STDs at the Bathhouse

[Guest50]

On 1/18/2022 at 7:11 AM, Philip said:

There are a post or two about the joy of having anon sex in the dark room at the bathhouse but not many about catching STD’s there.

Do you always catch some sort of STD when visiting a bathhouse? I usually do. I find it embarrassing to keep going to the Melbourne Sexual Health Clinic every fortnight to get tested, then eventually treated for it, so I try and limit myself to the bathhouse about once a month now so I don’t have to get treated as often, but that means I have less anon fun too. 

What STIs have you gotten?

[Philip]

3 minutes ago, Guest50 said:

What STIs have you gotten?

I seem to be a magnet for both gonorrhoea and chlamydia every time. Thankfully, they are both easily treatable. 

[Shotsfired]

On 1/18/2022 at 6:30 AM, fskn said:

I haven't been to my local bathhouse or to the glory hole arcades for a long while, but I concur. For me, fucking guys, getting blown, and occasionally blowing guys in those venues usually resulted in an STI. (Ditto for meeting privately with men who identify as straight or who are married and cheating on partners of any gender. These types are fun to fuck, but they tend to bury their heads in the sand, as if denial and inaction were effective STI prevention strategies.)

I have standing orders for HIV and STI testing through my regular health provider as part of my PrEP regimen, and can go as often as every three weeks. I choose to go monthly.

When I return to the fun venues, my strategy will be to fuck regulars at home right after testing, and strangers at the venues a week or so before my next tests. This of course won't prevent all transmission — known or regular partners can also have undiagnosed STIs — but it should reduce the chances that I'll pass something to someone else.

I do make clear to my sexual partners that I have not yet taken my vow of celibacy and that I play between tests; test results are static snapshots.

Conversely, I steer clear of people who don't fill out the date last tested in their Grindr profiles, or who indicate that they were last tested more than 3 months ago. Negative HIV and STI tests at a point in time are not informative, but a habit of regular testing tells me the kind of person I am dealing with, and it is what I offer in return.

I encourage you never to feel ashamed about getting tested, about having an STI, or about disclosing a current or past STI to a sex partner. First, STIs are a health matter, never a moral question. Second, people who never get STIs probably have limited sexual experience — great if you're into virgins, but not much fun otherwise. Third, by taking the step of getting tested, you are looking after your own health and that of your sex partner(s). This makes you the best kind of sex partner!

I have a gay doctor who's hubby is way hornier than I can even imagine,  so I get zero judgement.  I think possibly asking the manager of the bathhouse to host local testing services at different times will cut down on how many STDs you get at the bathhouse. Steamworks Chicago does this regularly and I rarely caught anything there.

 

As for avoiding people with no information on testing dates in their Grindr profiles. Grindr sold people's HIV information and testing information to third parties and got into hot water.  Many of us won't post that information there. We'll tell you if asked, but aren't relying on Grindr to do the heavy lifting.  They can't be rewarded for bad behavior so they don't get that information from me anymore. They can't be trusted to responsibly handle medical information. 

[Guest50]

4 hours ago, Philip said:

I seem to be a magnet for both gonorrhoea and chlamydia every time. Thankfully, they are both easily treatable. 

Yeah in a way that is good. I would suggest going on prep sooner rather than later though since eventually it may be something like hiv, especially when you are fucking anon.

[Guest]

18 hours ago, fskn said:

I couldn't agree more!

What you've described, incidentally, is San Francisco's City Clinic, which I believe is one of the most medically competent, culturally competent, and accessible sexual health providers in the world.

The ideal, of course, is that family doctors, general practitioners, doctors of internal medicine, etc. eventually do the hard work of educating themselves about sexual health care, of making talking about sex a routine part of medical checkups, and of providing stigma-free care.

Sexual health is a rapidly evolving field. I could tell you horror stories about general practitioners — typically suburban — who don't have a critical mass of gay patients and who are not humble enough to go back to first principles and read current CDC guidelines when treating an STI or responding to a request for PrEP (or worse yet, for PEP, which is time-critical).

Totally can relate. My doctor is a general family practitioner and he is basically clueless when it comes to gay men's health. 

[FunCheerSlut]

On 1/18/2022 at 8:30 AM, fskn said:

For me, fucking guys, getting blown, and occasionally blowing guys in those venues usually resulted in an STI. (Ditto for meeting privately with men who identify as straight or who are married and cheating on partners of any gender. These types are fun to fuck, but they tend to bury their heads in the sand, as if denial and inaction were effective STI prevention strategies.)

