I Am a Gay Scientist. Here’s What the HIV Crisis Taught Me About Risk.
By: Joseph Osmundson
Tags: Coronavirus, Pandemic, LGBTQ, Risk, Fear

I Am a Gay Scientist. Here’s What the HIV Crisis Taught Me About Risk.

We have to reframe the very notion of risk, of fear. The more we minimize risk, the less there is to fear.

Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images

The first time I went down on a guy, my mind was doing math. I knew the risk to contract HIV was 1 in 12,000. “Oh god, this is a mouthful,” I thought. I knew, too, that the virus, that virus, was poorly transmissible in any single act. Even bottoming (receptive anal sex), without a condom only had a 2% chance of seroconverting.

I was — I am — a professional biologist. I did my postdoc, in part, in biostatistics. Long before I touched another man, I’d gone to the CDC website and looked at a table of acts and percentages, calculated long ago.

I knew too well, even then, that probabilities and statistics have a wicked sense of humor. A 2% chance seems unlikely, until you end up on one side of it, the rarer side, asking how exactly is it that you arrived at this particular, unlikely destination.

“But I only did it once…” I imagined myself saying to keep myself from doing it at all.

This was in the early ’00s. I was born in the early ’80s. I have to admit that, looking back, I am ashamed of these calculations and the stigma behind them. I understood the virus as a threat. In many ways it no longer was.

Every time I got naked in proximity to another man, my mind was a calculator. Even after I started taking PrEP to prevent seroconverting, I knew that nothing was perfect, nothing erased risk entirely.

I’d spent my life afraid of HIV, and so never able to rid myself of worry or of stigma for those who had it. We know, now, that the only risk-free sex is with an HIV positive person who’s managing the virus with drugs. I’ve had sex with HIV-positive men, on PrEP, and my mind arrived only at one round number, the one I love most: 0, wide open like a mouth.

Well, it’s 2020 and we all want to know if we can safely go to the grocery store.

Late 2019, a new coronavirus passed from human to human for the first time, traveling from bats probably into pangolins before evolving the particular suite of mutations needed to bind to our human cells well enough to infect one person, and then another, and then another.

The virus doesn’t want anything. It is just a recipe for itself. And our bodies are the kitchen.

I’ve been obsessed with viruses ever since I read The Hot Zone in middle school. I wanted to be a virologist at the WHO when I grew up. This is why I’d studied French, and not Spanish, in high school. Silly, young child.

This memory only came back to me through my mother at my dissertation defense. In my PhD, I’d studied a protein from a virus that infects Staph bacteria, with the hope that we could build a drug that acted like that virus, and so killed that deadly bacteria.

“You’re doing what you always wanted to do,” she said, but I’d forgotten that particular desire over the long course of my life. I’d moved on to wanting to be a lawyer, a doctor, a professional soccer referee.

I’d managed to somehow come back to viruses.

Thanks to the coronavirus, Americans are inundated with numbers in a way that’s rare outside of political punditry. The mortality rate is 3.4%, or 5%, or 1%, or, according to Trump’s statements from early March, 0.1%, just like the flu. We thought the R0 is between two and three but now we know it’s actually between five and six meaning that each infected person will — on average — infect five to six. The doubling time for the number of infected individuals is around five or six days, which also, confusingly, happens to be Covid-19’s average incubation period. The virus can live on surfaces for 12 hours, or two days, or 17 days if on a cruise ship, apparently.

But, my god, we all just want to know: Is it safe to go outside? Can I… hook up?

Viruses don’t want anything. They’re too small for desire. Viruses are life-forms, but they’re not living. They, by definition, need a host cell to replicate. Living things can replicate themselves. Viruses are usually small, both in size and in the information they need to replicate. HIV has a genome — a collection of all its information — that is 10,000 bases (A’s, G’s, U’s, C’s) long. Coronaviruses are massive, at 30,000. You, me? We’re made of 3.3 billion letters (of T’s, not U’s), each written twice.

And yet the virus can get in us, copy itself, kill our cells, activate our immune system, target our organs, kill. This is not what the virus wants. The virus doesn’t want anything. It is just a recipe for itself. And our bodies are the kitchen.