In May, ICH WEISS WAS ICH TU joined forces with role model Stefan to provide information on the topic of "protection through therapy". There were a few critical and even insulting comments on social media. We asked Stefan what the reasons for this strong rejection might be. Here is his personal conclusion:
"For more than three years now, I have not only been an I KNOW WHAT I DO role model for the topic of "Protection through therapy" on the road and explain: People who are living with HIV and are undergoing successful treatment are no longer infectious to their sexual partners. This fact has been known since 2008 and has been clearly confirmed by several large international studies.
That's why I don't use condoms with my partner during sex. And my boyfriend is still negative even after almost three years of dating. Of course! The same applies to my ex-boyfriends, with whom I had sex without a condom. As a person who has been living with HIV since 2010, it's a very good feeling to know that no one can get infected with HIV when having sex with me.
In my opinion, there are several reasons why some people - especially on social networks such as Facebook - simply don't want to admit that people living with HIV are no longer infectious thanks to successful treatment:
1. the habit
People in my age group in particular - I'm now 44 - have grown up with the message to always use a condom during sex in order to protect themselves against HIV. Many of these people's knowledge is simply stuck in the 1990s and they simply don't want to recognise that medicine has made huge progress in the meantime.
2 HIV is about sex
If HIV could be transmitted by sneezing, every medical advance in treatment would be celebrated as a success. But because it's about sex, it's about taboos, about moral concepts. And moralisers who traipse through the countryside with their index finger wagging high in the air and "castigate the oh-so-evil bareback" seem to me to be from a different era.
3. the envious
As is so often the case in life, there are people who are happy that others have more freedom and enjoy it. They themselves would perhaps act differently, but these people think to themselves: "Hey, everyone as they please." But there are also the others, the grumpy ones, who look enviously and begrudgingly at everyone else who doesn't live the way they do. And that's not a question of age.
For the most part, it is probably also these envious people who have lived or are still living with a hellish fear of HIV, and who stow condoms in all their trouser or jacket pockets and - as in my day - Hawaiian shirt pockets, and cannot enjoy relaxed sexuality because of their great fear of HIV. It's also these envious people who want to denigrate sexuality with their "old stories".
I was also part of the Hawaiian shirt generation with condoms in every pocket. But times have changed. Today, I only wear Hawaiian shirts out of nostalgia and I only use condoms for casual sex, not because of my HIV infection, but simply to protect myself from other infections such as syphilis or gonorrhoea.
Those who remain stuck in the past are welcome to do so, but then they are not moving with the times. Medical progress in the treatment of HIV is enormous. If you don't want to see that, you can also claim that the earth is a disc or the moon is a cube.
To everyone else I say: Welcome to 2016!"
More on this topic on the I KNOW WHAT I DO topic page: https://www.iwwit.de/themen/schutz-durch-therapie
