At age 11 in the 1980s, Waynesboro native Shawn Decker was expelled from school not because of something he had done but because of who he was: a carrier of HIV, the precursor to AIDS.
Like more than 10,000 others in the U.S., Decker was infected with the virus by contaminated blood products he used as a hemophiliac, a person whose body cannot adequately control bleeding.
“One treatment was the equivalent in the early ’80s of having unprotected sex with thousands of people at one time,” 31-year-old Decker, who was later readmitted to school, told an audience Thursday at the School of Business Auditorium.
As part of his “A Boy, a Girl, a Virus, and the Relationship That Happened Anyway” presentation, which Student Affairs and Enrollment Services sponsored, Decker and his wife, Gwenn Barringer, also 31, shared intimate details about their personal life experiences and their experiences as a married couple. Since becoming infected with HIV, Decker contracted AIDS in 1999, while Barringer remains HIV-negative.
They spent most of their presentation enlightening students how they function as a normal couple in a society that always questions why they are together.
“What would you do if you fell in love with someone who was HIV-positive?” asked Barringer, an HIV educator who met Shawn while she was researching HIV prevention as a graduate student at James Madison University. “I think a lot of people can imagine having a friend who’s HIV-positive or having a family member who’s HIV-positive, but not a lot of people can understand what’s it’s like to date someone who’s HIV-positive.”
She said she was “definitely in that camp,” adding that she never thought she would marry someone with HIV.
Decker, on the other hand, said he wondered when he was younger if he would marry at all.
“I remember asking my mom, ‘Am I going to be able to get married? Am I going to be able to have kids?'” he said.
Decker said puberty and adolescence were especially challenging with HIV. As his peers around him began to develop physical relationships, he struggled telling others about his condition, he said. The struggle consumed so much of him, he said, that he preferred not to date in high school, although he did date some.
“I realized that I was going to have to learn how to be able to talk about HIV,” Decker said. “I owed it to who I was with to be able to do that.”
Decker was finally able to talk about HIV when he met Barringer, he said, because she was so knowledgeable about HIV and AIDS from her educational and occupational background.
Barringer said she became interested in learning more about the virus after she heard a compelling HIV-positive speaker in college.
“I remember listening to her speak, and I was so struck by the fact that she was just like me, and if she could be affected by this, maybe I could be affected by this, or maybe my friends could be affected by this,” Barringer said.
Although much of society disagreed with her, Barringer said she knew she could carry on a healthy relationship-a relationship that included sex-with Decker.
Barringer explained to curious audience members that she and Decker stay safe by always using a condom during sexual activity. If the condom were to break, Barringer has access to post-exposure, prophylactic HIV drugs that would significantly decrease the chances of her contracting the virus, Decker said.
“Any phrase with the word ‘sex’ attached to it, a condom is involved, in terms of Gwenn and I,” Decker responded to a question about oral sex from an audience member.
“The mint ones aren’t that bad,” Barringer added, sending the crowd into a roar of laughter.
In fact, laughter permeated the entire presentation, despite the sensitivity of some of the subject material.
“I think one of the ways I’ve been able to deal with it and cope with it has been the ability to laugh at myself,” Decker said of HIV during his introduction. “So please, if you hear something that sounds kind of funny tonight, don’t feel like, ‘Oh, we can’t laugh at the guy with HIV. That’s not right.’ ”
Decker made several jokes, referencing, for example, his astrological sign, cancer, and its accompanying symbol, a crab.
“So astrologically, not only am I a disease, I’m also a sexually transmitted little critter,” he said. “On top of that, my parents decided to name me Shawn Timothy Decker. They didn’t jot down those initials.”
During Q-and-A, students focused on the physical aspects of Decker and Barringer’s relationship. One student asked if the couple had plans to have or adopt children.
“The good thing is that we could have kids actually naturally if we wanted to,” Barringer answered. “There’s a process called sperm washing, and it’s a pretty simple process that basically separates sperm from semen and tests the sperm to make sure there is no HIV present. Generally, HIV is present in the semen. It’s not really present in sperm.”
More than 400 children have been born healthy and HIV-negative through the process, Barringer said.
Other audience members directed questions specifically to Barringer. They asked her how often she worries about contracting HIV.
Barringer said she gets tested about every nine months to a year. But HIV testing can be a troublesome topic, she said.
“What concerns me sometimes is I think people sometimes equate testing with prevention,” she said. “I hear people say sometimes, ‘Well, I get tested every month, so I know I’m good.’ It kind of scares me when someone says they get tested every month because I feel like they’re doing something in their life that they feel at risk for HIV and they need to get tested that often.”
Decker, who only started taking HIV drugs after he contracted AIDS, said the hardest part of the relationship is that so many people question Barringer’s rationale.
“That’s the hardest thing now, people thinking Gwenn is crazy, even though we explain we have a safe, healthy relationship,” he said. “People with HIV just want to work, provide for their family, find a relationship. It’s difficult because there’s so much ignorance about how the virus is transmitted.”
Decker and Barringer said they hope they can decrease ignorance about HIV with the human-interest angle of their presentation. They are currently traveling to colleges and universities across the country to promote Decker’s memoir, “My Pet Virus: The True Story of a Rebel Without a Cure,” which hit stands Sept. 21. When they are not traveling, the couple resides in Charlottesville.