Toronto, Canada – A Tanzanian youth, with links to a Toronto-based charitable organisation, was today announced as having created the winning logo design for AIDS 2014 - the 20th International AIDS Conference – being held in Melbourne, Australia in July 2014. This follows a global competition for youth aged between 10 and 30 years old launched by the International AIDS Society. 

Yohana Haule (21) is a young artist who has been working with the organisation Africa’s Children-Africa’s Future (AC-AF) since October 2011 through their office in Dar es Salaam. AC-AF first met Yohana at his secondary school graduation. Current Executive Director, Dave Christie and founder of AC-AF, Gita Jaffe, were attending as guests of the school and another youth in their programming. Drawn to Yohana’s talent, he would become the first recipient of the AC-AF Youth Leadership Award. The award looks to strengthen the youths’ skills to develop promising talent into concrete actions that can help the youth achieve their dreams. Since then, he has become the resident artist for the organisation, producing artwork used in programming resources for children and in awareness materials currently being used in Canada.

As Christie explains, “This is an incredible achievement for a young man from Dar es Salaam who, like many youth in Tanzania, has faced many hardships to get to where he is today. When we first met Yohana, we were not only struck by his talent, but by the messages that he was portraying through his art. One of the first images he showed to us was a depiction of the roles women play in Tanzania – both in the strength they bring to the country but the burdens they also face. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the burden on women in the AIDS epidemic is particularly harsh, and here was a young man willing to confront some of those issues.”

Toronto has strong links to the International AIDS Conference having hosted the 16th conference in 2006. As a legacy to that conference, the Global AIDS Initiative was established by the City of Toronto, to fund programming concerning HIV and AIDS undertaken by organisations working in sub-Saharan Africa. For the last two years, AC-AF has been part of the coalition of organisations utilising these funds for its work in Tanzania with children and youth. As a result of the budget passed in January at City Hall, this funding will end in August 2013. Although the financial legacy of AIDS 2006 is coming to an end, the work that the City of Toronto has enabled AC-AF to undertake, including with Yohana, will ensure that the contribution of the people of Toronto will have a lasting impact on AIDS 2014.

For AC-AF, this provides a moment of pride in the accomplishments of the youth they work with. At the heart of their programmes and ethos is a continual focus on the potential of children and youth. As Christie explains, “Our programming does not look to just help children; it is aimed at ensuring children and youth help themselves, both now and in the future. They need encouragement to increase their independence, ensuring that they can support themselves, their families and their community, while fulfilling their dreams. Yohana exemplifies this. Although we are able to provide him with some of the initial opportunities, it is ultimately his effort and talent that has brought him this recognition by the International AIDS Society.”

Yohana will continue to work with AC-AF before travelling to Australia in July 2014 to be officially thanked at the conference for his design. This will be the first time that he has travelled outside of Tanzania.

For more information about Africa’s Children-Africa’s Future (AC-AF) visit: www.ac.af.com.

For more information about the AIDS 2014 conference visit: www.aids2014.org.

Every now and then I catch myself speaking or laughing and I will hear my father’s voice. And as much as I hate it, I can’t deny that I am my father’s son. From the shape of my eyes and nose to the bad varicose veins on my legs….I was definitely made of his genes. And for the past few years I have been thinking about him. Wondering where he is and what he has been doing.

Because my father is 17 years older than me, he would be of the generation that would find computers and facebook a little intimidating. Hell…I can remember when I first started working with them back in the 80’s at The Tampa Tribune. Those black screens with the space-aged green fonts seemed like something out of a movie (“War Games” to be exact). So, he would probably have shied away from ever actually using a computer to find his son. And most likely he didn’t want to find me at all.

You see, my father was a longshoreman. He wasn’t a big man. He was actually kind of thin and spry. Don’t get me wrong…he was strong, but not that big in stature. The last time I saw him was Thanksgiving of 1991 at his mother’s house. By this time in my life, I had already come out to everyone in my family. I was living a gay lifestyle and working in gay bars. My father had even come to pick me up a couple times when I was stranded after a drag show at Rene’s (the popular black gay bar in Tampa). So, it was no big deal that I was in drag or had a boyfriend. He had even gone to school with a well known drag queen in town named Zara. But what happened at that Thanksgiving dinner would change our relationship forever.

