that self-delusion.

It’s good to equate some self-worth with the appearance of your body. Too little emotional and thoughtful investment in our bodies can lead to poor health and compulsive daily patterns. Equating too much self worth with our bodies can do the same, but the damage is often to mental health. We become sensitive, obsessive, or prone to taking mood-altering steroids which for some can amplify the problem.

***

But these are just the pressures porn performers face directly through their involvement in porn.

Since porn is a global phenomenon, watched by millions and millions of people, the largest part of the porn industry is the consumer. Consumers make up a special and powerful part of pornography. Since viewers derive pleasure from porn, they are connected to it, not exempt from shouldering some of the responsibility for the well-being of porn performers.

Despite the global popularity of porn, prejudice against performers has not diminished. Teachers have been fired, simply because they had consensual sex with another person on camera; but no one is prepared to say why being in porn should make someone unfit to teach. Olympic hopefuls with a porn past have been banned from competing under the auspices that they wouldn’t properly represent their country; but isn’t porn part of the country’s culture? Reality TV stars have been disqualified from their shows for being in porn; but pornography was the original reality TV, a blend of real and unreal, and certainly full of performers that people are willing to pay to watch.

Involvement with porn becomes an automatic, unthinking grounds for discrimination. The same people who fire or “out” porn and former performers must have watched porn. But the porn viewer can conceal his/her enjoyment of pornography. So long as this is true, the many people who have masturbated to pornography – and this includes most men and an increasing number of women – don’t have to feel any connection to the well-being of porn performers, who have provided the viewers with sexual pleasure.

All that is a broad, societal issue. But what about smaller, personal instances of discrimination? Porn viewers make discriminate against porn viewers on a smaller scale, through unthinking slut-shaming. But porn performers aren’t just a spectacle, they are, in one sense, the sexual partners of the people who watch them. Their images and actions tie into the arousal and orgasm of the viewer.  Why are we asking, “What is it with gay porn?” but not asking, “What is it with the way society treats people who bring them pleasure?”

These are larger questions that I – and many other sex workers – continue to work through, and that are larger than the scope of this essay.  One of the reasons many sex workers are interested in these questions is because they expose something fascinating about Western culture and sex. But another is that we want to be able to stop this unwarranted discrimination, to be able to be ourselves without reproach or dismissal.

***

So: Why do porn actors kill themselves? is not the right question.  It’s bound to prejudices, misconceptions, and shame.

A better question: What can we do to make involvement with porn easier, less stressful, and healthier?

Each of us, depending on our relationship to porn, can approach this by asking a series of different questions, and by working towards honest answers.

Performers can ask themselves:

• Am I ready to be in porn? Does porn fit into the context of my life and my vision of my future?
• Can I endure the misunderstandings of others without lashing out in anger or being weighed down by sadness?  Will I be okay when my parents and loved ones find out (and they invariably find out)?
• Most importantly, can I maintain the knowledge that I am not only my body, that my body is a part of me, not all of me?

People who work for studios can ask themselves:

• Am I ready to put in effort to deal with performers, who may have sensitive feelings about their bodies, in a gentle way that is at the same time honest and open?
• Am I being honest and open with the performers I work with and hire?
• Am I being transparent (with myself and my performers) about pay and why certain performers are being paid the amounts they are, and why they were hired or rejected in the first place?

Studio employees and owners can also ask performers the questions that performers should be asking themselves:  Are you ready for this?  Can you do this and not put your self-worth into it?  Does this fit into the context of your life? Etc.

Viewers can ask themselves:

• How do I feel about porn performers?
• Am I grateful for the pleasure that porn gives me, or do I feel shame about it?
• If I met a porn actor I liked, how would I react?

Viewers can also talk more openly about watching porn (and sex in general), which will help give voice to just how commonplace a phenomenon pornography is.

Of course, these questions don’t have to be phrased the way that I’ve written them. They don’t have to all be asked at once; any one of them might be difficult to answer honestly. I’m also familiar enough with the many problems we face in pornography – the way it tangles in with some of the best and worst aspects of economics, desire, and shame – to know that questions alone won’t solve all the problems facing us. But asking questions like these can help cultivate more kindness within porn and more acceptance in those outside of it.

