As I write this, an article about me is the number two trending story on BuzzFeed. My friends have been texting me all day to say that their friends have been texting them about me popping up on their newsfeed. The daily traffic to this blog has spiked into the thousands. Two different TV producers […]
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Here’s a list of herpes+ writers you need to be reading, AND, if you’re a journalist or an editor, contacting about writing for your publications.
Read MoreThe lovely ladies over at Femsplain let me write about my fixation with parallel universes for their August theme “jealousy.” I’m not an especially jealous person beyond the usual who is that girl in that picture with my man moments on Facebook. But I do wonder about the Ella who never got herpes, and whether or not her […]
Read MoreI had a secret weapon when it came to dealing with my herpes diagnosis: my best friend. This interview is different from the previous two I’ve done—BFF is not a romantic partner, but she knows me better than any boyfriend ever could. We grew up together in those stupidly formative years of college, navigating hookup culture, […]
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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Can you have sex without condoms if you have genital herpes?
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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 