BootmanLA

I realize you say that you don't want to bring politics into "the answer" but I would point out that you're asking about what would happen "if the rules change". Those rules are set by the political system, so it's kind of hard to pretend that things would substantively change in terms of access to health care other than by a shift in the political winds - and that applies in the U.S., in the U.K., in Canada (and probably much or all of the Commonwealth nations), and more.

I think we all recognize that this is the "reality" for some guys here. I would suggest that most of the people who downvoted your reply did not do so because they were "shocked", but because we believe (a) it's bullshit, for starters - as ErosWired said, it's only "exciting" in the same sense that playing Russian Roulette is exciting. Both are stupid risks to take. And frankly, ANY discussion of pursuing unprotected sex without PrEP belongs in the Backroom. (b) the fact that "no prep no meds is the reality for some guys here" does not make that good advice to give to anyone else, especially someone young and relatively inexperienced. It's shitty advice. (c) sure, people have the "choice" to do all sorts of stupid things. That doesn't mean we should applaud those who advise people to do stupid things. As the saying goes, "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes". For an HIV-negative man, to have unprotected sex with another man without PrEP or a condom SHOULD be a very carefully considered decision that requires a lot of mature thought. Treating it as "oh well, that's the reality for some people" and nothing else when someone is asking for advice is a shitty thing to suggest.

Here's the thing: you're making a lot of assumptions, some of which may be reasonable under the circumstances and some of which are just... guesses. --You assume he's gay, and there's apparently some evidence that may be the case, but you don't know for sure. --You assume he's single and available, whereas you may not realize he has a boyfriend or partner about whom he's very discreet (the boyfriend may be not out). --You assume he knows you're a couple, but don't know for sure. --You hope he's available (see: boyfriend possibility) and interested (no evidence cited) and interested in a threeway (again, no evidence cited). --You hope he's a bottom (no evidence cited). --You hope he can take a rough fucking (no evidence cited). In other words, you're trying to confirm a buttload (no pun intended) of ideas and assumptions about this guy leading to sex in very short order. I'm not saying you can't get answers to all of this one night, but if at any point the information goes in an unexpected direction (he's straight, he's got a partner, he has no idea you're a couple, he's not available, he's not into threesomes, he's not into one or both of you, he's not a bottom, he doesn't like rough fucking), you've got to get through the remainder of whatever social setting - dinner, whatever - you have set up with that awkward realization hanging over you. It won't be fun. My suggestion is to break this into chunks. Tell him you and your boyfriend are looking to expand your social circle with other gay men, and with apologies in advance if you're assuming incorrectly, ask him if he'd like to get to know you both better. I'd say get coffee or something like that first, because you're on neutral territory and anyone can leave at any point. If he agrees, at that meeting, you can find out about his own dating status, and IF he's single and available, then you can continue. I'd suggest the second meeting also be at a neutral spot, but for dinner. Again, that way, if it turns out you misread him or he's flattered but not interested or whatever, you can finish dinner and leave separately (which is less awkward than him leaving your house and you having to say goodbye at the door, etc. I'd wait until later in the meal to approach him (which gives you more time to decide if you like him enough to continue down this path). Then just lay your cards on the table: you and your BF both think he's attractive, you're occasionally open, and both are interested in some recreational fun if he's interested - and if not, you'll be happy to just be friends. That way, if he's really not interested, he doesn't have to wait long to end the dinner, everyone saves face, and you go on your way. If he is interested, you can start negotiating details, and furtively discussing those kinds of things over dinner in a public place can be kind of hot in itself. It also lets him choose to think it over for a future day, or to accept on the spot (which is harder to do if he's at your own house for dinner).

Jim - Eros answered this much more clearly and succinctly than I could have.

Just a quick reminder that if someone identifies this film and a discussion ensues, if there's more than a passing reference to chems in the discussion, the whole thread belongs in the Back Room.

