BootmanLA

There are tops on Grindr?

There are two routes you can take, depending on whether you will have employment-based or other health insurance, or not, once you arrive. Even with employee benefits for a pending job awaiting you, you'll need to enroll in the company's plan, and there may be a brief waiting period for doing so. If you do not have employment with benefits lined up, but you do have a job (without benefits) in place, you should be eligible for a subsidized individual insurance plan on the New York state exchange. You'll need to sign up there ASAP, as you probably won't begin the new policy until the following month. If you do not have a job lined up at all, while you are unemployed you should be eligible for expanded Medicaid in New York, which almost certainly will cover your medication. But again, you will have to apply for those benefits. If there is any way to obtain a few months' supply of your meds before you leave Japan - by, say, getting a 90-day supply refilled just before you move - that may bridge any gap. Finally: if nothing else, every state has an entity or organization that administers Ryan White Act funds, which provide funds to states for health care and other needs, including meds, for HIV-positive individuals with low or no income. In New York this is done through the Office of Uninsured Care Programs. Meds are handled specifically through the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP). Much information can be found here: [think before following links] https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/aids/general/resources/adap/

It reminds me of a press release my office got a couple of decades back, where the Louisiana Literacy Commission proudly announced a new initiative to "stamp out literacy" in Louisiana. I had to read it over the phone to the chairman of the commission three separate times before she finally understood the problem.

Yes. It's because you are a new member. There is an entire series of threads on the privileges of members as they join and participate in the Tips forum, which is where questions like this belong.

Here's what I think that boils down to. Imagine, for a moment, you're talking about someone who lists "uses condoms" as sexual health strategy. If he's a top, we know that means he wears one to fuck others. But if its a bottom? It means he expects HIS PARTNER to wear one - the strategy is the same, but the one actively using that strategy during sex shifted. In other words, a sexual health strategy for one person can involve the actions of another. Likewise with medication: if the bottom is negative and on PrEP, he may still expect any poz partners to use treatment as prevention. Or, conversely, a poz bottom on treatment may want any negative tops to be using PrEP, as a means of protecting themselves from possible infection from him. Because again, a sexual health strategy can involve both parties.

I'd say it is, in part, for some people. How's that for equivocation? Some bottoms (you say many, I can't say if it's most or just some) do in fact want "any cock". I think that some posters (again, can't say how many) dramatically exaggerate their willingness to take any cock out there, and some will do that when they're high but not when they're sober, or when they're extra horny but not other times, and so on. That said, I also know some tops that will fuck any hole that's not moving away too fast. Again, I can't say how many tops are like that. I *suspect* that tops who are reasonably fit, passably attractive, and hung at least slightly better than average have - IF THEY WISH - the ability to be pretty picky about who they fuck. There may well be significant numbers of tops who are less conventionally appealing, for whatever reason, who have to lower their standards as much as some bottoms do (as you note).

Different levels of membership have different restrictions. Some of the lower levels of membership still have limits of how many total posts you can make in a day. Why? I'm assuming it's so that you have to participate a fairly long time before you can post in an unlimited manner, to further weed out spam posters. Keep posting, and you'll find your restrictions lift automatically over time and with participation.

Hint: next time you join an ongoing discussion, add this disclaimer: "PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT IN ANY WAY ON MY POSTING BECAUSE I AM DOING IT FOR MY OWN GRATIFICATION, NOT TO ACTUALLY ADD TO THE DISCUSSION IN A WAY THAT MAY CARRY ON." Then at least the rest of us will have some warning that you consider responses "unsolicited advice", even when I didn't suggest YOU should do as I do, merely that this is what *I* would do in your situation. Your mileage my vary. And my closing comment was an observation, not advice. As for your "no way in hell" comment: you don't know me, and you don't know how I handle things. I've told guys NOT to do certain things to me during sex (that I really don't like), and if I'm feeling charitable, they get ONE reminder if they slip up. After that, I guarantee you my reaction is exactly what I said it would be. And crystal balls aren't necessary, because nobody is suggesting you predict what they're going to do. I'm saying that *I* would react *when* it happens (you know, AFTER it happens, no prognostication necessary) to stop it. If you're unwilling to intervene to stop it, it must not be very important.

