In earlier work on apocalyptic views of gay sex and identity, I’ve been particularly critical of the hyperbolic rhetoric of conservative Christians related to ’sodomy.’ However, as I’ve also noted, some gay neo-Freudians have a similarly overblown view of gay sex.

Leo Bersani (and Adam Philips, his collaborator) have produced a book that appears to be about ‘intimacy,’ which produces a deeply counterproductive chapter about barebacking (deliberate unprotected anal sex). In Bersani’s earlier work, gay anal sex was supposed to be something deeply significant that ’shattered’ masculine self-perceptions, a rather romantic proposition from the days of Lacanian neo-Freudian French/Belgian and Italian gay liberationists Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem back in the seventies. As the discovery of  ‘men who have sex with men’ demonstrates, ‘gay’ sex with men can be disconnected from one’s social identity or partcipation in a community of interest. One wonders what would happen if we discovered J.Edgar Hoover or Roy Cohn were butch bottoms, come to that?

This is archaic radicalism, and a transgressive assertion of defiance against the unacknowledged, regulatory and pathologising role of actually existing psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourse, which arose in the western world during the thirties and forties and subsided during the seventies, except in the ‘exgay’ Christian Right backwaters.

Sure, anal sex is a source of pleasure for some gay men, but not for others. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of French feminist Luce Irigaray’s work on female desire, and find our erogenous zones everywhere?

Why am I so down on Bersani and Philips? As one might guess, if gay anal sex is supposedly so mind-blowing, rational HIV/AIDS and STI prevention methods go out the window. Could this explain the ‘allure’ of barebacking, they ask?

No. Barebacking is a psychological and social construct. It is related to several other HIV/AIDS related risk variables like low self-esteem, minimal social and political adherence to gay communities, relative poverty and P/crystal meth abuse, all of which contribute to unprotected gay anal sex. It is not because barebacking is somehow an act of greater ‘intimacy’, no matter what its propagandists say, or whatever Michael Shernoff and other advocates of ‘negotiated [un] safety’ insist when they advocate unprotected sex in ‘monogamous’ relationships that aren’t.

Barebacking is about individual and collective self-hatred. Bersani and Philips should stick to cultural analysis, and not embark onto ill-conceived ‘theories’ about HIV/AIDS that are based on outdated concepts of gay radicalism from a bygone age.