GAY STUFF: Confessions of a Bareback Top

I've been debating whether or not to post on this website, Confessions of a Bareback Top , for a good long time now. First off -- NSFW!!!! -- you have been warned. The source of my dilemma arises out whether or not to give this guy any more attention than need be. However, he is already fairly well read and circulated, and having received the notice about it on the Gay Men's Health Summit listserv, well, I figured if "the professionals" couldn't keep it in their pants, neither could I.

My own personal fascination with it is from an HIV/AIDS standpoint. I've reported before on stories that discuss the growth of barebacking within the gay community, noticable within the porn community and websites like XTube (also NSFW), with figures quoted as high as 60% of all gay porn now produced is sans condom. This particular man has decided to make it his personal crusade to have as much as bareback topping as possible, despite "safe only" postings on sites like Craigslist and Manhunt. (To the uninitiated: "safe only" vs "bb" are options and criteria you post on hook-up sites where you get to make clear for the world your preference for a condom. Now, having worked in the world for a little while and having lived in this world, the distinctions are vague, as my friends and I have decided that, esp on Manhunt, if someone says "bb" they are HIV+, if they have "no preference" they are HIV+, and if they are "safe only" it is likely they are HIV+ as well.)

But there was also a posting that struck me recently while catching up on his goings-on that plays into this whole question of whether or not gay men are using condoms (posting dated 2-24-08):

Just for kicks...I created a fake profile on Manhunt for a week. I paid the membership, and I posted a very basic profile...which was missing the "safe only" option on my profile... Over the course of 7 days, I was contacted by 274 different guys. I contacted 44 guys (trust me when I say that I was busy replying to emails). Of the 318 men that I spoke to (in Manhattan only), 311 were willing to either fuck me raw - or get fucked by me raw - or both...Thats 98% for those still doing the math... The average age of those guys I have chatted with was 28. Tops, vers, bottoms... you all wanted it raw. 18 - 37, from Battery Park to Inwood. You all bareback.... It was a little experiment for me to see just how many of you out there love the raw as much as I do. Surprisingly, you ALL are. Which just goes to remind me of all that hate mail that I get from people telling me I should be shot for fucking raw.... Looks like there should be 311 other dead people with me...

I will grant the man this: he's right. He's so very, very right. And I'm not going to alleviate myself of guilt by saying, well, at least I'm not like that. Right. We've all made our mistakes in the past, some greater than others, and some with consequences greater than others. I'm sure he's gotten a lot of grief over what he's writing, but I'm going to grant him this:

He's not wrong.

Granted, his view of the world is pessimistic at best... hedonistic, as well. But it's true. People do this, and it's the way shit goes.

My boss and I had a discussion about "what's wrong with gay boys these days." Now, granted, he and I are queens of vastly different generational mindsets and different situations in life. It is often pointed out that those who lived through the dark days -- before the medical and care revolutions in HIV/AIDS in the mid-90s -- and those of us who have really only been "aware" after it has become 100X more manageable, that we view it completely differently and are behaviors are vastly different. For a generation who saw friends and family die and there was a constant panic over "whether or not I got it," the idea that barebacking and the active distancing from risk is almost ghastly. This disease which formed our movement, took some of our best, and killed a generation, to many, now, is no more of an inconvenience. Like diabetes, is the most common retort. There's a set of medical things you have to do for the rest of your life, but the life expectency for a diabetic and an HIV+ person at diagnosis is not that dissimilar these days -- 25 years -- and therefore it's not scary anymore.

And what's better, it doesn't ruin your sex life (see above), nor does it ruin your good looks. It's just another thing.

It's awful but true.

I think we have to believe this, those of us in this age with our mistakes and our scary histories and our ... everything. We have to believe that it's just something to deal with. We are children of a sexual revolution cut short by death, and we are dying to explode out into a world of our own sexuality, into a world defined entirely by our sexuality. That's powerful stuff and us gay boys want to explore, and we have to believe that the terrible that could kill us is just another side effect of the life. Is it a realistic viewpoint? Absolutely not. They don't see the death that's still out there; they don't hear it. HIV/AIDS has been taken up as an "everybody" disease -- which it is more of these days -- and the lack of openly positive people at the clubs drives us to believe that it's somewhere else.

And even if it is here, next to us, it doesn't matter anymore.

It's a scary thought, but by normalizing it, by abandoning the stigma, we have taken the power away from it. It's like when we started etching away at the stigma against homosexuality itself, it allowed us to become normalized, part of the mainstream. The sexual revolution fades, the edginess goes away, and we get into absurd debates about whether leather boys and drag queens should be in our Pride parades because "they scare the straight people." Instead, children and families should be the focus is the new belief. Normalizing it takes the power away. It's no longer counter culture, it is culture, and we leave everything that we were behind.

We've taken the death out of AIDS, and all we have is a part of the life. When I tell newbies welcome to the life, I don't mean this, exactly, and I'm sorry to all of you for promulgating it and not doing more to stop it. I know I could have done more.

Back Confessions of a Bareback Top, I'm not going to fault him for writing. I'm going to applaud him because it's doing exactly, I'm sure, what it intended to... to shock people. Make them aware. And when you hold up a mirror and people don't like what they see, they are revulsed by it. And that's exactly what he did.

It kinda makes me sick, reading... but, I can't stop reading it. I mean, really, what does that say about me?

Update: (I thought this had been added already) When I first found the website a year or so ago, my first thought was that it was created by an AIDS Service Organization as a way to call attention to this issue and to get a discussion going on about it.

Funny thing, I technorati'd the blog -- and Trevor Hoppe from the University of Michigan, an "academic" LGBTQI blog, called attention to a post that I had merrily skipped over and, apparently, not paid much attention to ... wherein the author had raped someone in a bathroom using (what I think -- I'm at work, I'm not opening the site LOL) GHB. I mean, come on, the man is disgusting, but this shit happens. It does. I know there have been nights that I'm sure I was drugged, as ending up on the floor of my friends van rolling around and vomiting is not in my MO -- though it's not far off. LOL

But it does continue to kinda play into my theory that it's an AIDS advocate out there. The author claims to be getting tested regularly -- I wonder at what point we'll get the blog about how he tested positive. (Although, if he's real, he would be wise not to post that, as god knows how many people could probably go after him at some point.)