My earliest memory of my father was my fifth birthday. My grandmother, Carrie, had told me that he had called and said he was going to come see me for my birthday. I remember taking a bath that afternoon. I never wanted to take a bath back then, but I wanted to look good for my father. I put on my Sunday best. I would run and go peek out the front window every time I heard a car go by. This went on for hours. I remember my grandmother making me come and eat a late lunch because he still had not arrived. Then it was getting later in the day. I had tried watching “Underdog” and a couple of other cartoons to keep myself busy until he arrived.

Finally it was after 5 PM and I decided to go wait on the porch. I remember rocking in the chair. It was really warm out and the gnats were swamping the yard. I sat there and waited all day until the sun went down. My father never showed up. This would become a long series of disappointments my father would supply throughout my life.

A few years earlier before that dinner, I was living with my gay cousin Michael and a friend, Godfrey (who went by the drag name Apollonia). Michael (who was also a drag performer named “Michelle Holiday”) had lost his job and was pretending to go to work everyday. Apollonia survived off her drag shows and her boyfriend. I was working as a DJ and drag performer. I happened to call Michael at his job at McDonald’s because my uncle Herb need him to come pick him up and was informed he no longer worked there and would I ask him to return the uniform. After confronting Michael, I told him and Godfrey that I was moving out. We were going to lose the apartment if we didn’t have the rent. Michael was unable to get another job immediately so I moved in with my friend Christie Matthews. Apparently, Michael and Godfrey went to my father and Uncle Herb and told them that I had moved out and left them with the rent.  My father and Herb gave them the rest of the rent and I guess my father started harboring ill will towards me.

Fast forward to 1991 and my father shows up to Thanksgiving dinner at his mother’s house with his current girlfriend. Grandma Sally always had a big meal at the holidays. Even my adopted gay brother Anthony Evans was invited. Now, my dad showing up with his girlfriend doesn’t sound like a problem, but his ex-wife, Teresa and the kids were there. I noticed that he had been drinking before he got there. He was very abrupt with me when he arrived. But like most dysfunctional family dinners, the main event was saved while we were eating.  My father proceeded to tell me that I had ruined his name (since I am a junior), I needed to go out and get a real job and stop hanging around all those faggots before I caught something.

Ironically, the year before I had received my diagnosis of being HIV+. I had no intention of sharing that fact with anyone in my family. I already felt like an outsider since I left home at 16. At the time when my father verbally attacked me at the dinner table, it seemed to have come out of nowhere. I was told later that he was still mad at me for moving out on Michael and Godfrey and felt that I was irresponsible. But this was laughable, coming from a man who didn’t have a permanent residence himself.  I sat and listened for about ten minutes and then I went off.

“You gotta lotta nerve! You ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of!” I said.

He gave the same look he did when he punched me in 1980 when I stopped him from beating on Teresa in their kitchen. I remember sitting on the floor after the hit and singing “We Shall Overcome” and him cursing at me. So, I guess he was about to hit me again, but my grandmother wasn’t having it. She threw him out of her house on that Thanksgiving. And that would be the last time I saw my father.

When I describe my parents, I always say that they seemed like my older brother and sister who were always in trouble. Mainly because I was raised my mother’s mother until she died in 1982. It’s funny how life can be like a stacked set of dominoes. You do one thing and it changes so many others’ lives.

My mother was the only girl out of three children. So, my grandmother kept her under lock and key. She was very strict with her and wanted her to go to school to become a teacher. But it was the 60’s and my mother had other plans. She wanted to see Jimi Hendrix live. She wanted to be a part of the Psychedelic Movement. So she got pregnant on purpose and my father was the poor victim. He really loved her and she ran off with a boyfriend shortly after having me. He didn’t know anything about raising a child. So, he took me to the one place he knew I would be safe and loved….my mother’s mother.

Unfortunately for him and all the rest of the women he came in contact with from then on, he would never truly fall in love again. He would become an abusive and womanizing man that had kids all over town.

So, on April 22^nd, 2013 I opened up my facebook account and found a message from a girl named Lakiria. It read: “Miss Teresa misses you and loves you. Please call her.” At first I was going to ignore it, but then I noticed the number had an 813 area code. That’s Tampa. So, I called it.

