(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.
It's time for another installment of The View from the Bottom, the vlog about gay male health and sexuality as told from the perspective of two bottomless bottoms. This week, Scott and Trevor discuss strategies for talking dirty, how to determine if a guy is a top or a bottom, whether or not piercings are hot, and barebacking.
As always, email in your burning questions to theviewfromthebottom@trevorhoppe.com
Aww isn't it so cute! You can really see the resemblance! This blog has been my lovechild for four years now, and I'm so proud to see it continue to flourish today with the addition this year of new voices and a brand spanking new design. I even was lucky enough to be attacked by Christina Aguilera fans who brought my site down for almost two weeks. I was so flattered. Thank you for thinking this blog matters enough to hack!
As has been my custom on this auspicious occasion, I'd like to highlight my favorite entries from over the years. Check them out and take a whirlwind tour of my life and thoughts!
Thanks for reading and supporting this project. It just keeps getting better and more wonderful to have more people logging on and showing an interest in hearing my thoughts. It's the ultimate flattery. For realz.
Lifelube has helpfully posted information on a new study published in the journal Culture, Health and Sexuality that asks 120 gay men in New York City: what exactly does the term "bareback" mean? The researchers here are trying to better understand how gay men use the term in their own lives, so I very much appreciate the spirit of the project.
The Meaning of the Term, "Bareback"
A few interesting findings about the term emerge from the project:
1) No Condoms: Obviously, most agreed "bareback" implied anal sex without condoms.
2) Natural, Intimate:Curiously, although some men defined the term using words like "natural" or "intimate", the researchers don't interrogate this at all. Obviously, I think this is a mistake because it adds another layer of social meaning onto the behavior. I would add it as another category in their findings (as I have here).
3) Intentional: Some implied that intentionality was critical. This is very interesting. For instance, when they ask a participant whether sex would be considered "bareback" if a condom breaks, one participant replies:
"Technically, I guess, briefly, unless they don’t pull out or if they continue, then yeah. But barebacking is usually a conscious choice. But I understand that is kind of complicating the situation. But if the condom breaks, then no, I don’t think so, because I think that barebacking isn’t by accident. It’s a conscious choice, unless the person’s fucked up and doesn’t know what you’re doing."
4) Risky: Risk is a critical component of the definition for some men. For instance, they asked some participants if sex would be considered "bareback" if sex without condoms between a monogamous couple where both partners are HIV-negative. Some said it would, but others said things like this:
"That’s not bareback … (Why not?) It’s not because these two guys are in a relationship. They’re in a monogamous relationship. They love each other. They’re both HIV-negative. They know their status. They’ve – it’s natural, I mean, for the gay world … But it’s just natural for them to have sex without a condom, if they know neither one has HIV or has an STD, or whatever, and they’re not sleeping around on each other."
Bareback Identity
They move from this linguistic investigation to an investigation into bareback identity. A few possibilities here:
1) "Yes, I'm a Barebacker": About 1/3 of the men involved identified as barebackers, and these men were more likely to be HIV-positive than negative. For instance, in this exchange:
I: Do you think of yourself as a barebacker?
R: Yes.
I: Is that an identity?
R: That’s an identity. That’s the truth. The truth … is the light. So I’m a barebacker, baby. And I ain’t going to sugar-coat [it] – I’m a barebacker [singing], I’m a barebacker! [laughter] OK?
I: That identity, is that, is that a private one? Is that something you –
R: I would want somebody to know? Yes, I’m a barebacker. I feel…it, it, it gives me a sense of empowerment, so to speak. I feel good about [that] shit. Yeah, I like the ass, I like to fuck and I like to get fucked. You know, and I like to be explicit. And I can get to the exact nature of what I’m about, so it empowers me. Barebacker, huh? You know, that is that term.
2) "No, I'm not": Around 1/4 of participants said that, in fact, they were not barebackers. A variety of reasons existed, including the stigma attached to the term, some men's desire to use condoms, or -- very interestingly -- "because labeling oneself as such would make others think, ‘Oh, sure, he’s a barebacker, so he’ll accept my dick inside him’." This is fascinating language here, but again the researcher's stop short of a more in-depth analysis, which is a shame. But curious that this quote is about being a bareback BOTTOM, and not a top.
3) "Maybe I am": Some indicated that they might be, or that they were only partially a barebacker because of the frequency of their having sex without condoms. For instance:
I: Do you consider yourself a barebacker?
R: Sixty percent of the times, yes, I do, mm-hmm. Yes I do. You know, because like I say I do…my best to practise safe sex, but once, you know, I meet a certain person or – it’s like – it’s like something that will go off in me that I’ll be, like wow, I would just love to feel him inside, you know? Or I would just love to run up in them and – stuff like that.
You can download the PDF of the report here, thanks to IRMA.
Eric sent this to me weeks and weeks ago -- I've been a terrible blogger lately! Sorry, Eric, for the much delayed posting and commentary. I may have hesitated to post it because, though I deeply admire and respect Eric's intentions and labor here, I'm a bit nonplussed by the execution and message of the video. The main message of the video, "After all we've been through / And all we know / Why are we still barebacking each other?" isn't a particularly new line of questioning, and I think not particularly productive.
