There was a time in this country when all you needed to constitute safe sex was a vasectomy and a 5th of vodka. Sure, there were STDS, but a quick dose of penicillin would sort you right out and you could get back to distribute your man juice like some kind of sexual Johnny Appleseed. Then our parents’ generation went and literally fucked it all up. Now there are things out there that can kill you.

There was also a time in this country, a much more naive time which did not have its finger on the pulse of anything because it was stuck so far up its own butt that it could pick its nose from the inside, in which the notion of marriage was a binding contract in which was clearly stated the mandate that sex with other people was forbidden. For this reason, unprotected sex with a person’s spouse was always considered okay. Now, sex outside the marriage is widespread and perhaps even allowed and, due mostly to some people’s abject lack of the ability to not be a lying whore, it becomes dangerous to trust that your significant other hasn’t brought some extra action to bed with you.

So I recently extricated myself from the sort of marriage that suggested that I should go ahead and have a full STD panel done to make sure I didn’t have a little bit extra to offer. Because the economy sucks and I am two bubbles from being a complete loser, I have no health insurance. This left me with a couple of options: Planned Parenthood or the neighborhood free clinic. Planned Parenthood can be tricky insofar as it can be expensive and having to navigate the slalom course of Pro-Life protesters makes rollerblading through the Demilitarized Zone look like skipping through a field of daisies.  So it was the neighborhood free clinic for me.

Now, a few things should be mentioned about the neighborhood free clinic. One it was no where near my neighborhood. Now that I think about it, it wasn’t even in a neighborhood but rather snuggled uncomfortably against the frontage road on the wrong side of the Interstate.  I don’t want to be overly critical but when you are already feeling uncomfortable about the potential of having something that could crust over your genitals like Rick Moranis after Gozer gets fried at the end of  Ghostbusters at best or something that can straight kill you at worst, you really don’t need to feel like you are an extra from the Road Warrior walking through the parking lot.

Further, the clinic is anything but free. Much in the same way that the cheap theaters are often still referred to as ‘dollar theaters’ the free clinic is now charging $20 for the basic panel and $30 if you want to test for HIV. That is okay I suppose, nothing is free anymore and it isn’t that much compared to a non-insured hospital visit, but when you have dudes in their early 20’s coming in first thing in the morning trying to bum a 20 off the receptionist because he ‘made some really bad choices’ the night before, maybe you should relax the fee just a bit.

Going in to the place, I was worried. Not necessarily because I was worried about the results. I had no  symptoms and hadn’t engaged in particularly high risk behaviors aside from trusting the wrong person, but still when you have a yes or no question in front of you the answer of which means you either live or die, you get a little nervous. Also, classic Gonorrhea testing includes a swab put in the urethra with an instrument that looks like a really thin Q-tip if its mom had unprotected sex with its pipe cleaner father. I realize that women are gone after with a speculum and that is traumatic and painful, but the pee hole is a bit smaller and not at all built for items of any size being inserted into it.

At the window where you sign in, I told the lady I wanted to do the full panel and she asked if I needed any counseling or an examination. I told her no, that I was just there for a routine check and I had no symptoms. She looked at me like I was anally violating a donkey with the head of Burt Reynolds and made an odd clucking noise with her tongue. I filled out my paperwork and was instructed to sit down and wait for my number to be called.

Armed with fear, my girlfriend’s support, and a wallet lighter from the evacuation of $3o, I sat in the waiting room for my turn to have a procedure done that Jack Bauer might use to get me to tell him who stole the nuclear football. As it turns out, the swab has been retired and the procedure is just a pee test. Sure peeing in a cup is a bit awkward and embarrassing, but the ability to walk properly afterward is a compelling feature.

There is a new way to perform HIV testing nowadays which involves a finger prick and a device that looks enough like a pregnancy test that I wondered if the results presented as a happy face or a sad face. This test delivers results in about 20 minutes, a rate of completion that beats the hell out of the week of hand wringing and asking yourself why you thought it was a good idea to have unprotected sex with that Haitian immigrant with the open sore on her mouth. The results will tell you a negative result to 100% accuracy and a positive result to about 90% accuracy. If you get a positive, you have to go with a bigger blood test to make sure it isn’t a false positive. The tests for syphilis, chlamydia and gonorrhea are done with blood and urine samples.

I went into the first phase of the process to do the HIV test and to complete a sexual history survey. I think that this would be better served with a self-written summary but I was asked questions by a fetching technician who was as stoic as a panel interviewer for a job at a bank. She gave nothing back as she asked me things like ‘have you ever had sex for money?’ and ‘have you ever had sex for drugs?’ and a question about current sex partners that doesn’t include a steady girlfriend or boyfriend. I guess they figure if you were walking the straight and narrow you wouldn’t be in for STD testing. Which is a huge problem for me, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Also, I am not sure why the distinction between sex for money and sex for drugs.

