A sharp-eyed reader caught an omission in one of Your Secret Admirer's previous columns. Last month, I wrote about how some hetero and queer couples navigate open relationships and polyamory (see "Poly In Practice," April 3). One 36-year-old male wondered why I left out any mention of safe sex, which is obviously more of an issue in these types of arrangements. "I think young people, and dare I say young white people in small cities ... think that STDs aren't a real concern," he wrote to me. "I don't know what the statistics are, but there must be some things being passed around even in our quaint little town."
I checked back in with Janice and Adam, one of the couples I wrote about for that piece. "It's funny, I'm not even sure how to answer this other than with 'duh'?" Adam says. "I went to college in the early '90s, during the rise of Act Up, dental dams, and finger condoms, when straight women were the fastest-growing segment of the population with HIV. If you had sex without a condom in the early '90s, you thought you were going to die, period. Janice and I don't use condoms for STD prevention with each other, and I even have my negative STD test results posted in a picture on my MySpace page. But with other people, whether it's one-on-one or group sex, we always use condoms. We don't currently sleep with anyone else regularly enough to be at the point of not using condoms with a third person."
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Unveiling the new (old) Planned Parenthood, Losing common ground, Review: Fig Trees, More 
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Planned Parenthood wants abortions for everyone! Well, not exactly.
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Here's a first: an AIDS documentary nested inside an opera that's obsessed with albino squirrels, figs, palindromes, and Pythagoras.
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The results are “normal.” I breathe a sigh of relief. But should I be relieved? It’s been two years since I heard a registered nurse tell me “You have HPV,” and I am still getting scraped from the inside out, still making appointments to see doctors, and still terrified that I’ll get cancer.
- Art dodgers
David S. Bernstein points out some key facts about who voted for Michael Flaherty in “Can Flaherty Woo Yoon?”, but he neglects to mention that, if Sam Yoon had won, he would need the base that voted for Flaherty, and he would also need to woo Flaherty’s support to win the mayor’s seat.
- HIV safety net in jeopardy
The 4000 Rhode Islanders living with HIV were on the mind of Dr. David Gifford when he went to Governor Donald L. Carcieri, and then the House Finance Committee, in late 2005 and early this year, with hat in hand.
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There’s no doubt that AIDS is a different disease than it was two decades ago. Rebecca Haag wants to make sure we’ll be able to say the same thing 20 years from now.
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- Letters to the Portland Editor, October 10, 2008
If I could type my applause, I would. Your last two issues, specifically the cover articles, were superb.
- Moving On
When AIDS Project Rhode Island opened its doors in 1985, President Reagan had still not publicly uttered the word “AIDS.”
- Fallopian follies
Speculating on celebrity baby “bumps” is Hollywood blood sport.
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This Just In
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, Culture and Lifestyle, Health and Fitness, Medicine, Sexual and Reproductive Health, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Birth Control, Relationships, Sexuality, sex, Less
