Oral Sex: Its great to Suck but don't be a Sucker

Ok, so I have established that I am very open and outspoken about my status but what impact does this stance have on my life? How does being so frank affect me on a day to day basis?

Some people have said I am stupid for being so forthright, that it will bite me on the arse at some point down the line.

Some say I am courageous and wish that others were as open about being poz as I am. 

Some say im being too in their face and that they don’t want to hear about it.

Others say thank you for sharing and that they resonate with what I am saying.

As for me? What I say is that I need to be like this. I need to be this honest with myself and others. It is one of the biggest and best mechanisms I have come up with for me as an individual to fully come to terms with and accept being HIV positive. And whilst I care what others think and value their opinions, nothing anybody says is going to quell my voice.

Last week I had an interview with Terrence Higgins Trust, a HIV charity set up in the name of one of the first individuals to die from an AIDS related illness. Their mission is to promote safe sex in the community and to offer a support network for those who are living with the virus, affected by HIV or struggling with their diagnosis. The role I was interviewed for was health promotion outreach. This involves going out into the community, to target areas such as bars, clubs and cruising areas to offer some support and advice to people about their sexual health. Now in your mind I can see you envisaging me as a safe sex police officer dishing out condoms like sweeties to all the drugged up, loved up, horny or drunken gays before they go to the sauna or into the woods or into a toilet cubicle or take some lucky guy home. Maybe this is your own personal experience of health promotion outreach: “If I nod politely and say yes in all the right places and take a few condoms off them they will hopefully fuck off in a minute”….. I know, I have been on the other side of this so many times myself. On the surface it seems like such a thankless job. Anyway, they loved me! They appreciated my frankness and candor and have enrolled me onto their core training next weekend!

I am hoping to turn this perception of health promotion on its head a bit. The fact that I personally choose not to use condoms when I am having sex slips a touch of irony into me doing this role. But in my head, the role is about sexual health promotion and is not just as a glorified condom vender. Being responsible for your sexual health does not just involve sticking a condom onto your cock every time you want to stick it into another guy. Oh if things were only that simple! If that was the case there would be no need for HIV charities in the first place! For example. Do you use a condom when having oral sex? This is a common question asked by doctors in the GUM clinic. Now if every man being asked this question were to be honest then the answer 99.5% of the time is always going to be NO! Come on, just how un-erotic is sucking on something that tastes of condom??? You may as well stick a dildo down your throat! I mean, sucking on a cock after a condom has been on it is bad enough! The reason that this question is asked however is because there is a very small chance that there is a transmission risk for HIV from oral sex. Now the risk is present if for instance one or a combination of the following factors are present:

A.   You have tonsillitis/sore throat/inflammation etc, in which case the odds that you are going to want to have a cock rammed down the back of your mouth are slim anyway.

B.   The guys cock has lots of scabs, cuts, warts or open wounds all over it. Not very appetizing to say the least!

C.   You have just brushed your teeth and have bleeding gums.. Oh come on, yeah, im in the sauna and have just popped to my locker to brush my teeth before I go cock hunting in the steam room!

D.   You swallow several pints of semen. If somebody can find this please let me know!

E.   The guy is bleeding from the end of his cock because he has a different STI, bladder infection or prostate cancer. All you Fang Banger True Blood fans are welcome to go for it.

I am not an official authority. I am not a doctor. I am not a GUM health care support worker. However, I am a sleazy gay biochemist, with more than a little common sense and passing understanding of HIV transmission. Sucking on a cock, provided points A-E above do not apply, is pretty much as safe as it can get! However… Life is not so simple is it! If it were only HIV we had to worry about! Whilst you may be relatively risk free from HIV by having a chow down on some horny blokes kielbasa you are still at risk of infecting your throat with Gonorrhea, Chlamydia or Syphilis and whilst, certainly with the first 2, these may not necessarily be of much consequence to you in your mouth (Syphilis is nasty wherever you get it!), the next person you chow down on is gonna be at risk of being infected in his cock from you! A secondary problem with having a STI living in the back of your throat is that it can make you slightly more at risk of getting HIV from oral sex!

All 3 of these bacterial infections can be A-symptomatic so you can never know who has them. The only ways of getting round these problem are from the following options:

1.   Never have oral sex again! OMG, that’s a bit draconian!

2.   Only ever have Oral sex with a condom. Great if you like sucking on a dildo or love the taste of lube, spermicide and latex.

3.   Only have oral sex with a regular partner whom you are 100% certain you are monogamous with.

4.   Go get tested regularly for a full MOT at the GUM clinic

If you have oral sex with a different partner, a casual encounter, a one night stand, a quickie in the bushes, cottage or sauna, a nosh job in the night club toilets, a 3some with your boyfriend, whatever it is that you have done then really, you are at some risk of having picked up something. This goes the other way too. Just think what could have been at the back of the throat of the last guy you fed your cock to! The best way you can be responsible for your own sexual health, if like me you live in the real world and admit that you do have some kind of active sex life, is to get yourself down the clinic every 3-6 months and have a full screen. It doesn’t take too long and is hardly embarrassing, especially if you have no symptoms. You can smile to yourself that you are just performing some essential maintenance. I mean, would you leave your £15,000 new car for years without a service? Then why not treat your own body the same. 

