Treasure Island Media, once a fringe studio because of its explicit fetishization of condomless sex, has gone mainstream. Even porn’s most condom-ardent director, Chi Chi LaRue, threw in the towel and released their first condomless film in 2018. According to a 2021 review, there is just one gay porn studio left that does not produce condomless porn. (I’m not exactly being dramatic here-condoms can chafe, especially without sufficient lubrication.) To be honest, it felt great.īut don’t just take it from me-we need only look to porn studios to see the shifting norms in action. I hadn’t used one in so long that I half-expected it to hurt. Undeterred, he slipped it on and slipped in me. I awkwardly told him I was on PrEP and that he could skip the condom if he wanted. Without missing a beat, I said, “oh I have poppers on the nightstand.” But instead of poppers, he pulled out a condom from his pants pocket. But instead of getting into position, he picked up his jeans from the floor. I laid on my back, legs spread, with him standing above me. We started making out, getting naked, shimmying awkwardly backwards towards the edge of the bed. To this point: A few weeks ago, I invited over a guy I met on Grindr. Condoms are slowly becoming the exception, not the rule. There are still plenty of men using condoms, but if you meet a trick on Grindr and nobody says a peep about protection, you can safely be sure that no one is planning to wrap it up. You had to specifically seek out partners for condomless sex, and many guys would turn you down. In the immediate years after PrEP’s launch in 2012, condoms were still pretty much assumed to be the norm. Without the specter of HIV looming over your shoulder, condomless sex is just sex. It exists only in relationship to the fear of HIV, to gay men’s dance with destiny. Let’s be real: This nexus of eroticism and gut-wrenching anxiety is the only reason the word “bareback” was ever coined. But I knew that I was playing a game with certain odds, and it was precisely those odds that made it all so titillating. I wasn’t a “bug chaser” or seeking out HIV infection, per se. In that moment – caught off-guard by expectations and overcome with pleasure – I realized just how much my desires had changed. This set-in most clearly during a recent out-of-town trip when a guy whose Manhunt profile lectured others about “wrapping it up” spit on my hole, shoved it in, and fucked me raw. For a host of reasons that this column will be exploring, I’d all but stopped using condoms. Over the past three years, I’ve noticed something about my sex life. The opening salvo in my first column penned as Jake Sobo, a pseudonym, describes my desires:
#GAY PORN STARS WITH HIV STILL HAVING SEX SERIES#
I authored a 19-part blog series called “My Life on PrEP” for the now-defunct e-magazine, Positive Frontiers (thanks to the Internet Archive, you can still find the posts here ). In the weeks that followed, I tried to make sense of this new technology through writing. That all began to change for me in 2012 when I swallowed my first Truvada pill. It would take years-and a few doses of Truvada-for me to be able to fully explore that desire to submit and please more fully.
#GAY PORN STARS WITH HIV STILL HAVING SEX FULL#
As a bottom, letting men inside me without a condom also came to signify a kind of submission in my mind-a way of giving myself up to a man, knowing full well that, as a bottom, the risk was more mine than it was his.
But also adrenaline, sweat, and-over time-a kind of thrilling intensity. I’ll never forget those moments they didn’t. Sometimes my partners used condoms when they fucked me. I started meeting men online for sex when I was a teenager, long before Gay.com (much less Grindr) would make that mainstream. I lived with that fear and impending sense of dread for my entire sexual upbringing. Brand new antiretroviral treatments were saving lives, but, for gay men, AIDS and death still seemed like destiny.
One of my friends who was just a few years older than me tearfully told me of his recent diagnosis. One of the first things they told me was that most men “like that” end up getting AIDS. My parents found out I was gay at the ripe old age of 14. This article was produced in honor of San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s 40th anniversary, which we are commemorating in 2022.