Been thinking about going to International Mr Leather (IML) this year. In some ways it would be a blast, but in other ways I’m not sure it’s right for me…

If you haven’t heard of IML – it’s the premier leather competition – this will be the 30th year. Leather title holders from come from all over to compete to be named “IML – International Mr. Leather”. For attendees it’s one of the top events for the leather community. If you’re in the leather lifestyle this is when you get to prance around a top notch hotel for days on end in nothing but leather. Just want to wear a leather jock strap? No problem…

But it’s also a great place to have sex. Some people have described it as one huge orgy. Even things that don’t involve actual sex are sexually charged… And over the last 10+ years apparently it’s become not just a big orgy, but a big bareback orgy. It’s a major event for “take all loads” bottoms…

Reasons To Go…

• Up to 5 days of as much sex as I could want
• There will be a lot of bareback bottoms available to fuck – some of which should be incredibly hot
• It will be good to be back in the leather and S/M community – been away for far too long
• Should be a fair number of opportunities to felch loads
• Could probably arrange to share the room with a cumhole and watch him take loads all weekend (and then felch them out of his ass)

Reasons To Not Go…

• Probably need Cialis or Viagra to keep up and not feel like I’m missing out
• I’m not a social butterfly and won’t have a group of friends to hang out with – could be weird socially
• While it’s not crazy expensive, it’s not a cheap vacation either
• I don’t fit into a lot of my old leather anymore – need new stuff (more money)

So, I’m just not sure… I feel like it’s one of those things I should do at least once… I just want to buy a little leather, find a way to get some Cialis, go, and enjoy myself – both sexually and in terms of getting back into leather and s/m. On the other hand I’m a bit afraid I won’t feel like it was worth it when it’s all said and done…

What do you guys think? Should I go? Any suggestions for the “male enhancement” issue and the social issue? Any of you gone by yourself before? How friendly are people to complete strangers? Any hot cumhole bottoms want to share a room?

Update: A reader e-mailed me privately with an answer that was pretty much the perspective I was looking for…

Hey, i was reading your blog and saw that you’re thinking of going to IML this year. I’d recommend it … i went last year on my own, for the first time, and had a blast. I’m going again this year, already booked the room and the flight.

About the social thing … i was on my own, but men were definitely friendly to me, and there are so many guys there that there’s always someone to talk to, flirt, hook up with, etc. it was a bit of a trial for me to try and meet new guys, be more social, and it was a total success, but it’s really just a good, warm welcoming vibe anyway so it’s easy to be friendly. and to be honest, i’d spent some time on some of the more leather sites … www.recon.com and www.bigmusclebears.com … and i recognized a lot of the guys there and made some dates in advance and all that worked well.

As for sex … it is the USA after all, and it wasn’t the total orgy/bathhouse experience i was expecting, to be honest. i love drinking piss and thought i’d spend an afternoon in the cans near the leather marketplace, but the hotel staff were policing the cans pretty thoroughly and not much was going on, which was a real drag. I heard even some people were threatened to be kicked out for public sex. But there was enough going on, you could walk around the hotel floors and pick guys up, or doors were left ajar, or messages on doors to walk in, that kind of thing, but it wasn’t as much a free-for-all as i’d expected. there were some bareback parties that i knew about, but the trick is to find out about them beforehand. i didn’t go to them because i was worried about the safety thing (i’m still confirmed negative, so have to be picky about who dumps inside me), but i did let one chicago guy i’d chatted with beforehand dump in me, and we already got a date for next time to do it again.

It was a great time … it’s really one of those absurd summer camp bonding type experiences, you have to suspend any sense of irony and just enjoy the testosterone and the sex. i even had a great IML/summer camp romance thing with a big ol’ raunchy fucker daddy type that was totally hot and totally sweet. and i met a lot of guys from where i live that i’d seen around but had to go to chicago to actually get to know them, and now hang around with a few of them still. So it’s just a great good time, you should definitely go and enjoy. and i’m happy to answer any other questions you might have (as a second-year IML goer) … and of course happy to take your load any time!!

I wrote back asking whether it was worth it to go for all 5 nights…

yes, definitely. last year i went from wednesday to monday, so missed the last closing out party … getting there a day early was nice to just sort of ease into it. i also had the chance to go out in the city a few times just to hang out, i think it would be kind of sad to spend 5 full days in a hotel in chicago without seeing some of the city. and this time i want to spend a few hours at the baths one night, my buddy went last year and said it was pretty intense there. there’s a lot to cram in!

this year i’m going thursday to tuesday, all 5 nights. and i’m bringing a laptop with me this time too, lots of guys were hooking up or finding out about parties online.

So given what he said, I think I may try to go…

What I’m about to say I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I’ve held my tongue ’cause I wasn’t sure it was my place to say anything.

