I got into an argument with a friend on MSN about the question of HIV in the gay community, and the fetischization of bare-backing among many gay men. Ironically enough, and this is true, Queen’s ‘Who wants to live forever’ was playing on spotify at the time.
As has been reported on this blog earlier London’s club scene is a dangerous place if you’re unwary. One in seven men you meet is going to be HIV positive.
So, if you go out and try to find a man for the night, I might feel like Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry movies, pointing a gun at you with one round in the chamber. I can make a little speech there:
– I know what you’re thinking. "Did he wear a condom last time or not? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is HIV, the most devastating disease to have ever hit the gay community, the bubonic plague of queers, and would blow your life clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
After fighting the disease for thirty years it is easy to understand why people are battle weary, and why many people have given in, but it is very hard to understand why the Russian roulette of bare-backing have come to be fetischized by elements in the gay community.
It is also hard to understand why serious participants in the community are not railing against this fetischization, but keep quiet about it and even ignore it. It is hard to understand why clubs and venues cash in on it.
It is a lie that the disease is manageable. It is not. It is a virus, and there is no cure, and even though the medication for now keeps it in check viral particles in the body survive. The modern medicines bring down HIV particles to less than half a million particles in a full grown man, of to less than 75 copies per milliliter of blood.
If those viral particles spread resistance to the medication will spread. If the resistance spread we will get back to how it was in the early nineties and late eighties, where every gay man will bury two or three of their friend per month. Have you seen movies of the bubonic plague of the middle ages? That’s how it was back then.
Do we want those days back? If not, it is time for pressure to be put on the fetischization of bare-backing. It is a too dangerous a practice to be ignored, and turned a blind eye to.
Tags: aids, britain, england, gay, hiv, homosexuality, uk, united kingdom
Makes perfect sense. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to have sex with a stranger without a condom, whether they’re gay or het. Then again, I’m from a generation where AIDS has always existed, so there has *always * been that risk. Not that that stops people from my generation from doing it, so who knows?
Condoms aren’t exactly an aphrodisiac, but neither is a death sentence.
Yeah, I came in late onto the scene, and came out at the end of the nineties, and people were still scared then – but they were also responsible. Maybe the fear-mongering worked.
The argument I got into was that my friend thought I was moralizing. No shit, I’d moralize anyone not to have to go through the AIDS-crisis again. It was bad. Really, really bad.
I think this is a really important issue to talk about in the community, and the reason (some) people are reluctant to speak out against barebacking is their belief in personal choice, understandable to an extent since our lives as gays can feel like a constant battle to buck authority, and we are skeptical about “morality” since it’s been coopted by religious fundamentalists.
But the message is crucial. As your article points out, when you bareback you’re not only hurting yourself, you’re hurting your partner and you’re putting at risk many other men–partners of partners–through the potential spread of more resistant strains of HIV. It is a moral issue, and we shouldn’t shrink away from questions of morality.