Now more than ever, The Stranger depends on your support to help fund our coverage. Please consider supporting local, independent, progressive media with a one-time or recurring contribution. Our staff is working morning, noon, and night to make your contributions count. Help us reach our goal of 1, new contributors by the end of fall! So you're finally here, in a big city with lots of different people.

Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation. Hodes provides details of the wedding of a white servant-woman and a slave man in , an antebellum rape accusation that uncovered a relationship between an unmarried white woman and a slave, and a divorce plea from a white farmer based on an adulterous affair between his wife and a neighborhood slave. Only with the advent of black freedom did the issue move beyond neighborhood dramas and into the arena of politics, becoming a much more serious taboo than it had ever been before.

There are 4 possible explanations, which are not mutually exclusive: 1 bias in assessment of risk behaviors, 2 increased prevalence of HIV among sexual contacts, 3 increased infectiousness among sexual partners, and 4 increased physiological susceptibility to HIV. By exploring these possibilities more deeply, we can increase our understanding of the apparent disparity between behavioral risks and outcomes while at the same time improving the design and implementation of prevention programs that address the specific needs of BMSM. Methodological problems that may lead to underreporting of risk behaviors may also explain why behavioral messages fail to translate into safer sex among BMSM: Measures, surveys, and instruments may be culturally inappropriate for BMSM; interviewers may not be race- and gender-concordant with or may not be properly trained to interview BMSM; instruments may use language or terminology that does not resonate with BMSM; research settings may not be comfortable environments for open discussion with and responses by BMSM.

I had been with my partner for six years when she announced, abruptly, that it was over. I remember she was crying. I was not: I was too stunned. It was as if, in the rulebook of how to end a relationship, she had torn out the last chapter. Disagreements, rows, eating meals in silence, sleeping in separate rooms: these things were all missing from our end sequence.