The Utah AIDS Foundation recently asked me to write about HIV from “a young person’s perspective” for an upcoming newsletter. As tomorrow is World AIDS Day, I decided to share it here as well:

Since I was born in November 1980, I don’t know a world without HIV. It’s always just been here.

In elementary school, the playground outcasts didn’t have cooties - they had AIDS. Girls perceived as ugly were called out by school bullies with “Hey, AIDS-face!” By the time I was old enough to understand the more technical specifics of HIV transmission, my classmates and I had been hearing about the disease for almost ten years. By then, the prevention messages had become easy to tune out. To us, they were right up there with “Just Say No” as buzz-word scare tactics that didn’t seem to apply to us. In the end, 10 years of abstinence-only sex education didn’t make us safer; it made us indifferent.

Now, nearly 20 years after our first lesson on the subject, my generation is still tired of hearing about HIV. We’re tired of worrying about it, and we’re tired of being preached to about it. Sure, we’re still concerned for ourselves - in a mildly worried sort of way - but given current infection rates, our worry obviously isn’t enough to make us do all we can to protect ourselves.

Boys will do boys no matter what - this I know - and awareness of HIV doesn’t keep us from an online hookup or from going home with the hot guy at the bar. It doesn’t help us talk about sexual history, risk negotiation, open communication, or safer sex with our long-term partner, our regular fuck buddy, our one-night-stand, or the friend with whom we “accidentally” had an alcohol-fueled all-night romp.

The fear-based education of the late 80s and early 90s hasn’t worked for us; it’s too hard to be afraid of something we’ve always known. HIV drugs, as great as they are, have made this disease appear much friendlier than it is. We’ve been able to ignore many of HIV’s horrors because, unlike the previous generation, our friends aren’t dying right and left. In fact, I don’t personally know anyone who’s died from AIDS.

To generation Y, HIV is just one more thing in life that we need to worry about. This deadly little virus gets lost among all the other things our current culture of fear has told us we should be afraid of. We forget that we really should take this one seriously, and that it’s one of the few concerns we can each do something about.

Fighting HIV isn’t just about ignorance anymore. Now, the stronger enemy is apathy.