Just a side note: once you've had chicken pox, you're actually *more* likely to get shingles as an adult, because the virus is in your system (since, as you know, they're caused by the same virus). Something like one in three people who have chicken pox go on to have a shingles outbreak as an adult, even without HIV. If you didn't have chickenpox as a child, that's another vaccine that most adults *should* get (if they didn't get the vaccine earlier). That said, HIV does make it more likely that your system will allow an outbreak of shingles than if you were HIV-negative, because (as you note) the immune system is already being pounded on.

I'm not following you. I'm replying to your posting in this topic. There is a very large difference between those things. And sorry, there's no rule that says "you can't reply to someone if he doesn't want you to". If you don't like my replies, however, you're more than free to hide posts and replies from me - that way you won't see them. Now: my profile pic doesn't say anything about what, if anything, I want in me. You can guess, if you want, but my picture does not "speak" to anything you choose to invent. I'm calling out your garbage take that bottoms would love your doctor's fingers doing a prostate exam because of their size and what you seem to think bottoms want - including being sexually stimulated in a medical setting. That says a lot more about the state of your mind than it does about any bottom's.

AFAIK there's no way to block, say, profiles newer than 2 weeks (or any other arbitrary creation date), but even if you could, there's nothing stopping them from creating a bunch of new profiles, one every few days, and then as they get past your "minimum" level, contacting you. You've hit on one of the problems with truly anonymous hookups: you don't know who the guy on the other end could be, and it could well be a catfisher, someone you've rejected before, or whatever. If you want truly anonymous sex, that's a risk you'll have to accept. If that's not as important, then I would shut down guy #2 with a very direct threat that if he contacts you again, you're going to come over to his house and inform his wife and kids what he's up to. For guy #1 (and possibly for guy #2), you might look into whatever the British equivalent of a restraining order is, and whether you can get one against either guy. If you can, for maximum effect, have it served on them at work (or in the evening at home, in the case of the married guy).

Not to support, defend, attack, or criticize anyone involved in this situation. You say this was "another PhD student" who blocked you - is he or she in the same program of study as you? Do you have to work together on any research or teaching projects? If not, then I'm not sure I see what the problem is. While I agree that (generally speaking) people involved in higher education are more open minded and tolerant than the population at large, we're each free to set our own boundaries. I warn people with whom I'm interacting online the first time they start with any Jeebus talk that I'll only talk about religion in neutral, observational terms - the role of Christianity in X movement, for instance, or how religion has infiltrated politics in the US in the last 40+ years. I have zero interest in anyone telling me how Jeebus saved them in a car wreck last year or how Jeebus came through for her when she was hungry and someone invited her to dinner out of the blue, and anyone who persists in that gets blocked, after a curt "I told you how I feel about this" reminder. It's very possible this fellow student simply doesn't want to have anything to do with anyone involved in bathhouse culture, and he or she has a perfect right to draw the line there. I will note, however, your statement: "Drugs and STIs aside, there is nothing inherently harmful about a bathhouse. Hooking up with me in your bed versus in a room at a bath should be no different." I agree with the first sentence. But it's a perfectly valid viewpoint to hold that sex should not occur in view of other people, even if they're consenting to the view. It's also a perfectly valid viewpoint to hold that businesses that exist to provide places for sex to occur are a public nuisance that may be legal but which don't deserve tolerance. I'm not saying I agree (or disagree) with that stance. But it's certainly not an uncommon one.

I'm guessing here that the IP address is part of what's used to validate that you're properly logged on the system in a valid session, having supplied your user name and password. If the IP address is NULL, then it may not be able to complete that validation.

And @Close2MyBro - it doesn't really bother me that you downvoted my post (though it's sad that you feel it necessary to downvote a much-needed correction to your false information). Just understand that if you post bullshit you're going to be called out on your bullshit.

