Bareback Nation

Academic Tim Dean explores the phenomenon behind purposefully risky gay sex.

by Ashlea Halpern

"These videos are of a graphic and spectacular nature that is not suitable for children and may be shocking for adults," declared the press release from last week's "On Bareback Subcultures and the Pornography of Risk" lecture at Slought Foundation.

A word like "spectacular" doesn't even begin to describe what it's like sitting in a room full of Ph.D.s and pseudo-intellectuals, tapping their chins and scribbling notes as a gonzo clip from Paul Morris' Breed Me buttfucks its way across the big screen — in the name of academia, of course.

Barebacking, for the uninitiated, is a term used by both porn directors and hippified, professorial types to describe some gay men's purposeful and sometimes organized engagement in risky, unprotected sex. It's a controversial issue, and one that has divided some members of the gay community.

In the case of the aforementioned clip, an unidentified hand dunks a giant dildo in and out of another man's velvety ripe rectum, while eerie music drones in the background. He is doing this, ostensibly, to recoup the semen of countless "donors," following what was either a gang bang or the yield of a circle jerk funneled into his ass. As the thick, brownish fluid oozes and splutters out, we see that the man holding the dildo is also in possession of a measuring cup. It seems this is a competition. He who can take the most man juice is the greatest man of all.

How much the guy attached to said anus is enjoying himself is not actually known, nor are the motivations and intentions of the filmmaker. There's not a condom in sight, leading us to wonder if any part of this semen cocktail is infected. Why the zoomed-in, clinical shots? Is this meant to arouse, or to make a sociocultural statement? All that we, the audience, can do, is study this proctologist's-eye-view of anal sex, and speculate. Or ask Tim Dean.

The noted theorist behind forthcoming bareback manifesto Unlimited Intimacy is, after all, the reason we're all packed into Slought in the first place, discussing gay porn with the same dispassionate rhetoric one might use to analyze pharmacogenomics or exilic existentialism.

Dean's lecture was rooted in hyper-intellectualized identity politics, and presented the practice of barebacking as "an alternative approach to kinship that is opposed to normative heterosexual relationships." Moreover, he posited that Morris was not only a pornographer, but an eth n ographer, making visible a queer subculture otherwise unseen. Where we see cum swapping, he sees communal ritual. Where we see leaky asses, he sees "compromise" shots. Where we see men acting with daredevil abandon, he sees a brotherhood founded in principled recklessness.

In short, we don't need your stinkin' vanilla sex, lady.

Still, major issues went unaddressed, or were lost in Dean's self-aggrandizing, dissertational approach. How are bonds formed through unmitigated risk? Is the wide availability of antiretroviral drugs to blame for snowballing rates of unsafe sex? Is there an appropriate way to characterize barebackers without pathologizing them as sick, or deviant? Is the willful transmission of the virus that causes AIDS ethically or morally wrong, as is the case with so-called "bug chasers"?

Maybe Dean doesn't have the answers. Or maybe he does, and they're just not accessible when and where they're probably needed most — in the bedroom.