It's friday night, and I’m headed to the East Side Club, one of the last two remaining gay bathhouses in New York City.
Ostensibly a relaxation and social club for gay and bisexual men, it’s located on two floors of a non-descript office building on East 58th Street. I take an elevator to the sixth floor and wait behind a thick, Plexiglas window in a dark cell of a foyer, reminiscent of a vintage, blue movie theater box office. Posters for events such as the International Mr. Leather Contest, prominently featuring half-naked men, line the walls.
After a few moments, the manager buzzes me in through a small door. I am immediately overcome by a smell of chlorine, industrial-strength disinfectant, locker-room funk and poppers.
A labyrinth of interconnecting dark hallways is lined on either side with innumerable clapboard rooms. Each room contains a twin-sized cot, a hook for hanging your clothes and a table with a couple of condoms and a packet of lube. But whether anyone will be using the provided protection is anyone’s guess.
The lights in each room are on a dimmer but, as none of the rooms have ceilings, ambient light and noise easily spill over from the hallway. It’s here in the hallway that I meet Rubin.
A slim, youthful-looking Filipino, Rubin’s soft, delicate features belie the fact that he’s actually 37 years old. He blushes when he admits that, in sexual trysts, he often lets men his own age believe that he’s many years their junior.
When I question him, he explains to me that he had been getting tested regularly for HIV every six months since coming out at age 20 and moving to New York City. Those tests stopped two years ago, however, after a night of heavy drinking when he had “bareback” sex with his best friend of 14 years, an HIVpositive man.
Bareback sex is a popular and, in its implied rebellion, erotic term within the gay community for sex without a condom. Rubin has been vaguely unsettled by that high-risk incident and does not talk about HIV status with the men he hooks up with. He knows he could have sought HIV testing and counseling if he had really wanted to, but part of what has stood in the way is his shame.
“I’m afraid that people will tell me I should have known better,” he explains, casting his soft, brown eyes toward the ground. “That I did this to myself. I just don’t want to hear that.”
Tonight, Rubin has decided to get an HIV test. He’s getting it here, in the middle of a sex club. Wearing nothing but a towel, he chats with me after having had his blood drawn.
“I don’t think these people are judging me,” he says of Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, director of the Men’s Sexual Health Project (MSHP, pronounced “Em-Ship”), the diagnostic center inside the club where the testing is administered. “I mean, how could they? Look where we are. And besides, he’s cute,” Rubin says of Mike Dreyden, the porn star who’s promoting tonight’s testing.
“I’ve never met a porn star before,” he admits. “And I want the DVD.” In addition to raffling off his latest release (the proceeds go to MSHP), Dreyden is giving away a free DVD sampler of porn previews to anyone who gets tested.
It's been more than 25
years since the publication of Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen’s
brochure, “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic,” introduced the notion of
“safe sex.” Most gay men know the message by now, but the safe-sex
rhetoric no longer seems to be working. At least it’s no longer
producing the intended behavior. In fact, it may be producing a whole
slew of new behaviors that work to defeat the message.
The
fact that sex without condoms feels better—both physically and often
emotionally—is an intense temptation. Many gay men—in fact, most men,
regardless of sexual preference— want to have sex without condoms and,
sooner or later, most do.
Recently released reports from both the CDC
in Atlanta and the New York City Department of Health confirm that new
HIV infection rates are rising dramatically in certain key
demographics, particularly in young men (in their teens and twenties)
and men of color, both locally and nationally, even as overall rates
are in decline. And those numbers don’t take into account the infected
and at-risk individuals who aren’t getting tested or counseled. Additionally,
other sexually transmitted diseases, such as syphilis, which were once
almost wiped out are now on the rise again—a sign of risky behaviors.
The
safe-sex message was born at a time of crisis when HIV was a literal
death sentence. Since then, radical changes in disease treatment have
(hopefully and optimistically) turned HIV into a chronic, rather than
fatal, condition. An entire generation of sexually active young men now
exists that wasn’t even in existence when the crisis was at its peak.
Plus, legions of men who have practiced using condoms for most of their
lives are beginning to seriously wonder what they’ve been missing.
One
of the least-discussed developments is the fact that some men live a
lifestyle where they not only prefer, but insist upon, sex without
condoms. And now some of these “barebackers” have started calling
bareback sex “natural sex,” implying that it is the safe sexers who are
engaged in unnatural behavior by wearing condoms.
