"HIV-Negative opens up a much-needed discussion about the position of the uninfected in a community devastated and alienated by plague. It is compelling reading for those who are considering HIV testing, who have tested HIV-negative, or who are in positive-negative relationships, and it is a valuable resource for counselors, social workers, and therapists interested in the mental health of gay men, and for researchers and community activists interested in HIV-prevention issues." "The voices in this book raise questions that resonate within all of us: How do we experience and define the meanings of sexuality, vulnerability, mortality, and responsibility in the age of AIDS?"--Jacket
In The HIV-Negative Gay Man: Developing Strategies for Survival and Emotional Well-Being, you’ll get instant access to some of the most recent information on the market today about remaining HIV-negative. You’ll come in contact with a wealth of information concerning the psychosocial and psychosexual needs of HIV-negative gay men and discover strategies for staying uninfected and cultivating a meaningful way of life in the face of HIV/AIDS. Compiled by both professionals and peers, The HIV-Negative Gay Man goes to the front-lines of HIV prevention to help you understand the most beneficial and dependable ways of preserving the value of life and living it to the fullest. Radically reshaping and rehumanizing traditional HIV prevention efforts, these updated and personalized approaches will give you many individual strategies for survival in a world in which the link between sex and survival has been turned upside-down. You’ll find new ways to expand and enrich your own coping repertoire as you explore these topics: how the HIV-negative gay man’s complex emotional reactions change what peer groups can do when creating and experimenting with new identities and roles when group work needs to be short-term or long-term why a sex life vocabulary needs to be built where Latino Men can learn critical thinking about internalized homophobia and transgression survival mechanisms changing attitudes as a result of the development of protease inhibitors and new drug therapies in HIV prevention In The HIV-Negative Gay Man, you’ll find that the road to survival is a long one but a road that can be travelled and enjoyed if the right strategies are applied. This book is a “road map” for survival. In it, you’ll meet many brave professionals who are currently fighting on the front lines of HIV prevention and coming forward to share their own personal stories of survival. In turn, you’ll learn from them and eventually tell your own survival story to someone else along the way.
The facts of life have never been more complicated for gay men. While the threat of AIDS has been diminished by new treatments and longer life expectancy, HIV remains a serious and intractable foe. In this affirming guide, therapist Michael Mancilla, himself HIV-positive, helps fellow gay men, both single and partnered, pursue the happy and fulfilling love life they deserve. Readers will find advice on everything from meeting Mr. Right and talking about HIV status to building the long-term relationships that many never expected to have. Candid first-hand accounts reveal how others in the community are negotiating safer sex, overcoming legal and financial hurdles to plan for the future, learning to accept care as well as give it, and crafting the kinds of intimate relationships they want, whether that means casual sex, dating, or permanent commitment. Smart, honest, and insightful, this book is written from the heart.
A moving exploration of how gay men construct their identities, fight to be themselves, and live authentically It goes without saying that even today, it’s not easy to be gay in America. While young gay men often come out more readily, even those from the most progressive of backgrounds still struggle with the legacy of early-life stigma and a deficit of self-acceptance, which can fuel doubt, regret, and, at worst, self-loathing. And this is to say nothing of the ongoing trauma wrought by AIDS, which is all too often relegated to history. Drawing on his work as a clinical psychologist during and in the aftermath of the epidemic, Walt Odets reflects on what it means to survive and figure out a way to live in a new, uncompromising future, both for the men who endured the upheaval of those years and for the younger men who have come of age since then, at a time when an HIV epidemic is still ravaging the gay community, especially among the most marginalized. Through moving stories—of friends and patients, and his own—Odets considers how experiences early in life launch men on trajectories aimed at futures that are not authentically theirs. He writes to help reconstruct how we think about gay life by considering everything from the misleading idea of “the homosexual,” to the diversity and richness of gay relationships, to the historical role of stigma and shame and the significance of youth and of aging. Crawling out from under the trauma of destructive early-life experience and the two epidemics, and into a century of shifting social values, provides an opportunity to explore possibilities rather than live with limitations imposed by others. Though it is drawn from decades of private practice, activism, and life in the gay community, Odets’s work achieves remarkable universality. At its core, Out of the Shadows is driven by his belief that it is time that we act based on who we are and not who others are or who they would want us to be. We—particularly the young—must construct our own paths through life. Out of the Shadows is a necessary, impassioned argument for how and why we must all take hold of our futures.
Risky Sex critiques this reasoning through an exploration of the actual lifestyles and sexual behaviors of men in this age group. Using as its base a study of the gay community of West Hollywood, California, this book profiles seven gay men who have engaged in risky sex, whether in a monogamous relationship or in other social contexts.
A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period commonly called 'The AIDS Crisis'. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid '90s, however, the meaning of an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable many people living with HIV to lead a healthy, regular life, but how has this dramatic shift impacted the representation of gay men and HIV in popular culture? Positive Images is the first detailed examination of how the relationship between gay men and HIV has transformed in the past two decades. From Queer as Folk to Chemsex, The Line of Beauty to The Normal Heart, Dion Kagan examines literature, film, TV, documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world to unearth the socio-cultural foundations underpinning this 'post-crisis' period. His analyses provide acute insights into the fraught legacies of the AIDS Crisis and its continued presence in the modern queer consciousness.