As Viking so clearly pointed out: it's not that anyone WANTS to provide sexually explicit material to kids under 10. And if that's all the bill did, and it clearly defined what was, and was not, sexually explicit in an orientation-neutral way, that would be one thing. But the bill goes much farther. It forbids "sexually-oriented" material, and then goes on to define what "sexually-oriented" material is, to include ANY reference to "sexual orientation". Imagine how many kid's books with fairy tales (the classic kind, not "fairy" as a slang term for gay) there are, where the handsome prince wins the hand of the fair maiden. Strictly speaking, that covers "sexual orientation" because it's describing the onset of a relationship between two people and it specifies that one's male and one's female, so it's referring to "sexual orientation". Now, nobody - no one, nowhere, no how, no way - is going to censor these books under the rubric that they discuss "sexual orientation". Imagine, however, if someone had an alternate book of fairy tales in their classroom, where the handsome prince wins the hand of the knight who defeats the dragon, or whatever. Not one word otherwise is said in the book about men who like men, what they do when the bedroom door closes, or whatever, but under this bill, you can bet that (a) the book would swiftly be banned in conservative communities, (b) the teacher who brought it into the classroom would be fired, and (c) the teacher would be barred from future jobs working with children because she brought "sexually-oriented" material to a classroom. It's a double standard, because for the right, "sexual orientation" means "anything except straight". Or as I've pointed out: If Mrs. Smith tells her class that her husband, Mr. Smith, is a doctor or fireman or whatever, no one's going to bat an eye. But if Mrs. Smith-Jones tells her class that her wife, also Mrs. Smith-Jones, even exists, she'll be charged under this law with discussing "sexual orientation", which breaks the law. And if you don't think this is how it's going to be used - you don't know much about how the right is trying to seize control of the educational process. Two areas in which the far right have made major gains in officeholding, in the last couple of years, are on local and state school boards, and in offices that manage and control elections. They've figured out that if they get control of the local boards, and the state boards that set the curriculums and choose the textbooks, they can ban this kind of thing from even coming up and make it so uncomfortable for an LGBTQ teacher that he quits or gets fired. That way, there's no way kids in those communities can get "corrupted" in public schools by learning that LGBTQ people exist and should be treated with respect. (And while LGBTQ issues aren't the driving force behind the takeover of election offices, it's part and parcel of the same thing: they know if they control the ballot acceptance, ballot counting, and certification processes, they stand a much greater chance of changing the outcome of elections (say, by rigidly enforcing ID rules in Democratic-leaning areas, while being lax in conservative ones). And once you control who gets elected, carrying out all the other objectives is a lot easier.

Not only that, but they'll make bail and get out of the police's way, perhaps chastened by the experience. Homeless people may just sit there in jail for days or weeks until they can be tried (if the charges aren't dropped) and they'll be housed and have 3 meals a day - certainly not in any sort of luxurious setting, but for some it might beat living outside. Also: fair or not, being homeless isn't illegal. Broadly speaking, sleeping in public isn't illegal. There are lots of laws against the homeless that are "on the books" but police are rightfully reluctant to try to enforce many of them because a lot of them are unconstitutional and would be struck down by the courts if they're used in a place where there's an active ACLU chapter. By contrast, public sex is illegal almost everywhere. I get it - some people like the public aspect of cruising, some people don't want to make the effort to connect online or at a bar and go to one person's home, some guys just prefer outdoor sex, some guys get off on the thrill of possibly getting caught. That doesn't mean the public needs to cede public grounds to people to use for sex. I'd note that nothing is stopping a group of gay men from buying, say, five or six acres, putting up a privacy fence around it, putting in parking, planting some bushes and trees, and opening it to "members" to have sex on private property. There just seems to be some feeling that the public ought to provide this for them for free. To say "neither was a public nuisance" ignores the fact that by taking over a public facility for this kind of use, it becomes unavailable for those who don't want to see sex in public. People with kids. People who just want to enjoy the (almost certainly very limited) woods in an urban setting because it's the only place one can find birds and animals in the concrete jungle.

Nothing specific, but it's a (generally) poorly administered site. It's possible no one is monitoring new signups right now; it's possible it was put aside to review and nobody's bothered to complete the review; it's possible something in your signup triggered something that makes them think you're a bot. You can always attempt to call their tech support line (+1 520 829 4420). It's not a free call, however, and I have no idea what the charges would be from India.

