Truvada "Whore" Interview
I really do try to keep an open mind whenever this topic comes up. I know HIV negative men who are taking Truvada as a prophylaxis and they are taking it for very good reasons. I don't like to judge that. Everyone's coming from a different place. To put it into perspective, I'm outside working on my property a lot and if there were a drug that battled Lyme disease I know I would take it.
So Truvada for the HIV negative person really is a personal choice, and there are gay men of all ages opting to use Truvada. Here's an interview that helps explain why they are doing it, in their own words.
Blake debated whether or not to take PrEP, but kept returning to one fact: He’s a gay black man living in Washington, D.C., a city with a very high level of HIV infections.
“My likelihood of having a sex partner who is positive, knowingly or unknowingly, is astronomical,” Blake told us, pointing out that young gay black men account for much of the increase in new HIV infections. Studies indicate that, although black men are more likely to use condoms during sex, the high incidence infection among black men who have sex with black men means they are more likely to come into contact with the virus than white men.
“I had to confront realities about myself,” said Blake, who serves as chair of the Young Black Gay Men’s Leadership Initiative, “including my race, my age, my risks for HIV and how I like to have sex. Particularly if I want to keep having what I define as great, fully satisfying, roll-over-and-smoke-a-cigarette unencumbered sex.”
And then there's this from the comments:
Good, they don’t get HIV…but they will get chlamydia, gonorrhoea, hepatitus, herpes, genital warts, syphilis and everything else…why start using a pretty aggressive and risky drug that only prevents ONE std when you can just slip on a condom that prevents most std’s?
So the debate continues. You can read more here.
James Duke Mason on Baltimore
James Duke Mason is an LGBT rights activist I've never heard of before, from Los Angeles, who believes that all LGBT people should stand with Baltimore.
Thirdly, they resonate with me as a gay man and an advocate for the rights of the LGBT community. Although I do not condone violence and regret that the protests in Baltimore have at times been overshadowed by a relatively small group of rioters who have tried to use the death of Freddie Gray as an excuse for criminal behavior, I do think that protesting and civil disobedience is a critical part of forcing the political establishment to take notice.
Throughout the history of the gay rights movement, protesting has been a huge tool towards creating more awareness, progress and equality. In 1969, it was the Stonewall riots that sparked the beginning of the modern gay rights revolution. In 1979, when Dan White, the man who assassinated the gay rights icon and San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, was sentenced to just 1 year in prison for the murder, the LGBT community took to the streets to express their anger in what has now become known as the “White Night Riots”.
You know, Mr. Mason seems very young and maybe a bit too young to be commenting on a topic as serious as this one. He doesn't present one single brilliant point in the entire article to make things better, which in turn only makes people angrier. We do, indeed, have racial issues and all kinds of discrimination issues here in the US, with African Americans and gays...and women for that matter. We do have issues with police and minorities...just ask any gay man who was ever entrapped unfairly in a cruising area by a hot looking young under cover cop purposely making lewd and inappropriate gestures.
The problem is we need more people to help bring all this together, not tear it apart even more than it already is. I think the first step would be to admit there's a problem on both sides and take it from there. I don't think it's an impossible situation and I don't think most people are racist. I do think everyone wants a solution.
You can read the rest here.
There are comments that vary in opinion.
Police and Gay Culture
Speaking of police, here's one that really shows how little some (I hate to say all) police know about gay men. Evidently, a man's life was ruined because the police didn't know the meaning of the word Twink.
A guy in Ireland was arrested for allegedly having 71 images of underage porn. When he denied it, the police laughed at him.
So they confronted Mike with the images, and so began a lesson in gay terminology that we would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at.
Mike, who had truthfully never seen the cached images (not that it would have mattered), recognized them immediately for what they were — twinks. But try explaining that to a group of straight Irish cops.
“I’d never seen it before but it was a twink, that’s gay slang for a feminine looking man over 18,” he told The Mirror. “The officers hadn’t a clue what I was talking about.”
“I said he looked about 24 and they laughed. They said the picture was of a 13-year-old boy and that I was going court where the jury would agree he was a child.”
There's a lot more here. He's free today but claims his life has been ruined because the police do not know anything about gay culture.That doesn't surprise me. There are many who think they know a lot about gay culture...and they don't.
Amazon Link
Five Star Amazon Review!!
I loved this book and found the plot to be very exciting! This book is full of twists and turns along with being a romance. Proctor and Blair are a great duo. They own a detective agency and are called to duty in their next big case. Issac went missing and he is a celebrity and model. Nobody really knows what happened and Proctor and Blair are called in to complete the case. Issac had something special about him that makes Proctor and Blair wonder. While they try to solve the case, they get more intimately involved with each other. I loved how fast moving the pace was and the story grabbed my attention! This is quite the romance and it's a mystery that will keep you on your toes. I hope that the author will continue the series.