Voices from In-between

Alexander McClelland discloses to a guy on Scruff, a dating app mainly used by gay men, that he has HIV and is undetectable. That guy blocks him. Then he discloses his status to someone else, who responds, “It’s ok, I’m on PrEP.” Neither interaction sits comfortably with McClelland, who teaches ­criminology at Carleton University. In the first, he’s on the receiving end of stigma. In the other, his “viral undetectability is of no interest.” A part of his life is all but erased. “The moment to have a bonded connection over our shared relationship to HIV, negative or positive, is no longer on the table,” he writes in “Old Testament,” one of thirty-six essays in Between Certain Death and a Possible Future. Edited by the writer and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, the collection grapples with what HIV/AIDS means for those who came of age before pre-exposure ­prophylaxis medications were available and how people think about the virus now that they are.

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