Chicago’s hottest new club? The bus stop at Cermak at Halsted. To get on the list, all you need is an HIV-positive partner and a PrEP prescription.
You read that right. Once demonized by the Moral Majority as “the blight of godless, sinful, Satanic, young, sun-tanned, bottomlessly desirable men, whose magnetism and Babylonian orgies Jesus explicitly commands you to deny,” HIV today is the party.
All over the city, nobody is more in the prime of their life than those in PrEP ads on public transport. Ride the Green Line and you’ll see two men sharing intimacies in a luxurious black-and-white condominium. Is this an ad for high-end real estate? No, it’s for life with HIV.
In a downtown subway station, a man shows off twelve-pack abs with a lugubrious yet seductive gaze. Is he going to the gym, or perhaps a very sexy staring contest? No, he’s just taking PrEP.
Happy, fun-loving people gather in parks, pop champagne, and burst into no-context dance parties. A photographer catches them leaping mid-air, and soon their poster is up by the alley where an assault occurred just yesterday. By now, you don’t have to guess what’s going on. Obviously, some of these people have contracted HIV, and the others are taking PrEP. Lucky bastards!
“I, for one, would like to go to parties, live in a poetically erotic high-rise, and participate in very sexy staring contests,” says local loser Dave Grubb, who marvels at the routine ecstasy of life with PrEP — despite having platelet levels far too normal for any of these things to be possible.
“No need to spell it out for me,” he says. “It spells itself.”