Letting my ‘guard’ down
Shortly before my 28th birthday, I discovered that a friend of mine was HIV positive. He wasn’t a very close friend, but I knew him quite well and it came as a shock to me because he was well educated, intelligent and financially established in the world, and I believed that people like him did not get HIV. I couldn’t understand how someone like that could be “dumb” enough to have unprotected sex. In the nineties almost every gay movie I could get my hands on was about gay men struggling with HIV or AIDS. How could he not have known to wear a condom? It was constantly drummed into us.