When Arpad died, many people rerouted their guilt about porn – stemming from a lack of openness, reflection, and care about sex, pornography, and desire – onto his life. Instead of sympathy, many people projected guilt and shame. It’s up to all of us involved in porn – not just performers, and studio workers, but viewers as well -  to be more loving, open, and honest with ourselves and each other. That way guilt, shame, and confusion can be redeemed and transformed, rather than absorbed by the empty space where a beautiful man used to be.

For John Bruno and Arpad Miklos

About the author: Conner Habib (pictured below and above left) is a writer, gay porn star, and lecturer. His sex and relationship advice web show appears each week on Logo TV's NewNowNext website. He lives in San Francisco where he runs a Rudolf Steiner spirituality and science discussion group.

There’s something odd about putting sex in a museum. If we think of museums as warehouses for relics of a bygone time, sex doesn’t seem a suitable focus for an exhibit. But if we think of museums as spaces to explore living history, sex starts to become an intriguing possibility for curation. 

Still, to manage an exhibition about sex would seem a daunting (though thrilling) task. “Sex Talk in the City,” the Museum of Vancouver’s endeavour to curate such an encompassing topic, includes a lot of local flavour in its survey of sex in our city. The museum has attempted to tame the tangled mess that is sex through three themes: pedagogy, pleasure, politics.

The exhibition begins in “the classroom,” and a timeline shows how sex ed in BC schools has changed over time, often in response to crises such as unwanted pregnancies, sexual abuse, and sexually transmitted infections. Yet even today “the majority of elementary students will receive just over an hour of sex education a year.” Visitors next wander into the fun of “the bedroom” to consider the different forms that sex and relationships can take. On one wall hang photographs of individuals, many posing with their chosen families; one memorable image shows a couple of intertwined seniors on a bed, a hand placed intimately on another’s thigh.

When visitors hit “the streets,” politics and power come to the fore, especially in a city like Vancouver. The city’s first brothel was established in the same year as the first public school (1873), and today debates over sex work centre on whether “criminalization and stigmatization of prostitution [is] the cause of unsafe working conditions” or “sex work [is] a form of violence against women that should be prohibited.” Contraception continues to be another battleground for control of women’s bodies—and by the way, did you know that lemon halves have been used as cervical caps?

The exhibit closes with one of the city’s most recent and ongoing pieces of history: the HIV epidemic. A small display from the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS illustrates how the massive load of pills initially used to control HIV has been replaced by fewer and fewer pills over time. At the same time, as a presentation of older and newer AIDS posters demonstrates, the virus and associated social issues persist. (The observant viewer will notice that Positive Women’s Network is mentioned on an older poster advertising an info session about women who have sex with women!)

“Sex Talk in the City” offers several slices of sex history and politics in Vancouver that are worth sampling, but like any exhibit the silences and omissions are as interesting as the content. My hope is that the exhibit leads to many more, allowing us to cultivate a larger shared memory and understanding of how the history of sex affects us as individuals and communities.

– Erin

This article originally appeared on the website of PWN here.

The days of the schoolmarm who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion are over. That is, if an individual becomes HIV+ in 2013, that individual participated willingly in behaviors that could, potentially but also in many cases unlikely, lead to contracting HIV. Moreover, these behaviors are morally neutral; they are not good, and they are not bad, they are simply human. Yet, because of the stark fact that the HIV- community is still stubbornly opening themselves up to seroconversion, a community of which I was part of at one point believe it or not, it is up to the HIV+ to ensure that these individuals failure to protect themselves and lack of personal responsibility do not have the potential to stigmatize or marginalize those living with HIV. 

All too often, well-meaning AIDS service organizations and LGBT-related health organizations propagate a tone-deaf message that is as groan-inducing in its poor marketing as it is insensitive to the logical conclusion of its assertion. Specifically, when an organization talks of the importance of condom use without taking into account that nobody likes to wear them, when a physician dubiously claims that HIV drug resistance is rampant and folks should be afraid of HIV (it isn’t and they shouldn’t be), or when an overly eager, boundlessly compassionate and otherwise tolerant young activist holds a placard about AIDS meaning death and that we should stop AIDS, these organizations and people are implicitly saying that we, the HIV+, are the boogeymen that need to be trotted out of our virologic closets to scare the living hell out of the HIV- community, who otherwise can’t be trusted with the truth.