For gay men who are HIV-negative in a community devastated by AIDS, survival may be a matter of grief, guilt, anxiety, and isolation. In the Shadow of the Epidemic is a passionate and intimate look at the emotional and psychological impact of AIDS on the lives of the survivors of the epidemic, those who must face on a regular basis the death of friends and, in some cases, the decimation of their communities. Drawing upon his own experience as a clinical psychologist and a decade-long involvement with AIDS/HIV issues, Walt Odets explores the largely unrecognized matters of denial, depression, and identity that mark the experience of uninfected gay men. Odets calls attention to the dire need to address issues that are affecting HIV-negative individuals-from concerns about sexuality and relations with those who are HIV-positive to universal questions about the nature and meaning of survival in the midst of disease. He argues that such action, while explicitly not directing attention away from the needs of those with AIDS, is essential to the human and biological well-being of gay communities. In the immensely powerful firsthand words of gay men living in a semiprivate holocaust, the need for a broader, compassionate approach to all of the AIDS epidemic's victims becomes clear. In the Shadow of the Epidemic is a pathbreaking first step toward meeting that need.
Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically and historically detailed case studies, the book examines how new technologies and scientific artifacts – such as antiretroviral therapy, digital hookup apps and research methods – mediate sexual encounters and shape the worlds and self-practices of men who have sex with men. Rather than debunking scientific practices or minimizing their significance, The Gay Science approaches these practices as ways in which we ‘learn to be affected’ by HIV. It explores what knowledge practices best engage us, move us and increase our powers and capacities for action. The book includes an historical analysis of drug use as a significant element in the formation of urban gay cultures; constructivist accounts of the emergence of barebacking and chemsex; a performative response to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and its uptake; and, a speculative analysis of ways of thinking and doing sexual community in the digital context. Combining insights from queer theory, process philosophy and science and technology studies to develop an original approach to the analysis of sexuality, drug use, public health and digital practices, this book demonstrates the ontological consequences of different modes of attending to risk and pleasure. It is suitable for those interested in cultural studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, digital culture, public health and drug and alcohol studies.
Acts of Intervention traces the ways in which performance and theatre have participated in and informed the larger cultural politics of race, sexuality, citizenship and AIDS in the United States in the last fifteen years.
Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures breaks new ground in offering an original and insightful interpretation of gay men’s shifting experience of the AIDS epidemic. From Dry Bones Breathe, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of current community debates focused on circuit parties, unprotected sex, and gay men’s sexual cultures, and you will learn how social, political, and biomedical changes are dramatically transforming gay identities and cultures.Dry Bones Breathe is Eric Rofes’explosive follow-up to Reviving the Tribe, a book which broke open debates in gay communities around the world about sex, identity, and gay men’s relationship to AIDS. In this volume, Rofes contends that most gay men no longer experience AIDS as the crisis they did during the 1980s. Gay men often attribute this shift to the advent of protozoa inhibitors, but Rofes explains how other factors, including the epidemic’s predicted trajectory, new treatments for opportunistic infections, the passage of time, and the increasing diversity of gay men inhabiting communities throughout the country have set in motion the transformation of gay life. AIDS organizations and gay leaders, however, continue to assert that gay men experience AIDS as an emergency, resulting in a tremendous dissonance between gay leaders and their communities. In the midst of this controversy, Dry Bones Breathe lets you share in stories of hope and recovery and a new vision for AIDS work that demands a radical redesign of prevention, care, and activism. Dry Bones Breathe tackles several other issues concerning the powerful shifts occurring in gay communities and cultures by: explaining why an understanding of the terms “post-AIDS” and “post-crisis” is crucial to interpreting contemporary gay male cultures and what Australian prevention theorists have to offer gay men in the United States describing the “Protozoa Moment” and exploring how a dangerous obsession with pharmaceuticals is leading many to mistakenly attribute all changes in gay men’s cultures to combination therapies examining the writings of Larry Kramer, Andrew Sullivan, Michelangelo Signorile, and Gabriel Rightly to illustrate how the crisis construct has unleashed a backlash against gay sexual cultures discussing the dramatic diminution in gay men’s AIDS-related deaths in epicenter cities and the impact of shrinking obituary pages on gay men’s mental health exploring the diverse relationships to the epidemic forged by young gay men, gay men of color, gay men from rural or small towns, and middle-aged men not infected with HI detailing how HI prevention and service organizations targeting gay men must redesign their mission and restructure their work In response to continuing efforts to direct gay men back into a state of emergency, Dry Bones Breathe suggests that long-term prevention efforts must be constructed around something other than a crisis. While AIDS organizations look at gay men’s diminished participation in AIDS activism, Rofes argues that these organizations should face how they have distanced themselves from the reality of most gay men’s lives. From stories and experiences full of hope, anger, sadness, and strength, Dry Bones Breathe will teach you about gay men who no longer base their identities and cultures solely around AIDS.
