If you’re HIV-negative, you’ll need to get on PrEP and take necessary steps to protect yourself. If you get HIV, you’re going to take your meds and live a long, happy life. I want to reach back through the years, hug him, and say, “Baby, you’re not going to die.” When I read it now, I cheer for that younger, scared me. The poetry is bad and cringingly written in all caps, but it’s one relic of my early writing I treasure.Īt the end of the poem, I come to the conclusion that coming out is worth it, even in the face of death - that it’s better to live a short, authentic life than to live in fear. I even wrote a 10+ page poem called “Heavy Is Venus” (H - I - V) in high school when I was 14 or 15, still deeply in the closet, in which I went through my feelings on this. In high school, I listened to musicals like Rent and believed wholeheartedly that if I chose to live life as an out gay man, I was sentencing myself to a slow death from AIDS.
Welcome to the party - but don't be unprepared.
This invisibility and isolation makes stumbling into a gay bar (or discovering a hookup app) akin to opening a treasure trove and finding that it’s yours, all yours. Where are cartoons with two little boy dogs sharing a spaghetti noodle, falling in love? Not on children’s TV. When we see those same cartoons, we understand a jarring truth: We are out of sync with the world. Every message they’ve been taught through childhood - when the cartoon boy dog meets the cartoon girl dog and the girl dog bats a pair of absurd eyelashes - cues them to have sex. As soon as puberty hits, bam! They’re fucking. Your straight peers may start early - in high school or earlier.
#VERY YOUNG GAY XXX HOW TO#
They have no idea how to prepare you for the eros embraced by many members of our community or the risks that come with it. The amount of sex some gay men have (and the ease with which it can be acquired) is preposterous to most straight folks - including your friends and family. You might not realize it now, but you’re growing into a culture that celebrates sex.