bearbandit

I really miss my PA - was at 4.5mm, but the supplements I have to take mean that I piss calcium and it collects. I was cleaning the ring one day, got distracted and by the time I remembered it the hole had closed up too much. I've got my and my then partner's original PA rings as tit rings, perhaps a little ghoulish but there you go. I like a guiche but don't know if I'd bother with one for myself - as a diabetic I get a lot of fungal infections there (my doctor trusts me to self diagnose and treat so I have fluconazole and canestan cream on repeat prescription for whenever I need them). I love a horseshoe septum piercing, but I'm too much of a wimp to get one myself. I'm fine with anything below the neck but above the neck, I just can't. My bad... Only thing with a septum piercing is, for me, for it to look right it needs to be backed up with a fair-sized 'tache. As someone else remarked, nothing says "pig" more than a septum piercing

Breedme420, I'm afraid your friend is wrong: if he sticks with PrEP the chances of him getting pozzed are along the lines of getting hit by falling space debris. Possible, but so unlikely you might as well not waste the time thinking about it. Be a mate and pass that info on to him...

Glad to have given you a laugh! What's the point of sex if you can't laugh at the bits that don't go to plan? At least you had a shower handy... Really pleased you've spoken to him and that things are okay. I shouldn't take my pills in front of people: I can throw a dozen pills down my throat at once, but even an average sized dick makes me gag. Suppose it's good for his ego...

I wish I'd written this! Beautifully done... Sorry, Tiger, but I have to disagree with you. You're just being greedy, no bad thing but... In my experience the 100% top is as rare as the 100% bottom. Sure, if you graph it out it's not a symmetrical bell curve, but heavily weighted to the bottom end. I see sex as being of the moment: when I had a playroom, my partner and I kept promising ourselves to add a sign over the door "abandon all disbelief..." John and I started out with him as 24/7 slave. it worked for a while and then we'd start switching and ended up with me more or less bottom within our relationship. An open relationship, sometimes we'd share a boy, one memorable time he used me as a threat to his newest boy "this is what you're letting yourself in for". It's whatever mindset is of the moment... But probably this discussion should be in a separate thread rather than distract attention from newboy's excellent writing...

London has the highest percentage of guys with HIV. The chances of getting HIV from cocksucking are so low that it's really not worth worrying about. Unless you're the sort to worry about getting hit by lightning or space debris as well I've been poz for over thirty years and I still haven't quite figured out why anyone wants HIV: in fact that was part of my original reason for joining this board. And since I got it before we even knew there was a virus involved in the illness, I don't think I'm really qualified to say why guys want it (though I can come up with a lot of arguments against getting it). The safest guys to have sex with are poz guys who are on meds and have had undetectable viral load for six months or longer. After six months the drugs have had long enough to clear the virus from cum, which is slower than getting it out of blood. And a poz guy on meds is looking after his health and having regular checkups for other sexually transmitted infections. I don't live near London, so I'm saying that for your information, not to try and expand my own pool of available guys It's reckoned in the UK that about a quarter of the people who have HIV don't know they have it, which is why, if I were neg, I'd be avoiding guys who haven't had a very recent neg test. But even sorting like that is unreliable: someone might have tested neg one day and that night got infected unintentionally. If PrEP were available in the UK I'd suggest going on that... But if it's sucking you're really into, don't worry about HIV - just make sure you have a checkup every few months for STIs - after all the tests and medications are free!

It's embarrassing, but it's something that happens to most of us at some point or other. I'd do a quick message/phone call to apologise again, and to stress that it was out of character. If he's got any sense he'l agree and not let it affect future meets. I recently had a mate empty his bladder into my mouth and thought I wasn't going to manage it all, but what was really getting to me was the taste of the tuna from the pizza he'd had earlier (I don't like seafood and it doesn't like me). A bit awkward when he wanted a description of what his piss tasted like. I mean "Fuckin' awful..." is a bit on the rude side ;-)

A mate of mine is a regular there - don't know about the event itself (London's a fair way from where I live), but from what my mate says the dress code there is as strict as it ever was. Just checked at http://www.thebackstreet.com/ and the dress code is as usual and there's a link for more information about the event.

