I spoke recently on this blog about how I learned a lot regarding the gay male community and how HIV has criminalized people just existing, how every gay man I’ve been with (and quite a few bi and pan men too) has had a very firm stance on personal responsibility when it comes to health care, when I dated a pretty teacher who happened to be HIV+ briefly.
And I’ve spoken in private conversations with friends about how, since the pandemic, the men I’ve dated prior to starting my current relationship AS WELL AS my current relationship have taken a very no-nonsense approach to the pandemic in order to ensure not only do they not get sick, but that they don’t become asymptomatic carriers to infect others.
I briefly dated a significantly older man who was part of the bear community as the LGBT community began gaining rights, and his very frank answer was ‘after surviving the AIDS crisis, losing so many friends, and living now as a gay man? I feel I owe it to everyone to not kill everyone around me because I exposed them to it. So the second I could, I got vaccinated’
And when I was still setting things up with the man that is now my boyfriend, he was adamant that not only did he need to be vaccinated but also he wanted to wait the full two weeks after his second shot to have full immunity. He wore a mask the second it was suggested. When I told him I couldn’t be vaccinated, he made sure to plan our dates when there’d be the least amount of people. He investigates every sniffle to make sure he’s not carrying COVID to give to me.
This pandemic is *personal* to the gay community because, let’s be honest, if AIDS had received the same initial response and call to action, maybe we would still have all those people we lost to this deadly virus.