His chances of becoming poz from topping you are slim. If your VL was at 36,000 three months ago, and you've been on meds since, you may or may not be technically undetectable yet, but your viral load is almost certainly close to that level. A negative man topping a positive bottom is already an activity unlikely to result in seroconversion, even if you had a much higher viral load. That said, you say he's violent. I'm not sure why you're craving him (unless you're a masochist), but either (a) accept that the risk is there, low as it may be, or (b) get tested again - which you should be, if you've just started meds, because your doctor should be monitoring you regularly until you become undetectable. But bear in mind: if he knows you're poz, and he ends up poz, he may blame you regardless of whether he gets it from you. Especially if some other trick of his claims to be negative but (knowingly or not) is actually positive. Frankly, I'd avoid anyone with violence issues, but your mileage may vary.

If you say it and you don't hold them to it, what is the point, and why are you complaining? If someone did something to me, sexually, that I'd made clear was off the table, my response would be to reach around, grab his nuts, and squeeze like I was trying to make a glass of OJ. "I said STOP!" is pretty clear, and anyone who keeps going after that needs a sharp, painful reminder to pay better attention. If you're not prepared to stop the sex to ensure it's done within the limits you've set, then you haven't really set any limits. You've made suggestions.

Indeed. There is a huge difference between saying stealing less than $1,000 is a misdemeanor - that is, setting the felony threshold at $1,000 - and "making it legal to steal $950" (which is just a stupid, stupid take on the whole thing). San Francisco, like all large US cities, has issues. Like the top-tier cities (NYC, Boston, DC, Chicago) income inequality is a huge issue in particular, and that tends to breed other problems; when people can't afford to live near lower-income work locations, and can't commute 120 minutes each way to reach an affordable neighborhood, well, you end up with people living six to an apartment meant for 2, or people living in their cars during the week to avoid the commute back to that apartment 2 hours away. And honestly: even if gay life has diminished somewhat, for someone coming from (for instance) a small city in Georgia, or anywhere practically in Wyoming or North Dakota, San Francisco is STILL orders of magnitude more liberating than anything they've got back home. Stores and restaurants with rainbow flags in SF don't get firebombed. And beyond the gay: SF is still one of the most incredible cities in the country, bar none. No, it may not be the ideal place to "pig out" any longer, if it ever was. But every gay person ought to visit, at least a few times.

If you think his question was a good-faith attempt to get an answer about whether there was something to worry about re: Biden, then you have not read his previous posts fellating his hero, Donald Trump - the president whose mental decline so disturbed EVEN HIS OWN APPOINTEES that they routinely described him as crazy. He's not looking for an honest opinion - he wanted to run down a liberal officeholder in a country in which he doesn't even live.

Just say "I'm SERIOUS. STOP playing with my cock. I'm not ready to cum, and if I do cum, we are DONE." Any top worth his salt will stop. And going forward, make it clear: "When you're fucking me, I don't want you playing with my cock trying to make me cum. I can't keep going once I shoot, and I want you to go as long as you can and enjoy it thoroughly. If you make me cum first, you're not likely to get to cum in me at all." Use.Your.Words.

I can't speak to Atripla use specifically, as I've never been on it. I would note, though, that it was approved for use in the U.S. in 2006 as the first "one pill, once daily" treatment for HIV. It has more known side effects and more known interactions with commonly prescribed medications for other conditions, and for that reason, I suspect, it's not as commonly prescribed as some newer alternatives like Biktarvy. Whether or not you'll have any issues with the switch is hard to say. I was initially on Genvoya, but that medication is known to be harder on certain organs than Biktarvy, and my HIV specialist switched me to the latter about 18 months into treatment. I've had no problems with it, but that's not to say you won't. I'd suggest you ask your doctor if there are any signs in your medical history that suggest Biktarvy may actually be an improvement for you. For instance, Atripla is known to interfere with certain drugs used for cholesterol, and with certain others used for hypertension (blood pressure).

