From AIDS to COVID-19: negotiating viruses and sex

Despite Florêncio’s (2020) argument that barebackers may have decoupled their sex from the spectre of AIDS or HIV risk thanks to new prevention and treatment methods, AIDS and HIV remain central to many discussions in the forum under analysis. Some users discuss how to prevent HIV infection by means of serosorting (i.e. selecting partners based on perceived HIV status), seropositioning (i.e. choosing sexual positions—e.g. ‘top’ or ‘bottom’—based on perceived risk of HIV transmission) or other risk-reduction techniques. Others focus on the reduced risk of HIV thanks to PrEP, PEP and undetectability. In one of the largest threads dealing with both viruses, a senior user shares screenshots from a Twitter account of a man who gloats about having had sex without condoms (barebacking) with multiple partners while in isolation for COVID-19. The Twitter user later reveals that he has been hospitalised for COVID-19 complications. The forum user titles his thread ‘Don’t be a Covidiot’ (a portmanteau between COVID and idiot) and comments:

“So the guy is under ‘lockdown’ (a stay-at-home order), and he’s still hooking up – and proud enough of it to post it on Twitter. […] 4 days after the first hookup, he posts a video of another hookup.… […] 3 days after the 2nd hookup he posts pics and videos from yet another hookup… […] 3 hookups later he’s in the hospital with COVID-19.”

The title and comments by the user anticipate the negative responses that the post receives, with many other users shaming and condemning what they see as recklessness. One user replies:

“What an idiot. I survived the 80’s crisis with HIV when so many of my friends died. 13 funerals in 1 year and I’m not looking for a repeat of that time. I don’t know how old this asshole is and maybe he didn’t live through that time but that’s no excuse for not being aware and putting not only himself at risk but others. And I want to point out his playmates are just as irresponsible as he is.”

Even if we do not know his age, this user demonstrates having lived through the AIDS crisis and employs his seeming experiences with health and illness during the height of the AIDS crisis as a tool to appraise and respond to someone else’s sexual practices during COVID-19. Deploying an experiential divide between those who lived through the AIDS crisis and those who did not, he suggests that both groups should be held equally responsible for their actions. He laments the risk to which the Twitter user subjects others and calls both the individual and his ‘fuck buddies’ ‘irresponsible’. These feelings are shared by many others on the forum who reply in similar terms and reinforce the idea of ‘irresponsibility’, returning to their experiences of the AIDS crisis as a comparator:

“I see a lot of irresponsible folks here

Stupid is as stupid does. I made it through the whole AIDs crisis. Not necessarily by ‘safe sex’ but by thought out sex with the least risks, and it worked.”

As much as many users draw on their experience of the AIDS crisis as a comparator, they also refuse to establish too close a similarity between both experiences:

“People, seriously, be responsible! Hospitals are over capacity. People are dying. There’s no cure. There isn’t even a decent treatment. Even in the middle of the AIDS crisis hospitals could manage their core caseloads. This is a whole other order of magnitude above that pandemic.

This [COVID-19] is different since the virus is spread just by being near each other before any physical contact is made. So my big ‘ol ass will be cherry again when this is over and will be available for an Alpha Top to pop!”

These two users share their lived experience of the AIDS crisis but do so to claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is different in quality (e.g. routes of transmission, treatment and cure) and quantity (e.g. number of cases). In doing so, they emphasise that their past experience of the AIDS crisis renders them as ‘voices of experience’ but, at the same time, argue that the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic is drastically different from the AIDS crisis as they remember it. Even if these are not entirely accurate statements (hospitals, e.g. did refuse treating patients during the AIDS crisis; see, e.g. France, 2017), these feelings are shared widely among the users who contribute to the forum.

However, not all posts in the forum are based on the AIDS crisis. Because of the seeming varied ages and lived experiences of the forum users, conversations move fluidly between talking about COVID-19 in relation to the height of the AIDS crisis and to the current context of HIV (as a manageable chronic condition preventable through biomedical interventions, such as PrEP, PEP and TasP). The very nature of the platform allows all users to add comments, which generates a complex conversation that may jump from the memories of AIDS to HIV today. Thus, there are also plenty of users who compare COVID-19 to a more contemporary framework of HIV. One such user narrates a recent encounter he had on Grindr, a popular gay dating and hook-up app, and explains that the following conversation took place:

“I asked the guy: ‘So…what’s your status? Have you been tested?’ ‘Yeah, man – I’m poz but undetectable.’ ‘No! I’m asking if you have coronavirus. Who cares if you’re poz right now?’”