First question has to be what's your viral load? Last time I floated the idea that medical opinion is that you need at least VL 1k to be infectious, someone countered with the claim that there was a report of someone with a VL in the 380's infecting someone, but I con't remember if there was any concurrent infection such as syphilis, which does make infection easier. In the UK undetectable is between 70 and 20, depending on the lab the hospital uses and it's reckoned that an undetectable VL for 6+ months means you're not infectious (the reason being that HIV clears faster from blood than semen). I guess there's a possibility that integrase inhibitors might speed this time up, but that's personal conjecture based on the fact that integrase inhibitors get further into HIV's hiding places. Depending on the nature of the submission, you could turn it into a game: I've made guys suck me off while wearing a condom "because you haven't earned my cum" - just a thought... PhillUrass and Eppigbttm are right - it takes seven days for truvada to reach fully protective levels in rectal tissue, and twenty days for vaginal tissue (just throwing the info in there as it might be useful to someone). Guys taking truvada therapeutically are encouraged to maintain an adherence rate of 95% which equates to one missed dose of a daily pill per three weeks. Same for PrEP, though truvada does have an unusually long half life in the body hence the French(?) trial of "as and when" truvada. Personally, I feel uneasy about such dosing... While it isn't your job to manage his risk for him, being poz too I understand your concern: on the occasions the diabetes lets me fuck, I won't cum in anyone if my VL is in triple figures, and it will have been discussed beforehand. Truvada is often used as a component of PEP, and may be prescribed as PEP by itself if it's known that the top guy has a low viral load. If his viral load is unknown, then the usual prescription is identical to whatever the clinic regard as the best starting therapeutic prescription. Truvada is a good choice as the tenofovir component is pretty hard and fast on HIV and integrase inhibitors are gaining in favour as the third drug. As far as PEP is concerned, the sooner the better, emergency room in the middle of the night if necessary: the earlier PEP is started the more likely it is to succeed, The chances of success with PEP diminish with time, and I'm sure I remember a report saying that the success rate diminishes faster after 48 hours (I never did understand calculus).

I read And the Band Played on when it first came out here and I was doing HIV-awareness training as a job. When I finished the book I binned it after throwing it at the wall, thinking it was one of the nastiest, most vindictive things I'd ever read. I recently gave it another chance and discovered I haven't changed my mind. Not binning a perfectly good Kindle though. It did a damn goood job of demonising people with HIV, when it had the potential to be the first history of the epidemic. I wrote my previous message here in haste and anger: I do accept many of your arguments, GermanFucker: I guess it's the stigmatisating effects of such a case that get to me, in that a whole community ends up being "punished" for one person's actions. When the topic comes up more generally I tend towards a reductio ad absurdam argument, citing the fact that they've tried to prosecute for transmission of herpes here, what's next? prosecution for having influenza and going out in public? It's a difficult question and I think needs more consideration than seems to be permitted by (in the UK's case) a law that's over 100 years old. I'd say that what we in the UK need is a law that takes account of the changes in mores since the Offences against the person Act (substitute whatever's necessary for where you are) takes into account what's been learned since whichever law that's used was worded, and the law to be updated at set intervals to account for improvements in knowledge. The attitude of both British and American law seems to rely on the knowledge of the eighties, slightly (but only slightly) updated.

My head says mostly top but my diabetes says bottom. I react badly to the standard prescription drugs, though I'm going to give cialis another try. I can do (and get off on) the full sub thing. I can get of on topping that doesn't need my dick - mentally I get a hardon but the body doesn't. So right now what gets me off most is aggressive bottoming. I'm not so bothered about sucking cock, but if a guy's been generous enough to stuff my ass and keep up with me I consider it only good manners to clean him up afterwards. Piss in me? Not a problem. The only caveat is that when I'm having a good time, I get very vocal: it wouldn't be the first time that I've had complaints from the neighbours about the noise - kinda embarrassing hearing a Welsh housewife quoting you sex talk at the guy who was fucking you the night before...