I guess Eric intends for the viewer to respond with, "Yea, what the fuck?!?!?" But let's get real: the guys who are having unprotected sex and at most risk for contracting HIV wouldn't view this video and reflect critically on those decisions. The reason I think this is true is largely because the video relies on the language of "barebacking," a category which has become so terribly villianized in the media that next to nobody chooses to identity with it. Barebacking as a label has come to be associated with pathological, irrational, and self-destructive gay men. In this way, it's easy to view this video and dissociated yourself from the label and, thus, the message it contains.
In fact, it's almost imperative to dissociate from the category. I've noticed in stories of men who test positive an immediate effort to reconstruct their sexual lives in order to fit a more socially acceptable seroconversion narrative. "Oh, you know, I slipped up and we didn't use a condom." Nevermind the fact that some guys were looking for sex on hookup sites built to facilitate sex without condoms. I'm not saying that they're to blame for doing so -- quite the contrary. Rather, I'm saying that to acknowledge oneself as a barebacker is to acknowledge oneself as a "bad" gay man.
I would also lament that the category / video fails to distinguish between Poz and Neg guys for whom engaging in sex without condoms carries VASTLY different meanings. Indeed, the silver lining of testing positive for many guys is the future of a life without condoms, an ability to relinquish those deep-seated anxieties about seroconversion that many negative guys feel deeply limits their sexual possibilities. Thus, a Poz guy might watch the video and respond with a healthy dose of resentment.
Just some thoughts. On the plus side, Eric really knows how to show sexy gay men getting it on without being overly lewd (which is only good because it allows the video to posted more broadly) or overly sanitized. Despite my reservations, I look forward to seeing more videos from him in the future! He's one of the few guys out there doing this kind of ad-hoc prevention work, and he should be commended for it. So a big hug and thanks to Eric!
I don't even know what to say about this story. I know this person from my years spent in Chapel Hill, going to the gay bar in nearby Raleigh, Legends. I'm upset by a few things:
1) That he was arrested in the first place. Criminalizing sex and HIV-positive people's lives is not only unethical but a dangerous practice that will undoubtedly stoke the flames of hate and stigma against Poz people.
2) That Q-Notes (Charlotte's gay newspaper) published his photo. You should know better! I'm so fucking disappointed about this decision. It's no different that newspapers in the 1950s posting photos of gay men arrested for having sex.
3) That his engaging unprotected sex is license for them to order him to a "psychological evaluation." The message is clear: you have to be crazy to have unprotected sex or not disclose your HIV status. But in a climate filled with stigma and hate against Poz people, it's no wonder that he didn't choose to do so.
That's only the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure. Why do you think he didn't disclose to his partners in North Carolina? Oh that's right, because HIV is so stigmatized there that Poz folks there feel like lepers in the community. We know so little from this story. Were his partners negative? Did he top them?
I'm so upset about this. It makes me want to cry and scream and vomit all at the same time. I don't just want to write a letter about this. I want to intervene in some way. To call the system out for its injustice and pathologizing actions. I'm disgusted. And sad. Deeply sad.
Here's the "story" from Q-Notes. I've bolded the parts that piss me off the most:
A gay disc jockey in Raleigh originally convicted of violating HIV infection regulations in August has been placed on house arrest after admitting he broke probation orders in early October.
On Sept. 6, Q-Notes reported that Joshua Waldon Weaver, 23, who works in clubs in Raleigh and Wilmington, pleaded guilty to charges that he failed to disclose his HIV-positive status and engaged in unprotected sex with three people. Weaver was given a suspended jail sentence and placed on probation. The terms of his probation ordered Weaver to use protection when engaging in sexual activity.
About two weeks ago Weaver was arrested after Wake County Public Health officials contacted his probation officer with information that he had possibly violated court orders by having sex without a condom. Assistant District attorney Boz Zellinger told The News & Observer that health officials became aware of the DJ’s violation after he contracted another sexually transmitted disease that could have been prevented by the use of a condom.
Weaver could have faced 40 days in jail for his most recent violation, but District Court Judge Jacqueline Brewer instead sentenced him to six months of electronically-monitored house arrest. He will not be allowed to leave his father’s house except for probation-approved employment. Brewer also ordered Weaver to undergo a psychological evaluation..
If Weaver breaks his probation again, he will face up to 25 days in jail and prosecutors will ask for a two-year quarantine in a state prison hospital.
“His behavior hasn’t changed,” Zellinger told the Raleigh newspaper after the hearing. “We’re trying to address the callousness his actions have demonstrated.”
Zellinger added, “It’s not a witch hunt. It’s a desire to change his behavior to benefit the community.”
Weaver’s attorney, Evonne Hopkins, who declined to speak with Q-Notes for our original Sept. 6 story, said she’s “confident we will not be back here.”
“Josh is very sorry we’re back in court,” she said.
North Carolina Administrative Code 10-41 and North Carolina General Statute 130A-144(f) address control measures regarding the spread of HIV and require those with communicable diseases — including other sexually transmitted diseases, hepatitis and tuberculosis — to comply with measures intended to curb their proliferation.
Weaver is only the second Wake County resident in 15 years to be sentenced for failing to follow laws governing the transmission of communicable diseases, according to The News & Observer. In 2007, only 16 people statwide [sic] were convicted of violating the communicable disease law. Rather than HIV, many of the instances were related to diseases such as tuberculosis or hepatitis.
