July 1, 2017
Video Series Tackles Bareback Reality of HIV Prevention
Brittany Ferrendi READ TIME: 2 MIN.
One film student is showing a "fun, sexy and outrageously frank 21st-century sex-ed for gay adults."
"PrEP is an HIV prevention strategy that deals with sex, namely bareback sex," film student Chris Tipton-King told Queerty. "And I got tired of people tip-toeing around that fact."
PrEP stands for pre-exposure prophylaxis and reduces the risk of getting HIV from sex by more than 90 percent. Truvada is the drug prescribed for the treatment.
Tipton-King wasn't happy with depictions of PrEP, which he felt was too sanitized and "awkward." So as one of his assignments for his master's degree in cinema, he created "The PrEP Project." It's a four-part video series that shows a more realistic side to gay men, their sex lives and the use of PrEP. Each video is 5-minutes long.
He created the series with zero governmental funding, meaning he had no obligation to adhere to guidelines, and that he could talk openly, sexually and explicitly about sex.
Instead, many of his funds came from Kickstarter, where 134 backers donated over $15,000 to bring the project to life.
"We explore the new drug that prevents HIV and the backlash against it, testing, treatment as prevention, fear and stigma," he wrote on the Kickstarter page. People initially argued that people would use PrEP as an alternative to condoms - but Tipton-King argues that condoms are not used often anyways, so gay men need to be informed about PrEP.
"The rate of consistent condom use among gay men has been estimated to be as low as 17 percent, and PrEP is the answer to that," he told Queerty.
He hopes to spread the word about PrEP through his "videos that are fun to watch and use all the tools of cinema to educate and inform, in language you won't get from your average doctor."
