Safe Sex and the Pornographic Vernacular
(from How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video. Bad Object Choices eds. Seattle: Bay Press, 1991. Reprinted with author's permission)
See also Visual AIDS: Gay Porn and Safer Sex Pedagogy, an HIV InSite Round Table with Cindy Patton, Michael Scarce, Paul Morris and Robert Kirsch.
Cindy Patton
Signifying Safe Sex
The eight of us sat late into the night watching the same videotape again and again. We ran the tape forward and backward, freeze-frame and slow motion. The cleaning man finished up and hurried past us, obviously disgusted that four men and four women were staying late at the office to watch homosexual pornography But sexual desire was not the cause of our obsessive watching: we were searching for a condom. The actor had donned one early in the video, but once he began fucking, we couldn't see it. We freeze-framed the tape to scrutinize the base of the actor's dick. We considered whether he might be wearing one of the new ultrasheer condoms with no nubby end-ring.
"Well, I don't see it," said our videographer.
"There! There!" said the design assistant, jabbing his finger at the screen. "See that. It's shiny here and not shiny here."
This was not a censorship board, although our discussions sometimes had a moralistic tone. No, we represented, in varying combinations, professional sex educators, academics, seasoned community organizers, professional filmmakers, and "ordinary gay people" who wanted to make a contribution to slowing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We had come together to design and produce an innovative, multiphase safe sex project for and by gay men in Boston. The women involved were also active members of the gay male subculture, and we hoped to develop a parallel safe sex organizing project for lesbians and bisexual women. Although we discussed gender differences in the construction and social organization of homosexualities, the first phases of the project focused largely on styles and strategies that might work among gay men. After months of reviewing other projects and discussing strategies, we decided that the adoption of safe sex practices depended on creating an environment in which gay men's sexuality (and at a later phase, lesbians' and bisexual women's sexualities) was once again celebrated and in which safe sex was assumed to be a norm rather than a problem.
To introduce the project, we wanted to include portions of a recent commercial porn film intercut with the project's logo. But we came up against a question in selecting segments for the trailer: how do you signify safe sex? Was it that magic edge of the condom, the line between shiny and not shiny? What might the effect on viewers be of the now-standard caution at the beginning of commercial porn films that all actors are practicing safe sex, even if the editing hides it? Or, if condoms are obviously donned early in a film, would viewers assume their presence later, even if they couldn't be seen? Was "condom continuity" necessary? Must the condom always be visible, along with technically proper application and removal? What about nonpenetrative (condomless) forms of safe sex? Could already-safe activities (licking, jerking off) be signified as safe? Should porn simply show (and therefore eroticize) safe sex? Must safe sex be constituted as a change in practice, requiring some signifier of sexual risk?
The concern to produce "responsible" sexual fantasy material was clear in most gay male video porn by 1989, but the approaches were contradictory and rested on widely divergent views of the role of fantasy and mediation in sexuality. As analysts of sexual representations, we, too, had dramatically different ways of interrogating the possibilities and requirements of teaching safe sex.
We eventually abandoned the porn component of our project, but the original reasons for wanting to use it and the debates that emerged are worth recounting, because they prompted me to begin theorizing a "pornographic vernacular" as a concept from which to produce better strategies for organizing communities or subcultures around safe sex.1
Safe Company: A Radical Experiment
Working from a complex and social constructionist community organizing model2 the members of our core group who designed the safe sex project, and who became peer educators, named themselves Safe Company. Subsequent recruitment and training produced an affinity-group-like team that engaged in innovative and militant safe sex work in the many places where gay men congregate — parks, bars, "tea rooms," porn cinemas — places familiar to the various members of Safe Company.
The name Safe Company was intentionally polysemous and suggested that anyone could be in safe company by openly celebrating the importance and eroticism of safe sex. Placing safe sex on the company/group/community level rather than the individual level resituated sex from a private, personal danger to a fundamentally social project. We wanted to affirm not only that safe sex can be hot sex, but also that working toward community-wide adherence to safe sex can be an act of resistance to the destructive political, social, and psychological effects of the HIV epidemic.
