When I was twenty I was living apart from my family because, two years prior, my parents had asked me to leave their home because I was gay and because we were not getting along on account of their harassment and persecution of me in refusing to be straight. To be sure, I had tried for the previous eight years of my life to be straight. Constant wrestling with my spirituality (or more accurately, religion) and living the way I was told which was supposed to convert me to heterosexuality did nothing of the sort. Toward the end of my eighteenth year I had an experience with my religious counselor that made me realize he was merely discriminating against me because of my homosexuality, refusing to let me serve a mission for our family’s religion just because I was gay and not because I’d done anything “immoral,” such as the many of my heterosexual counterparts who had already experienced full sexual intercourse with women but whom were allowed to “repent,” where I had not even kissed another person and yet was still denied the experience.

In retrospect it was what was best for me. The friends I’ve met over the intervening years who did serve a mission who were also gay had a much more difficult time extracting themselves from the lies and deceit and heartache staying in the religion caused them and their families. But it didn’t help relieve me of the debilitating depression and isolation I suffered being rejected and harassed by my family simply for being different and not because of anything I’d actually done to them.

During one rare visit home my mother confronted me. She had seen me share a glass of water earlier with my younger sister and started crying about how she wanted to stop me from sharing with her because I might give my sister HIV. I could not believe the utter maliciousness and willful ignorance my mother was using to attack me. It was 2001. HIV had for more than a decade been known to be a sexually transmitted disease. SHE KNEW THAT even as she chose to use it as a weapon to demean and harass her own child, and never mind the fact that I did not actually have HIV nor had we ever even discussed it, simply assuming I had HIV because I was gay much as a naive young teenager might think they could get pregnant from kissing, but which in this case was destroying our relationship and pushing me further into the bowels of depression.

Leaders of the LGBTQI+ community were not much more helpful, though, as the HIV crisis and our expulsion from and harassment by our friends, neighbors, and family had long instilled a sense of urgency and loneliness from people who are ostensibly supposed to care for the poor, the sick, and the lonely. Messages meant to communicate the finality of HIV infection and the need to protect ourselves from infection also engendered fear and animosity in the gay community even as those living with HIV tried to help each other overcome the associated stigma. I began to believe that I had HIV, too terrified to actually get tested not because of the health ramifications but those which were social and societal. Getting HIV seemed that it would confirm my parents fears and my worthlessness as a person, and not only would I have no place at home and with my family but neither with the community into which I had been adopted. My parents would move away from Utah, putting the final nail in the coffin which contained our relationship, and shortly after tried to end my life with a serrated bread knife.

I got tested and did not have HIV. And in spite of a raucous sex life over the last two decades, including being in a relationship with someone who cheated on me indiscriminately for four years never using protection and at one point even being  burdened also with severe metabolic illness I still have never contracted HIV.

The consequence of associating HIV with gay men eventually led to the disease being more prevalent in heterosexuals because, as the COVID pandemic has deftly illuminated, people want to believe that disease does not exist or is associated with behaviors we can control and thus blame other people for their illness instead of showing the compassion and intelligence required to deal with illness. Even their own families and mothers would not visit many of the gay men dying alone in the hospital during the AIDS crisis (a responsibly instead instead taken up by lesbians who stood beside their gay brothers in their time of need). But that is not how fucking diseases work, and as a consequence of our hubris we and our loved ones are often doomed to suffer as a lesson in the immutable laws of cause and consequence of the universe. In fact, the very generation who ignored and berated the victims of the AIDS crisis are now those most likely to die from COVID infection, in turn being fed to the disease by other human beings equally uninterested in their wellbeing as they were in ours. Karma really is the ultimate bitch.

That was really cynical of me to say, as Karma does not actually do these things out of malice or even vengeance. Those are human behaviors. Karma simply exists that we may experience the full breadth of life, where life without consequences would not be very deep nor fulfilling. We get ill and die because we must experience the depths of mortality to fully understand what it means to be alive, which is the entire purpose of our existence on this earth in the first place. We must all come to terms with mortality as well, and if we don’t do this willingly life will force upon us experience after experience which does. It is understandably difficult to do, because of fear. But the need remains regardless of how difficult it may or may not be.