In this recalled exchange, the user mobilises language that is frequently associated with HIV today (e.g. ‘status’ and ‘tested’) to, then, almost humorously break our expectations by showing how it is COVID-19 to which this language refers. In so doing, he shows how, for him, concerns about HIV in 2020 have been displaced from the pre-sex negotiations. This is further emphasised by the phrase: ‘who cares if you’re poz right now?’ The user shows how ‘undetectability’, and the push towards heightened public awareness of the ‘undetectable equals untransmittable’ (U = U) slogan, has rendered the risk of HIV negligible for him. However, this user also exemplifies how concern about COVID-19 has taken a pre-eminent place in sexual negotiations. In his anecdote, risk negotiation no longer only concerns HIV but also, and perhaps even more pressingly, COVID-19.

As explained above, the users of these posts recall both experiences of the AIDS crisis and the current context of HIV as a framework that helps them to interpret the COVID-19 context while also drawing out differences between the pandemics. Users emphasise that COVID-19 is ‘something different’ that requires a new set of prevention techniques and approaches. If these users establish HIV and COVID-19 as different (in relation to their sexual practices), the question turns to how this difference is experienced.

‘Being legs up in a bathhouse’: negotiating subcultural practices

Amidst negotiation of the similarities and differences between COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS pandemics, users’ discussions of intervention strategies are entangled within larger frameworks of barebackers’ subcultural practices. On the one hand, they engage in conversations about what behaviours are permissible. On the other hand, they consider to what extent these subcultural sexual practices can be continued while maintaining a sense of shared community and interaction. In this way, they provide discourses of preferred or ‘responsible’ behaviour, which might impede COVID-19 transmission and preserve the possibility(ies) of their sexual subculture. Some users suggest:

“Avoiding big crowds is important – so no busy bars, ride a bike not the subway, do 1-on-1 hookups rather than a sex party, and so on. Also, learn to wash your hands frequently after being in public.

It’s gonna be a long time (probably years) before we’re back to where we were before with big sex parties.”

Users such as these suggest modifying their practices in a way that minimises risk (‘do 1-on-1 hookups rather than a sex party’) yet also serve to continue barebacking sexual practices. However, the second user seems to imply, these modified practices may be somewhat unsatisfactory, as he longs for practices, such as sex parties, which are deferred to an uncertain future.

The impact of their ‘responsible’ behaviour is presented in forum discussions of the future of bathhouses. Bathhouses are commercial venues where gay men engage in sexual activity, frequently in groups or in open areas (see Chauncey, 1994, 207–225). Bathhouses play a key role in the barebacking community, not least because they are a key element in its early history and are seen as ‘safe spaces’ for barebackers (Chauncey, 1994; Delany, 1999; Woods & Binson, 2003). To this date, they remain a space where condomless anal intercourse is normalised (Dean, 2009). Bathhouses are a key concern of forum users, who frequently share advice on what venues are better, tips on visiting them or experiences they have had in them.

In the forum, bathhouses remain at the forefront of discussions about the survival of barebackers’ subcultural sexual practices, as evidenced by multiple users who open discussions about the future of bathhouses. Some discuss this in terms of the commercial viability of these spaces:

“Not only will bathhouses be strained on their margins by a percentage of their patrons opting to stay away, this will present a golden – if not irresistible – opportunity for moralistic elements to move to have them closed down by authorities as a menace to public health.

I’m sure this will be the final blow to a lot of bathhouses. Many of them barely hanging on the last few years. Can you imagine what their insurance premiums will be like if they can even get liability insurance?”

At the same time, others focus on the survival of the very social communities that existed within these spaces. For example, one of the most popular users (meaning a user who frequently posts and is respected by other users) suggests further ways to modify practices while also commenting on how ‘ideal’ barebacking may not happen until a distant future:

“Even when the stay-at-home orders are lifted people will still need to be vigilant to avoid another peak of the pandemic. You’ll need to focus on risk reduction – fewer partners, 1-on-1s, maybe sex in parks, maybe gloryholes. But being legs up in a bathhouse taking all loads isn’t going to happen again until there’s at least a decent treatment. If for no other reason, that sensible gay guys are gonna stay away.”

This user projects an ideal situation (‘being legs up in a bathhouses’) which is deferred ‘until there is at least a decent treatment’. Within this uncertainty, the user suggests that ‘sensible gay guys’ will stay away to observe risk-reduction practices. It is worth noting how the use of the phrase ‘risk reduction’ in this post confirms how discourses, experiences and memories of HIV and AIDS have influenced these men’s understanding of risk and COVID-19.

