April 4, 2007

Unprotected and in the dark

By Emma Wadland
ewadland@uwo.ca

It was 10 a.m. on a Thursday in winter when Margo Wilson (not her real name) discovered she was HIV positive. The nurse's voice was flat. "Did you know you have legal recourse?" she asked.

Wilson, now 40, was speechless. She started planning her own funeral.

Recent high-profile cases suggest that failing to disclose HIV-positive status to a sex partner is taken seriously by the law and people are paying for their omissions. Wilson's lover went to jail for his non-disclosure. But the law still waivers on how to address non-disclosure when an HIV-positive person uses protection.

And while HIV/AIDS organizations encourage disclosure, they do not pass judgment on those who choose to remain silent. After 25 years of AIDS, the issues are as contentious as ever. Such is often the reality when the personal becomes political.

Last Feb. 8, Former Saskatchewan Roughrider Trevis Smith was sentenced to six years in prison for exposing two women to HIV without disclosing his positive status. Neither woman has since tested positive.

On March 22, a Hamilton woman's photo was splashed across newspapers and the Internet after she allegedly exposed several men to HIV without telling them. Robin Lee St. Clair, 26, has known she was HIV-positive since 2003, police say.

Photo by Emma Wadland

Margo Wilson contracted HIV in 2003 from a man who failed to disclose his positive status.

Almost a year before her diagnosis, Wilson stepped out of character and into bed with a near-stranger. The combination of a black linen suit, white crepe shirt and blue eyes had her under the spell of Donald Scott Deblois, she recalls.

She basked in the bouquet of his Swiss Army cologne. He put his arm around her shoulder, twiddling her hair as they sat side-by-side on a friend's sofa. The attention bolstered her scant self-confidence; Deblois was stunning and the sort of man she considered to be out of her league.

The night would be about living on the edge. "I wanted to do something that I had never in my life done before - live in the moment," Wilson recalls. She could hear her grandmother warning, "Don't you come home pregnant" from when she was a teen. But she hadn't dated in the seven years since her divorce. She was 35 and there were no rules.

She trusted Michael Langdon (not his real name), the mutual friend who'd introduced her to Deblois. "I trusted his judgment. I should have trusted my own," she says. She would later discover that Langdon had his own secrets.

But the chemistry between her and Deblois was magnetic. The sex was freeing. So when Wilson returned to Langdon's St. Thomas, Ont., home in May 2003, she was floored when Deblois appeared to help with her bags. The simple fact that he was there again was amazing.

They did it again, in different ways, on Langdon's pull-out couch. And as with their previous encounter, the contact was flesh on flesh with no condom in sight.

But by August 2003, Deblois was no longer in the mood.

He arrived hours late for a dinner party and behaved awkwardly. "He gave me a pat instead of a hug," Wilson remembers. "He didn't sit near me."

The next time she'd see him would be in court.

"You'd think at 35 you'd know better," she says. "I didn't even think about what the consequences might be."

The Supreme Court of Canada has thought about consequences.

It ruled in the 1998 Cuerrier case that exposing a sexual partner to "significant risk of serious bodily harm," by not disclosing HIV-positive status, constitutes fraud and quashes consent to unprotected sex. The resulting charge is aggravated sexual assault.

But the court suggests protection mitigates the spread of HIV enough for the risk to be less significant. This leaves HIV-positive people contemplating a grey area in the law; they may or may not be able to avoid disclosing if they have protected sex.

The law seems like a moving target on the issue because precedents can change, Lyn Pitman says. She coordinates London's Options Clinic, which provides anonymous HIV testing. Ramifications of non-disclosure are outlined for people who test positive and the hope is that they will disclose to potential sex partners - even if they use protection.

Many HIV/AIDS organizations, such as the AIDS Committee of London, encourage disclosure, but do not label people who spread HIV as criminals. Dayle Allan, a counsellor with the organization, says both parties are victims.

Photo by Emma Wadland

Dayle Allen says people who spread HIV through non-disclosure are the exception rather than the rule.

The stigma of HIV/AIDS is relentless enough for non-disclosure to be a symptom of denial, she says. "Very seldom do we ever see that that is a malicious intent on their part."