The joy in Teresa’s voice was so wonderful to hear. Apparently she and my brothers had been searching for me for a while. My step brother, Adrian and his girlfriend, Lakiria came across my facebook profile and decided to write me. I cannot tell you the emotions that overcame me when I started talking with Theresa, my brother Adrian, my brother Anton, my brother Anthony and my Uncle Rudolph.  They were all so glad to finally reconnect with me. It had been 21 years since I had spoken to or seen any of them.

But it was a bittersweet opening conversation with Teresa. You see, my father had died in 2006. So, I finally had my answer. The man that I had despised for all these year was gone. But of course a part of me wishes that I had worked things out or at least got to tell him that I am married now. I believe I have found my purpose in life. I have a family of friends who love me and believe in me. I have a life that I am proud of. But this conversation was reaffirming to hear.  My real family still loves me and they are proud of me. Teresa even told me that she has been walking around the house singing “Bitch You Look Fierce”. Her and Lakira are now the biggest Jade Elektra fans.

My father’s death left so many questions. I wonder if he ever got to see any of my accomplishments. Did he ever hear any of my records? Did he ever see me in a movie or on television? Did he ever know that I really understood him and why he did the things that he did? Would he have embraced me if I had told him that I was HIV+? 

Well, a part of me thinks he would have. Teresa told me that he died of AIDS.

A part of me was shocked, but not surprised. For as many women he had slept with it wasn’t surprising at all. But my Uncle Rudolph shed some more light on something else I had no idea about. My father, like my mother had started doing heavy drugs and was shooting up. And at his funeral, the family discovered that he had three daughters that we knew nothing about. And since he got around - a lot - there’s no telling how many more are out there.

To put the kids in order of age…..it would be me, Von, Jerome, Anton, Anthony. These are the brothers I knew about. We didn’t have the same mothers, but there was no denying that were Alfonso King’s children. Out of protest of not having a father around when I was growing up, I changed the spelling of my name in grade school. Then it became my professional name when I started acting and modeling.

I guess the thing that I regret the most with both my parents is that I never got to tell them that I forgave them. They were two young 17 year olds who were making the best decisions that they could at the time. They had no idea that what they did that day I was conceived would change the rest of so many lives in the aftermath. And although many have said they were horrible parents, they taught me a very valuable lesson……how not to live. I just never got the chance to tell them that I loved them regardless of the mistakes.

This report by Gus Cairns first appeared on aidsmap.com here. 

The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has announced that it is discontinuing the HVTN 505 HIV vaccine trial. This trial, which started in July 2009, has involved 2,504 gay and transgender volunteers in 19 US cities. Since the successful conclusion of the RV144 vaccine trial in September 2009, HVTN 505, as a randomised, placebo-controlled phase IIb trial, has been the only ongoing HIV vaccine trial large enough to be a true test of vaccine efficacy.

NIAID stopped administering injections when the trial‘s independent data and safety monitoring board (DSMB) found during a scheduled interim review that there was no sign that the vaccine regimen was preventing HIV infection, nor any sign that it was reducing viral load among vaccine recipients who became infected with HIV.

The DSMB found that there were actually more HIV infections in volunteers receiving vaccine than placebo, but it is important to emphasise that this difference was not statistically significant and may have been due to chance. Statistically speaking, the vaccine had zero efficacy.

The HVTN 505 study was testing an investigational ‘prime-boost’ vaccine regimen developed by NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center. It involved a series of four injections. The first two, at the start of the study and four weeks later, consisted of a length of DNA – artificial genetic material – that ‘coded’ for proteins found on the surface and inside the HIV virus. The idea was to sensitise the immune system to the specific HIV genetic sequences.

The third injection, at eight weeks, involved a vector. This means the same HIV genetic material was wrapped inside the shell of a different virus, an adenovirus, one of the types that cause common colds. In this case the viral shell was altered so that it could not cause illness. The idea of a vector is that it causes a ‘fake infection’: the viruses can carry the genetic material through the cellular membrane and into the interior of immune-system cells. The two investigational vaccines tested in HVTN 505 cannot cause HIV infection because neither contains live or weakened versions of HIV.

The reason behind a prime-boost design is that it is thought to be the best safe way to stimulate both branches of the adaptive immune system: antibodies, which stop viruses getting into cells in the first place, and CD8 cells or cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (CTLs), which kill off virus-infected cells. Researchers hoped that if a prime-boost vaccine were successful, it might prevent infection altogether in the majority of people, but in the minority who were still infected, it might kill off enough virus-infected cells to permanently contain HIV replication and produce a consistently low HIV viral load.

