CHICAGO — Newly dating and slightly anxious, two men bared their arms for blood tests and pondered the possibility that one of them, or both, could be infected with HIV. An innovative program — called Testing Together — would allow them to hear their test results minutes later, while sitting side by side.
Eric Zemanovic, a dental hygienist, and Dominic Poteste, a restaurant server, had been dating two months after a year-long friendship. In the past, they’d both practiced safe sex and got regular HIV tests. Both are in their early 30s. They’d grown up when AIDS meant an early, horrible death. So, whenever they heard about friends testing positive, they felt pangs of fear.
Poteste explained: “There’s always an anxiety that comes with getting tested, even though 99 percent of the time I’ve been safe and been careful, there still is always …” His voice trailed off.
“A slight possibility,” Zemanovic completed the sentence.
“A slight possibility,” Poteste agreed.
Testing Together, now underway in Chicago and Atlanta, takes an unusual approach: It encourages gay male couples to get tested together and hear their results together. After delivering the results, a counselor talks with the couple about what to do next, including agreements they may want to make with each other about sex and health.
Are we agreeing to be monogamous? Is any sexual activity outside the relationship OK? How are we going to protect each other from infection? Couples address these questions and more.
The idea is to bring honesty to sexual relationships, said one of the researchers behind the program, Rob Stephenson of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta.
Relationships offer only “mythical protection” from HIV, Stephenson said. Some couples may have avoided talking about each other’s HIV status, thinking, “If he were HIV-positive, he would have told me,” or, “If he wanted to know, he would have asked.”
The concept of testing together started in Africa more than 20 years ago. Researchers believe couples testing has successfully reduced the spread of AIDS among married, heterosexual couples in some African regions. One study that looked at couples where one spouse is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative estimated that couples testing was cutting the rate of transmission by more than half.
In Washington, D.C., where the rate of HIV infection rivals that of some African nations, some community agencies allow couples to test together. Family and Medical Counseling Service Inc. has been testing about 145 couples together annually since 2008. Most are heterosexual couples.
In Chicago and Atlanta, Testing Together, funded by the MAC AIDS Fund, hopes to test 400 couples by the end of the year.
Poteste and Zemanovic got the best news possible: They were both HIV-negative.
They both laughed with the sheer relief of it. The counselor had been nonjudgmental and hadn’t wanted to talk about the past, only the future, pressing them to talk specifically and directly about their agreement on sex outside the relationship.
Zemanovic: “We both agreed on monogamy. And if we do need to go outside the relationship, (we agreed) to talk to each other and find out, ‘OK, what do we need to do here?’ “
Poteste: “This was a full exploration of (monogamy), whereas before, it was a casual statement or a passing joke that was maybe passive-aggressive. … We need to be much more direct in communications than we have been.”
