I need to preface this essay.  It flatly contradicts some things, which I've said in the past.  People and circumstances change; over the past year or so, my thinking around sex and AIDS has undergone some changes, too. 

There are a lot of assumptions floating around in this epidemic.  Some of them are valid.  Some are dangerous.  One of the more nonsensical ones is that your life is over once you contract HIV, you might as well start making funeral plans and 'walking toward the light' because your meaningful life is over.  That's bullshit, but it's a variety of bullshit that fertilizes a lot of social-service jobs, so it's produced with ever-increasing fervor by those millions of terrified Negatives and 'health professionals.' Personally, I'm over it.  I've been positive for most of my adult life, I've had a marvelous time, I've been professionally successful in two rewarding careers, and as far as I'm concerned the AIDS professionals have done me far more harm (inasmuch as I've allowed them to do anything at all to me) than AIDS has.  The main message that continues to come from these professionals is STOP HAVING SEX! - a message which I fundamentally oppose.  Sex is not and never has been the sum total of my life, but it does illumine and edify every area of life.  It is the body's wisdom, the world's best stress-reducer, and the most effective means of communication-and our professionals are doing their best to 'dumb it down,' to give us added stress around sex, and prevent us from rational, open, honest communication.

We're now coming back into the light of honesty, after years of denial: we're admitting, again, that yes, we do enjoy sex, in all its myriad forms.  One of the most liberating comments I've heard in recent years came from a friend who's also been positive since the early years of the epidemic.  I'm so sick & tired of these Negatives whining about how difficult it is to stay safe.  Why don't they just get over it and get Positive?' That was the first time I'd heard it in those words, but I realized that I agreed, wholeheartedly.  Men who orient their entire life around a desperate struggle to stay negative-and then have the gall to complain about it! -are akin, in my mind, to those unhappily married men who spend their whole lives struggling to avoid acknowledging their attraction to men.  It's an effort to deliberately eliminate pleasure from life, which is not, in my far-from-humble opinion, the object of the game.  One of my primary goals is the Maximization of pleasure…and just as I believe that Gay Men Have More Fun, so too do I believe that positives have learned to have much more fun than Negatives.  I'm delighted to be Positive;my only complaint is that so many of my fellows continue to be gulled by the Establishment into self-denial, guilt-trips, and emotional travail over their sero-status.  Just as the major problem with being gay is the limited pool of candidates available (and the solution to that problem has been, traditionally, le gay ghetto), the only real drawback to positivity is the difficulty of finding sex-partners who share my hedonistic view of life.  Even among other Positives, far too many have been hoodwinked by the anti-sex lie of 'reinfection.'

And you know, fucking with Negatives—fucking with condoms and other precautions, in other words—is kind of like fucking with virgins: always safe, sterile, and clean.  No matter how inventive the devices they come up with, the clever new erotic techniques they develop, I'm always aware of that invisible barrier between us, like a body-condom that he's slipped on before consenting to sex with me.  And when a guy asks me to fuck him and then hands me a condom, my dick does a disappearing act.  Fucking with condoms isn't worth the work to me; it isn't even exciting.  (Hey, I didn't start out with this realization; it's taken me years to admit to myself what bullshit all those 'condoms can be sexy'campaigns are.) The essence of fucking, to me, is not penetration per se, but trust: I trust you to be gentle (or rough, or whatever), I trust you to make me feel good, I trust you enough to want your cum up my ass.  Wearing a condom negates those feelings, for me, and leaves the act a simple in-and-out act of penetration.  If that's all I want, I can use a dildo.  No, I want a man-but not a Negative any longer, not a man who's scared of the juices of my body.  The Negative world is defined by fear, ours by pleasure-and it takes another Positive to treat me with the abandon for which sex was invented.

So herewith, I make a Declaration of Independence: I'm tired of using condoms, and I Wont.  I'm tired of restraining my partners, asking them if they really want to suck my dick or rim me, and treating them like little children who need their candy consumption monitored.  If someone doesn't want to have sex with me, that's his right; I probably wouldn't want to have sex with him, either.  But if someone's fucking me, I want him to go all the way.  I don't believe anyone's interest is served by an obsessive interest in prophylactics (except perhaps Trojan, Inc.'s), and I don't feel the need to encourage Negatives to stay negative.  If it's truly important to them, they'll stay out of my bed.  No one can ever claim that I'm hiding my sero-status.  Everyone knows.  I obviously couldn't have reached this philosophical cusp if I hadn't been extravagantly, fabulously 'out' about it for the past couple of years.  Those of you who still want to get it on with me, I'm horny as hell and ready to play.  The rest of you stay the heck away.

I will undoubtedly be pilloried for this position, called a 'murderer' for 'encouraging unsafe sex'! So be it.  I don't mind being demonized, it's more fun than being deified, and those seem to be the options.  We as a community are very fond of hyperbole: I've engaged in it myself from time to time (NO!), and its only fair that it should occasionally be aimed at me.  What I wish to encourage is an appreciation of pleasure, and a total acceptance of personal responsibility.  I decline to tell anyone else how they should be having sex; and I publicly declare that I will politely ignore anyone who is so impolite as to try to impose their standards onto me.  Sex is a negotiation and transaction between two (or more) people, and input into the limits, risks, and pleasures that are appropriate to each encounter should be restricted to the participants.  Whether you're an observer at a sex club, a government monitor, a social-service provider, or a gay 'watchdog' group, keep your nose out of other people's sex lives—or you're apt to get it bitten off.  Very unsafely.