As a volunteer for a gay men’s organisation I am sometimes involved in HIV prevention work in gay venues in central London. The organisation I work for develops posters, adverts and booklets to promote HIV prevention messages targeting a specific audience.
Recently, I was helping pre-testing our latest booklet to which I had also contributed. Therefore I knew what the booklet was about, which is usually not the case since editorial and testing teams are different. Over a period of two hours I interviewed ten people who agreed, some after a …

In a recent posting I suggested that the possibility to show your HIV status online proves “how much has been accomplished in stamping out stigma”. A reader objected that “Actually, no. This is a move to culturally pressured disclosure so that people with HIV can be further minoritized and excluded, and presumed HIV-negative people can couple with potentially dangerous self-satisfaction.”
A search on the Fridae.com website which allows for publicly showing one’s HIV status returns 280 profiles (110 of them Caucasian) stating being HIV negative at the last test (a period …

In February 2007, a Welsh man was diagnosed with HIV at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary in Wales. So far, he was one amongst the 2500+ new HIV diagnoses in the UK that year. But he became the subject of scientific investigation when he reported 62 sexual encounters in the previous 6 months.
Of his first 9 sexual partners contacted by a team of researchers from the Cardiff Royal Infirmary interested in the transmission of HIV through sexual network, 5 turned out to be HIV positive. This did not mean that he …

Treatment as a means to prevent HIV infection has hit the media following a declaration by Brian Williams, professor of epidemiology at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis in Stellenbosch, at the AAAS in San Diego.
Whilst the HIV epidemic has shown some signs of stabilisation in the recent years, more than 7,000 people are still infected every day with the virus that causes AIDS.
Despite interesting results of a vaccine trial in Thailand, prevention is still limited to a small number of options many of which are not …

Lost Decade Gays

It used to be simple: there were the Gay ones and the Rest (though the Rest would have said that “there was us and the Gay guy next door”). But starting at the end of the “sleepy 50s” to climax by the end of the “Glorious 30s” (1945-1975), a sexual revolution had happened and had revealed a world of sexualities.
It was no coincidence that the “Lost Decade” (1980-1990) inaugurated by the abandon of state-led development policies in favour of Neo-liberalism was also the starting point of the tragic …