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A COUPLE YEARS AGO after the Folsom Street Fair, an annual bacchanal in San Francisco that draws leatherfblk from around the world, I ended up at the South of Market loft of a beefy, transplanted Texan. Midway through the action, which had begun at Blow Buddies, a local club known (among other things) for assiduously promoting "safer sex," the Texan whispered, "I want you to breed me." His request that I ejaculate directly inside his rectum is one that I've encountered periodically during sex with strangers over the past few years, though the Texan was the first to put it to me in these particular terms. What does it mean to imagine unprotected anal intercourse between men as "breeding"? Exactly who or what is being bred?
More than an isolated incident, the Texan's solicitation was expressed in the vernacul11/ar of a new subculture, that of barebacking. Barebacking refers to anal sex without a condom, and the term derives from equestrian pursuits: riding a horse bareback, without a saddle, as a rugged cowboy might do. Within the gay community of the United States there now exists something called the bareback community-a notion that was unthinkable a decade ago. What has changed dramatically over the past several years is gay men's attitude toward condom-use and HIV, such that the practice of risky sex and even the deliberate transmission of the virus that leads to AIDS have become the basis for new sexual identities and for community formation. Barebacking has become a new sexual preference, an erotic practice overlaid with a whole set of social and political meanings. This paper tries to unpack those meanings and thereby to illuminate the significance condensed in my Texan trick s appeal to be bred.
When I first began researching sexual risk during the mid-nineties, I was guided by the assumption (as were most investigators in the field) that men who had unsafe sex were essentially mistaken-that gay sex without a condom should be understood as "slipping up." Why, everyone wondered, in the face of so much safe-sex education, were HIV-infection rates rising in the very population-urban gay men-that had invented safer sex procedures and guidelines in the early years of the epidemic? My answer to this question at that time was...