Abstract
“Shit,” thought Stuart, a 37-year-old software engineer, when he found out he was HIV-negative. “I’ve got to go to work tomorrow after all.”
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Notes
Simon Watney, “The Possibilities of Permutation: Pleasure, Proliferation, and the Politics of Gay Identity in the Age of AIDS,” in Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS Crisis, ed. James Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 347. Italics in the original.
Because it takes some time after infection with HIV for antibodies to develop, the tests currently in use—which detect antibodies rather than HIV itself—are not foolproof. Experts disagree about the time it takes for antibodies to be produced, but in general, most people infected with HIV develop antibodies within six months.
The chance of testing error is minuscule but not nonexistent. The preliminary test currently in use, the ELISA test, is designed to err in the direction of telling people who are uninfected that they are infected, rather than telling people who are infected that they are uninfected.
In San Francisco and a few other urban gay communities in the United States, the number of HIV-positive gay men is estimated to be equal to or slightly greater than the number of HIV-negative gay men. Because there is no easy way to establish how many gay men are in any base population, such estimates are hard to evaluate.
From a draft manuscript by Walt Odets. For more about the psychological issues facing HIV-negative gay men, see Walt Odets, In the Shadow of the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Marshall Forstein, “Suicidality and HIV in Gay Men,” in Therapists on the Front Line: Psychotherapy with Gay Men in the Age of AIDS, ed. Steven A. Cadwell, Robert A. Burnham, and Marshall Forstein (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1994), p. 121.
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© 1995 William I. Johnston
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Johnston, W.I. (1995). Reactions to Testing Negative. In: HIV-Negative. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6106-8_10
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