I’m into some pretty disgusting stuff. At least once a day, the thought passes through my mind how lucky I am to be alive now, in a time when I can enjoy the things I enjoy without debilitating, immobilizing fear. My forebears fought for this. Countless lobbyists, antagonists, and grassroots activists fought so that I could be a filthy slut and experience the beauty and liberation of sex without the threat of death in every encounter.
I love bareback sex. Many queer men reading this do too. It feels better – more intimate, more erotic, more natural. All the finger wagging from doctors and bowls of free condoms on coffee tables won’t change the fact that many (most) gay men prefer bare sex. All the slut-shaming and moralizing denouncements of our sexual behavior – like Patrick William Kelly’s op-ed in the The New York Times this week – won’t change that fact.
The op-ed, titled “The End of Safe Gay Sex?”, takes aim at PrEP, the pill with a 99 percent effective rate of preventing HIV when taken daily by HIV-negative people. Like various anti-science arguments before it, Kelly blames PrEP for decreased condom use among men who have sex with men and, by extension, our increasing rates of sexually transmitted infections like syphilis.
“Although public health advocates have been sounding the alarm on condom use for the last decade, their calls have gone largely unheeded. Part of that is because of a shift in how we talk about risky sex: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has replaced ‘unprotected’ with ‘condomless’ sex. The dangerous implication is that PrEP alone may ward off all sexually transmitted infections.”