Wilson, who has now been HIV-positive for about four years, finds the denial argument hard to swallow.

For her, having unprotected sex, while HIV-positive, is like playing Russian roulette with other people's health. "Why on Earth would you even consider putting someone else in that kind of jeopardy?" she says. "You can't be emotionally connected to do that to other people."

Dana Nosella, the volunteer coordinator at the AIDS Committee of London, has worked with AIDS organizations for 10 years. Media are a magnifying glass over people who have not disclosed and have charges pending against them, she says. "It's a broad paint stroke that paints all people with HIV negatively. We really fight to break that assumption that people with HIV do not disclose. The majority of them do."

Society is doing itself a disservice by evading the issue of personal responsibility, Pitman says. The media focus on demonizing individuals who have spread HIV, "but nobody talks about the other person involved." Prevention starts when people stop depending on their partners to take care of them, she adds.

Allan says her door is open to anyone infected or affected by the virus, but that as a social worker, she is obligated to notify the health unit if clients pose a danger to the public.

Wilson was at work when she got a call from the health unit in late 2003. Deblois had tested positive for HIV and his sexual partners were being told to head to the nearest clinic.

Wilson's doctors say she contracted HIV in early 2003. The timeframe makes sense; it marks her first unprotected night with Deblois - her first sexual partner in seven years - and explains the intense illness she experienced four weeks later that kept her in bed for a month.

"It felt like the flu," she says. "To go from my bedroom to the bathroom was exhausting. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep and couldn't breathe. I went to a clinic and got antibiotics, three sets back to back."

It was no coincidence that Wilson had never felt so sick in her life. Medical sources such as the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange explain why. The HIV inside Wilson's body had likely reached the acute stage, the point called "seroconversion", where the immune system is overwrought with virus. For some, HIV can come in like a lion.

What had been a phenomenal experience in her adult life - being reckless with an attractive, smart guy - became eerily clinical.

The nurse wanted to know everything. "It sounded like we were discussing a cookie recipe," Wilson recalls. "That's how matter-of-fact it was. Talking about anal sex, vaginal sex, oral sex." Discussing these details with someone she didn't know was, in a word, "horrendous."

"I'm in big trouble," Wilson told herself at the time. "If I get out of this one, I swear I'll never have sex again."

She turned her shame inward and remembered all the faces from her past who had ever told her she was stupid. Kids in the schoolyard, bad teachers, acquaintances. She agreed with them all - she was stupid.

Fragments of the past year gradually pieced themselves together.

Deceptions had piled on top of one another to create fiction fit for the movies; Langdon and Deblois had actually met in jail, not high school. And through contact tracing, the Health Unit discovered Deblois knew he was HIV positive as of March 2003.

The final blow was that he had slept with 11 other men and women, including Langdon, infecting five with HIV.

Deblois ended up with a three-year sentence for attempted aggravated sexual assault and was released Feb. 15 of this year.

Photo by Emma Wadland

Margo Wilson is sometimes fearful of the future, but for now she is in good health and planning for her summer wedding.

Wilson is not hindered by Deblois' release. Her face is more youthful without makeup and she exudes the energy of a 20-year-old. For now, she is still medication-free. "I'm on the giving, contributing side of the spectrum," Wilson says, smiling. She doesn't ever want that to change.

But HIV has changed her.

In Grade 13, Wilson failed a course to avoid a public-speaking assignment. Her confidence was hollow and she'd have done anything to avoid facing a crowd. It's the same timidity that landed her in bed with Deblois many years later, she says.

Now she addresses groups of 20 or more to tell them about her experience. Each time she finishes a speech, she watches her audience transform with new understanding. "That's the gift in all of this," she says.

And instead of a funeral, Wilson is planning a late summer wedding. She's already chosen a gown. Even though her fiancé is HIV-negative, he's as savvy about the virus as Wilson.

Wilson's funeral plans are still in a file on her computer. She looks at them, from time to time, to remember how scared she used to be. Her family has no idea she's been HIV-positive for about four years. She hasn't told them. Not yet, anyway. She doesn't want them to live the turmoil she's only now beginning to overcome.