UGH! This people don't fucking get it!
UPDATE: From the comments section of the Q-Notes newsstory. Looks like Q-Notes will be providing some feedback on their coverage in an upcoming editorial on Nov 1st. I've been rankling them in the comments and on of course here on my blog. I hope this will be a positive (so to speak) move:
Trevor, et al.,
Q-Notes will be publishing a staff editorial addressing this issue in the Nov. 1 print edition. The editorial will also appear online the same day.
In case there is some confusion, please note that this story, as noted in the text, is a follow-up to a Sept. 6 article:
We encourage concerned readers to guard against making conclusions that are not supported by the facts as reported in this story, in the Sept. 6 report or any other report by other news agencies. Further, we encourage readers to also guard against making personal and/or ad hominem attacks against the subject of the article or those participating in community discussion on this website.
Q-Notes reserves the right to remove or edit obscene, unsubstantiated or overly offensive remarks or comments. We remind our readers of our website’s terms and conditions.
I encourage those with concerns and questions to contact me directly via phone (office, 704-531-9988, ext. 208) and email (editor@q-notes.com).
Hey everyone! As promised, here's a copy of my remarks that I gave this morning on Wellness in the context of Gay Men's Health. Tipsy, so can't add too much more presently. But the plenary today went really fabulously. I hope y'all enjoy these remarks:
Good afternoon! I’ve been asked to provide some provocative opening remarks about Wellness – but I’m going to do something very academic-y, and talk a bit around the issue. Rather than defining what wellness looks like, per se, I want to ask us to be thinking about how Power works to structure Wellness. That is to say, how power – a concept I’ll elaborate on in a minute – works in different ways to either give or deny access to Wellness. Power gives us access to Wellness – without it, we can never hope to achieve it, collectively or individually.
So let’s dive in. It’s a rather vague word, “Power.” What ever does it mean? I want to briefly sketch out three potential meanings that have a direct impact on Wellness. First, from a Marxist or materialist perspective, we might first think about power as whether or not we have access to material resources – and by material resources I mean things like jobs, housing, health care, a down payment on a car that your parents lend you, or even the twelve dollars it costs for a monthly subscription to Manhunt.net. This is perhaps the most obvious kind of power because – especially in the last few months – we’ve seen how money and materiality can deeply impact our social worlds. But it’s not the end of the story.
There’s also another kind of power I’d like to draw on, a more sociological or anthropological notion of cultural capital. Money can buy many things, but often it’s who you know (and of course who you don’t) that prove to be your greatest assets. We see this in studies of job applicants. It’s not a resume that gets most people their first job out of college – it’s the fact that their fraternity brother’s father is doing the hiring. Or – more realistically perhaps for many of us in this room – that a friend works for the company and put in a good word. So understanding how gay, bisexual, and transgender men are networking is important to understanding the resources they have to draw on in times of need. More than just social networks, though, this kind of power also lurks around a thing we like to call in sociology “social status.” You know, the moment you turn to the guy to your left and ask him who he works for and where he went to school. Certain answers may lend him more credibility, while others may not.
So that’s two. One more to go. The final kind of power I’d like to present is more often associated with sex. And that’s the kind of physical power of brute force. Obviously, things like rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence come to mind here. We all know the serious impact that misuse of this kind of power can have on our Wellness – and the Wellness of our communities.
So, you say, “Well that’s all well and good Trevor, but what the hell does this have to do with Gay Men’s Health?” I think we’ve been relying on a very simplistic notion of power that we get from epidemiological public health data that shows HIV infections clustered among certain populations. Men of color, sex workers, etc. Most of us think primarily about race in this way – race is a rough approximation, it seems, for power relations and that has implications for Wellness. But this actually has told us very little about why this clustering is actually happening. We continue to distribute surveys, and we continue to be baffled when we get data back that indicates that, for instance, Black MSM aren’t engaging in riskier sex than their white counterparts – and yet their rates of infection are outrageously different. I have some news for you: surveys and epidemiology will never explain that difference. And I mean never.
This is because we’ve been too focused on the big picture. Let me use an art metaphor to help explain my meaning. It’s something like viewing a Monet painting. Far away, we can see a certain shape and structure to how things are operating. We think we see the picture. But as we get closer, we realize that that area of the painting that looks blue from far away, is actually composed of thousands of brushstrokes of all kinds of colors – red, green, and maybe even turquoise. To get back to race, the epidemiological data is giving us a rough approximation in the form of pie charts and time-series graphs. But this doesn’t tell us a damn thing about what’s happening up close and personal, about what kinds of variation exists within that “46% of new infections.” We know the outcome – the big picture – but we don’t have a fucking clue about the why. Settling for a macro-level “Big Picture” analysis of power does not paint a complete picture.
This occurred to most clearly while recently reading and essay written by a radical faerie by the name of Middle. The article was generally about bareback porn, but his analysis extended into relevant territory. He says:
I'm repelled when terms like bareback, pre-condom, and raw are used to brand, commodify, and attach a premium to risk. There's a human impact I've encountered first-hand - men and boys who feel their willingness is a commodity to be traded against their perceived shortcomings: age, ability, cock size, weight, femininity, HIV status. Where the vulnerable or clueless pursue fantasies fueled by glamorization of risk with little or no brotherly support, unhappy results range from name-calling to seroconversions, addiction, and worse.
