The subtitle on the blog says, "Kink. PrEP. Way too much Introspection." So, you've seen the kink and the introspection but what is this PrEP the Smartass speaks of?
If I just give you a dictionary definition, you'll think this is a bummer of a post and won't keep reading. So, I'll give you my subjective definiton: PrEP is the thing that has given me back my sense of my sexual self, has encouraged me to be brave, to explore and have adventures like I did when I was a teen. Like I've been afraid to for 30 years.
PrEP stands for "Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis)" and is a drug therapy for preventing HIV transmission. Folks who are HIV negative (like me) can take a once-daily medication as part of their safer sex practices to ensure that they stay negative.
The drug used for PrEP, Truvada, has been around for more than 10 years. Used in conjunction with other drugs, it suppresses HIV in folks who are positive. It's only been in the past 3 years that the FDA has approved Truvada for HIV prevention. So it's a newER approved use, but it isn't new.
I first heard about PrEP last summer when a wonderful man I knew from college shared this article from New York Magazine on Facebook. I haven't looked back.
At first, I thought it was too good to be true - I can just take this one little (albeit expensive) pill every day and be protected from HIV? If that were true, I thought, then every-fucking-body would know about it. Life-saving. World-changing. And for reasons obscure to me, nearly completely hidden from public view.
I was an adventurous and sexually active teen. One of the things I had heard about and hoped for about college was that it would be lots of sex and great drugs (OK - so maybe I shouldn't have gone to an engineering school, but that's a different subject). I had my first threesome when I was 18, went to Plato's Retreat the summer before college. I had reason to believe that adventures would continue and expand with the greater freedom of college life.
Thing is, I was a college freshman in 1984. While AIDS had been seen in gay communities in certain urban centers before then, it was that summer between high school and college that the whole world came to hear of AIDS. I can't tell you what a chilling effect this had on my college years. I had so much less sex in college than I did in high school. At the very age when I should have been exploring, should have felt free to do so, I was terrified of sex. There was even a point in my college years when I decided never to have sex again. I figured no one ever died from NOT having sex.
Many women of my generation just never thought HIV was a real risk for them. But here's the thing, I got knocked up when I was in high school. So we know that I was having unprotected sex as a teen. The guy who got me pregnant had had a very rough adolescence and had spent some of his youth on the street, earning his living the way street kids do. The realization that I had had unprotected sex with a man who clearly had engaged in high-risk behaviors kept me from thinking of myself as exempt from HIV.
After maybe a year and a half, I eventually gave up on the idea of life-long chastity, but when I resumed sexual activity, I still carried my fear and my caution with me. If I could have had the caution without the fear, that would have been great. So many have lost so much more than I have to AIDS and HIV - loved ones, their own health, their own lives, dignity, privacy. I know that my own loss has been minimal, but for 30 years, I've carried the resentment that HIV stole my youth.
Once I realized that PrEP was NOT too good to be true, I felt the weight of 30 years of fear and resentment lift.
I wept.
Here I am, at an age when folks are starting to have grandchildren, finally having the freedom and safety to express myself as the sexual person I knew I was when I was 18.
I feel like I'm myself again and I didn't even know I was missing.
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