I'd imagine that the imbalance among ultra promiscuous is partly due to the fact that total tops, being fairly rare to start with, can generally afford to be as picky as they want. Instead of going to a sex venue and hoping to find someone super-hot at the party who's not otherwise occupied, they can pick up a partner at almost any event and have their choice among the guys who fit their "type". Total bottoms, on the other hand, know they're competing against a high number of other total bottoms as well as a lot of "mostly bottoms" and a fair number of "prefer to bottom if possible" men, as well as the "true versatiles". Going to a sex venue where people are just fucking randomly is one way of upping your odds of getting fucked.

Numbers in general *are* plummeting. That's probably because of heavy vaccination rates in many of the "hotspots" where monkeypox was readily spread - NYC, SF, LA, SE Florida, Chicago, and so forth. STIs become epidemic when there is lots of opportunity for partner exchange, when a disease is easily transmissible, and when it is already prevalent in a community. When HIV hit the gay community in the late 1970's, in the heyday of bathhouses and sex clubs and bars encouraging frequent sex and constantly hooking up with new people, the rate of partner exchange was at its peak. Because HIV doesn't present the same kind of symptoms that other STIs (like syphilis and gonorrhea) present, and the one sign of early infection (flu-like symptoms) were easily dismissed as something else, there was ample opportunity for it to spread rapidly in cities where there were large gay communities (especially NYC, SF, and LA, but in others as well). People would flock to NYC Pride, LA Pride, SF's pride and the various street fairs, have lots of sex, and then go back home to their communities with an infection that would then get spread, albeit more slowly, via partner exchange back home. By contrast, monkeypox has much more visible (and painful) sores, making it harder to keep spreading once symptoms begin to manifest. And many men who might otherwise have been infected got vaccinated because (a) the vaccine existed and (b) there was a concerted effort to reach them. Obviously, some people were infected and spread it before symptoms developed, but enough of an effort was made to reduce the reproduction rate to the point where it stands a chance of being well-controlled, if not eradicated, in the west. Another boost came from the fact that Covid-19 protocols were still cancelling large events, especially some sexually-oriented ones, because of concern of becoming a spreading event. And event organizers strongly pushed participants to get mpx-vaccinated well in advance, if possible.

Why? Because bottoms sexualize medical rectal exams? Because bottoms all want big things in their hole? Can we please have a discussion about health care without the peanut gallery making sex jokes about it, especially given that prostate cancer is so often overlooked *precisely* because so many men are uncomfortable with the thought of a finger in their anus examining them? Making jokes about it being pleasurable for bottoms just feeds that stigma.

The point is, @Close2MyBro, the article YOU cited does not say what you claimed it did. The study YOU cited finds a correlation between having Covid-19 and erectile dysfunction, NOT between vaccination and ED. You misstated the findings of the study completely. As for the second study, it's (apparently) true that they looked at people who had received one of the mRNA vaccines. However, mRNA vaccines account for 97% of the doses administered in the United States, so it's highly likely this study covers the circumstances under which most men might find themselves affected, IF the vaccines caused ED. And that second study found NO correlation between ED and Covid vaccines. I'm not sure what you have against the vaccines - and frankly I don't care - but don't misstate what the evidence shows, and don't obfuscate the findings by saying they only studied the type of vaccine that covers 97% of the doses administered in this country.

I agree, and I've actually thought about some changes like this that would make sense, but it's getting them done - and that's not a knock on the moderators. It's not something I'd want to take on, time-wise, and can't imagine most people here would, either.

If you are having unprotected sex (particularly receptive anal sex) more than two times a week, the 2-1-1 schedule does not make sense except at the very beginning. At that frequency, you should be on a daily dosage without skipping at all. The problem is that with daily PrEP, you gradually build up a level of protection in your system over the week so that you can take potentially HIV+ loads regularly and still be protected. With 2-1-1 and jumping right into sex, you never go through that period where your system isn't actively fighting off an infection. So if you're starting from 2-1-1, and want to keep having sex before the full 4-pill regimen is complete, I would double up the first several doses at a minimum - so your schedule would be more like 2-2-2-2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 etc. That way, you stand a chance of getting your PrEP blood level up high fast enough to negate anything that might come along in that first week. That said, two points: first, it's only relevant if the load is HIV+ and at a detectable level, so if you luck out and your partners are all negative or undetectable, 2-1-1 followed by daily would be fine. The problem is you can't be certain that those loads are in fact negative or undetectable. Second, holes do not "need" to continue "hoovering up baby batter". I get that the appeal is strong, but please - let's stop pretending this is an actual "need". If you found yourself on a deserted island, or in an isolation ward in a hospital, or hell, even just camping in a remote area, your hole would survive just fine without "baby batter". Just admit you don't want to do without.