The only
response we have to these developments, however, is the same, tired
message: safe sex. The implied judgment of that message is that smart
people always use a condom and so those who choose not to, for whatever
reason, likely feel shame.
Dr. Daskalakis, who received specialized medical training on HIV in Boston, at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, before founding MSHP in 2006, concedes that shame is a big part of why it’s so difficult for us to talk about sex.
“I love working with commercial sex
venues, and would never say anything bad about them,” he says. “But why
do they exist? One reason is that people think it’s hot to have sex
with a lot of people in one place. The other reason I think, frankly,
is shame. I feel like the way that we push sex—gay sex in particular,
and unprotected gay sex especially—into this place of badness, whether
it’s pathologized because of HIV and STDs, or pathologized because of
some moral majority, I think what that automatically creates is shame
and the need to hide what you’re doing. I feel like shame is still a
major part of what is going on in the community.”
The shame
implied by the safe-sex message makes it difficult for HIV-positive
people to disclose their status or to talk openly and honestly about
their medical challenges.
Dr. Richard Greene, a frequent
volunteer with MSHP, tells of a med school student in his twenties who
called him after a sexual encounter with a man who revealed his
HIV-positive status afterward. The young student was shaken and wanted
Dr. Greene’s advice as to when or how or if to inquire about HIV in
regard to having sex. “And this is a med school student,” says Dr.
Greene. “How is the average guy supposed to know how to deal with
this?”
It’s 9 p.m. on a Friday, still relatively early by bathhouse
standards. Nevertheless, approximately five-dozen men—of various shapes
and sizes, skin color and ages (a good portion of whom appear to be in
their fifties and sixties)—draped only in towels, walk back and forth
in a never-ending, circuitous parade.
It’s a solemn ritual
whereby potential sexual partners scope each other out and express and
deflect interest by the subtlest of gestures: a quick nod, a knowing
glance, a grab of the crotch or briskly brushing up against one another.
MSHP,
an affiliation between Bellevue Hospital and the NYU School of
Medicine, under Dr. Daskalakis’ direction, provides free HIV and STD
testing inside this club and the West Side Club, the other remaining
gay bathhouse in New York City, on a rotating schedule. The
organization also recently offered HIV and STD testing inside the
annual Black Party, a well-attended, sexually charged circuit party
that takes place at Roseland Ballroom. It is a far more euphoric
setting than the West or East Side clubs.
“Working at the
Black Party was amazing,” Dr. Daskalakis tells me later, when I follow
up after the infamous bacchanal. “We tested higher than our capacity
given staffing and space, proving that HIV prevention should work with nightlife
and not against it.”
MSHP’s mission is to bring accurate information about HIV and STDs to sexually active men who have sex with men and to connect them with care. Dreyden, the porn star, discovered MSHP’s booth at the 2008 Gay Erotic Expo where, incidentally, he happened to be the poster boy for the event.
He
was so impressed that MSHP was offering testing and counseling where
sex was happening that he wanted to use his porn-star cachet to support
it in whatever way he could: He decided to promote HIV testing by
giving away porn instead of condoms. The collaboration may be the most
culturally significant thing to come out of a gay bathhouse since Bette
Midler and Barry Manilow played the Continental Baths.
Dreyden’s
mother was a Registered Medical Assistant who didn’t shy away from
frank, open discussions about sexuality with him and his sister while
they were growing up. He says he’s impressed by the range of services
available to HIV-positive people (he, himself, is HIV-negative), but he
thinks there is a lack of services available for people who aren’t sure
of their status and are afraid to get tested.
“Every time I
get tested, it freaks me the fuck out. I play safe. I know I’m OK,” he
explains. “But going in, filling out the paperwork, hearing about the
worst-case scenario; it freaks me out. I don’t think straight people
have to deal with anything quite like this.”
Dreyden is reacting to the need for a more nuanced message. The safe-sex message may have worked when the “penalty” was death, but it has proven less effective now.
Perhaps the lack of an evolved message can beblamed on eight years of flat funding for the National Institutes of Health under the Bush administration, making little money available for educational outreach, or the CDC funding only abstinencebased initiatives, rendering what little outreach was offered ineffective. Or accuse HIV medication advertising for minimizing the consequences of the disease.