Promoting pleasure and energizing a cynical urban subculture a decade into a devastating epidemic was an ambitious project. Safe sex campaigns and slogans were considered gauche, even if fears of sexual danger had produced a marked decrease in sexual expression.3 To make matters worse, the organization sponsoring Safe Company — the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, an institution looked to for direction in the social and political issues surrounding the epidemic — was widely perceived to be prudish and even antisex, and there were few alternative institutional forces. In order to signal the difference between this project and earlier individualistic or psychotherapeutically oriented programs, porn producer and star Al Parker — a Boston boy made good — was invited to join Safe Company at Boston's gay pride celebrations.
Safe Company asked Parker to participate for a variety of reasons: first, of course, because he was a nationally known porn star and, second, because his style and age were easily identified with by the "clone generation" of gay men, the thirty-five to forty-five-year-old mustachioed and LaCoste shirt-clad cohorts who had been hard hit by AIDS. Parker was also raunchy enough to appeal to the leather/denim crowd, who, although long active in AIDS volunteer work, had been publicly disenfranchised by the major AIDS groups and the wider gay and lesbian community. In addition, Parker had already appeared in several safe sex campaigns on the West Coast and had been a vocal advocate for safe sex in the gay media and in a controversial appearance on the "Phil Donahue Show." Parker required absolute adherence to ultrasafe sex on his sets and had produced a commercial porn video that was a primer on the use of condoms, surgical gloves (for finger fucking), and plastic wrap (to cover the anus for rimming).
Finally, there was a historical reason to work with Parker: his film career as actor, writer, director, and producer (Parker is the co-owner of Surge Studios, the only fully gay-owned commercial gay porn producer) spanned and mirrored the gay liberation era. Parker's films, like those of his competitors, were self-consciously stereotyped fantasies of male-male sex, but they also included scenes from or alluded to urban gay life. In the 1970s, gay porn makers generally tried to give their films a particular style or content to mark them as gay and thus different from films that showed men having sex with each other for the erotic pleasure of ostensibly heterosexual male consumers. In Parker's films — especially those from the 1970s — emotional issues and problems of gay life made up the erotic narrative into which sex scenes were slotted. Even Parker's films from the highly competitive 1980s were less "hunk"-dominated than other commercial gay porn: they played on the heat of sexual scenarios instead of conforming to narrow, if changing, notions of masculine beauty. The men in Parker's films were more diverse, and their activities seemed more perverse. Like gay films made before the explosion of gay and straight home video porn in the early 1980s standardized the genre, Parker's films were less insistently focused on intercourse as narrative closure, proposing instead a range of sexual activities to be pursued as objectives in themselves.
Safe Company felt this broadening of what constitutes sex was critical. Whereas gay male sexual practices before AIDS and safe sex discourse had included a wide variety of activities, the equation of condoms with safe sex had "heterosexualized" gay male sex, reconstituting many activities as "foreplay" to an ultimate "intercourse." This shift in perception of "already always safe" activities like jerking off, licking, tit play, verbal scenes, and so forth, which once constituted ends in themselves, was evident in high-production-value commercial pornography, in which virtually every sexual narrative ended with intercourse. Parker's films, however, had always included a wide range of already-safe erotic activities, and his work also met our requirements for a diversity of male types, a gay liberation ethos, and a message that safe sex was perverse and fun, not a limitation. We hoped Parker and his films would help us promote the idea that sex was integral to the strength of the gay male community and that aggressively promoting safe sex, rather than fear, was essential to individual and community survival. But, the videographers returned from their initial edit of Parker's film Better Than Ever (1989) with the charge that the film was not safe.
Containing Safe Sex
Better Than Ever began with the usual notice to the viewer that all actors were practicing safe sex, even though, for artistic reasons, barrier devices might not always be visible. Condoms were indeed donned on camera, but could not always be seen thereafter. Although a wide range of safe activities occurred (use of dildos and "stubbies" (short condoms that cover the head of the penis, useful for fellatio) safe sex was not signaled or problematized within the narrative of the film. Was that safe?
The representational issues raised were not unlike those debated at art schools. But we were working on an immediate, practical problem: using cultural artifacts to revitalize a besieged community in order to change sexual norms and behaviors and reduce the risks of a new disease syndrome. Theory and practice could not be separated: each argument about the nature of representation, the meaning of safe sex, and the modes through which community change might occur was conducted against a background of death witnessed and community destruction survived. While the arguments outlined below and the preliminary theorizing about sexual languages seem abstract, they represent the heart of a struggle for group self-determination.
