Unlimited Intimacy

Review

Note: Rather annoyed to go looking for metadata on this book and find RAW:PReP, PEDAGOGY, AND THE POLITICS OF BAREBACKING which comes 10-years later and includes an afterward from Dean. While I later reference Hatred of Sex I will also have to read this and perhaps return to some of my critiques below.

Introduction

Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy released in 2009, 28 years after the first CDC reporting of what would eventually be called AIDS, and 3 years before the FDA approved Truvada (PrEP) for pre-exposure prophylaxis. Its situation in time makes Unlimited Intimacy a little quirky. Reading in 2026, so many of the statements feel ancient, and the mindsets archaic. Such that generational differences cannot be put aside while considering the contents. Perhaps as a result of those generational differences, some of Dean’s contentions and conclusions feel strange and ill-considered. In particular, Dean’s paintbrush when it comes to men who bareback is obscenely wide—in some paragraphs he seems to suggest that anyone fucking without a condom is hard mostly as a result of gambling with HIV.

I’ve never read a book with so many citations to pornographic films. The titles are helpfully listed in a Videography. Some samples: Anal Cum Drippers, Breed Me, Fucking Crazy, Plantin’ Seed, Swallow and why not also, Cocktails #2? Glancingly, Dean will discuss commodification of sex, but not so much porn’s direct impact on sex itself. He is more interested in what porn says about the people viewing it, are we all perverts? Yes, certainly (if you are reading this and saying, well I’m not a pervert, I insist that you reflect on what gets you going a bit more). Do we all secretly want to be fucked by a group of people in a park in the middle of the night? No. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Dean also titles a section, “Fucking as Research” which I find very funny, though the subject of said section is rather serious. Dean states that not a little of his primary research for the text happens in the bathhouses and gay bars oft explored in the book, and many is the time that Dean pulls dialogue and exchange directly from (his) in-progress sex encounters. I admire it, though am not sure my writing here will be quite so exposed, and if it were, it couldn’t be so academic.

It is worth noting that my approach to this book is as someone with formal training in social work, who is gay, and who has had sex with strangers (oh my!). My academic work did not focus on HIV and nor does my professional work. Dean, in the book, speaks a lot about seeking not to pathologize the practice of barebacking, and indeed to depathologize it, and this I align with.

On Language

Before I get to my critique, perhaps what I enjoy most about this book is the use of language. Over-academician descriptions of sex and the people that have it gross me out a bit. Men who have sex with men (MSM) as a term appears all over academic literature. It is meant to capture “not just gay” men who have sex with men. Sure, fine. Generally, though, academic literature depicts sex so dryly, clinically, that it almost seems inhuman.

I like that this book uses the word fuck when it is talking about people fucking. I like that it does not spend a lot of time trying to dress up what we all know involves sweat, spit, lube, cum, moaning and laughter. If you’re going to write a book entirely focused on barebacking, to approach it any other way would seem a farce.

In the closing chapter, Dean takes passing shot at “family-values”:

The family-values rhetoric that has achieved such prominence in contemporary U.S. political discourse endorses above all the importance of the familiar, whereas I wish to stress the value for democratic life of contact with the unfamiliar, even the strange.

(page 191)

I like this. I want to be more direct, which is that I consider the family-values rhetoric in the United States to be a corrosive rot which is destroying democratic foundations of our country and facilitating acts of violence towards anyone that does not look exactly like those espousing the family-values line. This is, perhaps, more apparent in 2026 than in 2009—but not really.

Bareback Conflation

The most serious problem with Dean’s book is its flattening of men who bareback into one giant pool of people who are either actively looking for, or apathetic towards getting, HIV. It must be stated that this book exists in a pre-PrEP world, in which the only real risk-mitigations were condoms and serosorting (which Dean describes along with a few other less effective strategies). Other writing will have to explore the impact of PrEP on risk seeking behavior. But I feel comfortable saying that (and even pre-PrEP) not all bareback sex can be described as risk-seeking behavior. Risk-taking, risk-apathetic, sure. While I will write more of what I view as generational differences between this book’s world and that of today, this problem I think exceeds major generational concerns.

Very early, Dean develops the image of a barebacker, and begins with an asterisk: any gay man may have unprotected anal sex without adopting the identity of a barebacker (page 10). However, as he continues on just after to cite posts on barebacking websites to define the population, he here and later begins to conflate having bareback sex, preferring bareback sex, and especially, actively seeking out HIV by means of anonymous bareback sex. Dean’s writing is such that it is hard for me to determine if this conflation is an intentional flattening of the milieu of men that fuck raw, or if it is just that such a flattening helps his case. Throughout the introduction I bumped on his apparent flattening of all men who fuck raw into a single subculture and his prescription of certain characteristics or attitudes onto that subculture. Despite the asterisk that Dean applies early, he does not consider seriously the idea of men who fuck bareback that aren’t part of the subculture. All are introduced and brought in either by virtue of psychoanalytic id-superego tango. My knowledge of the psychoanalytic framework is essentially nil and Dean does not describe it sufficiently to provide a reader that goes in without a familiarity with Lacan and Freud a good understanding of the approach. I do not necessarily fault Dean for this because, ultimately, this is an academic text published by an academic press, not pop non-fiction. Nonetheless, it leaves me finding his groupings of people suspect. Not until page 53 did I find an example of dubiousness:

Bug chasing should be understood as one of the more extreme forms of body modification. . . . The slang term “poz” (also the title of a long-established U.S. magazine for HIV-positive readers) functions as both noun and verb: to “poz” another guy is to ejaculate HIV-infected semen inside him. Hundreds of online profiles represent men who are clamoring to enact the fantasy of “getting pozzed.”(10) The term “poz” implies that infected semen has developed a positive rather than negative connotation in the subculture’s argot. . .

