WHAT’S UP WITH GAY SEX?
ONE SIMPLE QUESTION WITH ABOUT A MILLION DIFFERENT ANSWERS. NICHOLAS FONSECA TRIES TO MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL.
Given the fact you’re holding this magazine, chances are high you have a keen interest in good old-fashioned (or, conversely, boundary-busting) man-on-man action. As gay men – which most of DNA’s readers are – we literally define ourselves by wanting to love and be loved by, and also have intimate relationships with, another man. Flip to the cover and look again. A gorgeous man stares back, an object of lust whose visually pleasing form speaks a simple truth: our desire for the masculine ideal is something from which we no longer feel the need to run.
DESPITE OMINOUS developments in too many corners of the globe (Russia, Nigeria, Uganda, progress-resistant pockets in the United States and Australia) there has never been a more optimistic time to be gay. Especially in the last few years, our community has overcome centuries of social resistance in more enlightened corners of the globe. Plenty of us have learned that boldly proclaiming exactly who we are and what we stand for – in our bedrooms and on the street – will be met not with hate but full-on acceptance. It’s exciting. It’s encouraging. It’s fabulous. Many gay men rightly hold their sex lives up to the microscope with a healthy dose of pride: the freedoms afforded us – the ones that really entered the discussion (in the Western world, at least) following the Stonewall riots of 1969 – are myriad. We have never played by anybody’s rules but our own; that is to say, we have long rejected traditional notions of coupling, relationships and mores in favour of something more dynamic and open-minded. Something, y’know, sexier. And yet, notwithstanding the incredible amount of work still to be done, many of us still grapple with an enormous amount of confusion, embarrassment and outright ignorance about the practices in which we so joyously engage. We couple in ways that f lummox both us and the outside world. Pleasure-seeking is often complex, heavily negotiated and fraught with the knowledge that one slip-up can constitute life-long complications. Plenty of us are having plenty of sex, but we still fail to grasp the full extent of its meaning to either ourselves or others.
To undertake a vast survey of gay sex – to bore into how, when, why and where we’re having it – would require hundreds of interviews, years of research and a small army of assistants to help sift through heaps of data only to arrive at a perfunctory conclusion. I chose an admittedly simpler route, albeit one that still gleaned useful anecdotes and eyeopening information. I talked to my friends. I reached out to experts. I listened to stories. And looked at the numbers – not all of them, but enough to draw decisive conclusions. My eyes were opened. My beliefs were challenged. My prejudices were dulled. I recognised myself in many of the tales that I heard. Some of them even turned me on.
Today, gay men have far more support systems, outlets and interfaces designed for the purposes of meeting one another than any prior generation. Good sex is on offer like never before. It sure sounds like an exceptional achievement. But it’s worth remembering that the pioneering men who laid the groundwork for our carnal freedoms (many of whom lost their lives doing so) were pretty crafty at finding ways to get off, criminal consequences be damned. If a good fuck is now simply a matter of swiping one’s thumb to the right as opposed to the left, they deserve much of the credit for helping us arrive at this moment in the socio-sexual continuum.
But now that we’re here, how should we navigate it? What currency do we place on all these enticing hook-up apps, the everexpanding opportunities to marry or the potentially revolutionary developments in HIV prevention? At a time of seemingly unlimited opportunity, where are our limits? Do we even have limits? Plenty of stressors – some old, some defiantly new – still impact and inform our sex lives in 2014.
WHO NEEDS CONDOMS? THE BAREBACK CONUNDRUM.
Gay men like porn. A lot. Long before the arrival of home video and the internet, we clandestinely depicted it wherever we could – from hieroglyphs to fancy stemware. Remember the scene in The Birdcage when the uptight politician’s wife (Dianne Wiest) attends a dinner party at her future son-in-law’s home and comments on the racy china pattern? “It looks like young men playing leap frog,” she purrs innocently. “Is it Greek?”
Porn has always played a central (and accepted) role within the gay community. Most of us have been to a bar where it played on a screen in full view of patrons, a visual amusebouche to the main course we’re hoping to pick up and take home, or back to his place. Gay porn has traditionally been more body-positive than straight porn, which can boast a violent and misogynistic bent; women, some lesbians in particular, are even known to prefer the genre.
