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I Am a Gay Scientist. Here’s What the HIV Crisis Taught Me About Risk.
We have to reframe the very notion of risk, of fear. The more we minimize risk, the less there is to fear.
The first time I went down on a guy, my mind was doing math. I knew the risk to contract HIV was 1 in 12,000. “Oh god, this is a mouthful,” I thought. I knew, too, that the virus, that virus, was poorly transmissible in any single act. Even bottoming (receptive anal sex), without a condom only had a 2% chance of seroconverting.
I was — I am — a professional biologist. I did my postdoc, in part, in biostatistics. Long before I touched another man, I’d gone to the CDC website and looked at a table of acts and percentages, calculated long ago.
I knew too well, even then, that probabilities and statistics have a wicked sense of humor. A 2% chance seems unlikely, until you end up on one side of it, the rarer side, asking how exactly is it that you arrived at this particular, unlikely destination.
“But I only did it once…” I imagined myself saying to keep myself from doing it at all.
This was in the early ’00s. I was born in the early ’80s. I have to admit that, looking back, I am ashamed of these calculations and the stigma behind them. I understood the virus as a threat. In many ways it no longer was.
Every time I got naked in proximity to another man, my mind was a calculator. Even after I started taking PrEP to prevent seroconverting, I knew that nothing was perfect, nothing erased risk entirely.
I’d spent my life afraid of HIV, and so never able to rid myself of worry or of stigma for those who had it. We know, now, that the only risk-free sex is with an HIV positive person who’s managing the virus with drugs. I’ve had sex with HIV-positive men, on PrEP, and my mind arrived only at one round number, the one I love most: 0, wide open like a mouth.
Well, it’s 2020 and we all want to know if we can safely go to the grocery store.
Late 2019, a new coronavirus passed from human to human for the first time, traveling from bats probably into pangolins before evolving the particular suite of mutations needed to bind to our human cells…
