“Men who have sex with other men die of AIDS.” That’s what my mother tells me just before I touch the large bloodstain on our doorstep. She quickly stops me with her hand. It’s 1997 and I’m eight years old. Many are still very afraid of the incurable virus. That’s why my mother enlightens me. From that moment on I can no longer sleep because I am so afraid of the HI virus.
I refuse to play with children who have open wounds or press elevator buttons because some AIDS patient may have touched them first. I keep begging my mother to take me to the pediatrician to take my blood. Even when the pediatrician in her office tells me there’s no chance in the world that I’ve contracted AIDS because the virus doesn’t spread through the elevator buttons, I don’t believe her.
If my mother might have put her hand in me to stop me from being gay the way she stopped me from touching the bloodstain, I guess she would have. I already understood this concern as a child – without it being expressed. My fear of AIDS was obviously my fear of becoming gay. And when I later became a gay man and started having sex with men, my fear of HIV/AIDS didn’t go away either.
Photo: Lea Hoppe
To person
Noam Brusilovsky is a German-Israeli theater and radio play director. In his play How to Recognize a Jew, Brusilovsky plays with stereotypes regarding Jews. His play “Adolf Eichmann – A Listening Process”, produced together with the journalist and author Ofer Waldman, was awarded the ARD radio play prize.
Sex with a condom: like a kiss with an FFP-2 mask
For years I felt sexual intercourse as a great danger and might hardly enjoy it. I’ve never really trusted condoms: they burst, slip off, are ugly. They also smell funny and having sex with them feels like kissing with an FFP-2 mask. Condoms are a constant reminder that you are living in an epidemiological emergency. And even if they saved the lives of many people, I always found them to be a massive handicap. Even though I used them all the time, following every fuck I ran to the doctor and got tested just to make sure I didn’t catch the damn virus.
I was taught at an early age that gay sex was obscene. And this thought didn’t leave me for a long time. Years later I learned that this phenomenon is called “internalized homophobia” – and that almost all of my gay friends suffer from it.
My fears of HIV were no longer up to date. These days my closest friends are living with HIV and a small pill they take daily allows them to live a healthy, long and full life. It has been recognized for a few years that people with HIV whose viral load is below the detection limit as a result of successful therapy are no longer contagious.
Gay buddies talk openly among themselves regarding their HIV status. However, many of them have great difficulty telling family members and their work colleagues regarding living with the virus. The ignorance of mainstream society and the stigmatization of people with HIV mean that only a few of them dare to come out in public.
A new type of therapy helped me to overcome the fear
Thanks to a new type of prophylactic therapy, I finally managed to conquer my fear of gay sex. PrEP (HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis) was approved in the EU in 2016. It is a drug that protects people without HIV from the virus. You take it every day – and even if you don’t use a condom, there is no longer any risk of contracting the virus. I will never forget my first bareback sex on PrEP: It was the first time I might fuck carefree without having to think regarding that phrase: “Men who have sex with other men die of AIDS.” It was that feeling of unlimited freedom. Liberation from the gaze of a heteronormative society, which for years associated my “sodomitic” lust with sin and danger, until it was finally pathologized and criminalized by the same society.
I not only want to catch up on what I was personally forbidden to do, but also what my queer ancestors were forbidden for generations. Having carefree sex is my expression of freedom and my personal revenge on the heteronormative regime.
My doctor, Mr. F., would probably raise his eyebrows at this point and twitch his mouth slightly. How often has he called me in recent years to tell me that in the course of my erotic activism in the name of queer emancipation I have caught this or that sexually transmitted infection. And how often have I run into his practice like a loser to pick up my prescription.
Mr F. is the best doctor in the world. In all these years, Mr. F. has never judged me or looked at me sideways. Mr. F. does not see sexually transmitted infections as a manifestation of moral wrongdoing – but simply as bacteria and viruses that need to be treated with appropriate medication.
Monkeypox: “A single catastrophe!”
When I asked Mr. F. in his practice at the beginning of last week what he thought of the current monkeypox crisis, he got upset. “What a disaster!” he replies. Although the first case of monkeypox in Berlin was only detected in May, over 1000 cases have already been diagnosed in the hotspot capital. I now know almost 20 people in Berlin who have been infected with the virus – all gay men.
“Patients on PrEP your age, Mr. Brusilovsky, are the main risk group,” says Mr. F. seriously to me. He tells me regarding patients who had to be hospitalized because they might no longer stand the pain; of smallpox in the groin, almost the size of a tennis ball. “When will we finally be vaccinated?” I ask him worried. He doesn’t have an answer yet. While other federal states have been vaccinating for weeks, the vaccine was stored in the Charité.
Meanwhile, the virus is spreading rapidly in Berlin – without the vaccine already available in Berlin being used quickly to curb this increase. In addition, the vaccine was divided among the federal states and Senator Gote apparently negotiated poorly: Although the majority of cases come from Berlin, Berlin only gets 39 percent of the vaccine available in Germany. It is therefore almost impossible to get a vaccination appointment. The specified vaccination centers are completely overwhelmed. The 8,000 vaccine doses that the green senator has obtained so far are simply not enough.
I hear from acquaintances who arrange vaccination appointments in Bavaria and Lower Saxony because they fear they will soon catch monkeypox themselves and because they do not assume that they will get the vaccine quickly in their place of residence in Berlin. Other friends frantically contact several vaccination centers and wait on the line for hours in desperation. We are restless and impatient. We want to be immune. The immunity we want, however, is not only once morest monkeypox, but also once morest the basic idea that sex between two men is pathological – an idea that has been held up to us for far too long and which we still hold in our heads have to fight.
