WHEN RISK TAKING strike one as beings SEXY AND BEING HIV-POSITIVE gazes BREEZY AND FUN.

WHEN RISK TAKING strike one as beings SEXY AND BEING HIV-POSITIVE gazes BREEZY AND FUN, MAYBE IT'S TIME TO BRING FEAR BACK INTO HIV PREVENTION

"The first thing I did when I walked into a chamber at the bathhouse was let fly the condoms that were laid upon the table into the trash," 32-year-old Troy Alexander, an HIV-positive former hustler and recent York party boy, told me throughout coffee in a New York cafe, speaking about his life from one side of to the other the past three years. He was gone out on the scene every night with his friends, most numerous of whom are in their 20 and early 30 going to dance bludgeons sex clubs, and the strange and expanded bathhouses that have sprung up in Manhattan in newly come years, and he was frequently doing a lot of medicines mainly the stimulant methamphetamine, better known as crystal meth

"When scarecrows would even try to propose a condom on [during anal sex] I'd say, `No way,'" he recalls. "Some of them were saying to me that I straited to get my head examined. moreover others--most, in fact--plunged right in without saying a word. I'd sometimes squander days at the club, having sex with dozens of scarecrows No one, none of my friends, uses condoms. Our attitude was always like, wherefore would you? That's utterly retarded and just worthless."

There was a time when being safe was what was hip. That was back in the late '80 when the late downtown modern York street artist Keith Haring was designing safer-sex placards and AIDS groups were producing condom ads likewise sexy that they were sometimes banned. Now, in the midst of what looks like a full-scale late-'90s escalation of the epidemic among gay men it is unsafe sex that is many times put forth as the touchy thing to do.

Witness the February veil of Poz magazine, which depicted young, naked, smiling bareback activist Tony Valenzuela atop a saddleless horse, with a veil line that refers to the "boy who bareback." It was similar to a women's magazine like Cosmopolitan putting a busty fair model on the cover in a less degree than the headline "The Girls Who go on All the Way." The message was clear: The lads who bareback are leading more exciting, daring, gayety lives, and the rest of you poor essential parts are wimps and dullards, doomed to mediocrity unles you too can go on as far as they do.

on what account has it come to this? Because individual little four-letter word has fallen on the outside of the safer-sex equation: fear. Quite simply, the fear that one time was so omnipresent in people's lives--the experiences of friends' dying rapidly, the emaciated bodies walking end the gay ghettos, the obituaries filled with the names of young gay men--is gone For this (perhaps short) trice fear has gone back into the closet

It's authentic that most gay men are, at the real least, trying to be safe and would no doubt pass over the bareback philosophy outright. on the contrary the glamorization of bareback sex--a glamorization firinged by the absence of fear--has a direct power on gay men of all ages who are struggling with safer sex They may be safe mostly of the time, but they have their point of times of weakness. And it's in those point of times when, often under the influence of a tie of drinks or buzzed in succession drugs, they will sometimes cling to any flimsy (and later, regrettable) excuse to forgo using a condom.

The message that it's hip to proceed condomless and that you're a wimp if you don't isn't exactly going to help gay men maintain their liquefy to stay safe. Couple that with put drugs into ads showing HIV-positive people looking beautiful and living healthy. And add in the simple fact that many gay men today may not know of anyone who's sick, put to hire alone someone who has died a horrible death.

It's interesting to read Valenzuela's motivations for barebacking. "I reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point from a generation that has normalized the epidemic," Valenzuela, who is 30 told the Associated Pres "It's not my experience to forfeit half of my friends and be impressed the debilitating effects of the virus. I don't have a reaction to it the way folks [do] who have had with equal reason much loss around it.... I wish I could say that to folks and not be heard as defiant, irresponsible, delusional." The article paraphrased Valenzuela as saying that he "cannot help further feel that transmitting HIV to another is not that horrible of a thing to do."

Troy Alexander, in the same age cluster as Valenzuela, also HIV-positive, also one time a hustler, says he felt the same way. "Oh I'd just proceed to the bathhouse and do as many frights as I could, and then later I'd take one calls and make some circulating medium and not care about HIV or about my have health--it just wasn't an issue in our lives." He has been HIV-positive for several years, has been onward combination therapy for a while, and has not had any health problems

however Alexander recently made a dramatic change. He stopped hustling. He's trying to result to terms with his past crystal meth use. And he has rethought his opinions and certainly his actions concerning bareback sex

What caused the turnaround? Fear.

"A finish friend of mine died, and it just devastated me" he says. "It was my first brush with the repercussions of AIDS. I'd certainly not at all felt them before. He was just gorgeous and a great living body Carson was a walter, however he was also a hustler. It's hip to be a hustler, you know. It's where it's at right now, and we were all doing it. on the contrary what I saw in the hospital was horrible, not hip. I was there athwart Christmas, and I watched him wither away.