Now he is making an incredibly illuminating point here. He’s noting that men online are often feeling the need to “trade” against their perceived “flaws” (judged on the gay marketplace of desire) – whether that be their old age, curvy figure, smaller cock size, race, or gender - he’s arguing that they feel compelled to trade their willingness to go bare against that perceived flaw. Too fat? Well maybe if you agree to get fucked raw, you might get laid. Too much of a queen? Just tell him how much want his load in your hole.
In this way, power is operating in all kinds of crazy ways both inside and outside our bedrooms. Though they are certainly playing a role, it’s not just about race or class – the two primary lenses through which many of us typically think about power relations in gay/bi/queer/trans male communities. It’s also about age, ability, weight, femininity, whether you’re a top or bottom, and even how big your dick is or isn’t. This is why we are in desperate need of a complicated analysis of power relations. Because – while from far away we think we understand what’s happening on the ground – the closer we get, the more muddled things become.
We need to better understand how sex and power interface to create risk disparities among different populations of gay, bisexual, and transgender men. Until we start thinking critically about these relationships, we will never understand why Black and Latino men account for the overwhelming majority of new HIV infections. And let me be clear: this is way beyond HIV. Power structures Wellness in all areas of our lives. You want a happy, healthy community? You better start thinking about housing and health care. You better start thinking about homophobia in public schools and racism in our bars. Wellness will not be achieved by knocking out one of these contributing factors. We won’t end homophobia without ending racism. We won’t eliminate new HIV infections without challenging and attacking the violent and destructive influence of masculinity in our lives and communities. Wellness is a package deal. I hope you will join with me this weekend in thinking critically about how your work moves us towards that vision. Thank you.
The faerie magazine RFD has a very interesting article by "middle" over the mag's recent decision to run ads from bareback porn studios (namely Treasure Island Media -- the ad pictured above is from issue #131). You can read the entire article on the flip (it's not available online, so I have transcribed it for you!), but I was particularly struck by one bit in particular:
I'm repelled when terms like bareback, pre-condom, and raw are used to brand, commodify, and attach a premium to risk. There's a human impact I've encountered first-hand - men and boys who feel their willingness is a commodity to be traded against their perceived shortcomings: age, ability, cock size, weight, femininity, HIV status. Where there vulnerable or clueless pursue fantasies fueled by glamorization of risk with little or no brotherly support, unhappy results range from name-calling to seroconversions, addiction, and worse.
Bingo! This is EXACTLY the issue I have been trying to put my finger on for some time. I see men out there -- online in particular -- "trading" in the way that he describes. Too fat? Well maybe if you agree to get fucked raw, you might get laid. Too much of a queen? Just tell him how much want his load in your hole.
This is the kind of logic I see operating left and right in online sex sites. And it's not just operating in the minds of bottoms; tops are totally working this logic to their own advantage. I get the sense that many guys out there are looking for bottoms they know they can prey on in this manner -- guys who they perceive as low(er)-value on the hooking up marketplace, guys who will desperately want it, no matter the cost. It makes me furious to see it happen -- or when I feel that it's happening to me. I got that sense in San Francisco almost every time I logged online. They'd ask if I fucked raw, I said no, and they said goodbye, hoping that I'd lose my will and give in.
Ugh. It's manipulation of the worst kind. Not only does it make you feel like an abject piece of meat, but -- oh yea -- it also is extremely high risk sex for the bottom.
Brooklyn-based "STFree Certifications" is apparently providing members with STI testing and a membership card that their sex partners can use to dial-in and find out the date / results of their last test (see picture below). This is perhaps the worst idea I've ever heard. They call their card a "Safe Sex License," but they're dumb as nails if they think that this won't be used in the exact opposite way. "You're clean? Great, no condom needed."
Clearly the founder didn't read the part in HIV 101 where it says that testing can't pick up recent infections (the so-called "window period") -- you know, that period of time where you're the MOST infectious / likely to infect your partners! I can't believe anyone's funding this ridiculous project.
There is a bit of a debate raging over at KnuckleCrack about Eric's entry on bareback sex, in which he asks for a bit of sanity in regards to the issue. That entry inspired my post last night about my frustrations as a bottom who wants to use condoms in San Francisco. As might be expected, there's been a bit of an eruption on the comments from different visitors to his site.
I was particularly disgusted by this comment from user "Charley Beal":
1. When someone indulges in raw sex and serioconverts, yes, they can go on meds and lead a relatively healthy life... But that conscious choice inevitably drives up the cost of healthcare and insurance premiums for everyone else who pays into the health insurance kitty. I deeply resent this self indulgent behavior. if someone wants to have raw sex fine. just DON"T ASK ME TO PAY FOR THEIR MEDICINE!
