In 1995, I was sixteen and experiencing the excitement of my first real love. As if out of a 1990s […]
Deconstructing HIV and AIDS on The Golden Girls
In 1990, the much-beloved sitcom, The Golden Girls — a show about four older women, Rose, Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia, […]
Gender, Health, & Marginalization: National Responses to HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and Jamaica
After conducting Fulbright research on the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in Jamaican women’s lives, I became interested in exploring how […]
A Few Things I Need You To Know Before Getting Tested for HIV, As Told By Your HIV Tester
Welcome! Before getting tested for HIV, New York State requires me to go over a few things with you. First, […]
The Second Sentence: AIDS in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison
In January 1986, Irish current affairs program Today Tonight reported on a spate of deaths and attempted suicides in Dublin’s […]
HIV in Brazil: Health and Human Rights in a Global Context
The fight over the future of the ACA here in the U.S. has made me think about universal healthcare, disease, […]
Love and Rage
On November 2, 1992, members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) carried a dead body through the […]
Bill Maher, Charlie Sheen, and Modern Day Snake Oil
Bill Maher has done the impossible: he’s fallen farther in my esteem. There was a time (high school) when I […]
Stay Positive: A Radical Alternative to the Gay Blood Ban
In December last year, the FDA lifted its longtime policy of deferring any blood or tissue donations coming from men […]
PrEP, The Pill, and the Fear of Promiscuity.
By Ian Lekus
The first I learned of PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, came from the signs and postcards around Fenway Health, Boston’s LGBT community health center. Those advertisements appeared as Fenway served as one of two U.S. research sites for PrEP, in advance of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approving Truvada in July 2012 as the first drug deemed safe and effective for reducing the risk of HIV transmission.[1] As I started learning more, I quickly discovered how its advocates frequently compare PrEP to oral contraceptives. One PrEP researcher I consulted with early on in my investigations explicitly drew the parallel to her decision to use the Pill a few years earlier. Some of the similarities jump out immediately: for example, like oral contraceptives, PrEP — a pill taken daily to prevent HIV infection — separates prevention from the act of sexual intercourse itself.