Engaging in a Culture of Barebacking: Gay Men and the Risk of HIV Prevention

Abstract

In his book Autopornography, the HIV-positive gay pornstar, writer and sex advocate Scott O’Hara gives a frank and amiable account of his sexual experience during the first phase of the AIDS epidemic in North America (O’Hara, 1997a). He describes periods of abstinence, of limiting his sexual practice to certain acts (both alone and with particular partners), of using condoms for anal sex (on one occasion he describes this as ‘kinky’ and ‘hot’) and also of unprotected sex. He describes times when he had no libido at all, some of which coincide with periods of illness, and he describes a time after 1994 when his libido returns, when he realises ‘there were other HIVers out there with whom I didn’t need to worry about transmission; men who didn’t worry about isolating bodily fluids’ (1997a: 129). Despite his upfront sexual manner and sexual articulacy, O’Hara relates how he found it difficult to raise the subject of AIDS with potential sex partners, such that he’d ‘essentially given up sex rather than learn[ed] to discuss it’ (1997a: 127). In 1994, he gets an ‘HIV+’ tattoo on his left bicep (which he refers to as the most visible spot on his body save his forehead) and surrounds it with a ‘tasteful little circlet of swimming spermatozoa’. These steps are taken in an attempt to ensure that the sex he has is safe or at least better informed with respect to HIV transmission. For example, on one occasion he describes a sexual encounter with a ‘redneck’ where he avoids doing anything risky (even oral sex) because it is too dark to see his tattoo. He suggests they jerk each other off in a scene he describes as ‘really exciting’ (1997a: 200).