Danny Pintauro: ‘Rough sex led me to meth addiction’
Former Who’s The Boss? child star Danny Pintauro has linked his addiction to crystal meth to his interest in BDSM sex in a new interview.
Speaking to HIV Equal, Pintauro – who revealed in an interview with Oprah last month that he’d been living with HIV for the past 12 years, following a period in which he became addicted to crystal meth – opened up about how he was introduced to the drug.
“So here I am wanting to explore bondage, wanting to explore rougher things, wanting to explore, sort of, being dominated,” he said.
“And the person that I find, who I think is just gorgeous and, oh my god, it’s, like, perfect. … This guy wants to hang out with me? How can I turn him down? I get over there, and he says ‘Well you should try this [meth]’. I’m not going to turn him down.”
“Maybe someone has ecstasy every once and a while and they don’t want to do it again – that doesn’t happen with meth. You do it, and you want to do it again,” he continued.
Pintauro, who revealed after his Oprah interview that he believes he contracted HIV via oral sex, also says that he can identify meth users just by looking at their Grinder profiles.
“From my experience, with Grindr and all of those sites, I could go on there right now and look at the people in this area who are either doing, have done, or want to do meth. I know what to look for, I know the look in their eyes, I know what they’re saying in their profile, and I guarantee you that’s going to be 1 out of every 8 guys.”
Pintauro was also asked what he thought of the advent of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP):
“I’m a huge fan [of PrEP], but I’m very cautious about how I go about talking about it, because it’s a huge thing that can be taken advantage of. The conversation with PrEP is not simply ‘If you take this regularly, your chances of getting HIV are very slim’, it’s ‘If you take this regularly, your chances are slim, but you still need to do the following things in a sexual environment, or you’re going to end up with something else.”
“That’s the whole sentence with PrEP.”
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