UNPROTECTED
By Celia Farber
Impression Jan. 1999
Rather than fearing the HIV virus, there are
gay men who actually eroticize it, and their stories are seeping through to the mainstream.
This is madness, to be sure, but it also says a lot about the power of
human lust and rage.
These are strange times, to say the least. Just when criminalization
of the sexual practices of the HIV-positive heats up, a movement that
prides itself on conscious unsafe sex blooms. Even stranger,
it gets depicted in the gay media (where so many innocent people have
been impaled on charges of undermining Safe Sex propaganda) as a new form
of self-expression. On the February cover of the mainstream AIDS magazine
POZ, a nude man is
sensually draped over a horse. The issue of POZ is
devoted to a craze known as barebacking that has been bubbling underground
for several years.
Barebackers are gay men, some HIV-positive and some negative, who have
''raw'' sex, condomless sex, because they have decided that it is
worth the risk -- a calculation no Safe Sex educator ever imagined possible.
Some do it because they are already HIV-positive and don't believe the
hype about ''reinfection'' (the idea that different strains of HIV can
compound the illness); others are negative and stick to other men who
are negative, but the most talked about camp are the ones who have no
interest whatsoever in avoiding HIV -- quite the contrary -- they
want to be infected.
''The debate is stuck between two hyperpolarized camps,'' Michael Scarce
writes in POZ, ''with antibarebackers screaming, 'dangerous sex
fiends,' while barebackers counter with 'Condom Nazis.' Meanwhile, a new
sexual subculture has emerged, organized around the no-condoms creed.''
Barebacking, Scarce points out, is no mere debauched, drunken, unsafe
sex. Here's the kernel of PR genius -- it's conscious unsafe
sex. It's enlightened and empowered and has its own clubs, parties, language,
Web sites and handkerchiefs. The idea is to ''unapologetically revel in
the pleasure of doing it raw,'' and barebacking is further defined as
''both the premeditation and eroticization of unprotected anal sex.''
In the most hardcore circles, it goes even further. Here, HIV-infected
semen is itself eroticized, and the ultimate erotic bond is for one man
to infect another -- consciously. Barebacking, Scarce explains, is equated
with breeding, and infection with impregnation -- some men even going
so far as to select the man who will ''father'' their HIV infection.
The barebackers themselves "speak" quite freely on the Internet, but
it is impossible to quantify a movement that often involves anonymous acts.
No movement should be judged by its extremes, except maybe this one where
the extremes tell such a fascinating story. The barebacker magnet site
is called "xtremesex" and here, against a solid black backdrop, all the
presumptions of the holy AIDS war are reversed. Here you can click on
"bugbrothers," "giftgivers," (those who eroticize the act of transmitting
HIV) or "bugchasers," (those who try to get infected.) Or you can click
on the floating white spots: ''Pozcum, the fuck of death.''
Start there, I figure, and with a click I embark on my voyeuristic journey.
I entered this realm with what I soon realized was a romanticized view
of barebacking. I wanted to think of it as a perhaps mad but perhaps also
twistedly heroic act of defiance in the face of Orwellian doctrines threatening
to destroy the texture of human sexuality -- that kind of thing. And
maybe it is all that ... but it's also just ballistic fucking.
* * *
One barebacker, who calls himself Joey on the Web site, gives a richly detailed account
of a barebacking party. The story reads like something out of a post-GMHC
dystopia. You may ask whether the accounts on the site are true, and I
can't answer
that. (My attempts to interview some of the men who had posted
their stories online were unsuccessful.)
I think so. But more to the point, they are ''true'' to
the fantasy,
and it is the fantasy itself that is important.
This is Joey's story: The host of the party addresses the 20 nude guests
and recites the rules of the game: ''Try to engage in anal sex primarily.
Make sure to get your cum inside as many men as possible. And, related
to that, get as many different guys' cum in your ass as you can. Remember,
no questions and no telling. Make each one like it's the one. And the
number one most important stipulation is no condoms!'
''There are 20 men here not counting me. I know that 12 of you are neg
and eight are poz. Anybody who takes at least 12 loads this weekend is
guaranteed at least one of those loads was charged.''
Hearing that, Joey's skin goes ''tingly.'' The orgy begins, and the
''poz'' men are the most desired. One man tells Joey, post-coitally, that
he's ''… pretty obvious in being neg; try not to give it away. Everyone
here wants poz cum.''
Joey's peak of excitement comes when he looks behind him and sees what may be lesions
on the man currently servicing him. ''Cool!'' he thinks, ''This guy's
got AIDS.''
Thirty-six hours later, he is proud to find out that he'd " … taken 15
loads and seven of them were from poz men.''
Twelve days later, he was thrilled to receive his test results
and find that he had sero-converted. He was HIV-positive. He had succeeded.
In another account, a "giftgiver" describes the sensation as follows:
''He was clean, healthy, disease-free, HIV-negative. I knew I had the
power and the obligation and the privilege to change that. After that
night, he would never be completely healthy again. I was going to take
that from him, and yet that power gave me a rush I'd never known.''
At this end of the spectrum, body fluids are fetishized as if from a
vantage point of extreme thirst, which I suppose you could say 15 years
of becondomed sex has created.
The personal ads on the Web from all around the world speak of wanting
not only raw sex, but also as much seminal fluid as humanly possible,
as fast as possible and with the kind of abandon that characterized the
gay '70's. ''Bottom accepting all loads,'' reads one of the ads. ''I have
become addicted to cum,'' reads another.
I want to tread carefully here with what I mention as I am quoting from
an X-rated site, but I also want you to get the idea. In this forbidden
world, the messages of Safe Sex have imploded as the stuff of terror and
control has morphed into the stuff of desire and abandon.. ''No hang up
whatsoever on sharing any type of toxic manfluid,'' reads one, and another,
titled ''Fluid Exchange,'' laconically states, ''HIV unknown/unconcerned.''
