It happened again last night, the first time for about eight years, but it happened. Maybe because it was my birthday and I wanted love or felt I deserved a treat. The guy was cute (I’d met him at a sauna six months previously and we’d been exchanging messages ever since), I invited him round, we were fooling around on the bed, I mumbled something about a condom but wanted to be in him bad, he sat on my dick without one. We fucked for a few minutes then, worried, I pulled out.

“I’m positive,” I said.

He wasn’t. He was shocked. He was also naïve: he’d only ever once had a test before and I knew he’d let other guys bareback him.

I rationalised. “At least I told you,” I said, “Though I should have said it sooner. And I’m on the meds and am undetectable. And I didn’t cum.”

“Yes, but you knew and you didn’t say,” he said. “I thought you were an educated guy and would be responsible. Look, I’m shaking. Don’t you feel guilty?”

I did. A paranoid thought went through my head. What if he went and got a test – and was positive. Would he blame me? Would the police come knocking on the door? Jesus.

He left. “Happy birthday – and cheer up,” he said as he went out.

I was training a group of experienced volunteers, many of them people living with HIV, at a London HIV centre one day and was talking about HIV transmission and safer sex.

“I don’t know if, in my 20 years of living with HIV, I’ve passed it on to anyone,” I said. “I very much hope not; but it’s possible.”

After the day one of the participants came to me and said, “I’ve never heard anyone say that before. Not just in a training session, I mean, ever.”

Most of the 60,000 people with HIV in the UK didn’t infect anyone last year. But a couple of thousand, at least, did.

If you admit in public that there’s a chance that you, at some point, may have been one of those people, you get jumped on. I once did on a web board and was told that, as someone known in the HIV world, I was a role model and shouldn’t even admit to ever having had unsafe sex, in case, presumably, it gave everyone permission to.

You’re either good all the time or you’re antisocial, irresponsible and – these days – potentially criminal. Which doesn’t leave much room in the middle to discuss the human, the times when we succeed in protecting others despite the rejection, loneliness, fear of disclosure, illness and self-hatred that HIV can bring with it.

Or the times when we fail to, for exactly the same reasons.

No condom = no talk = no AIDS

There were two periods in my history with HIV when I had more than a little unprotected sex.

After my partner died of AIDS in 1990 I was completely uninterested in relationships for a while but went on occasional forays to cruising areas, just to have some kind of contact with another person. I rarely asked if they were poz and I rarely told. Although on the surface I was still healthy and positive-thinking, I think part of me had gone with Sam; I was still grieving and didn’t care much about myself or others. I craved contact but any real contact would involve talking about AIDS and that would bring the grief back. Solution: no name, virtually no talk, casual sex.

No talk means not having to disclose, means avoiding the subject of HIV altogether, means avoiding discussion of condoms (though if others used them I didn’t object) because to discuss condoms was to discuss HIV. Sex was my escape and the last thing I wanted to do was think about the thing I was escaping from.

Despite the fact that I hadn’t thought twice about going with Sam when he told me he was poz (and getting tested to find out if I was too), I carried with me an assumption that disclosing HIV implied instant rejection.

“Ah, but what if it turned out they were poz too?” you ask.

Well, at that point I didn’t want another partner with HIV. I couldn’t have stood another loss at a time I knew I was likely to become ill and need looking after.

Even so, I did one thing that just felt at the time like the exploration of a side of me but which now, I think, was at least subconsciously to do with not wanting to infect others. I switched from being largely top to almost 100% bottom and indeed couldn’t perform if asked to fuck someone. I’d been top with Paul and although it hadn’t been me who infected him, I sat through a horrible death and some part of me rebelled against doing that to anyone.

Why not just use condoms all the time? you ask. I don’t know the answer to that one completely. I came of age at a time no one was using them so they weren’t part of my repertoire. I’ve always had difficulty fucking with them and sometimes lose both the sensation and my hardon.

If I dig deeper, I think I’m also someone with ah unusually strong need for love and union with others – like most sluts, I am a romantic in disguise – and bits of rubber symbolise cold sex, not love.

A new test

Anyway, I eventually recovered my sense of self a bit, thanks to time healing wounds and to a determined effort to get myself some support, including support from others with HIV. I started dating properly and met my next partner Gary in 1993.