10. A random quantitative check of the Web site [sic] [url to a defunct site called ‘ultimate bareback’], on July 25, 2006, indicated 41,626 active members; a search under the category “bug chaser” yielded 726 profiles—that is, 726 members who, when creating their online cruising profile, clicked an icon to indicate that they were interested in giving or receiving “the bug.”

“Hundreds” is portrayed as a great mass of people, but “hundreds” is in fact not a great mass, even in the citation Dean deploys to strengthen the statement. He cites ‘Ultimate Bareback’ (a now defunct website specifically for people who bareback, one could not imagine a place more predisposed to Dean’s assertion of a subculture) and a random check thereof, showing 726 profiles tagged as interested in giving/getting HIV. Of course this does seem insane to the average person, who in their right mind would actively be seeking out HIV? Yet, those raised online may know that one can find anything and everything there. On this site for those who fuck raw, only 1.74% of users declare themselves as interested in giving or receiving “the bug.”

1.74% is not a number of substantial enough mass to declare that all men on UltimateBareback.com are interested in flirting with HIV, and even less so for all other men who prefer sex without a condom.

Speaking of such preferences, a little later in this same section Dean notes that research suggests the amount of men who enjoy barebacking in North America is “surprisingly large.” He has no citation for this, but why would he? If researchers found that every single person with a penis who also enjoys sticking it in things (or who has a receptacle they enjoy having penii into which stuck) found that those folks enjoyed fucking raw, even that would not be a surprisingly large amount. In the same section, the author discusses ‘gift-giving’—the practice of intentional infection of a pattern with HIV—and contemplates the proportion of men who like to fuck raw and how they do not seem to think of themselves as gift-givers. I’m not sure what could be surprising about this, especially when the universe being considered includes the HIV-negative and the HIV-status-unknown and status-apathetic.

Dean does make this note:

It needs to be acknowledged that a substantial proportion and perhaps the majority of instances of barebacking combine a desire for unprotected sex with a desire to contain HIV. Plenty of HIV-negative men practice unsafe sex while nonetheless wishing to remain uninfected; correlatively, most HIV-positive men who bareback have no wish to infect others. Yet only recently have statements such as these become intelligible as anything other than paradoxes or contradictions. . . . The willingness to take [sexual] risks has been accompanied by the development of various strategies of risk reduction; abandoning condoms does not mean abandoning all caution or sense of responsibility.

(page 12)

And yes, that does need to be acknowledged, because while Dean writes this, the rest of this book does not seem to consider it. Today, people should understand clearly:

It is possible to want to feel someone cum inside you without wanting to get HIV. It is possible to want to cum inside someone without wanting to give them HIV.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the book completely accepts that premise. Dean suggests that, always, on some level, HIV and the risk of it are interlinked with bareback sex. Maybe his is an understandable mentality for someone who came of age during the AIDS crisis, but I find it a vicious association that, in a world with accessible testing, PrEP, DoxyPEP, and hopefully better communication, serves no purpose.

The subculture Dean discusses is not as wide as simply “men who fuck raw.” It is more like, men who fuck raw while being apathetic to or interested in transmission of HIV, which is quite distinct from men who fuck raw generally. Below I’ve added a table that I would have like to have seen a version of somewhere in the book.

Table of Barebackers

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Generational Concerns

Through HIV, gay men have discovered that they can “breed” without women. *Unlimited Intimacy* does not take for granted what might seem obvious, namely, that bareback subculture is all about death. . . . barebacking also raises questions that complicate how we distinguish life-giving activities from those that engender death.

(page 6)

Many times throughout Dean’s writing I thought, “I have no connection to this statement at all,” and could not identify any memory of anyone saying anything (or not saying anything) similar to me. Bareback subculture is all about death? This statement must be a relic of that interregnum between the beginning of the AIDS crisis and the slow change of sexual dynamic brought about by easier access to HIV testing and PrEP. Elsewhere, Dean says that HIV never comes up in his fucking, which really blew me away. While anecdotal, nearly every anonymous encounter I’ve ever had has included (often at my initiation, though not always) what I consider typical questions of sexual hygiene. And when they didn’t, that was a notable thing that might cause anxiety later! If this statement was well-founded in 2006, or 1999, it is not in 2026.

A certain type of Grindr interaction might look something like this:

Sure, not all, and I’m sure there are people out there, somewhere, using grindr to setup coffee and dates and to do more than find a fuck. But when they do, at least in my generation and surrounding, I think the “ddf/prep” bit is common. It isn’t unheard of to ask about most recent test date, either. One could put together a whole book of dumb, hot, mundane, annoying, assholish, or genuinely very sweet conversations a person has had on any of these services.

Back to Dean. It’s also a little odd that “breeding” here is tied to “breeding” HIV, which is presented as analogous to breeding for the purposes of creating a child, though I do not think this is a well-founded analogy. It seems a clearly fetishistic thing tied to impregnation, which has commonality in straight and gay porn. To assert that the intentional transmission of HIV is an act of rebellion / towards creating a “child” in the form of the infected is reaching. Despite the obvious denotation of the word, I suspect the word “breeding” in the context of (what makes it effective in) porn and horny sex has little to do with procreation.

