We've heard it a few thousand times before, but The Advocate is reporting that US Customs has issued a memo directing offers to hold any decisions on green card applications "based solely on HIV status":

The U.S. Customs and Immigration Service has issued a memo directing its officers to put a hold on any decisions on green card applications that are based solely on HIV status, pending a rule change to eliminate the HIV restriction that Health and Human Services is scheduled to issue later this year.

Under current regulations, non-U.S. citizens who are HIV-positive cannot travel to the United States unless they are granted a waiver, and immigrants are denied entry to the United States if they are HIV-positive. The CIS memo's intent is to halt any green card denials that are based on HIV status in anticipation that the policy change proposed earlier this year by HHS will soon be ushered through to completion.

This ban has terrorized HIV positive people for FAR too long. It has stymied AIDS research. And its about goddamn time.

I started feeling like crap on Saturday. The boys and I had just arrived home from the Russian River, where we spent the weekend with the bears for the annual "Lazy Bear" festivities. As soon as my friend dropped me off at my friend's house, I started to feel vaguely chilly and achy -- the kind of feeling you get when a bad cold or flu is just around the corner. I didn't think too much of it: All my friends had been sick the past week with strep throat that they kept passing around. Perhaps my turn was up. So after an episode of the Golden Girls, I passed out.

I'm not sure what time I woke up, but I immediately knew something was up. I felt feverish, with chills all over my body, and my muscles felt sore and stiff. I knew I had to get up and take some Ibuprofen to help check the fever, but getting out of my warm bed to venture into the chilly house seemed a challenge. After some procrastination, I managed the trek to the bathroom and downed some pills. And then back to sleep. When I woke up again in the afternoon I knew something was definitely the matter. I spent the day feeling terribly fatigued, feverish, and generally pretty gross.

My mind began to reel: What ailed my body? My friends had been sick with strep -- and this was definitely not strep. No sore throat. Perhaps the flu? Not likely -- I didn't have any nasal congestion of chest-cold symptoms. In the back of my mind, I knew that the last two times I had gay male friends who were struggling with flu-like symptoms in the summer months wasn't because of an unseasonable flu infection -- it was their seroconversion sickness. Essentially, it was their body sending them a memo that something was very wrong.

I began texting my friend who does HIV testing in the city, freaking out about how I needed him to bring an HIV test over immediately because I was sick and having seroconversion anxiety. He was in the East Bay, but luckily said he would try to bring one over a bit later. I tried to focus on the Golden Girls in the interim, but mostly spent my time recalling the past three months of my sexual life, detailing all the possible moments where HIV might have found its way into my body. The more time I spent crunching the possibilities, the more red flags I remembered / imagined.

Remembering -- of course -- is a process fraught with imagination, and in times like these our imaginations runs wild. Usually I reconstruct hookups' faces into some frail-like memory, focusing on a zit that could have been a sore, or a skinny waistline that at the time I thought was the result of cardio, but perhaps was a sign of a disease-ravaged body. This time, however, I was mostly focused on a passionate but short-lived affair I had with a wonderful guy I found out later had a long expired work visa and was living the US without government sanction. "His access to health care was probably zilch," I worriedly rambled to my friend who arrived with the test. "Did he get tested anytime in the last year?" I kept thinking about our sexual encounters -- mostly about how we didn't use condoms.

What I was feeling wasn't regret, per se. To say that I regret our having sex without condoms would perhaps be to indicate that I expect to act differently in the future under similar conditions. Don't get me wrong: I have sex with condoms most of the time. But it's of course the "most" in that sentence that is most operative. What separates who falls in the percentile of scrutiny is a mushy calculus that I won't attempt to describe as rational or even reasonable. To say that there is some formula that we might apply to decide such matters is of course downright silly. There are a dozen kinds of reasons Public Health research might demonstrate in action for some set of guys or another, but they're not ubiquitous nor are they likely to stay static for one guy.

You might be thinking here that I've written all of this before. And you'd be exactly right. And this is where I get so frustrated with myself -- because this anxiety is like goddamn clockwork. Is this what it's like to be a sexually active, HIV-negative gay man? A three-to-six month cycle of negative tests and a hodgepodge of sexual encounters, followed up with a fresh batch of Paxil-deserving anxiety while painstakingly reconstructing every possible "mistake" you made since you last tested negative?

It seems to me that there are two possible ways to get out of this unhappy cycle. One -- testing positive -- is obvious. The other, I guess, is to be the perfect Public Health princess and manage to reduce your risk of contracting HIV to absolute zero. I shouldn't be so flip; this actually is feasible for many HIV-negative gay men and I know many guys who do in fact use a condom every time. I applaud their commitment! But -- for probably hundreds or maybe even thousands of reasons -- this goal has eluded some of us. Some wish they could achieve it, but for whatever reason find it difficult or impossible to do so. Others never shared this goal at all, and instead prioritize pleasure over risk (and I mean that in the most literal, non-judgmental of ways).

I guess I'm just frustrated to find that in the five years since I wrote a piece strikingly similar to the one you're reading, I still find myself in the same cycle of fear. Perhaps this is just the cost of being promiscuous in the face of a sexually transmitted disease. Perhaps it is just a reality of this thing we call risk. But I can't help but think that I have no similar anxiety about getting in my car to drive home at 2:00 AM, despite the fact that I'm taking a risk that I will be injured or perhaps even die in a car crash. I don't think I'm naive about the risks of driving at night, just like I don't think I'm reckless when it comes to HIV. All I know that of all the many risks I'm bound to incur in my life (driving, jaywalking, checking my luggage on a domestic airline, etc), only one seems to sit so close to home at the intersection of identity, health, and sexuality. And that is one messy fucking intersection.

