(Un)limited Intimacy

Tim Dean's latest book is a remarkable exploration of what is arguably the greatest taboo in contemporary gay men's culture: the act of condomless anal intercourse. His claim that barebacking is not just an errant sexual practice but an emotional and cultural practice for many of its participants may strike some readers as audacious. And his interpretation of nonmonogamous barebacking as an act of kinship will provoke. But the most meaningful and productive shock of reading Unlimited Intimacy comes from its constant reminder that barebacking did not appear suddenly or randomly. Even if we are not practitioners, the discourses of our own sexual practices have helped construct condomless anal intercourse as the site of maximized intensity and "unlimited intimacy."

"Barebacking," Dean reminds us, is a relatively new term to describe the contemporary meanings of a very old act. As such, barebacking is an invention birthed in the wake of other inventions. He writes that "gay men invented safer sex and risk-reduction guidelines, but now we have invented Barebacking. Unprotected anal sex between men has become something different than it once was: Barebacking does not represent a 'relapse' or misguided return to what gay sex before AIDS used to be" (5). For many, barebacking is an attempt to modulate risk with intimacy, to create and maintain affective bonds to help one emotionally cope (and possibly thrive) with the imminent threat of infection and death. As Dean puts this rather compactly, "Bareback subculture reclaims gay sex as sexuality by relegating epidemiological concerns to secondary status" (11, emphasis in original).

This is important to consider because we so often presume that barebackers are in denial of, or ignorantly disregard, the mortality and seriousness of HIV/AIDS. But Dean interprets barebacking as just one of many strategies for having a sexual life in the presence of the virus. "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" (69). From this, it could be argued that the rhetoric of "safe sex" is replete with its own paradoxes that it too embraces and eroticizes.

To me, the second chapter of Unlimited Intimacy bears this point out: it is possibly the best close reading of pornographic film to date, a complex study of the work of pioneering "bareback" pornographer Paul Morris. Adopting the strategy formulated by Linda Williams in her classic Hard Core (1989), Dean argues that the invisibility of HIV creates a quandary for bareback pornography similar to the impossibility of the filmed female orgasm in heterosexual pornography.¹ Bareback pornography attempts to assuage this invisibility with carefully constructed visibilities: an emphasis on group sex and demarcating (in Morris's work, often through subtitles) the precise moment of internal climax. In fact, Dean goes so far as to suggest in the third chapter that straight pornography has taken to mimicking gay pornography with a renewed interest in condomless intercourse, even adopting some of the slang that was once solely in the barebacker's argot.

Dean's final chapter is a puzzling jeremiad on the search for casual sex online, which he argues privatizes public life and makes "cruising" a purely sexual endeavor, reducing its potential to generate friendships, feelings of community, and ultimately, one's sense of self. He writes that "the ethics of cruising is a matter not of how many people one has sex with or what kind of sex one has with them (bareback or otherwise) but of how one treats the other and more specifically, how one treats his or her own otherness" (177). Certainly one can arrive at the same conclusion without making a straw man out of the Internet, claiming that it reduces "the contact sport of cruising to a practice of networking" (194).

Also, I wish that Dean had more thoroughly explored the boundaries of barebacking as "unlimited intimacy": the paradoxes he masterfully locates are often disregarded in lieu of anecdote and confession. Dean is truly brave to continually remind readers that...