Adherence practices among people living with HIV.

This paper offers a critique of patient-deficit models of adherence by examining the articulation of dosing schedules and food prohibitions with the structure of everyday lives. Interviews with 31 men and 4 women taking HAART show that doses associated with regular daily life events are most consistently taken, but many individuals rework official dosing guidelines around timing and food consumption. Barriers to adherence often arise from conflicting demands imposed by work schedules, different medications, food prohibitions, and even outright discrimination as in the case of US immigration policy. Adherence may be the outcome of compromises made in an effort to solve contradictory demands, and may be situational and related to the qualities of particular drugs, as much as to personality traits. Autobiographical narratives that give order to one's sense of self provide foundations upon which adherence decision making occurs. Finally, perceptions of drug effectiveness may lead to self-reinforcing adherence practices.

Negotiating sexual relationships after testing HIV-positive.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 60 people with HIV disease and 40 of their caregivers, this article reports on the effects of HIV seropositivity on sexual interaction and relationship formation. Using a sample representing gay and heterosexual, black and white, and male and female respondents, we focus on how people in the syndrome account for, cope with, and work through problems associated with HIV. While disengagement from sexuality is common, at least initially, many respondents successfully readjusted the mutual understandings of ongoing relationships or went on to develop new ones, often with seronegative people. Further, we compare the experiences of those already in relationships when they test HIV-positive to those seeking new relationships and discuss problems of disclosure and safer sex, with notes on the responses and perceptions of HIV-negative sexual partners.

In Nicaragua: homosexuality without a gay world.

This paper addresses the social construction of homosexual relations among men in Nicaragua in the late 1980s. The political economy of a nation, subjected to a devastating war by the United States, created conditions where sexual relations among men have not become organized into a gay world which would be familiar to North Americans and Europeans. Rather, homosexually-inclined men remain fully integrated in family and neighborhood life where they are often "known about" but not "recognized," a condition which dissolves separateness but also suppresses the development of a gay culture beyond the bounds of heterosexist expectations.

Age, structure, and sexuality: reflections on the anthropological evidence on homosexual relations.

The paper compares selected examples of age-structured homosexuality to understand same-sex eroticism as a "predictable" outcome of particular combinations of age, gender, and kinship. Unlike traditional models of homosexuality which view it as exceptional or abnormal, cross-cultural evidence demonstrates that homosexuality is an inextricable component of the structural codes of the societies in which it appears.