HIV-positive people are by no means safe from rejection in the gay scene. The reason for this is not only the fear of infection.
A moment ago, everything looked like a hot, lustful date. Photos and compliments had been exchanged, preferences had been agreed and they had already got into the mood with some dirty talk.
However, Marco then ruined his fun with a small aside. His PlanetRomeo profile clearly states that you can only have safe sex with him.
However, the fact that he mentioned this again during the chat to be on the safe side made his date prick up his ears: "Why, are you HIV-positive????
"I could literally hear him hacking the question marks into the keyboard in a panic," says Marco. Even as he was typing his answer - "Is that a problem for you?" -, the next message rushed in: "You sick virus slingers! You should all be given a warning sign here."
It will come as no surprise to anyone that nothing came of the hot night. The whole thing happened a good two months ago, but when Marco talks about it now, he still vacillates between anger and offence. "I've seen a lot of stupidity in online cruising and elsewhere in the scene, but that really got to me."
There is a simple reason why Ben has so far been spared similar experiences: "After my test result a year and a half ago, I avoided such conversations because I knew they weren't always pleasant." Now, however, a good friend of all people has outed him as HIV-positive to a mate with whom a threesome was planned. "I then had a pretty exhausting phone call with his mate. He told me that I should always come out of the closet. The guy didn't even realise that he was treating me like a leper in the Middle Ages."
What particularly annoyed Ben: "He was intelligent enough to keep saying that he didn't want to sound stupid or negative and that he basically liked me. But what he didn't dare to say was that he simply didn't feel comfortable knowingly going to bed with someone positive, even though we wanted to use condoms. But as long as his sex partners let him believe that they are negative, nothing stands in the way of a sex date for him."
Ben finds this quite paradoxical: "We have safer sex precisely because we know that the other person has the virus or we can't be sure whether or not they do." However, logical arguments don't always get you anywhere, as Ben realised during this conversation.
Tim has not yet experienced any marginalisation or discrimination from other gay men because he is positive. (Photo: private)The fact that such irrational fears of HIV transmission are also widespread among gay and bisexual men is no longer just a subjective impression, at least since an I KNOW WHAT I DO survey from 2010, but has been proven by figures. One in five participants in this survey stated that they would not kiss an HIV-positive man on the lips, while a further 20 per cent were unsure. The result also surprised Jochen Drewes. "I am convinced that these men know that they cannot become infected with HIV by kissing," says the Berlin health scientist.
On the other hand, a third of respondents said they would feel ashamed if they were infected with HIV. "Guilt and shame are exactly the feelings that many positive people struggle with," says Drewes. "'Anyone who is still infected today is to blame, reckless or unreasonable' - this attitude is pretty firmly entrenched in some people's minds."
Campaign team member of ICH WEISS WAS ICH Tim, on the other hand, believes that the question of how one became infected is no longer so morally charged today. Tim has not experienced marginalisation and discrimination from other gays because of his positivity. He believes this is probably because he is so open about his infection. However, he has a suspicion as to why some gay men reject positivity so vehemently: "They are afraid of confronting their sexual fantasies and their desire for condomless sex. After all, we have stigmatised sex without a condom for a very long time, and not without reason... And some people are now apparently finding it very difficult to accept that there are now other options, such as protection through therapy."
Engelbert believes that the non-infectiousness of well-treated HIV-positive people has not yet arrived in large parts of the scene. (Photo: private)Tim suspects that the negative and untested who reject positivity are afraid that a dam might break if they were to experience the freedom of condomless sex with a partner who is no longer infectious, but still protected by the therapy.
However, Engelbert, who is active in the Munich AIDS-Hilfe organisation, has the impression that the message of the non-infectiousness of well-treated HIV-positive people has not yet reached large parts of the scene. "If I experience a rejection as a positive person, it happens regardless of my treatment status. I'm usually never asked whether I'm taking medication or not."
Marco is nevertheless certain that people's minds will change. "This paranoid fear of positives will disappear more quickly the more open and self-confident we become and the more we spread knowledge about the protective effect of the medication."
He has since put the verbal punch in the online chat behind him. "I'm actually glad that the guy disqualified himself in time and I didn't end up in the sack with him," says Marco. "Sex with dumb guys just doesn't work. As far as that goes, I'm actually proud of my discriminatory arsehole behaviour.
