This morning, as I drove through New York, I was listening to a liberal talk radio program that warned us that new HIV infection rates are on the rise again in gay communities, particularly among men who sleep with men, particularly in communites of color. They also noted that new syphillis infections are rapidly increasing.
This surprised me because when I went to the Health Center this past month for STI/STD testing, I was told that because I lived at Wesleyan, I was in a low risk group and did not need a syphilis test. This is not true. We need to be our own advocates and insist on comprehensive testing and health care.
The fantasy that queer people at Wesleyan are in a low risk group rests on the belief that we live in a bubble and have no contact with the outside world. It also rests on the assumption that because this is a majority white, majority middle to upper class place, that we are not at risk.
Nothing much has been said about women who sleep with women, trans people, etc. not because these diseases are not there but because no one is researching them. People who are biologically female can pass HIV to each other. Three of my partner’s lesbian friends died of AIDS they had contracted from sex with other women (one of whom had been monogamous with her female partener for years, only to discover that her partner had slept with another woman, become infected and infected her partner – monogamy is NOT a guarantee of safety!). Amber Hollibaugh speaks in her book “My Dangerous Desires,” about the lesbians she knows who have contacted HIV from sex with other female bodies people. It can and does happen.
AIDS activists have been fighting for decades against the assumption that wise partner choice will keep one safe. Partner selection and the choice to use or not use protection are usually based on assumptions about who is “dirty” based on race, gender, class and sexual history and guided more by bias than anything else. The only way to be safe is to use protection each and every time you are intimate with another person.
I see these assumptions of our safety at Wesleyan (or as lesbians or…) played out over and over again on this campus when students chose not to use barriers. But it is a false assumption. This is not a safe bubble and we are all risks to each other when we refuse to use protection. Please use a latex barrier (or latex alternative) for all oral, anal, vaginal contact – including fingering, and avoid genital/genital contact (50 percent of college students have HPV, the virus that causes genital warts-—that’s a high risk).
Being safe does not mean no sex – safer sex can be hot and intimate. Go online and do some reading, there are lots of resources for hot safer sex, and start asking people around you for advice/support.
We need to take care of ourselves and of each other.
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