Women aren’t the only people who are slut-shamed, as Stephen S. Mills found out when he went for a routine (and responsible) health screening.

He wheeled toward me on his office chair and eyed me closely from behind his thick glasses. He was in his late fifties and overweight with stringy gray hair flopping down his face, and he had perfected the government worker’s “I Hate the World” face.

Our brief encounter had already included him asking how I was and when I returned the question, he proclaimed that he was tired and ready for his first vacation in five years, which I learned he was taking the following week. I didn’t dare ask how he could be so tired since his department kept such limited hours, nor did I ask why he hadn’t taken a vacation in five years when government workers are given many days off including holidays and weekends.

No, I kept my mouth shut.

Before he began to draw my blood, he checked over the brief paperwork that was required for a full STD panel. I had carefully filled it out in the waiting room next to pregnant mothers and nervous teens talking on their cell phones sitting right under the “No Cell Phones Allowed” sign.

He looked up from the sheets of paper and said, “Twenty partners in the last six months?” It was written down, so I’m not sure why it came out of his mouth as a question.

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“We are doing an HIV test as well?”

“Yes.” It was also written on the sheet.

“Well, let’s hope you don’t have it. Twenty people is a whole lot of risk.”

 ◊♦◊

It took me a minute to fully understand what had just happened. This man who worked for the Florida Department of Health in Orange County where I lived at the time had just slut shamed me. He wasn’t interested in any real conversation about sexual health. He didn’t ask me about my safer sex practices. He just saw on paper that I had 20 partners in six months and those partners were men, which means (in his mind) there’s a good chance I have HIV.

I was there getting tested because I’m sexually active and responsible about my sexual health. I went to the health department because it is cheaper, and you can get the full STD panel done. What I didn’t come for was to be slut shamed by a man who looked like he hadn’t had sex in a really long time (Yes, that’s a low blow, but he deserves it).

I was angry, but do you make a scene with the person about to stick a needle in your arm? He no longer seemed so interested in talking anyway. I sat there as he took my blood and thought about what a terrible person he would be to tell someone they were HIV+. Would the results come with a “What did expect, you slut?” or a rolling of the eyes? I also pondered the effect his comment would have on people who might be less confident than I am about sex and the choices I’ve made.

For a culture that broadcasts sex all the time in the form of entertainment and advertisements, we also spend a lot of time slut shaming people (often females, but not only). We promote sex on the one hand, yet never want to have real conversations about sexuality or sexual health (even in a place like the STD clinic of the public health department).

And if you enjoy sex and have multiple partners you are seen as someone who deserves what they get whether that be HIV or raped or any other undesirable situation. People in this country are constantly trying to regulate people’s sexuality and sexual decisions from birth control to gay marriage.

 ◊♦◊

I was twenty-nine when this man slut shamed me. By that age, I was confident in my sexual choices. I practice safer sex, but I also have many sexual partners, and I’m in a committed relationship at the same time. I’m used to raised eyebrows and judgment from people. But these are my choices, and if I’m coming in to be tested on a regular basis like a responsible sexual person, why should I be shamed for those choices?

A twenty-year old me would have felt the shame in this man’s comment. I would have worried and questioned myself in negative ways. Slut shaming doesn’t stop people from having sex, but it can lead to people being less responsible and more secretive with their sexual health, which helps no one. Exploring your sexuality, having more than one partner, and thinking about your sexual health are all good things and shouldn’t be demonized.

◊♦◊

After this incident, I’ve continued to see slut shaming in many places including inside the gay community. In the last decade the focus of the gay rights movement (for better or worse) has been on the fight for marriage equality. I’m all for equal rights, and I recently married my partner of ten years in New York, where I now live, but this focus on the fight for marriage has come at a cost. That cost has been a “sweep anything out of the ordinary under the rug,” which means people like me who are in open relationships.

The start of the gay rights movement led to sexual freedom and exploration for gay men, but now organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (the largest lobbying group for gay rights) has pushed the idea that we deserve equal rights because we are just like everyone else. I hate this argument for any group of people. I don’t need to be just like you for us both to have equal rights. I don’t need to assuage your fears about my life to make you comfortable giving me the rights everyone should have. There’s been a big surge in trying to mainstream gay culture.

I’m in a loving committed relationship, but I also enjoy sex with other people, threesomes, and going to sexual events like Black Party or bars like The Eagle. I have no desire to be straight or to have children or to live many people’s definition of a “normal” life. I’m probably not like many people who are reading this piece, and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with me, and there’s nothing wrong with you.

