Just sex.īut still, rejection is rejection. The rejection was not a huge deal-and I was just playing around, not looking for a husband, a boyfriend, or even a date. That OK with you?” They would say yes, no, or block me. Once I had established that a man on Grindr was interested in having sex with me, I would message him: “I’m poz on meds undetectable. Back then, I experienced a lot of rejection on Grindr. The first app we downloaded when we got our new phones was Grindr.
I was not an early adopter of Grindr, but it’s true that my husband and I switched from flip phones to smart phones the first time some friends showed us Grindr on their iPhones at a swanky hotel bar on 55th Street. That was very touching but the damage to my heart and soul was already done. A number of years later, he called me to apologize, and to tell me that he had subsequently become a member of ACT UP and had been in a relationship with someone with AIDS, who died shortly after he called me. He was even afraid he’d get infected from biting my nipple too hard. Once, a guy I dated for about six months, who knew I was HIV positive the whole time, dumped me after his friends stoked his fears about dating an HIV-positive man. Back then, guys would walk out on me in the middle of a dinner date after I told them I was HIV positive. The early days of using Grindr could be just as traumatizing as the real-time cruising and dating scene of the 1990s. But the average horny Joe in the street did not know that undetectable equals untransmittable (U=U). By 2009, many scientists and medical experts already either knew or suspected that HIV-positive men who were on meds and undetectable could not transmit HIV to a sexual partner. Part of that fear may have been the fear of HIV. But in the age of hookup apps (that is, from about 2009), my own experience suggests that younger men who were HIV negative tended to avoid older men. Now, younger guys and older guys have always been attracted to each other sexually-going back at least to Alexander the Great and his boyfriend Hephaestion, or to the Roman poet Catullus and his boyfriend Juventius (whose name literally means “youth”). And for me, the issue does not start out being about HIV status per se, but is more about age-I like younger guys, and a lot of younger guys like older guys, or “daddies.” In my experience, a lot of HIV-negative men believe that HIV-positive men make better sex partners-in particular, that we are “hotter bottoms.” That may sound really offensive, but I completely agree. But for other men, it’s about access to men who are of the opposite status. Sure, some guys might use these profile options to serosort, or find men with the same HIV status as them. And the ability of these men to “come out” to each other about their respective HIV statuses is much easier, now that Grindr lets them disclose all the relevant details right in their profiles. Now, it is increasingly common for opposite-status men to have sex with each other, whether it be for dating, relationships, or just plain ole hookups. As a man who became HIV positive in 1990, I now have a much wider choice of sexual partners than I once did.īefore PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), in my experience at least, many-to-most HIV-negative men shunned HIV-positive men. In 2016, Grindr, my gay hookup app of choice, gave users the option to indicate their HIV status, beyond “positive” or “negative,” with the options “positive, undetectable,” and “negative, on PrEP.” These options have revolutionized my sex life. Now things are changing, as medications used for both treatment and prevention make it possible for men living with the virus and those without to feel more comfortable being sexually intimate with each other. But for many years, HIV positive and HIV negative was not a popular combination for gay men.