more about it all, but in the meantime, if my articles leave you with an appetite for more, then I recommend two wrenching books: Letting Them Die: Why HIV/AIDS Prevention Programmes Fail by Catherine Campbell, and The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani. (Pisani's book in particular gave me so many moments of recognition that I was almost offended. I was like, dammit, Elizabeth Pisani, this is the book I wanted to write!) In early 2010, while I was still in Africa, I began writing a series of articles about my experiences. These articles were published at CarnalNation.com and edited by Chris Hall, who is a smart sex-positive writer in his own right. I'm especially grateful to Chris because, unlike a lot of editors, he made the effort to grasp where I was coming from; he always made requests rather than demands, and never changed my work without consulting me. Good editors are hard to come by, and I hope that when I edit other writers’ work today, I do credit to the model Chris provided. I'm sad to report that CarnalNation ceased publishing new articles in late 2010, although you can still read the archives online (and I encourage you to do so). There are a lot of "sex-positive" websites out there that have little real understanding of sex communities, activism, etc. -- not to mention, there are websites that hire talented and ethical writers, but then hide truly unethical business practices. But from what I could tell, CarnalNation was the real deal. The list of contributors read like a Sex-Positive All- Stars, and I was proud to be part of it. So, anyway. This is the first of a bunch of articles that I originally wrote about sex and culture in southern Africa. Like all my writing, it’s framed within my own experience. (I'm not republishing all the Africa articles in this book, but they're all available in my_ CarnalNation archive.) And before we get into it, I would like to note one final thing. One problem with how