I'm so pleased for you, proud of you that you've taken action to allow yourself the sexlife we all deserve. I look forward to the day when guys in the UK have the freedom you're now experiencing. Personally, it doesn't matter a damn to me who knows that I have HIV, but some guys can't bring themselves to tell another living soul, and given the shit that gets flung our way, I don't blame them in the least. I can say "yeah, poz, on meds, undetectable..." - you can say "yeah... on PrEP..." To quote the Cynthia Payne character in the movie "Personal Services": "Let the fucking commence!"

These posts point up precisely why I am opposed to any form of criminalisation of HIV transmission. Criminalisation is the best possible way of spreading HIV: "I'm not going to get tested because I can't face a lifetime of having to tell people I have HIV" leads to the guy eventually getting HIV, but since he doesn't know he has it, he can't be held "accountable" for transmission, his health worsens, his viral load rises, and viral load is at its highest just after infection, but when it rises in the absence of treatment it rises and THEN you get sick. Maybe. You can live a long time with a high viral load before you end up in hospital where eventually they figure out that you have HIV and the illness that put you in hospital is a result of your immune deficiency... Yes, there are all the stealthing stories on here: if people can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, then they have a problem that needs to be addressed with psychosocial intervention, not with prosecution. The paper trail idea is a device in the long story I have in the chasing section. The boys who get pozzed (and I use the term boys as in bottoms, obviously) have signed a consent form saying that they want HIV before the central character's dick gets anywhere near their holes. The "wilful transmission" idea only serves to prolong and widen the gap in our community between the poz guys and the neg guys (I'm a firm believer in PrEP and wish to hell it was available properly in the UK.) and for the purposes of this discussion I'm discounting the guys who are chasing. I count myself extremely lucky to have a FWB whose last test was negative but is completely at home with the idea of my HIV. As he said "in another time and place we would have been good together": as it is there are things that go against a relationship beyond what we already enjoy, but it doesn't stop me thinking the world of him. Such relationships are rare in the UK: it's as though the self-perceived negative guys haven't learned anything over the past thirty years. In the UK the piece of law ("Offenses against the person Act") used to cover wilful HIV transmission dates from the 19th century! Worse, there has already been an attempt to use it for herpes. I said in an online article a couple of years ago that for the past thirty -odd years it has been demanded of gay men that we lead an unnatural sex life. I went on to argue that with TasP, which benefits the poz guy by protecting his health by reducing his viral load to the point where he's not infectious and there isn't enough HIV in his system to cause more damage, coupled with PrEP to prevent a negative guy from ever getting HIV, the condoms of the future are chemical. Criminalising HIV transmission works against this just by stigmatising PwHIV, a stigma which rubs off on guys using truvada as PrEP. Accidents happen: condoms break (as one did about 59 years ago in my mother's vagina), which isn't necessarily anyone's fault, someone may feel overwhelmed by the idea of medication - and let me assure you neg guys, even today, starting meds is a big psychological step. Hell, even guys on PrEP have found it a "moment of truth" to swallow their first truvada. Criminalisation just makes a bad situation worse. If someone is seriously deliberately passing on HIV, they don't need a prison sentence, they need a psychologist or psychiatrist. It's a medical issue, not a criminal one. My apologies if this all reads somewhat disjointed: I've written it as things have come to mind, so it's more a stream of consciousness than a well-argued case as others have written.

The danger with alcohol in the ass is not only that it's absorbed very completely (it's surprisingly how much alcohol you can end up pissing away if you're on a bender), it's also absorbed very quickly which can cause shock as our bodies aren't, as a general rule, accustomed to such fast changes of state. I'm diabetic and have poor hypo awareness (I had to change medication because of this): the rush between too little blood sugar and temporarily too much is weird and disconcerting. If you're going to play with alcohol in the ass, cut back the quantities to a small fraction of what you'd consider a normal drink, and see how much of an effect that has. Bear in mind too that it's possible to be too drunk to drive without realising it. How many times have you seen someone pass out from alcohol use, going from reasonably coherent conversation to unconsciousness in seconds? And that's through the stomach which slows absorption down. It's hard to give numbers, but if I were to play like that (since I've given alcohol up because of cirrhosis, I wouldn't) I'd guess and start at a ratio of one anal dose = ten oral doses; I know I could never drink ten shots of Jack Daniels, so I wouldn't consider a single shot in my ass... And yes, I'm plucking numbers out of the air, going as cautiously as possible. Alcohol poisoning (where you're so out of it someone has to sit with you in case you choke on your own vomit) is not a fun process.