I’m neg, but I have strong feelings about the meds poz guys are given. The gay community has welcomed the drugs with open arms but when I hear about guys who go on them right after becoming poz – it puts a shiver down my spine…

Before going on further I want to make a few things crystal clear. I’m not saying the meds aren’t wonderful and in many, if not most cases, I’m guessing these days they’re properly prescribed. My only fear is about the one-size-fits-all mentality and how they may be used too aggressively in certain cases.

What triggered me to write this post is an article talking about how they’re now seeing signs that long-term use of HIV drugs may cause premature aging and other health problems. Which made me think of my own interaction with some of “the best doctors” and “the best hospitals” and the care I saw a past boyfriend have also by top doctors and at a top hospital (he had AIDS and died 13 years ago)… I’m not going to say exactly what’s going on with me medically because it’s too personally identifiable, but it’s neurological and if it “went wrong” it would be very serious indeed.

I’ve been on Dilantin (an anti-seizure medication) on two occasions – when I was first diagnosed and later when there was a bit of a ‘relapse’. Thing is, I’ve never had an episode that was clearly a seizure – I’ve blacked out, my body has briefly gone rigid, and when I had my septum pierced and the piercer hit a nerve the blackout was combined with losing control of my bladder. But all of those episodes can be explained by 1) low blood sugar often combined with 2) extreme pain or stress. Simply put I “swoon” like a Victorian lady.

I have no problem with being put on Dilantin when I was first diagnosed – that doctor also took me off it a year or two later. My problem was when one of the top neurologists in NY put me on it and told me I had to stay on it for life or find another doctor. Meanwhile it was affecting my life – my gums were swelling and I wasn’t allowed more than one alcoholic drink a day. Luckily I had gone off it before and knew it had to be done over many months (going off Dilantin can cause seizures even in perfectly healthy people). There were a few close calls as I took myself off it, but having been off it for 5 years now there haven’t been any problems. I’m careful not to get low blood sugar and I avoid extreme pain and stress.

Thing is, this very well regarded doctor was perfectly happy having me on a medication for the rest of my life that had some serious side effects (the ones I mentioned were just the beginning of what was in store for me if I stayed on it). But more than that – many other neurologists would have agreed with her. It’s only now that I’ve been episode free for years that some doctors will agree with me that it isn’t necessary.

Then there were the unnecessary medical procedures I’ve gone through – I’m talking painful, expensive ones that weren’t absolutely necessary. I’ve had two stereotactic biopsies of my brain. Doing a biopsy of the brain isn’t a simple process. They screw a frame into your head (while your awake), so they can put a drilling rig on the frame to do the actual operation. In variably some emergency neurosurgery case will come along and you’re left in a hospital room for hours with a painful frame screwed into your head. And this is at one of the top cancer hospitals in the nation that’s generally has incredible patient care. But I want to reiterate – the biopsies weren’t absolutely necessary.

Then there was the bone marrow biopsy I was given to rule out one particular cause of my high blood pressure. The same doctor had already found one cause (which I thank her greatly for because it’s kept my blood pressure down while avoiding the really nasty general blood pressure meds). But the thing is – she didn’t think I actually had the thing that the bone marrow test would eliminate – it was just to rule out something that was rare. If anyone ever suggests you have an elective bone marrow biopsy – run the other way… It’s incredibly painful!

Then there’s my boyfriend’s experiences… He was in what was called “coop care” at one of the hospitals here in the City. That meant I moved into the hospital with him and we essentially had a hotel room at the hospital. The doctor prescribed a really powerful drug combination and cautioned me that drug A had to be given before drug B or else there would be big problems. I was there every night when he was given the drugs and one night I thought they were being given in the wrong order. I questioned the nurse and she assured me it was the right order. I should have stopped her but I accepted that she knew what she was doing. The next morning when we got up my boyfriend didn’t feel well. I took him upstairs to the nurses and his heart rate was well over 200 beats per minute. He he was a weak AIDS patient and his heart had been running the equivalent of a marathon all night… Needless to say that caused big problems for him – sent him into a tailspin and unfortunately he never recovered – it was downhill from there until he died a couple months later. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t gotten the drugs in the wrong order that night. He might have gotten better, lasted a year and been able to take protease inhibitors and could still be alive.

I could go on and on… Even recently I’ve seen things happening to a friend of ours who’s been in the hospital for the past month… My point is doctors sometimes make big mistakes or they do potentially harmful things to you ironically to cover their asses when it comes to liability. Put in a context of HIV – you could be given a drug cocktail that you don’t really need simply because it’s the standard practice and if the doctor steps outside of the standard practice they have big liability problems. Whereas they’re protected if problems arise if it was the accepted practice at the time…

There’s also a lot of what you might call “treating the chart”, not the symptoms. In other words, you’re given medications for things that aren’t (yet) causing problems. There’s a fine line here. Take my high blood pressure. Hypertension is something that we have a lot of long term data on. We know it’s a “silent killer” and if left untreated can cause serious problems. But the drugs can also cause problems too. I’m lucky – there’s a drug that I can take that controls one particular chemical in my body that keeps my blood pressure in check. That med seems to extremely mild, but other people have to take some horrible meds to keep their blood pressure under control. The only good news is that there are many decades of experience with hypertension and even with some of the drugs.

