As false beliefs about HIV persist among Gen Z, young gay and bisexual people born after 1997 share their complex representations of the virus on World AIDS Day, December 1.
Misperceptions, lack of information, trivialization, a sense of invulnerability, serophobia… Regularly, studies and surveys warn about young people’s relationship to HIV/AIDS. In March 2025, an OpinionWay poll for Sidaction focusing on 15-24-year-olds showed a significant decline in knowledge about the virus and its modes of transmission. Published on November 25, 2025, a study by Santé Publique France warned of an increase in the number of new diagnoses among young people: seropositive discoveries rose by 41% among 15-24-year-olds between 2014 and 2023.
These troubling figures, which concern especially people born in sub-Saharan Africa, reflect above all the health precariousness of young migrants, infected before or after their arrival in France. At the same time, among young gay and bisexual men born in France, the number of new diagnoses has stabilized. This stabilization – while one would obviously have hoped for a decline – is explained by limited access to prevention for 18-21-year-olds. According to a Santé Publique France study covering the year 2023 and published at the end of November 2025, 43% of young gay and bisexual men in this age group do not talk about HIV prevention with their doctor and 46% have not had an HIV test during the year. Furthermore, their use of PrEP remains low – only 8 % of them take it.
Behind these figures, HIV representations are sometimes complex and contrasting. Born after the peak of the epidemic and the invention of the first antiretroviral therapies, young gay and bisexual men from Gen Z testified, for Têtu, to their relation to prevention and to the trace of the epidemic in community memory.
“An STI Like Any Other”
“For my generation, HIV is almost an STI like the others”, says Alex, 21. If the young man has already found himself “in a panic” after an unprotected encounter, he says he is generally reassured by the widespread adoption of PrEP, introduced in France even before his sexual debut, and which he himself took occasionally. In his circle of gay friends, he “does not observe strong anxiety related to HIV”, but rather “a distancing from the fact that a contamination could happen”. Sacha, 22, did not use condoms until his ex-boyfriend educated him, last year. “Since then, I’ve been careful, even though I’m not optimal in assessing risks”, he comments. After a trial period, the young man decided not to pursue PrEP. “It annoyed me to take a medicine every day when I wasn’t sick”, he explains, omitting the possibility of on-demand dosing.
If young people thus neglect prevention basics, even when they know them, it is because they sometimes believe that the overall risk of contamination has diminished. Benjamin, 29, describes himself in this regard as “a stowaway”, and says that he is “reassured” to be part of a generation in which, in his view, “it’s still extremely rare to be HIV-positive”.
The risk assessment does not rest solely on the probability of contracting HIV, but also on the perception one has of the virus itself. And one must acknowledge that in 2025, thanks to medical advances and the effectiveness of TasP, HIV is no longer scary. “If I am so nonchalant and carefree, it’s because I think that if I caught it, it wouldn’t ruin my life”, continues Benjamin.
A Disease of the Past
This distancing from risk among a slice of Gen Z also roots itself in the representations it inherited—or not. “HIV evokes for me mostly the past, the 80s-90s. I don’t have images of the present”, analyzes Sacha. These young adult gay and bisexual men share the trait of having grown up in a world where HIV was little visible in cultural productions: between the late 90s and the mid-2010s, it even somewhat disappeared from screens, as notably shown by historian Marion Aballéa in her book A World History of AIDS (1981-2025). From high school, a gap widens according to origin. Hugo, 22, went to see the films 120 battements par minute and Plaire, aimer et courir vite when they were released in theaters, while he was a teenager. But for others, who grew up in more conservative environments, the discovery happens later. This is the case of Alex, who only had vague memories of HIV from history class, until this memory took the traits of Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in the series Fellow Travelers, discovered at age 19, a year after his arrival in Paris.
Not surprisingly, the memory of the epidemic and the struggles thus resonates in very contrasted ways for them. Hugo had long wondered why he was “so touched and traumatized by those years he did not live through”. In talking with other gay friends his age, he realizes that he is “not alone in bearing this HIV-related weight”: the young man sees it as a form of community “intergenerational trauma”. But this “duty of memory” that he feels does not win unanimous support in his generation. Some, like Benjamin, express little interest or deliberately keep their distance from this past of struggles and mourning. “That surely stems from a form of denial”, he admits.
Gays and HIV, a Persistent Stigma
But whether they want it or not, gays and bisexuals under 30 are still often reduced to an entire imaginary around HIV/AIDS. Alex remembers very well the cutting remark from his best friend when he told her about his first (unprotected) encounter at 18: “You won’t come crying to me if you catch AIDS”. And this symbolic violence seeps into the intimate sphere, notably for bisexual men who still face rejection and distrust in their relationships with women. Félix, 25, has felt stigmatized several times by female partners who had “a disproportionate fear of HIV”, “which no test result could dispel”.
These misconceptions, disconnected from medical realities, also surface during coming out to parents. The labeling of the disease and all the fantasies associated with it still seem very present within a generation of people in their fifties or sixties who lived through the epidemic’s dark years. Benjamin’s mother told him of her “blue fear that her son would spend his life in the hospital”. A similar reaction for Alex: the young man did not cope well with “her summarizing [his] homosexuality as risky practices”.
