Ramblings of An Aging Gay Guy

Sometimes I wake up at night and I do not know who I am or where I am.  A feeling of panic comes over me, I feel so lost, adrift.  This feeling and this blankness of mind lasts for 5 or 10 seconds, long enough for myself to become worried.  Then, like a slow, faulty breaker switch, something flips inside and I slowly start to come back to myself. It is not a very good feeling, but at least it passes. But...sometimes I feel something like that in the daytime.  Sometimes I wonder how I got to where I am, how I got to this point.  I forget all of the good things in life and become depressed.  I see my failing relationship in stark counterpoint to the happiness I used to feel.  And then that triggers a tsunami of regret that washes over me, for having made yet one more bad decision in my life. I sometimes think I stumble blindly through life, barely grabbing on and hanging on to something before I lose my footing and stumble again into the next situa...

The challenge for the new Safe Sex 2.0 effort will be trying to capture the attention span of someone who only lives life and thinks in 140 characters.  In this Internet age, we in the HIV+ and HIV- (basically that is everyone) have been given the dual-edged sword of the Internet as a tool for advocacy and outreach.  The internet is definitely useful in finding the answer to almost anything, and it has exponentially increased the means by which information can be disseminated to the masses.  However, the internet has also created vast, huge, and deep canyons in between us, where we are only as connected as our wi-fi signal allows us to be. Back in the “old days”, we in the older gay community used to go to gay bars.  At those gay bars there were bowls of free condoms.  They were right there on the bar or by the door so that they were always on hand.  Back then, we cared about protecting our community.  Back then it was not as controversial or offen...