Now, it is fair to hone a message that people will remember. And, in the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis, this simple message meant equating seroconversion with dying. But, in 2013, we need to stop scaring people by implicitly stigmatizing the HIV+ through otherwise well-meaning public health efforts. Of course, however, as the HIV- must admit their culpability and personal moral and legal responsibility in potentially contracting HIV, the HIV+ must also acknowledge that we have a hand in HIV transmission. After all, if both of these statements were not true, then nobody would become HIV+ today. I only need to point to my existence to disprove this hypothesis.

I have bareback sex. I like to go to bathhouses. I participate in behaviors that many people might consider reckless or morally reprehensible. These people are, unfortunately, woefully hypocritical and, frankly, probably have very boring lives. Notwithstanding the sad fact that many folks are still shackled to religious-based, anti-human poppycock, I acknowledge, however, that I behave this way and I have a vibrant, incredibly active sex life only because I do so responsibly as an HIV+ gay man.

Behaving responsibly as an HIV+ person means that, prior to seroconversion, you regularly got tested at any of the dozens of confidential, or anonymous, free testing sites here in Philadelphia like the Washington West Project. Behaving responsibly as an HIV+ person in Philadelphia means that, upon seroconversion, you called             1-800-985-2437 and got an immediate referral for HIV case management service from Philadelphia’s stellar AIDS Activities Coordinating Office. Behaving responsibly as an HIV+ person means that, upon intake with a case manager at a place like Action AIDS, you agreed to see a physician and go on antiretroviral medication. Finally, and most vital to being able to freely enjoy yourself in any one particular sexual exploit, behaving responsibly as an HIV+ person means that you adhere to your medication.

In 2013, and in particular in Philadelphia, there is no reason whatsoever to not follow these incredibly straightforward, easy guidelines short of stupidity, stigma, or self-loathing recklessness. And, inability to pay for medical care or antiretroviral treatment is no excuse: thanks to the decades of hard work of LGBT and HIV/AIDS activists, like PGN publisher Mark Segal, and organizations, Pennsylvania has one of the most progressive, forward-thinking, and easy to apply for programs offering all HIV-related medicines and care for free to anyone who earns less than $35,000. Even better, unlike in many states where if federal HIV/AIDS related funding, otherwise known as Ryan White or RW Funding, is exhausted before year’s end then HIV+ are out of luck, in Pennsylvania, private organizations and the state pick up the slack.

Personally, I saw this situation come into reality when starting treatment in December. My case manager and my physician over at the incredible Jonathan Lax Center worked their asses off to ensure that, even though federal funds had been exhausted, I started treatment the very same day my doctor prescribed it. Throughout this entire process, I paid nothing, I simply had to have an open-mind, and I simply had to take a couple hours out of my schedule to afford these folks the time and respect they deserve for their hard work on behalf of the HIV+.

In Philadelphia, obtaining medical care and HIV medication is free and easy and has no ridiculously long waiting list as in other states, particularly those without a history of compassionate, Democratic governors like former Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey, or without aggressive, commonsense, grassroots organizations like Philadelphia FIGHT or the Mazzoni Center.

Now, adhering to medication isn’t the easiest of processes. In 2013, effective HIV treatment typically means one of two triple drug therapies, mostly involve a single pill taken once a day in the form of Atripla or Complera. Both of these medicines, and in fact all HIV medications, have no interactions whatsoever with alcohol, even drank to excess, or drugs, even crystal or ecstasy or GHB. In Atripla’s case, many of my brothers and sisters experience dizziness, disturbing dreams, or depression, and the pill must be taken at the same time every single day without interruption on an empty stomach. In Complera’s case, many of my brothers and sisters, and myself, experience headaches and dizziness, and we must take the pill at the same time everyday on a full stomach in order to get our stomach acid churning so we can best absorb the medication.

On a practical level, this means that every morning, between the hours of 7 AM and 8 AM, I must force feed myself a hearty breakfast and then take my single pill. And, on some, and thankfully rarely occurring, mornings, I need to give myself extra time to get ready because I get a dizzy, almost hangover-like dissociation. Most importantly, I cannot miss a single dose.

