‘EMBARRASSED,
ME?’As I was standing in the queue in a supermarket, my handbag fell over, its contents cascading to the ground like obscene confetti.
Orange-flavoured condoms and mega-sized tampons rolled down the aisle. The man behind me picked them up, smirking in the jubilant expectation of my embarrassment. Instead I casually accepted them and responded blithely that he at least didn’t have to pick up my haemorrhoid cream.
Embarrassed, ME? Hello, when HIV has taken you down the rocky road of having HPV warts sizzled off your anus and handing over stool samples in little self-labelled pots, embarrassment becomes a thing of the past.
I’ve never been embarrassed about being HIV positive. Or ashamed of the fact that I got it through sex. I suppose I could claim that I contracted it through a freak incident involving a splinter in a wooden toilet seat, but where’s the fun in that?
As George Michael sung “sex is natural, sex is fun, sex is best when its one on one” - though any kind of sexual activity, between consenting adults, is okay with me. Why should we be made to feel embarrassed because of our sexuality, or the fact that we may have a sexually-transmitted infection or three?
I’m often asked to give interviews to the national press, who seem desperate
to get their mucky hands on anyone who doesn’t ‘fit’ the
stereotypes of an HIV positive person. I choose not to. Is this because I’m
ashamed of my positive status?
No, I just don’t particularly fancy being freak of the week for the Daily Mail’s smug readers. I made the mistake of doing one interview once with a women’s magazine. It portrayed me as a hapless victim, desperately grateful that my disease-free boyfriend deigned to go out with unclean me.
They also attempted to make me a more sympathetic character to their home-counties readers by dramatically cutting the number of sexual partners I’d had. Apparently I’d said: “I only slept with two men, with whom I had long-term monogamous relationships and we only ever made gentle love, in the missionary position, with the music of Barry White swelling, like my husband’s manly manhood” - or such like. Nice girls don’t take it up the ass apparently.
But the main reason I don’t talk to the national press is that I haven’t yet told my kids that I’m HIV positive - and I don’t fancy them finding out by seeing me on Trisha.
I’m not in any way embarrassed about talking to my two sons about sex. I just don’t want them to worry about me. Chances are they’ll be able to handle it, they are very switched on kids, and because I work in the HIV sector they’re very knowledgeable about HIV.
I am excessively proud of them. They wore their red ribbons to school on World Aids Day without prompting, and challenge homophobia in the playground. They even know how to put condoms on, after an unorthodox demonstration with a banana.
I’m not going to preach to them about abstinence or make them feel that sex is dirty. I want them to be careful when they start to have sex and to be respectful of other people. And I’d much rather they talk to me than rely on playground myths.
But perhaps I’m just a shameless hypocrite. I may not get embarrassed about sex or be sheepish about my HIV positive status; but I get absolutely mortified when caught out looking like shit.
Last month I injured my back (sadly not from sexual gymnastics, but a rugby tackle from my 11-year-old) and experienced the ignobility of being wheeled about Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in a most unglamorous NHS wheelchair. “Aren’t you the girl who writes for Positive Nation who talks about her high heels all the time?” someone asked me in Kobler Day Care, eyeing my dingy trainers and bespectacled grotesqueness, with bemused pity. Like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, I can act tough in my hooker heels, but get me out of my confidence uniform and I crumble.
Me, embarrassed, being caught looking like Quasimodo’s unfortunately deformed twin? Hell yes!
