Communication
How To Talk About Sexual Health For The First Time
And why you shouldn’t have sex unless you do
Storytime: I contracted HPV (the Human Papilloma Virus) from one of the first people I had sex with at 15 years old. Huge bummer. And for nearly a decade after that, I dealt with moderate to severe outbreaks of warts on my genitals.
How’s that for a lead in?
To say that it put a damper on my budding sex life would be an understatement. Casual, care-free sex was entirely off the table. I was petrified, horrified, and mortally embarrassed, and I had no idea how to move forward.
I didn’t tell anyone or talk about it except with the nurses, doctors, and clinicians who treated my outbreaks. I had a lot of treatments, and even many health care professionals weren’t that great at talking about STIs.
I showed HPV symptoms on and off for about seven years, which means that if I wanted to have a semi-normal sex life as a young man, I had to learn to talk about STIs.
That said, I’d had a couple of hookups early in my budding sex life where I didn’t disclose my status and felt terrible about not coming clean about my symptoms, and vowed never to do that again (I eventually contacted those I could to finally have the…
