I have been HIV positive since January 17th, 2009. I’m not writing today to tell that story.

I’m writing today to tell you about my own personal experiences as an enthusiastically sexually active HIV-positive gay man, and how drastically my experiences have changed in the span of a mere two years. I’m writing today to offer my own anecdotal opinions on PrEP, and the overwhelming cultural shift I have witnessed in the advent of its widespread use, in addition to the increasing awareness of the treatment as prevention strategy.

For a long time after I became HIV-positive, my choice of sexual partners was often guided by serosorting–I wanted to enjoy condomless sex without the worry that I was putting anyone else at risk of infection, in spite of the fact that I’ve been lucky to retain a consistently undetectable viral load since almost the beginning of my living with HIV (and have been almost obsessively adherent to my medication regimen). Of course, there have always been some men who choose to have unprotected sex regardless of HIV status (or any knowledge thereof, for that matter); I myself had been one of those people. Somehow though, for me, once I was sitting at the other side of the issue, I never felt quite as comfortable about engaging in condomless sex with an HIV-negative partner; the circumstances of my own seroconversion had been so mired in the unethical behavior of the man who infected me that, even with my own relatively strong standards of communicating my status to any partner, I was still haunted by the fear of putting someone else through the same trauma I myself had experienced.

Even though the first widely effective HIV medications went into widespread use the year I graduated high school (1995, in case you were wondering), any gay man in or above my age range inarguably lived in fear of AIDS. My brow broke into a sweat every time I went to receive my regularly scheduled HIV test results, and even though I already knew in my heart when I had become infected, the day I received the call that I needed to come in to “discuss my test results” remains one of my most traumatic memories (although the utterly extraordinary support of my dearest friends throughout that day also makes my heart swell when I look back).

The funny thing about being told that you’re HIV positive–the bit that I really think only a poz person can truly, deeply grok–is that, once it’s happened, there is a certain weight that gets lifted from your shoulders forever; for 30-plus years, this has been the worst news a gay man could receive: the specter that haunts all men who fuck men. As horrible as it is to hear the news, once you’ve walked through that door, you never have to walk through it again. Fear does not disappear, but it transforms. In some small way, I felt like I was able to exhale a breath that I had been holding for most of my life.

It is true that I seroconverted at a time when the disease needn’t affect one’s quality of life very significantly (at least, so long as you’re lucky enough to live in the First World and reside in a progressive urban center). I am old enough to have lost a handful of friends to the disease (and have more than enough older friends to know rather viscerally what it was like to lose hundreds of friends), but young (and again, lucky) enough that I have never had to consider my own lifespan being significantly shortened due to my HIV infection. This is what I refer to as being “on the tail end of AIDS mortality.” From a generational perspective, this is an interesting divide to straddle. Some people as few as five years younger than me have little concept of the overwhelming terror that gay men lived in; people ten years younger often seem never to have considered such a thing.

It took me a long time and a lot of soul searching, but I’ve come to see this as a good thing.

Over time–and again, this is wholly my opinion, not stated as indomitable fact–I have come to recognize a phenomenon which I refer to as “survivor’s anger.” This is an evolution of survivor’s guilt in which older gay men who lived through the darkest, most horrific days of the AIDS epidemic feel a (sometimes vitriolic) resentment toward younger generations of gay men who do not view–and indeed, cannot even fathom–HIV as a crisis any longer. While it is true that many people of these younger generations are underinformed and sometimes seemingly willful in their ignorance of this chapter in history, the fact remains that we are simply living in a different era now. And in the past few years–particularly the past TWO years–I have witnessed an astonishing sea change in the entire gay culture, which I largely attribute to PrEP.

As the prophylactic use of Truvada has exponentially gained traction, I have seen the corner of the gay world in which I reside become a much more sexually active place…and even if this is merely a perception of increased sexual promiscuity, it is at the very least a symptom of decreased sexual shame. With the removal of fatality as a likely result of sex (and/or a growing awareness of such), many men are now coming of age in a world that feels very much like the pre-AIDS era. What I find unfortunate is that some of those who harbor survivor’s anger seem to have lost sight of the concept that condomless sex has largely been the norm in all carnal acts (particularly homosexual ones) for an overwhelming majority of the span of life on this planet. “Safe sex” as defined by use of condoms was a response to a crisis and a then-fatal disease; we have now entered a new age in which the rigid dogma of using condoms in all sexual encounters is simply not a matter of survival. I won’t even bother to provide links to the science behind this–despite the bitter controversy around this, it is simple fact that PrEP works. Medical adherence to a daily pill prevents HIV infection, and HIV-infected people who are medically adherent to a regimen and have an undetectable viral load cannot transit the virus. If we lived in a world where all people–both positive and negative–took these medications daily, HIV would go the way of smallpox.

I won’t belabor that point any longer; indeed, none of the above was truly the point of why I’m writing this. On this World AIDS Day, I want to talk about fear. More accurately, I wish to talk about what is happening in a world in which fear of HIV seems to be rapidly disappearing.

In a few short months, I am going to become legally wed to an HIV-negative man with whom I am indescribably in love. I have been HIV-positive for close to seven years now, but if you had tried to tell me as few as three years ago that I would commit to a lifetime partnership with a serodiscordant man, I never would have believed you. Nor would I have fathomed that, throughout our joyously polyamorous exploits, we would have sex with as many or more negative guys than positive ones.

Even more extraordinary is the remarkable increase in discussions of sexual health prior to engaging in intercourse. To my perspective, the most powerful side effect of PrEP’s popularity is its incredible potency in decreasing the shame and stigma which has plagued not only HIV status, but the very act of sex itself. Gay culture has experienced a renaissance of sexual liberation which I never could have fathomed a scant five years ago (and certainly never would have believed possible when I became positive). The farther-reaching implications of this are only just beginning to emerge, but I want to share my own observations:

The gay culture in which I am enmeshed is no longer living in the grip of fear. As sexual intimacy becomes less and less anxiety-producing, the culture is becoming more and more bold in its embrace of emotional intimacy. As HIV status becomes less of an issue, discussions surrounding it become easier and easier. Even as technology becomes more ubiquitous and (arguably) more isolating to human connection in general, I see gay men become increasingly confident and enthusiastic about interacting with one another, both online and in social spaces. We dance. We flirt. We make out. We hook up.

We talk about the sex we’re going to have, and we negotiate boundaries. We take responsibility for our own health, and we show concern for the health of others. We get regular screenings for STIs. We even notify our partners when we think we may have put them at risk, and the reaction is gratitude rather than anger, more often than not.

In short, sexuality is moving beyond being merely accepted; it is becoming celebrated. The rise of slut pride has emerged from the ashes of the 1970s.

While I realize that there are a great many people in the world who find the above statements abhorrent, I personally find overwhelming joy in the embrace of this trend. We were never supposed to be afraid of sex; not because of death, nor disease, and especially not due to fear of eternal damnation. Sex feels amazing. It makes us feel more connected and more empathetic towards those with whom we engage in sexual acts. It brings us together as humans. It promulgates joy and yes, it increases the amount of love in the world. You may not agree with any of what I’m saying, but what I am relating has been my 100% incontrovertible personal experience. As my idol Penny Arcade says in her show Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!: “There’s only one energy, and it’s sexual.” The very driving impulse of existence is creation; or to quote the excellent comic book Saga by Brian K Vaughan, “The opposite of war is fucking.”

As I have written before…love is the opposite of fear. And in a world where people can be less afraid to love one another–through any avenue, not merely sexual–love can win.