The only way to do that is to report the topic and suggest where it might better belong. If the moderator(s) agree, they have the tools to move it. Unfortunately, this entire folder ("Making the Decision to Bareback") is pretty much a non-health area now. There was a time, before PrEP, when discussing the reasons to bareback or not meant it was inherently a health discussion, because there was no way to bareback and still remain relatively protected. So in that sense, this group of topics once was a health issue. Now it's not, and as is evidenced by the tenor of recent topics - "I Bareback ONLY, No regrets ever", "What turned you into a bare pig?", "Bottom should accept poz loads?", for examples - this section is quickly becoming another "Look at meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee how trashy can i beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?" part of the forum. And that's fine - but those aren't health discussions. Unfortunately, the moderators have their hands full with other things, but what the entire "Health" section needs is a major pruning - moving large numbers of threads to other areas, locking certain topics, and then more aggressive day-to-day management of making sure posts here have to do with health issues. That said, while I can diagnose the problem, I can't fix it.

Costs, of course, vary depending on the drug and where you get it. But for comparison's sake, using full retail pricing (exclusive of any insurance coverage, but taking into account the pharmacy's own discounting for its bulk purchases), Descovy (the most recently approved oral PrEP medication) runs from $2,178 to $2,450 for a month's supply. Truvada, which has been out longer, is somewhat cheaper in general. By contrast, full retail on a one-month supply of Biktarvy (which I'm on) runs from $3,828 at Albertson's to $4,522 at CVS. Genvoya, which I was on before Biktarvy, runs from $4,006 at Walmart to $5,230 at CVS. Of course, essentially no one pays those prices. Major insurers negotiate steep discounts on those drugs, assess you a copay, and pay the balance to the manufacturer. So, for instance, Blue Cross may pay Gilead only $1,500 for that Biktarvy prescription and my copay might be $250, meaning that Gilead is discounting the medication by $2,000 a month or more. And in turn, Gilead offers copay assistance programs, where they waive the copay portion of the tab for those who make less than a certain amount. And to be honest, they don't check that very closely - you don't have to submit a copy of your tax return or anything to qualify for that. In fact, my pharmacy handles that internally so I've never actually filled out anything. Of course, one still has to have insurance. As a self-employed person, I foot the bill for that myself, and it's not cheap. I don't qualify for an ACA subsidy because I make too much money - and I recognize I'm fortunate in that respect! - but I still shell out nearly $1,400 a month to cover just me, personally. And that's with a $4,300 deductible, $9,100 out-of-pocket maximum, and where they only pay a 60/40 split on in-network covered expenses above the deductible until the out of pocket max. Prescription drugs have a separate $500 deductible, but that is met the first month of the year. So any way you slice it, HIV isn't cheap.

