Hello Polyam Comrades 
Hopefully your week is starting off well! Sorry for not posting over the holidays, my brain wasn’t functional enough to do it, but here we are back at it in the new year. To help foster a safe and inclusive space for polaymory discussion, we wanted to provide weekly discussion topics! The goal is that we share our stories and our experiences, listen to each other, provide safe space for each other, and learn from each other. Please ask questions and provide answers in good faith only, let’s be the wonderful communicators I know we all are.
This week’s discussion topic is: Ask That Burning Question You Have!
Maybe you’re new to polyamory and are unsure about something and need some clarifications, maybe you’ve seen polyamory in a movie and are wondering if that’s how it really is, maybe you’re a polyam pro but need a suggestion for a better calendar app than google calendar to manage your various polycule schedules (this is me someone please help me I’m overwhelmed by my google calendar right now I’ve got like pod’s pods on there and it’s not helpful anymore).
Please feel free to use this thread to suggest future discussion topics as well, ideas you have to foster a better community, or feedback you have about the community.
how do people manage HPV risks when seeing multiple people? it can lead to deadly cervical, anal, penile, and oral cancers, but in most places there are age restrictions on the vaccines, and no screening tests for AMAB people (justification for both boils down to “it’s too prevalent” 🙄🙄🙄). common advice to avoid it is sexual monogamy.
what do people do? or are the options just “form an all-AFAB polycule” or “abstinence”?
I think like most things everyone has to make their own decisions on risk. Personally I use protection with all partners but one, and I only do things that would open me up to STI transmission risk with folks who perform regular testing and communicate about that. Within my circle we have HPV (had? I guess HPV can go away? I dunno I’m AMAB so as you noted they refuse to test me for it -_-) and HSV (again, not something most healthcare providers test for, because HSV doesn’t typically cause any long term meaningful health complications) and I communicate to everyone that may be exposed to me in that way about those risks. The vast majority of the time folks that I talk to about those things go either “oh yeah, me too, no worries” or “oh yeah, that’s just a risk of non mongamy, no worries.” Maybe one time ever someone said “I don’t sleep with folks who are dirty” which…honestly thank you for throwing that red flag in my face now instead of later once we were invested in each other! HIV is the real one most people are worried about and with regular testing, protection, and PReP, it’s not really a major risk factor for most people. I would recommend anyone worried about any STI transmission even in monogamous relationships to just discuss it with their healthcare provider if you can…I know when I started on my non mongamy journey it went from “this is a real point of anxiety to me” to “I am asking the right questions and I am armed with the right knowledge, I’m gonna be fine.” And if you can’t talk to a healthcare provider about it, honestly just looking it up online. Conversations have changed a lot in the last 10-20 years around STIs and what they mean and what impact they have.
For the most part though I know very few people in either kink or polyamory scenes who would look at either HPV or HSV and go “too risky no thank you!” Not judging anyone who determines those open themselves up to unneccessary risk though, we all have to manage our own risk and I encourage everyone to make an informed decision about their own health even if it’s different than mine. I have a polyam friend who has a history of cervical cancer in their family and so when they opened themselves up to that risk they decided with their doctor to switch to testing for HPV specifically from yearly to every 6 months, so if they do catch it with all of their other precautions, they can start managing any potential cancer risks earlier. Folks have options!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply 💘
I agree that communication is important, and finding out red flags early is helpful (even someone using the word “clean” to describe STI status is bit of a warning sign to me that they haven’t thought a lot about it).
I wish I’d had better experiences talking to doctors about STIs. I’ve had some first-hand experience (and lots of second hand-reports) of doctors being incredibly judgemental about having multiple sexual partners.
I’ve also been in situations more than once where a doctor trying to insist I take risks for myself and all current and future partners, but was underinformed about their own field… like the time one who’d never heard of HSV antivirals or extended barriers like latex shorts said “there was no point getting an HSV test because there was nothing I could do with a positive result”. And they didn’t ask if anyone in the polycule was immunocompromised (someone was) which can make HSV debilitating or even fatal.
Likewise I’ve heard doctors saying that condoms for PIV are “mostly effective” to prevent HPV transmission even though there’s a lot of evidence for oral sex and even kissing transmitting it, and self-infection from oral to genital HPV and vice versa.
One wild thing to me is that there are HPV tests for AMAB people - and they’re considered reliable enough to be used for prevalence research (all the many " %X of people with penises have HPV" studies didn’t just guess, turns out 🙃), and there’s a lot of evidence on how to do those tests effectively (basically just a penis swab for a PCR test)… but good luck getting one, so far I found one online clinic in India and one in the UK which claim to offer them.
And last thing yes I’ve read somewhere like 90% of HPV infections go away by themselves within 2 years, especially for people under 30. But also lots of warnings about symptoms (genital warts, cancer) taking months or years to present. It’s a fair point about community norms, my one AFAB partner was never (and probably never will be) eligible for an HPV vaccine so the stakes are pretty high for us unfortunately. Regular cervical screenings can definitely help but it seems like a weird way round to do things, I feel like if humans are still around in 50 years we’ll look back on the establishment attitudes that “universal screening doesn’t help” pretty sorrowfully…
Yeah fortunately I have a number of queer sexual health experts in my broader community so I am able to have real conversations with folks that would be difficult to have outside of the community. And it’s easy for them to recommend doctors to me that actually understand what is going on. If there’s one thing I have learned over the years (and your post definitely exemplifies!) is that the Western medical community is almost solely focused on AMAB folks. The fact that HPV tests exist and are accurate but are nearly impossible to get in the US is beyond ridiculous. It’s a critical piece of information that is just inaccessible to people. I didn’t know about HSV impacting immunocompromised people, so that’s good to know. I’ve had people ask me why I bother even communicating that I possibly have it, and I always just tell them that I don’t know everyones body and want people to make informed decisions for themselves. But now I have an even more concrete reason so thank you. Sexual health being such a taboo that even something as simple as testing being impossible is bullshit shaming behavior. Society needs to move past it so we can have real conversations and do real research on this stuff and get real answers that everyone agrees on. It shouldn’t be as hard as it is!
Anyway thanks for sharing your perspective on it too!