The group could not decide what constituted the representation of safe sex, in part because although safe sex appears to have a real reference in medical data, it is, in fact, a cultural construction that joins science, fantasy, group histories and identities, and health logics. The relation (or distinction) between fantasy sex and "actual sex" and the capacity for sexual agents to rework the symbolic meaning of particular acts were far from clear. Moreover, the nature of porn watching was in dispute: is watching porn a sexual activity in itself (a parasocial relationship, in clinical terms)? Or are porn videos an aid to the imagination, doing the work of fantasy production for the viewer? The underlying issues concerned whether videos are taken to be real by viewers and what people do with the videos. Do they imitate what they see? Does watching unsafe sex provide a viable substitute for practices now out of bounds? Do unsafe videos image and stabilize activities that ought to be erased from any moment of desire? The dozen or more people involved at some stage of the discussion had their own stories to tell about their relationship to pornography, their experiences of both sexual pleasure and sexual danger, their own vision of what a "safe company" might look and feel like.
Three basic, partially overlapping positions emerged:
1. Gay male porn videos must show proper application, use, and removal of a condom in logical order and with a kind of episodic structure that leaves no doubt in the viewer's mind about the pragmatics of condom use. The viewer should be able to clearly see the condom on the dick when the actors are fucking. This argument assumes that some measure of imitation of the process will occur, and, thus, "learning" requires real-time, accurate presentation of condom use. The primary goal of safe sex advocacy in a video is information, not eroticization. Although pornography might be able to provide information, the specific requirements of safe sex representation are probably at artistic odds with pornographic conventions.
2. The now-standard disclaimers in commercial gay pornography — insisting that actors are practicing safe sex and explaining the cinematic technique of editing — are effective and enable the viewer to imagine that condoms are in place. Porn is understood as fantasy, and viewers supply or ignore any number of details or elements. This argument assumes that safe sex is already accepted in gay male sexual practice and that explicit visual description is not required. Overemphasis on condom use, especially by signaling its "difference," comes at the expense of celebrating the many other already-safe activities. Safe sex is a symbolic concept for a range of practices, only one of which is condom use.
3. Individuals have a wide range of reactions to pornography and are strongly influenced by intratextual characteristics, such as stereotyping or narrative structure, and by viewing context. What porn tapes say about gay male sexuality and how porn relates to the social context of gay male culture are larger issues than the specifics of condom use. Interpretations and enactment of safe sex depend on cultural attitudes, not on the presence or absence of specific representations. Porn videos are useful if they suggest positive attitudes about gay male sexuality, since they help create and sustain a social environment in which safe sex is practiced because it is viewed as a positive aspect of gay male sexuality. Thus, nuances in pornography narratives about sexuality and about interrelationships between men will promote the confidence men need in order to practice safe sex and not feel limited by condom use. Making no reference to the issue of safe sex is not acceptable, but a range of textual strategies — narrative, overt visual representations, specific dialogue, the instruction before the tape — can cue the viewer to interpret the video in the context of safe sex. This argument posits viewers as already actively interpreting porn texts in the larger context of their lives and sexual practices and suggests that the traditional cum shot might be reinterpreted as an enactment of the safe sex slogan "On me, not in me."4
The only weapon we have ...
When AIDS emerged as an epidemic in which, as was often said, "prevention is the only weapon we have," new demands were placed on both the imagination and the languages of sex; theories of representation and of sexuality were ill-equipped to provide practical guidelines for representing safe sex in a culture in transition. The relationship between codes designed to negotiate sex, provide group identification for sexual subcultures, and resist the values of the dominant culture's repressive categories were largely untheorized. The apparent need to define unequivocal methods of conveying and reinforcing safe sex information collided with arguments about the limits of good taste, the meaning of sexual representation, and the role of fantasy in sexuality.5 But picturing change and tapping the fantastic interior of erotic possibilities put pornography in conflict with pedagogy. "Your brain is the biggest sex organ" became a cry of the 1980s, but the thought police were ready to set limits on imagination.
