The chills shook Courtney Brame awake. Then the sick heat of fever registered. How could he be so cold and so hot at the same time? His mom drove him to urgent care. “They said, ‘This is what you have. This is what it looks like.’ Then they gave me medicine and a pamphlet and just sent me on my way.”
Photography by Remrod
Courtney Brame went public, for everybody's sake.
Back home, still feverish but shot through with the adrenaline of bad news, he Googled and of course “the worst came up first.” After a lot of compulsive clicking and scanning, though, the advice settled into common sense: Take care of your physical health, work out, keep your immune system strong.
Brame asked a friend from high school to be his personal trainer. “He pointed out that what I was eating was crap, and I lost a significant amount of weight.” He grins. “I didn’t necessarily keep it off. I didn’t like eating that way all the time, so I gained back about half.”
Working out, though, stuck 100 percent. He’d soon switch gears and become a personal trainer himself.
Meanwhile, the burning question: How had he gotten herpes? An elephant’s weight of guilt had its foot on his back: “I’d just finished a relationship, and I thought, Oh my God, did I give it to her? I’ve got to tell her.” Blurting it out wasn’t easy, but his gut wouldn’t let him slink away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. You should go get tested.”
She shrugged. “Well, I’m sure if you have it, then I have it.”
But she tested negative.
“I really believe it varies from person to person,” Brame says. “It matters how you handle your own immune system. She was pretty healthy.”
His next Herculean challenge: confessing his status to the woman he was currently dating. Instead of the blank, shocked stare he’d dreaded, she said a relative of hers also had herpes. They dated for a while, took the necessary precautions. Then he moved to Houston for a marketing job.
“It didn’t necessarily affect me, because I was in a relationship for most of that time,” he says. “When that ended, it hit me: Oh, shit, now I’m single.”
He found a dating site called Positive Singles, which sounds a little Dale Carnegie but had nothing to do with optimism. When a woman he was emailing through the site confided thoughts of suicide, though, Brame was shocked. “Hey, it’s not that bad!” he replied fast.
Once he’d heard her despair, he started hearing it from other people, too. They were depressed. Lonely. Ashamed. Had nobody to talk to.
That was the inspiration for starting his podcast, Something Positive for Positive People.
That was last year. He’d been positive for five years. He’d moved back to St. Louis. He was working as a personal trainer. Now, by night, he put on what he laughingly calls his superhero cape, with an H on his chest to stand for herpes. His Twitter handle was @honmychest. His mission was to save St. Louis from itself.
Our city has hovered at or near the top of the chlamydia and gonorrhea rankings for more than a decade—a not entirely deserved shame, because the city is ranked apples to oranges, by comparison to counties. When you compare the entire St. Louis region to other metro areas, we rank eighth for gonorrhea and 19th for chlamydia.
But the people who have those diseases, or herpes, or are HIV-positive…don’t want to talk about it.
“You don’t want to say, ‘Oh, I’m having a discomfort in my genital area,’” Brame remarks wryly. No condition this personal is pleasant: “I remember in college, I went in for chafing, and a doctor asked me all these questions, and she put a Q-tip up my dick hole, and I was like, f-k this. I’m not doing this again.”
On top of that basic reluctance, there’s guilt, shame, ignorance of the consequences, and the selfish notion that ignorance is bliss.
“As I talk to more people of different backgrounds and different experiences, to say the cause of STDs in St. Louis is one specific thing would be a lie,” Brame says. “The closest thing I could say is not being able to honestly communicate with potential partners. St. Louis is a pretty conservative place. Growing up, there were certain things you wouldn’t necessarily talk about, things that just went unspoken. And if you were raised in that kind of household, you carry that mindset into adolescence. So the stigma plays a large role. There are a lot of secret groups for different STDs. If everyone were to just come together in one group, the numbers…” would astound us.
So how was he going to find people willing to open up and be recorded, for strangers to hear from now on?
All he wanted to make public was race, age, location, and sexual orientation, and that was just to dispel myths about which folks have STDs. Otherwise, he promised, they could be anonymous.
The floodgates opened.
Guests came to him through dating sites, through other sites where you can disclose online, or after hearing someone on the podcast who echoed their own predicament. They talked about self-esteem (more often, the threat to it); about health issues; about dating and relationships; about misdiagnosis.
One woman had been repeatedly diagnosed with a urinary tract infection, given antibiotics and sent home—until someone finally diagnosed her with herpes. Another woman had been sexually abused and contracted a virus that way. Friends and lovers contacted Brame, too: One guy said, “My girlfriend has herpes. I don’t, but I’m dating her.”
Brame’s dating someone now, too. “I actually met her at the gym,” he says. Which meant he had to face the eternal question: Do I tell you now, is this going to go somewhere? There’s never really a right time to open up about that kind of information. I wanted to make her ask me what the podcast was about, and she just wouldn’t ask!”
When she finally did ask, he texted her an explanation: “I said, This is how I manage it, this is what it means for you. And five minutes later—which felt like years—she texted back and said, ‘Me, too.’ It’s surprisingly common.”
The relationship’s going well—what about the herpes? “I wouldn’t know I had it,” he says. “I rarely get outbreaks. If there’s a tingling sensation, I just take my medicine, and that’s happened maybe once every other year.”
No big deal.
Once you’ve dealt with it.
