Silence and Assumptions: Narratives on the Disclosure of HIV Status to Casual Sexual Partners and Serosorting in a Group of Gay Men in Barcelona

ABSTRACT

Disclosing HIV status and seeking sexual partners with the same serostatus (serosorting) are strategies used by some gay and bisexual men to have unprotected anal intercourse (UAI). This study aims to gain an understanding of the occurrence of disclosure and serosorting with casual sexual partners. A grounded approach was used to analyze 22 interviews with gay men from Barcelona. The results reveal that disclosure of serostatus or the seeking of sexual partners of the same HIV status are not behaviors in the repertoire of most HIV-negative men and were not even taken into account when they engaged in UAI with casual sexual partners. The opposite was observed in HIV-positive respondents who did consider the possibility of revealing their serostatus. Some relied on intuition or subjective elements to evaluate the HIV status of their occasional partners.

KEYWORDS:

• Gay men
• serodisclosure
• serosorting
• HIV/AIDS
• risk
• sexual behaviors

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Tony Keirle for reviewing and correcting the translation of this article. This study is part of the Sialon project “Capacity Building in HIV/Syphilis Prevalence Estimation Using Noninvasive Methods Among MSM in Southern and Eastern Europe” (participants: Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and European Union/Directorate General for Health and Consumers). The Sialon project has received funding from the European Commission under the Public Health Program, 2003–2008. The sole responsibility for the project lies with the authors, and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained herein.

Notes

Gilhooly and Green (1996) refer to the fact that the coder reliability should be at least 85% to be considered valid.