I'm with wood here - it's incomplete treatment that gives rise to resistance. Too many people stop the antibiotics (saving them up for next time?) as soon as the symptoms go away, unaware that they're still infected. The infection naturally recurs, and with each incomplete attempt at getting rid of it, it adapts to the presence of what is, in effect, poison to it. "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" is pretty apposite in this situation. Whether it's clap or bronchitis or a stomach ulcer caused by helicobacter pylorii, always complete the full course of treatment or you're making trouble for yourself (and others) further down the line.

It's strange that people worry about getting HIV through cocksucking, yet it's the only sexually transmitted infection you can't get by sucking cock. Other STIs are likely to be more noticeable in the mouth/throat than in the ass, but still the possibility of symptom free infection exists. All I can recommend is to have a quick look at the cock in question before you get it in your mouth and avoid cocks with any obvious sores, discharge or other "not quite right" appearance or smell. And take a step back to the 1970s when the standard advice we used to give out about STIs was that everyone who was sexually active should have a screening for STIs every three months whether they had symptoms or not. Unfortunately it's the people without symptoms (and that tends to be men more than women) who are most likely to pass their infections on, sumply because they don't know they have them and therefore don't get them treated. Think of your quarterly STI screening as a pre-emptive strike on behalf of your health. Tell the truth at the clinic (they've heard it all before, anyway) and if you have an infection, complete the course of whatever treatment they give you: if too many skip out on their antibiotics we end up with a strain of clap or whatever that is increasingly resistant to that antibiotic, making it more difficult to get rid of...

In short: no. The fantasy and acting it out is one thing, the reality of rape is very different. I know from experience. The real thing is a life-damaging event. Indeed when it happened to me there was a part of me that wondered if I was, in fact, being murdered. I remember very little of the event now, except for the overwhelming sense of terror, which was such to make sex difficult for me for more than a few years. Paradoxically, it was re-enacting the fears I had as a result of the event that enabled me to get to the other side of it. In the days when my late partner and I had a playroom he used to get a bit freaked that whenever it was getting heavy I'd be yelling "no!". I wasn't even aware that I was doing it. We had to talk a long time, in quite painful detail, about how the events of so long ago were still affecting me. Fortunately for me, he understood that when I was yelling "no" I meant "yes - more" and for his sake we started using a stop word rather than relying on reaction.

The technical term for women who use this as a method of birth control is "mother"...

HIV, diabetes related ED and hypertension here... The interaction between viagra and friends and HIV drugs is caused by ritonavir and cobicistat which are used less for their anti-HIV properties than for the fact that they pre-empt the very same pathway the liver uses to metabolise oter drugs like oral ED drugs and ecstacy - in the UK there was a spate of ecstacy-related deaths around the turn of the century. What was happening was that people were taking ritonavir (and maybe other protease inhibitors were involved - I honestly can't remember) in the prescribed overdoses giving the liver a massive job in processing the ritonavir, and other drugs were forced to wait. Not knowing how ritonavir was blocking the metabolisation of other drugs, people kept taking another e, and another, eventually dying from what was basically an ecstacy overdose. Advice I had from a friendly pharmacist ("if I tell you 'don't' you'll do it anywayy; I just want to make it as safe as I can for you") was to try a quarter of a normal dose and if more were needed, proceed in very small amounts, much smaller than the increments others would use. In Wales it's part of diabetes screening that all men are asked about ED and the appropriate helper drug prescribed as necessary: because I take ritonavir with my darunavir I get quarter doses. When I could tolerate the side-effects of blue vision and intense migraine-like headache I was taking a tablet and a half of viagra as 25mg wasn't enough. (I note that at least one online pharmacy is now selling pill cutters.) Slightly different situation with blood pressure medication: oral ED medication works by messing with your blood pressure at a very specific point, stopping blood from leaving your dick. Anything that messes with your normal blood pressure, like blood pressure medication or poppers, does not play nicely with oral ED medication. If I'm expecting sex in the next day or so I leave off taking my BP medication (night) and leave the ritonavir (morning) out of my usual daily routine, figuring that the odd missed dose is worth it. I'm also bottoming more... Part of the problem is that most GPs don't understand HIV medications as, in the UK at least, they're only prescribed by specialists, which leads to the GP knowing fuck all about possible interactions. An excellent site (and possibly one to make your GP aware of) is http://www.hiv-druginteractions.org/ . It's good enough that my HIV doctor (who I rate to be the best I've ever met and is definitely in the top ten in the UK) uses it as a reference. Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor, what I've just written is based on my understanding of the drugs and my own personal experience of them...