All of these questions about condom failure, at least in the context of the California law (and not any proposed laws that may be pushed in the future in any other state) ignore the plain text of the California statute, which discusses "removal" of a condom. When a word such as "removal" isn't defined in the particular law, or in an encompassing section of law, such word is given its ordinary and customary meaning in English, and I don't think any dictionary's ordinary and customary definition of "removal" covers "came apart due to structural failure," whether or not such failure was coaxed along by a pinhole or incompatible lubricant or whatever. U.S. courts often, though not always, refer to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary for an "ordinary and customary" meaning. This may involve choosing which meaning is relevant to the particular statute; for instance, the first (1a) entry for "remove" in MW is "to change the location, position, station, or residence of, as in 'remove soldiers to the front'." That definition is clearly irrelevant, as is the 1b definition ("to transfer (a legal proceeding) from one court to another"). So we move to the second definition (2a), which reads "to move by lifting, pushing aside, or taking away or off" - and now we have a clear fit for the statute. None of those meanings for "remove" could encompass "sabotaging so that it fails". In fact, it's not hard to argue that if the guy allowed himself to go soft for a bit, and the condom slipped off as he moved back and forth, even THAT wouldn't be "removal", because in the relevant context, "remove" is a transitive verb, implying the necessity of a "remover" specifically acting to remove the condom, as opposed to "it came off". Now, again - some future legislation, somewhere, may attempt to prohibit tampering with a condom such that it fails. But that'll be another fight, for another day, and it's probably telling that few states have attempted to criminalize that activity, because it would be so hard to prove (as Eroswired and others have noted).

PS if you base your idea of what people look like in real life on the shitty rendering of a video onto a computer at low definition, and on top of that extrapolate ideas about their mental condition, well, I feel sorry for you.

Why instead don't we ask how long that clown with the idiot haircut you folks elected on your side of the pond will stay in office? What is it with arrogant Brits who think they know enough about US politics to comment on whoever is president here? We endured four full years of a president who couldn't complete any sentence whatsoever, even reading it off a teleprompter, without dropping into a stream-of-consciousness rant about "crooked Hillary" or any of the other thousand people living in his delusional, sociopathic brain. I think we can endure another three years of Biden, who has, I might add, surrounded himself with intelligent, capable aides who can assist him in carrying out the duties to which he was elected, as contrasted with the collection of backstabbing, felonious grifters that surrounded the former guy, leaving us to lurch from one crisis to another with no one at the rudder and the purported captain of the ship too busy complaining about "hoaxes" and other idiocy to actually lead - or even to provide direction so that others could lead.

It's called "big Western city" vs. "Anywhere else" (i.e. smaller cities, small towns, rural areas, non-Western cultures). And yes I know some (not all) big non-Western cities also have easy access to sex.

As I understand the studies that have been done, if you take doxycycline at the doses recommend for treating active infections, it can indeed impact some (though not all) of the bacteria normally present in the digestive tract. When taken at lower doses - which may or may not be what is prescribed off-label for prophylactic use - the changes were less dramatic. See, for instance, [think before following links] https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/9/e035677 for a summation of studies of various antibiotics and their effect on bacteria in the human gut. But in general: yes, this is another concern with overuse of antibiotics prophylactically.

I assume you're familiar with the concept of edging - when someone masturbates until he's close to orgasm, then stops until he's "backed down" from the edge of orgasm, then starts up again. Doing it to someone else is even more intense, especially if he's restrained in such a way that he has no control over the edging. That's the closest thing I can come up with to describe one of the reasons darkrooms/blindfolds are so appealing to some people. With seeing comes control - if you can see the guy who's trying to fuck you in the dark, you might reject him. The darkness takes away that control, just like being edged by someone deprives you of control over your orgasm. When you're in a dark room and you have no idea who's fucking, you also can imagine him to be anything you like. Once you see him, that illusion is shattered. That's not to say that seeing is a bad thing. But sometimes NOT seeing is a hot alternative.

