Porn - Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think With Kink (13 page)

Tim Dean, in his provocative book-length study
Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking
, remarks that the bareback porn is shot in a manner closer to documentary realism than the more theatrical and stylized productions of mainstream porn. Dean finds that bareback porn is more likely to reveal the presence of another camera in bareback porn, whereas mainstream productions tend to minimize intrusions that foreground the constructedness of the scenario. In Dean’s reasoning, the unpretentious style of filming, including shots of another camera and similar “mistakes,” foregrounds the spectator’s status as witness to an actual event. The viewer is thus implicated in the intimate exchange taking place on the screen. In dispensing with props, plot lines, musical accompaniment, and sophisticated editorial flourishes, the bareback porn emphasizes the fucking as a real-life event to be witnessed. While I would temper Dean’s reading of the standard bareback scene as “documentary realist” by suggesting that even these signifiers of “authenticity” and “realness” are, to some degree, performative in nature, containing an element of less recognizable theatricality, he makes a legitimate distinction between the tone of bareback scenes and that of mainstream gay porn.

Rehearsed dialogue in the bareback video is also practically non-existent; we often begin the sex scenes
in medias res
. Verbal exchanges are typically monosyllabic and sparse. What is striking about bareback scenes is the intensity of eye contact often involved among performers.While not much is uttered in a typical scene, visual contact is palpable.The scenes, which end in single or multiple ejaculations into the submissive performer/ performers, often witness the bottom partner thanking the dominant one for the “gift” he has given or the “seed” he has scattered. After ejaculation, the top often either digitally or orally extracts the semen as visible proof of the fluid transmission. Overall, the scenes come across as heavily ritualistic, often reverent, with an air of religiosity.

Bareback porn frequently employs a more diversified profile of actors. We have a wider range of ages among the performers; often a middle-aged man will be paired with one in his late teens or early twenties. Mainstream gay porn tends to value very young performers (so-called “twinks,” who are usually between 18 and 22 and have idealized fit, slightly muscular bodies); when mainstream porn does employ older actors, there is usually an explicit “daddy” theme in the film. In addition to including a wide range of ages, much bareback porn contains a racially diverse cast of characters,
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and the body types of the actors are much more varied than the hyper-body-conscious mainstream porn product.

One often-employed format of the bareback video consists of one bottom, in essence the “star” of the production, who takes the semen of multiple partners over a period of time. Whereas mainstream gay porn, when it features an orgy scene, usually has several tops and several bottoms who may or may not switch positions (known as “versatile” performing), bareback porn is more likely to take the form of a gangbang, where one bottom functions for the pleasure of many tops. In an extreme version of this format, we have the title
Dawson’s 50-Load Weekend
, which is not an exaggeration, but a visual document of 50 different ejaculations, with the performer Dawson as a bottom in all of these acts. Sometimes, the number of fluid transmissions is used in the title, or a tally is kept within the filming itself (for instance, the performer, once he has ejaculated, may make a hash mark with a marker on the back or ass of the bottom, and these hash marks are tallied at the end of the performance).

In introducing a new star and a new release from Treasure Island Media, Paul Morris describes the process by which he procured his newest “ingénue” bottom. He writes:

Ian Jay, a smooth and boyish 20-year-old, isn’t my usual kind of obsession. . . . [B]ut he wrote to me and told me he was ready to take a big step: he wanted to be irrevocably bred. I knew what he meant, and I took him at his word. So I flew him to San Francisco and put him through a deep-boning weekend that would do the job. Before he came to me, he’d been dabbling in raw sex, but he was still naïve. By the time the weekend was over, his hole was fuckin’ insatiable, ready and willing and available to any man.

Because Morris cannot explicitly announce his intention to get his “star” infected, he uses the above oblique language to make it clear to an audience who is “in the know.” Clearly, the “big step” that Ian envisions is his sero-conversion. The next sentence is interesting in its implications: “I knew what he meant, and I took him at his word.” Obviously, knowing “what he meant” indicates Morris’s recognition that infection is what Jay desires; the clause “I took him at his word” seems to indicate that Morris felt no need to examine his request in depth, in terms of his motivations or desires. His declaration, as far as Morris is concerned, is simply an admission of consent to the orgy, where sero-conversion might take place, an exhortation to “do the job.”