I am fucking sick of this kind of individualistic, moralizing, 21st century politics spingame. AS IF people who make these arguments don't get in a car every day, knowingly taking a fairly decent risk that they will suffer an injury from a car accident -- potentially costing millions of dollars in health care. Fuck off, neoliberal assholes. Your argument doesn't have a leg to stand on. These guys are just mobilizing moralistic platitudes to try and stigmatize gay sex. It's nothing new. I wrote this comment in response to Charley's:
I'm so over this neofuckingliberal "I'm not paying for your mistakes" health insurance crap. People make all kinds of mistakes and decisions that lead to things happening to our own health. I drive a car regularly, knowingly taking a risk that I run a comparatively high chance of dying in a car accident. We take risks all the time. For whatever reason, some risks get pathologized and stigmatized and -- finally -- politicized by talking heads on TV who want to moralize our dirty sex lives.
Okay okay, so the title is overly dramatic. But bear with me. I'm here in San Francisco for the summer doing research on bottom identity. This article isn't related to my research, though, but out of my forays into online sex culture here in the Bay Area. I haven't had a lot of sex since I touched ground in San Francisco in May, mostly because of one issue that's been bugging the crap out of me for several years: Tops in San Francisco won't have sex with me unless I agree to go bare.
This is fucked up -- and it needs to end. Yea yea yea, people can desire to have the kind of sex that they want to have. But the boys I'm chatting with aren't the guys with "bareback only" in their profiles; many of them are the guys with "safe sex only" in their profiles. I sense a pattern here that I'm having trouble describing. I think most guys understand that bareback sex puts its HIV-negative practitioners at an increased risk for testing positive. As a result, I think many guys who want bareback aren't looking for (publicly) like-minded individuals; they're looking for guys who say "safe only only" as a strategy for reducing their risk. So, a top who wants it raw might message me instead of messaging "barebackbottom83" who publicly claims that desire, thinking that I'm a safer bet.
They also know that most guys here in SF think it's a "top's market." It's a standing joke here that San Francisco is a city full of bottoms. While my unscientific Manhunt and Adam4Adam searches don't necessarily bear that out (right now, for instance, there are 185 self-identified tops or top/vers on Manhunt, and only 127 self-identified bottom or bottom/vers guys), most guys in the city share the idea that getting laid in SF is tough for a bottom. I've chatted with more than one top that I suspected of using this myth to coax me into allowing him to go raw.
They don't ever explicitly say it, but I'm quite sure they've convinced a bottom or two to go sans condom. I had for several weeks been flirting with an attractive top who lives around the corner from me in Hayes Valley. We were both into each other, and I was hoping we'd meet up to see where things went. Two nights ago, I was frustrated when he abruptly asked me if I "played safe or bare." In my experience, 99% of the time a guy asks this question, he expects/wants you to confess the latter. I told him that I played safe, and his response was a simple "cool." Hah! I wrote back, saying "lol. which means you want to fuck bare, I presume?," to which he responded, "well, not necessarily - but it's hot." Indeed. (conversation is pictured above).
And it is hot. Nobody is denying that sex without a condom is sexy. Xtube and other sites are brimming with bareback porn, which is fast eclipsing studios that demand condom use in consumption. But trying to coax guys into having unprotected sex is going beyond expressing a desire for the kind of sex you like. It's knowingly perverting other guys' boundaries and desires for your own pleasure. And in situations like the ones I've been describing, it's especially problematic because bottoms are putting themselves in a position of MUCH higher risk than tops.
I'm not saying here that the reverse never happens. Surely there are bottoms out there trying to get tops to fuck them bare. But from where I'm sitting, as a bottom, it seems suspiciously like some tops are knowingly gaming the system.
The moral of the story: Respect guys' limits.
(P.S. This entry was inspired by a post over at Knucklecrack on the barebacking movement. Read it.)
This is incredibly sad news. While most psychotherapists make my blood curdle -- particularly when it comes to sex politics -- Shernoff was one of the good guys. He worked hard and asked difficult questions since the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Sadly, he was diagnosed in March 2006 with pancreatic cancer, and lost his battle with the disease last Tuesday.
If you're unfamiliar with his work, see this interview he did with The Advocate in 2006 about his last book, Without Condoms. I love this quote from that interview, which sums up his approach to "risky sex" and gay men:
It’s important for me to meet patients where they are at. Good therapy provides curative emotional experiences. I don’t need to act like a nonapproving parent. With patients who have developed drug problems, I needed to advocate a harm-reduction approach if the patient in question wasn’t ready to stop using. I decided to apply that same approach to men who engage in unsafe sexual behavior so that I wouldn’t run the risk of alienating them or driving them away from my office. If I shake my finger at them and try to tell them what to do, the patient feels judged and infantilized. A harm-reduction approach doesn’t eliminate harm all together, but it can help the individual make certain choices that reduce the risk to himself and to the broader community should he choose not to use condoms during sex.
Losing another good guy from his generation is.... :(
This is incredibly sad news. While most psychotherapists make my blood curdle -- particularly when it comes to sex politics -- Shernoff was one of the good guys. He worked hard and asked difficult questions since the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Sadly, he was diagnosed in March 2006 with pancreatic cancer, and lost his battle with the disease last Tuesday.