But, if living to the age of 70, if being able to have bareback sex without any statistical probability of transmitting the virus, and if sincerely feeling that I am healthy, vibrant, and happy means that, regardless of my social plans or regardless of my annoyance with having to stop having sex at 7AM to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I adhere to my medication and actively take ownership of my personal health, well, this is an easy trade-off. I make no excuses for the HIV+, most notably in Philadelphia, who do not adhere to these practices. I make no excuses for people who, in 2013, still stubbornly refuse to get tested or who mistakenly blame HIV+ people for HIV transmission. After all, even the HIV+ were, like it or not, at one time HIV-.

Most importantly, I make no excuses and nor do I have any sympathy whatsoever for HIV- people who contract HIV and then play the part of victim or martyr under the heavy yoke of the HIV+ boogeyman. Most specifically, I argue that if you are in bathhouse, if you hook up off Adam4Adam, GrindR, or BBRT, or if you go to a sex party and get high, you are giving your implicit consent and acknowledgment that, by engaging in this behavior, you understand that there is a potential for HIV transmission.

But, I also don’t give a pass to HIV+ folks who refuse to be rational, reasonable adults and who, under the convenient disregard for their hand in HIV transmission, don’t manage their own health. After all, I like to have sex. I like to have bareback sex.

And, I do it responsibly.

This article first appeared on Josh’s own blog here. 

Contacts: twitter @jawshkruger Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. www.joshkruger.com

Len Tooley is a relatively young, HIV-negative gay guy who works in downtown Toronto as a gay men’s health promoter and an HIV educator, tester and counsellor. As a way of helping him stay HIV-negative, his family doctor prescribed him Truvada as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). 

In the first part of his interview with me, which we published two weeks ago, Len talked about what motivated him to go on PrEP. Last week he discussed the conversations he had with his family doctor about PrEP, his experience of actually taking Truvada every day and how he feels about asking his drug plan to cover its cost. 

This week, in the third and final part of our interview, Len responds to those people in the gay and HIV communities who are critical of negative guys like him who decide PrEP is right for them, about why he decided to talk publicly about being on PrEP and what he would say to others who are considering this option as a way of staying HIV-negative.

 ***** 

John: Len, I’d like to start off this third part of our interview by asking you to to respond to some of the criticisms we’ve heard about PrEP.

As you know, not everyone thinks that HIV-negative guys like you should be prescribed anti-HIV drugs but should, rather, depend on condoms to keep them and their partners safe.  Some people hold very strong views about it indeed. For example, freelance journalist David Duran has written, in an article for the Huffington Post entitled Truvada Whores, that “having unprotected sex and willingly taking that risk because you're on an easy, preemptive treatment regime is just plain stupid”. 

Len: My first reaction is - Wow! That’s a lot of judgment and shaming to respond to. Maybe I should get a t-shirt made that says “Truvada Whore” on it.  Sticks and stones may break my bones…. 

Seriously though, I wish that I could be 100% certain that even if I used a condom every single time I had anal sex I wouldn’t get HIV. I also wish that condoms could be made out of a magical material that didn’t have any texture, scent, colour or substance – but I know that not all my wishes can come true! 

But I’ve had to admit to myself that I’m not perfect at using condoms 100% of the time, and, because I’ve been working as an HIV tester and counsellor for so long, I know that a lot of gay men that I provide HIV testing to aren’t perfect either. And that’s not because we’re not trying, it’s because we’re not robots. I can also admit that condoms aren’t some invisible barrier that doesn’t impact the quality of my sex life at all. Condoms aren’t easy to use, and for me (but not for everyone), they make sex a lot more difficult. I wish it wasn’t so, but alas, it is. 

