For the class Object, Consumption, and Desire

“Why do they do it? ” Since the bareback phenomenon has entered the gay scene in the late 1990s, it has raised perplexing questions in the minds of popular journalists and public health professionals. The fact that numerous homosexual men intentionally engage in unprotected anal sex–and that many of them are out and proud about it–generated a new interest in investigating gay men’s sexual behaviors. In the past few years, many articles have presented barebacking as gay life’s new problem in urgent need of a solution, or as a mystery of human behavior that needs to be understood and treated. Psychological and social sciences (among others) are invoked to elucidate what makes individuals slip-up into life-threatening practices. Put another way, they ask how come gay men fail to use condoms. But it seems like no one really wanted to look closely at what is at the end of this question: an object, the condom. Of all the explanations that we could give about the bareback phenomenon, are there any that can be relegated to the actual reality of this item? In one of the firsts accounts of barebacking, Michael Scarce observed this subculture “through the latex looking glass”; I suggest the opposite view: to take position in queer culture and direct the “condom lense ” at the industry that makes them, in order to understand what kind of mysterious problem makes it fail to create products to which gay men cannot relate. In some aspects, the bareback subculture is a place for gay men to claim back the radical sexuality tha