August 2009 Archives

[ Image redacted -- see here ]

(This image illustrates some of the backlash towards IML's new policy. Far as I know, only bareback porn is banned from IML's leather marketplace)

The tone of the online debate has been, well, impolite following the announcement by International Mr. Leather to ban the promotion and distribution of bareback porn at the weekend event's leather marketplace.

"Fascists. No wonder they like uniforms," wrote a man identified as Liam Cole reacting to the ban on Treasure Island Media's blog "You're just a bunch of sick people who need help," countered an anonymous poster on the same blog.

On August 17th at 6 pm at the Center on Halsted in Chicago, I will be sitting on a panel called "Risky Business? Reclaiming Pleasure," to discuss what effect bareback porn has on men's desires, fantasies and behaviors. The forum is not about IML's ban but will throw a wider net on the discussion of porn, sex without condoms and desire.

As a guest on Trevor's blog, I'd like to focus here on the IML ban that, once again, brought into focus the raw feelings that surface when gay men talk about raw sex. I should state my opinion up front: I disagree with IML's decision, don't believe it will affect behavior, and fear it will further marginalize a group of high risk men who need to be brought under the tent of community wellness, not banished.

"I never thought I'd see the day that IML is used as a vehicle for censorship," said one anonymous source at the Chicago Free Press website. "I don't like being treated like a child at an adult event." Disputing this charge was Colin at Gay Men's Social Crisis blog (GMSC) who said, "I have a hard time with this [censorship] argument. I find bareback porn in direct conflict with health education, even if it does present what can and should be recognized as a fantasy scenario."

Maybe the better question isn't whether or not IML's new policy is censorship - it is by definition - but whether censoring bareback porn from the IML marketplace, however offensively this may strike some of us, is worth the presumed outcome of "social responsibility" and health?

This is where the ban on bareback porn starts to appear arbitrary. On GMSC Colin observed, "I do love how bareback media is banned, and yet Mr. Renslow has made no mention of the bestiality porn that was quite prevalently displayed this year." Porn fetishizing shit was also available in the marketplace, according to online commentators who attended this year. If sexual ethics and health are what's at stake, then why ban barebacking but not bestiality or scat? At The Moby Files a man identified as J.P. added, "Perhaps IML should stop courting the alcohol company sponsorships and ad revenue if they were truly serious about setting a tone of responsibility for the community."

These arguments about the "gateways" to HIV infection (be they substances or images) are, it should be noted, of the same class of argument used largely by evangelical Christians and Republicans in their attempts to criminalize pornography, to censor sex and violence from TV and video games, and to shut down commercial adult establishments such as strip clubs and bathhouses. The business of protecting you from your untrustworthy self has historically been the province of the right wing.

Is viewing bareback porn a greater risk for HIV transmission than attending establishments and events (such as sex clubs or IML) where it is readily available? That's unlikely. There's a better chance of getting drunk by going to a bar than by watching National Lampoon's Animal House. But aren't these the wrong questions to be asking when we're talking about the purview of consenting adults? Deciding what is "advocating" versus "personal choice" at an event that celebrates sexual fetish is an exercise in tortured logic. Leave it to consenting adults to decide, no?

Interestingly, the question of whether or not we're even talking about adults is a major point of contention. "Imagine being a 23 year old kid and walking into that scene," said a man identified as Keith on Manhunt's blog. "You are being told that bareback is hot, bareback is masculine and bareback is acceptable. Is that the message we want to send?"

Chuck Renslow repeated this sentiment when he told me in an interview that a primary reason for IML's bareback porn ban was to protect leather newbies who might be uninformed about the continued dangers of HIV and misconstrue the display and sale of bareback porn at the marketplace as a sign that safer sex is no longer necessary. "If I can prevent even one HIV infection," he said.

To this, Paul Morris of Treasure Island Media e-mailed me: "Well, how will he keep the uninformed from walking around the hotel, where raw fucking and drug use are everywhere? The goings-on in the hotel exceed the imaginings of the sleaziest bareback porn producer (which would be me). So if he's serious about saving the innocent young'uns, Chuck would have to shut the whole operation down."

The "protect the youth" argument is a strange one to be having about an indisputably adult event and ironic considering this is the argument used repeatedly to whip up fear against LGBT people in our battles for civil rights. The right wing is, at least, actually talking about youth when, in an anti-gay marriage commercial, it casts an 8 year old girl telling her mommy she learned in school she can one day grow up to marry a princess. At the IML marketplace, not even 18 year olds can enter: 21 is the age limit.

Treating twentysomethings like children does not support them, it alienates them. Twentysomethings, like the rest of us, do not want decisions made for them. And like the rest of us, when it comes to health what they want is reliable information and the freedom to use that information by their own free will, even if we disagree with their choices. This has not changed since I was a twentysomething in the mid-90's and older activists at the time claimed the reason my generation was taking risks was because we didn't see all our friends die, the same reason given now about the latest batch of twentysomethings. If seeing our friends die is the only barometer by which you believe health promotion can be effective, you need to quietly retire yourself from this conversation.

The top reason cited for IML's bareback porn ban, stated in the letter sent to vendors, is that the CDC and local health officials informed Mr. Renslow that new HIV infections are on the rise. In graduate school I put together a list of newspaper headlines from the early 90's through the present (then 2004) that announced "alarming increases" in HIV infections among gay men. Every year, several times a year, the same headline. We should have all been infected by now.

This has never been new information. There are always populations of gay/bi men somewhere in the U.S. where infections go up (like young gay/bi African American men in Baltimore), while they go down in others (like older gay white men in San Francisco). HIV statistics are cited so frequently and confusingly and have been used so often to manipulate our fear and guilt that many gay men hear them like Bush era terror alerts.

I am not saying this to diminish the genuine concern of new infections. The best research I've read does indeed point to increases in infection rates especially among young gay men of color. What I question is the wisdom of banning, marginalizing and demonizing that our community practices when public health issues its press releases.

This, to me, is the saddest aspect of IML's decision to ban bareback porn, a decision that followed similar bans at Folsom, Dorey Alley and likely other venues I've not heard about. We know bans don't affect behavior but we ban anyway, perpetuating secrecy, lying and shame among gay men.

"What about our porn?" an HIV positive friend of mine said the other day when we were discussing IML's new policy. He was acknowledging the fact that bareback porn is largely (though not entirely) porn made by HIV positive men. Is it responsible to censor the sexuality of poz men in the interest of HIV negative men? Not if you respect HIV positive men, it's not.

I don't doubt that Chuck Renslow is "my people." He's a legend in the leather community, has owned bathhouses, sex clubs, fetish bars and has spent the majority of his life as an unabashed defender of the sexual subcultures that many gay men identify with more strongly than the mainstream LGBT movements that keep them at arms length. What I'm afraid Mr. Renslow doesn't realize is that his people have evolved, and that sophisticated understandings of safer sex without condoms (i.e. serosorting, strategic positioning) are widely practiced by gay men everywhere, and especially by those who attend IML.

Perhaps it's time that the leather community incorporate men who bareback into its credo of "safe, sane and consensual." Without these men as partners in health promotion, one of the community's most marginalized populations becomes disenfranchised from wellness altogether. This is neither safe nor sane.