He Took the Blue Pill
An incredibly sad question from Ask Metafilter, where strangers can ask other strangers questions, using their username or anonymously. A gay man and his new partner supposedly get tested for HIV (both supposedly negative) and start having unprotected anal intercourse. Only later does the man get curious about the blue pill his partner takes every day, for “joint pains,” run a drug imprint search, and find out it’s an HIV drug.
I can’t imagine who would do such a terrible, vile thing. Sickens me.
Just for the record–and this is for everyone, whatever type of sex you have and whoever you have it with–there is a “window period” where someone can have HIV but still have a negative HIV test. While it’s getting shorter with better and better tests, all the folks I talk to still say the window period can be up to 6 months (but it’s up to 3 months for 98% of people). Please, please, practice safer sex, talk about these things with your partner(s), and get tested. One negative HIV test does not put anyone in the clear if they’ve had sex recently. If you use it, test it.
wow. unspeakable. That is horrible.
When I was in my casual-sex period my basic assumption was that people lie about sex and often have very good reasons for doing so. I never asked someone if they had STDs - I assumed they did and acted accordingly. I felt it wasn’t fair to ask someone to (potentially) choose between lying to protect themselves and making themselves vulnerable to protect me. It’s not a fair choice.
Anyway, that was casual sex. We’re talking something more stable here, where people have a right to hear the truth. It’s also a situation where someone who feels like damaged goods has a lover to lose by telling the truth. And they may have heard that the medication they were taking put them at a very low risk of transmitting the virus.
I’m not saying there’s an excuse, or that what the guy did was somehow ok. I’m saying that doing the right thing can be difficult and not everyone is mature enough to do it. While the guy may have been malicious we don’t have enough information to know. He may just have been stupid and immature.
Take-home for the rest of us: be very careful in situations where other people have something to lose by doing the right thing. That can be difficult. Announcing to your lover that you don’t trust him to tell you the truth about his HIV status may be too difficult, and you may choose to ignore the little voice in your head and trust him anyway. That decision could cost you your life, or at least your health. But it’s not far from the kind of decision that your lover might be making when lying to you.
There’s more to ‘getting tested’ than dumping the condoms. What if you are serodiscordant? What will you do then? Have you talked about that clearly?
And be sure to be there for each other’s test results. If telling you about a positive test might be too hard, don’t put your lover in a position where he might have to do it.
This whole situation sucks.
You’re absolutely right, Alison; great advice.
[...] From this story: Update, the poster’s initial HIV test is negative. (Of course he will need to get follow-up testing.) [...]