Your post is ambiguous, because it's unclear what you mean by "it". If you mean "I just got approved for PrEP, but I want to take PrEP, too", then there is no problem. Get on it. If you mean "I just got approved for PrEP, but I want to get HIV, too", then your post belongs in the Bug Chasing forum on this site, not the health section. Basically, if this latter construction is what you mean, then the advice you get will be based on where you post. Here in the health section, the point is to encourage the use of PrEP to avoid getting HIV, and there are very extensive discussions of the problems you can face as an HIV+ man. Basically, you're signing yourself up for a lifetime of expensive health care, which practically no one can afford without some sort of health insurance (be it an employer plan, an individual plan, or a government-financed one. You'll be at heightened risk for all sorts of complications for the rest of your life (because HIV medications not infrequently take a toll on other parts of your body). Despite a vastly better educated populace than we had in, say, 1985, substantial numbers of potential partners (romantic or sexual) will reject you because of your HIV status. If you have dreams of world travel, there are places where you won't be admitted if you truthfully answer questions about your HIV status, and if you lie and they figure it out because you're carrying HIV medication in your luggage, some of those places will arrest you for trying to enter their country illegally. (Thankfully, this is becoming rare, but it's not unknown even today). This isn't to say you must get on PrEP. It's a personal decision. But as I've said many times here, there will always be idiots in the Bug Chasing forums talking about "brotherhood" and deep spiritual meanings behind sharing DNA and all kinds of other bullshit. That "brotherhood" isn't going to be taking care of you when you get your first serious opportunistic infection. They're not going to pay your insurance bill to keep your treatment going when you change jobs and have a gap in coverage, or when you lose your job and you can't get coverage because you don't live in a state with expanded Medicaid (and COBRA coverage is far too expensive). "Brotherhood" in the poz community seems (to me) to be mostly a bunch of jack-offs online indulging in the fantasy that you're all connected because of your shared HIV experience, and it manifests itself mostly in people showing off biohazard tattoos. And look - I get it; the erotic appeal is much like the appeal inherent in things like vampire legends, the seduction of someone into permanently changing something key about himself, a change that wreaks a fundamental reconstruction of the body' But at the end of the day, all it really means is that you now have an incurable disease, one that for the overwhelming majority of people will eventually kill them if they stop treatment (and by eventually I mean far younger than would otherwise be the case). Thanks to science, it's possible to ward off that death sentence to the point that most people with HIV on treatment will die of something else before they reach that point. But the key there is treatment, something that's expensive and can't be stopped if you want it to remain effective.

Actually, the bill in Florida, and the bill introduced in Congress, are exactly "Don't say gay" bills - at least insofar as in the places they apply, such as schools. They pose as standards about "appropriateness" - a bunch of bullshit about how we shouldn't "sexualize" children and topics of "sexual orientation" shouldn't be discussed in schools below a certain grade. But they don't mean ALL sexual orientations - they mean LGBT ones. Because I guarantee you, no second grade teacher is ever going to get in trouble for mentioning that she has a husband, and no boy's PE coach will ever get in trouble for mentioning that he's got a girlfriend. A heterosexually married female teacher will never get in trouble for acknowledging to her students that she's expecting a child. What this is aimed at is not letting LGBT teachers acknowledge having a same-sex partner - an acknowledgement that presents no problem if the partner is the opposite sex, because small-minded bigots want to control what their children think about such issues. If they're presented with a positive role model in a school setting, their iron-clad religious grip on the child's thought process may loosen. And THAT boils down to "don't say gay" - just don't mention it, or else you're likely to lose your job.

I'm not objecting to you making an update. I'm saying that the whole topic could easily be moved by a moderator to a more appropriate area, given that this really isn't a health discussion any longer. (But I will note: all the discussion of what panties you're wearing, how deeply he entered you on his first thrust, all of that - that's irrelevant to the actual HEALTH question you raised initially, which had to do with whether you should agree to take a load from a poz guy. Those are points best raised in a section of the site devoted to describing one's sexual exploits.) One of the real issues on this site is organization. Even when a post initially fits a topic - as yours did, when it was introduced - time, intervening events, and the nature of the discussion can render it inappropriate for a particular part of the site. And while it's not the case here, there's a serious problem with new members joining and then their first, second, or third post is a personal ad ("Looking for guys to do X or Y or Z") in the midst of the health forum, the porn video forum, the fiction forums, or whatever. Even worse are the ones who decide to post a tale - true or not - of some sexploit, full of details like a porn story but with a line or two at the beginning just to nudge it into another area. There are lots of places on this site where one can post true and fictional sex tales. Nowhere on this site is this issue a bigger problem than the health forum - not because there are more "misplaced" posts here (although those are frequent), but because people who are looking for accurate, up-to-date health-related information have to sort through so much else. I have no problem with posts encouraging people to chase HIV, for instance, as long as those are in the Bugchasing area. This area is set aside for discussing the health consequences of our actions - sexual and sometimes otherwise - and the issues involved in making those health-related decisions.