Nobody who died of HIV deserved to die. And nobody who has HIV, or COVID, or cancer, or who otherwise experience the limitations of mortality deserve it either. We are simply creatures living for a limited amount of time in this incredible world, and there are diseases and limitations on our potential as a mortal creature which many humans are very afraid, because they do not yet understand why we are here nor the purpose of life. In terror they grasp at denial, religion, conspiracy theories, or bigotry and xenophobia to protect their fragile minds from fears they have not strength to handle.

I first began to be suspicious of the origins of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus through my sexual experiences. Very often when I would hook up with another guy (to have sex) they would use an inhalant colloquially referred to as “poppers.” But I hated poppers. The smell is terrible and boys who used them most often lose their erections entirely, and were so loose that having sex with them was not much better than fucking air. My association with an unfulfilling sexual encounter and poppers was so great that when I began having libido problems I would lose my erection entirely when a companion would bring out poppers.

While poppers are now very popular among the gay community for the sensation of euphoria and relaxation they bring, poppers were for nearly a hundred years a drug most common among the general population. The etymology of the word poppers came because the form in which inhalable nitrites (which is what poppers are) were manufactured for a long time beginning way back in 1867 in small glass spheres which were “popped” by crushing them in a rag or handkerchief and then inhaled (and also referred to as “snappers”). Inhalable nitrites were first discovered to address cardiovascular problems such as angina, which is a painful condition in the chest which is caused by inadequate blood flow which can often feel like a heart attack. By dilating the cardiovascular system poppers helped relieve sufferers of the symptoms of this condition. Because drugs were not highly regulated until the mid and latter half of the twentieth century during the advent of the “Drug War,” poppers were as much a recreational drug of convenience before the drug war as was tobacco, cocaine, and even heroin which could be purchased at times even from convenience stores sold as common consumer products. But even in 1960 the FDA eliminated the requirement for prescription. The reason that poppers even came into prevalence in the club scenes of the 70’s and 80’s was because it was already in recreational use by those adults as high schoolers in the 60’s and 70’s who had unfettered access to inhalable nitrites. Eleven percent of high schoolers in 1979 reported use of poppers during high school. When access to inhalable nitrites was finally recognized as a health hazard and access began to be restricted it was then deceptively repurposed by commercial interests as supposedly household and cleaning instruments, which failed to inhibit access entirely until their specific chemicals were outright outlawed in 1988 and 1990, and use of nitrites among high schoolers dropped to 1.5% by 1992.

Poppers produce their physiological effects by strongly increasing nitric oxide production, which in turn dilates the cardiovascular system to increase blood flow and the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to tissues. Our body increases nitric oxide production anyway during arousal, because it facilitates sexual intercourse by increasing blood flow to the genitals (in women too), and prescriptions of erectile dysfunction drugs such as Cialis or Viagra work along very similar pathways to facilitate arousal, although those work by inhibiting the enzymes which degrade nitric oxide rather than providing substances which increase it. Even pre-workout products contain arginine, the precursor to nitric oxide, and other chemicals which promote or exaggerate nitric oxide production because the increase in oxygen and blood flow helps athletes feel more energetic and powerful when they lift.

But nitric oxide excess also accelerates aging and metabolic disease, which is why men who use common erectile dysfunction medications experience rapid aging effects after they begin use. Nitric oxide has a dual function when certain dietary and environmental conditions required for the proper function of human biology are not available to saturate mitochondria and inhibit normal cellular respiration, as an adaptive survival strategy to reduce consumption of valuable nutrients during times of reduced nutritional availability. Actively promoting excess nitric oxide without also considering the factors which promote its interference with mitochondria means actively accelerating the aging process, which is also why it is now so common for bodybuilders to begin losing their hair prematurely, develop thin and lifeless skin, and a thickening and stiffening of connective tissues and breakdown of internal organs leading to severe metabolic problems before they are yet very aged.

