Barebacking and Other Gay Issues

I was just checking out the other Blogs today and came across this one on Jason Curious’s blog and it was getting a little heated. I was going to post a comment there but it turned in to this long dissertation so I thought that I would just make it a post on my Blog. The subject was about the sudden upswing in bareback porn and its effect on the industry and the young gay men of today.With companies Like Hot Desert Knights, Eurocreme, Cobra Video and Treasure Island Media to name a few producing this product and their sales climbing because of it, will this be the new trend in gay porn?. There are a few things I Have to say to start this off when I first started looking at Gay Porn it was all bareback. The whole Aids crisis had not yet begun. The boys were young and hot and the sex was wild and uninhibited. But that started to change in the early 80’s when a few models started to get sick. Then more were getting sick and dying and I’m talking fast. Some people got sick and were dead in a few months. No one knew what it was but it was bad whatever it was. The gay community went into a literal panic. People were scared to touch each other or even drink from the same glass. There was a period that if you did not see someone for a couple of weeks you assumed they were dead. I’m not being over dramatic here I am just stating the truth as to what I experienced. So I made a conscience decision to learn as much about what was going on as possible. During this period I watched hundreds of young men die from this dreaded disease. It was hard and it was tragic. One week in 1988 I went to 10 different memorial services. And one was for 4 guys who were all friends who died in the same week. So I think I have a really good idea of the affects and the effects of AIDS. I knew a few Gay porn stars Jon King, Lance Chisolm, Ron Pearson and Mike Henson and they are all gone now and the all died from aids or was HIV Positive when they died. And they all preformed in bareback Porn the common denominator here. And now we are watching all these companies who are shooting bareback porn again.

The big question you should ask is what precautions are they taking to protect their models? Are they taking any at all? Is the draw to perform in bareback porn the lure of the money? And now we are having a few of the current gay porn performers coming out and saying that they have contracted the virus. This is a serious problem and one that should not be taken lightly. I am not saying that these models contracted the virus on a movie set because they do have sex outside of the videos that they film but it is going to directly impact the porn industry again just like it did 20 years ago. This is a really good debate and it is something we all should rethink. I have been through the gay pandemic and came out the other end still negative. But during the late 80’s and the early 90’s I lost a great number of close friends and acquaintances to AIDS.
It was Hard at the time and It still is today as well. The recent amount of Bareback companies popping up has me a little worried to say the least. I mean Jason is correct when he says that the education system is lacking on the subject. He is also right when he says it is a personal choice. So the mission of the older generation of gay men is to help get the message across to the younger generation and to help them make an educated choice. There is one problem with that statement though and it is the previous generation: mine that took the biggest hit from AIDS and HIV and of the many hundreds of thousands of men and woman who have succumbed to the disease are not here to tell there stories.
That leaves a few of us to impart our knowledge of the effects of AIDS and HIV. I am all for personal choice and freedoms but you have to be educated on your choices. I will not say that I have never had unprotected sex because that would be a lie. But I am saying that when I did it was an educated choice. I read about how the virus is transmitted and I was there at the beginning of it.. I choose to not get fucked by just anyone but only by people who I had some faith and trust in and was in a relationship with. And if I did choose to have sex with someone who I was not to sure of a condom was used. There is still risk in having anal sex with a condom. The use of a condom is at best is only 65% safer than receptive anal sex without one. So you see there is still a 35% risk involved anyway. There is also a risk of contracting the virus through oral sex. It is much smaller but if you have any cuts in your mouth and you suck some one off there is a greater risk. The virus hides in body fluids semen, vaginal fluids, and the blood stream. It has been known to be present in saliva. If you are healthy the virus is harder to contract. But if you use drugs and or alcohol they lower you immune systems ability to fight off the virus and they lower your inhibitions to make a conscious decision about who with, how and where you have sex. They also affect whether you use appropriate protection. In truth the only way to remain sure that you will not contract the virus is to remain abstinent. But that is not a viable solution for most people. So you take the risk and go out and have sex anyway. Life is filled with a lot of choices and tough decisions and to use a condom is really not a hard one to make if you want to live a healthy long life. HIV is no longer the death sentence it once was but it is a life altering one nonetheless. I have some friends who have been positive for 20 plus years and are still healthy but they know that it could change at any moment. Some have had serious setbacks and were literally swirling around the drain so to speak and the meds kicked in. So you can make an educated choice to not use a condom but you must be well aware of the possible ramifications of your decision. This is where the education system has failed us. They just say unprotected sex = death, not that you can live with HIV. What they should show the young people of today is how it will affect them and what is required to try to stay healthy once you have contracted the virus. This subject is not cut and dry by any stretch of the imagination but it is something we must deal with in an informed manner. Sorry this was so long but it's a really important subject. As for the porn industry they should not be looked upon for their stand for or against bare backing because to them it is really all about your dollars. Bare backing in gay porn was the norm until a few studios took a stand against it and they did this because the models were all dying. As I mentioned before I knew quite a few of the models from the late 80’ early 90’s and most of them are dead now. It is really a sad commentary to see that we have come full circle with a new generation of young men who really have no older generation to look up to and to help guide them through the tough period called youth. I was one of the lucky ones to survive the pandemic and I will try to impart my knowledge on the next generation. I was also lucky enough to have the experience of learning the ropes on how to deal in the New World of being gay from the experienced men who came before me. And a New World it was, filled with the excitement of new encounters with new men and sex. The gay community was a community then and it still is but society has changed in such a way that we are now not confined to the gay ghettos. Gay people live their lives out and proud anywhere they want to now. There are still the risks of hate crimes but we are not isolated as we once were. This is where we have the big problem. We are not as centralized and we don’t have the programs that we once had because of the de-funding by the government of such projects. The current political atmosphere is fighting world terror and the rest of the country is under siege by the rightwing conservatives who are spouting phrases from the bible of our damnation and that AIDS is Gods will. We need to regroup as a community and start to provide more out reach programs for at risk gay youth. These kids are coming out much earlier and they are being raised by parents who may still love their gay child but are ill equipped to deal with the realities of the fact that there child is gay. I have many straight friends who have sons and daughters who are now at the age where they are becoming sexually active and the parents are freaked out. They want to believe that their children will be like they were and not have sex until they are much older say late teens early twenties but the facts are their kids are having sex as early as 12 in some cases and the parents are clueless. I have been available to these kids as a kind of a mentor, because most of their parents just can’t handle the facts that their baby’s grow up. The parents know what’s going on because the kids know if something serious comes up and they are scared to tell there parents they can tell me and we can all talk about it together with their parents. I have one friend who has a son who is 16 and we were in the garage working on putting in some shelving. I said to her "Did Costco have a sale Kleenex" and she said that her son has allergies and goes through a box a week. I looked at her and said, "since when does josh have allergies?" and her response was "since he turned 13". Needles to say I lost it and her response was "what’s so funny?" I looked at her and said "you really don’t have a clue do you?" and she was "about what?" I said "Josh doesn’t have allergies and it’s not his nose that’s running." She was like "well what is it then?" and I gave her a look of mock disgust and she finally got it. Then she said "eww I just cleaned his room and there were Kleenex everywhere". We had a good laugh and when Josh came home I told him about it and we both had a good laugh too. This is just an example of how naïve parents are about the sex lives of their children. So we really need to give the young gay community some guidance and help in navigating the waters of there new found sexuality. Brent Corrigan had a post on his Blog in the ask Brent section where he tells how he got involved in the whole bareback scene in porn and how he feels about it now. So I hope this does not sound to preachy but it is important to love yourself enough to care about yourself and make the right decisions to protect your health.

This is Elmysterio and I'm out