The fourth injection, at 24 weeks, involved an injection of the viral vector alone, without any HIV genetic material. This was to gauge the level of immune response to the adenovirus shell rather than to the HIV material it contained. This is important because in one of the previous vaccine efficacy trials, the STEP study, the vaccine actually made people with high levels of pre-existing immunity to the adenovirus vector more, rather than less, vulnerable to HIV. In the case of HVTN 505, volunteers were required to have no pre-existing immunity to ad5, the adenovirus vector used.

In its April 22 interim review, the DSMB looked at volunteers who were diagnosed with HIV infection after having been in the study a minimum of 28 weeks and found that 27 HIV infections had occurred among the vaccine recipients and 21 among placebo vaccine recipients. Twenty-eight weeks was chosen because by this time the vaccine, if it worked, would have stimulated a sufficiently strong protective immune response. Including volunteers who had become infected less than 28 weeks after enrolment, there were 41 cases of HIV infection in volunteers receiving vaccine regimen and 30 cases in those receiving placebo.

Additionally, the DSMB found that viral load among the 30 volunteers who acquired HIV infection at least 28 weeks after entering the study, and who had been followed for at least 20 weeks after diagnosis, was no lower in vaccine than in placebo recipients. Study volunteers are being asked to report to their specific clinic sites over the next few weeks to find out whether they received the investigational vaccines or placebo. Individuals who became HIV-infected during the trial were referred to local services for appropriate medical care and treatment.

The HVTN 505 study will continue follow-up with study participants to further evaluate the trial data, and especially to see if the greater number of vaccine recipients who were infected is in any way significant.

For more information about the HVTN 505 study, please see the updated Questions and Answers page here.

To learn about what other vaccine trials are currently taking place, visit IAVI’s vaccine database here or AVAC’s summary here.

I just spent a few days in Berlin, capital of the Federal Republic of Germany and according to the brochure, the largest city between Moscow and Paris, working on an HIV-related project; of which, as it is big enough to literally affect all of us, much more detail later. But meanwhile, I’d warrant that Berlin itself deserves a story.

Start with the obvious: if you enjoy urban beauty or the elegance of a perfect cityscape, book a flight to Paris. Berlin is, to be blunt, ugly. It doesn’t have the richly layered history of Rome or London, the gilded perfection of Saint Petersburg, the raw pulsing energy of Hong Kong or New York. Berlin is too young to be profound, too compromised to be innocent or exuberant. Its nightlife can be of an order of decadence to make the Marquis de Sade blush; but alas, the local metro goes to sleep at one A.M., incomprehensibly, leaving one with a Hobson’s choice of a very long walk or the use of taxis that are literally beige. That’s right: beige. Nothing says “I just had epic sex with twin Siberian gymnasts in front of a paying audience” quite as clearly as a beige Mercedes-Benz. It is to weep. On the other hand, the city’s Lord Mayor, Klaus Wowereit, is openly gay.

Until recently divided by the monstrous Berlin Wall – one of my earliest memories is standing in front of it, and understanding even as a tot that I was looking at something abhorrent – Berlin has not yet truly become one city. What it has done instead, assisted by the largesse of the German taxpayer, is nonetheless remarkable: acknowledge the darker sides of its history with a frankness probably without equal anywhere else. That begs the question of how it got to where it is today.

Few places have been as central to the tragedies of the last century than this lightly wooded spot of sand, lakes and gravel roughly the geographic size of New York City (with rather a bit less than half as many people, no coast and no skyscrapers). It began the century as the ostentatiously nouveaux-riche capital of Imperial Germany, ruled by a man we in the English-speaking world know simply as the Kaiser, Emperor William II. He qualifies as a tragedy of his own. This is the complete jackass that practically single-handedly strangled four centuries of European world pre-eminence by dragging every great power of his day into a war none of them wanted to fight all that much, and despite most of them being ruled by members of his immediate family. He began his career as monarch by firing his chancellor, Otto Prince Bismarck, the man who in 1871 handed William’s grandfather and namesake King William III of Prussia the crown of a shiny new German Empire and then kept the peace of Europe for decades. “Jackass” may be an excess of charity, come to think of it.