Speaking of breeding:

Apparently the heterosexuality of these men remains uncompromised by their unsheathed erections rubbing together to the point of orgasm inside an anus, because the anus belonged to a woman. The structure of homosociality—in which putatively straight guys bond with each other through the mediation of a female figure—can tolerate overt physical intimacy between men, provided there is a woman somewhere in the picture who functions as a guarantor of the sex-gender system. Even as the most extreme forms of straight porn come to approximate bareback gay porn, a barrier divides them at the level of discourse: straight pornographers speak of “cream pie” and the “internal pop,” whereas their gay counterparts speak of “barebacking” and describe internal ejaculation as “breeding.”

(page 170, emphasis of this interesting term is mine)

The difference in discourse may be an artifact of time. While I have little idea of what porncabulary looked like in 2009 on this book’s publication, today I think these terms are sufficiently cross-pollinated. In Pornhub’s 2025 stats, breeding doesn’t appear, but then neither does “raw” nor “bareback” (for straight consumption). While Pornhub doesn’t publish annual stats for their ‘gay’ section, they did publish stats on Pride 2026, covering June. None of these terms—raw, breeding, creampie, bareback—show up either. I’m relatively surprised that bareback doesn’t show up! The top results are not surprising: twink, femboy (talk about interesting discourse), anime, and the coveted “straight guys first time.” Only, when you get to the section, “Top Relative Gay Categories by Age Group,” do some of these terms appear. While 18-24 year olds are typing “cartoon” into the search bar, 35-44 year olds are typing “creampie.” Bareback shows up in the top 5 consistently in the older cohorts (45-54, 55-64, 65+). A 45-year-old in 2026 would have been born in 1981, would have been mid-puberty around 1996, mid-epidemic. Those older would have experienced much of the epidemic’s beginning, and almost certainly lost people to the AIDS epidemic.

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Conclusion

I have two or three other sections that I’ve been tinkering with. Maybe they’ll get added to this, maybe not. They are/were about masculinity and the pornification/commodification of sex (thinking specifically about grindr and platforms like fansly/onlyfans). I’ve been tinkering with this for about two weeks since I finished the book and I can feel my steam going down, and I’m not sure I’ll finish those sections. When I began this, I wondered if it wouldn’t be something better for a separate article.

I’m planning to read Dean’s newer work, Hatred of Sex soon, and perhaps some of these threads will find a way to resolve there. In the meantime, I would suggest this book only to folks with a relatively academic interest in the dynamics of gay sex specific to barebacking in the late 00’s. Much of the topic is changed significantly with the widespread adoption of frequent testing and pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis. Certainly, there is a subculture around barebacking. People who like to fuck raw are all over the place, but I would only assign folks to that subculture that have a near-militant orientation towards barebacking, such that they lead with this in encounters, organize and attend groups focused specifically on barebacking for this sect of barebackers, etc. Someone with a casual aversion to the condom, especially when they are also taking PrEP/DoxyPEP and testing routinely, can hardly be called subcultural. Drawing these boundaries does not result in any such pathologization, but lets a population be better defined for better understanding.

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Notes

Introduction: Confessions of a Barebacker

• p3 - One prominent gender theorist, the author of an incisive critique of antipornography feminism, responded to my research no less hyperbolically by characterizing the subculture as “gay men creating death camps for themselves.”

• p5 - Rather than being understood as self-destructive behavior, promiscuity could be redescribed as promoting reciprocal care and self-protection. In this line of thinking, promiscuity is not merely defended in the face of AIDS panic but is actually promoted as the route to something new. Promiscuity, in other words, concerns more than new sex partners: it also concerns new ideas and new ways of doing things.

• p6 - Through HIV, gay men have discovered that they can “breed” without women. Unlimited Intimacy does not take for granted what might seem obvious, namely, that bareback subculture is all about death. . . . barebacking also raises questions that complicate how we distinguish life-giving activities from those that engender death.

  • TB: Feels like a generational difference, which will be a theme.
  • TB: “Breeding” here tied to “breeding” HIV, which is presented as analogous to breeding for the purposes of creating a child, though I do not think this is a necessarily well-founded analogy. Similarly, I am not sure that saying “bareback subculture is all about death” is well-founded, at least in 2026, it may have been in 1999 or 2009.

• p7 - Given that, in this book, I draw on some of my own experience with the subculture, I should mention that during casual bareback sex nobody ever has inquired about my HIV status.

• p10 - On one hand, barebackers represent a new minority constituency; on the other, any gay man may have unprotected anal sex without adopting the identity of barebacker—just as some married men and other ostensibly straight guys regularly participate in casual same-sex erotic activity without regarding themselves as gay. It is easy enough to maintain a conscious belief in the importance and necessity of safer sex while not using condoms; barebackers may be understood as those who have relinquished that mental prophylactic along with latex.

  • TB: goes on to describe what “barebackers” say about themsellves, citing posts from barebacking websites. I suggest this might be a bit of a sampling problem, though I do not want to suggest that quantitative data would be better here.
  • TB: Difference between a person who is indifferent about HIV, chasing HIV, and then people who simply have unprotected sex because it feels better. I do not think these things are always well-defined, but I also would insist that one cannot equate a non-monogamous barebacker to a bug-chaser.

• p11 - As long as masculinity remains a source of fascination and desire for gay men, bareback iconography will constitute a potent fantasy object for the silent majority as well as for the vocal minority.

  • TB: I wonder if ‘masculinity’ is the predominant theme in gay pornography today. I wish PornHub released their statistics specific to their gay subdomain. Anecdotally, I feel like twinks, femboys, college guys, seem more popular than leather bears. But I don’t know? Maybe take a look at the front pages of a few porn sites and see what the apparently-obvious categories are? I don’t think that would be incongruous with Dean’s approach here (which I do not condemn).