So let’s get right to the dirty end of things (sorry!) by addressing a (fairly) new truism: pre-condom era porn is a phrase that has, for all intents and purposes, lost meaning. Not so long ago, bareback porn meant grainy movies with mustachioed men engaging in what most of us thought of as dangerous sex – the kind in which the then-nascent HIV virus was quite possibly being passed along before our eyes. As soon as the AIDS crisis hit, condoms became the norm.
Now, bareback porn is everywhere. I almost always watch it when getting off. So do my friends. All of us came of age in the shadows of AIDS, which means few of us are doing so without conf lict. “On one hand,” my buddy Aaron told me, “I am excited by the deviant things these men are doing. On the other, I’m appalled by their carelessness. In the moment leading up to orgasm, that dilemma is non-existent but immediately afterward, as the poppers fade and the porn plays on, I’m
The relationship gay men have with HIV today is very different. They don’t see scores of guys being pushed in wheelchairs by friends on Saturday mornings, or men standing around with their ventilators.
confronted with the strangeness of it all.”
The rebirth of bareback porn can be traced to the late 1990s, not long after anti-retroviral drugs began effectively reducing infectiousness and prolonging the lives of HIV-positive men who, until then, were typically living out a grim death sentence. For many young men (myself included) who had only ever experienced penetrative gay sex with a condom, this was filthy, no-holds-barred stuff, the likes of which many had never seen: dicks literally pumping asses full of cum, all of it in extreme close-up. For a time, only a small and seemingly deviant clutch of producers dared make it.
Today nearly every porn purveyor on the market traffics in the stuff. Formerly condomonly imprints like Lucas Entertainment, Sean Cody, Bel Ami and ChaosMen are almost exclusively “raw” these days, following the fiscally advantageous trail blazed by Paul Morris’ Treasure Island Media. In 2004, TIM released Dawson’s 20-Load Weekend, featuring a site-fan-turned-star engaging in marathon hotel-room sex. (It should be noted Dawson had sero-converted a few months before the film’s shooting.) The video won six bareback “Spoogie” awards and, two years ago, The Huffington Post published a piece by Mark S King, who called it “the most important gay porn film ever made.”
Sydney University’s Kane Race, an HIV scholar who chairs the school’s Gender And Cultural Studies program, says, “after two decades of feeling restricted in our sexual activities by the condom code, I don’t think it’s surprising [we’ve seen] widespread and growing erotic intrigue with the idea of sex without condoms. What’s forbidden often becomes a source of eroticisation, as we’ve found time and again in sexual history.”
The worry is that some consumers of bareback porn interpret its increasingly frequent production as an endorsement of the practice. But the porn-made-me-doit argument does not sit easily with Race or Martin Holt, Associate Professor at the University Of New South Wales’ Centre for Social Research in Health, who both say data has not yet borne out evidence of a cause-andeffect relationship between condomless porn and STI/HIV rates, which are both on the rise.
In fact, says Holt, “bareback porn has become popular at the same time gay men have become more likely to have anal sex without condoms, anyway. So in some respects, the porn industry has just caught up with what many gay men have been doing. Of course, educating less experienced gay men about effective ways to negotiate anal sex without condoms remains a challenge. Discussions about HIV are rarely sexy, and not a standout feature of any porn narratives that I’m aware of.”
Daniel Laurin is a Toronto-based filmmaker who visited the Austin, Texas set of ChaosMen for four days to film and interview the site’s “stars” for his upcoming documentary, Straight Boys. Once upon a time, Chaos models used condoms for filming; now almost all its clips are tagged “Raw”. A disclaimer that plays before each one states the site neither recommends nor endorses bareback sex – this despite the fact nobody in their videos is using condoms.
Laurin told me Chaos models are expected to hand over results of at-home STI and HIV tests a week prior to f ilming; failure to do so means their shoot is cancelled and pay is withheld. Ostensibly, these guys are playing safe; that being said, a window of time still exists in which they could have contracted an STI or HIV. Says Laurin, “I’m conf licted about bareback porn. Watching it does not make me seek out bareback sex; what worries me, though, is that porn is often a young queer kid’s only type of sex education. If your only example of gay sex is condomless, that has to be problematic.”
