Contracting an STI From a Trusted Partner Whilst Being Queer
Within even the most peripheral of my memories, I’ve had a repeated inclination towards placing trust in others. It’s with considerable privilege that this has been the case, and even greater privilege that I’m able to raise it for cross-examination. My early childhood was arguably run of the mill and stress-free, made so by a roster of dependable adults I could turn to for both guidance and assurance; a valid license to hide my face away from all that I wasn’t primed to acknowledge or which I wasn’t yet required to understand.
It was only once I somersaulted into puberty that I began to speculate whether my proclivity for perceiving only the best of any personality and disregarding the less desirable components was more of an affliction than an asset. I was dealt a fortunate hand in that the several fleeting relationships I found myself in as a teen, despite perhaps wreaking some emotional carnage at the time, ultimately set me on a path to locating the blossoming queerness which I had been internalising so resolutely.
However, in predictably contradictory style, my naivety in the arena of romantic combat meant I was severely underprepared for handling the sentimental fallout of physical liaisons gone awry. Two profiles I’ve never aligned myself with are that of a liar or an idiot. But it would be foolish to sidestep admission of the fact I had spent a significant number of years deceptively believing I was insusceptible, or worse, somehow ‘above’ the threat of sexual illnesses. All faith is blind faith if it’s been misplaced to a personal detriment.
Viewed parallel to cohorts of my school peers, I suppose I was comparatively wise when the focus was put on conduct in fledgling physical relations. By chance I acquired my first boyfriend at the age of fourteen, though in a backwoods West Country bubble where sex education consisted of snickering at a reluctant sports teacher fumbling with a condom and a banana from behind cupped palms, the degree of risk never registered as being alarmingly high. Despite this, no ‘action’ was taken without regard to the neighbouring metropolis of Swindon being one of the teenage pregnancy capitals of England between 2000 and 2007, and I for one was determined to avoid embodying this statistic. By the age of sixteen came the end to my dealings with the aforementioned first boyfriend and an additional mistake in the form of a second one.
Simultaneously, I had established in my own mind that I was glaringly bisexual, and had done so with a crystalline candour. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid to disclose this to my inner circle, any more than it was rarely commonplace for those of us raised in the blurry wilderness between generations Millennial and Z to talk frankly about personal explorations of sexual identity. For this reason, any burning declarations were reserved for stage whispers between friends after a couple of drinks, when gaps in the timeline would ensure my secrecy remained intact.
Three years elapsed, leaving only the faintest of indents on my consciousness. My nineteenth birthday came and passed before I forged any real acquaintanceship with a sexually transmitted illness. Not that I lacked a pre-existing bank of vague generalisations; oh no, I have mainstream post-watershed television boasting such delights as Embarrassing Bodies to thank for that. What I did lack was a palpable, discernible entanglement with the most intimate parts of my anatomy to which I could ask - “well, what the hell is this all about?”. Unluckily for me, we all know that what we don’t wish for crashes into our lives in double quantities.
I met someone online - the opening phrase of every cyber-age nightmare. Being one of only two in my immediate friendship group to deviate from the predetermination of going to university fresh out of school, instead opting to pursue a (now somewhat futile) education in the arts, I wrestled to establish an identity when not having a social safety net meant I was effectively persona non grata. In direct opposition to my expectations, art college offered a deluge of judgement with none of the perks of its subsequent soul-searching.
Social media was the gateway to the life I felt I was missing out on, and the Instagram algorithm was quick to spew this person of interest out into the expanse of my discover page. They were a musician, I was undoubtedly gullible, and it must have been fate that both of us were suffering from identical cases of the crippling loneliness which drove us together. Red flags sailed on the horizon barely past the starting line; reeling off the notches on their bedpost without provocation? Sure. Smuggling their phone out of sight on the regimented ‘ding!’ of a message from a particular ‘friend’? Okay. Items of underwear belonging to other women strewn about their flat or poorly concealed under the bed? Yeah. Why not? Every excuse I could manufacture on their behalf I deployed in a vain attempt to protect my feelings from their (more than probable) actions. My trust issues lurked shallowly beneath the surface - It wasn’t that my capacity for reliance was compromised; it was simply far too great.
By my estimations, a reluctance to commit more than impartially to a relationship was just symptomatic of late teenage-hood. Either that or it was just a fault with me. Around three months into the relationship, I noticed something not quite right down there. With my relationship being long-distance across opposite sides of the country, the rational side of my brain concluded that it must have been an unfortunately-timed bout of thrush or some other exclusively ‘female’ problem. Nothing to be concerned about. After all, I had only been ‘significant’ with my other on two separate occasions. A multitude of Google searches yielded only melodramatic results - autoimmune disease, skin infections, surely not cancer? To my benefit, the voice of pragmatism nestled itself just deep enough in the recesses of my mind to book an appointment at my local doctor’s surgery, “just in case”. Which is precisely the moment everything came crashing down around my ears.
I enter stage left; green felt chairs and an obnoxiously loud water cooler.
“Miss Emma Doyle, please.” A short, homely triage nurse appears stage right. I walk adjacent to her through a heavy fire door; clunks upon closing. We re-enter stage left; rubbing alcohol and clammy plastic mattress. Pause. (She refers to herself in the third person). “Don’t panic but we think this might be syphilis, stay there for five while we get a second opinion.”
