A new study of 361 men from Canada and France suggests that taking two doses of Truvada for PrEP from 2 to 24 hours before intercourse, another 24 hours later and a fourth dose 24 hours after that dramatically reduced the risk of HIV transmission. Just as with men on PrEP daily, the rate of protection was found to be 97%.
Keep reading for info on this study, plus hot links regarding Anthony Scaramucci, Republicans who want to stall our 2020 election, Chelsea Manning and a video of Corey Feldman attacking his fans ...
Joseph Osmundson writes extensively about PrEP — his personal experience — for this week's Village Voice. Like so many great essays, it's not 100% about the thing you think it's about, and there are going to be passages that most gay men will recognize.
On how AIDS has always informed his sexuality:
My generation of gay men came after the plague but before the pill. What I knew was that fifty thousand people died in the U.S. in 1995. I was thirteen. What I knew was that sex kills, that no pleasure is ever free of worry, of death. The first thing I learned about sex was Kaposi's sarcoma lesions, gaunt thirty-two-year-olds on TV. I became a gay man and a scientist with a background in microbiology and biochemistry. Viruses have always fascinated me for being so complex and yet so simple, for being so deadly with so few genes.
On the tendency to have condomless sex as soon as you're in something like a relationship:
We'd been having unprotected sex for a year. I've always had unprotected sex with my boyfriends, a sign that we cared for each other, that we had built something like trust. I insisted on couples trips to the free clinic after three months of monogamy. I loved this man in part because his sex seemed so free, so out of my control. I begged him not to put me at risk. I told him my body was in his hands. He looked me in the eye and said I could trust him. I did trust him. After I caught him cheating, we used condoms. I got tested. He said that he never had raw sex with anyone but me, that it was an intimacy I alone had earned. I believed he was telling the truth. I trusted that he only cheated safely.
The (anonymous) man who became the first known to contract HIV in spite of using PrEP has opened up about his experience on the drug—and says he regrets nothing except his bad luck with the person who infected him.
He says:
The more we know, the better we’re prepared. PrEP’s a calculated risk. It’s important for people to know that there is the possibility as opposed to the fantasy that there have been no recorded infections on PrEP. At least now there is one, so it makes it more real. And I tell people, ‘It didn’t work for me, but I still think it’s great.’ If I had to do it all over again, I would still go on PrEP. I just wouldn’t have sex with that specific person.
The man admits that being on PrEP created such a sense of protection due to the low odds of HIV infection that he stopped using condoms, becoming so accustomed to sex without them that if someone on a hook-up app requested condoms, he would call off the encounter.
“Being the house ethnic was destroying my life and my sense of myself. Because I had been consigned to play every dusky maiden you’ve ever seen in your life in movies.”Watch actress Rita Moreno, the first Latino person to have won an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony and an Emmy, give her #BriefButSpectacular take on her lifetime in show business (as well as an acapella performance of ‘This Is All I Ask”.)
Posted by PBS NewsHour on Thursday, December 10, 2015