But then there are other drugs that treat things people used to just live with – like bone density problems. Bone density is a good example of “treating the chart” since low bone density is potentially dangerous, but now we’re seeing that the drugs seem to have long-term problems and you’re left wondering which problem is worse – the low bone density or the problems the drugs cause?

We’ve known for a while that HIV/AIDS medications can cause problems. There was a day when all too often the problems the drugs caused were worse than the problems of the disease itself. Luckily the meds are getting better, but as the study I mentioned above shows – it doesn’t mean there are no side effects.

This is the part of the post I’m wary about writing… In different ways I’ve been there, but I don’t have HIV so I feel weird about saying how a poz person should approach their treatment plan. But at the same time doctors are doctors… All I can say for sure is be careful and don’t take what the doctor says for absolute truth. They can be individually wrong and they can be wrong in group decisions as well. Their motivation in recommending a treatment plan could be the avoidance of a malpractice suit or they could prescribe a lot of drugs because pharmaceutical sales reps pay them a lot of attention and does nice things for them (I’ve seen this one in action too)…

There are no easy answers here. But I often wonder what I would do if I were poz. One thing I do know – I wouldn’t start taking powerful drugs just because a number on a chart went over a certain threshold – at least not without doing a lot of research of my own to validate the doctors recommendation. And just as now my blood pressure is on the high side of acceptable and I won’t take additional meds to lower it further – personally, I’d err just slightly on the side of fewer drugs and the mildest drugs…

So many people just accept what doctors say. I’ve done it myself and too often lived to regret it. Question your doctors over and over – make sure you understand and agree with everything they do to you. Do your own research (off things like pubmed, medscape, and talking to others with hard scientific evidence). If it pisses your doctor off, get another doctor. Oh yeah – and don’t think herbal remedies are any different – they can be just as destructive, but that’s another post…

The efforts to find an effective HIV vaccine haven’t been looking too good lately, but I just read an article about how researchers uncovered something that may be very helpful in creating a vaccine… Not that it’s going to happen tomorrow, but it’s better than nothing… And if nothing else, the knowledge from vaccine research helps create even more effective treatments for people who are poz…

While I’d still say if HIV infection is very likely for you, you may want to try to get the mildest strain you can. For the bulk of you who are likely to stay neg, try to stay that way as long as you can (without giving up the sex you enjoy)… I had a lover who died a year before protease inhibitors came out. If he had been been pozzed a year later he’d probably still be alive 13 years later.

I know I take risks, and I’m generally OK with them. I know an effective vaccine isn’t right around the corner and with my other medical issues I also know I can’t participate in a vaccine trial – so I won’t be one of the early ones to be vaccinated. Still, in the back of my mind I think about how it would be a bitch if I became poz and a vaccine came out a year later…

Last month I mentioned how I hated the new Bareback.com, but BarebackRT.com was looking pretty good. Well, I can say after some pretty active use that it’s a great site… I highly recommend it… You can sign up here (though please make sure you say you were referred by ‘rawTOP’ – I want the guy running the site to know I’m sending him users).

But beyond that I recommend you donate money to keeping it running (sites like that aren’t cheap to run). The webmaster put the following on his blog…

When I launched the site, my philosophy was to make the site totally free to anyone that wanted to come, but as the site grew beyond my financial means I decided to put a donation link on the site, allowing members that wanted to contribute to do so. I plan on keeping the site this way unless I’m forced to charge because of a lack of donations. If this ever happens it will probably be a nominal quarterly fee to cover the expenses of the site. I did make the decision that if we ever were to charge, people that made a donation before hand would be grand fathered in as “charter members” and would be exempt from the fee just as a thank you for early support.

Guys this is an excellent deal… Not only is it a site that’s worth supporting, but you’ll basically get it free for life if you donate now.

So I donated a bit and now guys from all over are contacting me… There’s a feature on it that lets you see all the guys (anywhere) that are logged in and site supporters are listed first – so everyone sees you when you donate… Regular users get a little lost in all the pages and pages of guys who are online…

There’s some hot guys on the site – too bad they don’t all live in my neighborhood… 😉

So sign up and give it a shot…

The other day I mentioned that HIV infection rates in NYC were down overall, but up for young gay men. Now the City has released the analysis of the causes of death for 2006 (PDF) and actual deaths from HIV are the lowest since 1984. In fact they went down a whopping 14.8% between 2005 and 2006. Given that we didn’t know HIV/AIDS existed until 1981 or 1982 – we’re basically at an all time low for HIV-related deaths.

