“…Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
From Ozymandius, Percy Bysshe Shelley
From my personal perspective as a poz gay man looking for love in a desert (never mind sex), the idea of sero-sorting is gaining popularity with me. It’s not that there aren’t informed neg guys out there, there are, but they are few and far between and the idea of being “safer sex teacher” with a potential partner is really a turn-off (limp noodle stuff).
Why, when and how we decide to choose our partners based on their serostatus is deeply personal and everyone will weigh out their options and take into account the availability of other poz people in their own communities. I suspect in rural and remote communities it’s really lonely – there, I may be the only poz guy for kilometers…
The reason I find sero-sorting an attractive choice is that I’m tired of explaining. I’m tired of rejection. I’m tired of the “ddf” culture that neg guys espouse (erroneously), and I’m tired of being a leper.
At least with other poz guys there’s a common understanding and a degree of acceptance – although not entirely. If you’re poz and you don’t fit the perfect mold of what our shallow gay sub-culture espouses to be beautiful, you’re just as likely to be rejected by other poz guys.
The problem in my community (Victoria BC), is that poz guys seem mostly interested in sex and sex alone – I’m at an age where that’s less important to me than intimacy and communication. Nonetheless, the idea of meeting another gay man living with HIV is that impossible dream to which I cling like the battered remnants of a sinking ship.
Available gay men are a rarity. The men who are worth partnering are already partnered. The rest seem to be either needy little boys or completely fucked up (I myself fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum). From my experience with dating sites, I get a lot of guys from very large cities (Vancouver, Chicago, San Diego) that are looking for that special someone – it astounds me that men in large urban centres have to go so far afield to find a connection. Perhaps loneliness is endemic in this completely “connected” age.
As I’ve said in previous postings, I also believe that we’ve gone back to a high tech version of the old cruising days. Who needs a relationship when I can access an app and have a big old schlong in my bedroom in a few minutes? And yet, I think the majority of those men, even the gay ones, are only in it for the moment – the brief ten seconds of cumming and then going… It’s all very vacuous and tedious and tiring.
Add HIV on top of that and it’s more complicated. The neg married guys all asking “are you ddf?” and how do I respond? I know I won’t be infecting anyone, but should I disclose? If I disclose I’ll likely be rejected, because clearly the guy is uninformed and doesn’t have a clue about where his risks lie around any sexually transmitted infection let alone HIV.
Sex with a poz guy isn’t always clear either. There are those who insist on barebacking, and that’s something I’m not interested in. It’s not that I have fear of contracting his virus, it’s that I’m fearful of contracting the other crap he might have floating around his interior. And sex for the sake of sex is not what I ultimately want to fulfill myself as a whole human being. I wonder if in fact we all long for real connection, but don’t know how to do that anymore. We regress to our teens and the porn-driven world that applauds youth and beauty and manly encounters reduces us to gonads and spurting and empty-headed masturbatory fantasies that never come true and so we must continue the hunt.
And so the desert remains. Sero-sorting, as a concept, is a goal I can work with, but in reality I think it’s self-ghetto-ization: shutting myself off from the potential that there is a negative guy who isn’t so negative about positive guys.