During the advent of the AIDS crisis, intelligent medical professionals and those who were also members of the gay community rightly recognized the potential for inhalable nitrite to be the cause of the problem. By this time nitrite and nitrates from artificial fertilizer had been recognized as toxic chemicals with the potential to cause poisoning, and regulation of environmental levels of nitrates were coded into law, and it just made sense that the potentially toxic nature of nitrites could impair the immune system when used recreationally, and a few studies began to explore its role in the etiology of the mysterious illness affecting gay men, finding for instance that it might alter human lymphocyte activity. But as soon as the HIV virus was discovered interest in Amyl nitrite as a causative factor evaporated.

Renewed interest in the nitrite origination of HIV began in the late 1990’s and continues today, but because of very common mistaken beliefs about HIV, AIDS, and the nature of the immune system it has failed to gain much attention from institutions and organizations actually working to eradicate HIV. Nitrates are very toxic in excess, and can even kill animals (and humans) simply from excess in food sources, since the entire point of synthetic fertilizer in industrial agriculture is the addition of ammonia, nitrate, and nitrite to amend nutritionally poor soil. Our body actually uses nitrates and nitrites in our own physiology, specifically because they are so toxic. For instance, our saliva concentrates nitrate and nitrites to feed commensal oral bacteria which use it in turn to produce nitric oxide which kills pathogenic microbes, and the level of nitrates in saliva can be 100 times higher than that in our plasma. But this is one of the reasons why exogenous nitrate and nitrates can be toxic, because there are active pathways in our bodies which utilize them, so excessive amounts can overwhelm the systems in which they participate, and nitrate and nitrite have been found specifically to have suppressive effects on the immune system, which is not something we would desire in the first place while suffering an immune disorder such as what is caused by HIV even if it weren’t participating in the route of pathogenesis. At the very least, using poppers while having HIV is like refusing to pull the parachute cord while skydiving. But my experience studying nitrates, nitric oxide, and nitrites in relation to other biological purposes like erectile dysfunction, insomnia, aging, and oral disease has made it apparent to me that exposure to nitrites is the primary etiology of HIV infection, not actually the virus itself, whose presence is facilitated instead through the evisceration of natural immune function, in the case of HIV positive gay men is facilitated largely through the recreational use of inhalable nitrites, “poppers.” Because there are actually many factors which can seriously impair the immune system, including other agrochemicals or industrial toxic products such as dioxins and pesticides, or even simple nutritional deficiencies, other populations affected by HIV are thusly affected by deficient immune function and not actually the virus itself. While antiviral therapies have helped people live with HIV, it’s no coincidence that debilitating AIDS related complications such as Kaposi's sarcoma all but evaporated after the outlaw of the most toxic recreational nitrite inhalants. That drug and alcohol addiction also continues to be misunderstood and vilified in developed countries instead of being recognized as a neurological medical condition as I have identified in my work on curing alcoholism and addiction only compounds the vulnerability of marginalized populations such as gay men.

The HIV epidemic in gay men would evaporate within a year or two if people just stopped using poppers. Because the etiology of HIV also appears to rely on immune dysfunction and not actually the cause of it, practicing behaviors which avoid exposure to toxic sources of nitrite such as poppers and industrial agriculture while also promoting healthy nitric oxide and immune function as discussed throughout the entirety of my book, Fuck Portion Control, can probably promote spontaneous resolution of HIV infection. At the very least, fucking stop the use of poppers. While I understand why we use them, you’re an idiot if you think that huffing toxic chemicals is a great idea while you’re also infected with an immune condition. Just have a drink or smoke some weed like a normal person. HIV in the larger population requires improved access to nutrition and reduced exposure to industrial contaminants like excess of nitrates and nitrites found in industrial fertilizer.

The need to use poppers or other drugs to feel good having sex is a common problem facing many people, but especially gay men, because of the unresolved trauma and pain of our pasts. Substance abuse is a neurological condition which can be addressed through several therapeutic strategies as discussed in my article The Cure for Alcoholism and Addiction. While Fuck Portion Control covers the nutritional and biological origins of diseases like addiction, cancer, hair loss, erectile dysfunction, etc., my new book The Perfect Child takes a deep dive into our developmental psychology and methods for resolving the trauma and pain of our pasts and is now available for pre-order. I also love following TheAidsMemorial on Instagram, which curates photos and stories of people who were taken by HIV, which gives me a connection to the past and appreciation for the struggle they went through which helped make a better future for us.