Blog’s authors
In this blog we’re known as “Elettrona and Gifter” but our real names are Elena and Alessandro.
We met online at the beginning of 2019 and, right away, we knew we were polar opposites:
- Elettrona: straight woman, blind since birth, HIV-negative and former partner of an HIV-positive man. Many years of experience in creating sites and blogs.
- Gifter: gay man, sighted, HIV positive, husband of a man without the virus. Zero experience in creating sites and blogs.
- Pets we own: Elettrona a dog, Gifter a cat.
Yet the common interests between us were evident: a passion for writing and reading detective stories; but what made us “the electron and proton of the same atom” was our life with HIV-related stigma, experienced and shared from opposite points of view.
What does Plus Brothers mean?
The name of the site “Plus Brothers” sums up the fantasy environment of our invention: the plus sign, the brotherly bond, and the passion for music that unite the characters in our stories.
Blatant assonance with the well-known musical group “Blues Brothers” but they have nothing to do with Blues.
Inspired by other books and movies in which “ordinariness” becomes an exception, we have created a setting in which people with HIV are discriminating and humiliating those without the virus: it’s called Positive (poz) World.
Someone blames us
Reading our stories, some people heavily criticized our writing style:
“Your irony about those who already suffer stigma is inappropriate.”
We, however, reply that satire was born to “poke fun at the powerful,” of which HIV undoubtedly is a part: no cure completely eradicates it, it has affected our sex lives, and it is the subject of a hard-to-die stigma.
On this, we want to quote the words of an Italian satirical page whose translated title sounds as “man bites dog”:
[…] we need culture to understand that by “powerful” we don’t just mean the king or the politician but any person or event that can hold us in check. And disease, addiction, suffering and death are “powerful” in the strongest sense of the word.
We believe in satire and irony because we want a world where we stop viewing HIV as biblical punishment: scientific advances exist, and there is no reason to keep society trapped in the same prejudices spreading in the 1980s.
How to talk to us
To avoid on line hate speech we decided not to implement contact forms or private messages; people can reach us through comments on posts or, in extreme situations, the Agony Ass always keeps their door open.