Tim Dean makes a valuable observation concerning the prominence of the bareback gangbang scenario in gay porn that has both an aesthetic and a practical dimension. Scenes like these clearly depict a common sexual fantasy of many gay men – that of submitting to and being dominated by a group of men.Thus, the gangbang scenario offers a vicarious satisfaction of the multiple-top fantasy. However, the presence of multiple tops has a strategic element as well. If a bottom does in fact seroconvert as a result of being fucked in a bareback video, the top – provided it is a one-on-one scene – can be charged with manslaughter in many states, and the recorded act constitutes the proof. However, if a bottom sero-converts as a result of a multiple-top orgy, it becomes much more difficult to prosecute, given the various permutations of sex partners.

Cultural Responses to the Bareback Video

Obviously, this subcultural practice, as well as its enactment in this sub-genre of porn, has come under vicious attack from AIDS activists, public health officials, and many other cultural and political groups. It has been discussed heatedly among medical practitioners, gay outreach organizations such as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and by journalists in both gay-centered and more mainstream media outlets. In 1997 the gay and lesbian publication
The Advocate
included a feature about the unwelcome resurgence of unprotected sex in gay culture.
POZ
magazine, a publication dedicated to HIV-positive issues, published a feature in 1999 as well; however, it was not as much a condemnation of the practice as it was an exoticizing take on a new fad. In 2001 the issue of barebacking came to greater public prominence when
Rolling Stone
magazine chose to run a feature profiling two out-and-proud barebackers.

Reaction to the publicization of condomless sex has been predictably vitriolic. To many, its emergence signifies a kind of cultural amnesia around the issue of AIDS or a naïve or delusional complacency regarding the status of AIDS as a manageable illness, given the pharmaceutical advances (the drug cocktails, etc.) over the last few years. Still others blame the outbreak of publicized barebacking on the always popular notion that gay men act in self-destructive ways that are rooted in internalized homophobia and self-loathing. I should make the distinction here that condomless sex has, without a doubt, been a practice before AIDS, at the onset of AIDS, and ever since. I do not intend to demarcate a particular cultural moment where this particular activity came into being; I am, rather, interested in tracing the emergence of a discourse around barebacking and the accretion of cultural meanings around the term as it began to be deployed by the subculture itself, which of course was formed by the very naming of the act, and by those in opposition to the subculture. Primarily, my interest lies in how, why, and at what cost the subculture founds its expression in the production of condomless video.

The Language of the Bareback Experience

It is not surprising that the bareback video has become so successful, given its online “grassroots” origins. It is on the web that people have met, organized, and produced a formidable virtual community, with hundreds of chat rooms and websites (like bareback.com and barebackrt.com) dedicated exclusively to barebackers (or online browsers who claim their identity as a barebacker). A new vocabulary has surfaced on the web to describe the multifarious identities, desires, motives, and activities of the subculture. HIV-positive individuals looking for sex with one another use monikers like Poz4Poz; likewise, users who identify as negative use names like Neg4Neg. Perhaps the more disturbing appellations involve those who are looking to be infected or to infect someone else. The name “bug-chasers” has been adopted by those looking to sero-convert, while users intent on spreading the virus frequently call themselves “gift-givers.” Solicitations of fluid exchange and viral transmission have taken on a rhetoric strikingly similar to that of the Aryan brotherhood. Users looking to “spread the power” and finding “brothers to unite” abound in online personal ads. Condom use is explicitly stigmatized in these online environments; those advocating safer sex are repeatedly labeled “latex police” or “condom Nazis.”

