By Ian L. Haddock
I’ve had the great fortune of spending most of my life doing work in community. But my passion didn’t originally stem from wanting to change the world; it came from the desire to save myself. At age 20, I was introduced to the idea of sex work, a line of work I would ultimately participate in for years to come. When I entered the industry, and therefore began having numerous sexual partners, my mentors and friends stressed to me the importance of being regularly tested for STIs and HIV. I took their advice and, in the process, was introduced to community health and advocacy work. As I learned more, it became my goal to make this work my full-time job. Soon after, I was honored to be hired to an outreach position.
Sex work had left me feeling devalued and used; my outreach work helped to revive me. Landing a position on the frontlines of community health helped me to find my voice as I retook full autonomy of my body. As I progressed, I realized that many people feel that they cannot lead healthy, responsible, and sexually active lives because of past traumas surrounding the intersections of race and sexuality—even those who have not participated in sex work. I knew I needed to help change this narrative.
But first, I had to examine the multiple layers of my own sexuality to better understand how sex played a role in my life. At first, I felt silenced out of guilt, shame, and stigma. I was working diligently to help end the HIV epidemic but refused to acknowledge that sex itself is a major part of sexuality, a connection that is a huge part of this fight. It’s easy to ignore sex and to instead focus on public health terminology. But by doing so, we miss out on the opportunity to promote responsibility and autonomy over our bodies.
So, I would be silent no more. The truth is, the sex culture I was involved with was filled with condomless sex, poor negotiation of risk identifiers, and a feeling that I was only valuable for sex. My whole life, I heard the rhetoric of “gay men get AIDS and die,” and “one in two Black gay men will contract HIV in their lifetime.” Instead of heeding these warnings, they caused me to give up all hope of remaining HIV-negative.
I had been so focused on ascending in my new career field that I had become robotic, creating outreach programming, promoting buzzwords for the community to learn and associate with, identifying funders who would help our programs sustain and grow. Yet, when I stopped to take a look around, I found my fellow community members to be much like me: waiting on their reactive HIV test results. I knew I had to do something different.
I needed to first stop conflating HIV with my own risky sex life before I would be able to make a positive impact on my communities. This realization first took me to sex therapy, then to activism. Sex therapy taught me that my conceptions and the related trauma were the mechanisms behind the irresponsibility I had toward sex. Activism taught me that I wasn’t an anomaly in this respect.
Through this work, I learned that, in consensual sex, we are responsible for our own bodies. It is not our partner’s right or job to be responsible over our bodies. With the innovations of PEP, PrEP, multiple types of condoms, and spreading the knowledge that undetectable equals untransmittable (U=U), we can take control over our own status.
These are the ways in which I bring my whole self into my work. It’s a mixture of being on the frontline and engaging in grassroots activism, heavy social media outreach, and being able to share my own story, which I am doing through my current work as a CDC Let’s Stop HIV Together ambassador.
While there are many ways to help spark change in our communities, one of the most impactful is to share the ways you’ve helped yourself. Not every queer person fears HIV. Not every queer person has lots of sex (or any sex at all, for that matter). But every queer person is faced with the complexities of navigating how sex fits into their sexual identity or gender expression. And the quicker we normalize this conversation, the easier it will be to eradicate the stigma around the testing, treatment, and prevention of HIV.
Today is National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Let us remember that Black women are 17.2 times more likely to contract HIV than their Caucasian counterparts. Black men have a 4.3 times higher chance. These numbers are not because of risk—statistics show that the rate of “risky sex” is lower in these communities than in other subpopulations. Rather, they are the result of high rates of poverty, community viral load, stigma, and shame.
Your activism can change that. Simply having open and honest dialogues about sex with your friends and family in-person and through your social media networks can help to fight stigma. Choose to not be ashamed of having conversations about sex, your responsibility, and the autonomy of your body. That’s activism.
Together, we can stop HIV. If you choose to mark today by having an open conversation about sex, here are some helpful questions to consider:
1) What does sex positivity mean to you?
2) How are you being responsible with your sex life?
3) How can we stop HIV together?
Please use the hashtags #LetsStopHIVTogether, #NBHAAD, and #SexPositive so that we can all join in on the conversation. For more information on National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, visit cdc.gov/hiv/library/awareness/nbhaad.html.
