John Byrne was born in 1981, a few months before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed a new report about “five young, previously healthy, gay men in Los Angeles” suffering from strange infections that had already killed two of them.
That was on June 5. Throughout that summer, doctors across the United States reported similar cases of “GRID” (gay-related immune deficiency) and The New York Times reported on a deadly cancer affecting 41 gay men in New York and California in early July. The next year, the CDC named the new plague AIDS, and gay men in San Francisco and New York City began the first community-based efforts to eradicate its cause, human immunodeficiency virus or HIV.
Condoms were the only reliable defense against contracting HIV then, and AIDS activists fervently encouraged young gay men not to bareback.
More than three decades since those first reports, plenty has improved across the country when it comes to HIV and AIDS. Still, Miami-Dade and Broward counties still claim the highest rates of new HIV infections in the United States. Byrne, publisher of RawStory.com, and others throughout South Florida have begun their own community-based campaigns to address this alarming local trend.
And despite warnings from activists, drug companies and the U.S. government, some young men are dropping the latex in favor of a little blue pill deemed equally effective in preventing the spread of HIV.
The pill, Truvada by Gilead Sciences, has been used for about a decade for HIV treatment. As it turns out, it’s been found to be nearly 100 percent effective in preventing people who are HIV negative from contracting the virus.
“Swallow This” is the slogan for a campaign Byrne recently launched. He is advocating something revolutionary: the widespread use of PrEP or pre-exposure prophylaxis.
“I never really liked condoms. It didn’t feel sexy. It didn’t feel like sex,” says Byrne, who came out at 15 and became sexually active in high school at the height of the AIDS crisis.