Safe sex education evolved rapidly as various strategies met with mixed success. At first (1981-82), information was categorical and sexological, declaring promiscuity, penile-anal penetration, and oral-genital contact suspect. Very soon, the how-to style took over as men were encouraged to "eroticize safe sex."6 But cultural and subcultural variations in gay sexual and learning styles threw up obstacles to the largely middleclass, psychobabble-oriented "Hot, Horny, and Healthy" and "Meeting Men" style of workshops, however successful these were/are at introducing a new set of relational styles, values, and terminologies to a select group within the visible gay male community.
The terms culturally sensitive and sexually explicit were bandied about as if the former were a category of narrative preference and the latter a marker of realist representation. But both terms were already overdetermined, and they began to cut both ways. Culturally sensitive suggested a hands-off, community self-determination ethos. Sexuality is not, however, a culture in itself, but rather, an artifact of cultures. By the time "cultural differences" were a common concern in gay community-based AIDS groups (around 1985 or 1986 in the dozen hardest hit cities), the "clone" core of the gay community was well into a new sexual austerity, the complex roots of which related not only to the multiple problems of the epidemic-caring for friends and lovers, fear and despair-but also to the aging of, and career demands on, this upwardly mobile baby-boom group. This austerity was visible in the closing of many bars, a declining attendance in other gay clubs and entertainment businesses, an apparent increase in monogamous relationships (or at least reversal of stated values about monogamy and "leisure sex"), and the increase in concern about so-called sexual compulsion and substance abuse.7
Outside of the gay communities' grappling (however badly) with their own diversity, "cultural sensitivity" became a new form of voyeurism for public health officials and clinicians, who mastered the quaint vernaculars of their charges. Both in the discourse of the gay community and that of public health practices, those who "need" cultural sensitivity are measured against a middle-class, white norm and found lacking in both the decoding skills and the behavioral and social values of the mainstream society. Their perceived deficiencies are gauged by their distance from the mainstream and by whether or not they "change" once they receive a "culturally sensitive message." The distinction between those who "want" information and those who "need" a culturally sensitive message creates two target audiences: those who have a right to (and could be counted on to respond to) education and those who could be held legally and medically liable (through arrest or denial of health care) for the ignorance their infection or "risk behavior" was presumed to represent.8
Cultural sensitivity came to mean addressing the way those people who can't understand straightforward medical terms talk about sex. In some arenas this meant softening medical terms that might seem offensive for some groups, notably those not perceived to be "truly at risk." Thus, when speaking to mainstream heterosexuals, we were to talk of "making love" rather than penile-vaginal intercourse. For other groups, such as gay men, it meant not blinking an eye when speaking of rimming or fisting as opposed to oral-anal contact or manual-anal insertion. In all cases, cultural sensitivity entailed scientists begrudgingly giving up their stuffy clinical terms in order to water down the "real" and "specific" language for sex into derivative popular terms considered less accurate and thus at the opposite pole from "documentary" on a realist representational continuum.
Despite the nod toward pluralism, the notion of cultural sensitivity posits a reality of acts existing prior to the meanings created around them and constructs a double-entry system that equates specific acts with corresponding, technically correct words. Scientific language for acts is presumed to be more correct than vernacular terms, which are slightly confused translations. The task of the culturally sensitive educator is to match up existing vernacular terms with corresponding scientific terms in order to ensure that the message conveyed is true to its ideal form. The process involves treating vernacular concepts as "found" and static artifacts of a pre- or protoscientific thought system: the educator is "sensitive" when he or she leaves such language as is and covertly determines its match to the ideal terms.
What are ignored are the ways in which the vernacular terms are altered or are reinvested once they are linked to the dominant discourse through an enforced equivalency determined and policed by the culturally sensitive educator. Like the subtle imperialism of late twentieth-century anthropology, uncritical educators and clinicians unconsciously accept their own scientific language as the standard for reality effects even as they celebrate the "richness" of the speech of the indigene. This pseudo-aesthetic appreciation masks the educators' inability to understand the meaning potentials of vernacular terms, which constitute a surplus in their system of equivalencies. Although the education occurs in the vernacular, some amount of cultural violence occurs in ripping loose the sexual vernaculars from the objects of scientific/educational intervention. Using vernacular terms in the charts and graphs of scientific conferences or educational materials designed by outsiders may appear to mark the scientist or educator as culturally sensitive, but appropriation robs the vernacular of its linguistic polysemy and temporal specificity. Rimming and knocking boots sound like a foreign language when pronounced back into subcultures, however proficient the accent.
