How We Fuck Now

BuzzFeed LGBT editor Saeed Jones joins journalists Steven Thrasher and Dave Tuller to discuss sex, gay men, and what we are (and aren’t) doing. “Marriage and wedding registries are much easier to talk about than fucking.”

John Gara for BuzzFeed

Saeed Jones: OK, let’s be real: We have to start with Truvada if we’re going to have a candid discussion about gay men and sex in 2014. The drug has sparked a heated debate about the past and future of the HIV/AIDS crisis as well as necessary and complicated questions about everything from bareback sex in our bedrooms and in porn to disclosure, serosorting, and relationships between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men.

If HIV-negative gay men take Truvada once a day, they drastically reduce their chances of acquiring HIV. (Antiretrovirals can also be taken up to 72 hours after an unsafe sexual encounter — this is known post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP — but people should be aware that the evidence for whether this kind of HIV “morning-after pill” works is much less solid.) Personally, I’m still learning and making up my mind about whether or not Truvada is an option I’d like to act upon. But it is great to know that I at least have a new option. Still, though, I was a bit taken aback when Larry Kramer told the New York Times: “There’s something to me cowardly about taking Truvada instead of using a condom.” Steven, what did you think about Kramer’s comments?

Steven Thrasher: I was kind of stunned by Larry Kramer’s comments initially, though not entirely surprised after thinking about them a bit. In Tim Murphy’s outstanding New York Magazine article, you can see how it is easy to imagine a young Larry Kramer — the author of The Normal Heart and basis for its protagonist — as very at odds with the elderly Larry Kramer who made those comments. The second (and last) time I interacted with Larry Kramer, I found him to be almost entirely against a position he was haranguing me to be for the first time I’d met him. (Of course, like any of us, Kramer has certainly earned the right to change his mind over time.)

But I’ve certainly seen a big generational difference in how people respond to HIV, especially in reporting the story about Michael Johnson. (Johnson, a former college wrestler, is awaiting trial on one count of “recklessly infecting another with HIV” and four counts of “attempting to recklessly infect another with HIV,” felonies in the state of Missouri.) Some young activists asked me after reading the story why I hadn’t written about Truvada, or PrEP. However, the truth is that this is all very new to the public. The men I wrote about having bareback sex in St. Louis did not know about Truvada in early 2013. Most probably don’t still. Safe sex to them was simply a matter of using condoms. I questioned the school in that story, Lindenwood University, about why it didn’t have condoms available for free or for sale on campus. A year and a half later, Truvada is only barely starting to register as an option for people who are highly informed about HIV/AIDS in major metropolitan areas. I think this summer will be looked back upon as a turning point in using Truvada as a major tool for HIV prevention, especially considering the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recent endorsement for all sexually active gay men to take it and a study presented last week at the International AIDS Conference that showed how effective taking the drug can be. But we’re not there yet. I mean, while working on the story, I met someone in St. Louis who said his doctor refused to prescribe Truvada because it was a “whore’s drug.”

Sarah Karlan for BuzzFeed

David Tuller: I think the introduction of Truvada for HIV prevention has definitely been really challenging for guys of my generation, and Larry’s — I’m 57, so I’m quite a bit younger than him. It’s upended the basic assumptions we’ve lived with for 30-plus years. (Can it really be 30 years?) I had my first sexual experience with a guy when I was 21, in 1978. I didn’t feel comfortable having sex at all at first, but by the time I was starting to, the epidemic was already getting underway. In those days — the early ’80s — I pretty quickly became terrified to have sex at all. Could you kiss? What about blow jobs? Fucking felt too fraught to think about. What could you do? It really froze my budding sex life in place. I’d missed the wild days of the 1970s, or rather, I just caught the very end of it. And that terror stayed with me for years. And now, it’s a completely different world. We were, basically, terrorized into using condoms. You were a bad community citizen if you didn’t. And of course, those of us who adhered to the “condom code” did not get infected, thankfully. But the price we paid was that sex was always — always — accompanied by great fear and second-guessing. I think many men of my age cohort think, If we could use condoms faithfully, why can’t you?

SJ: I’m 28 years old. When I started realizing I was attracted to men, one of the assumptions I made was that HIV/AIDS and being a gay man were inextricably linked. I did a lot of reading and learning (and mis-learning) on my own because I didn’t feel comfortable asking questions about sex and, obviously, my high school sex education course didn’t address LGBT sexuality, HIV/AIDS, etc. America is still “debating” whether or not we should teach middle school students about birth control; imagine how far we have to go toward teaching teens and pre-teens about LGBT-relevant sex. Kids are coming out (across the LGBT spectrum) at earlier and earlier ages, but sex education is playing catch-up.

So, though I didn’t live through the AIDS plague years, that terror you mention was definitely a part of my sexual coming-of-age. I remember going to the public library in my hometown and looking for nonfiction books about gay people. The only books available were either about HIV/AIDS or “coping with” your gay child. My sophomore year of high school, I stole a copy of The New Joy of Gay Sex from a Barnes & Noble! Though I didn’t fully understand the politics of why I wasn’t being educated in a useful way about gay sex, I knew I wanted and needed to understand my body and how I felt about guys. I shoved that book into the front of my jeans and walked, quite awkwardly, out of the bookstore — nervous but incredibly proud. It was like, Fuck you! I’m going to figure this out one way or another. At summer camp that year, the boy I was hooking up with would page through the book with me and then we’d try things out. (We even snuck away from the camp to buy condoms and lube at Walmart.) Having someone just as audacious, horny, and determined as I was helped me feel sane. It was the only time I had sex before my twenties that I wasn’t terrified that the world wasn’t going to collapse in on itself immediately after my orgasm.

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