I also know that if I were to do every single thing I could possibly do to prevent HIV and STI infection I would not be enjoying sex very much at all. If I were to do only things that were “no risk” or “negligible risk” that would mean, for example, that I would have to use a condom even if I was giving a blowjob to a guy I was on a date with. It’s low risk to get HIV from giving oral sex, but when you’re having sex in an epidemic, low risk really doesn’t mean no risk. I’ve had to give HIV-positive results to guys who were certain they hadn’t had any unprotected anal sex, some of whom could even pinpoint the exact partner and blow job they’d given that had led to seroconversion symptoms shortly after. Their stories have really stuck with me, because they taught me that for guys in my world low risk really doesn’t mean no risk. I don’t really want to give blowjobs with condoms. So while statistically the risk is low for oral sex, I know that I could still end up with HIV anyway. This really made me re-think my relationship to risk and where I stood on things. And it also makes me aware that even if I’m only giving blowjobs, I still have to be vigilant about HIV because I could be one of those guys – I’ve seen it, so I know it isn’t impossible. The stress and anxiety that I was living with around getting HIV really impacted my life and it was something that affected every experience I had with other guys I was dating and/or having sex with. 

John: One of our regular contributors on PositiveLite.com, Dave R, worries, among other things, about possible resistance to Truvada, one of the most highly prescribed antiretroviral medications, developing down the road due it being used as PrEP. 

Len: The question of drug resistance is definitely a challenging one. If I ever were to test positive, I would want to be able to take the most tolerable drugs possible, and Truvada is one of those drugs. I decided that this is a consequence that I will have to deal with, and a risk that I will have to take. If anything it gives me all the more incentive to manage my risk for HIV as carefully as possible, to get regular HIV tests done, and to stick to my medication schedule as closely as possible. 

I guess the only other thing I would say again (I know I said it before) is that taking an HIV medication every day at the same time without fail is not a simple task. It really takes a commitment. But I’m really motivated to do so, because I do indeed hope to stay HIV-negative. I’m not great with routine, I’ll admit, but for me taking a blue pill at the same time every day, while difficult, is much easier than dealing with the anxiety and guilt of not being a perfect condom user. I want to stay HIV-negative, so I make the adjustments necessary to adhere to the prescription as best as possible. 

John: That’s very helpful, Len, to hear your responses to those who criticize negative guys on PrEP. Yet here in Canada, it’s not just community members who have expressed these kinds of concerns. Professionals, too, are undeniably divided about PrEP and treatment as prevention generally, arguing over whether they work or not, even though both were among the major focuses of last year’s International AIDS Conference. Why is Canada such a divided country on these things, do you think? 

Len: That’s a really difficult question to answer, John. I think that, as should be expected, nobody wants to jump the gun and start making decisions based on what they feel is not complete evidence. So scientists, politicians, and healthcare professionals may be worried that implementing a new technology, that we aren’t 100% certain of, is a dangerous proposition. 

But science will never be perfect. And as a fellow “PrEPer” Jake Sobo noted in his blog, back in the day when gay men took it upon themselves to have “safer” sex (by using condoms) rather than have no sex at all, they were doing so without evidence that condoms were 100% effective. I’m in a situation where I can’t be 100% sure I will never get HIV unless I’m abstinent, so I don’t have the same standards as scientists, politicians or healthcare professionals might – since I don’t have the luxury to. 

I understand that those who are hesitant about PrEP feel they are taking the most conservative, cautious and appropriate actions. But at the same time I feel that for me, the evidence that exists is good enough to be confident that if I do it right, PrEP can have a significant impact on my chances of not getting HIV. 

On another note, there are a number of poz guys that have taken Truvada and experienced horrible side effects of the medication. I’ve spoken to a few of them who had very strong (negative) feelings about the idea that I would take the drug if I don’t actually “need” it. I can understand where they’re coming from, for sure, but I felt I needed to see for myself if such would be the case. It turns out that for me, there weren’t any side effects – at least there haven’t been any so far. The only real effect PrEP has had so far is to allow me to be a little less guilty, feel a little bit less shame, and be a little more confident, about the sex I have. 

John: Why did you decide to talk publicly about your decision to go on PrEP? 

Len: John, I talk to a lot of gay men both through my work doing HIV testing but also socially. So I know how many of us struggle with being – or trying to be – perfect condom users. I also know that the majority of guys simply don’t know that PrEP is even a possibility, period. If I had the opportunity and privilege to read and learn about PrEP and decide if it was right for me, I felt that other guys in similar situations should have the ability to make their minds up too. I guess I just felt that it’s time we have this discussion. 

