Question to the Sexpert:“I’m 32, straight and have never been tested for HIV. I know that I’m supposed to get tested because everyone is supposed to, but I can’t find a logical reason to justify doing it. I have safe sex, feel healthy and don’t know anyone with HIV. And I can’t get over the feeling that if the test came back positive that I’d be better off not knowing anyway. I don’t want to be an asshole about this, but can you actually give me a reason why I would want to know my status?”

Aside from the fact that it’s just so terribly hip to hop onto one of those luxurious free rapid testing buses parked outside gay nightclubs, there are a sl

ew of perfectly good reasons one should feel motivated to get an HIV test.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not selling anything here and totally understand your point. You think that in the event of worst case scenario (a positive diagnosis) you’ll end up just nihilistically counting down the days until you’re toast, wishing to God you’d never learned the inescapable truth so you could still be living your life, prancing around as joyously ignorant as an uninformed voter.

After all, if your sex is always protected, you don’t share needles and you’re not making a regular habit of handing the tissues from your bloody noses to strangers for safe keeping, a positive diagnosis wouldn’t change much about your behavior in terms of infecting others. I get that.

That’s all well and good, my friend, but knowledge IS power and I’m more than happy to identify, in list form no less, reasons why you should go do it anyway.

No More Learn: Head is Full
Sometimes it takes a frying pan to the head to drive home a point. You may be convinced that you do everything you can to protect yourself: making good decisions about safer sex and other ways of looking out for your loved/liked/banged ones.

But have you ever injured something little, like your thumb? Have you ever had a really strenuous workout that left some particular part of your body sore? It wasn’t until that day that you ever really appreciated, ever really noticed how much you use that body part every single day. It’s only then, when there’s a big flashing pain going off like a neon sign reading “Dumbass!” that you realize how much stuff goes unnoticed all the time.

You have safe sex? Awesome. Congrats. Every time? Every…. Single….. time? You’ve never put anyone at risk ever at any point in your life? Never had one drunken night of bad decisions? Never been in a relationship where you got a little lazy? It’s possible you’ve shared razors with a friend who stayed the night. It’s possible someone has helped you clean up a scraped elbow. Those last two are highly unlikely ways to spread HIV but really, are you sure you know everything there is to know about prevention? If you go get tested you can talk to a professional who can really help you gauge your risk level and give you tips on keeping your negative status.

Get Your Head Out of the Oven, Sylvia Plath
I’d give you much better odds of being negative than not, considering you take precautions. However, in the small possibility you would get a positive diagnosis, it’s not the same death sentence it used to be. Yes, people can and do die of HIV (hence all the hoopla about testing) but the sooner you know, the sooner you can get on medications that can give you years and years of healthy, productive, fulfilling life that you might otherwise lose.

Many people are living with the virus, going on with their days, appreciating them more fully and feeling relatively good about their futures because they are receiving the proper medical care that enables them to do so. Everyone’s days are limited, regardless of HIV, but that doesn’t mean we need to throw the world into hopeless anarchy.

Cheer Up, You Pessimistic Punkass
What if your result is negative? Wouldn’t that be, like, a really happy little present to yourself? Knowing that monkey’s off your back? Having a fresh, clean slate with which you can approach the world, renewed in your conviction to protect yourself and others?

How About the Bun in the Oven?
This may or may not apply to you, but if there’s any possibility you’re pregnant, an HIV test is an even better idea because you don’t have to pass the virus to your fetus. Knowing your status means you can start on meds right away that protect your child.

C’mon, All the Kids are Doing It
Making HIV testing a normal part of life is strange, yes. We don’t like thinking about big picture things like life and death and it’s not a lot of fun to get blood drawn. Yet, despite that, we live in an area and age where polio is a specter of the past and tuberculosis is a non-issue. What we do have is HIV. It’s our generation’s problem. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Being educated, making safe and wise decisions and facing the world with a rational optimism is the only option.

To find a testing site near you:
Call:
1-800-230-PLAN (7526)
1-800-CDC-INFO (232-4636)
Or visit:
http://www.hivtest.org/
http://nfprha.org/main/about_us.cfm?Category=Member_Clinic_Directory&Section=Main

Timaree Schmit is a trained sexologist who has also worked as an HIV prevention counselor and sex educator. She has written widely for numerous publications and was recently recognized by Coed Magazine as one of the 10 Most Famous College Sex Columnists in America. Timaree is completing a doctorate in Human Sexuality at Widener University.

Do you have a question or comment? Please email Timaree directly at sexpert@MarcLamontHill.com

Love Jones : So what’s the fuss about?
An EverythingBlaxx film review

“You’ve never seen ‘Love Jones’ before?”  “ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?” “He’s never watched ‘Love Jones’? LYNCH HIM!!!!”

