bearbandit

I'm afraid you heard wrong: piss is sterile to the pisser (ie it doesn't contain anything more than his body already contains). However if the donor has gonorrhoea in his dick, his urine will be teeming with little gonorrhoea bacteria anxious to set up camp inside you. Not a pleasant prospect, especially with this new strain of gonorrhoea which is especially resistant to antibiotics. Resistance to antibiotics occurs when people feel better after about half a course and decide not to take the rest so thay can "re-use" the prescription. False economy! Even at the stage when there are no symptoms there may well be surviving cells unable to cause trouble in themselves, but once they get back to reproducing you've got gonorrhoea again, except this time the bugs have a better idea of how to avoid the antibiotic. Darwin in action. I've picked on gonorrhoea, but other STI's hide in piss as well. Having re-read this I thought I 'd better point out that I thoroughly enjoy pissplay either way round.

About ten years ago: <quoting Wikipedia> Armin Meiwes is a German man who achieved international notoriety for killing and eating a voluntary victim whom he had found via the Internet. After Meiwes and the victim jointly attempted to eat the victim's severed penis, Meiwes killed his victim and proceeded to eat a large amount of his flesh. Because of his acts, Meiwes is also known as the Rotenburg Cannibal or Der Metzgermeister (The Master Butcher). His main occupation was working as a computer repair technician. There a bit more about him in the article. Also note Dennis Nilsen who murdered 16 or more men in London and ate some of their body parts (Also wikipedia). It should be noted that none of Nilsen's victims appear to be willing, as Meiwes' victim was. Sometimes the trivia I know or know where to find frightens me... ;-)

The good thing is that you recognise that he has this control over you... the bad thing is whatever you do about it is going to hurt you: you have to remember you deserve better. And don't feel bad about falling for his mixed messages - it happens to all of us at one time or another. I've just got rid of Mr Right Now, having discovered the lies, the search for "brownie points" for dating someone with HIV (like I'm some sort of charity!) and the way he gets through a litre or more of whisky per night. All stuff I slowly discovered about him... Like your guy he could be really nice and thoughtful but there was usually an "I want and I am going to have" at the end of it. (And yes, I'm aware I'm probably over-identifying with your situation!) If I were you, I'd break the control. If he has a key to your place, change the lock. Change your phone number. Well before you've stopped feeling bad about what's happened, he'll be set up with his next victim...

Of course the risk adds to the pleasure: I wouldn't drink Tabasco sauce, but I'd sure as hell miss it in a bolognese. This time last year I was using the parallel of my bike as the risk/pleasure balance. The bike was too big for the roads I was riding on (mid Wales) and eventually there was one dodgy bend too many, and the bike was sold to be parted out and I spent 9 days in a trauma ward with a broken ankle. Given the chance I'd do it all again (except those last few seconds as the bike fell into the road and I fell into the gutter and felt my ankle snap). Translate my experience into HIV terms - assuming I didn't already have it - and I'd now be taking a pill at bed time with an attitude of "you win some, you lose some". But I had a lot of fun with that bike... All I'll say in HIV terms is if you pay for medicine and treatment, read your insurance documents very carefully and talk your insurance over with someone who knows what they're talking about and knows what you're asking. Last thing you need is to discover that you're limited to too low a figure a year or whatever (sorry, being British, and unable to afford private medicine, the only health insurance forms I have experience of are for dogs). Basically, get your life sorted out to the extent that if you did seroconvert, it's not going to make so much difference to your job, housing etc.

Dammit! shouldn't post after night-time pills... last sentence should read "It takes a man to get fucked by a man"

I've never bought into the butch/femme, who's more masculine than who thing, any more than I've seen breeding as the be all and end all of sex. When I had a playroom I was more into torture than anything else. Yeah, penetration might come into it, it might not. I don't think there's anything I've done to someone that hasn't been done to me. Who's top and who's bottom might be decided beforehand, it might be decided when play starts (the one thing I hate is being bottom and having to turn it round "for fuck's sake this is how you do it"). It takes a man to fuck a man, whatever they're doing...

