From his HIV diagnosis in 1985 until his death in April of 2009, Cass Mann was one of the world’s longest-term HIV-positive survivors. He founded Positively Healthy, the UK’s only HIV/AIDS charity staffed exclusively by openly gay men, which provided HIV services including education, support, and peer counselling. These videos now archive his wisdom and insight for future generations. Here he talks about the risks of oral sex. Oral sex, known as “giving head” or “blow jobs”, can transmit HIV, syphilis, and other STIs. Syphilis together with HIV is a killer combination. Remember that dementia is a possible end-stage complication of both syphilis and HIV. If you have unprotected sex, you’re risking syphilis, HIV, gonorrhoea, and whatever other diseases your partner has in their system. However, it’s difficult to get gay men to use condoms for oral sex because people consider the risk much lower than anal sex. It’s true that the risk of HIV transmission via oral sex is lower than the risk of HIV transmission via anal sex, but the risk isn’t zero, and the risk isn’t only of HIV transmission. Remember that your partner might have had sex, including anal sex, with other partners immediately before you have oral sex with them, especially in the context of dark rooms, back rooms and parks. Oral sex is most definitely not safer sex. Use a condom if you choose to have oral sex, as difficult as you may initially consider this to be. For more information, visit http://www.AIDSvideos.org/. This video is freely downloadable from http://www.archive.org/details/AGayManSpeaksOutIsOralSexSafeSex . [Do you want to help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS? Are you fluent in a language other than English? Then volunteer to translate our videos into other languages! Click http://AIDSvideos.org/translate.shtml to to learn how you can help!!! © Copyright 2008-2011 Global Lifeworks. All rights reserved. This work is licensed to be used for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.]
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