Whatever the reason, the stakes for new infections have never been higher and, without a new message that addresses the reality of bareback sex, those rates are likely to continue to increase.
The culture of bareback sex is one of the most fascinating consequences of 25 years of the safe-sex message.
“What we suppress, expresses,” explains author, lecturer and sex educator Barbara Carrellas (www.urbantantra.org). She, like Dr. Daskalakis, was inspired to become a sex educator in response to the great loss of life and health in the original wave of the HIV epidemic. “If you study the course of what has been a fetish over time, you discover that the essential badness and kinkiness associated with something is an integral part of the fetish.”
“The bareback community,” explains Max Sohl, a NYC-based producer/director for Treasure Island Media, one of the first exclusively bareback porn production companies, “is defined by men who have made the decision to seek out ‘natural sex’ and are not afraid of it. This is different from men who are practicing safe sex but ‘slip up’ for one reason or another… or men who are barebacking with their partners but practicing safe sex with men outside their relationship.”
This important distinction is most evident in the world of gay, bareback porn. Few people consider “vintage,” or pre-condom porn (porn made before the HIV crisis, mostly in the 1970s and ’80s) bareback porn, even though the performers don’t use condoms. It isn’t the lack of condoms alone that makes porn, or sex for that matter, bareback. It is the conscious lack of con doms in the face of the safe-sex message that generates the essential “badness,” the excitement and the fetish.
“I believe,” continues Sohl, “that the labeling of ‘bareback’ porn is a creation of the gay community. What I do is document real men having real sex—that sex just happens to not involve the use of condoms. When I started working with Treasure Island in 2003, you couldn’t find a bareback video in any store in New York City.”
Sohl notes that adult
video stores now stock huge sections of the formerly illicit material.
“It went from being a taboo, underground, fetish genre with a niche
audience,” says Sohl, “To topping the gay DVD charts in sales and
rentals.”
It’s not just in porn, a random sampling of several
online sex hook-up sites (including Craigslist M4M personals)—filtered
for key words such “bareback,” “BB” and “raw”—turns up dozens of
listings. Few of them mention HIV status.
Even GAYVN (pronounced “Gay Vee Enn”), the industry magazine that covers gay porn and hosts one of the most highly visible porn awards ceremonies, has had to make concessions to bareback’s growing popularity. Up until very recently, the company had not acknowledged bareback porn or allowed any of the bareback movies to be nominated for awards. But a recent switch in management to a new editorial staff that believes its job is to document the trends in gay porn without moralizing and pressure from the advertising department to sell ad space to bareback companies has changed that.
“We have to contend with it,” says GAYVN
editor-in-chief Harker Jones. “Bareback porn is no longer a fad.” GAYVN
tried, in 2008, to create and implement a set of what they considered
responsible standards (such as mandatory STD testing) by which bareback
porn companies could become eligible for award nominations this year.
But the landscape became too difficult to navigate, and the venture was
abandoned.
Shame and fear of judgment is also what makes it difficult for HIV-negative people to ask their physicians serious questions about the risks of unprotected sex or for physicians to know how to properly respond.
Tyler,
an acquaintance of mine, revealed that he often engaged in sex without
condoms. His recollection of the conversations he would have with his
doctor, a physician with a large gay practice, prior to sero-converting
(becoming HIV-positive), are disturbing.
“He would ask me if I
was using condoms all the time, and I would say, ‘No,’ and he would
say, ‘Well, you should.’ And I would say, ‘I know, and that was that.”
The unfortunate result, then, is that most people only learn the real
consequences of sero-conversion after they have converted, and it’s too
late to make an informed choice.
Since sero-converting, Tyler
has become an avowed barebacker. He loves having sex without a condom.
He has performed in bareback porn, he escorts and only uses condoms at
the direct request of clients (he never offers), and he is currently in
an open relationship in which he and his boyfriend almost exclusively
insist on bareback sex with other men. They rarely disclose their
status (both positive) and are almost never asked. Tyler has also
maintained a healthy T-cell count, so it would appear the consequences
haven’t been so dire.
So, I asked him whether the “privilege” of being able to have all the bareback sex he wanted outweighed the disadvantages of having HIV. “No,” he said, “definitely not. It’s a booby prize. I’d rather have my health.”
