It's, again, stressing the arsenal of ways you can prevent diseases, and PrEP is just one of them that we have to at least talk about. Let's just stress the important things like getting tested." If you are sexually active with many different people or a few people, go get tested every month or three months, and certainly, if you ever have an accident, go to the doctor immediately. What better approach than just to say, "OK. It's an easy way to meet instead of going to bars or clubs. I take care of people all the time who don't even want to get screened for cancer, and I know women who don't have mammograms or pap smears. They don't even know their status to begin with they don't get tested, they don't want to know, and I think you can make that argument for a lot of diseases. That's several hundred thousand men who don't know their status but do claim to be negative. ![]() And now that we have rapid HIV testing, where you don't wait a week for results and you can do it at home all of these things are tools, so why not use them?Ī recent survey from the Center for HIV Education Studies found that 10 percent of men on Grindr have never even had an HIV test and a third of them tell their potential partners that they're HIV-negative. It's amazing to me that gay men don't want to get tested. These are all things we have to contend with, so why not have conversations about safe sex and getting tested? We still don't get tested frequently. And we've seen the other side effects: kidney problems, bone problems, higher instances of lipodystrophy. I don't know anybody that wakes up and says, "Oh! I'm so glad I have these HIV medications I have to take every day." The younger generation right now is looking at a very long life of HIV when you seroconvert in your 20s. The treatments have gotten better, but we're no nearer to a cure, no nearer to a vaccine, and even though you are going to live a longer life, you're going to live a longer life with HIV, and that means antiretroviral medication. There's a misconception about HIV because things have improved. You think that our community would understand more about how we contract HIV, yet we still fall prey to the human error, and that's why the new cases of HIV are still consistent at 50,000 a year. For the older set, a lot of that is just because they're living longer but also because many of them come out of relationships and start dating again and they fall into practices where they're either getting involved with drugs or partying and having sex with younger men, and they make mistakes. So if I was a 20-year-old top, I would think my chances were really, really low and I'd probably think the group of men that I am having sex with, also in their 20s, don't have HIV. there is this "no big deal" kind of mentality. And, secondly, it's not an imminently fatal disease anymore and. I don't think the younger men have a really clear frame of reference of what AIDS was like 30 years ago. One is younger men who have sex with men, and the other is older men who have sex with men-and I would say that's older than 50 and younger than 30. ![]() There are two subsets that I think fit into this category. At the same time, we know that over half, 57 percent, of gay and bi men reported having anal sex without a condom at least once in the past year.
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