ABSTRACT
In this chapter I trace the history of the term “pig” from its emergence in gay magazines of the 1970s published in Europe and the USA, all the way through to contemporary online pornography. In doing so, I reflect on the ways in which gay “pigs” have been conceived in relation to the wider spectrum of gay masculinities, and how the AIDS crisis brought about a particular set of challenges that triggered a shift in the forms of embodiment and sexual sociability that had been associated with early iterations of the “pig” sexual script, leading many men to abandon the sexual politics of gay liberation and to start pursuing a rights-based agenda of inclusion in mainstream society. The crisis notwithstanding, a minority of gay men continued to engage in practices that were seen to put them at risk of acquiring HIV, the very same practices that would eventually return and be taken up by increasing numbers of men and porn studios in the aftermath of the introduction of combination antiretroviral therapies for the management and prophylaxis of HIV infection. Those practices, often centred on an eroticisation of both penetrability and porosity to bodily fluids, led to the emergence, in the age of antiretrovirals, of contemporary gay “pigs” as embodiments of a porous kind of masculinity, as men who script their senses of self through their sexual athleticism, ability to endure multiple penetrations, and a willingness to welcome inside their bodies the bodily fluids of others.
