STIs and Stigma: Effects of STI Diagnoses and Sexual/Gender Minority Identity on Perceptions of Potential Partners

Abstract

This study tested how an STI diagnosis influences perceptions of hypothetical romantic/sexual partners. In an online experiment, participants (n = 189) were randomly assigned to one of five vignette conditions, which varied in how a potential partner’s STI status was described. HSV or HIV-positive status (with treatment) decreased the likelihood that participants would have sex or a relationship with the target. However, LGBTQ participants were less likely to consider an STI diagnosis a deal-breaker relative to cisgender, heterosexual participants. Results highlight a need for accurate sex education content about living with treatable but incurable STIs.

Keywords:

• LGBTQ
• HIV
• herpes
• STIs
• stigma

Acknowledgments

We thank Viviana Jaimes for assistance with content-coding of open-ended responses.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 The CDC acknowledges that some cases of genital herpes are caused by HSV-1; we use HSV-2 here given that we specified HSV-2 in our experimental vignette.

2 The most recent CDC guidelines recommend a single 500 mg intramuscular injection of the antibiotic ceftriaxone, along with a 7-day course of oral doxycycline (100 mg twice/day) if chlamydia co-infection has not been ruled out (Kuehn, 2021).

3 Analyses including the interaction between condition and SGM were also conducted with linear regression models using heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors; results are available in the Supplemental Material. There were no substantive differences between those models and the results presented here.

Additional information

Funding

Rebecca Sanchez was supported by the McNair Scholars Program at St. Edward’s University.