ABSTRACT

As a self-conscious social practice, as opposed to individual acts, barebacking has to be understood as a revolt by some gay men against the risk-averse prevention culture that had developed as the HIV/AIDS epidemic exploded. The widespread adoption of regimes of Safer sex in gay communities from the mid-1980s reinforced the message that, in the absence of magic bullet vaccines or ‘cures’, the only effective way of preventing the spread of HIV was through avoiding the interchange of bodily fluids, with condom-protected intercourse the safest bet. At the height of early community-based prevention campaigns about two-thirds of gay men regularly engaged in protected sex, but that still left about a third at high risk. As more effective treatments developed from the mid-1990s many survivors of the early epidemic, and new entrants to the gay scene, began to reject what they saw as the rigidities of safe-sex messages and practice. Barebacking emerged as a sexualcultural phenomenon in this context, acted out in sex clubs and parties and no doubt bedrooms, sustained by numerous magazine contact ads, websites and porno-films, and the subject of heated polemic, pro and anti, in the 1990s and 2000s.