We actually have two diseases caused by HIV in the public mind: even those who were too young to remember the campaigns have absorbed the first anti-aids campaigns of the eighties and carry the messsage in the heads that "HIV=aids=death". At the same time massive leaps forwards have happened in the pharmaceutical industry, such that many aids support organisations are spreading their brief to include hepatitis C or sexual health in general as HIV is rapidly becoming just another STI as they can't admit that their original reason for existence is there any more. For the first time ever we're beginning to argue about the possibility of a functional cure - it doesn't eradicate HIV from the body but keeps it imprisoned where it can't do any harm. Barebacking in the eighties and nineties certainly carried that underlying premise of "I'm fucked anyway, so why not?" Let me stress here and now that for me at least, bb was something I'd only do with a small select group of other HIV+ men. There was enough about the "revenge fuck" in the papers at the time. At the time we were fucked: common folk wisdom had it that once diagnosed you had about five years left. Indeed the UK's major HIV charity's advice was to work as long as you felt like it, cash in your pension, go on a cruise or whatever while you you could still enjoy it. A recent report into the efficacy of condoms (sorry, can't remember where I found it, but it was from a source I trust) concluded that in the end in the late eighties condoms prevented 40% - 70% of potential infections. And this was in the days when you'd finish work, cook several meals and take them round "your guys" before attending to your own needs. Now, with PrEP, you can get the same results, but at a price: firstly, the cost of the drugs, secondly adherence: look at the number of women who get pregnant while on the Pill, and thirdly emtricicabine and tenofovir are fairly toxic substances in themselves (declaration of interest: tenofovir nearly killed me last year) that I wouldn't swallow just in case I ran across some really hot guy. As time goes on, my bet is that guys on PrEP are going to start forgetting to take their pill resulting in resistance and incomplete protection. After all that doom and gloom, you decide to go ahead HIV or no and end up getting pozzed. The odds are in your favour in that today's ARVs, taken religiously, are reliable and relatively side-effect free. The first infection is the catastrophic one: superinfection, if it happens, is like hen's teeth. If you pick up a few resistances on the way, there are plenty of alternatives for most people; the number of people like me, on salvage therapy, is shrinking, either through death or the discovery of new drugs. As Jizzdump rightly says the problem is fear. Last year I was terrified of having a colonoscopy: I was already older than my father was when he developed colonic cancer and there's a history of bowel disease on my mother's side. I'm afraid I grossed out the doctor explaining the procedure: his description had just got past the second sphincter when I told him that so far he hadn't told me anything that I hadn't done for fun... The days of five years and then a funeral are, thank the gods, long behind us, but living with HIV still takes a hell of a lot of discipline (and not the fun kind). I hear people complaining about having to take three or four pills a day (I take thirty). HIV is heavy on the liver and guts. A functional cure is still years away, current treatment is basically a siege. If you can cope with the discipline the drugs impose, and your insurance covers ALL drugs you might need, then yes, being diagnosed is a liberation. When they told me I had it amongst the thoughts that went through my head were "I won't see the 1999 eclipse... but I won't have a forties crisis... and I can stop worrying about getting HIV"

I'm with Jimmy 1212. Look after yourself first. Different people respond differently to drug holidays. I drop CD4 cells hard and fast but my viral load increases so slowly that I'd be dead of an opportunistic infection before I was infectious with HIV. Other people respond in the way you hope you'll respond. Sounds like way too much of a risk for me...

If a cock ring won't come off, three words: very cold water.

I'm always honest about my age and usually put 30 as a minimum age. I was recently contacted by a guy who'll be cute when grows up and turned him down (nicely) because of the age thing. He replied, fully confident in himself, that although he'd put his upper age as 45 he could make an exception. "No, mate, I'm afraid you're too young for me... Gimme a shout in ten years' time"

The UK and US have different definitions for aids: in order to bring people who were clearly ill, but didn't fit into any of the categories for diagnosis with aids, the Americans decided that a CD4 count of less that 200 was part of the definition, which got a fair number of people onto welfare. In the UK we're moving away from a straightforward definition of aids, using instead degrees of severity of HIV disease. So make a good recovery from cryptosporidiosis or PCP and you move from having severe HIV disease to mild or moderate, or maybe even aysmptomatic HIV disease. The American system seems to say once you have aids you have aids, full stop, whereas the UK system allows for remission from aids.

Spending several days talking an online friend through his latest come down, and then several weeks talking through what he'd done to his immune system has been more than enough for me to forget the idea. Reasonable alcohol use (beer makes the the best piss), and good quality poppers are enough for me.

If nothing else I would have thought it was only polite... Manners (Miss)

Thanks for acknowledging him, straycowboy, though that wasn't my intention in mentioning him. He's simply a very important piece of my past. As you say, though it and getting back to life... ;-)

Short'n'thick does the trick...

About 11 or 12 years... In 1998 I started on high dose ritonavir (800mg per day - a dosage which thankfully has been consigned to history), which had the side effect of chemical castration. Within two weeks of starting I lost all interest in sex. With a change of drugs I was beginning to recover from this when my partner got sick. Nursed him for four years, basically thinking that if he couldn't go out whoring, it would be unfair for me to. He died in 2007, and I decided that I needed some time out to sort myself out (at the end nursing was a 24 hour job with help from district nurses etc)... The way things turned out it was only a few years ago that I got interested again. Now I'm just catching up for lost time...

I'm nearer to 60 than 50 and the mind is hornier than the flesh - but that's only because of diabetic neuropathy destroying the nerves that control blood flow to the dick. But gimme some viagra and form an orderly queue...

Basically what Jimmy1212 said: however I've wandered around areas of the site that don't interest me in real life, and have increased my understanding of why, for example, Tina is so important to some. Yes, there's some very horny stuff on the site, but there's also an awful lot of educational stuff. Anything that increases our understanding of other people has got to be a good thing...