Advanced HIV disease... I remember in the eighties at an aids/HIV conference, taking my turn manning the Body Positive stall which just happened to be next to the Frontliners stall (Frontliners was a group for people with an arc or aids diagnosis), I remarked to the guy on the Frontliners stall that having different names for what we were beginning to recognise as points on the spectrum of a single disease was confusing and frightening. At the time, a few people recognised the concept of seroconversion illness, then you were "merely" HIV+ until your lymph glands got swollen as part of PGL (persistent generalised lymphadenopathy); then you progress to arc (aids-related complex) before hitting the actual aids diagnosis. A quick note on my spelling habits: I maintain that both arc and aids, once acronyms, have become words in much the same way as radar and laser have become words, hence my refusal to capitalise either of them except when they're the initial word of a sentence. Nowadays, seroconversion illness is more clearly defined, and PGL and arc have pretty much fallen out of use. My late partner was quite happy (insofar as one can be) when told that he had advanced HIV disease, but when another doctor told him that advanced HIV disease meant aids, he fell apart, such is the terror that the word contains. It used to be that an aids diagnosis was a one-way door: once you'd hit the definition, you had aids no matter how well you were on recovery from the aids-defining illness. I got my first aids diagnosis in 1991, recovered, spent the rest of the nineties dropping into the "aids zone" and recovering. I most recently hit the "zone" in 2008. While I was very ill in 2012, and left disabled by that illness, that was caused by a rare rezction to commonly used ARVs: throughout the illness, which nearly did for me, my HIV numbers remained pretty good. The way thinking is going now, I think the damage of hastily applied names in the eighties is showing itself and we need a new way to define HIV disease. Presenting it as a sliding stage which someone can go back and forwards on makes more sense psychologically. Until recently (I'm on a R&R break) I was a volunteer on a web-only service offering peer support to other PwHIV. Newly diagnosed people can cope with being told they're HIV+ much more easily when they're well. People who are diagnosed late often (but not always!) have advanced HIV disease. The latter holds out a hope for recovery in a way the term "aids", with all its eighties baggage, doesn't. Finally the term "aids" is a bit of a nonsense in itself: from day one of infection people show an acquired immune deficiency in that HIV starts out by colonising CD4 cells... Rant over... ;-)

It keeps your story together and makes it easier to find. I've got a story in the gifting section that must have taken me a total of eighteen months to write (but there are 32 parts to it). And yes, when I added part 2 I made exactly the same mistake as you! Remember, each time you add to the story, or someone makes a comment on it, it gets bumped to the head of the "new content" list.

Most of the time no symptoms at all are evident in the butt (and it's ny no means unknown for dick nor throat/mouth to show symptoms either. I had a friend get to secondary syphilis before the clinic found it (the initial chancre had been in his ass). Best advice is to do what we did in the seventies before we knew HIV was there and go to the clinic for a full STI workup (and, please, don't lie - they've heard it all before)

Repeating myself (I'm getting old so I'm allowed!), there's a European study (Partners) into serodiscordant couples where they define undetectable as 200. The few people who've seroconverted on that study have to a (wo)man had risky sex with a third (or fourth or fifth) party. Someone posted anecdotal evidence on here that the lowest viral load in someone who "successfully" passed HIV on was in the 380's. The current medical point of view in the UK is that it takes a VL of at least 1,000 to be infectious, and the infection risk then is still pretty low.

