An injection to prevent HIV is something to celebrate

I suspect it’s because the group still most affected by HIV in the UK is gay men. In 2017, while I was editor of gay magazine Attitude, I took the daily pills – known as PrEP – and wrote about my experience, arguing that they should be available on the NHS. I was shocked by some of the responses. The sort of sentiment I heard from various straight people was: why should my taxes pay for you to sleep around without condoms? Even within the gay community there were concerns the drug would get us a bad reputation. I had thought the situation would be much improved but the comments under the news story on Mail Online proves otherwise. “Sounds like a licence for free and rampant cheek-clapping, the activity that brought us HIV in the first place,” one reader wrote in the messages.

Such responses ignore the fact that gay men, especially from older generations, suffer higher rates of poor mental health and addiction, in my view because of the shame instilled in growing up in a world that taught us who we were was wrong. For years I thought I was a pervert, suffocated my shame with binge drinking and punished myself with anonymous, sometimes reckless, sex. But the man I was still deserved the care of society. And yes, the NHS is short of money but it funds preventative remedies such as anti-smoking therapies and the contraceptive pill for straight people. So why not PrEP injections for gay men?

Negative responses to news of the injection hark back to the homophobia that impeded research into Aids treatments when HIV was first discovered in the early 1980s. President Ronald Reagan only publicly said the word “Aids” in 1985, four years into the epidemic. And it’s taken 40 years to get to this point. Compare that to what happened with Covid, when a vaccine was developed in less than a year of the World Health Organization declaring a pandemic. An estimated 7 million people around the world have died of Covid; 44 million people have died of HIV-related causes.

As a gay man growing up in the 80s, I was terrified of contracting HIV and only ever had sex under the shadow of the threat. I knew I could protect myself with a condom but just getting one out served as a reminder of the threat. I found it impossible to have sex innocently or joyously. For me, PrEP changed that. The pills helped me finally shake off my shame, find love and get married. They have changed the lives of thousands of gay men like me. And they have allowed us to finally take control over the virus. In 2024, 111,000 HIV-negative people took daily PrEP pills in the UK, and the rate of HIV infections plummeted to just 3,043.

But some people find it hard to take daily pills; those with medical contraindications, addiction problems and less regulated lifestyles. Many people from faith-based backgrounds or less accepting cultures don’t want their families discovering their pills and asking questions. To offer people like this another means of protecting themselves against HIV is crucial. And surely as a society we can accept the efficacy and convenience of preventative treatment that could soon be taken once a year, as we do a flu shot?

If we believe all lives are valid, if we value the contribution of every member of our society, we should be welcoming the news. So please join me in celebrating.

Matt Cain’s latest novel is One Love (published by Headline)