You find that a lot. Especially in guys hooking up. You know, I'm negative. Are you, too? So in that situation he definitely took my word for it, which is still kind of scary. Cuz my experience is that everyone who has HIV is not gonna disclose it to you mainly because of the stigma and the fear of rejection. So now with me, condom use is 100%.

I've had issues with it in the past where my partner and I have not started off using condoms. I started educating myself on HIV and I felt scared. Especially cuz you can't help associating HIV with a predominately gay disease. And it freaked me out, cuz here I was a gay man in a gay relationship having unprotected sex. Me and my partner are not together 24 hours a day. I don't know what he's doing when I'm not with him. So, in the back of my mind that was always there. You know, what if? When I thought about it, it freaked me out. That's why I think I tried to not think about it. I didn't want to all of a sudden approach him about the option of using condoms out of fear of him thinking that something shady was going on. So, I think I kinda settled back about the option of using condoms. There was a little argument, a disagreement. But, I didn't want to fight about it. And I definitely didn't want him to think that I was doing anything behind this back. So I figured business as usual.

So, I went to this free clinic that did HIV testing once a week. I went and answered all the creepy risk assessment questions. Of course they branded me very high risk cuz I"m gay and sexually active and on top of that, my partner cheated on me with someone who is HIV positive. So, my exposure is likely there. I"m like sweating bullets. It got worse when they told me that I had to wait seven fucking days for my test results and the shit was extra tense cuz I was leaving to go to college two months later.

The last thing I needed was to find out that I'm HIV positive. I'm going to college. I'm not out to my family. So I was like, god forbid I have to tell my family that I'm gay, now I have to tell them I'm HIV positive, too...which freaked me out cuz in the African American community these are things that are all associated with being gay. Gay is bad and if you're gay, you are gonna have HIV. So my fear was "Ok, so my family is gonna find out that I'm gay and that I'm HIV positive," in essence reaffirming all of those ignorant stereotypes that they may have already have. So, seven days of running all these thoughts through my head. I never went back for the result. Fuck that! No way I'm gonna find out that I'm HIV positive before I go to college.

I didn't get my results cuz I was convinced that I had it and I just didn't want to know. And its funny cuz it didn't have anything to do with knowing that I was HIV positive, it was like, "If I don't know, then I can't tell my family anything." It was kinda like "If I know I'm sick, then I have to tell my family, but if I don't know I'm sick then there's nothing to tell them." It had more to do with me not wanting to actually have to go back home and say "Mom, guess what?" Cuz of course then the question would be, "Well, how?" and "Well, my boyfriend." It would have been this whole stonewall effect of this bunch of shit that I would not have wanted to get into.

So finally, I came to a point where if I wanted to get rid of that anxiety I had to get tested. I had to know the answer, cuz that was the only way I was going to get rid of the anxiety for me. I remember going to my doctor's for a routine appointment and an HIV test because I was so concerned and consumed about a fever that I had. That test came back negative. So then, I went back to going to a nightclub and getting all fucked up on the same drugs and getting involved in that same behavior: having multiple sex partners, going to a bathhouse, and doing just about anything. And again, I had the same guilt and the same kind of anxiety that I felt initially. Then, I started having more and more signs making me think I had HIV. I had a night sweat here and there. Then, I just talked myself out of that like, I'm just over dramatizing this. When I started having this stomach flu, I started thinking, "Well you know what, maybe now I did do something that this time I finally got it." And, I had this feeling, I just couldn't explain it, but I had this feeling.