I have never been to a bath house. I have gotten most of my STI's from the crowd described above. The straight or married and cheating types who won't go get tested even after I tell them they have been exposed. This boggles my mind. What is the big deal??

They "don't have any symptoms" so they won't go get checked. I don't understand this. There is so much ignorance around one's sexual health. Sad.

[fskn]

On 1/24/2022 at 11:55 PM, Shotsfired said:

As for avoiding people with no information on testing dates in their Grindr profiles. Grindr sold people's HIV information and testing information to third parties and got into hot water.  Many of us won't post that information there. We'll tell you if asked, but aren't relying on Grindr to do the heavy lifting.  They can't be rewarded for bad behavior so they don't get that information from me anymore. They can't be trusted to responsibly handle medical information. 

I could understand reluctance to disclose HIV-positive status in a Grindr profile — or HIV-negative on PrEP, which also invites stigma.

Date last tested does not reveal any medical information, though. Grindr doesn't specify what test(s) a person should get to fill out that field. Quantitative viral load, for someone who is Poz? For someone [who thinks they are] negative, second-generation antibody (accurate as of a few months ago), fourth-generation antibody + P24 antigen (accurate as of a few weeks ago), or qualitative viral load (accurate as of a few days ago)? STI, regardless of HIV status? Which STI(s)? Must the STI test result(s) be negative, or does completing treatment count too?

I cannot tell anything about the tests people got, let alone the results. All other factors being equal, I can tell that Grindr users who openly disclose a recent test date care more about their sexual health and mine than those who leave the field blank or put a date months or years in the past. (For fuck's sake, we're on a gay sex app; we not only meet the CDC's definition of, but we also epitomize, high risk! I celebrate that classification because it's realistic and it means we like to fuck.)

The less profile data, the more likely I am to block. I'm on Grindr because I'm ostensibly a skilled top, decidedly not because I'm a skilled detective. Sorry, but my crystal ball is broken.

A nuisance chat this afternoon served as a good lesson to me. A guy with pictures but a thinly filled-out profile messaged me, suggesting that I come over. I was out shopping. I show my distance, explicitly name my home city, and mention that I take transit. Any other Grindr user immediately knows whether we're both in my home city at the moment and if not, whether we're close enough that I could come over right now.

I re-checked the guy's profile. Distance hidden. Text empty. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, replying that I was open to meeting but that I was on foot and had no idea where he was. I added a plain smiley face to avoid any hint of frustration. He answered that he was in Berkeley.

The city narrowed it down to 10 square miles. Like a famished, fast-running animal on the savannah, zeroing in on a delectable piece of prey, I experienced an adrenaline rush. My dick hardened. Any closer and I would have started leaking precum like a faucet.

In all seriousness, how the fuck should I know whether I could get to his place? If he was afraid of sharing his location, then cross streets, a landmark, or a neighborhood would have helped.

With 4 billion men on the planet, of whom 200 million are fags, 100 were nearby on my Grindr grid at that moment, and 75 were bottom or versatile, I blocked this one instead of asking again, how far away?

In my experience, Grindr users who are eager to fuck share information readily and reciprocally.

- - -

This isn't directed at you specifically, @Shotsfired. I agree with you that Grindr made a mistake selling profile data with HIV status. Some straight "analytics" expert must have assumed that all profile fields carry the same low significance.

Little harm was done because Grindr users need not identify themselves. Apple iOS provides an anonymous numeric user ID when the app is installed. A user can give whatever e-mail address they like when creating the Grindr account; let us hope that people know not to use an address that identifies them by name. No pic is required.

The sad reality is that, for anyone who has done a Web search about HIV testing, followed within weeks by a Web search about HIV medications from the same IP address or from the same device (distinguished thanks to JavaScript code embedded in most commercial Web pages; the code assigns a unique "fingerprint" by querying for and combining parameters such as exact Web browser version or "user agent" string, screen size, memory capacity, and operating system version), Google could easily use its "big data" processing capabilities to infer positive HIV status.

Google owns identifying information for all Android users, and for any iOS users who log in to Google apps or services. When Google doesn't have direct identifying information, it can generate it by correlation.

Google could easily match Grindr profile pics, as well as pics exchanged in private Grindr chats, against its Google Photos database — photos willingly contributed by foolish users — and against its vast index of miscellaneous photos crawled from the Web.

It would be easy to match up streams of timed location points from Grindr — which we know to log into with a generic e-mail address — and from a weather app — which we are more likely to trust and to log into with our regular e-mail address.

Presto! Google could infer that a specific person was HIV-positive and sell the information as part of the person's consumer profile. More properly, Google would be selling the information indirectly, by using it to target the person with HIV-related, paid advertising.