The Gay Blade

One of the downers for me about life with HIV is when I meet someone, and they don't know I have the virus. I sort of assume that guys in the scene here know about me, but of course not everyone does. I don't automatically tell every guy I fuck with - I don't have to, I just make sure they know we're going to be having safe sex. If they ask, then I tell. If it's just a casual one-off, then I don't care so much. But sometimes I meet a guy online, we fuck, we have a great time,  discover we have stuff to talk about,  want to see each other again, and then I have to decide "When do I tell him - and how is he going to react?"   Because even for me, telling people about having HIV is still not that easy, even with my years of practice. If I tell people before we get to know each other, they might run before they ever get to know me. If I wait till later, then they can feel like I've been hiding it, and I don't like being thought of that way -...

When I look through hook-up sites (sorry "dating" sites) I notice a lot of ads where guys say they are "non-scene". Isn't gay life online the biggest scene there is now? But I digress...And I say with comfort that I am definitely "scene" - not "non-scene". If we think of it as all the clubs, saunas, bars and fuck-venues, you get a good idea of the scene. It's pretty universal, you can walk into a gay bar or sauna in Auckland, NY, Melbourne, or Paris and see pretty much the same thing. The scene gives us a space where we know the rules, can be sure we're hanging out with others of the same persuasion, and should feel safe. And you might even meet Mr Right. you do need to have a certain number of people to make it work though. In the bad old days, the scene was all there was. There were really no other social spaces to go and meet other gay guys, unless you count the beats and the bogs (Public Toilets). So the scene was central to g...