Zachary Quinto Clarifies His Remarks On PrEP, Hopes To Be Part Of The Gay Conversation

It can be difficult for stars to comment on anything these days, as the internet means that if some people don’t like it, they won’t hold back from telling them so. Zachary Quinto discovered that last year when he tried to express his feelings about PrEP/Truvada and whether they potentially exacerbated other problems.

At the time, he said, “I think there’s a tremendous sense of complacency in the LGBT community. AIDS has lost the edge of horror it possessed when it swept through the world in the ’80s. Today’s generation sees it more as something to live with and something to be much less fearful of. And that comes with a sense of, dare I say, laziness… We need to be really vigilant and open about the fact that these drugs are not to be taken to increase our ability to have recreational sex. There’s an incredible underlying irresponsibility to that way of thinking… and we don’t yet know enough about this vein of medication to see where it’ll take us down the line.”

Many took him to task for his comments, accusing him of slut-shaming.

Now he’s stepped forward to clarify him comments, telling Huffpo,’“Look, I just think we need to be vigilant as a community and a community of gay men. It was not my intention to judge anybody or to rankle anybody, or to put myself in some kind of superior position by any means. I think if people use PrEP as part of a responsible regimen of taking care of themselves and preserving their bodies and their well-being and the well-being of the people they’re having sex with, then more power to them. There was this thing that I was ‘slut-shaming.’ Anybody who knows me knows that that is the last thing I would ever do. I just think that we can’t let our guard down.”

The piece adds that, ‘Quinto seemed to suggest that the very idea of PrEP itself might influence everyone to let his or her guard down by forgetting the past and the reality of HIV and AIDS. “I’m old enough to understand how absolutely horrific and decimating that time was,” he explained. “And I think I was speaking more to [infection rates being the same now as in the past].” Quinto sees his critique as a way to remind people of that earlier time, and to “honor the people we lost, an entire generation of men, and to be responsible to who we are and how we relate to one another, how we take care of each other.” He adds, “That’s all I was trying to talk about. I wasn’t trying to heap any judgment on anybody.”’

However it seems he doesn’t want to shy away from talking about LGBT issues, as part of the reason he publicly came out was because, he wanted to be part of a “larger conversation”, adding “That conversation is about the well-being of kids who are struggling to come to terms with who they are in the world. And that’s what motivated my decision.”

Speaking of other actors fears of coming out, he says, “The only way to change that is to stop giving it power. It’s my responsibility to work with integrity, to live with integrity. And if I do those two things I feel like the idea of limitations based on who I spend my life with or who I sleep with is everybody else’s problem. That’s not mine. Mine is to do good work, to show up, to be who I am and to, in some way, be one of many, many, many voices that over the last generation made incredible and very powerful changes in the way that we treat LGBT people.”