It’s widely agreed that the paucity of real, usable sex education available to teenagers on the whole is appalling – blame everybody from overprotective parents to skittish, lawsuitaverse educators and, perhaps most blatantly, homophobic public servants whose policies would be laughable if they weren’t so disgusting. (Lawmakers in Tennessee, for instance, tried passing a bill last year that would have required
After two decades of feeling restricted by the condom code, I don’t think it’s surprising [we’ve seen] widespread and growing erotic intrigue with the idea of sex without condoms.
school administrators to out students suspected of being gay to their parents.)
On the whole, surveys of gay and lesbian high school students bear out a sad truth: few receive even perfunctory lessons around navigating same-sex relationships or encounters. “Sex education in schools is absolutely critical,” says Nic Parkhill, CEO of the AIDS Council Of New South Wales (ACON). “And yet the time it’s given is completely limited and largely focused on reproductive health, with a touch on STIs and that’s it. Unfortunately, we remain in limbo.” Homophobia, meanwhile, still runs rampant in most schoolyards and discussions on diversity in the classroom are often so watered down they might as well not happen. Parkhill says this creates a vicious and dangerous cycle: “Those issues create real vulnerabilities for our community that can lead to higher rates of suicide, drug use, anxiety, absenteeism… and when those play out, you have greater chances for HIV transmission.”
THE (ILLUSORY) END OF HIV
Time for that decidedly unsexy discussion Holt mentioned: HIV. So much controversy, confusion, misinformation and emotion surround our attitudes toward the virus that has literally plagued sexually active people – gay, straight and everything in between – for 30-plus years that even attempting a reasonable discussion can feel like a losing proposition. For gay men in particular, the stigmas that remain only compound matters.
That said, there’s no real way of getting around the facts. There are more people living with HIV than ever before. They are living longer, healthier and far more actively than those who contracted the virus in the 1980s and early 1990s. So far, so good. But things get muddied when you look at the evidence: after years of decline, HIV rates are on the rise among gay men in developed countries around the world. And there’s also been an upswing in men who report they’re having unprotected sex.
We’re trained to recoil in ref lexive horror at news like this; gay men have, for decades, been on the frontlines of a battle against a plague that threatened to obliterate our entire community. None of us wants to feel we’re backsliding. But when I mentioned the upswing to Parkhill, he was quick to note that “an increase is not necessarily always a bad thing.” Say what? He explains: “It’s estimated that around 30 percent of positive people in the gay community remain undiagnosed. So if efforts to increase testing result in more people knowing they’re positive, that’s good. Those people can then modify their behaviour and take steps to get treatment. At least we’re now reaching them.”
It’s easy to speculate and harder to pinpoint exact reasons for the increase in HIV diagnoses. Condom fatigue, complacency, a lack of innovation and reform in the health sector, and the fading of HIV as a key policy issue in the gay community have all been cited, ad nauseum, by experts and onlookers alike. UNSW’s Holt insists the stats tell only part of the story, reminding me “gay men have always been more likely to report sex without condoms with their boyfriends and long-term partners.” There’s also no accounting for how many men chose to forgo condoms after frank discussions about status – two positive men, for instance, are often likely to disclose their status and make a decision on condom use accordingly. Parkhill, meanwhile, suggests that while gay men, by and large, still believe HIV is an important issue, they “probably don’t rank it as they did 20 years ago.”
Gay men of a certain age tend to despair when we hear opinions like this. I came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the era of Ryan White, Pedro Zamora, and one infamous photograph some say turned the tide of public opinion about the disease. Published when I was 12 years old, it shows HIV-positive David Kirby on his deathbed. He is a gaunt wisp of a thing, his eyes staring emptily into the distance as his grieving father cradles him and his sister sits nearby. He looks not unlike Jesus, and when clothing line Benetton (with the permission of Kirby’s family) used the image two years later in an advertisement meant to draw attention to the fight against HIV, many Catholics unsurprisingly voiced their outrage.