The problem with disclosure laws is that they put all the responsibility on the person with HIV: what happened to the guy who's just tested negative making an effort to stay that way? Sure, it's an awkward question, but it's one we've been dealing with since the test was invented. Prosecuting for exposure to HIV (with or without infection) is pretty dangerous ground too: already in the UK we've had someone prosecuted for not informing a sexual partner that they had herpes, though I must admit ignorance as to the outcome of that case. The mere fact that it got as far as court is worrying. I've spoken to a number of people who've recently discovered they're HIV+ and all blame lack of information (!) and many have a chilling desire for revenge on the person who they think infected them. My personal opinion is that the only time HIV should be on a charge sheet is as an addendum to charges of rape or sexual assault, in the same way as herpes or other STIs sometimes appear.

Ultra-vivid dreams are the most prominent side effect of efavirenz, which is a compnonent of atripla. Sometimes the effect can stray over into wakefulness: "free acid!". The tendency is to put combinations into one pill: atripla contains efavirenz, tenofovir and FTC. The idea is that it's easier to take and you're less likely to skip doses. Most people have little trouble with side effects, maybe a bit of diarrhoea with protease inhibitors, or bloating with tenofovir while your body gets used to what is actually a fairly powerful chemical in your system. Personally I'm open about HIV, but if I weren't I'd be asking "what the hell gives you the right to go looking through my cupboards?" "The look" can come from malabsorption syndrome, caused by HIV itself (the gut is one of its favourite places to live), or as a result of the drugs. Lipoatrophy, fat loss in the face, can be treated with artificial fillers, but if you're unlucky to have things go wrong the results aren't pleasant. Lipodystrophy, where fat migrates from the limbs to collect around the internal organs or as a "buffalo hump" is untreatable, though the right exercise regime can help disguise the effects. The difference between today's drugs and the 90's drugs is that we've a damn sight better idea how to target to HIV and also we've a damn sight better idea of what dosage to be using. almost all drugs in the 90's were way over-prescribed so it's no wonder that those of us who have survived that period on meds have other medical problems as a direct result.

Going by what we know now I converted in 1980. There was a lot of syphilis going around London at the time and some guys (whose primary lesions were inside the arse and therefore not very noticeable) progressed to secondary syph which can involve a skin rash which looks rather like the skin rash HIV can cause. I recognised the rash I'd developed as being similar to the rash a housemate had had which turned out to be secondary syphilis so took myself to the clinic where they didn't find any syphilis, nor could they find an explanation for the rash. I got sent home with a bottle of calamine lotion. Kinda amuses me that my first HIV medication was calamine lotion. We're talking over 30 years ago so it's pretty much an impossibility to say how bad it was - a dose of flu and the rash were my only symptoms and if Al hadn't also got HIV I'd've forgotten the whole incident years ago. Maybe a week or ten days?

In the UK at least there are tax advantages that guys in civil partnerships have over guys who "merely" cohabit. The row over gay marriage boils down to the fact that marriage carries with it tax advantages that are missing from civil partnerships. In other words the legal definitions all boil down to money.

A difficult question to which I hope I can offer an alternative view. I was raped when I was 19 (only just out, and according to the law of the UK at the time under the age of consent). The first thing that stopped me from doing anything about it in terms of police etc, is that I, the victim, would have been charged with gross indecency, whatever the rapist was charged with. To this day, over thirty years later, there's no way I could engage physically or socially with someone who resembled the guy who raped me. My problem: UK law just exacerbated it. Time passed and a few years later I'm learning about bondage, piss and all those other fun things. I'd switched roles several times though I think my favourite was when my partner was another top (anything you can hurt I can hurt better - or fuck help the guy we pick up tonight). It wasn't till about fifteen years later when I was going through a definite bottom stage that the Boss (who bore no resemblance at all to the guy who raped me) made me start use stop words: he knew my history and needed the reassurance that he was heading in the right direction - hence using the traffic lights. Left to myself, the more I liked it, the more it hurt, the more I'd use the word "no". The Boss died a few years ago and I'm back to switching. I still have the need to check that the boy's alright via the traffic lights: I don't give a damn about "yes" and "no". Same when I've gone bottom: more of a turn-on to beg it doesn't happen: only the traffic lights are constant.

Check along the pouch-to-band stitching with Nasty Pig: if it's straight stitched (looks like ----------- ) it's not very strong in my experience. If it's zigzag (looks like \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ ) it's going to be a working jock rather than a posing jock ;-) I've had two straight -stitched Nasty Pig jocks that I've had to repair by hand (not fun) and I wasn't doing anything more than having a wank...

There are only a few cable companies in the UK, so it's going to show unreasonable clusters of members at their hubs (I'm even showing up in a different country!). I liked chestercub's idea of using enough of a postcode to give an approximate location... more work , I know, but why be merely very good when with a little more work you can be excellent?