HIV, Cyberbullying, and Self-Harm [CW: self-harm]

For those who know me well, I am an open HIV activist and advocate. What does this mean exactly? It means that I promote specific values and politics around HIV:

1. People with HIV are still worthy of their life, love, and even intimacy.
2. People who are HIV-undetectable cannot spread their HIV, period. That info is not commonly known.
3. Words like "clean" are serophobic and not exactly progressive. It implies a moral uncleanliness. It is not a medically used word.
4. There are laws and policies that discriminate against people with HIV even if it is more treatable than things like herpes (for example).
5. People often use HIV as a weapon against bareback sex practices, even though there is nothing inherently wrong with those practices. While it is "risky," any sex is a risk, and for some reason our current culture punishes people who are open about their undetectable status over people who don't get tested and assume they're negative.

But of course, this means I post a lot of this kind of stuff on my social media and engage in a public discourse about these politics and more. One day, I encountered some people talking about how unclean I was, and that was the word they used. I learned around the same time that the person was a diehard libertarian, and I rolled my eyes at the exchange. At that point, I didn't want anything to do with them either, as libertarians turn me off about as much as conservatives. When the conversation ended, I tweeted about it: "I hate when people without STDs call themselves clean. Like, you have guns in your house, a Confederate flag on your wall, a bible by your bed, and you think you're 'cleaner' than me magically? How about you go fuck yourself?"

At the time, it was a very impassioned tweet, and people generally responded well on my own feed. Most of my social media is populated with people who are similarly leftist. Not everyone is as caught up on STD politics as me perhaps, so I enjoy getting to share these kinds of thoughts with people. I've heard from numerous people living with HIV stating that they admire my openness and approve of these kinds of thoughts getting out there.

However, a couple of conservatives found this tweet and began sharing it.

Above is the tweet that really blew up. They didn't share the post. They just screencapped it and posted. Granted, they whited out my username. But you can see how quickly it blew up: 1,769 likes. 219 retweets. It's probably a lot more now, too. There were between 100 and 200 comments last I checked. Here are some of them.

And, possibly predictably, someone found me and added my handle to the conversation. 

People started commenting on the original post. And they started private messaging me.

I've since had to make my account private. But this has been super hard for me. Super hard.

When I first found out I had HIV, I DID want to kill myself. I believed a lot of these things. I believed I was filthy, that I was unclean, that I was a waste of space. I imagined all of these voices. But now, there are about 100 people saying that I in specific am ignorant, stupid, worthless, a slut, deserving of my HIV, unclean, and that they hope I die.

It hurts.

It hurts so fucking much.