Serostatus, risk and responsibility

Rises in new HIV infections and the return of the hyper-epidemics of sexually transmissible infections have occurred among gay men in North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. If you look beneath the surface, discourses of failed responsibility and blame are a common reaction among gay men, educators, doctors and governments. When HIV first spread among gay communities in the late 1970s and early 1980s we were ‘innocent’ because we didn’t know it was happening. Underpinning health promotion responses to HIV was the belief that gay men would act responsibly (to themselves) and rationally in order to protect themselves and their health. Over 20 years later, with the rising incidence of HIV infection, we ‘know’. Therefore, if we examine our common health-promotion belief, gay men must be ‘irrational and irresponsible’— not a comfortable proposition for gay men. Another response to rises in HIV infections is to substitute discourses about ‘selfresponsibility’ with discourses about the ‘responsibility’ of positive men to the ‘other’; if self-responsibility is obviously not always working then let’s make positive men ‘responsible’. While not denying our partial responsibility, ‘sole’ responsibility places positive men in a very vulnerable position.