SummaryAlexander Cheves grew up on a 500-acre farm in rural Georgia, raised by evangelical missionary parents who blocked gay websites and warned him that choosing this "lifestyle" meant choosing death. At sixteen, he decided to come out anyway, convinced he was trading a long life for a brief, honest one. He tested positive for HIV at twenty, in 2013, during his final year of college. What followed wasn't the manageable adjustment the medical timeline might suggest. In the six months after diagnosis, Alexander fell into a depression so severe he nearly didn't survive it. He went through a period of manic sex without disclosure, behaviour he's since written about with unflinching honesty in his memoir My Love Is a Beast. He later learned from infectious disease specialists that this response is statistically common, though rarely discussed. This conversation covers Alexander's decade as a sex worker, his move from Atlanta to New York to Berlin, his relationship with drugs and nightlife, and his views on HIV criminalisation and personal responsibility. He talks about friends who didn't make it, including one who died after "bug chasing" and never sought treatment. And he reflects on turning thirty, an age his father once predicted he wouldn't reach, and discovering that life only got better from there. Timestamped Takeaways00:02:25 - Growing up isolated. Alexander describes the 500-acre farm, the Christian parental blockers, and arriving at college in 2010 believing gay life still looked like 1985. 00:05:18 - Choosing death over the closet. At sixteen, Alexander made a conscious decision that a brief, honest life was preferable to survival in hiding. He wrote a 13-page poem debating it with himself. 00:09:37 - The closet is unendurable. Alexander reflects on why so many queer men choose perceived shorter lives over staying hidden. The daily anxiety of concealment, he argues, is a form of suffering that cannot be sustained. 00:12:20 - College and consequences. With no sex education from his parents, Alexander went wild. He was in and out of the student health clinic constantly. In hindsight, testing positive at twenty was no surprise. 00:14:43 - The drive to the clinic. When the clinic refused to give results over the phone, Alexander knew. The six months that followed were the hardest of his life to survive. 00:16:05 - 2013 realities. Pre-PrEP, pre-U=U. Doctors worried about medication adherence in young patients. Alexander was told disclosure was entirely his responsibility. 00:18:04 - No one would touch him. Overnight, his sex life ended. The only partners willing to engage were older men who understood HIV. These "gay daddies" saved his life. 00:19:52 - The manic period. Alexander describes anonymous, strategic sex without disclosure in the months before medication. He later learned this response is clinically documented, though he'd thought himself uniquely transgressive. 00:24:22 - Sex work and healing. Alexander spent nearly a decade as an escort, learning that many clients simply wanted someone to talk to. The loneliest were often older men who'd lost everyone in the plague years. 00:29:02 - Drugs, loneliness, and gay culture. Higher rates of substance abuse among gay men, Alexander suggests, stem from isolation, societal trauma, and a culture built in spaces of consumption. 00:30:17 - Harm reduction, not abstinence. Therapists at Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York focussed on moderation. Combined with daily meditation started after diagnosis, Alexander found a relationship with drugs that works for him. 00:36:09 - The friend...
