“It wasn’t worth the orgasm.”

Elaine Pasqua, a nationally recognized speaker who led a workshop about HIV/AIDS last week, was told this by an actor who had just been tested HIV positive.

The actor had just been offered a role on the soap opera “One Life to Live,” but turned it down for fear that his body’s physical deterioration caused by the disease would be nationally televised. Pasqua was working at NJ AIDS Education and Training Center, doing HIV testing at the time; part of her job description was tracking down and consulting all the sexual partners of each patient that tested HIV positive.

Both Paqua’s mother and her stepfather were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1989. She now travels to college and high school campuses across the country speaking to students about the dangers and realities of HIV.

According to her website, her presentation “Sex and Excess: Surviving the Party” was “tailored specifically for Catholic universities and colleges.” This religious bent did not repel Oberlin students, RAs and community members from participating in her Wilder 109 workshop last Wednesday evening, however.

Pasqua started the workshop with an activity that simulated the rapid spread of AIDS: each student was given a small cup of clear liquid, which they then mixed randomly with other students’ liquids. Two of the cups contained sodium hydroxide while the rest had pure water. Pasqua added a drop of phenophathylin to each cup, which turned the sodium hydroxide solution bright pink. More than ten of the cups were pink after the short exchanges.

Pasqua later set up a role-playing activity to drive home her point of how dangerous a breezy sexual lifestyle can be. Eight students stood in front of the group and read their sexual histories from large laminated cards. Every student was ultimately connected through past sexual experiences — exposing each of them to potential HIV infection when it was revealed that one student had the virus.

Pasqua talked statistically about the severity of HIV/AIDS. Although, according to Pasqua, the media has their HIV/AIDS lens tilted towards Africa, Pasqua said the United States is failing to bring down its own infection rates. There are currently 40,000 new cases of HIV in the U.S. each year, twice the number that the government had promised to narrow it to by now.

“We’re not making progress,” Pasqua said. As well as informing students about fundamental aspects of HIV, Pasqua also touched on her “abstinence base” strategy. She clarified that her message goes beyond a George Bush-like approach to sex education.

“‘Abstinence only’ doesn’t work,” said Pasqua, who said that she started having sex while in a committed relationship at age 16. “I’m a realist — I know what people do.”

Pasqua said she hoped to get students to see the gravity of irresponsible choices:

“My goal is to get students to realize that one night, one time is all it takes to get infected.”

Lori Morgan Flood, the Assistant Dean of Students, said the staff could not predict how the liberal-minded student body would receive Pasqua, whose talk was provided for by a grant from a trustee.

“Hopefully the RAs will take something away from it to bring to their students,” she said.