His dynasty, the House of Hohenzollern, produced competent, hard-working and occasionally brilliant kings of Prussia over the course of several centuries, then two quite serviceable German emperors, but apparently had precious little left by way of talent, taste or administrative ability in the genetic larder for poor William. Those imperial buildings still standing, tragically mainly his, breathe an air more at home in a nightmare Las Vegas than the smaller, merely royal and more humanly modest Berlin that was the capital of the kingdom of Prussia. The aesthetic difference is roughly that between Wagner at his most loud and Mozart at his more sublime. What remains of Royal Berlin is one of the jewels of Europe. Imperial Berlin was then and is today a continental eyesore.

Empire and kingdom both fell in the course of a single day at the end of the Great War, the 9^th of November 1918, as Germany’s armies disintegrated in defeat on the bloody fields of northern France.  In the Commonwealth, this date is marked as Armistice Day; in Berlin, it saw the birth of the first German Republic, declared in a mix of exuberance, confusion and despair from the balcony of one of those Imperial buildings, the Reichstag or Imperial Parliament. There’s a certain irony inherent in the fact that this happened more or less by accident; the emperor had fled the capital for the Netherlands a day previously (maybe to avoid the fate of his cousin, the Czar, recently shot by the Bolsheviki), the crown prince refused the throne, no other male members of the Imperial House in the line of succession were to be found, and a republic was essentially the only option left that might prevent the full collapse not just of the already crumbling government, but of the state itself.

That republic, colloquially known simply as Weimar, was not long for this earth. It did manage to preserve the Reich as a united state, but never gained the broad legitimacy required to sustain itself. However, in fourteen short years it brought into being one of the great brilliant fireworks of human civilization, the sudden and gorgeous flowering of a new modern age. Modern cinema wasn’t born in Hollywood; its cradle rocked in Babelsberg. Without those few years in faraway Berlin, New York City’s iconic MoMA would be as interesting as a barn. A defeated, impoverished republican capital became the Chicago of Europe, a marvel of the world entirely beyond the imagination or capacity of imperial Berlin. And equally something contemporary, democratic Berlin would like to be again, but presently is not – and likely never will be.

Consider the losses:  Albert Einstein, Theodor Adorno, Walter Gropius, Greta Garbo, Mies van der Rohe, Wassily Kandinsky, Fritz Lang, Thomas Mann, Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder and too many others to count. No modern city since the sack of Constantinople has lost so much talent, so quickly; with one obvious exception: New York City in the age of AIDS.

Those halcyon days will not return for one simple reason: the force that extinguished them, the Nazi dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, murdered or drove into exile the very men and women who made them possible. Obviously, Hitler – who Berliners today are quick to point out was a native of Austria and never won an election in Berlin itself, accurate statements both – hated Jews to the point of genocide, along with gypsies, communists, homosexuals, trade unionists and many, many more. Precisely the groups that provided the yeast for the city’s ferment and made it das Rote Berlin, Red Berlin. This Red Berlin became Hitler’s first victim.

The infamous Reichstag fire, likely set by the Nazis themselves, provided the pretext for outlawing the powerful communist party and imprisoning its leaders and many of the rank and file in the first concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, an hour outside of the city limits.

The Nazi paramilitary organization SA stormed and burned to the ground the world’s first gay research institute near the Brandenburg Gate. Clubs and bars within larger buildings couldn’t yet be torched without consequence, but were sacked.  Meanwhile, Berlin’s 160,000 Jewish citizens – out of a population of four million – were systematically ghettoized, first economically and then physically, from the life of the city. The silence of the majority of Berliners at this very visible persecution was and remains a moral disgrace to the city’s people; it continued during the infamous Kristallnacht and until the last Jews were deported to the death camps in 1943, at which point the city was declared Judenrein, “cleansed of Jews”. At that time and in the following months and years, though, there wasn’t much of Berlin left, either; instead of Hitler’s fabled European capital Germania, it became just one more field of rubble among many on a continent in ruins. Nor is this ancient history; not in a city where the very stones seem to weep.