You haven't looked far enough: the entire first draft of my novel Pozdaddy is in the chasing section. I've just finished its second edit and it's currently with beta readers whose mission it is to tell me where I've fucked up with continuity, grammar, or ideas before I set about finding a publisher. And I'm with Knife-edge on needing the feedback to make it worthwhile continuing: it's not looking for praise or fans - it's the only way of knowing whether or not a particular story is "hitting the spot"...

To my mind, people who refuse to take PrEP on the basis of the one or two cases where someone has seroconverted and no lapse can be found in their adherence, or any other explanation, must have great difficulty even getting to their local shop. They're far more likely to be in a road traffic accident than to catch HIV while taking PrEP properly. Or hit by lightning. Or <insert your own choice of almost certainly fatal disaster here>. I took tenofovir along with a couple of other antivirals for about eight years, and it was only through the negligence of my doctor that I ended up seriously ill (a 1 in 100,000 chance) because of tenofovir. Doesn't stop me recommending it to others, though. I was just plain damn unlucky. And the good news for guys on PrEP is that tenofovir comes out of patent in 2017, and emtricitabine around the same time, which, of course, means that the price will fall as generics come onto the market. And as tallbtm says other drugs are being tested for their potential as PrEP. Personally I'm betting that the next drug is an integrase inhibitor, maybe with an NRTI, because the integrase inhibitors have shown a remarkable degree of tissue penetration and an extremely low side effect profile...

Wow! That's some list of things to deal with. First off, you don't say where you are so it's pretty impossible to give you ideas on where to go for support (I truly think that phone or face to face support is better than internet support when you've just found out you're poz). Your fear of infecting other people: after a month or two on stribild your viral load should be down at the undetectable level (between 20 and 70 copies, depending on the sensitivity of the equipment the lab uses). Sexually, the general rule is that if you have a viral load under 1,000 you pretty much non-infectious, though someone here posted an anecdotal report of someone who passed it on with a viral load of 380+. In the European PARTNER study (following serodiscordant couples who don't use any protection) they define "undetectable" as 200, which it probably was when the study started. The only seroconversions that have happened on that study have been when there's been a third party involved. None, I repeat none, of the monogamous couples have had the negative partner seroconvert. When you're helping looking after your mother, you should be using "universal precautions" which, in this case means go out and buy a box of rubber/vinyl surgical gloves and wear them when changing dressings etc. What you can expect is the life you were having anyway, possibly a little longer because you'll be seeing your HIV doctor and they tend to be pretty good at picking up other problems early. Most men tend not to "bother" their doctors, so things tend to get a lot worse before they see their doctors. Even in the 80s/90s, HIV wasn't necessarily a death sentence: I got it in 1980 and somewhere between fifteen and seventeen drug changes since (I was asked to count them by a local HIV charity), I'm still here. And I can assure you I was no shrinking virgin throughout that period. There are other guys around here who have been poz as long as I have. I guess we got lucky, because the first drugs (I started on meds in 1989) were crap, to be blunt about it. Today's drugs are kinder on the body and bloody effective. Yeah, chasing/giving can make for some very hot fiction, but that, to my mind, is where it belongs. I'm reaching the end of the first edit of a novel in which chasing/giving is a major part of the plot (such as it is). One of the things I often say to guys who are newly diagnosed is "leave google alone". The reason being, as you've discovered, that there's enough crap out there to scare the shit out of you. The two sites I recommend are British sites (basically because I know people who work at the organisations and trust them with the info they make public): www.aidsmap.com and www.tht.org.uk . There are a number of secret and closed groups on Facebook, but you have to know about them to join them, which is a bit of a Catch-22 situation. I freaked out about the very same thing when I was diagnosed: aids dementia syndrome... Although some dementia has proven to be caused by another virus that needs the immune system to be low before it starts causing damage, HIV itself gets into the brain, but today's medications keep your viral load low enough that this rarely, if ever, happens. When I get forgetful, it's way more likely to be age related than HIV related. At your age, and having started drugs so early on in your infection, the only real difference being poz is going to make to your life is seeing your doctor on a regular basis, taking a pill every day and letting the guys you fuck with know (it's only fair). Nothing else. Let us know how you get on...