There is a sense of anger, of sex with a vengeance, of a total psychic
split or counterrevolution. But it seems to be as much about oblivion
as about communion; many ads cite poppers, ''meth-slamming'' and ''chem-happy''
as preferences, and this combined with the purely hedonistic sex makes
this site seem like perhaps the only place on earth where AIDS never happened.
* * *
I walked down Broadway in New York where I live, thinking about all this,
snow swirling through the air. The late, great activist Michael Callen,
inventor of Safe Sex, sublime AIDS intelligence and friend, would have
understood it in a heartbeat, and I wish, as I so often do, he were here
so we could talk. Despite the fact that Michael had invented
-- amidst tremendous acrimony -- Safe Sex, years before HIV was ''discovered,''
he was also one of the few who could speak honestly about what sex was
for gay men and about what had been lost in the realm of the ''Safe.''
He was always angry over the way that Safe Sex propaganda was projected
-- not as a necessary drag, which he saw it as, but as a glorious innovation.
''Safe Sex is not hot sex,'' he would say, ''and let's stop patronizing
gay men by pretending it is.''
Now I read on the "xtremesex" Web site: ''Safer sex is not hot sex. It's
pretend sex. The need for the intimacy of actual skin to skin contact
is primal. Condoms are not just a question of sensitivity, they are a
barrier to physical, emotional and spiritual communion.''
Through knowing Michael, I grew to understand that gay sexuality, before
AIDS, had a kind of velocity and urgency that I could probably never comprehend,
and also that the way we all talk about it in the age of AIDS is wrong,
deluded, watered down --- as if sex could be standardized.
Michael and I used to have long talks about what sex might really be,
about the current that passes between people (which I thought of as electrical,
as did he). Metaphorically speaking, rubber seemed like such a silencer,
such a censorious material, such a very sad way for sexuality to be summed
up at the end of the century.
I worried a lot about the loss of intimacy, about the consequences of
such drastic sexual dictates, about the long-term effects of fear when
what is feared is human contact itself, now forever pathologized by the
notion of bodily contamination.
"You must write about this,'' Michael would say. ''You will
have your head handed to you, but you must do it.''
I never did. When he died in 1993, I lost the thread and internalized the notion
that such talk is bourgeois nonsense when people are dying.
But I still don't know why people are dying. If you are convinced
that the putative retrovirus HIV has been proven to cause the array of
complications known as AIDS, then all of this is simple: Preventing AIDS
amounts to preventing HIV; curing AIDS amounts to obliterating HIV.
But for many of us, there is a question mark -- in fact it's all a question
mark. Where does the spiral of death really begin in this cycle of drugs,
sex, terror and toxic medications? HIV dominates the minds, hearts and
souls of millions of people -- whether it is a matter of avoiding it,
surviving it or, as in this most recent development, acquiring it. Safe
or bareback, HIV still reigns supreme. In fact, its hold on the gay male
psyche has never been more potent than amongst barebackers, who in eroticizing
the virus and making a sadomasochistic ritual out of its transmission
have raised the level of HIV occultism to worship.
* * *
For now, I'm too busy being dumbstruck and fascinated to truly pass judgment.
To think of all those endless condom ads, the endless sermonizing, the
paralysis of both science and journalism in the face of any idea that
was thought to promote ''unsafe behavior.'' To think of poor Peter Duesberg
(the dissident virologist who first questioned HIV as the cause of AIDS) being drummed
out of science for the imaginary crime of promoting unsafe sex. To think
of all the years, all the millions, all the dances and walks and runs
and ribbons, and everywhere, like the emblem of the future utopia: the
condom. It was the one thing you simply did not question, unless you were
mad, a monster, a subversive, perhaps a terrorist, or maybe an AIDS dissident.
And then it happens -- people start to abandon condoms -- and it has
less than nothing to do with the ''dangerous'' dissident movement and
everything to do with basic human lust and rage. Of course POZ
has the barebackers draped glamorously on horses, smiling. They recognize
that there is no stopping this, and the publisher, Sean Strub, even wrote
in his editorial that this has been going on all along but has been barely
talked about until recently. I for one found the candor of POZ
refreshing.
The boilerplate text on barebacking reads that it is the false promise
of protease inhibitors that has made it inevitable because now gay men
think that AIDS is a chronic manageable disease, not a deadly one to be
avoided at all costs. But that doesn't speak to the deeper reason -- the
yearning for contact, which eventually may prove more powerful
than the fear of death.
What is most interesting about this new phenomenon is that it breaks
the holiest of AIDS pledges -- to live in fear forever. Barebacking is
like the ideological equivalent of trying to climb across the Berlin wall,
pre-1989, when guards were ordered to shoot. People did that, too, and
yes, it was suicide, but it was also the inevitable outcome of a long-repressed
freedom. You can no longer control a person who doesn't fear death.
Need I bother with the obvious -- that barebacking on one level seems
mad? I'm far more interested in what makes it strangely rational and
heartbreakingly human. But before I get all misty-eyed, before I contribute
to yet another kitschification of gay sexuality of which I know little
or nothing, let me just call a spade a spade: Barebacking is simply sex.
It is a powerful
reminder that sex is not a kitchen that can be cleaned up and child-proofed -- that sex is not safe. The
only thing that can be guaranteed once a
pendulum swings so fast and so far as the Safe Sex pendulum did is that
it will eventually swing back, not to the middle, but first all the way
to the other end.
"The letters I received about [above] column on unprotected sex among
gay men -- also known as barebacking -- made me want to write a bit more on
it and clear up a few things, as some readers were confused about my perspective."
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