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Hey Woody!

Do you think I should use a “morning after” prophylactic when I get drunk and end up barebacking with a poz guy?

— Positive or negative, it’s beef

Dear Beef:

Yes. The medical consensus is that if you know you’ve just had unsafe sex with an HIV infected person, you should go on post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP). For years, the CDC has been recommending PEP for health-care workers and researchers accidentally exposed to HIV (like when they stick themselves with a contaminated needle).

But don’t be an idiot. PEP should be used for one-time, accidental exposures. The kind where your drunken HIV positive partner simply misheard your request to be “tucked” in bed. Using PEP as a way to continually have unsafe sex is stupidity on stilts. A better way is to add an “R” to PEP and call it PrEP. Ask your doctor about Truvada, the first drug proven to prevent HIV infection in men who bareback.

Hey Woody!

There was this really cute German boy across the aisle on an international flight I was on. We start talking and he does that cute, blonde smile thing that made me want to hijack the plane to the moon.

We traded American and German listens on our iPhones. He held my gaze, smiled, and practically beamed at me every time we talked. At this point I’m pretty sure he’s gay, especially when I realized that almost all the music he had were dance tracks. When he asked me if I liked Britney Spears I thought it was only a matter of time before I joined the mile high club. Besides, he was drinking wine. Don’t straight Germans drink beer?

So I give him a pen and paper and asked him to translate four words into German: 1) Beautiful, 2) Very, 3) Are and 4) You. When he handed me back the pad I re-arranged the German words into a sentence that said, “You are very beautiful” and handed it to him.

Well, Woody, that was the end of that. He sort of gave me this frozen smile and he just kind of withdrew for the rest of the flight. He wasn’t gay. How could I have been so wrong? I have his email address and I was thinking of apologizing to him. Do you think I should?

— Airsick over America

Dear Airsick:

Anybody’s gaydar would’ve gone off with all the cues you picked up. Still, anybody who’s gone to Europe can tell you that straight people over there have a pronounced gay sensibility—they love dance music (it’s about all they play in Berlin), holding your gaze, smiling, and God help us, listening to Britney. I’m sorry, but that woman’s singing makes me howl like a dog hearing a siren.

Anyway, it’s not unusual for European straight men to kiss each other hello and goodbye. Didn’t you see the Russian gymnasts greet each other at the last Olympics when they came off the floor? They were “high-fiving” each other with their lips.

And forget about the apology. What the hell for? You didn’t do anything wrong. If a woman came on to him and he wasn’t interested, would she feel the need to apologize? F–k that s–t.

It’s total homophobic crap to believe there’s something wrong with a gay man hitting on a straight man. Herr Blonde should have felt complimented, not insulted. He could have simply said, “Thanks, I’m flattered but I’m also straight.”