Subject: Jim Eigo's column on barebacking, AIDS prevention
From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 20:03:30 EST

What's Wrong With This Picture?
by Jim Eigo
02-16-99
www.cruisingforsex.com

 Across the back of a black horse a young dark-haired guy reclines 
langourously. The shot is cropped so we see him from the waist up. He is 
well-built and naked and he looks us in the eye. Here's a Marlboro Man 
for century's end, as alluring as the original but a lot more 
approachable and, well, fuckable. What's he trying to tell us? "Tony 
Valenzuela and the boys who BAREBACK take you on a ride inside...." 

You may have seen the cover of February's issue of POZ (the magazine of 
"Health, Hope & HIV") on barebacking (intentional unprotected anal sex). 
You may even have heard some of the brouhaha that this issue cover, 
editorial, two accompanying articles, and a subsequent town meeting in 
New York City to discuss them has set off in certain sectors of the gay 
world. While more virulent than most, the reaction from longtime AIDS 
activist Michael Petrelis, written "from the AIDS ward of SF General 
Hospital," was not atypical. "During one morphine morning I read the 
front page article in the SF Chronicle about suicidal gays engaging in 
unsafe barebacking sex, a deadly idea enthusiastically promoted by POZ
 magazine... It seemed to me POZ should sponsor a barebacking party at 
the hospital's AIDS ward 5A, with a medical theme, of course. That way 
the barebackers could see what their future likely holds for them, and 
POZ could pick up more readers who will need all those expensive and 
toxic drugs hawked in its pages." 

Because I've always believed that people have a right to consensual sex 
of their own choosing, even the sort of sex I disagree with, I'm not one 
of those who are wagging their fingers at Tony and the boys. Because 
I've always believed that honest talk about the sex that men are having 
with each other is the necessary ground for effective AIDS prevention, I 
don't blame POZ for giving Tony and the boys a forum. I know that Walter 
Armstrong, current editor of POZ, was once a driving force behind an 
interactive AIDS prevention postcard project that circulated short 
stories about real-life safer sex decisions, and I believe Walter's aim 
in this issue was to continue such work. (In his introduction, POZ
 publisher Sean Strub asks readers to situate this issue in a line of 
classic community-based HIV prevention literature.) 

Although the straight world holds the legal power to persecute men who 
love men, I'm not overly worried about what it will think upon hearing 
that the fags are fucking raw again. Yes, some gay men have had 
unprotected sex throughout the epidemic; but I'm not of the camp that 
says that barebacking is nothing different, just the Queen's New 
Clothes. Barebacking e-mail networks, websites and parties tell us that 
a fresh subpopulation of gay guys has made a conscious choice not to 
rubber up before fucking. And Michael Scarce, cruisingforsex.com
 columnist and author of POZ's survey of the barebacking scene, is 
certainly correct in asserting that AIDS prevention groups are behind 
the curve in coming to terms with this subculture (small but real). 
Barebackers are worthy of harm reduction efforts (although the 
guidelines as published in POZ and posted on this website, equivocal and 
qualified, are of limited use against HIV). 

So what's wrong with this picture? It begins with the cover, a 
tantalizing image and a come-on, that flubs a chance to place 
barebacking, in all its complexity, in a world where HIV still threatens 
and where prevention, for many men, is still possible, and a daily 
choice. The cover will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. A 
fraction of them will buy the mag, fewer read the article-interview with 
Tony. Like it or not, the cover will remain the issue's most memorable 
legacy. No one is served, least of all Tony, when the cover of POZ scans 
like an ad for unprotected buttfucking. Tony in the flesh is a lot more 
complex than his cover photo or even the interview inside. At the town 
meeting in New York City, Tony, more vulnerable than assured, spoke with 
true ambivalence about his sexuality, his seroconversion, how taking cum 
had been as transiently alluring as making money or gaining fame, how it 
no longer means to him all that it once did. (Perhaps he spoke about 
this and more in his recent online chat for barebackers on this 
website.) All this showed a Tony who could have an important part in 
AIDS prevention efforts. The simplistic cover betrays him, reduces him 
to a cartoon advocate for sexual bungee-jumping, our millennial Marlboro 
Man. The title of the article-interview with Tony, "They Shoot 
Barebackers, Don't They?," a bit of glamorizing martyrology, endorses 
barebacking's outlaw allure. (Of course they didn't shoot the original 
Marlboro Man; a victim of the product he advertised, his demise was 
nowhere near so neat.) 

But POZ's cover image of Tony misfires even more deviously. Contrary to 
revisionary history, early gay AIDS prevention efforts were not 
exclusively about condoms. The most successful safer sex workshops circa 
1983-4, once the principal route of the sexual transmission of AIDS had 
been established, challenged a man to examine his whole sex life, 
consider his sexual options, and realize that sex occupies a lot wider 
terrain than unprotected anal sex. Buttfucking is not naturally more 
intimate, valuable, or pleasureable than other sexual options. Repeated 
studies reveal that buttfucking has a place in the regular sexual 
repertory of a minority of gay men. And even if you buttfuck (and I do), 
the exchange of cum, while wonderful, need not be the ultimate way 
lovers ratify their affection. Safer sex is only sustainable when its 
practitioners focus not on their deprivation, longing for the one act 
they're least safely able to have, but on a world of other sexual 
potential. 

Barebacking at its simplest fetishizes this single riskiest sex act, 
anal intake of semen. Because the barebacker is betting nothing less 
than his future on it, he expects of that act a return it can almost 
surely never repay. So Tony appears disillusioned with semen-exchange 
two years after his seroconversion. But I didn't learn that from POZ, 
where images of barebacking help to imbue it with great cachet and 
allure, the sex act that every gay male will have to aspire to before he 
can earn his outlaw stripes. Such a message subtly undermines nearly two 
decades of safer sex efforts and a broadened menu of pleasures, 
reinstating the old hierarchy with unmediated buttfucking as the ne plus 
ultra of gay sex. Odd how limiting freedom can sometimes be. 

But at the town meeting, Michael Scarce brought up an issue that gay men 
and AIDS prevention advocates of all stripes can support: We all deserve 
effective, sensuous replacements for the pleasure-deadening latex 
condom. 
---------
BIO:  An early AIDS activist, Jim Eigo wrote the first draft of the federal 
policy that expanded access to experimental AIDS drugs. His erotic 
fiction appears in the anthologies: Stallions, Best Gay Erotica 1997, 
Butch Boys, and Best American Gay Fiction 3. Jim resides in New York 
City.

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