John: What would you say to other guys who are considering PrEP as part of their strategy to prevent getting HIV? 

Len: Firstly, while there are no official Canadian guidelines and even though Truvada has not been “approved” for this use in Canada, it is not illegal for anyone’s doctor to prescribe PrEP. Doctors have the freedom to prescribe drugs “off-label” if, through experience or deduction, they feel it to be in the best interests of the patient. 

Secondly, I want to make it very clear that I have gone out on a limb by seeking out and taking PrEP. I’m aware that this strategy might not completely insure me against getting HIV, and I keep this in mind with every safer sex decision I make. It’s impossible to know exactly how much of a ‘risk’ I’m taking, but for someone like myself who is having sex in an epidemic, sex without risk is more of a dream than a reality. 

Thirdly, while I am taking PrEP every single day, there might be other options in the future. For instance there is one study taking place in Canada right now that’s looking at PrEP called the IPERGAY Trial and it’s centred in Montreal. They are testing the possibility that perhaps PrEP can be taken “intermittently.” In this study, this means starting one day before you might be having ‘risky’ sex, every day while you are having ‘risky’ sex, and then for two days afterward. Other researchers are studying a form of PrEP that can be given as an injection that you get every three months, that slowly releases the drug in your body over time. So the PrEP I am using isn’t necessarily what PrEP will look like in the future. 

And last but not least, it’s important to recognize that I’m only one person with one story. That being said, I have had a unique privilege to access PrEP because of my education, occupation, knowledge, and ability to self-advocate. I’m also a white, gay guy with a university education. While I’m thankful that these have all led me to having access to PrEP, it is problematic that others don’t have access to the same information, and even if they had, they may not be able to access a prevention tool that works for them. 

My story is yet another example of white, gay guys having access to the newest technologies and information, appropriate healthcare, ability/expectation to self advocate, and so many other privileges. It is an injustice that most gay, bi and queer men, cisgendered and transgendered, are living with a healthcare system that doesn’t understand their HIV prevention needs (not to mention their larger healthcare needs), have never heard of PrEP, and don’t have family doctors. Or if they do have family doctors, they don’t feel safe disclosing their sexual and gender orientations to their doctors. And many of us don’t have access to drug plans for even low-cost medications that can make our lives better. This is especially true for the queer folks in our community who don’t have legal status and are really struggling because of it. (No One is Illegal — Toronto is a great group of people working to change that). PrEP is only one small piece of a larger puzzle that our community — positive and negative — has to tackle. 

John: Thank you so much, Len, for sharing your PrEP story with us. 

Len: My pleasure, John!  

You can read the first part of Len’s interview here and the second part here.  

In 2004, I fucked a young, HIV-positive leather guy at the G.I. Joe bathhouse on Montreal’s rue Sainte-Catherine. I heard that he had committed suicide weeks later—hardly reassuring. Once, I impregnated a man in his fifties who later, panting and with a bizarre smirk, told me he had lied to me about being HIV positive. I have met men who first swear they have no addiction and then hide in a lavatory to inject, emerging all sketchy. I’ve touched the arrogant and pneumatic bodies that only play with equally gorgeous boyfriends, and who only fucked a troll like me because they slipped up—at 2 am we all “slip up”. I think in Canada we’ve got a huge problem with good gay men doing stupid shit out of shame and lack of self-awareness. We like to tell ourselves we are liberated, that we know all about our being gay, that we are tolerant of each other. We have antiretroviral medications that extend our medical lives and sustain our precarious greenhouse produce suppleness. I have lost friends and lovers equally to loneliness, depression, and AIDS. In this scenario, safe sex only confounds things.

We’ve had twenty-some years of safer sex education, risk reduction, and begging guys to get tested for HIV with uneven and inconstant support. Is safe sex a feat or a failure? The upside: gay men know mostly one thing, that anal sex without a condom transmits HIV. Abstinence? Oh, please. We know dick about safety because we accept little about taking risks. Do we have intentions of keeping safe? Yes. Do gay men keep safe when fucking or even meeting with each other? No.