What? I didn’t know much, aside from that it was incurable. Al Capone died from it. Not that I thought I would die. The mock dramatisation was primarily for context. Additionally, the burden of regular flare-ups stretching too far into the future for me to forecast seemed an unnecessary weight to carry. It wasn’t syphilis, it transpired. It was genital warts, and I apologise if this makes the interest of any readers dip.
Surely I can’t have been the only student to be fed through the wringer of the school mechanism knowing only of the risks of Chlamydia and Gonorrhoea in any detail. Although ranking just below Gonorrhoea and Chlamydia, genital warts are one of the most common sexually transmitted infections not only in the UK, but globally, information that your long-suffering sports teacher may not have been willing to begrudgingly impart. Like many other commonly spread STIs, genital warts do not require penetrative sex to be passed along in a chain, only oral or skin-to-skin contact with an infection site, or even sharing sex toys. As a result, the sex you have to be at risk of contracting genital warts and many other STIs doesn’t even have to be heteronormative. This revelation hit me with the force of a freight train. At that moment in time, I hadn’t yet slept with another woman, though my partner had been considerably more experimental with people of all gender identities. This was information that we had openly shared and discussed, and something I loved them for (yes, despite the warning signs). A joint sexual openness presented a chance for us to understand each other more deeply, yet the thought of receiving the brunt of another woman’s lack of foresight, however inadvertent, granted me mixed feelings.
My heart ached for the girl, more likely girls, who had ostensibly been caught in the same trap as I had. My partner had an innate knack for making me feel like a rare acquisition, but clearly, this was simply one more talent distributed with abandon. I felt angry for them by proxy, too. They would never, in all probability, have knowledge of the betrayal which ensnared them like flies in a spider’s web. Our emotions were indiscriminately disposable. Given the chance, I thought, they would be indignant. Or they would if they were anything like me.
Be that as it may, I was forced to recognise that questions surrounding my identity were being laid bare amidst the unravelling of my relationship. As a general rule, queerness as a concept is othered - a digression from the norm. Following this formula, people who identify as queer are therefore extraneous to the core heterosexual faction of society. Queer love is conspicuous if your vicinity is overwhelmingly straight. Queer sex is distasteful unless you’re conventionally attractive. Instead of providing an alternative way of determining one’s position, the sliding scale of acceptability that queer people are loaded onto only serves to establish sexual disorientation.
In recent times, I’ve not seen a better example of how this manifests than in a discussion between non-binary performers Ginny Lemon and Bimini Bon Boulash during a previous episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, arguably the best LGBT focussed US export to bless the small screen for years. Lemon, born Lewis Mandall, broke down in tears as they described with poignant bluntness how growing up in a working-class environment, “anyone who was any different from the binary was a freak”.
“I was brought up to think I was ugly and stupid, so I never had a possibility to explore anything else other than the idea that I was ugly and stupid”.
In the discussion of gender and sexual binaries, many of the same laws can be applied. The classification of queerness as ‘other’ through alienation or exclusion can contribute to the accusatory dogma that refusing to adhere to societal standards is an act of aggression rather than a valid choice. I had already been aware of my unusual-ness. There was a pre-existing insight into how I didn’t quite fit. With this acting as a supplement to what I saw as a stain from my STI misadventure on my otherwise spotless record, the deep-seated conviction that one part of me or another would always be rejected in order to belong was compounded. My queerness compelled me to engage with a far broader spectrum of emotional behaviours, but simultaneously my exposure to what was potentially twice the heartbreak.
Ever the realist, I concede to the fact that it’s not possible for every cloud to have a silver lining. By a series of fortunate events, however, mine does. Years of minimising myself and the queer side of my identity built to a crescendo of emotional burnout, and handing out sincerity like party favours to the people who were willing to abuse the privilege left my holding power severely depleted.
I met my current partner following an extended period of acclimatising to my personal needs, and how they ought to be met. Every day, I wake up safe in the knowledge that neither of us will ever have to deliberate over whether our worth is being compromised. Once I’d given myself the permission to love my queerness with the ardour of a new flame, it was only fair that I gave credence to the pitfalls it triggered, albeit indirectly.
We have seen critical headway achieved in the acknowledgement of LGBT and queer-specific issues, and the recognition of a widening gap in the youth demographic caused by the education system’s insistence on promoting only heteronormative values. If queer children and teenagers could be given effective guidance that could prepare them for their own reality, there would be no need for them to create a false one in order to appeal to society’s palate. Inarguably, there is work yet to do. For now, I can find contentment in the freedom that my queerness awards me were in its place had been chains and breathe a little easier knowing that people like me - people like us - can finally evidence the beauty in otherness.
Written by Emma Doyle
I am a 22-year-old illustration student based in Manchester, swiftly-turned freelance writer and English tutor. I love nothing more than exploring the intricacies of political criticism, intersectional feminism and my scepticism of celebrity culture, though ask me unrehearsed and I’ll probably tell you that my obsession with true crime and the horror genre will prove to be essential one day.