• p12 - It needs to be acknowledged that a substantial proportion and perhaps the majority of instances of barebacking combine a desire for unprotected sex with a desire to contain HIV. Plenty of HIV-negative men practice unsafe sex while nonetheless wishing to remain uninfected; correlatively, most HIV-positive men who bareback have no wish to infect others. Yet only recently have statements such as these become intelligible as anything other than paradoxes or contradictions. . . . The willingness to take [sexual] risks has been accompanied by the development of various strategies of risk reduction; abandoning condoms does not mean abandoning all caution or sense of responsibility.

  • TB: The first time I read this, I understood “contain HIV” to mean “become infected with HIV.” This is clearly not was intended. Following this, a few paragraphs discuss various types of risk-reduction (serosorting, negotiated safety, etc); I think advances in risk-reduction in the almost 20 years since publication have significantly altered the landscape that Dean’s text engages with.

• p17 - Some of the men who solicit infected semen, however, are HIV negative. Indeed, Tewksbury’s study of 880 advertisements posted on barebackcity.com during January 2003 found that nearly three-quarters (70.6 percent) of those soliciting unprotected sex identified as HIV negative.

  • TB: cites Tewksbury’s “Bareback Sex” page 475. My question, were these people cited in this sentence seeking infected semen or bareback sex? To see bareback sex is not the same as to seek infected semen.
  • Citation: Tewksbury, Richard. “Bareback Sex and the Quest for HIV: Assessing the Relationship in Internet Personal Advertisements of Men Who Have Sex with Men.” Deviant Behavior 24 (2003): 467-82.
  • The abstract of this article states, “Results suggest Internet personal ads are more explicitly sexual than traditional personal ads, and, although despite large numbers of such personal ads there is little evidence of a direct link between a preference for bareback sex and an active quest for HIV infection.”
  • I can’t find a full PDF, so I’m not sure if the 880 number is a subset of the overall study. But I do not think that the conclusion drawn in Dean’s text is supported by the abstract of the cited article.
  • An article citing the same Tewksbury states: “Tewksbury (2003) analysed a sample of profiles posted on a website specialising in bareback sex. His results showed that the majority of barebackers were not specifically seeking HIV infection. Another study by the same author (Tewksbury 2006) focused on profiles of self-proclaimed bug-chasers (men actively pursuing HIV infection) and gift-givers (HIV-positive men willing to infect others), confirming that these are but a minority of all those seeking bareback sex. The majority of men were in their 30’s and White. Most profiles were sexually explicit and only 30% included face pictures. Most men indicated no preference concerning their partners’ serostatus. Two-thirds were interested in drug use associated with sexual activity.”
    • Nodin, N., Valera, P., Ventuneac, A., Maynard, E., & Carballo-Diéguez, A. (2011). The Internet profiles of men who have sex with men within bareback websites. Culture, health & sexuality, 13(9), 1015–1029. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2011.598946.
    • TB: A more recent (2014) article on generationing: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4768590/

• p19 - But exactly whose public image is represented by the institutionalized gay movement anyway? . . . These questions concern not merely inclusion (do barebackers get their own float in the next gay pride parade?) but the broader issue of how homosexuality’s social acceptance is being won by the sanitizing of queer people’s image. . . .

  • TB: reminds me of the guy wearing the ‘CUM IN ME BRO’ shirt I saw at Pride a few years ago.
  • TB: In 2026, I feel like barebacking is pretty well depathologized, I wonder if that’s true or just my anecdotal experience? Either way I think this specific line of thinking is interesting. Though I remain unconvinced at this point that “barebackers” are a specific subculture, or at least I don’t think the composition is that which Dean is describing.

• p20 - You could feel better about being gay as long as you felt worse about being a slut. In other words, you could be openly and proudly gay at the office, but the dozen guys you sucked off last weekend at Blow Buddies must remain a dirty secret. These encounters could not count as sociability or intimacy, only as extreme acting out or freakish behavior.

  • TB: Okay, but I think this is a false equivalency. A straight person can talk about how nice a weekend they had with their wife over the weekend without saying, “Yeah I came in my wife 12 times!” A gay person can say, “I had a fun weekend!” without saying, “Yeah I beat my personal best and swallowed 6 loads.” All of these things are perfectly okay to do. I would not talk about the cumming if I were at the office. I think that would be inappropriate regardless, and I don’t think that has anything to do with queer life being seen as not-normal. Personally, at least among people I know in 2026, I don’t think that shame is the default orientation. I have certainly been told and shared “slutty” stories with friends. Perhaps it is a time-and-place thing.

• p23 - Most gay men, even the buffest and most handsome, worry that they are not buff or handsome enough.

  • TB: Our old friend toxic masculinity.

• p26 - A significant aspect of bareback subculture entails HIV transmission, thereby disqualifying from the outset a merely relativist approach to sexual behavior.

• p26 - ==Adjudicating the politics of bareback subculture can be a way of reassuring ourselves that we’re on the right side of it, uncontaminated by it, when what I’m trying to suggest is that seeing how we’re implicated in this phenomenon may be tougher than we readily acknowledge. It is not only “the other” who barebacks.==

• p32 TB: starts section, “Fucking as Research” which I’m tickled by.