The image has stayed burned in my brain for nearly 25 years – so much so that nearly all of my sexual encounters since have been informed by it. When I asked my friend Liam how an HIV diagnosis might change his life, he told me, “I think I would be destroyed. It might not be a death sentence anymore, but you’re still stigmatised. It’s actually nightmarish for me to think about.”
Given what we now know about HIV transmission, that may seem like a dramatic answer. But upon hearing it, I found myself empathising. Like me, Liam arrived at sexual maturity when HIV had yet to become something “manageable” and condom use was still very much a non-negotiable; like me, he had the literal fear of death instilled in him by virtue of his age and what he saw happening to men with a positive status. Parkhill himself recalled a time when gay urban enclaves like Sydney’s Oxford Street or New York’s West Village teemed with dying men. “The relationship gay men have with HIV today is very different,” he told me. “They don’t see scores of guys being pushed in wheelchairs by friends on Saturday mornings, or men standing around with their ventilators.”
Liam and I could do well to better appreciate the fact HIV-positive no longer has quite the same meaning. As psychologist Renato Barucco, head of the Transgender Family Program at New York’s Community Healthcare Network, recently wrote, “The time of binary HIV statuses is pretty much over.” Barucco claims six specific statuses now exist; two in particular still perplex a wide swath of gay men. A growing number can now call themselves HIV-positive and undetectable – that is, their viral load is so low the odds of transmitting HIV to a negative partner are next to none. (David and Jim, a sero-discordant couple I met while researching this story, told me they do not regularly use condoms for this very reason.) But there’s another, more controversial classification Barucco calls “recent, exciting and increasingly more visible”: HIV-negative on PrEP.
PrEP, which stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, might be thought of as a counterbalance to PEP, the post-encounter, month-long treatment cycle used by men who believe they have been exposed to the HIV virus. Based purely on anecdotal evidence and stories relayed by friends who have used PEP in the past (Aaron told me his sole treatment was “a horribly stressful and sad experience”), it may be difficult to convince people to trust Barucco’s decidedly sunnier take on PrEP.
Still, and while it remains early days, analysts say research shows HIV-negative men who take Truvada (the blue pill approved as PrEP in the United States and soon to be made available in France) are actually engaging in the least risky form of sex imaginable, whether they supplement it with a condom or not. As Barucco puts it, “It doesn’t get safer than this for sexually active people.”
Particularly in the US, PrEP has caused heaps of hand-wringing. Freelance journalist David Duran wrote a divisive opinion piece about the treatment titled Truvada Whores?, while AIDS Healthcare Foundation president
In the moment leading up to orgasm, that dilemma is nonexistent but immediately afterward, as the poppers fade and the porn plays on, I’m confronted with the strangeness of it all.
Michael Weinstein asserted that Truvada is “a catastrophe for HIV prevention” and a “party drug” encouraging men to wantonly ditch the condoms. After his comments ignited controversy, Weinstein doubled down: “The people who’ve been yelling the loudest – they’ve all been associated with bareback porn.”
True, porn purveyors like Michael Lucas – who now films bareback scenes because “times have changed” and “condom-free porn is hotter”– have called on Weinstein to step down from his post. But the experts with whom I spoke (Parkhill, Holt, Race and two friends who work in HIV/AIDS policy) also expressed concern. “Castigating people who want or need an HIV prevention method other than condoms is incredibly short-sighted and foolish,” says Race, who points out the so-called “condom code” is not as easily adhered to by some as many of us might like to presume.
You may consider this argument and wonder, well… who on earth can’t simply remember to use a condom every time? On the surface, it seems obvious: if you plan to fuck, plan to use protection. But there are segments of the population for whom consistent use remains a challenge. Men in serodiscordant relationships who struggle with economic, self-esteem or intimacy issues; injecting drug users; sex workers; men with erectile dysfunction… they’re the people for whom most experts advocate PrEP use in the first place.
On the other hand, there are folks like my friend Marcus, who uses PrEP not because he falls into any of those demographics but because “I had gotten to the point in my life where I wanted to explore and enjoy sex without having to always rely on condoms.” And after years of struggling with erectile issues and physical discomfort from condoms, “I did the research and learned PrEP actually provides more protection from HIV than condoms do.”
