bearbandit

With a condom I get sore pretty quickly, which can last several days. Sometimes it's been bad enough that it's only the absence of the pain in the big nerve running down the thigh that lets me know it's not herpes. Without a condom, my ass's reaction is "that was fun - can we do it again?" Last month I took what were probably the hardest fucks I've ever taken, and instead of being wrecked like I'd have expected with a condom I was raring to go round again - he's one hell of a fuck that man (his husband's pretty good too).

We're essentially saying the same thing, but our viewpoints are influenced by the differing law systems we live under. You've simply expanded my point about HIV unknown status people: a negative test result means exactly what you say it does - it's the uncertainty about the window period that makes me think in terms of HIV unknown, especially when it's someone I meet in a charged sexual atmosphere. I know guys who test on an annual basis yet bareback on the grounds that they're negative... HIV education in the UK is appalling with sex education frequently being left to how rabbits reproduce and people do something very similar. I've come across both views amongst young people, that HIV=aids=death and that it's something that happened a long time ago and doesn't affect us. Last year the UK saw its largest number of HIV diagnoses in gay men ever. I'm a volunteer for one of the major charities and do a lot of work on the poz-only message board, and it's bloody heartbreaking seeing newbies signing up a few days after being diagnosed. (Naturally I have to keep a line between my personal life and my work as a volunteer, which some might see as hypocritical, but there you go.) My comments about prescribed medicines was intended to be ironic/sarcastic: HAART involves some pretty toxic chemicals and having been in treatment so long (I started AZT monotherapy in 1989) I've lurched from one drug to the next just in time. You say medicine isn't an exact science; I'm inclined to think of it more as an art. The problems we had with the early drugs was that we were demanding their early release while the medics hadn't worked out accurate dosing for them. When I first started PIs I was warned that there could be a problem with fiabetes but they weren't sure. My attitude was "yeah, I'll worry about that if and when it happens: right now I want to see next week" The drugs have improved immensely but still have their problems. The way I read your comments we agree on everything but the one point: criminalisation. As I've already said prosecutions here are built on case law which means with each judgment the law shifts slightly, so that there was a recent attempt someone for passing on herpes. I don't know the US legal system: I'm talking about a solution for the UK and in the UK criminalisation is not going to be an answer. I'm far more in favour of psychiatric intervention if necessary and counselling to change behaviour. We've both got strong opinions and I think the time has probably come to say that our differences are shaped by our respective legal systems and put the argument to bed. <holds out hand hoping for a handshake>

While I argue against criminalisation, it's on grounds of expediency to end the epidemic once and for all. I said that medicated HIV+ men with an undetectable viral load are among the safest, not the safest people to have sex with. There's a difference. And all a negative test proves is that at such and such a time no HIV antibodies were observed. It doesn't say they weren't there at all. which is why I tend to view the world as being divided into people with HIV and people who don't know their HIV status. We have a whole generation on our hands who think that either HIV=aids=death and won't go near someone with HIV or else that HIV was something that happened in the eighties, long before they were born and is therefore nothing to do with them. You mean I should sue the doctors who prescribed medications that damn near killed me? Doesn't the Hippocratic oath contain the maxim "First do no harm" or am I thinking of another medical text? Informed consent, certainly. But getting people to HIV testing centres is like herding cats.

I have days when I'm 100% bottom and days when I'm 100% top. Plus days where I'm at some point between the two. It's an advantage of Viagra (thank you diabetes) that although I can get one hell of a hardon with it, it makes it difficult to cum. So take your average play party that fizzles out about two in the morning. If I'm sharing a bed that night, the guy's going to end up waking up at about five with a certain pressure against his ass...

