The Undetectable Bottom Bunker

Luke and I thought we had the whole safer-sex system down already. Our main events often consisted of foreplay instead of anal sex. But occasionally we craved some good ol’ fashioned bum lovin’. And since the HIV has a harder time transferring from bottom to top, we found comfort in the fact that Luke preferred top bunk. Regardless though, we always used a condom.

Luke and I started off our relationship in an experimental way: by seeing a couple’s therapist. Even with the potential for great love, many differences still endured that could brew a future of total chaos. We decided to be proactive and wrestle with such topics as monogamy and spirituality. Most importantly, we had to wrestle with being a mixed HIV status couple.

“I don’t think you guys have truly thought about what this means yet,” our therapist said during one session. “A major part of making love is the intimacy of actually feeling your bodies connect through sexual intercourse … without any barriers.”

And by barriers, she meant condoms. And she was right. Unlike standard couples, we would never get to experience what it would be like to have sex without a piece of rubber between us. The thought suddenly made Luke and I very sad.

“You guys can overcome this,” she guided us further. “But you’ll have to do so by mourning this — kind of like the way you would mourn the loss of a loved one.”

We decided to do just that. It sounds somewhat silly, but Luke and I worked our way through some of the stages of grief for our atypical sex life and eventually, the two of us reached a stage of acceptance. Condoms would always be in our lives and that certainly didn’t define our ability to love one another well.

Later that year, I finally went on medications and achieved undetectable status rather quickly. Even though we had become quite accustomed to our “special needs” sex life, my being undetectable added a huge, extra layer of relief. However, as we started meeting other mixed-status couples, we learned that for all of them, being undetectable was more than just a layer of relief. It was a way to go back to engaging in sex without the rubber.

“I never use a condom when I top him,” one HIV-negative friend of mine told me about his HIV-positive partner. When I asked if he ever even had the slightest worry, he laughed. “Not at all. We’ve been together for more than ten years. He has been undetectable the whole time, and there has never been a scare.”

Although I should have been more shocked by the fact that they still had sex after ten years, his stance on safety blew my mind. I chalked it up to one person’s mere opinion until I started meeting more “magnetic couples.” All of them practiced this way. When the poz partner was undetectable and on bottom bunk, they didn’t use
a condom.

In a way, I could see why this worked. With how HIV primarily infects, it’s already more difficult for the virus to travel upstream. So if the bottom bunker was indeed undetectable, the chances of passing it on had to be next to nil. But just to be sure, I asked a doctor buddy of mine.

“Yeah, this is true,” he confirmed. “It would be like a 0.01% chance of risk. But it only really works if a guy is truly undetectable. If his virus is up, he could pose way more risk to the top.”

When I continued to respond in disbelief, he offered to top me right then and there to prove his confidence with my undetectable status. However I turned down his graciously sexy offer as Luke and I weren’t quite ready to do that kind of thing with other guys.

As it turned out, Luke and I weren’t ready to take on this barebacking exception either. After all the evidence, both of us felt it would totally be okay. Yet when it came time to bottom bunk, we still strapped on the rubber. We had just reached total comfort with the condom as part of our love making. In a way, we didn’t let some silly little latex define who we were as a couple. And something about that felt just as good as getting to feel your own partner bare. l