Marcus was quick to remind me that he does not see PrEP as a free pass to justify condom-less sex every time, saying, “I always use them if the other person wants to.” This is exactly the kind of thing that Weinstein wants to hear, because it helps illustrate his point about Truvada being a party drug. I recoiled in dismay myself: how, I wondered, could Marcus really justify his behaviour when he had no real reason not to be using condoms?
Parkhill warns against passing judgment so quickly. “There’s a real resistance to new technologies and prevention options,” he reminds. “And there’s an ethical issue here, too – not to mention fear of judgment from the broader community: Bad gay boys! How dare they not wear condoms! Irresponsible party poofs! It’s just not that simple. PrEP has been scientifically proven.”
Despite its efficacy, it remains elusive: PrEP has government approval in the United States, though it can be cost-prohibitive and usage rates remain scant. In Australia, it is not yet officially available; if you can find it, it’ ll cost upwards of $800 per month. That means usage is limited to a select and well-heeled group of men who have access to important (not necessarily legal) back channels – and they may not even be the ones who need it most. Trials are on the horizon in New South Wales and Victoria; it will be interesting to see if the same divisive debate rages once PrEP is more readily available in Australia.
DATING, DRUGS AND DICK – THE NEW OLD MATING RITUALS
It used to be so easy: Friday night rolled around. You and some friends gathered at somebody’s apartment, poured a few stiff drinks (or popped a few pills), got a nice buzz going and headed out into the night. Your destination: the gay strip. Your mission: good sex. Your target: anybody looking for the same.
If everything went according to plan, you found fun sitting at the bar stool or f lailing around the dance f loor, took him home, got off and sent him along. Or maybe you popped by the bathhouse for a cruise, the scent of poppers and the moans of sex surrounding you as you prowled the hallways or unwound in the steam room. Then, of course, there were the beats: public spaces such as bathrooms, parks, cinemas or anywhere else you could exchange
furtive glances and bodily f luids in a thrilling and unsanctioned sexual encounter.
Gay men have always taken a special kind of pride in our ability to seek out and f ind great sex. It is a key aspect of our collective identity. So it can be easy to bemoan t he decline of t he traditionally symbolic “gay strip” (as it was known for a brief, bold moment post-Stonewall), a development t hat has occurred in nearly every city with a t hriving queer community. New York, West Hollywood, London and Sydney have plenty of long-time residents who pine for t he “good old days” when leather bars, bookstores, coffeehouses, nightclubs and diners frequented almost exclusively by gay patrons sat side-by-side, rainbow f lags in t heir windows. Many of t hose enclaves have been decimated – or at best dulled – by a number of factors. Race cites “real estate prices, problematic policing practices, changing demography and homophobic violence” as some of t he main culprits.
And then, of course, there’s the internet. Since hook-up and dating websites like Gaydar and Manhunt arrived on the scene a decade ago and, more recently, GPS-based mobile apps (Grindr, Squirt, Hornet… take your pick) became the preferred mode of communication for all generations of gay men, the need for physical gathering spaces has been called into question altogether.
At least, that’s the simple explanation. Race warns against placing too much stock in mobile apps’ effect on how we meet, date and hook up – for now, at least. “Revolutionised might be too strong a term,” he cautions. “But [they] do enable people to avoid some of the more established environments of gay sex and socialising, institutions such as cruise bars, saunas, sex clubs or beats, if they desire.”
About casual sex: Grindr allow us to order up, a la carte, men who f it our specified ideals.
There were the beats: public spaces such as bathrooms, parks, cinemas or anywhere else we could exchange furtive glances and bodily f luids in a thrilling and unsanctioned sexual encounter.
But how much are we really being told? These profiles often provide no more specifics than a simple chance meeting at the bathhouse or on the dance f loor might; as with those encounters, the back-and-forth of a Grindr conversation can be as pointless or as pointed as we choose to make it. Holt says one of the new challenges of GPS-based dating apps “is the relative lack of information in guys’ profiles. To ascertain this information, you have to t ype and message, in as few syllables as possible, often while you’re out and about and on the move. I think men may therefore be meeting each other with less preparation and mutual understanding than they previously had.”