That was the reaction of most some of you upon learning that I’ve never seen this film (OK, I might have exaggerated a bit on that last one) and I was pressed into watching the film and providing an in-depth review. Now I know what some of you are saying right now, “Blaxx, that was 2 years ago, WTF took you so long?” Well, I did take it upon myself to pick up the film on DVD (Thanks Amazon.com) and write a review. Why didn’t it ever get posted you ask? I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I had written, mainly because of my frame of mind and stance on love at that time, so I let it linger on my hard drive for all eternity. I recently stumbled upon it and marveled at how different 21-year old Blaxx thought compared to 23-year old Blaxx and it was worth revisiting. So let’s get into it.

Now as it has been well documented in the past, I slept on this film when it dropped in 1997 (sue me, I was 11) and when I finally did peep it for the first time, it was long after I had bore witness to the Black movies of the late-90s, early-2000s where every plot revolved around a wedding or special event (see The Wood, The Brothers, The Best Man, Soul Food) or the characters had a stereotypical occupation or interest that because the whole purpose of the movie (for example Love & Basketball, Brown Sugar, Barbershop, Save The Last Dance). So I was admittedly skeptical when one of Love Jones’ opening scenes was set in a spoken word club but thankfully ‘The Sanctuary’ serves only as a backdrop to what keeps the movie moving but I’m going to get into that in a bit. We’re 3 lines deep into ‘A Blues for Nina’ and I immediately know that this is definitely not gonna be another ‘Poetic Justice’. By the time, the scene with Darius and Nina in the record store is done, we’ve established that poetry, music and visual art take home all of the supporting cast awards in this movie.

Speaking of the cast, althought it is the usual suspects when it comes to black actors and actresses, everyong did their thing (with one slight exception). I can never be mad at cha for casting Nia Long in a role that calls for love scenes, that’s always a good look, even if they are with closet homosexual Larenz Tate (I KEED, I KEED). The supporting cast manages to do a lot with very little, I don’t know if anyone else noticed but none of the other characters had very many lines in this movie and serve mostly as sounding boards for the protagonists. With the exception of Lisa Nicole Carson’s Josie (sidenote: Did you know Lisa is schizophrenic? I only learned that today when I asked my good friend Google where she been at) and Isaiah Washington’s Savon who happens to be that slight exception I mentioned a few sentences ago. Nothing against Isaiah personally but I don’t think he was suited for the role and vice versa. The most effective way I’ve found to critique an acting performance is to focus on the character, not the actor, and try to see if you can think of an actor who would do a better job in the same role. I wasn’t able to do this with any other character, but with Savon, the possibilities were endless. The best fit in my mind was, interestingly enough, Leonard Roberts who plays Eddie. I just wasn’t feeling it, especially the scenes with his wife, those were train wrecks. However, he was the focal point of one of my favorite exchanges of dialogue in the film where he and Darius are playing pool. My last comment on the cast is that I was very pleased with the fact that the characters were simply upward-mobile black people, Theodore Witcher easily could have made them some pean pie eating, yuppie mufuckas, or *shudder* musicians, or (insert stereotypical black occupation here).

After watching the film serveral times over the past 3 weeks, I can safely say Theodore Witcher is a better director than writer. Some of the cinematography in the film is excellent and I wish he could have expanded on some of the visuals but that would have taken away from their effect. The scene of Darius and Nina on the motorcycle is probably the greatest 3 seconds of film I’ve seen since Children of Men. Every setting helped answer all the questions you could possibly have about the characters before you even asked them. However, the plot stumbles a bit towards the middle of the movie. The turmoil created between Darius and Nina was kinda thrown together and unbelievable but that’s as much the fault of the poor writingn as it is the fact that the film does a terrible job of establishing any sense of time until the end of the movie.

So overall, what did I think? Good movie? No, great movie. Classic? Errrr…Barbershop classic. Would I recommend it to friends? Well my girl has never seen the movie either but before you think about lynching her, we’ll be watching it this weekend cuz “that’s urgent like a mufucka”

Gov. Palin’s E-Mail Hacked

The son of a Tennessee state representative hacked into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account. What do you think?

Bart McCorkle,
Roofer
“This is outrageous. Clearly it’s the responsibility of the government to infiltrate people’s e-mail accounts, not rogue private citizens.”

Shandra Ferguson,
ESL Teacher
“This makes me sad. I remember a time when nobody knew who Sarah Palin was, much less what sort of spam she had.”

Blake Gruber,
Systems Analyst
“I’m sure it won’t be long before they crack McCain’s elaborate system of cans and strings.”

Today’s video of the day comes from Syracuse University Professor (and Barbershop regular) Boyce Watkins, who recently released his first rap single “When I Rise.” Following in the footsteps of Cornel West, Boyce will be releasing an album soon. Thoughts?