Saturday I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would do if I tested positive. Who would I tell? Would I blog about it? I felt frustrated not by the immediate reality of the health of my body, but rather by the possibility of having to disclose that seropositivity to potential sexual partners in the not-so-Poz-friendly state of Michigan. Or better yet, of being branded HIV-positive and how that might inflect / affect my future identity, research, activism, or employment.

After another negative test, I find myself back at square one. What I want is a sexuality without this kind of maddening, cyclic anxiety. A way to live my life, have great sex, and quit spending days or even weeks freaking out about seroconverting. Perhaps that's too much to ask.

Andrew Sullivan is reporting what many of us feared: The US Government has not complied with legislation passed to lift the ban on travel for HIV-positive people. In fact, he's been told to leave the US for good by March:

The Bush administration has not yet lifted the regulation barring people with HIV from entering the United States, despite the law lifting the ban overwhelmingly passed by the Congress and signed by president Bush last July. Yesterday, they simply reiterated their previous plans to "streamline" the process, which, in fact, does nothing but make it more bureaucratically cumbersome for temporary visitors with HIV to enter the country as tourists or for conferences. They have done nothing to end the ban as the law clearly asked for.

As it currently stands, I will still be required to leave the US for good next March. And many more are in much worse straits. They say they will change the regs. And that it takes time. My guess is that it will take until after the election. But does anyone believe a Palin administration would make life any easier for people with HIV? For people with HIV, the Palin nomination should be terrifying.

He's damn right.

(Via Joe. My. God.)

Over the past few months, there has been an explosion of activity around the possibility of repealing the travel ban that blocks HIV-positive folks from traveling or immigrating to the United States. Britain-born Andrew Sullivan -- whose been openly Poz for many years now -- was one of the more vocal critics of the ban, which blocked him from getting a green card. He posted this celebratory message on his blog:

I'm not usually speechless but I'm ecstatic to report that the Senate just passed PEPFAR without the Sessions amendment, and Senator Biden, who managed the bill, just said they will probably avoid a conference with the House and send the bill forthwith to the president's desk. Barring some unforeseen event, the HIV Travel Ban - a relic of the days when HIV was a source of fear and stigma and terror - is finally over.

Obviously, the bigger achievement in PEPFAR is the funding for continued help for those with HIV and AIDS in the developing world - people whose plight is unimaginably worse than mine or so many others trapped by this HIV law. Bush's legacy in this is one for which he is rightly proud. But for those of us who have long dreamed of becoming Americans, and have been prevented by 1993 law from even being able to enter or leave the US without waivers or fear or humiliation, this is a massive burden lifted.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's one of the happiest days of my whole life. For two and a half decades, I have longed to be a citizen of the country I love and have made my home. I now can. There is no greater feeling.

So the Senate passed it. Let's get it signed into law! Pronto!

It's about time that this country had a serious conversation about our nation's prohibition on HIV-positive people from entering the United States. Andrew Sullivan -- who is British by birth and unable to apply for US residency because he's poz -- just wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post arguing for the repeal of this ban. Sullivan writes:

It seems unthinkable that the country that has been the most generous in helping people with HIV should legally ban all non-Americans who are HIV-positive. But it's true: The leading center of public and private HIV research discriminates against those with HIV.

HIV is the only medical condition permanently designated in law -- in the Immigration and Nationality Act -- as grounds for inadmissibility to the United States. Even leprosy and tuberculosis are left to the discretion of the secretary of health and human services.

Last week, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for countries with restrictive measures to eliminate these travel restrictions on Poz folks. He said:

Six decades after the [Universal Declaration of Human Rights] was adopted, it is shocking that there should still be discrimination against those at high risk, such stigma attached to individuals living with HIV. This not only drives the virus underground, where it can spread in the dark; as important, it is an affront to our common humanity.

One of my most moving experiences as Secretary-General has been my meetings with the UN's own group of HIV-positive staff, UN Plus. They are wonderfully courageous and motivated people. I am determined to make the UN a model workplace in embracing them, and all our staff living with HIV.

In the world as a whole, I call for a change in laws that uphold stigma and discrimination – including restrictions on travel for people living with HIV.

As Sullivan and Greenwald point out, there are only TWELVE countries that prohibit entry to HIV positive folks: Armenia, Colombia, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Sudan, the United States and Yemen. Yes, that's right, we're on a very short list with those bastions of the human rights community, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Time for change, folks! Glenn Greenwald has a nice blog entry linking this ban on poz travelers to the State Department's hypocritical critiques of violations of human rights in Russia and Zimbabwe.

Reports from the UK indicate that an Iranian-born immigrant there is facing deportation. Iran is notorious for its human rights violations against any number of minority groups, particularly gay men. The UK's "Home Office" for immigration told CNN the quote featured above -- basically denying the well documented history of abuse there. I call it like I see it - total bullshit!

In a letter to the "Home Office," the teenager involved, Mehdi Kazemi, wrote:

"I wish to inform the Secretary of State that I did not come to the UK to claim asylum. I came here to study and return to my country. But in the past few months my situation back home has changed. The Iranian authorities have found out that I am a homosexual and they are looking for me... I cannot stop my attraction towards men. This is something that I will have to live with the rest of my life. I was born with the feeling and cannot change this fact but it is unfortunate that I cannot express my feeling in Iran. If I return to Iran I will be arrested and executed like my former boyfriend."

Iranian-born LGBT-identified people in Western countries should be granted political asylum. End of story.