It is a matter of supreme irony that the regime’s crimes hit the city as devastatingly as they did; historically, Prussia was the first country in Europe to fully emancipate its Jewish population and grant Jews the rights of citizenship, in line with a royal decree, revolutionary at the time, that granted freedom of worship to all faiths. So many French Protestants fled the radically different policy of Louis XIV of France, the Sun King (and architect of Versailles), that at one time the language most widely spoken in Berlin was French. The kingdom of Prussia was a notoriously militarized and regimented state, but its capital was a place of intellectual and artistic ferment, a place where a brilliant Jewish woman, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, in the latter half of the 18^th Century could lead the leading Enlightenment salon. She was a peer not merely of Christians or aristocrats, but of men as one of the first widely published female writers. In the late 19^th Century, the first modern gay rights group was founded in Berlin; around the same time, the first gay magazine was published there. The city that Christopher Isherwood scoured for male flesh was often a scene of hunger, riots, and pitched battles between Nazis and Communists, but das Rote Berlin had room for the outcasts of the world.

As did New York, and Toronto, and London, and all the other cities large and small scourged by AIDS. Berlin has something to teach them: how to preserve the memory of the lost. How, in the Part Two. 

“Some people are going to think, ‘Oh god, why did he not take steps to prevent HIV? Why did he act recklessly, and who the hell does he think he is, I saw people die from AIDS!’” A friend and colleague whose candor is always helpful said this to me over lunch recently, and his words have stuck with me over the past day

Most interestingly, I’ve noticed that those most receptive to my messages are under 30, those 30-50 are generally receptive but ask more poignant questions, and those over 50 are oftentimes, not always but often, openly hostile to my writing on bareback sex and HIV. In the next few months, I’m going to be speaking at several sexual health seminars and symposiums, and I’ve been assessing my own writing and essays on sex, barebacking, HIV, and personal responsibility, and I’ve reached the same conclusion that I originally had when I began writing on HIV and sex; that is, we are inadvertently sustaining HIV infections and continuing this epidemic because we are unable to confront our past honestly and without emotion.

I was born in 1984. Personally, I have no firsthand recollection of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Ryan White, Arthur Ashe, the AIDS quilt’s beginnings, Rock Hudson, C. Everett Coop, or the obscene neglect the United States government took in relation to HIV/AIDS throughout the entire 1980s.  Rather, all of my knowledge of these things, people, and movements comes from oral histories from LGBT elders that are my friends, exhibits at places like the William Way LGBT Community Center’s stellar John J. Wilcox, Jr., Archival space, named after a man I am heartened to have called a friend, and from textbooks and documentaries. In addition, when I began to go through puberty and learn about the physical and sexual changes taking place in my body, it was the late 1990s, Bill Clinton was president, HIV/AIDS organizations and infrastructure had been in place for over a decade, and my teachers, parents, and mentors knew how HIV was transmitted, how HIV was not transmitted, and HIV’s timeline of progression in the human body.

When I was growing up, there was no plague where funerals were being attended every week. There were no candlelight vigils, there were no large scale protests interfering with traditional institutions of power and policy in the United States; rather, there was knowledge, there were early concepts of treatment that are still being used today, and there was a local, state, and federal government trying its best, guided and sometimes provoked by activists and advocacy organizations, to respond most effectively to HIV/AIDS.

Instead of learning about HIV through my own experiences or through seeing friends or loved ones suffer or die too early, I learned about HIV as an abstract concept far removed from my own life. Of course, this abstract viral boogeyman was as frightening as it was imaginary; after all, when our own innate fears are coupled with histories, real or not, of our elders and teachers, we manifest these fears in irrational terror and paradoxical behavior, like posting links on Facebook to condom campaign websites but barebacking someone we met on Adam4Adam because he said he was “clean.”

For years, I was terrified of this virus because it had seemingly no effect on me or my own circle of friends and family; rather, it was something that we knew existed, we knew how to prevent, and we knew how it attacked the human body, but this knowledge was predicated on the idea that I was born, luckily, at a time where I did not become a man or a sexual being until long after the early days of the virus spreading rapidly through the gay community. Of course, the only reason HIV/AIDS took off throughout the gay community is because gay men engage in anal sex which allows for easy access for the blood barrier to be crossed between sexual partners because of, often entirely unnoticeable, usually microscopic abrasions and tears around the skin on the penis or inside the anus.

Contrary to the belief of some misguided idiots who think HIV/AIDS was god’s divine judgment toward those of us who like to kiss men, HIV only seemingly “picked” the gay community because of this fact; if straight women were clamoring to engage in anal sex like gay men typically do, they would have been the ones who bore the brunt of HIV/AIDS. Instead, because gay men are the ones who engage in this, admittedly fun, activity, we were the ones who suffered the most during the early days of HIV/AIDS. And, to this day, the LGBT community overall, including transwomen and gay men, are dramatically disproportionately affected by HIV because of this fact.

