HIV Live is a column that ran in The\n Bloomington Beacon during the past year. It's a\n column about living with AIDS, and how it colors\n the vision of everyday life and events. It's a\n column about risk, resolution and the ultimate\n question -- am I at risk of acquiring HIV? You\n can interact with HIV Live! If you have questions\n about HIV, the column or what you read in it,\n you can e-mail maaprice@indiana.edu -- some\n answers might appear within the series.
You might think that a diagnosis of AIDS would\n seem the ultimate betrayal to a person who loves\n sex. It did upset the paradigm I must admit, but I\n had safer sex for many years prior to my\n diagnosis. The diagnosis was not a betrayal of\n that ethic.
Sex has been a part of my life for a long, long\n time. I remember my elementary school gym\n teacher, the fourth grade teacher (Mr. Yoder,\n sigh), and that furtive and fiendish mania for\n masturbation. I remember the first oral sex\n performed on me (I was 13), the first penetration\n (heterosexual, I was 16 -- Are driver's licenses\n wonderful things or what?), and my first\n full-fledged naked body, sloppy gay sex (also at\n 16). I loved it.
As a gay man in my late 30s, many of the people\n with whom I shared my youth are dead. My\n boyfriend Ken died in 1988; other\n acquaintances, sex partners and friends in the\n years after. For many of us out gay men of the\n late '70s, our sex was not only intimate, robust\n and erotic, it was political and anti-establishment.\n We were the people for whom the norm just\n wouldn't fit, and we wouldn't have it any other\n way.
So, why do I still love sex?
Sex is the honest, unfettered Mark at his best. It\n involves every sense and faculty I have to a\n degree that nothing else has ever matched. It's\n the way I say things without any left-over,\n intellectualized or pseudo-Victorian grammatical\n conventions encumbering it. It's occasionally\n loud, sometimes soft as a feather and always\n sweat-inducing.
I met my partner Chuck one year before I was\n diagnosed. As two gay men of similar age with\n similar experiences involving HIV among our\n circle of intimates, we knew we had to have safer\n sex. More than anything, we knew that our\n healthy-as-horses profiles could be illusory --\n and mine was. He has continued to test negative\n since my diagnosis (we're now shooting for his\n fourth negative test in a row).
I still love sex because it's the anaphoric\n convention in my autobiography. It yins my yang.\n It's roles and games without dice, paper money\n or pressed cardboard with cheap graphics. I still\n love sex even though it now has a rule book: no\n penetration without condoms, no oral penetration\n and no sloppy kissing after brushing the teeth.
There have been times in the past 18 months\n when I've turned away from sex. For the first\n three months after my diagnosis, Pee-Wee just\n wouldn't come to the Playhouse. It was a slow\n process to release my anxieties. I felt utterly\n breakable, and Chuck seemed ultimately\n vulnerable. Indeed, until his second test showed a\n negative result, I carried an unenviable load of\n stress.
I love sex because I still want it, and it gets better\n with age. It gets better with a partner you trust,\n have open communication with, who casts no\n judgments upon your kinks. Sex has moved out\n of the crotch and into the mind for me; different\n things are erotic, new body parts are exciting. I'm\n not especially a foot guy, but Chuck has beautiful\n feet. In my rush-prone 20s, anxious for Old\n Faithful, I wouldn't have noticed that. I am a leg\n guy by the way, and he has great gams.
I love sex because talking about it is a good\n imitation of doing it, as those of you who like\n phone and cyber sex have discovered. I love sex\n because my pal Russ taught me long ago how to\n conceptualize it. HIV Live is a column about sex\n as much as it's about living -- the two things\n aren't any more separate for you than for me.