• p39 TB: Thinking about how Grindr, Sniffies, and even porn platforms like OnlyFans have removed some boundaries to the “pornification” of sex. But only sort of. Some of this feels like it was already happening, generally thinking of porn as reflective of cultural boundaries and pressing/pushing. But when there is a camera its a different type of performance, no? This is the page where Dean describes someone flying cross-country every weekend to fuck at a bareback party (suggesting, perhaps, that this person is relatively privileged. I certainly can’t afford to do that.). #-ification-of-sex

• p45 - Barebackers’ abandonment of condoms is motivated not only by a lust for enhanced physical sensation but also by a desire for certain emotional sensations, particularly the symbolic significance attached to experiences of vulnerability or risk. Rather than mindless fucking, bareback sex is an activity deeply invested with meaning. Despite the emphasis on raw, unmediated contact, barebacking often works most powerfully for its practitioners as a metaphor. Physical contact becomes a way of achieving less tangible forms of contact.

  • TB: Not convinced of this.

Chapter One: Breeding Culture

• p51 - This chapter explores in greater detail what motivates men to bareback, especially those men who identify as bug chasers. Having suggested that barebacking is overdetermined behavior, I want to anatomize its multiple determinants while also bearing in mind their inconsistency; complex behavior often is motivated by mutually exclusive impulses. . . . I pursue the contradictory determinants of barebacking and bug chasing by examining several rationales: ==embracing risk as a test of masculinity==, counterphobically reinterpreting the pathogen as desirable, diminishing fear of HIV/AIDS, increasing doubts about HIV as the cause of AIDS, eliminating anxiety by purposefully arranging seroconversion, and resisting mainstream health norms. . . . The determinant that interests me most . . . is . . . the attempt to use viral exchange to create kinship networks.

• p53 - Bug chasing should be understood as one of the more extreme forms of body modification. . . . The slang term “poz” (also the title of a long-established U.S. magazine for HIV-positive readers) functions as both noun and verb: to “poz” another guy is to ejaculate HIV-infected semen inside him. Hundreds of online profiles represent men who are clamoring to enact the fantasy of “getting pozzed.”(10) The term “poz” implies that infected semen has developed a positive rather than negative connotation in the subculture’s argot. . .

  • TB: (10) is footnote: “10. A random quantitative check of the Web site [sic] [url to a defunct site called ‘ultimate bareback’”], on July 25, 2006, indicated 41,626 active members; a search under the category “bug chaser” yielded 726 profiles—that is, 726 members who, when creating their online cruising profile, clicked an icon to indicate that they were interested in giving or receiving “the bug.”
  • TB: 726/46626 is 1.74%. That is a low percentage, especially considering the universe is a website specifically devoted to barebacking, when Dean seems frequently to collapse barebackers and bug-chasers.

• p58 - Whereas Rotello argues that the price of a sustainably gay culture is our sacrifice of certain cherished activities (namely, promiscuous unprotected butt fucking and semen exchange), Morris contends that it is preferable to risk lives in order to protect those activities that define the culture. From Morris’s perspective, gay culture ceases to exist once we relinquish our sexual freedom; from Rotello’s point of view, gay culture will cease to exist unless we relinquish some sexual freedom. To put the matter bluntly, one views gay promiscuity as genocidal, while the other views abandoning that promiscuity as genocidal.

• p60 - Fidelity to the subcultural ideal of erotic pleasure necessitates betrayal of the mainstream cultural idea of health . . . Sociologists such as Robert Crawford and Nikolas Rose argue that, since the nineteenth century, the pursuit of health has been understood as the pursuit of moral personhood, even though the emergence of germ theory ostensibly recast moralistic conceptions of disease etiology.

• p63 - Although Beck’s diagnosis of the risk society, originally made in 1986, seems ever more prescient two decades later, he has less to say about the implications of eroticizing risk. . .

  • TB: This line makes me wonder what risk is. I have some notes on the page: vulnerability → fascination in tops of blowers/takers ‘load count’ + personal records; social media visibility; that essay about the birthday gangbang (or this oneor this one, or this one on Cosmo; it appears women quite enjoy writing about birthday gangbangs, which I did not expect).

• p68 - When illness is conceived in terms not of present physical conditions but of a future that must be forestalled at all costs via scrupulous risk management, then we “create a new class of lifetime pariahs, the future ill,” argues Susan Sontag.

• p69 - By embracing risk one eliminates risk, in the tautological sense that seroconversion alleviates the perpetual worry about HIV infection (and, given the inconclusive scientific evidence, very few barebackers are concerned about reinfection). Paradoxically bareback subculture institutionalizes risk as a permanent condition of existence, embracing and eroticizing it, while promulgating the idea that seroconversion renders moot one particular risk. In this way, bug chasing provides a way of eluding superegoistic health imperatives, even as it simultaneously offers a mode of conforming to the imperative of enjoyment.(39)

  • (39.) A different line of reasoning than the one I’m pursuing here might see the superegoistic imperative to “Enjoy!” as motivating bareback subculture and perhaps gay culture in general; such a line of reasoning would contradict my claim that bug chasing represents a way of eluding superegoistic imperatives. The work of Slavoj Žižek tirelessly elaborates the Lacanian logic whereby the superego commands not moderation but intensification of enjoyment…

  • TB: If this was a sound conclusion for 2009, I do not think it is in 2026. While there is certainly still risk, for those that are not bug chasers, or those unconcerned by the risk of infection, the risk of infection is much lower. PrEP and doxyPEP in particular, but also HIV treatments are now such that even the post-/during-treatment sexual circumstances are different once levels are undetectable.

