Positive Life NSW

One positive man prefers the virtual world.

I've been living fulltime in virtual worlds for over 10 years. Real life became increasingly less interesting to me sometime in the late '90s. I am a Generation Xer and have spent most of my life working on and playing with computers. Being of the first generation to take up computer technology has completely messed up my workplace and personal relationships.

I've had lots of conflict with workplace managers. I recall fighting tooth and nail in one job to get email for the other staff and then being labelled a troublemaker. In that same job, every time a co-worker's software went haywire, I would have to fix it. So I ended up doing everyone else's work for them. In another job, I was demonised for using email instead of talking face to face. I was hired for my PC skills then criticised for using the PC to get things done! I've been fired from jobs when managers read my personal emails, using the technology against me, with no basis to their actions. The hardest thing for me to accept is that the people who did these things to me probably now use PCs in exactly the same way I did – it’s just that now it's accepted that everyone uses computers 24/7.

Avatars
I started staying in on weekends and chatting on the early social networking sites like MIRC around 1995. MIRC was a copy of the university-designed peer-to-peer chat networks that I had spent many nights on in university labs during the late 1980s. There was a gay chat channel on MIRC so you could talk to other gay people – when I say people, I mean avatar names on a list.

In the 2000s, when data speeds finally allowed cost-effective multiplayer gaming, I started spending my weekends in virtual worlds. I've spent the past five New Year's Eves running around the virtual World of Warcraft. I spend more time solving problems in my virtual worlds than I do in the real world. For me, the sun is now the enemy and darkened rooms are inviting. I pretty much only leave the house to get groceries. Having HIV has meant being on welfare for long periods and so staying home. Now I much prefer to be on my own. There are virtual spaces on the Internet for people with HIV and I log on each day in the hope of finding a partner. Standing in a bar and staring at someone across the room all night as I slowly get drunk will not achieve a relationship.

Living with HIV for 20 years has been hard not because of the virus but because of the demonisation and discrimination – especially the overpathologising. This means everything that happens to me is seen as medically related. People view what happens to me through HIV goggles. Serious stuff like money problems or social problems get ignored because 'It could be worse for you, you've got HIV, remember!'

Negative software
Trying to find other people going through the same stuff as me has been difficult. I steer clear of newly-diagnosed poz people because their heads are programmed with HIV-negative software and it takes them about eight years to unlearn all that and find their own way.

I gave 'real life’ a red hot go. I worked hard in my jobs and tried to buy a house and travelled all over the world and went out every weekend to bars and volunteered and ran sports groups. But my PC has always been my best mate. I feel strongly that the inner Sydney gay lifestyle is fairly toxic to mateship. There are a few reasons for this. Men don't help other men. Gay men compete with others for 'trade'; there's horrific body image competition and sex is basically who can do more for longer (the same applies to recreational drug-taking). Free market forces apply.

People move to inner gay Sydney to enhance their social life. You see all the time on social networking sites, "I'm looking for a drinking mate or someone to show me a good time." Once you don't enhance someone's social life, you get dropped like a hot potato.

PC as best mate
Add to the above that I've had HIV my entire adult life since the age of 20 and it's complicated things. Having HIV has distanced me from my family and I've never had the support I've needed from them. Looking back, I'm in my forties, and I've lived my life on my own with my PC as my best mate.

In my virtual worlds I have strong healthy relationships chatting via text or Skype every day. I've never met these people in real life but they are my world and I care about them. The virtual world is my real world. And I wonder, since I was an early uptaker of technology, how long will it be before everyone else starts living in virtual worlds fulltime like I do? PB