So getting back to the health promotion. Being a health promotion outreach worker is so much more than just giving out a condom and a lecture on using a condom. It involves openness and empathy and getting a message of risk management and personal responsibility across to people who, as a rule, don't want to listen. It involves increasing awareness of sti's and std's by using humour and tact and wit, something most gay men have in abundence. I can't wait to get started! And for me, I would say it will involve showing that I am not separate from the community which I am reaching out to but that I am a functioning member of it. 

Hep C: Fears; Risks and Recriminations

I think I really need to talk a lot more on the matter of Hep C and my experiences and observations around this growing epidemic. I feel for me a massive turning point in my viewpoint on hep C was acquiring it. Up until this point I really didn't  know a lot about it at all and as a result had been polluted by the emergent swathe of misinformation, Chinese whispers and hush hush cloak and dagger conversations on the subject by buddies, guys in chat rooms and blokes on the scene. By the time I was told I was positive I was so scared, hortified and anxious about it (I was HIV negative at the time) that I genuinely thought it was the end of the world. I figured if I was going to be told i had anything it would be HIV. This was not something I had mentally prepared myself for. This was the wrong virus. How could this be happening to me?

The ironic thing is, that as a result of a particularly difficult period in my life, mixed with high levels of stress, grief and depression, I had decided to bug chase. I Needed to punish myself, and what better way? The problem was, I was stupid enough the fool myself into thinking that I was only chasing one specific bug. More fool me eh. If there was one thing I didn't want to get it was the dreaded Hep C! Nobody would touch me with a barge pole now! The (HIV) poz community I had been so desperately trying to join had suddenly become even more distant! Oh what a fool I had been!  I instantly felt like i needed to point a finger. Find another to blame, shout at somebody else to make myself feel better. I think in retrospect, this is a kind of normal reaction. Bug chasing or not.

Who had given this to me?

Who had not told me their hep C status?

Who had been the liar?

Who had duped me into playing with them whilst knowing all along that I was negative for everything?

Who the fuck was I kidding?

Nobody had given it to me. The possibility that somebody had gone put of their way to deliberately infect me existed, but, was remote at best. As fucked up as the world is I don't think it's quite that fucked up yet! The only thing most of us are guilty of is being permanently horny. Though using the word guilty in this context implies that this is a bad thing which it most certainly isn't. The fact was that the only person responsible for me getting Hep C was myself. This was a difficult conclusion the reach.

It is not (for the majority of us) until you acquire a disease however that you start to properly dig around for hard solid facts and find out a lot more about it. Just how easy it is to get. Just how hardy the virus is and how it can survive as a viable and infective agent for months outside the body and in the right conditions, like in a nice tub of crisco (Fisting lube for those of you who don't know what Crisco is) kept out in a warm playroom or even stored in a refrigerator to keep it fresh! How the straw or bullet that John, Dave and Brian have been using for the past 18 hours to get the ketamine, coke and mephedrone up their noses is probably laden not only with drug powders but also with small speckles of blood from their damaged nose lining. How Hepatitis C can appear unsymptomatic for over a decade, or that the symptoms can be so vague that you blame them on a hangover or comedown or are masked by other things such as side effects for other medications you already take. All these little facts that had managed to slip past me. The only thing to blame here then was my own ignorance. Or was it?

Being positive for Hep C grants you access to a different type of ‘Club’. However, as I was to discover, it is a very dark, underground and secretive club. One whose members habitually lie about their status. One fuelled by fear, stigma and ostracisation. Exclusion of a newer sub- group by another already ostracised and excluded group. I soon discovered with a lot more clarity that having Hep C was a little like being a Leppar within the HIV community. People stopped playing with you, stopped talking to you, stopped sending you messages online. You would get sudden waves of activity and tracks being left on your online profiles but with no cruises or subsequent contact. These behaviours left me not only paranoid but also feeling very dirty and not dirty in a good way I can tell you. However, a big upside of having Hep C for me was something pretty obvious. Acquiring this virus was something which tended to happen to the sleazier and more deviant of the fetish brotherhood. I now had access to all the filthiest fuckers on the block with no fear of getting something nasty; I already had it! Every club has its benefits so it seems! The flurry of dirty sex I had in the first 6 months of being Hep C positive was possibly the biggest learning curve about my own sexual limits I have ever experienced <GRIN GRIN GRIN>.

The problem with me is I don’t know how to keep my mouth shut! I am very open and vocal about who I am, what I have, what I have done etc etc (Though I do respect the discretion and identity of my playmates unless I have their permission to disclose who they are. Many on the scene however don’t share this moralistic viewpoint and revel in the drama of gossip and tiddle tattling about who they last fucked!). I am now very much of the opinion that the best weapon we have against ignorance and stigma is openness and communication. Being honest with myself and those around me and being able to express myself freely is something I seriously value and take a big pride in. This is what gives me confidence, helps come to terms with changes in my life and very much shapes me as an individual. This is the best weapon we have against Hep C. I feel that we still have a long way to go but I do hope that the feeling of segregation and isolation felt by many in the Hep C community can be waned away through openness and acceptance of this STD as a part of our lives as members of any community, be that HIV, fetish, gay, bisexual, sleaze, fisting, disco bunny or barebacking.  I am now Hep C negative but I still feel very much part of the Hep C community because effectively were all in this together!