So, like the Holocaust, the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic are a mere idea my generation and the generations after mine have to learn about from our elder peers, from our teachers, or from our books. We have no concept of the human tragedy endured by millions; we have no firsthand account of what things were like. And, this is why our experience as HIV+ people born post-AIDS outbreak is entirely different than that of those who lived during this time as sexual adults. Now, this is not to say that either experience is better or worse; rather, our experiences are equally as valuable and equally deserving of a seat at the table when it comes to outreach, prevention, and care.

Notwithstanding, if we are to successfully combat the tide of rising HIV infections brought on by what older folks like to call “recklessness” but what I like to call “natural human behavior,” we must be willing to honestly look at ourselves and admit that nobody has a monopoly on HIV/AIDS, and the fact that someone lived through something does not automatically give them deference on opinions just as the fact that I am HIV+ most definitely does not give me absolute authority on all things related to HIV. Rather, on the logical and science-based merits should we approach HIV/AIDS today without the baggage and trauma, both experiential on part of our elders and vicarious on part of my generation.

This is the current approach of the more misguided folks in our LGBT elder generation, generally, in relation to HIV: tossing out HIV stigmatic slurs like calling me, literally, a “murderer;” browbeating young men who bareback as “reckless;” advocating condom use over everything else; making people who bareback feel bad about themselves; shrilly obsessing over death when telling 20 year olds about the 1980s instead of honestly admitting that you were at the DCA club also getting topped on the truck bed at the bar; claiming falsely that dental dams are used widely to prevent hepatitis and so should condoms for anal sex; ignoring the fact that part of sexual liberation means engaging in natural human sexual activity like bareback sex; and, ignoring all scientific literature that refutes every single backward notion born out of 1990 and early treatment that effectively was more toxic than HIV itself.

If this approach worked, then we would not be seeing a steady rise in HIV infections.

 So, let’s stop damaging the lives and futures of young people today by taking a step back and stop forcing other people to obsess over our own memories, effectively refusing to allow these men and women to experience life on their own without the specter of a de facto Holocaust; the time of this period is over. We have antiretroviral treatment with no side effects that literally both gives us life expectancy into our 70s while simulanteously preventing us from being able to transmit HIV whatsoever (when we adhere to this medication); we are not dying, we are living. And, we are not frightened anymore because now that some of us have seen HIV for what it is. In particular, we know that HIV is a virus that will kill us if left untreated but that it is also a virus that is, today, incredibly manageable with the right governmental approach toward treatment availability like exists here in Philadelphia.

Human tragedy should never be swept under the rug or forgotten. And, we should strenuously remind folks that these things went on, that good men and women died needlessly and far too soon. But, we should not predicate our public health efforts and prevention efforts on the idea that we should force people to remember our dead friends or a tragic decade that future generations had nothing to do with. After all, if this fear-based approach was effective, nobody would get HIV anymore.

The fact that I’m writing this and HIV+ refutes that hypothesis.

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

On April 5, 2013 I took my first dose of Truvada as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). 

So many questions were swirling in my head at that point, and had been for weeks and months. As I was about to swallow my first pill, I gazed outside the window and wondered…

• How did I end up in this situation where I feel like I need PrEP?

• How is it possible that it was this easy for me to access PrEP when so many people don’t have access to ARVs to stay alive?

• How did I go from being a major PrEP skeptic 4 years ago to actually taking PrEP now?

• What would people think if they knew I was taking PrEP and therefore by implication putting myself more at risk than I’d even been willing to admit to myself?

• Will I be taking this pill every morning for the rest of my life?

• Will I start taking more risks than I did before?

• Will I experience side effects?

• When will this damn winter end? I know this is Canada and everything, but enough already with the grey skies and slush and dreariness.

