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…
