There. I hope I’ve addressed your question. I am not well. I have never been well. But I continue to function.
I still do not see the correlation between HIV and my health; only a correlation in increased medical problems when I am taking the ARVs.
I’m willing to grant that gay men are entitled to use PrEP… provided they have access to all the information they need to make an informed decision. Informed consent has been a hallmark of the HIV and AIDS research and prevention efforts for three decades, and that shouldn’t be waived for the campaign favoring PrEP.
Gay men deserve to know that all the claims for Truvada reducing the risk of acquiring HIV-positivity are based on trials—funded by Gilead—that emphasized the importance of using condoms…
What troubles me is the apparent willingness of an entire community to consider embracing Truvada as some sort of symbol of sexual freedom… evidenced by charges that those of us who are skeptical are guilty of being sex-negative and “slut-shaming”.
All of this on the basis of research that has been manipulated and twisted by Gilead to create a false reality of safety.
I’m resigned to the fact that Truvada as PrEP is here, regardless of what I or others fear. Now it’s mostly a question of time to see it PrEP meets the expectations of sexually active gay men…. and Gilead shareholders. The former is yet to be proven; the latter is a foregone conclusion.
When I received my HIV diagnosis in 1998, I withdrew from my community of gay men. I “went to ground”, thinking that isolation was the only safe place to avoid being criticized for seroconverting at such a late date, when we were all supposed to know better.
This past week has been yet another bifurcation point in my life. I returned to a community I have known about, if not been a steady part of, for more than 30 years. A community of men whom I could touch and hug. Men whose tears might wet my face and whose body heat and life forces I could feel in ways that can only happen in person. It really did feel like coming home.
John McNair, a musician and a philosopher from Perth, Australia, is something of a counter-cultural role model. McNair has created a very wide-ranging collection of podcast interviews with people who might get overlooked in the larger, mainstream media. I met John on Facebook a few years ago and we quickly established a rapport with each other. Last week […more]
Last November I wrote about the outcome of my willingness to step outside my personal comfort zone to engage with a former nemesis, J Todd DeShong. When we both lowered our personal shields and allowed civil dialogue to occur, we discovered we had far more in common than we had differences. Those differences that remain did not have to […more]
Frankly, in the end, I really, really don’t care what causes AIDS. I just want people to stop suffering and dying from whatever it is. It appalls me deeply that after all the hundreds of billions of dollars in research — possibly more than that spent on researching all other microbes combined — HIV research has ‘succeeded’ only in giving patients the horrifying choice between either dying slowly of Opportunistic Infections associated with a damaged immune system, or dying slowly of Liver Failure or having your skin peel off or maybe a Heart Attack caused by HIV drugs themselves. All the while ignoring the patients who do just fine for rather a long time when left to pursue their lives unmolested. So pick your death.
-Carl Stryg
Here’s another short outtake from the pre-show walkthrough that John Grosso and I had in a G+ Hangout On Air (HOA) earlier this week for tomorrow evening’s Rainbow Show. Live stream begins at 7 pm CST. Please drop in to view the show live, and ask questions via the comment stream on YouTube or Google+. The […more]
Remember when Google+ was launched more than a year ago to compete in the social networking arena with giants like Facebook? You don’t? Well, you’re not alone. Despite our love/hate relationship with Facebook, few of us who had grown accustomed to that place could find the time and energy to embrace yet another site for […more]
Once again, the crazy attention whores at Westboro Baptist Church are threatening to do more than just picket funerals. On their website, godhatesfags.com, this morning was the following message: “WBC has suffered unrelieved reproach for warning you. Now, we will happily assist in the administration of the universal outpouring of God’s wrath, which shall imminently […more]