The guilt that you feel when someone catches HIV and you haven’t been talking about PrEP is so extreme,” he says, his voice stricken with sadness. “I knew I wasn’t protecting anybody by keeping it quiet. Then he realised the devastating consequences of silence. This wasn’t always the case: when Domino first discovered the treatment he kept quiet until a close friend contracted HIV. A few years ago he founded Porn4PrEP, which fuses sexual health advice and activist toolkits with sex scenes starring HIV+ performers, and continues to advocate for treatment. This isn’t the first time that Domino has used on-screen fucking to concisely communicate PrEP's efficacy. In other words, Domino needn’t have worried. Domino admittedly “freaked out,” (“My HIV knowledge was really rubbish back then”) but quickly realised that Parker was undetectable. (“Tony thought I had been told – that’s what had always happened in the past”). His first porn scene was with an HIV+ partner, Tony Parker, although he wasn’t told beforehand.
But in addition, performers like Jason Domino build initiatives like The Good Porn Project, which goes a step further by also tackling issues like transphobia and sexual racism. So, if we can’t trust sex education or a supposedly faithful biopic of an HIV+ icon to tackle the subject, what can we trust? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is gay porn.įor starters, a handful of HIV+ porn stars have sex on-screen to demonstrate in extreme detail that treatment works. Meanwhile, mainstream media and entertainment treats HIV as either a historical footnote or glosses over the subject entirely – a fact proven once again by the recent Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which arguably neuters his radical legacy by creating a pleasant, ‘safe’ narrative that won’t piss off Middle England – or, of course, hinder its box-office numbers. As a result, HIV+ women in particular are all too often rendered invisible.Įngland still doesn't deliver effective, mandatory sex ed in schools, although Wales and Scotland recently introduced LGBTQ-inclusive lessons. But the virus can affect anyone – a fact largely obscured by the homophobic panic of mainstream media, which used the AIDS epidemic to demonise gay men. And so HIV education for those vulnerable groups in particular is even more important. East and Southern Africa is by far the hardest-hit region (with some countries in the region imposing age restrictions on buying contraception, for example), whereas black, trans and gay male (MSM) people are still disproportionately likely to contract the virus overall. It isn’t: around 36.9 million people worldwide were living with HIV/AIDs last year, and there were around 5,000 new infections every day, although mortality rates are thankfully much lower. Understanding the devastating impact AIDS had on LGBTQ communities in the 1980s is crucial, but there is a tendency to talk about HIV as a thing of the past. The 1st of December marks World AIDs Day, which means the coming weeks will bring an influx of red ribbons and articles commemorating those who died at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis.