Personal memoir of sex-positive writer’s Africa HIV/AIDS work

more about it all, but in the meantime, if my articles leave you with an appetite for more, then I recommend two wrenching books: Letting Them Die: Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes Fail by Catherine Campbell, and The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani. (Pisani's book in particular gave me so many moments of recognition that I was almost offended. I was like, dammit, Elizabeth Pisani, this is the book I wanted to write!) In early 2010, while I was still in Africa, I began writing a series of articles about my experiences. These articles were published at CarnalNation.com and edited by Chris Hall, who is a smart sex-positive writer in his own right. I'm especially grateful to Chris because, unlike a lot of editors, he made the effort to grasp where I was coming from; he always made requests rather than demands, and never changed my work without consulting me. Good editors are hard to come by, and I hope that when I edit other writers’ work today, I do credit to the model Chris provided. I'm sad to report that CarnalNation ceased publishing new articles in late 2010, although you can still read the archives online (and I encourage you to do so). There are a lot of "sex-positive” websites out there that have little real understanding of sex communities, activism, etc. -- not to mention, there are websites that hire talented and ethical writers, but then hide truly unethical business practices. But from what I could tell, CarnalNation was the real deal. The list of contributors read like a Sex-Positive All- Stars, and I was proud to be part of it. So, anyway. This is the first of a bunch of articles that I originally wrote about sex and culture in southern Africa. Like all my writing, it's framed within my own experience. (I'm not republishing all the Africa articles in this book, but they're all available in my_ CarnalNation archive.) And before we get into it, I would like to note one final thing. One problem with how many Westerners write about Africa is that they treat Africa as “one country": there's little acknowledgment that Africa is a huge, diverse continent full of many different cultures. I try to avoid that, but I also write under a pseudonym, and thus I can't write too precisely about where I was or what I did in Africa. I'm sorry about that, and I hope I don't come off as too much of a colonialist asshole. KK ok Sexual ABCs in Africa, Part 1: Abstinence In the beginning of 2009, I made a name for myself as a sex-positive, pro- BDSM educator in Chicago -- and no one was more surprised than me by how suddenly successful I was! I curated the explosive pro-sex, pro-queer, pro-kink documentary film series Sex+++ at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. I lectured on both BDSM and sexual communication in Chicago, San Francisco and New York. I even fielded a call from Oprah's office! Then, just as my life was going all crazy, I was offered a job doing HIV/AIDS mitigation in southern Africa. I've wanted to do it for years, so I accepted -- though not without some soul-searching. Rather a change of pace, right? I thought I might even give up basic romance by coming here... but not so fast. Only a month after moving, I met a guy I really liked. He's another American, also here to work on HIV/AIDS; we live a bit far apart, but flirted constantly HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018581