Sarah, @Bloodswanmusic on Instagram shows up for a live podcast recording on Instagram if you want to watch. We initially began with her herpes story as we usually do. But then we went into discussing co-dependency vs interdependence in relationships, love addiction, disclosing celibacy, the difference in dating men vs women for her as a bisexual woman, and how all these other things in our lives with much more weight than herpes tend to not carry as much weight to us as an HSV diagnosis does.

Here's the Love Addiction Podcast I referenced: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Nu9tF2AtwAGYMVNPtanwk?_authfailed=1

Zach 38 year old man who tested positive for HSV2 in 2017. Our episode here really emphasizes the quality of communication that comes from an STI diagnosis increasing. This is something that can be integrated into an intervention that serves people who have yet to test positive for an STI and for those who date or will date someone who has at some point tested positive for an STI. We speak about kink/BDSM negotiations coming after an STI diagnosis and how a little more care goes into it when someone has an STI to disclose already. Zach shares how different his chlamydia experience was compared to his herpes diagnosis as well, given the symptoms were so bad with his first outbreak. He was in a committed relationship with a partner who was told by a provider she was “good” after having come in for what in hindsight was likely her initial herpes outbreak.

Elle (She/They) 35 year old Mother, Sex Worker and Educator who’s had experience with chlamydia, HPV and oral HSV shares a powerful perspective with us on how bias shows up from health care providers when sitting across from someone who IS comfortable talking about sex. The greatest analogy here was from how prepared we are for sports, but not really and how we are prepared for sex . . . but not really. The similarities are described in this podcast episode. If we all knew the risks of playing football for example, would we sign up for it just because it’s fun? We aren’t nearly as well prepared for sex, but we do it anyway and deal with the outcomes of it. What does preparation look like? For football, we don’t explore every potential injury and then consent to participation, it’s just wear a helmet. For sex, we don’t explore every potential injury/infection, it’s just wear a condom. Elle speaks very well through points of our ongoing SPFPP messaging of “Sexual health is mental health” given we want health care providers to see patients as whole humans rather than a consequence of an action that may not align with that provider’s on values. As we wrap up this series for the Oregon Health Authority, we again see that patients need better resources to navigate STIs in and out of the doctor’s office, and that it often takes a diagnosis for someone to begin to learn the things they wish they learned from their doctor.

We talk details about her sex education and how it completely missed the mark for teaching youth to communicate boundaries, consent, and vetting practices for playing in this project that ultimately just said don’t have sex and if you do you’ll be contaminated. Uncoupling pleasure from sex and intercourse from sex allows us to see all that sexuality encompasses. Adults dumb down common sense youth has essentially putting them on an escalator for failure in their sexual relationships to further detour people from sexual pleasure in a safe way. These tools early on can make us better patients to providers and therefore make providers better for patients, but for some reason there’s such a resistance to the comprehensive lessons of sexuality education because intercourse and pleasure are so linked together. Jade speaks to the antistigmatizing health care she received and how that coupled with coaching and kink/sex positivity set her up for success moving forward in her dating life after her chlamydia experience.

Tori, freshly 29 years old (she/her) shares her experience with revisiting planned parenthood 4 times to receive a herpes diagnosis. She brings up a good point about grief, and we tie the lessons she learned through grieving her old self can be integrated into this sex avoidant society we live in. The barrier to the sexual health convo coming from people who DO NOT have an STI is simply them receiving our experiences and lessons post-diagnosis. This communication is a critical part of prevention efforts and is far under-utilized as a sex positive approach falling to the prioritization of a sex avoidant approach such as “use a condom” exclusively to reduce risk of STIs.

Ashley (She/Her) shares her experience testing positive for chlamydia, HPV, and HSV1 and 2. What developed from this conversation is that sex positivity is pleasure positivity. She shares how being sex positive is essentially an acceptance for the lifestyles and decisions of others in relation to their on sexualities, but what was missing from my perspective was how in sex positive spaces, the emphasis is on one’s own needs and how accepting they are of themselves. This was my third recording today and interestingly enough, the conversation about institutions needing to be involved with the folks who are out here educating large audiences and who engage on social media need to be considered for partnership to improve efficiency of messaging. Ashley was on top of her providers, but she shouldn’t have to have been. After researching online about her own diagnosis and becoming more educated, you hear her share how she essentially became the educator of her providers about HSV.

Elle (she/her) is a 27 year old sex positive Oregonian. She’s heterosexual and monogamous and ironically our talk led to this statement of mutual non monogamy which you’ll hear more about here. Diagnosed with HSV-1 genitally just a few months ago, I was really shocked at how cool she was with talking about it so soon. We talk about how her self education led her to discovering the most useful information she received was learning how others navigate discussions about HSV, disclose and just overall talk about it. It’s odd that health organizations don’t want to work with those of us who are being sought out for sexual health information at all. My resistance was that I’m not credible because I’m a dude with a podcast. Now, as a non profit, I’m still just unable to get connected to anyone at the CDC for what’s a no brainer collaboration to minimize new STI transmissions. We’ll get there soon though, with or without the support of major institutions.

Zia is 22 and tested positive for genital herpes last year during the pandemic and in college. Her experience with the health care providers was neutral and she saw Planned Parenthood. Our discussion brought up this idea that what she learned through sex positivity could’ve been more useful to her if integrated in sex education. Her education was a group project where groups presented what they found on Google about different STIs and the message was “if you have symptoms, get tested”. Nothing on communication, frequency of testing, the fact that condoms on penises aren’t the only thing to discuss with sex and how sex and intercourse are so locked together when we discuss the two. We’re beginning to see a need to separate intercourse from sex, sex from sexuality, and pleasure from sex so that we can best offer transparent, consistent, accurate information to guide youth into their experiences with sex when they get there. An interesting note was that the sex ed she received potentially doing more harm than having any impact at all. She said it made no difference, but we’ll explore this in future interviews.

Link to Thesis on herpes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRyqQ0klBlgMA80nmlYRit5kyopGtN5cpZTBxPnYnIhaexnk4gN1RjLLLlATXLVZHGe4BL4-RUPvoGw/pub

Dr. Evelin Molina Dacker joins us to validate and affirm our findings so far throughout this series, which is that the aspects of sex education that people don’t get from their health care providers appear to stem from providers’ discomfort with speaking about sex. We dissect the connection of sex to intercourse and sexuality and pleasure as a way of finding a common ground reference point that allows both the patient and clinician to co-create as a way of allowing the patient to disclose relevant information that can while potentially making the provider uncomfortable, also allow for top notch treatment to happen as a result. In learning to take a sexual history, we cut through a lot of the unneccessary obstacles a patient will go on to navigate when faced with an STI or a partner with an STI. It isn’t just sex-positive health care we are needing to advocate for, it’s pleasure positive.

Instagram: @sexmeddoc

Website: Maketimeforthetalk.com

Erin is a 32 year old cis-gendered heterosexual female who uses she/her pronouns and is sex positive and new to the space of kink.She shares how her experience with HSV-2 diagnosis led her down the path of seeking sex-positive communication resources that weren’t given to her at the doctor’s office (Planned Parenthood). It took for her not only to look for the information herself, but to apply it through trial and error as well. What we learn most from this episode is that sex-positivity is more than interactions sexually with the people in our relationships, its about our relationships to ourselves. This kind of communication with ourselves is actively an anti-stigmatized approach to navigating relationships with others. A transition into sex-positivity rather than herpes support communities & dating to learn the lessons that many of us learn through trial and error. A resource is to be created in collaboration with sex positive world to bring folks with STIs into this space to learn to communicate with folks.