Neither the calls for responsibility nor the risk-reduction suggestions are particularly different from those enacted by mainstream media. As one of the users above mentioned, ‘avoiding big crowds is important – so no busy bars, ride a bike not the subway, do 1-on-1 hookups rather than a sex party.’ Thus, the discussion of barebacking is linked to that of other activities, such as exercising, bars and riding the subway. This connection between bathhouses, barebackers and larger, more mainstream, public health discourses is at the heart of the forum. For example, one user comments in the thread about bathhouses:

“This is the first time in history where to save humanity we just need to stay at home.”

Through this post, the user incorporates a sense of a shared responsibility to ‘just stay home.’ Though the assertion ‘just stay home’ is not, in fact, specific to the COVID-19 pandemic—the idea stemming from the concept of quarantine which was first notably deployed during a 17th-century bubonic plague outbreak (Snowden, 2019, 30)—it does provide a telling link to mainstream perceptions of disease intervention: particularly, the desire to interrupt transmission through the sequestration of infected bodies. In highlighting that the responsible thing is to ‘just’ stay at home, this view colludes with nationalistic rhetorics popularised through social media, for instance, the Italian message: ‘Ricordiamoci che ai nostri nonni fu ordinato di andare in guerra, a noi stanno chiedendo di stare sul divano’ (‘Let us remember that our grandparents were ordered to go to war, we are being asked to stay on the sofa’). Thus, forum discussions sometimes transition from discourses specific to barebackers to those about the society at large.

Barebackers themselves, a group that has historically been framed as hedonistic for their search of pleasure and attitude to HIV (even today, when barebacking can be practised without risk of HIV thanks to new prophylactics), discuss individual and social responsibility both at the subcultural and societal level. In encouraging others to maintain socially distancing practices, they complicate perceptions that barebackers are simply reckless. Rather, these users actively negotiate the terms and conditions that will enable the maintenance of their sexual cultures and well-being within and along their larger societies.

As shown in the excerpts above, forum discussions fluidly move between users who recall vivid memories from the AIDS crisis and those who frame their views in more contemporary times where HIV is a chronic condition. Overall, the users of this barebacking forum evidence a complex negotiation between the desire for sexual pleasure and the responsibility to reduce risks and protect others. This is revealed in many posts:

“The question is for me: will anyone avoid random sex especially saunas, cruising bars, boom stores, etc. even 1:1 hook ups?

Stay at home, if you must, only have 1-2-1 sex and avoid groups and saunas at all costs. Maybe try getting a couple regulars, as opposed to randoms.

I guess handcuffs would keep me from touching my face, but as a cocksucker, I’m a little confused as to whether I should wash my hands before or after swallowing a load. The same with rimming – should you wash your hands before licking out a hole?”

These users describe difficulty balancing desires between sexual pleasure and risk reduction, but they do so using language that draws upon complex histories of health intervention and with surprising nuance in their adaptations. The humorous tone of the third post is particularly poignant, pointing out the need for greater clarification of what extent the community should consider particular practices are safe or risky, and whether they can find avenues for engagement by collectively considering modes of risk reduction and personal hygiene.

Given this discussion, COVID-19 provides an opportunity to think about the diversity of risks associated with their sexual encounters. While HIV remains a significant risk for some barebackers, though not for others, it poses an altogether different risk to COVID-19. Users consider the body in their discussion of washing hands and using ‘barrier’ methods (e.g. condoms and glory holes), which demands attention to not simply the transmission of sexual fluids but all bodily fluids. That explicit negotiation of HIV risk is subsumed within these larger discussions of personal and community safety in times of COVID-19 is not surprising given the current options for prevention and treatment of it. Rather, this group adds to their repertoire of risk negotiation the various layers of transmission from two viruses which ultimately pose a problem for social cohesion and subcultural practice.

The users of this forum evidence a careful and complex negotiation of pleasure and prevention, desire and responsibility in the face of COVID-19. The new reality of COVID-19 forces these men to juxtapose pleasure and prevention in their posts, with the outcome of discussing multiple modes of intervention and prevention under the banner of ‘responsibility’. As such, these barebackers are not simply focused on a dichotomy between pleasure and prevention. Rather, in processes the multiplicity of risk and infection, they articulate pleasure and prevention as the praxis that allows them to build dynamic bareback communities (Heaphy, 2018).

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