Disclosure

The other day I was with a few friends chatting when the conversation took us to rumours about someone being HIV positive. What stroke me was a comment from one of the guys along the lines of “If he was positive, he wouldn’t have had sex without telling me, he’s not an asshole”.

A couple of things surprised me here. First is that someone seemed to assume that HIV+ people go around disclosing their status to everyone they have sex with spontaneously. And second, that if they didn’t they’d be “assholes”.

I know some people who happen to be positive. I also know they do have sex with other people like everybody else, and they don’t go around disclosing their status unless either someone asks them directly or things are getting serious so they want to share  their status with their potential partner.

I also know they are most certainly not assholes, they take every precaution to make sure they neither expose others to unnecessary risks nor themselves to reinfection.

After so many campaigns to reduce stigma, inform people of what is safe and what is not, and telling people they cannot assume their sex partners are negative based on look; they still seem to make such silly assumptions.

What is more important, are they taking additional risks by believing someone “nice” would be disclosing their status? And with statistics suggesting a big proportion of infected people do not actually know their status, does it even make any difference?

I know negative people with positive partners that have been having sex for many years and never infect each other. And this is simply because they take the usual precautions, each and every time.

Shouldn’t everyone simply play safe and stop making assumptions based on whether someone is nice or not?

What do you think?