Deliberate transmission of HIV is certainly immoral, but if we make it a crime, we lose the fight against it. What will happen is that people will stop testing: if they don't know they're positive they can't be accused of deliberate transmission. Who's the most infectious? People whose immune system has totally collapsed, who tend not to be very interested in sex anyway, and people who've just acquired the virus. Who's among the safest people to bareback with? Guys who have their HIV under control and don't have any other STIs. In other words HIV+ guys who look after themselves. Yes, a certain number of people who get a positive result get very freaked out, and though it's unusual "revenge sex" has been known to happen: psychological intervention needed here. Similarly someone who's fucking around pretending he hasn't got HIV because he's afraid of rejection needs psychological help and support to understand what he's doing. Sexually active people who don't test for whatever reason aren't taking care of themselves: there's a host of STIs that they may also have (a reason why I serosort for poz guys), many of which facilitate infection with HIV. But they won't test because they're afraid of having to disclose that they have HIV, with all the stigma and disadvantage that brings. So we end up with reservoirs of HIV in people whose health is slowly failing (and you can go a long time before showing any sign of infection) as their viral load climbs making them more infectious. We need to change society to remove the stigma attached to HIV, to make it as normal as having any other infection. The problem is that you generally get HIV from doing "naughty things". The vast majority of people think of gay men as being the biggest cohort of people with HIV whereas in fact more woman have HIV than men. It's literally vital that anyone who's put themselves at risk test for HIV: criminalisation is about the best way to stop that testing happening. Worse still, in the UK all the law on HIV transmission is case law, usually using the Offences against the Person Act from the nineteenth, yes nineteenth century. Because it's case law, it can change with each case, There was recently a prosecution for deliberate transmission of herpes. As far as I remember that prosecution failed. What about those parties mothers organise for their kids when one of them gets one of the childhood illnesses so that all the kids end up getting it out of the way? Chicken pox springs to mind here because my late partner caught it from the child of a friend and when I phoned the clinic to ask what I should do their reply was "how quickly can you get here?". I was lucky: it turned out I'd had it without symptoms as a kid and had the antibodies to it, otherwise it would have cost a considerable amount of money protecting me from my partners illness. Criminalisation opens a whole bucketful of worms, the chief one being that it's going to make us lose the fight against HIV.

Another alternative might be the Hump Gear. They say it's not intended for use as a condom, but you can bet your bottom dollar that's how it'll be used. I've got one on order and one of the first things I want to establish is exactly how porous it is. Water molecules are smaller than particles of HIV so I see the potential for its use as a condom substitute. Probably not suitable for use over an extended period, but you never know. I'd guess that the disclaimer simply means that it hasn't got FDA/British Standards approval for use as a condom. Has anyone tried it a a condom? With what results? I thought it looked a fun toy anyway, so I've got one on order.

When they were first introduced they used to be known as the crisp packet (crisps being Brit English for chips)

Condoms for cocksucking was part of the advice in "How to have sex in an epidemic" published in 1983, the first ever safer sex literature. We now know how difficult it is to pass on HIV through cocksucking - my personal opinion is that even that low figure of infections happening through oral sex are inflated because of the number of guys who don't want to admit to taking it up the ass: sucking is a little less of an admission of being gay. However, if you've got a sub who needs punishing, denying him the taste of your cock by using a condom and making him suck rubber is a great way to go once in a while. Extra punishment by cumming in the condom (if you can), knotting it and throwing it in the trash in front of him. Amazing how well behaved a sub will be after being denied cock like that...

Yeah, but I like 'em with a fair bit of hair around them, good firm pecs beneath the skin, and a ring of bar through 'em. And a hard dick pressing against me while I chew...

The essential core of what I was saying in the long post above

It's one hell of a time (nearly 40 years) since I had sex with a woman. To me the answer is "it just is". I can see a woman and think "she's absolutely stunning" but there's no flash of desire, no twitch of the ass and dick that I get when I see a guy I like the look of. Different example: an ex of mine loved lobster and ate an awful lot of it when we were in Australia. I tried it and "meh" it just wasn't right for me. I could see why he liked it, I could tell it was good stuff, but I just didn't like it. Now the piece of rump steak I had with mushrooms last night - that's a different story. I'd misread the weight on the pack and ended up with twice as much steak as I'd normally eat. Ate the whole damn lot because it was right. Unfortunate in sterotype terms comparing seafood with beef, but it's what came to mind.

From an old boyfriend after phone sex "Shit, but you even talk a great fuck..."

It's a long way from phase one trials to the market place. If, like me you have a tendency to leave your destop machine on all the time why not consider putting Fight Aids at Home on it (available from http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/home.do ). After a user defined period of inactivity it starts number crunching and sending its results back to the lab, whereever that is. Basically it's distributed computer with thousands of machines giving up their spare processor cycles to crunch numbers that need crunching.

Tiger, the thing to watch with Complera is your kidney function as it contains tenofovir. None of the ingredients drugs of complera have, to my knowledge, been associated with weight gain or lipo, so you can stop worrying about that. As I've said before I don't understand the American health system, but you need to have your kidney function checked every time they do bloods and at the first sign of kidney trouble, switch drugs rather than stick with Complera: the trouble the tenofovir component can cause just ain't worth it, believe me!

Some of the stuff we do, just because we can veers more to performance art than sex...

I've fucked and fisted at the same time, but never had my hands and dick working like that. I was born left handed but trained to be right handed and find that there's some things I just do better with my left hand even though I'm functionally right handed. Maybe next time I'm fisting I should see how my left hand does then get a free bottom to back onto my dick... But, man, fuckin' horny photos. I could take any of their places (and with a bit of practice yours, maybe) Woof!!!