An interesting study in England, for example, showed that people preferred being addressed by interviewers in medicalsounding language, even though they often did not fully understand or recognize the terms. Likewise, injecting drug users and street teens feel offended when outsiders use their vernacular, sensing that the professional is using the street terms in quotes. Vernacular cloaks group identification; boundary defenses are diminished when a vernacular is colonized.9
Like cultural sensitivity, the idea of sexual explicitness bears a realist mark. It is as if there were a bare, mirror representation or language of sex. But instead of filtering "correct terms" through a posited "culture," the notion of sexual explicitness views the downest, dirtiest words as most accurate to the user: anything less than unvarnished prose is marred by repression. Bawdy terms place sex in a bodily rather than a clinical context. When used in clinical discourse, bawdy terms are treated rather like foreign words that become standard usage but are italicized to indicate their otherness and their magic power to defy translation. But because bawdy terms are perceived by educators as having privileged access to a bodily or sexual reality, there is no mechanism for deciding which bawdy terms to use, no assessment of the context or mode of address in which the terms are conveyed, no appreciation for the ways in which sexual rhetorics reinscribe systems of power
In this framework, linguistic transgression is equated with realism: rather than evaluating specific, local bawdy terms as they operate doubly and performatively in their contexts, the most naive educators use their own discomfort or amusement with "dirty words" as the criterion for closeness to sexual reality. This constitutes an inverted, romantic imperialism: dominant culture's rejection of the validity of "talking sex" in bawdy terms is taken as a validation of those terms. But when a subaltern population, unconsciously idealized as "naturally" less "uptight" about sexuality, rejects those very same terms, the educator searching for explicitness deems the subaltern culture lacking in the verbal tools to express their sexuality. 10 The fact that the dirty words of a culture function to constitute, resist, and protect sexual identities is missed when these words are stripped of context and inserted into another culture's linguistic system of sexual constructions.
Community educators worked from one of these two frameworks (or from both) in the shadow of U.S. government silence about AIDS. The downside of no government response was no government funding. On the other hand, no government response meant no government interference: education by and for gay men and injecting drug users could stay within the borders of these fragile communities. The first federal funding for education became available in late 1985, more than four years after the identification of the first cases of what came to be called AIDS. And the $400,000 came with restrictions, including potential censorship by a "community standards" board and a requirement that the then-new antibody testing had to be a part of the package.11 In 1987, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina displayed on the floor of the Senate some sexually explicit, culturally sensitive brochures from Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York City. The pamphlet that drew the most ire was a cartoon book, by a well-known gay artist, about s&m sexuality. It was sensitive to this minority sexual culture and explicit in visuals and language. Although scrupulous bookkeeping records at GMHC demonstrated that no federal monies had been used for the project, Helms was able to leverage personal revulsion into political terrorism by alleging that American taxpayers had paid for the pamphlets.
Pornography of Life
Helms's attack had a chilling effect on gay male health education. In sorting out how far to go in producing material "direct" enough to be useful without bringing wrath down on the gay community, two questions emerged: first, are realist portrayals of gay male sexuality pornographic by definition to a mainstream culture that wants to hear nothing about it? And, second, the question I've already raised: is conventional pornography used as stimulus for solo-sex "safe" regardless of whether or not its content conveys a message about nontransmitting sexual behaviors?
Porn producers, educators, and community activists were divided over the above questions, and discussions ran through another range of questions: Is sex a drive? Is it a compulsion in some men? Can men make choices about safe sex? Do certain environments lessen one's ability to stick to safe sex? Can someone consent to unsafe sex? Whose responsibility is an individual occasion of safe sex? Who is responsible for establishing new norms?