“Doctors think they know that people with HIV are going to live,
hopefully, happier, healthier, longer lives, with maybe with a few
extra pitfalls along the way,” says Dr. Daskalakis, “but that’s based
on conjecture. We haven’t yet had a generation of people with HIV
living full, average life expectancies. Serious medical complications
are likely to develop, and side effects from the meds can be severe and
debilitating in their own right. Even under the best of circumstances,
an HIV diagnosis means that you are likely to have to see a doctor
regularly for the rest of your life and all that entails.”
Shame
often compels people to act in secret. Later at the West Side Club, I
spoke with Chris, another MSHP test client. He is an unassuming guy in
his early thirties with a wholesome, Broadway chorus boy look about
him. He’s supposedly been in a monogamous relationship for four years
but has repeatedly had bareback sex outside of the relationship.
Although he has recently come clean to his boyfriend about the sex—and
has entered a 12-step program for sexual compulsion—he hasn’t been able
to admit to his partner that the sex he had prior was not safe. “I’m
afraid of his reaction. I mean, I put his life at risk.”
Shame also drives some people to lie. Keith sero-converted in what he understood to be a monogamous relationship and, to this day, his ex-boyfriend claims to be HIV negative. Keith did have sex with a few other men toward the end of his relationship, so he admits he might have been exposed then, but what little sex he had outside of the relationship was safe. He only barebacked with his boyfriend. “I remember once seeing what I thought was an STD on him, but he denied it. I mean where would it have come from? We were monogamous. Sometimes I wonder.” Keith has gone to the other end of the spectrum and now insists on disclosure and wearing condoms. “But I see guys online on hook-up sites all the time,” he says, “who list themselves as HIV negative when I know for a fact that they are HIV positive because we’ve disclosed to each other and had sex. For a fact.”
It appears people simply aren’t getting and sharing the information they need to make informed choices about their lives and their health. Knowing your HIV status is only the first step.
“Make no assumptions about anything,” says Carrellas. “Do not assume
that people hold the same values as you or even define something in the
same way you do. Not even monogamy. People can have vastly different
interpretations.”
Carrellas proposes a model along the lines
of safe, sane, consensual, risk-aware sex in place of the safe-sex
message. “It’s a model from the kink world,” she explains, “whereby
someone can say I am aware of certain risks and I am willing to play
with this much risk, but not that much risk. Gay men were the sexual
adventurers of the 20th century, and they had some great skills prior
to HIV. Negotiation was one of them. You really had to know how to
negotiate back then if you wanted to play with the leather boys. You
had to be able to name your desires, set your limits and to talk about
it. We could use a return to some of those truly queer roots.”
Carrellas
is talking about honest, genuine sexual negotiation. “We may not all be
able to agree on how safe we want to be collectively,” she says. “But
if we can’t agree on being safe, sane and consensual with the people we
are playing with, we’re in real trouble.”
It’s the minimum we
should expect. Everyone is entitled to make informed choices about
their lives and take the associated risks they are comfortable with in
their own pursuit of happiness. And we’re not simply talking about the
health risks that HIV-negative people assume in the absence of
negotiation.
HIV-positive people also assume great
psychological risk when they lie or misrepresent themselves to
potential sexual partners. It’s bad enough when people make decisions
without being adequately informed or aware of the degree of risk they
are assuming. But when the best available public message about that
risk is not strong enough to overcome the attraction of the behavior
and, worse, actually generates the sorts of feelings and behaviors that
keep accurate information underground, it’s a genuine tragedy.
One
of Dr. Daskalakis’ goals with MSHP is to facilitate dialogue among and
between men who have sex with men who are not necessarily socially
connected and to integrate those men into the larger community.
“It’s
always the ‘dirty dog’ that goes to the bathhouses and causes a
problem,” says Dr. Daskalakis. “But that dirty dog is often married and
has children. The complexity of this is so great that anything we can
do to bring it into the light, anything, we should.”
That
brings me back to where I started, the middle of the East Side Club on
a Friday night, talking to Rubin. He’s stepped away to get his results
and his free porn sampler and to ask whatever questions he has of Dr.
Daskalakis and his staff. It’s a good 20 minutes before he learns his
the result. He’s negative.
Rubin recedes back into the dim
hallway and takes his place in the ritual dance surrounding us—one more
anonymous face.
What he does with this new information is up to him. As
it should be.
Seth Michael Donsky is a NYC-based filmmaker, fiction writer and journalist. www.SethMichaelDonsky.com
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