Hurley M, Grierson JW, Willis JM, McDonald KM, Pitts MK; International Conference on AIDS.
Int Conf AIDS. 2002 Jul 7-12; 14: abstract no. ThOrE1500.
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University,, Melbourne, Australia
ISSUES: Cultures of HIV positive gay male sex in developed epidemics have outpaced policy environments to the extent that policy environments threaten to undercut safe sex cultures. In Australia, minor variations in HIV incidence and increases in unprotected sex are being interpreted as breakdowns in safe sex practice, though there is no concomitant increase in HIV infection nationally. DESCRIPTION: The HIV Futures I and II quantitative (n=924) and qualitative studies clearly indicate that HIV positive gay men in Australia take good care not to put their HIV negative sexual partners at risk of HIV. Lessons: There is a mismatch between policy environments and the lived sexual cultures of HIV positive gay men. This mismatch has the effect of demonising HIV positive gay male sex, and casual gay sex generally, as 'barebacking' and sexual excess. Same sex passion is represented as threatening to public health. An alarmist interpretive framework of imminent risk has two problems. Firstly, it singularly fails to understand why the conceptual difference between 'unprotected' and 'unsafe' sex matters. Secondly, it encourages policy responses that undercut the co-operation of lived gay male sexual cultures with partnerships supportive of dynamic safe sex practices. The cultures and practices that enable the social enacting of care between HIV positive and negative gay men are unproductively constrained and public discourse around them overly delimited. The HIV Futures qualitative study confirms that the field of safe sex constituted by HIV positive gay men is dynamic and careful but threatened by being burdened with requirements that it act to protect HIV negative gay men. RECOMMENDATIONS: Implications for intervention include educational and policy initiatives integrating understanding of HIV positive sex cultures and HIV negative unprotected sex into shared practices of harm reduction between HIV positive and negative gay men.
Publication Types:
Keywords:
- Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
- Australia
- Culture
- Educational Status
- Environment
- HIV Infections
- HIV Seropositivity
- Health Education
- Homosexuality
- Homosexuality, Male
- Humans
- Male
- Safe Sex
- Sexual Partners
- Teaching
- Unsafe Sex
- education
Other ID:
UI: 102255256
From Meeting Abstracts