In 1982, TIME Magazine published a very special cover story: “The New Scarlet Letter.” In five dense pages full of salacious personal anecdotes and some incredibly horrifying doctoral testimonies, TIME set the standard for herpes journalism. I read the entire piece with my friend (and this site’s editor) Gabe Rosenberg so that you don’t have […]
Read MoreAnother piece for Women’s Health, another amusing stock photo choice. The real title for this piece should be “How to Not Be a Fucking Asshole,” but this was the headline they pitched me. It was harder to write than the other articles I’ve worked on for Women’s Health—having herpes isn’t like being an out queer person […]
Read MoreI didn’t meet anyone else with herpes for nearly a year after getting diagnosed. That’s a lie—of course I did. There was the guy who have given me herpes in the first place, and statistically I knew dozens, hundreds, thousands of people with the same virus over the years. I learned after I began publicly disclosing […]
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I think I texted him that I needed to talk and asked if we could meet up. I might have called him directly, but my voice was shaking and brittle and I knew he would hear it. So I think I texted him, and he must have called me instead of answering the text—he liked […]
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I get asked a lot if I have seen a backlash to my herpes activism. The simple answer is no, because it isn’t the backlash people expect. No one is raising ‘whore’ banners against me, and I largely ignore negative comments on social media when the response I’ve met has been so overwhelmingly supportive. There […]
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Can you have sex without condoms if you have genital herpes?
Read MoreIt’s a Saturday afternoon. I am sitting at a table outside of Usdan, Wesleyan’s student center, under a big black umbrella. The sun toasts my exposed shoulders. A student journalist with the school paper asks me questions about my recent, surreal herpes stardom, and strangers at nearby tables peer over at me as I answer because […]
Read MoreA crazy thing happened last week: I became Internet famous. Yeah, I know, that’s a gross thing to say about yourself. But it’s kind of the truth—within 48 hours I went from being a blogger in my relatively quiet corner of the Internet (other than that one time I infuriated the entire Outlander fandom by […]
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Picture this: you’re twenty years old, you’ve just been diagnosed with genital herpes, and you have no idea how long you’ve had it or who might have given it to you. You know you have to do the responsible thing and call everyone you have recently slept with—except eight months ago you had the most epic breakup of your life.
Read MoreI learned quickly after getting diagnosed with genital herpes that no one writes about having an STI. There are no memoirs about herpes. There are no academic studies about the literature of herpetic authors. There is a gigantic gaping hole on the Internet where herpes blogging should be, other than the herpes support community on Tumblr (which, […]
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Ella Dawson 