The issue here is sex positive education and facilities. Trying to shame people into conforming will never work, nor is it healthy. One thing that often draws people to the gay community (gay or not) is acceptance of things outside the norm. Losing this acceptance is a dangerous path to go down. I’ve seen a growing amount of conservatism among gay people who seem willing to turn their backs on the rest of us. Offering us up as the sacrifices to the cause. Isn’t there room for all of us?

This is often on full display around pride month when many gay people express their disapproval of pride parades showcasing half naked men and women or groups or organizations that they don’t see as helping move equality along (leather groups, dykes on bikes, etc.). But I’ve also seen it in other more personal ways. I’ve often been confronted by random strangers on hookup apps like Grindr or Scruff telling me how they disapprove of my open relationship. Guess what? You don’t have to approve, and I didn’t ask.

I’ve also seen people being negative about new preventive medicine for HIV called Truvada, which is a pill you take daily that is proving to be very effective against contracting HIV. It’s actually one of the biggest breakthroughs in HIV research, yet few people are taking it.

The assumption here is if you take this, you are a slut. Some doctors are even refusing to prescribe it even though it has very few side effects. Some worry it will encourage people to make risker choices even though no research supports this claim. I recently began taking Truvada myself and was lucky to find a supportive and informed doctor to prescribe it, but some of my friends in other cities haven’t been so lucky.

 ◊♦◊

When I got home from my slut shaming experience a few years ago, I wrote a letter to the health department explaining in detail what happened and submitted it on their website where they claim to take feedback seriously. As you might expect, I never heard back.

As a culture we have to stop trying to regulate people’s lives or deny them proper healthcare based on our personal feelings towards sex or sexuality. Like our issues with selling sex, then shaming sex, America has a similar issue with proclaiming to love diversity, yet attacking it just as quickly.

—PhotoMike Babiarz/Flickr

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How one doctor’s appointment felt like a life sentence for one writer.

I never appreciated sex as much as when I stopped having it.

And while I can say I stopped voluntarily, I don’t want to fool you into thinking it was the kind of voluntary that comes from some deep­seated search for truth and light and a monastic existence.

No. I stopped because of the STD.

It wasn’t the first STD I had. The first one had been a momentary blip on my panic radar.

Something my dermatologist eased my fears about by saying, listen if you have to get one, this is the one to get. It’s easily curable.

The second one however, was entirely different.

I have always loved doctors’ temperate nature, their calm demeanor makes scary things feel less so. However, doctors are not therapists and when things aren’t easily curable the words of doctors feel like bandaids that don’t stay on, not even for a second.

Like those of my physician: It’s viral, but it’s pretty common. Most of the population has it. In fact most of the people who have it never even know about it. You’ll always carry the virus but your body clears out the physical signs in about one to two years.

It only helped partially rationalize it for me. Unfortunately even though most of the population had it, only 1% of the population got the physical manifestation of it that I got.

It was not the 1% I was looking to be a part of.

◊♦◊

Most of the time we don’t know who has STDs. The close­quarters “who is sleeping with who” rumors of college mostly stop once you graduate. The large majority of us keep our baggage checked secretly away. We use STDs as slander against people we don’t like or have been wronged by. People with STDs are punchlines of jokes. People with STDs aren’t people we know or care about. They certainly aren’t ourselves.

I was devastated.

I became frustrated at how varied and incredibly inconsistent the research was. The more I read the more conflicting statistics I saw. I got angry at science for not knowing more. I realized how little we actually know about how our bodies work, why viruses happen, who they happen to, and in what frequency.

I went through months of sexual self­-seclusion. My therapist encouraged me sex was not off the table but I was ashamed and embarrassed. Avoiding it altogether was easiest. While I had been forced to accept my new reality, I certainly would not make more efforts to confront it.

One of the beautiful things about being in my 20s was the idea that anything could happen at anytime.

Honestly, I was probably never going to date a supermodel, join the mile­high club, or end up the focus of a threesome…

But those thing could have happened.

Suddenly none of those things would have been possible without a conversation I didn’t want to have.

◊♦◊

I got angry at myself. I thought about every girl I’d ever slept with. I wanted to assign blame.

I didn’t think I had defined myself entirely by my sexual stature, but I was shocked to realize how wrong I was. I didn’t recognize this person I had become. I felt tainted and subsequently castrated.

Things I loved doing made less sense if they wouldn’t end in sex.

I stopped drinking as much. I stopped being the last to leave parties.