Other operative metaphors show a co-opting of the language of heterosexual reproduction; exhortations to “knock me up,” “give me your seed,” or “breed me” liken viral reproduction to human reproduction. Other parlance reveals a less veiled relation to aggression, danger, and death; users looking for “poison cum,” a “lethal load,” or the “hot virus” foreground the perils and risks involved in unprotected anal sex. Many online are seeking a mythic moment they call the “Fuck of Death,” where they rhetorically ritualize a hoped for sero-conversion experience.

Before trying to account for the ways in which the bareback video as a cultural form might be compelling and desirable for some queer audiences, I would like to summarize a few of public intellectual Michelangelo Signorile’s astute observations about why barebacking and the infection rate among gay men particularly has reached such a critical mass at this cultural moment. He cites the “glamorization” of barebacking and its portrayal as an outlaw sexual fad, the sense of entitlement among gays to have the most pleasure in sex possible, the ads for protease inhibitors which portray buff, sexy, and healthy-looking men with AIDS, the often-heard yet dubious claim that “AIDS is over,” young gay men’s lack of firsthand experience with AIDS-related deaths, and the already transgressive nature of gay men’s sexuality as factors contributing to the popularity of unsafe sex. I would suggest that these are also substantial reasons for the continued marketability of bareback video.

Plenitude and the Death Drive in Bareback Porn

Undoubtedly, Signorile’s explanations for this sea-change in attitudes and sexual practices ring true. In closing, I would like to propose some more psychically oriented descriptions of the pleasures intrinsic to the practice of unsafe sex and the visual representation of it.The AIDS crisis brought about unfathomable loss in gay culture and in American culture in general. Not only has it heralded the deaths of millions and the challenging illnesses of many more to come; it has brought other forms of devastation. Accompanying those material, bodily consequences are countless manifestations of loss that are less tangible.The ongoing association of gay sex with impending peril has generated a profound loss of perceived intimacy among gay men. What many perceive to be the consummation of gay sex – the exchange of semen – has been associated with the most reckless form of human endangerment.

Bareback porn producer and owner of Treasure Island Media Paul Morris emphasizes the importance of fluid exchange in the sex act as the ultimate guarantor of intimacy; he laments the presence of condoms in mainstream gay video. He argues, “Condoms in this context – a context of stylized and commercially driven political correctness – actually say little about safe sex or personal responsibility.They become instead the final sign for the absolute unavailability to the viewer of the communion and connection that the entire well-practiced language of the video had promised.”
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Freud’s insights into the psychic registering of loss and the desire for the lost object become valuably descriptive here of the desires evoked (but never, of course, fulfilled) by bareback video. I would argue that semen operates as the fundamental lost object in post-AIDS gay male sexuality. It becomes, in essence, the mother’s milk that, once denied to the child, shatters a sense of original plenitude and belonging. The exchange of what I term “brothers’ milk” signifies a fantasy of restored intimacy, of essential sharing of the self with another. Just as the advent of AIDS installed a radical sense of alienation and displacement in the gay psyche, the condom becomes a barrier to this intimacy, a place where feelings of separation and radical incompletion are cathected. Bareback video provides a fantasy space in which viewers can access an image of fullness and completion, however vicarious or metaphorical.The nature of desire, after all, is its inability to be fulfilled; the condomless video becomes a dream screen whereby desire is glimpsed and renewed.

Finally, the bareback video is a potent condensation of the struggle between eros and thanatos. AIDS has forced gay men to confront the inextricably entwined notions of sexuality and mortality. Freud has argued that the death drive permeates, even constitutes, sexual impulse, and that no attempt to dispel aggression from the psyche or from sexual relations is possible. The visual representation of imperiling sex makes visceral, explicit, and palpable the many shifting feelings of aggression, anger, frustration, intimacy, attachment, and identification that infiltrate gay eroticism, particularly since the onset of AIDS. Survivor guilt, the need to blame and scapegoat, the need to annihilate vengefully, to be annihilated psychically – all of these motives oppose themselves violently to the also-present instincts of self-rebuilding, of moving forward, of forging meaningful and loving relationships. This struggle between hostility and affection, between estrangement and reunion, is animated by the spectacle of unsafe sex.