Infectious Sex? An Autoethnographic Exploration of HIV Prevention

Public service announcements, community education sessions, stultifying school classes, gossip, and pornography taught me about gay sex. Each of these crafted similar stories: use a condom for EVERYTHING—even mutual masturbation and oral; anal was the proof of actual sex happening; and sex was simple and straightforward.¹ These points remain neither helpful nor accurate. Condoms were not something found in my imagination of male bodies nor in furtive looks through underwear catalogs. Anal sex did not come easily for me, and the stuff that happened before anal seemed more fun. I wanted to dally in the foreplay, but the condoms got in the way.

I saw the Gran Fury piece "Kissing Doesn't Kill" in the now defunct Out/Look magazine as an undergraduate. The three multiracial polysexual couples featured in the piece were kissing, and this was a welcome message in early 1990s HIV panic. Although I was inundated with instructions about condom use, there was significantly less about sexual acts and intimacy that would not involve latex wrappers. There was a dearth of material that featured the men I was attracted to, as well as the men who resembled me. Where was a language for sex—the kind I was having and the kind I wanted?

I learned how to have gay sex through the act of doing it.

Queer Autoethnography

I employ queer autoethnography to explore HIV and sex. Autoethnography utilizes personal life stories to examine social phenomena. It is purposefully disruptive of academic writing norms. Communication researchers Berry and Patti confess "[a]utoethnographers vulnerably lay [them]selves bare and at the service of something bigger—unique and often overlooked understanding concerning the complex problems that riddle communicative worlds."² As a method, inter-cultural communication scholar Shinsuke Eguchi considers autoethnography "an autobiographical genre of performative writing that explicitly explicates, elucidates, and elaborates on the social, cultural, political, and historical."³ As such, I am doing autoethnography to expand the knowledge about HIV and sex, particularly in the realm of HIV prevention. Through this examination, I will add to uncovering what Jimmie Manning describes as "the connections between sexuality, relationships, and health" because these "are certainly worth exploring as possible links to people's sexual health, happiness, and well-being."⁴ The lived experience of HIV is a valuable way of understanding its complicated impact.⁵

Queer theory is meant to be disruptive. Emerging out of a concern for sexuality, queer theory quickly embraced a multiplicity of differences and identities. As a model, it resists power and engages marginality as a center. Jimmie Manning asserts "[q]ueer theory ultimately represents a spirit of understanding how we are essentialized and how we can undo this essentialization; begs questions about the imbalance between the personal and the political; and calls into multiple and thoughtful questions what we know about our own identities, about the identities of others, and how it all intersects."⁶ I use queer theory to examine how my own sex life has been situated within the HIV epidemic, HIV-related stigma, and the social realities of race, class, gender, and masculinity in the United States.

HIV 101: Use a Condom!

Without a knowledge base in established public health institutions, the first populations most vulnerable in the HIV epidemic—GLBT people, sex workers, and people who use drugs—had to develop strategies for preventing the spread of the disease. This work was both political and creative. The art collective Gran Fury created several posters and ads with overt sexual and political messages.

"Kissing Doesn't Kill" appeared as a poster and a bus ad in New York City (see Figure 1). The full line, "Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do," stretches across the top above three couples: an interracial heterosexual one, an interracial gay one, and Latina lesbians. They playfully kiss above the line "corporate greed, government inaction, and public indifference make AIDS a political crisis." Although these situate the poster as political critique, my twenty-year-old self found the kissing a revelation. This was an intimacy that was safe when sex itself was deemed...