PrEP activist Eric Paul Leue (aka Mr LA Leather) has created a series of videos as part of The PrEP Project which explores “the new drug that prevents HIV and the backlash against it, testing, treatment as prevention, fear and stigma.”

If you don’t already know what PrEP is they give a simple explanation of what it is and how it works in the first episode of The PrEP Project, or you can check out our more in-depth PrEP guide here.

The PrEP Project video series was funded by a Kickstarter campaign which raised over $15,000 with the goal of educating gay men about the HIV preventing medication.

According to the Kickstarter description, The PrEP Project is “sex ed for the 21st century, taking the fear out of the HIV epidemic with fun and outrageous frankness.”

Condoms

In the first episode in a series of four, Leue kicks it off listing the reasons that he doesn’t like condoms.

“They stink! They stink terrifyingly,” Leue exclaims at the beginning of the NSFW video. “I have tried every condom on the freaking planet and I’m sorry, but they stink.”

He goes on to lambaste how getting a condom and putting it on is “an ordeal” and if you want to have sex for longer than ten minutes “it starts hurting”. Once you’re done, you have a “balloon” with a cold liquid that you have to discard of, effectively ending the post-coital “ecstasy”.

Leue explains that condom efficacy lies somewhere between 70 and 95 per cent, and that “only 16.9% of those 7,000 people [surveyed by the CDC] said that they had used condoms at all times.”

If you don’t use a condom every single time, you’re probably better off preventing HIV infections with PrEP

Of those 16.9%, Leue wonders how many of them were not telling the truth about having worn condoms.

“If you don’t use a condom every single time, you’re probably better off preventing HIV infections with PrEP,” he says.

Prevention Toolbox

“For the last 10 years, we have had 50,000 new infections every year in the United States. So we knew that something we were doing for the men who have sex with men (MSM) is not working,” Leue says.

The messaging for gay men has consistently been about condom use with the latent implication that that condomless sex is ‘bareback’, ‘unsafe’ or ‘dirty’ and this video could help to change that long entrenched belief.

In the ’80s, there was a strong fear based public health campaign with a simple idea that HIV was a death sentence being at the core of communications, with little thought about the implications that would have on those living with HIV, Leue explains.

Leue is careful to impress that he is advocating for PrEP as one tool in the sexual health toolbox that healthcare providers can choose from and not a replacement for the other tools including condoms and treatment as prevention.

London

That said, PrEP does appear to be a very effective tool at preventing the spread of HIV.

Recent statistics from the UK indicate a significant decrease in HIV diagnoses which has been attributed, in part, to PrEP.

This year, the 56 Dean Street clinic reported a 42% drop in HIV diagnoses since Autumn 2015, while Ireland, where PrEP is not yet widely available, has seen an increase of 30%, with 50% of Irish diagnoses being in the MSM community.

Community activism group Act Up Dublin and the Gay Health Network have been urged the government to make PrEP available in Ireland to help curtail the spread of HIV amongst MSM.

With impressive results in the UK and community groups already pushing for PrEP access in Ireland, the next step is to make MSM aware of the medication, which The PrEP Project does.

Check out the NSFW video compilation of all four PrEP Project episodes below: