POZ is a magazine that chronicles the lives of people affected by HIV/AIDS. Its website, Poz.com, has daily HIV/AIDS news, treatment information, forums, blogs and personals.
Myths of Black MSM
Forgotten Sons
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Myths of Black MSM
True: HIV is on the rise among young African-American men who have sex with men. False: Promiscuity is to blame. Studies presented at the XIX International AIDS Conference shed more light on the facts.
After years of unfulfilling relationships, Brandon Kennedy was looking for love. In 2008, he thought he found it. He first met his boyfriend at a party and then re-connected with him a year later online.
Though they’d only been seeing each other a few weeks before entering into a committed relationship, Brandon decided to trust his boyfriend when he said he had no sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Brandon had just had his own battery of STI tests performed—including one for HIV—so he was confident he did not pose a risk.
“I was at a point in my life where I had decided that the next time I would even think about having unprotected sex would be in a committed relationship,” Brandon recalls. And so, like countless other couples before them seeking more intimacy, they didn’t use condoms. -
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Forgotten Sons
Rates of HIV among young black men who have sex with men continue to skyrocket, leaving people wringing their hands and asking, "What are these men doing?" But the problem is not so much what young black men are doing but rather what is being—and what has been—done to them. And what hasn’t been done for them.
Michael Tikili remembers vividly the night he lost his home and his father. After an evening out with friends two years ago, Tikili, then 23, was confronted by his Pentecostal minister dad in the hallway of their Brooklyn home. Tikili was chastised for missing two Sundays at church, for being generally disrespectful—and for being caught in bed with another man.
But before Tikili’s parents could march him upstairs to pack his belongings and leave, he decided to give the man who’d raised him and his four siblings a piece of his mind.
“I told him that the reason most of my life had been shit was because of his so-called church,” says Tikili, whose family hails from Nigeria but who grew up here. “I told him all he did was preach hate. I told him I felt my entire existence was an abomination, and that was why I had tried to commit suicide [as a child].” -