So I get the finger prick and answer her questions and ask a few of my own, all the while wondering if it would be in poor taste to shovel a pocketful of free condoms into my cargo pants from the bowl right next to me while she gives me less human interaction than the last time I did the over-the-phone job interview for Best Buy. The only thing that suggested she was actually human was a smile when I asked if she would like me to close the door on my way out.

I waited in the waiting room for about 10 more minutes before I was collected into another room where I had blood drawn. This technician was fairly upbeat and found my aversion to watching the blood extraction to be funny. I asked to see what the swab would have looked like and she produced what I am fairly certain was a streamlined version of something developed during the Spanish inquisition.  After noticing that my name was misspelled on the sample and paperwork, I was shuffled into the bathroom with a cup and instructions to bring it back in and set it on the counter while she goes to fix the labels.

I had some water to drink on the way and had no problems relieving myself into the cup and I brought it back in. I put it down and waited for her to return. She came back and started gathering the samples and the first technician came back in holding a manila folder. Now, it had been about a half an hour since the HIV test and the whole time I couldn’t stop asking myself what I would do if it was positive. It would be a cataclysmic event in my life and it scared the crap out of me. The first technician showed the contents of the folder to the second and she said ‘hmh!’ with a high note at the end and I wasn’t sure what that meant. She put the folder on the examination table and pointed to a big read stamp that read NEGATIVE and I chirped ‘AWESOME!’ and maybe did a little arm pump that probably wasn’t in keeping with the general decorum one is expected to comport oneself in whilst in an STD clinic but fuck it, I wasn’t going to die. Not of AIDS anyway.

I was given a card and a password and told to call back in a week for the other results. This would be a long week.  The following Monday rolled around and I called for my results. A girl answered and I asked for my results. She paused a long time like I had called her child a mongoloid and then put me on hold. Another woman answered and asked for my name and birthday. She then said that the results weren’t back yet and I was calling too early and I should call back tomorrow. I mentioned that my card said to call at that time and on that day. She said that not all of them were back. I asked if that meant that some of them were back. She put me on hold. Another woman came back on and told me that they had switched labs and that the results were being delayed and I should call back Wednesday.

To shorten the story, I called back on Wednesday and they said I did not have syphilis but the other two results weren’t back yet. I had to call four more times and didn’t get my final results until Monday. So what was supposed to take a week took two, which would have been fine had they mentioned that to begin with. I can only assume that they KNEW they were moving the lab when they told me to call back in a week.  I would have much rather been told that upfront than to have to feel like  I was playing the first Super Mario Bros being told ‘Your test results are in another Castle!’ The people I spoke to on the phone ranged from being very helpful to very rude but regardless I began wondering if I was going to have to go back in and redo the tests. All my tests were negative. WHEW!

I tell this story not to give readers way more insight into my life than they would ever want but rather to illustrate why so many men do not take proper responsibility for their sexual health. With all of the various and sundry ailments hopping from bed to bed out there men should be on top of this shit certainly before getting on top of anyone else but that is not how it is.

The onus of sexual health is placed squarely on women. Given that STDs do far more damage to women than to men and that women have to deal with the greatest of all STDs, or pregnancy as it is also known, I think that men should do some preventative tests and make sure they are clean. That would really sort out a lot of problems and keep people safer. Also, if they didn’t give women that line about not being able to feel anything when wearing condoms, that would help. If you get the Hammerhead Clap, you will get all the feeling you need and you then deserve it, asshole.

So guys should get tested more often, but it isn’t easy.  Even the CDC suggests that men wait to get tested until they get symptoms or until their girlfriend starts having tentacles coming out of her cootch. I suspect this is because the people who wrote those guidelines for the CDC were dudes. It doesn’t make sense to wait for symptoms because a lot of times, symptoms in men do not present terribly strongly. So you can get Syphilis and have your brain eaten away before ever noticing.

Aside from that, there is the stigma of going to get tested. If you say you are going to get an STD panel people look at you like you are dirty and have been doing something nasty. And maybe you have been, but if everyone is safe and gets checked out it shouldn’t matter. Getting STD testing is the responsible thing to do and no one should be vilified for it. Creeping around carrying more STDs than the cast of RENT is not cool. Asking what sort of make-up is best for hiding your herpes sores from your girlfriend is the worst kind of irresponsible at best and the best kind of evil at worst.

At the end of the day, people get shit for taking care of themselves. If you say you are going to go to therapy for some problems you are having, you get treated like you are a broken person who should be tiptoed around and kept away from pointy objects. If you say you are getting STD testing you are treated like you are the subject of a Mapplethorpe series  on goat fucking. This is batshit crazy. I want to be healthy and I want people I care about to be healthy. Regular testing is one way to be healthy. The only shame lies in spreading shit around when you could have taken care of it. And if you work at an STD clinic, try to remember that the people coming in are the ones responsible enough to get problems taken care of and they may or may not have had anything to do with why they are at risk. Not every one who has an STD has earned it through bad choices. Or at least not a bad choice made in the past five years.