For those of you who wonder why guys would “risk their lives” barebacking… The reason is simple – ’cause they don’t see people dying anymore. The generation before me was decimated, my generation saw some people die and a lot of others have serious problems (prior to 1996 when protease inhibitors came out). The generation after mine just never saw the sick or dying and they are the ones where HIV infections are on the rise.

Still, 1209 people died of HIV/AIDS in New York last year. I really wish the report told more about them. We know 34% of the deaths were black men; 21% black women; 11% white men; and 3% were white women. We know they were more likely to live in the Bronx (357 with a rate of 26.8 per 100,000) than in Manhattan (277, 18/100,000) or Brooklyn (363, 14.7/100,000). We know (luckily) that kids are no longer dying of it – just one death under the age of 15. We know the average age of people dying of AIDS is climbing (now up to 48.7 years for men). We know that in terms of “years of potential life lost” that both cancer and heart disease are each two and a half times the problem of HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS is on par with overdoses and murder in that regard.

But how long had they been poz? Did they have good insurance? Did they adhere to their cocktails? Did they take recreational drugs? Did they have other health complications? Were they gay, bisexual, IV drug users?

There are trends in the statistics that make me think actual deaths from HIV/AIDS are primarily hitting low-income communities of color. If the deaths aren’t predominantly in the gay community, it means AIDS-related deaths in the gay community really are at an all-time low and explains why the only group with an increasing rate of HIV infection is young gay men – they just aren’t seeing the problem, so they don’t see the need for a solution. It’s classic risk vs. reward behavior.

Outsiders always have the initial impression that New York is some sort of sex paradise, but the reality is actually quite different. The only way in which NY is good for sex is the sheer number and variety of guys we have here. It’s not hard to find someone to hookup with – unless you’re picky or something… And then there are private sex parties (more on that in a moment)…

The problem is there are laws on the books that prohibit sex in commercial establishments – PERIOD. No oral, anal or vaginal sex. It’s a bummer – you go to a J/O club and there are “monitors” running around saying “no lips below the hips”. And any bar with a back room doesn’t last long before it gets shut down… The bathhouses are lame – the saunas and steam rooms are usually closed (by order of the Health Department), and you can’t do anything in public areas and the rooms have signs on their doors saying “one person per room” (yeah right)…

So now there’s a report out by the NYC Department of Health that makes it seem like things may get even worse. According to the report the rates of syphilis and HIV infection are up (even though another study says NYC HIV infections are down overall) and so the Department of Health is trying to figure out how to control people’s sex lives to bring down new infections.

It’s the controlling people’s sex life part that bothers me the most. They’re trying to limit anonymous sex in particular and social norms that encourage/accept large numbers of sex partners. Needless to say that doesn’t sit well with me…

Now the curious part is their evaluation of where things stand and what they can do about it. They talk about how there are only 4 bathhouses in the City, and they respond pretty quickly when a bar or club gets a dark room… The bathhouses they’re worried about because they can’t legally enter the “private rooms” to observe what’s going on and they seem convinced that there’s stuff going on.

Yet the “problem” continues and the root of the problem, according to them, is private sex parties which are largely unregulated. Some of these are highly organized and function much like bathhouses. But there are a few problems enforcing the laws when it comes to private parties – first, the parties move around as soon as there’s a hint of a problem, and second the DOH inspectors don’t want to remove their clothes to get into the parties and to take any action they have to actually observe the sex act.

One of the funniest statements had to be

In two New York surveys, bathhouse users reported large numbers of sex partners per year (mean 26-29, median 11-12)

Having sex with one guy a month is considered a “large number of sex partners”? LOL… In the gay world that would amount to a single guy who’s not successful at dating (or hooking up)…

The end result is that they seem to desperately want to close all bathhouses and private sex parties or, at a minimum, turn them into San Francisco style bathhouses that have no private areas and are rigorously monitored for safe sex compliance. UGH!!!

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to a bathhouse or a private party (the closest I’ve come were the informal gangbangs last year) – so this doesn’t directly affect me. Actually, it helps in a way ’cause the guys who would go to the clubs and parties need another outlet when they get closed – so they turn to regular hookups which gives me more guys to fuck…

Still, all this really bothers me. I guess you’d call me a libertarian on this one – I just don’t think it’s government’s job to interfere with our sex lives. I’m all for education and information, but not regulation… If I were trying to improve the situation I’d focus on an expansion of free HIV and STD testing… That seems like a helpful role for government.

Frankly, I wish every bar had a back room – maybe then guys would go out to the bars like they did “back in the day” and New York would be fun again…