Debate over the relative balance between sexual pleasure and sexual danger brought accusations, on one hand, of denying the reality of an epidemic and, on the other, of denying the demands of desire; of promoting unsafe sex or of promoting paranoia about sex. The value of specific safe sex educational interventions was difficult to assess because of a failure to clarify assumptions about sexuality and representation. How sex is accomplished and how sexual vernaculars evolve needed to be more rigorously theorized. Simply stated, I want to argue, first, that groups (audiences, target populations, subcultures, mainstream culture) bring a range of readings to a particular representation of sex and, second, that safe sex educators must work within the logics of interpretation established and/or evolving within subgroups. This preliminary move toward a theory of sexual vernacular makes no sharp distinction between "sex" and "text," but views sexual performance, sexual identities, and sexual networks as constructed in and as language.
In this framework, sexual expression is learned through communication and observation in both public and private social venues as well as through mediated observation and communication, including medical texts, the popular press, how-to books, and pornography. The particular matrix of public/private, communication/observation, texts, identification with social categories, and subsequent punishments and pleasures experienced "from" a range of subject-positions in a range of social fields creates for each person a set of registers, or decoding strategies, or a hermeneutic, which in turn positions him or her in a network of policing, advice, sexual possibilities, style, erotic "preferences," and closets.
Sexual vernaculars are learned contextually: members of various language communities experience cultural recognition not through visual identification, but when performances — what is said — are meaningfully decoded by another person. Sexual vernaculars are the identifying characteristics of liminal sexualities — being "in the life" historically precedes more visual markers of subcultural affinity. Only when a vernacular achieves hegemony does it appear to be a "natural," coherent language (instead of "dirty words") with a legitimate parentage. Thus, by its claim to naturalness, the dominant language of heterosexuality (for example, "making love") intimidates those who operate within the liminal space of a minority sexual vernacular 12
Every culture — and subgroups within every culture — has public and private sexual languages, with strong rules concerning the appropriateness of speaking such languages "out of bounds." Dirty jokes, double entendre, and sexual leers are probably the classic and nearly universal modes of public sexual discourse, but medicalized discourses about the sexual (like the charts of Ronald Reagan's colon in an era obsessed with anality) as well as graffiti, euphemisms, and pointed polite silence are also forms of public sexual signification.
In addition, gendered and class-based differences in access to "the public" intersect with public/private languages, so that, for example, men engage in a public language (for example, porn film viewing in X-rated cinemas) in the absence of women, and it is precisely this absence of women that constructs as "public" those particular words/texts/performances on that particular occasion.
Sexual languages vary dramatically and are important in some cultures — gay culture, for example — and unimportant in others. Sexual languages vary by class, gender, ethnic group, age, location, and even time of day: sexual language employed in the marketplace is not the same as that used late in the evening in the bar, even between the same interlocutors. Thus, determining what is an "appropriate" use of sexual language, or how a set of sexual ideas will be interpreted, requires understanding the register of usage and the people likely to recognize that register
Sexually explicit materials are not a form of representation on the opposite end of the spectrum from euphemism; that is, there is not a spectrum with liberated sexuality on one end and repressed sexuality on the other, each with its own "natural" language. A better term might be sexually consistent material, that is, material consistent in form — oral, written, pictorial, gestural — in style, and in mode of cultural circulation. This latter is probably the least examined area and the one most often violated in the quest for cultural sensitivity. Safe sex is a cultural intervention that may work entirely within existing cultural economies or may stretch the edges of those economies, but it cannot be imposed from outside without making participants feel ridiculed or even attacked. Sexually consistent material is not more "real" or "accurate" material thrust upon a repressed or ignorant group. That is sexual imperialism. Sexually consistent material must work within the conceptual logics of a group and must circulate within the borders of the microculture.
Some would argue "if you don't like it, don't look at it." Unfortunately, "public" and "private" collide in contended areas of social power: the live-and-let-live politics of pluralism is impossible in a society in which a mobile media threatens previous linguistic cordons (Playboy at the 7-Eleven; gay newspapers offered as "evidence" in right-wing publications). The curious ideology of taxation, which constructs the public will within the collectivity of purchasers, made the Gay Men's Health Crisis pamphlet fair game for public debate. Direct-mail letters informed right-wing constituents of the details of the pamphlets, which the The New York Times did not find "fit to print." Although the language in the GMHC pamphlet was "targeted" and considered "private" by participants in s&m culture, the right wing considers it not a language to be left in its venue, but a language to be scrutinized in order to reveal the hidden truth about homosexuality and AIDS.