To find clues about how I got here and how long I might need PrEP, I took a sexy stroll down memory lane. Or as I like to call it…

My Sex Life: A Tale of HIV Risk in Five Phases

Phase 1: “In the Beginning”, lasted 8 years. I grew up in Moncton NB, (right) a small town on the East coast of Canada, and stayed there until my mid-20s. Let’s just say there were not very many opportunities to participate in activities that would have put me at high risk. This was pre-interwebz and smartphones, folks. In a town with one gay bar. I don’t do bars. Ever. All my experiences were very low risk. I didn’t even want to experiment with high risk behaviours. I was much too scared. I watched my father, an out gay man, progressively get sicker and eventually die of AIDS, desperately gasping for breath in his last hours, right in front of my eyes. I was 18 when we learned he already had AIDS and he died when I was 20. Trust me, this leaves an indelible impression on a young gay man who is just beginning to have sex, and who has not even come out yet. I did come out very shortly thereafter, and I ended up in a long-term relationship pretty much immediately.

PrEP would have made no sense for me then. I didn’t even need condoms. That would come later.

Phase 2: “Spreading my Wings”, lasted 9 years. I moved to the Ottawa/Gatineau region where I still live now, a sprawling metropolis compared to what I’d known until then. I was here by myself for a while. I decided it was time to explore and play around. Even after my partner joined me. But I was still not at high risk for HIV. This was largely because I was frankly uninterested in activities that would have put me at high risk. Partly out of personal preference. Partly out of concern about “bringing something home” to my partner (oh ya, I was suuuch a considerate adulterer!). Partly because at this stage my fear of getting HIV still considerably outweighed any desire to do anything even moderately risky.

PrEP would have made no sense for me then. I didn’t even need condoms. That would come later.

Phase 3: “Letting Loose”, lasted 1.5 years. After the end of my 14-year relationship, I decided it was time to explore and play around even more. Not that I’d been an angel before. Far from it. But now I was ready for some adventure. Through it all, I can honestly say that I managed to maintain absolutely 100% condom use. Each and every time. How did I manage that? For one thing, while my fear of getting HIV no longer outweighed my desire to explore activities that happen to be more risky, it still was strong enough to reinforce my resolve around condom use. It also helps that negotiating, convincing, or cajoling are rarely required when you’re almost always the one actually wearing the condom.

PrEP would have made very little sense for me then. That would come later.

Phase 4: “The Dark Ages”, lasted 1.5 years. Through a very severe depression, there was nothing going on. Nothing.

PrEP would have made no sense for me then. I didn’t even need condoms. That would come later.

Phase 5: “The Renaissance”, lasted 5 years. I was back to a life of adventure as a single gay man in a mid-size city, and on very frequent travel. At first, I still managed to maintain 100% condom use. But gradually, over the course of the last 2-3 years, I started to veer away from 100% condom use for reasons that I will explain in my next installment. As a sneak preview—it has to do with the current state of knowledge about HIV transmission, and, well… because sex feels better without condoms! *GASP* Stay tuned for the shocking next episode.

So now, for the first time in my life, at the age of 43, and after 25 years of active sex life (minus a brief depression-induced hiatus), PrEP makes sense for me. How long will this new phase last? How long will I be on PrEP? I don’t know. But luckily it exists and I can access it.

***

There are a million other things I have to say about PrEP. Well OK, maybe only half a million. But luckily others have already addressed many of them, and have done it so eloquently. I encourage everyone to check out the following remarkable first-person accounts:

• Len Tooley did a series of interviews on PositiveLite.com.

• Jake Sobo has been writing a whole series of articles on his blog, “My Life on PrEP”.

• Several other first-person accounts can be found right here on the “My PrEP Experience” blog.

Len and Jake are so friggin’ smart and insightful and articulate, I want to marry both of them. It has been a tremendous source of help and support to read the thoughts of everyone who shared their stories publicly. A big hairy thanks to Jim Pickett for starting the “My PrEP Experience” blog because he recognized that amidst all the heated debates and discussions and policy decisions about PrEP, we weren’t hearing the voices of real-life flesh-and-blood people actually using PrEP.

To be continued. . . 

About the author: Marc-André LeBlanc has worked in the community-based HIV/AIDS movement for 20 years.  He does community engagement, capacity-building and policy work related to biomedical HIV prevention research, both in Canada and globally. He is a co-founder of International Rectal Microbicide Advocates (IRMA), serves as secretary on their steering committee, has authored two reports on the global state of rectal microbicide efforts, and leads IRMA’s global efforts to ensure the safety of sexual lubricants. Marc-André loves movies. He got a film studies degree while working full-time, just for the sheer fun of it. He is now leading advocacy efforts to get ice cream and popcorn recognised as new basic food groups in Canada’s Food Guide

This article first appeared on My PrEP Experience here.