An evening of watching Tales of the City, and the realisation that I’ve hardly stepped outside Zone One in the last 12 months, prompted me to dive to the computer and search for flights to San Francisco. A few clicks of the Michael Mouse on British Airways’ website was all it took. Next, I secured a fabulous apartment in The Castro - the gay hang-out of the city.
It was all going swimmingly well. So what was left to do? Why, transfer my internet profile to the San Francisco room of course! What better way to arrange meeting the locals in advance.
My run of luck continues. The man of my dreams appears all over my 17-inch flat screen. He’s sleazy yet sensitive, muscular but no slave to the gym, well travelled, well educated and, let’s not deny it, well hung. But will he like me? Yes, I meet all the credentials he requires. I prepare to send him a message, and scroll down a bit to read more blurb on his profile...
You must be d & d free.
Just
like that. He might as well have written, ‘No Aids Scum’ in big
letters.
For those of you not up on gay internet lingo, ‘D&D Free’ means ‘Drug & Disease Free’, ruling out a healthy slice of the gay population in one fell swoop - including me. Because in his eyes, I am ‘diseased’, right? Therefore, unattractive to him.
This ‘D&D Free’ mentality is rife in the US chat rooms, and it makes me furious. Not only does it add to the stigma that HIV can still carry, but I have a feeling that the folks that write this have a sense of smugness - that they have been clever enough to fend off this virus that the ‘diseased’ among us have been too wanton in our behaviour to avoid. They are often the people that will indulge in unprotected sex with someone who they also believe to be ‘disease free’. The US gave us delightful telephone automated systems, and the internally homophobic ‘straightacting.com’. Please let us not adopt ‘D&D Free’ as our phrase of choice.
The same evening, the BBC News alerts me. Anna Ford solemnly declares that the first successful conviction of a man who has knowingly passed on HIV has taken place. ‘First successful conviction’ gives the air that there hopefully will be many more to come.
Fair enough I thought, the guy has lied to a bunch of women, perhaps he got what he deserved. Then the news cuts to the white middle-class lawyer of the ladies who prosecuted him. In a waft of twin-set and pearls, she declares, ‘Now at last, this proves to people with HIV that they must take responsibility for their illness’.
For the second time that day I was furious. What the hell happened to individual responsibility? This was not a rape case. The women involved willingly went to bed with this guy, and did not know his status.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but at no point in the story did I hear that they had asked him of his status, and he had lied. I agree that it is his responsibility to have safe sex with those who are HIV negative. But it is also the responsibility of the women to take care of themselves, a point that everyone seemed to have forgotten, too wrapped up in the excitement of branding the HIV carrier as the Bad Guy.
This conviction has frightening implications for the gay scene. Does it mean that we can meet some hot stranger in a leather bar, who nuzzles up against us and whispers in a macho pseudo-American accent, ‘lets do it bare buddy’, then we’ll wake up three months later to find the police on the doorstep?
Forget the article I wrote about ‘barebacking’ everyone - I’m wrapping myself up in cling film with condoms on every finger and toe, and a big one over my head!
A few days ago I saw a different internet profile. The guy had simply written, ‘I only have safe sex, so your HIV status is irrelevant to me’. Now that’s more like it.