  • TB: That said, I think some of Dean’s interest in kinship networks and sense of generationality via infection survive the medical treatments, including U=U. The U=U campaign began in 2016 and is summarized on the CDC’s U=U page: “A person living with HIV who is on treatment and maintains an undetectable viral load has zero risk of transmitting HIV to their sexual partners.”

• p70 - Research suggests that although the portion of North American men who enjoy barebacking is surprisingly large, the proportion of those in bareback subculture who identify as gift givers is very small. (I think that what I find disturbing about the occasions on which strangers I’m barebacking ask me to ejaculate inside them is the impression that I’m being interpellated as a gift giver—a sense that I’m being misrecognized as an HIV-positive man willing to transmit the virus deliberately yet casually, without discussion of the matter.)

  • TB: A few thoughts: 1) It is not surprising that the population of North American men who enjoy fucking raw is large. 2) It it also not particularly surprising that the proportion of men who like to fuck raw don’t think of themselves as “gift givers”—especially if they are HIV-negative or HIV-status-ignorant. 3) It is perfectly possible to want to feel someone cum inside you without wanting to get HIV, and perfect possible to want to cum inside someone without giving them HIV.
  • TB: 1 & 2 above need to be stated because Dean again collapses barebackers and bug-chasers/givers into one category.

• p71 - The example of Dick Wadd makes clear that some in the bareback community, despite their commitment to unprotected sex, remain vehemently opposed to viral transmission.

  • TB: I have written here, “NO SHIT!”
  • TB: Re-reading this, I think possibly we could identify a tree of different populations here:
    1. Men who fuck…
       1. bareback…
          1. ignorantly of their HIV-status.
          2. knowing they do not have HIV…
             1. and take precautions against becoming infected (PreP, doxyPEP, or the earlier methods Dean describes contemporary to 2009).
             2. and intending to become infected.
             3. and are apathetic of HIV infection.
          3. knowing they have HIV…
             1. intending to transmit it.
             2. NOT intending to transmit it.

• p87, quoting O’Hara, “Viral Communion,” page 69 - “Feeling a man’s dick inside me, condomless—that’s when the sex becomes spiritual in its intensity. Communion, in the truest sense. Integral to that closeness is the knowledge that he intends to leave a piece of himself inside me; his cum, like the sex itself, has a psychological value far beyond anything physical.”

  • TB: Several mentions of “communion” throughout the book and the feeling of communion. Unlikely to be a coincidence that there is an “international sex party” called CumUnion, which focus on barebacking and cumplay. Their website has a dedicated Health page, where they describe harm reduction, preventative measures, U=U, vaccinations, link to various other health resources and clinics, and sex general expectations of the event (which do not include rules around wearing condoms). I learned about these events because it is a lot of fun to read about the steamy and slutty encounters people have when they post them on boards like r/gaystoriesgonewild; but they also appear to be sponsored by the Free Speech Coalition, a few porn studios, and bathouses like Steamworks.

• p89, re: genealogy - What would it mean for a young gay man today to be able to trace his virus back to, say, Michel Foucault? By thinking in genealogical terms, we start to appreciate how HIV can become a basis of authority and pride rather than of merely stigma and shame.

  • TB: over the next section, Dean talks more about communities and support networks that are analogous to family and support groups for things like Down syndrome.

• TB, general note on Chapter 1: Dean collapses barebackers and bug chasers, as well as a less specific group of people who happen to prefer condomless sex (which I think is most people). The kinship idea of transmission is interesting—but again, I think misapplied to all “barebackers.” The idea viral kinship makes perfect sense for a society that tends to seek familial analogies everywhere. Though, it also feels to me like a distinctly post-hoc value. Re: marriage. The idea of marriage becoming more discriminatory as access to it (marriage equality) expands does not track for me. I understand what Dean suggests, that as the group of people who are allowed to marry based on their specific configuration grows, the group that is not allowed shrinks, and thus is more of a minority. I think it makes more sense, in this context, on paper than in reality. Although the increasing hostility towards trans folks in the United States, which I think you could probably chart alongside the spread of marriage equality, offers a strong support to Dean’s argument. The solution in my view would be to divorce the economic and societal benefits of marriage from its religious base. Let marriage under the State be between consenting adults of any configuration and number. (Good luck doing that in the US.)

Table of Barebackers

flowchart TD
    A["Men who Bareback"]

    A --> B["HIV status unknown"]
    A --> C["Know they are HIV-negative"]
    A --> D["Know they are HIV-positive"]

	B --> B1["Take precautions against infection
(PrEP, doxyPEP, or earlier methods)"]
	B --> B2["Apathetic toward HIV infection"]

    C --> C1["Take precautions against infection
(PrEP, doxyPEP, or earlier methods)"]
    C --> C2["Intend to become infected"]
    C --> C3["Apathetic toward HIV infection"]

    D --> D1["Intend to transmit HIV"]
    D --> D2["Do not intend to transmit HIV"]
    D --> D3["Apathetic toward HIV transmission"]

Chapter Two: Representing Raw Sex

• p101 - What are we to make of the face that the most extreme forms of heterosexual pornography produced today resemble bareback porn in their obsessive focus on the archetypal scenario of the anal gangbang, in which multiple (condomless) men penetrate a single individual? And why do barebackers refer to such activity by the ostensibly heterosexual term “breeding”? What is the motive for filming these rituals?

  • TB: Seems a bit overthoughtful.

• p102 - At the same time, increasing numbers of men were taking advantage of virtual technology and reorganizing their erotic lives online. Not only were Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards replacing outdoor cruising and gay bars, but digital technology also was changing the distribution and consumption of hard core.

