LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
CAMP Safe |
by Salvatore Seeley |
Why Do Some Gay Men Think Becoming HIV+ is Inevitable?
I'm angry and afraid and mystified, all at the same time, and it has nothing to do with my sex life. That's a whole other article. No, what's worrying me is some conversations that I have been having (and truth be told, overhearing). The conversations are usually along the lines of not needing to do HIV primary prevention work anymore, after all hasn't everyone been told the message? Frankly, no. For one, I don't believe we preach a single message. Some people think our message is "use a condom every time," but I can't remember a time when CAMPsafe has said that in it's media. I think we are all a bit more sophisticated than that. Yes, we supply condoms; yes, we encourage men to use them, and yes, we encourage men to decide what is safe sexual behavior for them, and yes, among a myriad other things, we talk to positive men about re-infection, STDs and continuing condom use. But that's not one message. It may be about one thing (condoms) but it sure ain't one message in my book. One of the big things I've learned in my time here is that one-message campaigns are the least successful. How can you think that one piece of text is going to mean the same thing to all men? We need a range of messages (and interventions) that hit men at different times and take account of us all. That is apart from the fact that men are coming out and into our social scenes all the time. But that's an old argument and I won't go into it here, but to me it's like saying well we've said that smoking kills you once, why do we need to say it again? Duh huh... Cos we're all at different points of our lives, making different decisions and being alternately receptive and non-receptive to these messages and thoughts. The thing I do get worried about, because I believe we can influence it and have done adversely already, is that so many gay men report that they think that it is inevitable that they will become positive, and so why take any precautions to protect yourself? There doesn't seem to be any explanation about why they think it's inevitable, whether it's because they have had unprotected sex and so assume they are now positive, or because they think that it is inevitable that we will all (as gay men) become positive, because that's just the way that it is. What worries me is that men seem to think that we do say 'use a condom every time' even if we don't say that, with the result that men become worried about not using a condom every time, and there is no reasoned thought about the possibility of HIV transmission. It seems that the reason why you use condoms has been forgotten, and condom use itself has become the be all and end all. In my time doing outreach work I have alternately been compared to a monk, a nurse, a killjoy and a safer sex fascist, all because I was giving out condoms or advocating the use of them. I'm not advocating one type of intervention over another. As I said earlier I believe in a spread of messages, but if we are contributing to men stopping the use of condoms for any reason when they don't know for sure that they and their partner are the same status then I think we need to look at our approaches. My ideal is that we prompt men to think about why they may be indulging in sexual behavior that they themselves are unhappy with. At the same time we need to be prompting them to examine their own baseline understanding of the reasons (both internal and external) that underlie their choices. I have been thinking for some time that we should be talking to men about their sexual strategies. I really do think that many men just have sex, and there are things that they don't do sexually because they believe that we as "HIV educators" think they are "naughty" if they do, but they don't have their own really thought out reasoned strategies. They are so used to the traditional Health Education modelwe have decided what is good for you and will now tell you what to think and dorather than a Health Promotion modelokay, here is all of the information that we can possibly give you, and here are some prompts for your thinking, now go away, be an adult and make up your own mind. If they did, they may be able to identify the times when and if they slip off that sexual strategy. Of course I also think that some men out there have strategies, but I feel they are a minority (well not the majority). I'm prepared to be shot down in flamesin fact, I'd like to be proved wrong. But the stuff I've heard from gay men's mouths and things I have read have made me come to these thoughts (I won't call them conclusions). The most worrying thing to me is hearing those things that men tell me about their sexual behavior. Not because of that behavior, but because of the thinking behind it. It's that thinking that I feel is so important. It's also bloody hard to influence, but hey, if we don't try, no one else will. CAMPsafe is looking for volunteers to help with it's beach outreach program! Call Salvatore Seeley at 302-227-5620 for more information on being involved. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 11, No. 4, May 4, 2001. |