What They Wanted To Hear

"I would never really intentionally infect someone.  That's just not something I would do.  I don't think it was really my sexual fantasy, I think I was just playing it up for others where it was their fantasy.  Personally, I wasn't turned on by it.  I would tell people it turns me on and everything because that was what they wanted to hear."  Steven Boone

In a desperate appeal for sympathy for his misfortune, Steven Boone who has been found guilty of attempting to kill his sex partners by communicating the HIV virus to them, now has repeated what others in the field of HIV/AIDS have asserted, that society is punishing the unfortunate.  Yes, it is highly unfortunate that Mr. Boone and others like him contracted HIV, and thus live a complicated life. 

A life sufficiently complicated by their malady that they control it with medication but are expected by law to inform potential sex partners that they are HIV-positive.

Mr. Boone of his own free will and quite deliberately, boasted that he enjoyed having sex without take precautionary measures to ensure he would not communicate his shedding viral load to other men.  He went so far as to repeatedly boast on line that it was his deliberate intention to infect as many other men with HIV as he could. 

He boasted additionally of the large numbers of men he had enjoyed sex with, without the tedious obligation of informing them of his HIV status.

He spoke glowingly and with much satisfaction of having had unprotected sex multiple times with a 17-year-old man whom he had also not informed of the risks he would be taking having sex with him.  That young man, now two years older and infinitely wiser, testified at Mr. Boone's trial of his anguish on discovering the truth that Mr. Boone had withheld from him and which Mr. Boone's roommate had informed the young man of. 

The young man spoke of his misery and his panic of knowing he might be HIV positive as a result.

And he spoke also of his discovery that he had indeed been infected and is now himself HIV-positive.  His life has certainly taken a change for the worse. 

He must now school himself on a medical procedure he hardly anticipated would structure his life for the very rest of his life.  While HIV/AIDS no longer represents a death sentence, it does represent a situation of life-long compromised health, one which must be treated by available drug therapy.  And one that will most certainly affect his social life.

Mr. Boone was unwilling to have his HIV-positive status affect his personal and social and sex life.  He resented that it could and determined it would not.  In the process causing great harm to others with whom he withheld the knowledge of his status and whom he placed in grave danger. 

Another trial will yet take place, this one on behalf of a vulnerable young man with mental disabilities whom Mr. Boone also took advantage of.

He may yet be declared a dangerous offender and if that occurs he would face life in prison.  That would panic anyone to declaring their wholly involuntary surrender to happenstance; that nothing malicious was ever planned, it was all a huge misapprehension, he was only playing to others' fantasies, and he would never, under any conceivable circumstances, think to harm another human being by such actions as have been imputed to him.

"I've lived with HIV for nearly 30 years, and I'm not dead.  I'm 70 next year and I'm as fit as a fiddle.  It really, really concerns me that HIV is even considered within the law.  If this was any other health issue it would not be being decided by the Supreme Court.  It does nothing whatsoever to achieve any understanding about how HIV is transmitted.  It is, in my opinion, a catastrophe that the Supreme Court was not more enlightened and put themselves in the position of being quasi-medical professionals."  David Hoe

Mr. Hoe has his experience, and while he speaks of the ordinariness for him of living with HIV, he would not be living at all had the symptoms of that once-dread diagnosis not compelled medical scientists to find drug protocols that would assist those living with the disease to manage it, as a chronic life-endangering condition.  One that he and any other carrier should be concerned not to transmit to others.