You Can’t Shame Your Way Into Safety | How Different Communities Handle STIs

There’s a conversation I keep finding myself in. One that cuts deeper than most people realize. It’s not just about STIs. It’s about how different communities treat risk, responsibility, and the shame wrapped around it.

Because if you’ve spent time in both queer and hetero or swinger spaces, you’ve probably felt it too. That quiet tension in how we handle our bodies, our boundaries, and the moments when things go sideways.

I’m a firm believer in taking responsibility for yourself and your body. People get strep, the flu, and all kinds of things that need antibiotics or antivirals from sex. Why we’ve decided a handful of them are shameful while the others are just “part of life” blows my mind

Gay Culture: A System of Shared Risk

In queer men’s spaces, especially among bi and gay guys, STI risk is treated more like a given than a personal failure. It’s something you manage, not something you moralize. Regular testing is expected. Conversations about PrEP, DoxyPEP, and being undetectable aren’t awkward. They’re just part of the code.

Very few people I know would ever ask someone who’s undetectable to disclose their status. Why? Because if you’re a slut, you should be on PrEP. And if someone’s undetectable, the chance of transmission is so low it’s almost laughable compared to all the other risks we take. Why put someone through shame for something that’s already handled?

Qeer communities have been doing this work for decades. Long before the rest of the world got practice with COVID, they were already organizing testing events, building care webs, and setting up systems during the worst years of the HIV epidemic. We figured out how to be sluts and responsible at the same time. Same thing during Mpox — guys in the community were lining up for vaccines, canceling play parties, getting the word out, and adapting their sex lives overnight without needing the CDC to guilt-trip them into it.

There’s a collective understanding that everyone is a grown-up navigating a game with known variables. You can do everything “right” and still catch something. And when that happens, the goal is usually repair, not blame.

This culture leans into prevention as a system, not as a virtue signal. It allows for pleasure and imperfection. It doesn’t treat STIs like a scarlet letter. It treats them like what they are — a biological outcome of doing something humans do.

Some guys can be cum dumps and fuck 2 to 30 people at a weekend event, maybe take some pills after, maybe their partner catches it when they get home — and still go on living a happy, connected, empowered life. Life goes on.

Hetero and Swinger Circles: The Illusion of Control

Then there’s the other side, where STI talk feels more like legal liability than shared vulnerability.

Testing becomes currency. You see it in how single men are treated — often like unvetted threats unless they show proof. You see it in how many guys post their full STI panels on FetLife like badges of honor, names and dates and all, just to prove they’re “safe enough” to be let in. It’s honestly heartbreaking. Not because testing is bad, but because the pressure to perform cleanliness has gotten so intense that men feel like they have to give up privacy just to be seen as human.

That’s not consent culture. That’s performance culture. And it’s driven more by fear than care.

Worse, some people in these scenes act like getting a partner tested gives them immunity. And if something slips through, it’s someone else’s fault. A complete cop-out from taking personal responsibility for the risk they chose to take.

I’ve talked to couples who demand test results from others but don’t test as often themselves. I’ve seen STI exposure treated like a breach of contract. Like someone needs to be blamed, cut off, or punished.

That vibe isn’t about safety. It’s about control. And shame.

There’s a little grace sometimes for women and couples, mostly because of pregnancy fears. But beyond that — a lot of people are still clinging hard to sex-ed from 1985.

Shame Isn’t Strategy

This is where herpes and being undetectable really make the point. Not as main characters, but as cultural case studies.

Most doctors won’t even test for herpes unless you ask. Not because it’s rare (it’s not), or dangerous (it’s usually not), but because the emotional fallout of a positive result is often worse than the actual virus.

Some providers literally choose not to test unless there’s a reason. Because they know the shame it might trigger. That’s how deep stigma runs.

So if we know shame can hurt people more than the virus itself, why are we still designing sexual ethics around blame?

And no — I don’t have herpes and have never had HIV, for anyone still reading in disgust wondering if that’s why I’m writing this.

I’m writing it because my heart breaks watching people disclose things they didn’t need to, feeling like they had no other choice. That’s the part that wrecks me.

Bodies Aren’t Contracts

Sex is messy. Microorganisms don’t care how many conversations you had or what paperwork you brought. You can test regularly, disclose everything, play as safely as possible, and still walk away with a new hitchhiker in your bloodstream.

That’s not failure. That’s being human.

And let’s clear something up while we’re here. Someone not using a condom with a random hookup is not putting the whole community at risk. Stop that narrative. Your poly book written by one person with one worldview is not a bible. You’re not in danger because of what someone else did with their body. You’re in control of your own. You can take that information and make your own choices — but seriously, knock that one the fuck off.

Blaming other people’s personal decisions for your anxiety is not a safety plan. It’s control disguised as concern.

When we play sports, we stretch, we train, we wear gear and sometimes we still get hurt. So we treat it, we rest, and we keep playing.

That’s how STI culture should work too.

Moving Forward

What we need, especially in crossover spaces, is a cultural reset on what personal responsibility actually means.

It doesn’t mean guaranteeing zero risk. It means knowing your body, taking care of it, and giving others the info they need to do the same. It means honesty over perfection. It means supporting someone when they get something, not punishing them for being the unlucky one that day.

Because the moment we let shame run the show, we stop seeing each other as people. And we start treating sex like a courtroom instead of a connection.

I never want someone to be afraid to tell me they got something or worry that I wouldn’t talk to them again over it. That’s the worst kind of silence — when someone’s too scared to speak up because you made risk feel like moral failure.

And to the newbies out there, if you make your contract conversations so dramatic and rigid that people feel like they’ll be exiled for catching something, you’re literally creating the exact situation where someone’s gonna be too afraid to tell you.

Now if they knew, and they did it anyway without saying something? Fuck them. That’s different. But I honestly don’t think most people are like that. That kind of behavior usually comes from economic pressure, from people who can’t afford to see a doctor, not malice.

And maybe instead of blaming them, we should be asking why we’re still making healthcare so damn hard to access in the first place.