Unfortunately, most sexual vernacular is very offensive to those for whom it is not a native tongue. Sexual vernaculars may be more open to misreading than other vernaculars because they rely on "found" symbols and syntax, but sexuality is also chiefly regulated through the policing of speech and gesture — from psychiatry's attempts to elicit the hidden psychic language of deviant sexuality to the queer-bashing that results from a "reading" of a victim as "homosexual." Queer-bashers may perceive their victims through dominant-culture stereotypes, such as effeminacy; or through presumed subcultural codes, such as having a particular haircut; or through the perception that the "gay man" was attempting to deploy a subcultural code, that is, to "cruise" the queer-basher, or that the lesbian was refusing to participate in a verbal/gestural performance of heterosexuality/femininity.
Thus, people from certain subgroups become afraid to speak their native tongue when their "texts" – a red hanky, a turn of phrase or cut of suit, a pamphlet, a book – thought private, suddenly come under scrutiny and become public, rendering the private language and symbols of the subculture vulnerable to unanticipated readings by someone with greater social power. And, on the other side, members of dominant language communities feel their territory has been invaded with languages they do not wish to acquire (perhaps because these languages highlight, perhaps for the first time, the experience of the irregularity of the borders of their arbitrary and unjustifiable concentration of power).
Finding the Limits: Our Sex, Our Cinema
The borders of microcultures; are precarious, changing, coopted by commercialism, and facilitated by the interpenetration of commercial culture that serves as camouflage for encoded desires. At the risk of ripping particular artifacts out of their natural habitat, I'd like to explore several approaches to representing safe sex in porn films, including both commercial and independent productions.
Play Safely, 1986, directed by David McCabe, Fantasy Productions. Commercially available, but produced with the consultation of educators, Play Safely uses a before-and-after narrative structure to display gay men's concerns about their changing sexual culture. The film's premise is that a "brush with reality" (in the encounter of a "promiscuous" man who is rumored to have AIDS with a character who tests antibody negative) enables the men to make positive and hot changes. Like most porn films, the narrative weaves together the stories of several characters, allowing producers to show more icons having more types of sex. In this film, one member of each couple is "anxious" and articulates specific concerns common in urban gay male culture. The partner responds with words of comfort and wisdom. Various strategies-monogamy, testing, avoiding people who "don't look well" – are proposed, but proper use of condoms is always the chosen solution. The film makes unusual use of dialogue to voice and elaborate logics concerning decision-making in the context of safe sex.
We are shown the practical aspects of safe sex in exhaustive, almost didactic detail from the middle of the film on. Sexual danger is produced by representing characters as having unsafe sex in equally hot flashback scenes. The film is thus anxiously poised on the edge of realism, asking the viewer to believe in the recounted dangers in order to appreciate the importance of taking up safe sex practices.
This film contains one of the few coming-in-the-condom shots I have found (Al Parker's Turbo Charge trailer also has such a shot). In terms of safe sex practice, there is no good reason not to remove the condom upon pulling out (as many men do in "real life"). The film does not appear to be suggesting that men actually duplicate this activity; rather, it assumes that the traditional "cum shot" of porn (where the man pulls out and masturbates to copious orgasm) is a metonym for what is happening "inside," out of camera view. Thus, the coming-in-the-condom shot helps the viewer visualize condom efficacy: the condom actually will contain coming, even if we can't observe this happening "inside."
Top Man, 1988, written, produced, and directed by Scott Masters, Catalina Video and Newport Video. One of the top grossing films of 1988, this coproduction has extremely high production values and humor and incorporates condom use without foregrounding safe sex. The use of condoms is not problematized: all scenes of fucking include both condom application and clear "meat" shots (penis-in-anus) in which the line of the condom is visible. Two scenes include dialogue about condom use incorporated into stereotyped scenarios of "teaching" another man how to have homosexual sex. Thus, the film inculcates a sense of collective responsibility for ensuring condom use. In a final orgy scene, there are plenty of condoms for everyone, and everyone uses them, Again, condoms are completely normalized, both something you can give to someone who is not initiated into gay sex and something you can freely use and ask for in front of men within gay male culture.