If you're unfamiliar with his work, see this interview he did with The Advocate in 2006 about his last book, Without Condoms. I love this quote from that interview, which sums up his approach to "risky sex" and gay men:
It’s important for me to meet patients where they are at. Good therapy provides curative emotional experiences. I don’t need to act like a nonapproving parent. With patients who have developed drug problems, I needed to advocate a harm-reduction approach if the patient in question wasn’t ready to stop using. I decided to apply that same approach to men who engage in unsafe sexual behavior so that I wouldn’t run the risk of alienating them or driving them away from my office. If I shake my finger at them and try to tell them what to do, the patient feels judged and infantilized. A harm-reduction approach doesn’t eliminate harm all together, but it can help the individual make certain choices that reduce the risk to himself and to the broader community should he choose not to use condoms during sex.
Losing another good guy from his generation is.... :(
It's true! I've been blogging officially for three years as of May 24th. I was so busy with Anthony here that I didn't actually realize it until this morning after he left. In honor of this anniversary with myself, I thought I'd look back and highlight my favorite 30 blog posts over the years. Enjoy!
Tony Valenzuela and I chatted it up last night about planning a workshop for the upcoming Gay Men's Health Summit, taking place October 17-21 in Seattle. Very quickly, we realized that our ideas were for something much bigger than a singular workshop -- but rather on a series of related sessions featuring smart / sex-positive content on gay men's health, risk and prevention.
So far, we've sketched out five workshops that we'd love to see scheduled for Seattle. There are many more important ideas out there. Can you add to this list? We'd love to have your input!!!
1) The Ins and Out of Transmission Risk: At two recent forums in Chicago and Detroit, I (Trevor) realized that many conversations on HIV / gay men's health get bogged down in bringing everyone to the same page on the actual data that exists on transmission / risk. This includes questions like: Is oral sex risky? Does taking ARVs reduce risk? Is superinfection likely / possible? And so on and so forth. This would be the first step in this track, just to try and get some of those questions out of the way.
2) Bareback Porn: There are many different "kinds" of workshops that might happen here, but some questions: How do we think about the proliferation of bareback porn over the past 10 years? What's the relationship between gay men's desires and porn consumption? What happens when most gay porn gets produced in a city like San Francisco -- where testing rates are high and serosorting appears to be an effective strategy for risk reduction -- and consumed in cities unlike San Francisco (where testing rates are low, thus making serosorting a disastrous strategy for risk reduction)?
3) Sex Panic! The Media and the Risk Narrative: MRSA and the "Superbug" New York Case provide two excellent case studies for 1) how public health / epidemiological research involving gay men is disseminated to the media and 2) How the media then reports / (mis)construes that data. Presentations of these case studies could prove useful springboards for how we might consider interventions to prevent another MRSA / Superbug panic.
4) Are HIV-related CBO's Actually Community Based Anymore?: Over the past 25 years, communities hit by HIV have worked hard to build robust institutions to help manage / treat / prevent HIV/AIDS. Along the way, organizations that began as community efforts have seemingly become detached public health institutions that view gay men simply as one "at risk population." Is it even possible to hold these organizations accountable for their work anymore, given this bureaucratic proliferation? Should we (as community members) expect that these organizations will produce the "best" prevention strategies?
5) Public Health Scholarship and the Risk Narrative: How can researchers design and execute studies that avoid the pitfalls described by a growing number of critical prevention studies scholars who have argued against the disease / risk model for public health research. This would be more of a "hands on" discussion for / by researchers who work with gay men.
6) Your Idea Here!
Really - feedback here would be super helpful! Are there speakers you'd like to see on this topic that might be headed to Seattle? Topics that should be covered? Let me know!
Gary Dowsett et al have just published a new piece in Sexualities about gay men's use of barebacking internet sites. Dowsett has long been doing fascinating work on gay men through the lens of masculinity studies, and this new piece is no exception. They begin by sketching out the need for internet studies and then by overviewing masculinity studies. I particularly like this bit on the trouble with trying to fit gay men in a domination/subordination model of gender power relations (which I just blogged about last weekend):
In gender theory, particularly mainstream forms of feminist theory, gay men are often wedged back inside patriarchy by virtue of their biological sex – they are men first and foremost. In the hegemony/subordination formulation, gay men are usually lodged on the right-hand side of the virgule, at best trapped within a set of discursive practices that render them always trailing behind if still within patriarchy, or at worst marginalized, stigmatized, refused or locked out from much of the patriarchal dividend. Which is it to be: subordinated or embedded? Is the reference point for gay men qua men still and always non-homosexual men, and then only the minority atop the hegemonic masculinity totem pole? Might we misread such barebacking sexual pursuits as merely masculine and miss something vital about the sexual that could be useful for HIV prevention?
He then goes on to complicate how gay men are percieved in the Western world at this moment, which I've also just blogged about. He notes that, in most western cultures, gay men "are certainly at or near the bottom of the masculine pecking order; yet, gay men’s position in the gender order is not uniformly that of subordination." He goes on to argue that, since the rise of gay rights movements in the 1970s, there has been a dramatic shift in gay men's position in western culture. The failure to acknowledge this shift, he says, is due in part to the current dialogues on Western sexuality that are largely limited to gay/straight and dominant/subordinate, which end up making for a pretty lousy discourse on sexuality (my words!). Dowsett ends this paragraph with two powerful questions:
1. "Is subordination all that gay men experience?"
2. "We can extend this question by asking whether this applies to gay men uniformly; questions of social class, race and ethnicity, age and generation, even disability, come into play.