The environment does not and will not exist for safety, only for protection. It’s difficult to raise awareness and change behaviours related to HIV infection when we know everything kills us: food preservatives and colouring, traffic, environmental poisons, toxic personalities of those around us, and auto-immune disorders—the list is long. It seems counterintuitive to ask people to use condoms when buxom speakers like Elizabeth Pisani tell us that HIV prevention should be focused on whores, gay men, and persons who inject drugs while all the others are fucking their brains out without condoms and brimming with body affluence. The message for gay men—that sex kills—has been camouflaged, embellished, eroticized, and in Canada, legally sanctioned.

Individual and selfish protection is still our response to HIV and other anxious infiltrations of our bodily state. Why would I want to protect my junkie trick when all I want is a piece of ass for an hour and I feel embarrassed of him in public, anyway? Why would I want to practice harm reduction when I have not healed my past and myself first? When I have no community at large to celebrate me with all my deficiencies and mistakes at the same time as everyone seems to be accepting the limitations of others? Straight couples can go and have babies; gay men must protect themselves from each other.

We dangle between shame and precarious male self-entitlement that sex is owed to us, a modicum of which is given by a liberation-in-progress. Like all men, we are still socialized to believe that the sex of others is available to us, that we as males have more or less free access to it. Gay liberation instead of tempering those arrogant thoughts to understand that sex is not free even when it is a smorgasbord, creates the expectation that gay males should have even more interesting and radical sex than the average straight suburban boys. We think we have the right to access unbridled, glossy magazine sexuality. Speaking on the other side of our mouths, gay men judge each other harshly: “you have no right to infect others.” Minorities can be contradictory, self-indulgent, vicious, and self-deluded. However, I refuse the guilt of it. I want you to know that we “play” with our self-entitlement and we are also prey to it. Unlike the sexual righteousness of straight men, ours is deeply ambivalent. Gay men can be at times sexual radicals, patriarchal machistas, and wounded children. It took me until my forties to own this: that I could be both good and bad, that my perceived right to have sex with whomever I want (I can), to take risks, to infect others, was not permanent. My self-entitlement wavers, it coaxes, it misleads me and it sometimes vanishes into thin air, leaving me desolate.

Sex is not sex anymore, it’s a constellation of brands on the supermarket shelf. When you’re fucking with someone, you don’t even know if that particular brand will hit the spot, get you pregnant, or kill you. I read peer-reviewed science journals that state that gay men have not been doing the nasty safely all along, and that it’s the HIV pills that make us un-infectious. But no one wants to talk publicly about gay men with HIV possibly being un-infectious; it doesn’t sell death, precaution, or shame. For pharmaceutical companies, this wishy-washy discourse will continue to sell pills. For public health workers and policy makers, it helps them keep gay men towing the line. For AIDS service organizations, it keeps us all employed (for now, not for long).

Our cultural medium tells us to stop consuming junk, while it simultaneously lures us to supersize it. We are reminded that catastrophes will soon change the face of the earth as e know it, that earth will continue to exist but without us and what we have built, while telling us to live hoping for the future, reproducing and prospering. Gay men living with AIDS are nicely embedded in this Armageddon/Paradise bewilderment, were good poster girls for the conundrum. Pharmaceutical companies tell us to get well, showing gentle, diverse bodies with HIV in their advertisement, while reciting a litany of very negative side-effects which they know little to nothing about. The side effects of any pharmaceuticals over time are bad, very very bad.

What’s a queer to do? I’m a recovering Catholic. I commit sins everyday that surely incite war, weather calamity, and plane crashes. Every time I get a load of warm cum up my hole, I have to redress the intensely intimate pleasure by reminding myself that I’m a poor role model to other gay men, that I’m a pricey liability for public health, and that I might be prosecuted for infecting others.

It gets juicier. They say that shame is on its way out, like good manners and civility. We peddle our petty personal business on memoirs, blogs, and television, the age of too-much-information. I say that shame is alive and well for HIV-positive gay men and for a large number of gay men overall. It is a time of conflict of ideas and attitudes. Some days I feel shame, other days bravado, and some I’m so darn confused, I wish I had been born straight. It is a maddening way of living, living with HIV. I dance in a space between my guilt and the envy of others because I can fuck without condoms, especially the envy of my HIV-negative gay brothers; a space between self derision and the pity of others, between the manufacturing of gay and the consciousness of who I really am.

