Re: When We Assume... We're Just Like Everyone Else... aka The "Right" Way To Tell Someone You're Dating That You're HIV Positive...
In my last blog post entitled "Re: When We Assume... We're Just Like Everyone Else..." I answered a letter from someone, who calls himself Waterfall, who was dating and had had sex with someone without that person telling them beforehand that they were HIV positive. I took an issue with that, not so much with the fact that the person didn't tell him but moreso with the fact that when he did finally reveal it to him he chose to do it via text message. (I know, how classy?) If you haven't already, before you go on I suggest that you read that blog post just to get yourself up to speed.
Probably moreso here there than with anything else I've written I put a lot of care into writing that blog post. I wanted to make sure that I didn't come off as self-righteous, arrogant, or condescending. although the HIV negative person, Waterfall had written to me I wanted to take both sides into account. As usual I gave an example from my own life as I'd been in his shoes before, having someone who I was dating tell me that they were positive, post-sex, except my person did it the "right" way (I'll explain the "right" way later). I even went so far as to ask friends of mine who are HIV positive to proofread my response and they were cool with it. Judging from you, the readers, your subsequent responses I pretty much thought I was doing aight. That is until I received the response below which I decided to take the time to reply back to in it's own blog post. Here it is:
Morning, y'all.I'm sorry, but I have to step in here, and speak up for the guy on the other side. I myself am positive so I definitely think I can impart some insight into what may have been going through the older guy's mind that apparently Adam and the others here have little sympathy for.
I will say that I agree mostly with the opinions stated here, regarding what you should do.
I do want to say, however, that I don't believe that Adam's summative advice is the right way to handle this. I don't think you should just "drop him."
I would tell you to put yourself in his shoes, which I feel a lot of people don't do. As someone with HIV, I COMPLETELY understand his lack of desire to tell you. It is the worst thing to have to tell someone, ESPECIALLY because you have no idea how they may respond. It takes quite a bit of gauging before you decide to let someone know that. While I think Adam is trying to empathize with you, I really don't think he would go around telling people as freely as I believe he expects this man to.
Without going on a huge rant, my advice to you (if you feel like you had a connection with him) is to TALK TO HIM!! I will agree with Adam and the other posters regarding the text. I think that's the most tasteless way to reveal a secret like that, but I completely understand why he may not have told you in person.
I myself TRY not to have sex with my intended suitors without revealing that to them, but the stigma associated with the disease (despite the numbers) is still very much rampant.
I honestly believe that this man really likes you, and I'm sure that's why he even bothered telling you in the first place, and to follow Adam's advice and just drop him because he didn't include it in his self-introduction is trite...and predictable, and only goes to illustrate why HIV+ folks DON'T reveal who they are... because of responses like that.
To conclude, I think a conversation is necessary. You should also definitely go get tested, consider this: if the man didn't care about you, he wouldn't have told you at all.
-S. Austin
Hey S,
Ummm wow, judging from your response here you obviously didn't read my intial response it all. It seems as though you anxiously skimmed through it looking for an opportunity to respond to the contrary. The part of your reply that alarms me most is when you said:
"I honestly believe that this man really likes you, and I'm sure that's why he even bothered telling you in the first place, and to follow Adam's advice and just drop him because he didn't include it in his self-introduction is trite...and predictable, and only goes to illustrate why HIV+ folks DON'T reveal who they are... because of responses like that."
Nowhere did I ever say that anyone who is HIV positive should include ithat information in their introduction to people, as though they should carry it on business cards and shit. And I certainly didn't say that Waterfall should drop the guy just because he has HIV. What I said in the original post was quite the opposite. I said:
"...And you can't realistically expect someone to tell any and everybody that they have HIV upon first glance. 'Hey I'm Adam, how are you?' 'Great. I'm Tommy and I have HIV.' It just don't work like that. So your reasoning for not dating him shouldn't be based on the fact that he has HIV."
What's trite and predictable is the fact that you came ready to oppose what I'd written when you abviously hadn't read it. You also say:
"I myself am positive so I definitely think I can impart some insight into what may have been going through the older guy's mind that apparently Adam and the others here have little sympathy for."
and
"While I think Adam is trying to empathize with you, I really don't think he would go around telling people as freely as I believe he expects this man to."
In the original post I told a story about someone who I was going to hook up with who ended up revealing to me that he was HIV positive. Regarding that experience I said:
"I mean, think about how hard that must have been for him. In the heat of the moment, we're getting it in (or at least I was about to), for him to stop things, to say that he was positive, to tell a total stranger the most intimate detail of his life. What if I had wiled out and tried to kill him or something? What if I was the errant homo who had decided to tell all his business to everybody? He did me a favor in letting me know his status, but it was really my responsibility to take precautions for my health's sake. I mean, yeah he coulda never told me, but I never asked either. If I had caught HIV from him that day it'd essentially be my fault because I failed to protect myself.
