I got monkeypox at my first Pride party in years. The physical pain was excruciating — but the intrusive feelings of self-loathing were worse.

• Insider’s Joel Marino had monkeypox in July. The pain was so severe that sometimes he could not even lie down.
• Merino said the stigma was terrible — with monkeypox, people see you differently.
• This is Marino’s story, as told to Insider reporter Hilary Brooke.

I spent most of June in isolation from COVID-19, a disease I managed to avoid until this summer. Disappointingly, as a gay man, the diagnosis meant spending almost all of my glory months pacing my New York City apartment. I canceled plans with friends and stayed in.

This was the year when nothing was going to stand in my way. The onset of the pandemic in 2020 and the 2021 delta surge put a damper on the two Pride celebrations; I didn’t want to miss out on a third.

So once my week of fever, fatigue, and chills was behind me, and I tested COVID negative for three days in a row, I formed a line for a queer dance party in Manhattan on the last Sunday of June.

It was a wonderful night. Finally, after so many months of precautions, vaccinations and promotions, and necessary epidemiological precautions (which, honestly, meant less dating), I was able to touch strangers again and we could enjoy it. . I danced, I kissed, I conquered. I met someone and we asked each other blushingly, “Your place or mine?”

Monkeypox feels like something that happens to other people. Until it isn’t.

At that time there was not much talk of monkeypox going to the club. People briefly mentioned it, if the slander is nothing else to laugh at, but still it felt like something was happening to more people, somewhere else.

My mother, who was already worried about my recovery from COVID, had texted me and suggested that perhaps I should get the Jynneos vaccine, but there were barely any monkeypox vaccines available in the city at the time. It was so hard to make an appointment, people often waited for hours and hours in the scorching sun, and I just thought, “Really, what are the chances of catching this thing?” I had yet to hear of anyone who had caught monkeypox in my social circle, or even on social media.

I spent a week feeling good after the party, reconnected with friends after my COVID infection, and drenched in the summer.

Then, about nine days after the dance, I started feeling a strange itch in the back of my throat. Over the next several days the tickling turned into a swelling. I went to urgent care. Nobody even mentioned monkeypox. It was not on my mind or anyone else’s. I was tested for strep, syphilis and other diseases. Nothing positive came back.

my monkeypox appeared overnight

On Sunday, two full weeks after the party, I woke up and suddenly realized my throat was so swollen that I couldn’t swallow properly. I couldn’t talk. I ran to the mirror and, to my horror, my body was covered with tiny pimples and blisters. They had surfaced like a swarm of mosquito bites throughout the night.

I had tiny red spots all over my body—I counted more than two dozen on my face, arms, hands, legs, stomach, and butt. I knew immediately that I had monkeypox. The incubation period was neatly lined up with a dance party.

A diagnosis of monkeypox was much harder on me than COVID, and not only physically (the wounds were so painful I couldn’t even sit or lie down) — mentally and spiritually, the illness really took a toll.

COVID didn’t hurt me emotionally in the same way. The disease has been studied intensively for more than two years, with vaccines, booster shots and treatments available, plus I knew what to expect. I have a lot of friends who have shared what it feels like to get COVID, so my loss of smell and taste was no surprise, and a pity the US no longer has to confirm the diagnosis. There is a plentiful supply of free, at-home tests. ,

Avoiding monkeypox meant dealing with internalized homophobic thoughts I hadn’t accepted in years

Monkeypox felt like my punishment for being a proud gay man. Growing up in a fanatical Christian family, the son of a Pentecostal minister, I had thoughts that long ago I was running in my fever dreams.

As I sweated through my sheets and my temperature climbed to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, I briefly considered going to the hospital, but I worried about putting others at risk, or eventually getting stuck in the hospital, and eventually I Thought, “Okay, I just got infected with COVID myself. I could be infected with monkeypox myself.”

Being home alone with monkeypox gave me a lot of time to think about the diagnosis, to think and dissect my own thoughts: “Is this a punishment from God? Have my wanton ways caught up to me? Have I become too hedonistic, and is this the universe’s cruel way of telling me so?”

Thoughts about being gay I hadn’t had since my father attended a session of “reparative therapy” at 19 years old, all turned back.

I was not the only one who had them.

Many people are making dirty rhetoric, both explicit and coded, by the way people are getting monkeypox, to suggest that spreading monkeypox to children is something violent and pedophilic, or even that Illness is not their concern. Marjorie Taylor Green’s remarks that monkeypox “does not pose a threat” to “the majority of the population” were perhaps the most troubling to me—such a classic other of gay people, much like it did during the AIDS crisis when I was a child. was . It’s painful to see people react this way even when gay people are sick.

Watching episodes of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and “Love, Victor” really helped me balance the apocalyptic, religious thoughts running through my head. “Hey, it’s okay to be gay, Joel,” I said to myself. “remember this.”

My colleagues sent me pinches of ice cream as a gift, and the cold treat really helped my throat swell (so did the salt water gargles, though it was very painful at first).

My wounds, both physical and emotional, are still healing

I’m spending time visiting my family as I recover from monkeypox, and it’s nice to be in person with the people I love this summer after being sick and isolated for so long. Am. But there are things we don’t mention.

I haven’t pointed them to the still-healing monkeypox scars on my body, the pinkish new skin left where the sores have peeled off. Accepting the mark would be acknowledging my homosexuality in front of them. We don’t do that anymore. I came out to my family as a teenager, and after several controversial years in my 20s, we’ve now reached a place where no one really wants to talk about my homosexuality. This is very disturbing for everyone including me. I wonder if I see visible signs of infection as I type on my computer: “Is this something I need to address?”

Once you get monkeypox, people start looking at you differently. A lot of my friends have asked me about some version of a raised eyebrow “How did that happen?” – Which no one ever thought of my COVID diagnosis.

Now I tell all my gay friends, “Please get vaccinated as soon as possible.” Some say, “I’m careful” or “I’m in a relationship,” suggesting that they aren’t worried about getting infected yet.

People need to understand that monkeypox is happening to people they know and love. And it is not a punishment for any moral misdeeds.