Your profile says nothing about where you are, so, no, no tips. What you can get a doctor in Mexico to prescribe is likely very different from what you can get a doctor in the U.S. to do. Antibiotic resistance is a serious concern, and most doctors are understandably reluctant to prescribe antibiotics for non-existent, "potential" future infections.

Mostly true. But the devil is in the details. You're on PrEP - great. Assuming you've not missed any doses in the month before you have sex with him, you're almost certainly good to go. If you have missed doses, you may want to wait until you've had a month of steady dosing. Or - double dose on the day you plan to have sex, then make absolutely sure you take a dose 24 and 48 hours after the double dose, as though you were on 2-1-1 scheduling (and then resume the daily doses after that). Secondly: PrEP-resistant HIV is rare, but it does exist. If you're really concerned about his med holidays having made his HIV PrEP-resistant, ask which med he was on before he stopped taking it, and compare the ingredients to what's in your PrEP prescription. If they're entirely different, it's probably not an issue (as any resistance would be to the meds he was taking, not yours). If there is overlap (PrEP typically contains 2 compounds, and most HIV treatments consist of three, sometimes four), then there's a small chance. Mind you, the odds are still heavily in your favor that (as timfreo notes) he can't poz you.

It may well be idiotic of Americans to, as you say, "lump everyone non-white into one category and call them people of color." I'm not defending that. But to the extent that we do this idiotic thing: Ted Cruz is not "mostly white" simply because one parent is (50% is not "mostly"). Under our admittedly (for the sake of this discussion) "idiotic" classifications, Cruz's father was absolutely a person of color. Ditto Geraldo Rivera, whose father was Puerto Rican, an ethnicity we "idiotic" Americans absolutely consider a person of color. And of course, I get the racism inherent in classifying only "pure" (insofar as people can tell) "white" people as authentically white, while recognizing anyone of mixed ancestry as a "person of color". It's unquestionably racist. But no more so than deciding that someone with one white grandparent is "white". Put another way: if it's illegitimate to call someone with one parent who was unquestionably black a "person of color" or "black" because of that ancestry, it's equally illegitimate to call someone with one unquestionably white parent a "white person". If you want to argue we're all, with few exceptions, rather a mixed lot, you won't get much argument here.

The only correction I'd note to your excellent post: in most of the states that did not expand Medicaid, "basic Medicaid" frequently doesn't cover most people who would need/use PrEP. For instance, in Texas, in addition to meeting the "low income" threshold, you must be one of the following: --Pregnant, or --Be responsible for a child 18 years of age or younger, or --Blind, or --Have a disability or a family member in your household with a disability. --Be 65 years of age or older. None of those applies to the vast majority of sexually active people, men or women, gay or bi or straight. And those are typical of the limits of non-expanded Medicaid. For the 12 states that have not expanded Medicaid, virtually none offer any benefits of use to an otherwise healthy working-age person.

Well, this is a tough one. Certainly no other species "divides" itself by race in terms of names, because no other species uses language (as we understand it), as we do, to describe things. So in one sense, you're absolutely right that no other species claim "race". But if you mean how WE look at other species: in science, "race" is essentially synonymous with "subspecies", although this usage is now rare given the disreputable uses for the word "race" in the last few centuries. If you look at scientific works from as recently as the 1960's or so, you'll see references to "race" in this context. And in this context, it's something like how we used to view race: an identifiable population, usually visually distinct, that nonetheless can successfully breed across the subspecies lines if the separate populations come in contact with each other, and where the offspring typically have features intermediate between those of the two parents. The reality is that there's "race" as it's been used in human history (which is a social construct used to divide and oppress, and which is a blight on humanity), and "race" in the sense of a broad bioethnic sense that's valid as long as one bears in mind that a significant number of people are descended from more than one such group, and thus it's impossible to use other than to describe one's ancestry in a general sense.