Liam echoed those concerns when he told me he fears the apps on his phone “have turned men and dating into an endless Amazon catalogue – I can’t stop scrolling. I rarely buy anything. It’s actually awful.” Also awful, and of particular concern to researchers like Holt and Race, is the level of abandon with which many gay men express their sexual desires online. Few of us would feel comfortable walking into a gay bar and yelling, “I’m looking to top but if you’re Asian, forget it!”
Yet given these apps allow us to literally choose our preferences from a drop-down menu (horny for Middle Eastern otters between the ages of 21 and 26? Have at it!), they also seem to threaten empathy and inclusiveness,
two qualities for which the gay community has long patted itself on the back. “Being online lowers inhibitions and may enable greater directness,” says Dr Denton Callander, who researches sexual racism in online forms. “In some instances, this can cause offence – such as when men engage in public racial discrimination. And when men approach online sex and dating with a proscribed list of wants, it’s a brand of inf lexibility that can decrease sexual variety and ultimately homogenise their sex lives.”
There are also concerns apps like Grindr and Scruff have entered a new and potentially more dangerous phase – people aren’t just
I did the research and learned PrEP actually provides more protection from HIV than condoms do.
using them to date and hook up, but to arrange sex work, purchase drugs and, in some horrific worst-case scenarios, commit homophobic crimes. Their usage as conduits for drug purchases in particular are concerning, especially considering drug and alcohol abuse among gays and lesbians continues apace at sometimes triple the rates in other communities – after HIV and mental health issues, Parkhill says he considers this to the most critical issue we face. But again, there’s that pesky old idea of a ‘stigma’ attached to drug and alcohol use in our ranks. Holt says it’s vital that health services targeting gay men with those struggles do so in a non-judgmental way.
And there are, of course the men who – embouldened by increasing opportunities for marriage equality worldwide – log on looking for true love. Cynically, I’m always dubious when I see a Grindr profile with phrases like “Not into NSA” or “NO HOOKUPS”. But if these men are, in fact, holding out for something more substantial than the easily arranged quickie that an app offers, they’re indicative of a wider trend in the community at large.
It can be easy to bemoan many of the statistics on the sexual health of gay men, but Holt offered a glimmer of hope, “One thing often overlooked in these discussions – especially around rising trends in unprotected sex – is a countervailing trend: a gradual decline in the last decade in the number of sex partners that gay men report. It seems that, in general, gay men have become a bit more focused on relationships and a bit less focused on casual sex.” It’s a development many of us – especially older gay men who, Holt reminds, were “perhaps more likely to have grown up in gay cultures that celebrated casual sex as an expression of freedom and enjoyment” – find welcome. Not necessarily because it speaks to a larger trend of assimilation (after all, plenty of us proudly continue to hold our sexual freedoms dear), but because the notion of finding and settling down with that one true love, possibly even marrying him, is finally coming to fruition for an increasing number of us. And that goes double for younger gay men, the bulk of whom (a troubling lack of schoolsanctioned sex ed aside) are more likely to have grown up in social networks defined by a healthier integration with their straight peers. “The challenge,” reckons Holt, “is to recognise both stances as valid. There still seems to be a tendency to characterise casual sex as disreputable and seeking a relationship as conservative. Neither position seems particularly helpful for supporting gay men to have healthy sex lives.”
I look around my own social circle – ranging in age from early 20s to early 70s – and see a fascinating kaleidoscope of approaches to sex, dating, commitment and casual encounters. I’ve been in a committed, not-always-monogamous relationship with my college sweetheart for nearly 18 years. He’s not going anywhere; neither am I. It’s this shared understanding that allows us the chance to dabble on the side (apart and/or together) without grief or heavy judgment. Many of my friends date regularly in all manner of arrangements: I know happy “throuples”, monogamous pairs, couples who met at threeways and in orgies, single men and everything in between. None of us are “doing” love and sex any better than the other; I’d venture to say every time we share the details of our own sex lives – be they titillating, terrif ying or tedious – we’re doing our community a favour. It’s a process that demystifies the foreign, shoves aside stigmas, breaks down prejudices and, if we’re lucky, saves a few lives. And how sexy is that?