“Don’t smell it or touch it; certainly don’t put it in your mouth.” Our idea of safety is attached to repressive mothering, misguided I-am-what-I-am individualism, and stigma, but I think violence or epidemics are the result of group neglect and fear. AIDS organization have gone from advocacy and politics to AIDS service organizations to put to the sole use of public health everything we first did to promote collective notion of sexual ethos and have turned it into individual irresponsibility—way to bend! We make terrorism happen every day, in the violent, growing disparity between the rich and poor, in the arrogance of the (temporarily) healthy and in the acquiescent (self)victimization of the diseased and disabled. No one can protect us from the paltry cruelty of the everyday.

Against a backdrop of viral terror (picture Monica Lewinsky grimacing, not wanting to suck a presidential nine-incher), banal scandal (a Christian politician has a meth lover), medical porn (you and your specialist discuss your anal warts screened on high definition), and potent street drugs (your latest licit/street combo that catapulted you into the stratosphere), runs yet another repressive tale: sex must be romantic, gentle, and benign, or a combination of the three. Sex between men is aggressive and even violent (more so when the swishy, frustrated queen has to top the gigantic, eunuch bodybuilder one more time).

Sex is supposed to be sober and pragmatic: suck with condoms (yuck!), quit smoking, stop eating too much and too spicy (which may resulting in an addiction to gruff, smelly armpits and ass), and stop using street drugs to escape your gloomy reality. They praise queers on their adherence and compliance, while having made each HIV-positive gay man into an adherent and compliant drug user since the initial 1996 Canadian dispensation of anti-HIV drugs. See the contradiction? If you’ve never gotten drunk or high to withstand the battle of sex, you haven’t been out much. If you’ve never deluded yourself into thinking that his disdain is interest and his roughness love, you’re one of the few. Safe sex body popular mechanics tells us little how to hedge our bets in the complexity of risk.

We must interrupt the banal piousness and the contradictions of prevention, the negation of the irate flesh. While I probe into my fear to age as queer in a society that only likes queer as young, clever entertainment. While I still have breath in me and as I become a lecherous old man, I’ll reduce my carbon print by overtly negotiating unsafe sex. I’ll seduce one of those geeky, white boys selling memberships for global causes at the corner (not without a good scrubbing under the drizzle first) and fuck with his head, his ass, and my membership to his cause. I will felch the dregs of others while someone pummels my back with a cat-o’-nine-tails. I'll perform fellatio on toys imported from China. On every virtuous World AIDS Day I will ooze fluids and lick my wounds with my raw tongue. I will take the risks.

When I heard that that strapping, young leatherman had killed himself in Montreal, that he was depressed about being HIV positive and I thought of the intense, intimate, and dangerous sex we had together, I didn’t feel cavalier; I felt sad I was part of a community that didn’t protect him but kept on spewing safety. Who knows what services and supports weren’t in place for him along the way. I didn’t pity him either.  Those who play with fire don’t pity others—we just watch the flames lap the sky with the fright and famine of an arsonist.

******

About Giving it Raw: In tragicomic blows that span twenty-five years, I, with the aplomb and ingenuity of a postmodern Scheherazade, aim to stay alive by telling you one story about living with AIDS at a time. In Giving it Raw, I use my quirky accent and uncanny ability to switch missionary positions to turn my story on its head. In memoir storytelling, I tackle city traffic, flight turbulence, barebacking, cyber sex, and eating manners. I dish out street insight about infecting some and protecting many. I go from science and bureaucracy to backroom and bathhouse in a swish of the pen. The reflections in Giving it Raw are about ‘taking’ it all in, learning from challenges and ‘giving’ it back to the reader as bite-size, full-mouthed wisdom, a raw ceviche of sorts, sometimes tangy, sometimes bitter.

About the author: Francisco Ibanez-Carrasco’s novel ‘Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers” was published in 2001 by Arsenal Pulp Press, “Killing Me Softly”, a collection of short stories was published by Suspect Thoughts Press in 2004 and he regularly publishes creative non-fiction and academic essays in the US and Canada. Find a bit more about him in this PositiveLite.com video interview and the CATIE interview here. 

Read an earlier excerpt from Giving it Raw here.