• p104 - One of my concerns lies with what happens when the attempt to represent non-normative sex comes up against the norms of representation. I am intrigued by how bareback porn, in its effort to make certain forms of intimacy visible, poses a challenge not just for pornographic conventions but to representation as such.

  • TB: Bit odd to think of sex without a condom as “non-normative.” Definition: “Of, relating to, or prescribing a norm or standard.” Perhaps it is said more in the sense of a cultural norm of ‘safe sex’—though even this seems perhaps uncertain.

• p105 - Bareback porn is a form of thinking. As a genre confronted with problems of representation—such as how to capture insemination on film—bareback porn constitutes a mode of thinking about bodily limits, about intimacy, about power, and of course about sex. . . . Unlike “pre-condom” gay porn produced during the ’70s and early ’80s, bareback porn is far from oblivious to HIV. Bareback porn, in other words, is no more simply a case of “denial” than bareback sex is simply a case of irresponsibility.

• p106 - What we look for in pornography are not people going through the motions of sex to earn a living but those who seem carried away by pleasure and desire—those who are genuinely moved, their bodies consumed by lust to the point of oblivion.

• p110 - According to this way of thinking, hard-core porn resembles nonpornographic cinema ontologically more than it resembles erotica, because hard core is driven by what Williams calls the principle of maximum visibility.

• p113 - Dismissing such pornography as irresponsibly nostalgic prevents us from appreciating how its attempt to capture something that has been lost constitutes one instance of this genre’s persistent effort to picture what remains invisible . . . A blindfold bareback gang bang arguably offers quite an accurate picture of what it’s like to be at the mercy of forces beyond one’s control. Far from recklessly ignoring the consequences of unprotected sex, this pornography may be thinking about sexual risk in a quite deliberate way. The trouble is that its manner of doing so makes people uncomfortable, since the possibility lingers that we may be watching—and getting off on—an attenuated version of a snuff film.

  • TB: All of this seems rather high-minded. Do people watching bareback porn think, subconsciously or otherwise, that they’re watching someone sign their own death sentence? I understand that the psychoanalytic perspective is fascinated by death but this seems farfetched in the extreme. What if people are getting off because these are general taboos—you’re a slut if five guys fuck you at once—and it’s fun to test boundaries in fantasy? What if some folks go further and go out and get five strangers to fuck them, because they find it hot to flaunt societal ideas of coupledom? What if it’s just hot because they find it hot? Fantasy and reality are not the same thing, but even when someone decides to go out and behave “promiscuously” — I don’t think that demands a death wish. I can’t tell if I’m reading Dean’s suggestion clearly or not.

• p130 - The sexual rites of initiation described by Preston—and dramatized in Fucking Crazy—may be about establishing generational distinctions, these rituals provide a structure that enable transmission of the culture (or subculture) from one generation to the next. . . . By taking all the other men inside him and storing their semen inside his body, the bottom in a bareback gang bang may be establishing communication—via formal identification—with previous generations of the subculture. This kind of connection through ritual is especially important for a subculture that has lost whole generations of its members.

  • TB: I think this line of thinking so, so bizarre. Because generations were lost to HIV/AIDS, the intentional transmission of the virus is a form of communication? Put the idea of transmission aside and leave it at the gangbang itself—a guy thinking it is hot to be fucked by a group is communicating with generations gone by? This seems very strange to me.
  • TB: How much of this does Dean think is conscious vs subconscious? Surely Dean is not suggesting that a guy wakes up one morning and thinks, “I’d better take my fiber and douche extra good today, I want to take a few loads in sexual séance and talk to my guncle.”

Viral Fetishism, Visual Fetishism

• p147 - . . . The list’s ellipsis implies that this catalogue could be extended, since any visible mark or action is capable of being fetishized.

  • TB: I don’t think fetishes are a primarily visual or visuality-based phenomena.

• p156, TB: A general note. Woe be to the person thinking they’ve no fetishes, for their lack of experimentation.

• p157, TB: Lots of discussion here about fetishes and I ask, What defines a fetish? Is it taboo alone? Or is it something more akin to level of need (of the thing, to reach orgasm)? Preference vs. fetish?

• p160 - It is not whole persons whom we find sexually arousing but partial objects; we find an individual to be arousing by discerning in him or her the lineaments of a partial object. I like the curve of his eyelashes or his butt; what gets me is the tilt of his head as he laughs. This is what Lacan means when he refers to objects of desire as “in you more than you”—and it is what makes desire ineluctably fetishistic.

  • TB: Cites Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. Chapter 20.

• p164 - A card I carry in my wallet lists no fewer than 59 different bandana colors, each of which signifies a different activity or type and each of which is subdivided according to position: if you’re looking for a blow job, wear a light blue bandanna on the left; if you’re looking to give blow jobs, wear it on the right.

  • TB: Terribly pleased I don’t have to carry a reference card if I want to find a dick to suck.
  • TB: What happens if they change color in the wash?

• p169-170 - As with bareback porn, straight hard core focuses increasingly on anal eroticism, as if, thanks to AIDS, straight porn viewers were fully aware that condomless butt fucking provides maximum exposure to the other. It is the most risky and therefore most intimate sexual activity: by heightening vulnerability, unprotected anal sex intensifies a sense of closeness.

