LITBC Part Three: Now Introducing, Kylie
Okay, it looks like I get to talk about what I am now claiming is my incredible, dead-center accurate read on Young and how his relationships continue to falter. In Part One, I talked about how I believed one of the biggest reasons that Young and Jaehee slowly drifted apart in their friendship was because at some point Jaehee got serious and Young still could not allow himself to experience deep emotion, brushing everything off as a joke. Pretending it didn’t matter. Pretending it didn’t hurt.
And it’s curious to me because I feel like we got to see Young leaning in to the deeper emotions, the heavier pain during Part Two, but it wasn’t enough to alter him wholly, though considering how he describes his relationship with Gyu-ho as boring it seems like there are parts of him that are starting to change. Just…not enough because when it comes down to the actual tough, serious shit, he still can’t bring himself to feel it, to voice it. He can’t do anything but smile through it, and as someone who has dealt with people like that it is frustrating as fuck to try over and over again to be there for someone, to offer support, a listening ear, understanding and sincerity and just be met with a joke.
Maybe it’s just cause I’ve spent more time in his head now, or maybe it’s because he’s starting to loosen his grip just a little, but the death by a thousand paper cuts was really bleeding through the chapter for me in relation to Young and how he navigates his HIV diagnosis. To be clear, I do not mind that he calls it Kylie, that he has put his own name to it, that he considers is a part of him, that it’s almost like family to him. But that does not negate the fact that he does not ever say it. He never says “HIV” not once in the entirety of Part Three does he write the words HIV.
He describes it all, how he got it, what his symptoms are (his description of the fever and the red patches matches common symptoms of acute HIV to a T), he jokes about it with his friends, and otherwise he keeps it hidden, until Gyu-ho becomes important enough in his life that he has no choice but to tell him. And in all these instances Young is taking it harshly. His healthcare providers don’t deliver the news with care, going the homophobic route of asking Young what sex position he prefers while delivering his diagnosis.
You know what I find extremely interesting about this book so far is how terribly the healthcare industry has been presented. That is not to say there aren’t problems, there are plenty of problems with healthcare both systemic issues and individual provider issues, I am not necessarily trying to say he is wrong in his portrayal. I just noticed that in Part One we got Jaehee’s terrible shame-y doctor and Young’s terrible homophobic nurses, in Part Two we got the psychiatric facility that essentially tortured Young for six weeks before telling him his mother was actually the problem and offering him no additional support for what they had just put him through, in Part Three his providers are homophobic and not only that but Gyu-ho’s brother who is in medical school is described as the most dickish, vile, piece of shit to date.
Young’s HIV diagnosis definitely recontextualizes some stuff from Parts One and Two, (forgive me for not going in to further detail, I was brain foggy when I ready Part Two last week and can’t recall a lot from it off the top of my head) but moreover it adds an additional layer to Young’s utter refusal to let himself feel. Every aspect of Young’s HIV diagnosis is harsh, the healthcare providers who break the news are harsh, T-ara’s jokes about the HIV+ guy they see walking past after Young is essentially forced to out his status (want to just call out the parallel here between Young having to out himself in college and then having to out himself with friends) are harsh, the barriers that he faces and his fears of discrimination in the workforce are harsh. The only person who is ever soft about it is Gyu-ho.
And I do think that scares him, and where Young calls himself dickmatized for his boyfriend in Part Two, in Part Three he just keeps calling Gyu-ho cute, he and Gyu-ho live together for awhile, they split up but come back to one another, Young seems more settled. And honestly, I think that has a lot to do with the fact that they aren’t having sex.
I feel the need to clarify, since book club has a lot of people who I don’t think are as familiar with my essay content, that I am not anti-sex. I don’t think that Gyu-ho and Young’s relationship is as successful as it is for as long as it is because sex is morally wrong and they shouldn’t be doing it or anything like that. I think that the absence of sex in Gyu-ho and Young’s relationship forces Young to actually consider what a relationship looks like to him and what he wants out of it. The Young we met in Part One was a fuck-the-pain-away kind of person, he and Jaehee got along so well partially because they were both sluts and therefore knew they could talk about their sexual encounters without being shamed or judged.
In Part Two, Young really seems to use his boyfriend as a distraction from his mother and his mother’s treatments. He allows himself to ignore huge disparities in his relationship for some dick, he changes parts of himself for some dick, he attempts suicide after losing that dick. As the wise @bengiyo always says, dick is not magical, it cannot fix you. And Young really has to reckon with that in Part Three when he gets in to a relationship with a man who actually feels things, unlike himself, unlike Jaehee, unlike his ex because Young can’t use sex as a crutch.