This involved a new test; coming out as positive to someone who actually mattered to me. This I didn’t find that difficult; it was clear that if I wanted this man in my life, he had to know about my status.

I not only knew he was HIV negative but, through a mutual friend, that he had been very scared of HIV in the past. I told him in the pub about two weeks after we met. We’d had sex but it had been safe. He said: “Hmm. I’ll need to think about this,” phoned me back a week later after I’d convinced myself I’d blown a relationship, and said “OK, I still want to go out with you.”

So obviously after that for the whole of a ten-year relationship, we had safer sex.

Yes? No.

We used condoms at first and reasonably regularly throughout. I always would if I fucked him.

But we slipped more and more into not using them if he fucked me. At first it was done without really talking about it. We just ‘let the moment happen’ even though the condoms were in the drawer, acknowledged we’d been ‘bad’ afterwards, and vowed not to do it again. But it increasingly became the level of safety we tolerated in the relationship. He stayed negative.

By 1995 anyway I was increasingly uninterested in sex as AIDS took hold of me. Gary saw me through it all. Saved in the nick of time by combination therapy, I wasn’t really well enough to think or more than cuddles till 1998.

Barebacking – and its consequences

At this point, or shortly after, we got the internet and I discovered barebacking websites. I remember the erotic charge I got when I first saw one. Here were guys celebrating an utterly taboo activity – something I missed, something I craved. Something I intended to do.

I met up with some guys through the sites. In those days – despite the fact that gay men everywhere were probably continuing to, on occasion, have unprotected sex - to be open about it felt, for a brief while, like membership of some ultimate sexual secret society. There was even a little group of us met upstairs at a pub in Soho! Oddly, I only ever had sex with one of them.

For a short while I deliberately sought unprotected sex through barebacking sites. No, it didn’t feel like dicing with my life, mine or others’. I felt the worst thing had already happened to me: what else did I have to fear? In any case, I soon discovered that the vast majority of overt barebackers were HIV positive, and the ones who said they weren’t were lying. I never once met – though I did talk to – some naïve HIV-negative young thing that thought it was a thrill. I never met a bugchaser.

Three things shook me out of the mood for fetishising condomless sex. First, Gary had a scare. We went to the leather bar in Barcelona during the 2002 World AIDS Conference. Used to free condoms on the premises, he didn’t take any, then, when he found none, let a stranger fuck him.

The result was three months of anxiety – and anger directed at me. “You and your barebacking! How are the rest of us supposed to keep ourselves safe?” It shook me out of my complacency. I realised identifying as a ‘barebacker’ wasn’t a choice that only affected me and the guys I fucked with. Maybe I was glamourising something stupid and dangerous, something self-hating, after all.

Then, of course, I got an STI. Anal warts. God, those buggers took a year to go. I’d rather have syphilis any day (and I have, years ago), what with the effect on the self-image and regular sessions of indignity as doctors stuck liquid-nitrogen guns and lasers up my ass. Ouch! Never again!

Learning to disclose

But thirdly and finally I started saying something else instead of “Wanna do it raw?” I started saying “I’m poz. Are you?” I realised the erotic charge behind barebacking was to do with making sexy something I was at heart still deeply ashamed of. Yes, sixteen years positive and I still couldn’t disclose.

Well, I learned to. I got a few rejections. Some guys never contacted again, some I’d done it safe with didn’t want to know. Some came out as poz too.

Weirdly, disclosure suddenly enabled me to use condoms again. I found I’d developed some kind of fundamental self-respect that made me feel like more of a man – something that had hardening effects on the dick. I started topping guys again – safely. I realised that if I told a guy I was poz and he still wanted to do it then – hey it means I’m sexyyy. Result!

I split up with Gary three years ago. I’m not happy about being 50 and single and wonder if I’ll get a lifemate to grow old with. But I’m not ashamed of HIV any more. I’m always safe and/or I always disclose. I’m nothing like the slut I used to be anyway, though I do occasionally worry about STDs and superinfection.

But I’ve haven’t put anyone in danger of my HIV, or myself in danger of spreading it, for years.

Until last night.

One more thing: I’m a very publicly-positive person. But this piece is, potentially, the admission of a criminal act.

Therefore I will have to sign it,

Anon.