I realized how much the possibility of female interaction determined my social plans.

I left bars early realizing that the only thing I really wanted was a good night’s sleep. I couldn’t bare holding on to this by myself anymore. Slowly I started telling people, a few close friends mainly. All of them were sympathetic. Nobody made me feel as cast out as I had made myself feel. And it felt good to share. I felt more accepted.

Most of my friends dismissed it as just something that happens to us which part of me appreciated.

But part of me was still angry; sure you say that but you aren’t the one dealing with it. You aren’t the one avoiding sex.

◊♦◊

Somehow I met a girl who happened to be accepting enough not to care. She was a colleague and after drunkenly making out on two separate occasions I decided to tell her.

It happened late one night over google chat. Not quite the face to face courage I would have hoped for myself, but it was all the courage I could muster.

After I had told her everything her response came instantly.

Thank you for telling me.

There’s not much to say.

It doesn’t change the fact that I am still wildly attracted to you.

It was overwhelming. Her openness and maturity baffled me.

I realized I might not have been as supportive had the tables been turned, and that depressed me. I felt disgusted in myself.

Not only was I casting myself aside, I was also finding out I was not as open as I thought I was. Not as secure in myself. The list went on.

It just so happened this girl also happened to be just young enough to have been vaccinated against what I had… against me. Something I was born too late to benefit from.

And so we dated.

Months would go by where I’d think I was in the clear, but every time I had to go back to the dermatologist for treatment I’d do it shaky voiced and ashamed.My girlfriend would comfort me. My doctor would play down the severity of it.

The sequence repeated itself over and over again.

I missed my ignorance. Desperately. I cried. I pitied myself. I got angry. So angry.

I called into question rock stars and celebrities. Surely they must have it too right? How could they not have? The odds must have made it so.

Why me?

The anger was always there.

◊♦◊

It has been almost 3 years now and a lot has changed.

I have had several new dermatologists, several new doctors and my girlfriend and I recently broke up.

But I still get mad. That much hasn’t changed.

I still get frustrated. I still isolate myself.

I try to look at it as some greater plan to protect me against some other horrible decision.

Like there is some greater plan for me.

But I’m not sure I believe any of it.

I do understand that having something does not make you that thing. But I understand it the same way I understand gravity, theoretically.

It feels impossible to deal with the idea that I carry this thing. Through nobody’s fault but my own I have felt like an outcast, a reject, an embarrassment, and most frighteningly but also hyperbolically, a weapon.

I’ll note that even as I write this, whenever I think about it, I feel bad for myself long enough for gratitude to eventually seep in. I’m not dying. I don’t have cancer. I am as healthy as I’ve ever been. All that’s changed is I am no longer allowed to be reckless with my body. But maybe what I want, what we all want, is not to be reckless but the always available opportunity to be reckless, the option, the possibility.

I know at some point, if I ever want to have sex again, I will have to have the conversation with a woman again. Maybe more than once if I’m lucky. It terrifies me. It pre­embarrasses me. I am afraid of being made fun of, of somebody freaking out, of having to be publicly, instantaneously embarrassed and ashamed in front of another person. In real life.

I wonder if I could handle that.

I meet women and think to myself, how would she react if I told her? Flirting, while exciting, quickly seems pointless. It causes my already existent anxiety to heat my body like a solar flare.

◊♦◊

When I was 25 I took a personal essay writing class. One week, a semi­hipster seeming girl who I might call a flibbertigibbet took a deep breath before announcing her piece:

So this is the Herpes story.

My mouth hung open. I had never heard such honesty from a stranger before. I remember wondering about her lifestyle and how she got it, what mistakes she had made. I remember when my turn came to give her feedback all I could say was how brave it was of her to write that.

Looking back, I feel more compassion for that girl than I possibly could have the day I heard her essay. I realize as I age that the greatest delusion we all suffer on a daily basis is that of control.

But I certainly don’t feel brave. I feel tired.

Tired of the endless inner monologue of panic and rationalization, of fear and embarrassment and the oppressive constant awareness of my situation.

Yes, we have input, we may even have influence, but there are so many more things that are beyond our control than we could possibly fathom. And on days when I’m feeling embarrassed, on days when I feel angry, and on days when I feel sad, I take comfort in that. That this could happen to anybody. That nobody really has any control. That the only way to prevent this would have been to live less of my life.

And that gives me solace even in something I haven’t come to fully understand or accept.

Even if perhaps, I never will.

Photo: Roxanna Salceda/Flickr

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