ABSTRACT
Queer counter publics have been seen as a significant resource for gay men's HIV prevention and harm reduction. This chapter works with this concept to think about how critical collectivities of sex might operate in the digital context. This chapter revisits some of the most influential theorizations of queer counter publics to recall their basic operating principles and think about how they might be realized in the digital context. Digital sex is thinly but dismissively characterized in the critical literature that advances queer counter public theory. Certainly, the examples Warner gives of social relations mediated by queer counter publics are suggestive of the transformations associated with queer responses to HIV. The queer enthusiasm for face-to-face environments could be attributed to the sense in which the infrastructures of urban gay life have traditionally been predicated on encounters with strangers, or at least facilitated such encounters.