Full disclosure, I hadn’t heard about condom-associated erectile problems (CAEP) until reading this book. Had no clue that was a thing before. Bearing in mind that these studies are over a decade old, studies have shown that erection loss can occur in roughly 14-28% of people during condom application. At the time of Part Three, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) which helps minimize the chances of acquiring HIV should you be exposed to the virus was not on the market in South Korea. Truvada and Descovy are the two branded PrEP medications, Truvada has been on drug markets since 2004 (when it was taken in combination with other medications) but was not approved for use without other med combinations in the United States until 2012, the first CDC guidelines for Truvada usage came out in 2014, and Truvada did not hit South Korean drug markets until 2018 with Descovy following close behind in 2019. PrEP is an incredibly important drug in HIV prevention because it reduces the risk of acquiring HIV via by up to 99% (and reduces the chance of getting HIV from injection drug use by 75%!)
If PrEP had been around at the time, it would have been expensive and likely unaffordable for at a time when Gyu-ho’s income was helping to support not only himself by Young as well (Truvada in South Korea cost over $10 a pill and must be taken daily, so Gyu-ho would have had to shell out $300 a month for the medication alone). Compare that to the first antiretroviral treatment (ART) in South Korea, zidovudine which is supplied for free by the South Korean government, or their highly-active antiretroviral treatment (HAART) which was covered by insurance. Studies have shown that triple combination therapy, that is three different medications, were able to reduce HIV to undetectable levels within one month for 70% of patients and to 90% of patients within one year. Considering Young’s mention of liver protection medication, he is likely on a triple combination therapy.
Is this a tangent? Yes. But did this all make me realize something? Also yes. Young never gets a blood test. With a consistent HAART regimen this is an extremely high likelihood that Young would have had an undetectable viral load. For those of you who don’t know how human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) works, the virus destroys white blood cells in your body which are used to fight infections, with a compromised immune system the chances of acquiring additional infectious diseases are high as are the chances of having extremely bad cases of those infectious diseases increasing your chance of death from things like pneumonia, or in a lot of HIV to AIDS progression cases kaposi’s sarcoma which is a type of cancer.
The success of antiretroviral treatments is measured by how low of a viral load a person has (think of it like measuring how much HIV you have in you). Viral load is measured through blood work. When the viral load is low enough it becomes undetectable and when a person is undetectable they are untransmittable (U = U) meaning they cannot give HIV to their sexual partner. The U = U campaign didn’t really take off until 2016, so it is still entirely possible that had Young been undetectable at the time that he still would not know that he could not transmit the virus to Gyu-ho. But he never got a blood test.
All of which is an extremely long winded way of saying that Gyu-ho had infrequent success at remaining erect while wearing a condom resulting in infrequent penetrative sexual encounters with Young because the best way to prevent transmission of HIV is through condom usage. But The King of Kings of Avoidant Personalities sent Gyu-ho to his first blood test and withdrew his job application and essentially forced Gyu-ho to break up with him rather than get the second blood test. So it is likely, and honestly very highly likely that any concerns Young had about the lack of sex he and Gyu-ho were having could have been solved by Young getting his bloodwork done and keeping an eye on his viral load.
This of course also assumes that Young is keeping up with pretty meticulously with his treatment regimen, which he most likely is not. Inconsistent medication adherence not only makes it more likely that Young’s viral load would never reach undetectable levels, but also increases his risk of his HIV infection mutating and becoming resistant to antiretroviral treatments. Which is…bad.
So let’s say that his viral load never reached undetectable levels, or they didn’t know U = U, and the condom problem still existed. Maybe it is just a western lens coming in to this, but I think with all the queer media I’ve consumed, with all the queer people I am around on a daily basis the dilemma that Young seems to be carrying around knowing that Gyu-ho wants to have sex and that his CAEP and Young’s status makes that very difficult I see and understand where the barrier comes in. But because Young never talks about anything, especially what is troubling him, there is no room to really talk about solutions to that problem. I think about relationship structures like polyamory or open relationships. I think about a number of non-penetrative ways they could have had sex or how they could have used sex toys. But again, I don’t have the cultural context to understand what gay culture is/was like in Korea, and I know these are not solutions that always work for everyone anyways.
But just like we will never know if Young was undetectable before Gyu-ho left for Shanghai, we will never know if alternative solutions to sex would have been feasible for this couple because Young whether through circumstance or his own volition is constantly trapped between a rock and a hard place. He won’t engage in open communication with Gyu-ho, he won’t be vulnerable with Gyu-ho, so he doesn’t know how the lack of sex is impacting Gyu-ho in their relationship. He doesn’t want to experience discrimination based on his HIV status and possibly lose out on a job so instead he blows up all chances of getting that job by withdrawing his application so that he doesn’t have to get tested. Not getting tested means he doesn’t have an accurate gauge of his health, which means he doesn’t have an accurate gauge of how safe it would be to have unprotected sex with Gyu-ho, which perpetuates the cycle.
Young is running from his feelings, running from his pain, his loneliness, his fear. In Part One, Young and Jaehee started to drift apart after Young was not able to treat Jaehee’s abortion with sincerity; in Part Three, Young and Gyu-ho drift apart because Young is so scared of his HIV that he can’t even look it in the eye. He can’t even call it by its name.