I also had an experience just like what happened to Waterfall with someone who told me that he was HIV positive after we'd had sex. Regarding that experience I said:
"I was right in your shoes a few years ago. Slept with someone on the first day I met them for them to tell me later that they were positive. The difference between my person and your person is that my person took the time to sit me down and tell me in person and didn't have sex with me again until he told me. Because he was so forthright the way he went about telling me, I wasn't mad at all. I wasn't mad because he told me after we hooked up and started seeing each other, not after we started seeing each other for a few weeks and had sex and he sure as hell ain't send me no damn text message...."
That doesn't sound very unsympathetic to the HIV positive person to me, either one of them.
Then you said:
"Without going on a huge rant, my advice to you (if you feel like you had a connection with him) is to TALK TO HIM!! "
and
"To conclude, I think a conversation is necessary... consider this: if the man didn't care about you, he wouldn't have told you at all."
Bullshit. If the nigga could fuck Waterfall in person, he could talk to him in person. Waterfall was not in a one night stand, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am with this guy, they were dating, talking, whatever for a few weeks, seeing each other. This guy says he cared about Waterfall and then he's gonna send him a text message? I mean c'mon now. Being that I was in the same situation as Waterfall makes me even more angry about it. My person gave me enough credit as a decent human being to come to my face and tell me, that's a major part of the reason why I was okay with it. If he had sent me a text message it would've been a different story. The guy obviously didn't want a conversation because if he did he did want a conversation he would have started one and not sent a text message!
As far as the whole if he didn't care he wouldn't have told him thing, that's the smelliest bullshit of all. I think that the only reason why he told Waterfall anything was because his conscience was eating at him and he decided to take the easy and the selfish way out. Think about it, in this technological day and age what's the easiest, quickest way of telling someone something difficult without having to deal with the drama and repercussions behind it? You send it in a text message. If he's mad, if he cries, if he asks you a whole bunch of questions you don't feel like answering, you don't have to deal with it as you can simply stop texting. But in the back of your mind when your conscience starts fucking with you you can always say, 'well at least I told him'. I mean, c'mon you can't see that shit? You don't send news like that via text if you really care about the person you're sending it to, you just don't, that's so disrespectful. It's like breaking up with someone via text, I'm guilty of it. The times I did it I did it not particularly caring about how the other person felt or really wanting to hear what they had to say about it I just wanted things to be over. Notice there are a lot of "I" statements here, further illustrating the selfishness of this act. So once again I must reiterate that the whole if he didn't care he wouldn't have told him thing is bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. If he really cared he wouldn't have told him that way. In my opinion that person certainly isn't someone that Waterfall should be with and really the other guy shouldn't be with anyone at all right now as he has a lot of things he needs to straighten regarding himself and his status.
Now S, I can go on all day talking about how wrong and misinformed your reply was but that's not what's important. The one thing you said that was important was the fact that we do need to have a conversation about this, we all do. So many of us are engaging in sex, knowingly and unknowingly infecting and being infected with all kinds of things, not just HIV, every day and no one is talking about it and what good is that gonna do?
To be honest, in writing this whole thing I had reservations about even telling my stories. For a moment I feared what telling my experiences with sexual partners who were HIV positive might make people think of me. But then I thought about the fact that CDC numbers are saying that almost half of us (black gay men) already have the virus, a good portion of us not even knowing it. That brought me to the realization that my silence wouldn't help anyone and if so many of us have the virus then I can't be the first one to have experienced what I've experienced. Although, I'm HIV negative today, who's to say that I haven't been with or will be with someone else who's positive? If I were I would want that person to feel like they could be open and honest and be able to tell me. Hopefully answering letters like this, sharing my stories and having these conversations can help us all be a little open, open to tell, open to listen, open to accept and open to take proper precautions.
As far as the "right" way to sit down and tell someone that you have HIV is concerned, there really is no right or wrong way. As a person who has had a partner tell me that they were HIV positive I feel that the only wrong way is not to be honest about it, although being honest about it via text message doesn't go over too well either. HIV ain't easy and neither is love, but if you say you love and/or care about somebody sometimes you are gonna have to tell them things that may hurt their feelings or make them mad or just things that they just simply don't wanna hear, but that's love. You'd have to have confidence that their love/care for you goes beyond what you're going to reveal to them. In a perfect world we could say that an HIV positive person just shouldn't have sex with anyone until they've divulged their status to every partner they ever get with and that HIV negative people should always ask every partner they are with what their HIV status is right away to avoid any problems later. Is that ideal, yes, realistic, no, the world is far from perfect. If you have HIV and you get with somebody on a long term basis most likely you are going to eventually have to tell them, better sooner than much later and there's just no getting around that. That is what it is. On the other hand for those of us who are negative there's only but so mad we can get about the answer to a question that we never bothered to ask.
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Playing In The Background...
"I Want To Know What Love is"
by Mariah Carey
from the album "Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel"
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