It somehow hit me so hard, I held the map upside down for a ridiculous length of time. The shock of connecting someone I knew with the virus made it very personal, which no amount of reading the literature could have done. I was familiar with the basic facts about HIV transmission and those facts would have told me that sharing a home, bathroom,  dinner table and a handshake with an HIV-positive person was no risk at all. Nor was it anything but absurd to imagine that B had a sexual relationship with his brother. B’s brother was straight, after all. Yet, even if it wasn't a matter of apprehension about any risk to B or myself, the news still left me feeling rather crushed.

B had to jolt me out of my silence by reminding me that it was my job to use the map to tell him where the next turn-off was. He was driving and I was supposed to be navigating, and we were going at 90 kmh down a highway with no U-turns for miles. Missing the correct exit would be a serious matter.

Up till then, HIV and AIDS had been more or less an academic matter for me. The virus affected other people -- millions of them, no doubt -- but millions of others. In that moment however, it became real, with a face to it. It was something that might eventually break the heart of a person dear to me.

As it turned out, B and I never got anywhere in our relationship, and through that short while when we were not-quite-together, his brother remained asymptomatic. Thus, I was spared any real engagement with his family. I should stress that the relationship not working out had nothing to do with this fact about the brother; I recovered my senses soon enough to be rational about it, as B seemed to be.

Yet today, years after, when I recall the key moments of the time I had with B, that almost off-the-cuff remark from him as we were motoring down the highway is one of them. My own reaction gave me a glimpse of how terrible it can be for anyone when news of HIV strikes. If just the idea of B’s brother being infected could knock me off for a while, if it’s something I can remember so clearly more than a decade later, imagine what a body blow it can be to the person affected and his entire family.

* * * * *

 
A few days ago, on 7 September, a friend of mine asked me to do something for him as he had to rush off to Thailand urgently. His boyfriend "U" had passed away.

I had met the young man once, about 2 years ago. In that brief meeting, he struck me as a very nice guy, doing quite well in life. I don’t recall we ever had much of a conversation even though I believe his English was quite good, but I remember he did me a favour providing me with recruitment contacts when I needed them.

"What happened?" I asked my friend. "How can somebody just die?"

"Pneumonia," was the reply.

Immediately I suspected AIDS. Young men do not die of pneumonia without an impaired immune system. "Do you know whether he was HIV-positive?" I asked my friend.

"No, I don’t know," he said.

In subsequent sms exchanges and phone conversations, I learnt that U had had an on-and-off fever for a month, and an abscess on his arm that "grew as large as a rambutan" i.e. about 4 - 5 cm in diameter.. He sought medical attention, but due to work commitments, wasn’t exactly prompt about it. Nonetheless, a medical test done on 22 August showed he was HIV-positive -- this might have been the first time he knew it himself.

U told his sister but not his boyfriend. The sister also noticed that he had lost about 7 kilograms in weight, something which my friend wasn't aware of because they didn’t see each other during those weeks.

Then quite suddenly, U’s fever worsened and he was hospitalized. Next thing my friend knew, U was on oxygen and barely able to speak over the phone. A few hours later, the sister called to say U was gone. My friend rushed off to Thailand that same evening to be with the family and attend the cremation.

And so another precious life is lost. Another family and partner devastated.

* * * * *

There is a tendency, in Singapore as in too many other countries, to want to maintain a silence about sex, for reasons nothing to do with disease prevention, but almost entirely to do with cultural queasiness and religious taboos. Yet this silence is rationalised into the theory that if people would only be "morally good" and abstain from such "evil" as sex (or at least unfaithful extra-marital sex) then the HIV problem will take care of itself. Silence serves the purpose of casting sex into moral shadows, which, by this simplistic theory, should stop people from having sex.

What a neat solution. But the problem with such wishful thinking is that almost no one can go through life without sex, and most will not want to be told to keep to just one partner for life. That is the reality which the imposed silence on the subject stops us from hearing.

Even as a theory, abstinence and monogamy suffers from a fatal defect. It only protects you when everybody else that you are intimate with subscribes to the same morality as you and is as disciplined as you. What chance of that in real life? You are only safe when everybody else does as you say. You don't protect yourself; you expect others to do it for you. In any other area of human activity, you'd say, "How stupid can you get?" Yet here we have entire governments and religious establishments telling people this is the way to go.

Here is one statistic that jumped out at me when I saw it recently: of the 17,000 new HIV infections in Thailand in 2005, thirty percent -- the largest demographic subgroup -- were married women, who typically were faithful to their husbands.

And let's not imagine it cannot happen here in Singapore as there is no reason to think our social behaviour is fundamentally different. For goodness sakes, let's talk about sex and condoms, and stop denying that HIV and AIDS can happen to ourselves and the people we love.

© Yawning Bread