Gay stealth breed

Once you’re infected, you’re infected for life.

Around the age of 24, I had gotten out of my second major relationship and was on quite the prowl. Lest anyone believe these parties are confined only to urban gay meccas, they are also organized in cities such as St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Phoenix and Indianapolis.

Websites such as XtremeSex, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels and America Online (AOL) chat rooms have sprung up, seemingly out of nowhere.

Some people use the word barebacking to describe all sex without condoms, but barebackers themselves define it as both the premeditation and eroticization of unprotected anal sex. It’s worth noting that as the risk of HIV infection escalates, so do moral judgments. I also decided I didn’t want to spend my whole life going without the sex I love the most.” For many, liberation from the necessity of condom use with other positive men presents a certain appeal.

So I told Colton that while I wished he would’ve said something before, I still wanted to come play anyway. In an episode last season of the popular television series ER, a gay sex worker described how his customers paid him extra for bareback sex.

Since its public debut over three years ago, barebacking -- also called raw or skin-to-skin sex -- has been simultaneously condemned and sensationalized by the media.

The risk that has placed barebacking at the center of national debates on gay sexual mores, of course, is that of HIV. Many HIV negative men are barebacking, and while some attempt to do it only with other negative men, it’s impossible to be absolutely sure of a partner’s serostatus.

Eighteen years into the HIV holocaust, a gay man -- regardless of serostatus -- is likely to have an immensely complex relationship not only to unsafe sex but to the virus itself.

When the guy asked to have sex without a condom, the teenager explicitly said no. “I was so afraid of becoming positive for such a long time,” he says, “and once that happened, I felt relief. Nonetheless, as we fooled around, I somehow felt extra cautious. A harm-reduction approach is merely the beginning, and doesn’t address what is perhaps the greatest danger currently surrounding barebacking: the inability of community members and leaders to discuss these issues with mutual understanding and respect.

SAFER BAREBACKING CONSIDERATIONS

This is not a set of HIV prevention guidelines.

To keep the list from erupting into a debate about the moral pros and cons of barebacking, the listserv’s No. 1 rule is no discussions of AIDS. One invitation instructs participants to wear a bandanna to signify whether they want guys to “unload” in them. When it came to actual play time, that was nothing short of amazing as well.

Had Colton told me about his status in the first round, my own ignorance might have caused me to run, but having gotten to know him prior to his disclosure, I found a man who I saw as kind and gentlemanly. Generally, the public views all barebacking unilaterally as “unsafe sex” and as the opposite of “safer sex.” In my own effort to make sense of why some men choose to eliminate condoms, I’ve found it enormously helpful to consider barebacking in a different framework: like safer sex, on a continuum of “un-safety” with varying degrees of protection and danger (pulling out before ejaculation is less “unsafe” than not).

“I’ve talked with him for quite some time so that he understands what he’s getting into, and evidently he feels it’s controllable and wants it,” he says.