About Staying Negative

Staying Negative aims to emotionally engage, inspire and facilitate imagination in sexual health practices. The campaign profiles the real life stories of gay, bisexual and trans men who have sex with men (MSM). Men talk about all aspects of their life from coming out, relationships, sexuality and a broad range of other topics. While HIV and safe sex is an important part of all stories, it is not the exclusive focus.

Prior HIV prevention campaigns have traditionally focused on providing gay men with information that will encourage them to adopt safe sex behaviours. In reality, safe sex practices are influenced by a whole range of environmental and cultural factors. The campaign also provides an opportunity for HIV positive men to talk about their lives and discuss how their strategies to staying HIV negative were not successful. We understand that there is more than one way practice safe sex and adopt healthcare seeking behaviours, so let's be creative about it!

There are no real criteria for participants other than that they are MSM and happy to have their stories appear as part of the campaign. In addition to the personal stories, the website provides information on HIV/AIDS, sexual health, relationships and broad of the other relevant topics including domestic violence, drugs and alcohol and depression.

Fetishes

Sexual fetishes or erotic fetishes are defined as an act, a person (or body part) or an object that turns someone on sexually. Anything can be fetishised, really, but who are we to judge on what tickles someone’s fancy. They can be all sorts of things, ranging from what people may perceive as seriously weird or relatively normal. Some of the fetishes out there include:

  • Apotemnophilia which is the sexual attraction to amputees which includes the enjoyment of rubbing on nubs.
  • Maschalagnia is the armpit fetish where people like to lick, smell, touch or fuck armpits.
  • Podophilia is the foot fetish where pretty feet are a must to get turned on. This can involved just looking, sucking on toes, licking or using feet around your cock to get you off.
  • Urolagnia (also urophilia) is the golden shower fetish which is pretty much what it sounds like where someone likes to get pissed on.
  • BDSM which stands for bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism. This usually involves a dominant partner, who is aroused by inflicting pain on others (sadism) and a submissive partner who enjoys being tortured or gets turned on by having pain inflicted upon them (masochism).
Tell us your story

Tell us your story

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Come and tell us your story! We would love to hear from you! If you want to find out a little more about how it all works, give Jessie a call at VAC on (03) 9865 6700, or email staying.negative@vac.org.au