Northern exposure BY DAN SAVAGE

I am a Middle Eastern guy who lived 21 years of my life in that region. This year I came to Canada. The sexual freedom in this country makes you feel more and more inclined to have sex with a girlfriend. Lately, I met this girl on an Internet chat. She said she has a crush on me, and offered to come and visit me in Canada, stay at a hotel, and have sex with me. We masturbated together a couple of times during chats, but now that she is getting serious about coming to Canada, I am starting to worry:

1) About the chances of getting HIV even if I use a condom.

2) About a sense of guilt for fucking a girl I barely know just because I am horny.

3) Because she is married and I am scared to put myself in trouble.

Do you think I should sleep with her if she comes, or cancel the plan?

So Alluring Until Disease Intervenes

That’s odd, SAUDI. I’ve been to Canada dozens of times and the sexual freedom up there has never made me feel inclined to have sex with a girlfriend. But my experience/cheap shot is neither here nor there, so I’ll just get to your questions/statements:

1) A man’s chances of getting HIV from a woman during vaginal intercourse while using a condom are slim to nonexistent. There are a few other STDs you could get even while using a condom — syphilis, herpes, HPV, and more — but if you use a condom correctly, your odds of catching even these STDs are low/lower.

2) Let go of the guilt, SAUDI. I have it on good authority that in Canada men routinely fuck women with whom they’re less acquainted than you are with this young lady. You’ve invested time chatting with this woman and you’ve masturbated with her online — by Canadian standards, you’re a gentleman.

3) Not all married Canadian women make monogamous commitments to their husbands, SAUDI, and some Canadian husbands actually get off on the idea or the reality of their wives doing other guys. (Some American husbands do too — I have a file full of e-mail from them.) But even if this woman is a lowdown, dirty cheater, it’s not your job to police her adherence to her marriage vows. Unlike the country you left behind, there are no morals police in the part of North America where you live. (In the part of North America where I live, on the other hand, the morals police are running the place.)

4) You didn’t have a number four, so this is bonus advice: not everyone who meets and masturbates with strangers online tells the truth about themselves. For all you know, SAUDI, this woman could be a liar, a psycho, a man, a mullah, or all of the above. Proceed with caution.

You’ve been running a lot of piss-related questions lately, and I need some advice. I’m in a long-term relationship with my partner; we’ve been together for almost nine years. I’m extremely kinky and he’s not, and we have some difficulties meeting each other’s needs. One thing we both used to get a lot of pleasure from was when he’d drink my piss. It was something fun we could share regularly, he loved it, and I really enjoyed the kinky aspect. Coming home after a long commute and unloading an aching bladder down his throat was definitely a win/win for both of us, and had been something we’d been doing for years.

Then my partner developed gout. Gout is an arthritis-like disease where uric acid forms crystals in the cartilage of the joints, which get painfully inflamed and swollen. Sometimes it will flare up all by itself, or after drinking alcohol. He’s been hobbled by it for weeks at a time, needing crutches just to get around. And he’s only 29!

Ever since he was diagnosed, we’ve been terrified to make a bad situation worse, and have stopped the piss drinking entirely. Urine contains a lot of uric acid (of course), and I worry that it is partly my fault that he developed gout! Since you’ve been extolling the safety of piss drinking, and potentially tempting your readers to try it for themselves, is there any chance that it could cause or exacerbate gout? I’ve looked online for medical information, but I’ve never seen anything about this at all.

We are both totally bummed that one of the few kinks we could share and enjoy has been taken away from us. Is there anything we can do? Is even a little additional uric acid in his diet going to make his gout worse? Please ask your doctor friend before anyone else winds up with this chronic disease!

Must Our Urine Sharing End?

I’m afraid the urine sharing must end.

But before we get to my doctor friend’s advice, MOUSE, I have a bone to pick with you: I have not been "extolling the safety of piss drinking." I have not gone out of my way to promote the practice, or to popularize it. My recent controversial mention of the practice merely pointed out that compared to eating shit, getting into piss — splashing it over your skin or sipping from the source — is very nearly harmless. I certainly didn’t encourage people to drink large quantities of piss or to take up the practice. Like all other sexual practices, drinking piss carries some degree of risk — and one of the risks, as it turns out, may very well be gout.

"No one really knows what causes gout," says my doctor friend, Barak Gaster of the University of Washington’s Department of Medicine. "The higher that uric-acid levels are in the blood, the higher the chance that someone will have gout, but we don’t really understand why one person with a slightly high uric-acid level gets gout but another with the same slightly elevated uric-acid level does not." Doctors believe that there must be some genetic factor because gout is much more common in men than in women, MOUSE, so you may not be entirely to blame. It’s possible that your boyfriend would have developed gout even if he wasn’t drinking your stanky piss. Still, all that piss couldn’t have helped. "People who have had a gout attack can reduce their chances of future attacks by lowering their uric-acid levels," says Barak, "by taking medications and avoiding triggers." Such as? "Common triggers are alcohol and dehydration or eating large quantities of meat such as liver." And? "Drinking large amounts of urine also could bring on an attack. Since urine is made up of stuff the body wants to get rid of, drinking very large quantities could be bad for you and should definitely be avoided in people who have gout."

What the hell happened to santorum? I have been anxiously awaiting updates to www.spreadingsantorum.com, but the last letters were posted in June! Please don’t forget about us santorum lovers, Dan! We miss the frothy mix!

Allie

I’ve been lax about updating www.spreadingsantorum.com, Allie, because it was just too much work for little ol’ me. Still, with the actual Santorum — Senator Rick, not that frothy mix — gearing up to run for Senate majority whip (and inspiring all the obvious double-entendres), perhaps it’s time to get the site going again. But you know what I need, people? I need help! If there’s someone out there who’s Web savvy, hates Santorum as much as I do, and wants to take charge of the site, I would love to hear from you.

Dan Savage can be reached at mail@savagelove.net