Dowsett concludes that "The rendering of gay men as a subordinate class/caste in the gender order masks significant chasms, fractures, gaps or simply differences within the homosexual order of desire" -- which is fancy way of saying that to uniformly describe gay men as being always "done wrong to" in our gendered culture is to erase the vast differences that exist in our experiences today.
In their analysis of barebacking sites, they find several themes (they refer to the six websites analyzed in ALL CAPS psuedonyms):
1. Macho Body Talk: "No flinching faggots here; both homosexual sex and barebacking are charging forward as definitively manly and ‘pussies’ flee in their wake! Elsewhere, site users are also enjoined to ‘simply tell the world that you take it like a man’. Here, the receptive mode in sex is manly; receiving semen (presumably anally as this is a barebacking site) is what ‘real men’ do."
2. Sexual Ethics: "Men’s sexual actions are popularly regarded as selfish or oafish. There certainly was a hint of this in NOWIMP: ‘you just want to fuck and go home’ and ‘no matter what you promised, never, never pull out of Dodge’ (meaning even if you promised to withdraw before ejaculating, do not). This was rarely evident in other sites. More often, there were issues of intimacy, reciprocity, responsibility and comportment that emerged from the site analysis.4 We term these collectively sexual ethics."
3. Race and Ethnicity: "Importantly for the purposes of this article, we note the identification of race/ethnicity as an important sexual marker in the sites, particularly, but not exclusively, among users of colour. This is not achieved just through the employment of racialized stereotypes – Asians are ‘bottoms’ and effeminate, African Americans are ‘hung’ and ‘studly’ – although these clearly have effects (see Cheng, 1999). Handles at times (e.g. ‘blondbutt’, ‘tempura’ and ‘strokinrican’) and profile statements (e.g. ‘uninhibited black hole’, ‘into ethnic guys, latino, african-american, and asian’, or ‘I am open to all races and types of people . . . but a latin/Italian top would be ideal . . . and of course . . . strong Black brotha’) revealed how racial markers add, either explicitly or implicitly, a sexual cadence that intensifies desires sought or offered. Reading these markers becomes a racial act in itself: a user is urged to consider what race/ethnicity might offer to a potential sexual act or encounter. Deep-seated cultural and historical forces are engaged here. How does a European American man using these sites to meet African American men ‘read’ what is meant in an African American man’s profile text ‘horny big dick bottom looking to hook up with well hung tops’? Masculinities also become racialized (Bleys, 1995) in the handles users utilize, e.g. one African-American user called himself 'thugbro’, someone who ‘love[s] to tear up some ass’. The sexual cannot be separated from the racial/ethnic here; indeed, they are one and the same phenomenon."
Dowsett et al conclude with a call for more thoughtful research and theoretical work on the intersections between sexuality and gender -- and particularly research that looks more closely at intersections with other important factors such as race/ethnicity.
Curiously -- and I think rather brilliantly -- they discuss the ways in which the dialogues on these barebacking sites removes the penis as the focus of attention, and puts it all on the "desiring anus":
"One key feature is the decentring of the penis and the ascendancy of the
desiring anus. Sexual objectification becomes a project of the self. There is playfulness, irony, dissidence and, at times, downright contradiction in the way language, bodies, desire and the self-as-object are deployed.
Dowsett has more hope for these discourses than I do. I have tended to link the "breeding" barebacking subcultures (porn, websites, etc) to a dominant heterosexist culture in ways that he is rejecting and resisting. I will certainly need to rethink some of my analysis in light of their arguments....
Unfortunately I can't repost the entire piece. Here's a link (if you have access via a library). The full citation is:
Dowsett, G. W., et al. (2008). 'Taking it like a man': Masculinity and barebacking online. Sexualities, 11 (1-2), 121-141.
So how amazing is XTube? For the unfamiliar, XTube is pretty much a variation of YouTube, but for porn. It's just incredible to see all these guys from across the world fucking. We've had porn for ages, but it's not a stretch to claim that porn is hardly a representation of what really happens when we turn of the lights and climb into bed (or, perhaps, into an elevator or rest-stop). The glistening muscle bodies; the hairless crevices; the strained grunting and groaning. It's performance art.
Now, XTube has a bit of that, of course. Anytime you turn on the cameras, you're bound to get even amateur folks in their bedroom doing a bit of acting. But this happens even without a camera around, so I take much of what I see on XTube to be a reflection of what's actually going on in queer men's bedrooms.
So, now that I've praised XTube's democratic potential, I think it's also very interesting to look at the kinds of porn that are making it to the coveted "Top Favorites" block. Basically, members can after watching a video push a button to indicate to save it as one of their favorites. The videos with the most number of folks adding it as their favorite get added to the "Top Favorites" page. Makes sense.
It may come as no surprise to most of us that the *vast* majority of these videos are guys fucking without condoms. More precisely, of the 20 vidoes from the top 25 that feature anal sex, only one explicitly shows condom use. Two are ambigious, and the rest (18) are explicitly bareback.