  • TB: This goes on for a bit. I think it is nuts! I’m skeptical that most straight men ever think about HIV/AIDS, especially not when their dicks are hard. I think the reason that anal porn has become more common in straight porn is probably the same reason that drives a lot of porn trends: taboo. Pornhub publishes stats on straight porn consumption on their platform annually. In their 2025 stats, the top 10 are mostly demographics, genres (for lack of a better word for hentai), and then there is at the #10 spot, “step mom.” Incest and incest-adjacent pornography seems to be huge in straight porn over the past several years (recalling the infamous Ted-Cruz-likes-porn-tweet, the video so affectionately clicked involved a woman and her step-daughter and, from what I can tell, the step-daughter’s boyfriend. Some regretful googling went into finding this information). Probably there is a lot to be said about taboo and fetish and racism (there is a section on racial fetishism later in this book).

• p170-171 - . . . Apparently the heterosexuality of these men remains uncompromised by their unsheathed erections rubbing together to the point of orgasm inside an anus, because the anus belonged to a woman. The structure of homosociality—in which putatively straight guys bond with each other through the mediation of a female figure—can tolerate overt physical intimacy between men, provided there is a woman somewhere in the picture who functions as a guarantor of the sex-gender system. Even as the most extreme forms of straight porn come to approximate bareback gay porn, a barrier divides them at the level of discourse: straight pornographers speak of “cream pie” and the “internal pop,” whereas their gay counterparts speak of “barebacking” and describe internal ejaculation as “breeding.”

  • TB: Emphasis mine, I think this is an interesting term.
  • TB: The difference in discourse may be an artifact of time. While I have little idea of what porncabulary looked like in 2009 on this book’s publication, today I think these terms are sufficiently cross-pollinated. In their 2025 stats, breeding doesn’t appear, but then neither does “raw” or “bareback” (for straight consumption). Pornhub doesn’t seem to publish annual stats for their ‘gay’ section of the site. However, they did publish stats on Pride 2026, covering June 2026. None of these terms—raw, breeding, creampie, bareback—show up either. I’m relatively surprised that bareback doesn’t show up! The top results are perhaps not surprising: twink, femboy (talk about interesting discourse), anime, and the coveted “straight guys first time.”
  • TB: Interestingly, when you get to the section, “Top Relative Gay Categories by Age Group”—only then do some of these terms appear. While 18-24 year olds are typing “cartoon” into the search bar, 35-44 year olds are typing “creampie.” Bareback shows up in the top 5 consistently in the older cohorts (45-54, 55-64, 65+). A 45-year-old in 2026 would have been born in 1981, would have been mid-puberty around 1996, mid-epidemic. Those older would have experienced much of the epidemic’s beginning, and almost certainly lost people to the AIDS.

• p172 - When the body’s interior can be inscribed similarly to its exterior, it can be more readily tracked and more intensively eroticized. In this way, deliberate HIV transmission might be understood as a practice of internal tattooing, a technique of marking the inside of the body both literally and symbolically. “Breeding” thus may represent an updated version of having a lover’s name tattooed on one’s bicep.

  • TB: There is no citation for this assertion. My initial reaction is one of extreme skepticism. However, I am wondering about the continued conflation of the ‘bareback subculture’ with ‘people who fuck raw’ by Dean. Perhaps there is a segment of people that are thoughtful of this in this particular way. I am skeptical, but this may be a generational difference as well.

• p173 - We pen lyrics, carve names into the surface of our skin (or a tree or a rock), and now, through the practice of “breeding,” gay men have devised a technique for tattooing the body’s interior.

• p189 - Then I remembered Delany and the line that encapsulates the genius of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue: “For decades the governing cry of our cities has been ‘Never speak to strangers.’ I propose that in a democratic city it is imperative that we speak to strangers, live next to them, and learn how to relate to them on many levels, including the sexual” (193).

Cruising as a Way of Life

• p191 - Without going so far as to advocate unprotected sex, I want to suggest that the subculture’s embrace of risk may help illuminate the pleasures and ethics of encountering the unfamiliar. ==The family-values rhetoric that has achieved such prominence in contemporary U.S. political discourse endorses above all the importance of the familiar, whereas I wish to stress the value for democratic life of contact with the unfamiliar, even the strange.==

  • #conclusion

• p192 - In terms of Delany’s distinction between networking and contact, cruising at the gym occupies an intermediary point between cruising on the street or in a bar—that is, in a public space accessible to all—and cruising online. What troubles me about online cruising is that it contributes to the accelerating privatization of public life that began in earnest during the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, under the Reagan administration.

  • TB: Dean’s points in this ¶ as he goes on are fine, but he doesn’t contemplate benefits to online cruising. Apart from risk mitigation and risk management, there is also a relatively novel social innovation in some, I think. For example, until recently online cruising platform Sniffies had public cruising locations (parks, hotels, etc.) labeled and someone (I often wonder who, in DC they all looked as though they were written by the same person) and under this description there was the ability to “check-in” and announce your presence. More interesting, they had bulletin boards, and one could see people looking for specific things. This is what I call a Cheap Thrill, fun to look at even if you’re not going to go to the park at 4am for strange. It was not uncommon for people to announce police presence, but in 2026 this broadened (in DC) to announcing National Guard presence. I would be surprised if—somewhere—ICE movements were not announced on Sniffies as well.

• p193 - Nevertheless, the article throws into relief the insidious appeal of online cruising by making clear how Internet hookups create an impression of unprecedented control over one’s erotic engagements with others.

  • TB: Oh, Tim, please! Insidious! Not everyone wants to go to a park and get fucked behind a tree!
  • TB: In seriousness, there is much to be said about an impression of control. Ultimately, a hookup precipitated online is no different from one in the bar or bathhouse, you’re taking people at their word. But this is true of all things.