The average lifespan of an HIV positive person on medication is almost exactly the same as an HIV negative person.For gay men who have HIV and still want to date, there is hope. If you’re on medication and taking it diligently, you will never have AIDS.
Thankfully, we have medications that reduce the level of HIV in your blood to the point that you can live an extremely healthy life (undetectability). If HIV is left untreated, in time it will progress to AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Remember: HIV and AIDS are two different things. If your doctor diagnosed you with AIDS, you may have seen some changes in your body already. That said, some people, both HIV positive and HIV negative, choose to serosort. Today, there are more and better ways to treat and prevent HIV than there were even twenty years ago, so serosorting is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Serosorting is the practice of only dating people with the same HIV status as you, whether that’s positive or negative, for health reasons. I know countless long-term, happy serodiscordant couples. I am in a serodiscordant relationship, which means I am HIV-positive and my partner is HIV-negative. As long as they are aware of your HIV status and unafraid of it, you can date anyone you want to date - assuming they want to date you, too. But there are medicines so effective that they’ve been called a “functional cure.” Which is to say: They don’t remove HIV from your body completely, but they reduce it to the point where the virus is so benign that it is untransmittable, and you can live a healthy, normal, happy, sexy life. No, there is no cure for HIV, at least not right now. You can stay undetectable as long as you keep taking your daily medication. Let me say that again: Undetectable HIV-positive people pose no risk of transmitting HIV to their partners - regardless of condom use. When you are undetectable, you are unable to transmit the virus. This is the healthiest you can be without being HIV negative. (Your HIV is unable to be detected by the test - hence, it is “undetectable.”) When you are undetectable, the virus is unable to trigger antibody tests, which are the tests used to tell if someone has HIV. Compare that number to people who have been recently diagnosed and are not yet taking medication - their tests can show millions of copies of HIV in one millimeter of blood. You are “undetectable” when the medication you are taking has reduced the amount of HIV in your body to less than 20 copies of the virus per one milliliter of blood. The people who pass this test and embrace my status have ended up being better fuck buds, better hookups, and better relationships than any I had before. I don’t want to take the time to get invested in someone only to be rejected later. This weeds out poz-phobic (or simply poz-ignorant) people faster. On all the hookup apps, I write my status (HIV+ and Undetectable) on every profile, and tell interested parties as soon as we start talking. But do they get to have sex with me? Nope. If they want some information about HIV, I’ll gladly send some links. If someone’s not accepting of my HIV status, it’s a dealbreaker. I can’t have a sex ed tutorial every time I want to get laid.
A sexually responsible, socially cognizant adult should do that self-education on their own time, particularly if they are part of a community that is at high-risk for HIV (men who have sex with men, particularly men of color, and transgender women).
It’s not my responsibility to educate anyone on the modern realities of HIV. In the beginning, I felt it was my responsibility to educate potential sex partners who didn’t know all this terminology - guys with no idea what “undetectable” meant. Safer sex practices include condoms and PrEP, the once daily pill that prevents HIV transmission. And discuss with every partner what safer sex practices you want to use. How you disclose this information is up to you. As long as your sex partners know your HIV status and consent to have sex with you, you can have sex. Some people wait until they’re undetectable before having sex again. Until you are undetectable, you are infectious, which means you are able to transmit the virus.