So this tells us something about barebacking, I think. Many of the folks I know who say they enjoy bareback sex put sensation at the forefront. Condoms reduce sensitivity, and also make it difficult for some guys to keep an erection. But the fact that some many guys are pushing these bareback videos to the top tells us that fantasy is a *big* component of what the drive for unprotected sex is all about. After all, why does seeing a condom in a video seem to be such a huge turn-off for many guys? It's about ruining that fantasy.
Now, curiously, there are a few dominant scripts that seem to be playing out in these barebacking videos. One is the "boyfriend" script (see photo below). These include videos, like the one from the top 25 titled "Enjoying my Boy Friends Horse Cock," basically alluding to the fact that the two men in the video are romantically involved. Another script is the one of the "buddy" or "friend" -- with videos titled "My New Pal" or "Bike Dude fucks his buddy's hair ass in garage." Again, the titles suggest a level of familiarity and intimacy, although somewhat reduced from the boyfriend narrative. And finally, we have the casual encounter hookup scripts, which vary in explicit language about the nature of the encounter. Some rely on a kind of controlling / S&M-light kind of rhetoric ("Big Dicked Punk Twink Fucks Young Skater BareBack"), while others rely on scripts about anoynmous sex ("me getting fucked in public toilet").
The point of this all is to say that, although XTube is allegedly just video clips of the sex gay men are having, users are relying on and constructing porn-like narratives to background the video. This is obviously about fantasy. So I think we should be paying attention to the kinds of stories that guys on XTube are enjoying, since I think that tells us a fair amount about what's generally "hot" right now in the minds of gay men.
And right now, the hotness is barebacking. There is no question about it. I think the fact that bareback porn is so prevalent and popular dispels the idea that barebacking is popular primarily because of sensation. It's about fantasy construction. We can use this as a potential prevention tool. Making hot amateur porn for XTube that features safer sex practices may very well be a tactic that prevention organizations will want to consider.
So my prevention message today to all you hot sexy guys out there with a exhibitionist streak: Make some porn!
I recently blogged about this guy over at "Confessions of a Bareback Top," complaining about his most recent post which recounted his alleged rape of this younger guy. I was drunk when I wrote that post, and in the glare of daylight, I think it seems clear that the story is fiction. As are probably many of his posts. But the fact that he pushes them as truth still makes me really uncomfortably.
Anyways, I digress. My friend Nat just recently sent me a link to this posting over at "Raw Top," in which the blogger there responds to an HIV-negative reader who writes in asking what he should do about his desire to take raw loads. He says that, while he considers himself coming from an "upstanding" upbringing (ivy league education and all), all he can think about is "taking loads and being one of those gangbang bottoms in a treasure island video."
Yawn. He's certainly not the only boy who pops wood in the middle of a meeting thinking about his porn collection. The reader's interests aren't particularly noteworthy, but the blogger's response is pretty fucked up: "one option some people would probably throw stones at me for suggesting is to find a long-term non-progressor to poz you." He later refers to this (in scare quotes) as a kind of "vaccination."
Well let me cast the first stone! This raw load phenomenon has just gotten out of control. We desperately need some good analysis on this matter. I don't deny the pleasure that some gay men say they get out of taking a load. But I certainly want to question the fucked up heteronormative place that that desire comes from. And I certainly don't want to suggest that someone test-positive in order to enable a fantasy. That's what it is: a fantasy! I hate to break it to these guys, but there are many fantasies in all of our little heads that we find ways to live without experiencing every day. And others we would never dream of (or want to) actually exploring in real life! (rape, obviously, comes to mind here). I'm not suggesting that all potentially problematic fantasies should be always suppressed, but that we might want to think of other ways to deal with them than testing positive!
Furthermore, this whole "long-term progressor" thing is such bullshit. Not of course the fact that there are LTNPs, my friend in San Fran is one of them (he's been poz for 20 years now, without meds, and his viral load today is undetectable). But if you're infected with HIV through someone who's medically categorized as a long-term nonprogressor, that in no way means that you too will magically become a LTNP. This is medically false. Being a LTNP is about the host's immune system's response, NOT about the strain of the virus. While it is true that weaker strains of the virus exist today than did in the early 80s (because the hosts with more virulent strains died off before they could infect others - a kind of counterintuitive viral evolutionary adaptation), it is not true that LTNP have a different strain of the virus.
This guy blogging as "Raw Top" is being painfully irresponsible. It just boils my fucking water!
The International Rectal Microbicide Working Group has released preliminary results of their Internet survey on people's preferences for the lube they used. There's a lot of great stuff here, and you can find the results in Powerpoint format here. In particular, I was interested in the data on why respondent's indicated they sometimes did *not* use lube. You'll see that a majority indicated they instead used saliva and that just short of a majority indicated lube wasn't available.
As we know, liberal application of lube is a prevention strategy - it reduces the potential for HIV transmission. This data gives us a few clues for prevention. First, that we ought to think seriously about the fetishization of saliva use that I think is paired with the fetishization of bareback sex and the idea of "natural" / raw sex (which I talk about here). Second, while this data isn't a representative sample, it suggests that for many people lube still simply isn't available. Finding new ways to distribute it (other than those packets of the cheap, sticky, gross lube that I find just repulsive to pull out during sex) might be a key prevention strategy.
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Pam's House Blend
She's a fabulous North Carolinian blogging about politics, LGBT and women's rights, the influence of the far Right, and race relations. What more can I say?