Turbo Charge Trailer, 1987, written and produced by Al Parker and Justin Cade, Surge Studios. Presented as a public service announcement, this how-to trailer to the then soon-tobe-released Turbo Charge shows Al Parker and Justin Cade using condoms, surgical gloves for fingering, and plastic wrap for ass licking. No reference is made to safe sex, per se, until the end title of the clip. The smooth acting and ease with which the men employ safe sex techniques suggest that this is simply what men do. The men snap the condoms in mock dick-torture, suggesting not only that condoms are ordinary, but also that they are an improvement in the game. Split-second repeat editing provides viewers with a clue to the problem points in safe sex technique: getting the plastic wrap out and smoothly covering the ass and getting the condom rolled down past the foreskin are foregrounded without interrupting the flow of the sexual narrative. The five-plus-minute clip is didactic insofar as time and care are taken to present safe sex techniques, but the techniques are "taught" in the course of a scenario that shows the men having fun and sexual ecstasy.
The Gay Men's Health Crisis Safer Sex Shorts, 1989, directed by Gregg Bordowitz and jean Carlomusto. These videos, ranging in length from three to four minutes, are part of an ongoing project by activist videomakers working with members of target groups to create vernacular safe sex representations. The first two were screened at the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal in June 1989: Something Fierce is a rock-video-style guide to fantasizing, touching, and fucking using a condom, including a didactic interlude in which the dancer applies and removes a condom. Midnight Snack shows two men meeting at the refrigerator and using whipped cream and honey to sweeten fellatio (with a condom). Neither shows the traditional cum shot, but both signify sexual pleasure through the men's facial expressions.
Car Service was designed by a black gay men's focus group and shows a more typical porn story progression: a yuppy black man discovers he has lost his wallet and pays his macho black cab driver with three condoms. The cab driver pulls into a quiet place, and the men have sex. Although we see the condoms, a penis, and a greedy, winking anus, we do not actually see the condom applied or the penis inserted, even though the men appear to have anal sex. The focus group preferred an erotic, soft core representation in which the condom signifies both anal sex and safe sex. The video is an implicit critique of the more hard core, fuck-focused eroticism of mainstream, largely white-oriented gay male porn.
Current Flow, one of the first projects aimed at safe sex for lesbians, acknowledges that the concepts, techniques, and tools of safe sex are new for most lesbians. One woman interrupts another, who is masturbating, and unrolls a towel containing the full complement of safe sex devices. The camera pans slowly over dental dams, surgical gloves, lubricant, and a dildo. The camera pan, which was commonly used in early gay male and heterosexual safe sex films, is a critical didactic moment for lesbians, many of whom are only beginning to be introduced to safe sex ideas and have little idea of what a dental dam looks like. The women engage in a variety of activities using all of the latex accouterments. Current Flow is remarkable both as a safe sex video for lesbians and as an early and cine-realist contribution to the emerging field of lesbian-produced lesbian porn. The video does not suffer from a lack of generic reference and sets an interesting aesthetic standard in using longer takes and women's music in the background.
Notes
The term community has been nearly evacuated: the illusory unity of a "gay community" has been highlighted by the failure of mainstream AIDS groups to work effectively outside the white, middle-class gay-male core group. In addition, co-optation of the term by mainstream media – "heterosexual community" or "white community," for example – has robbed the term of its references to shared histories of oppression. Subculture, too, has its problematic connotations: sexual networks and the political groupings arising from resistance to policing are constituted through forms of "culture different from those recognized in the dominant" culture. Specifically, the term sexual subcultures suggests exotic groups with values utterly divergent from the main culture. As I will suggest here, and develop in detail elsewhere, there are a variety or groupings of homosexual actors, and each needs to be theorized. I have made these tentative moves toward language theories in order to suggest, at least for the urgent project of communicating the techne and political significance of safe sex, how we might understand differences in these groupings. We seem stuck with the term for now, but rather than understand community as an essential, stable social institution, we might view it as a historically specific site of contestation that is in the process of reinvention. For all its undecidability there is some notion of "community" to which urban gay men pay allegiance, and it is in this "ethnomethodologic," somewhat evacuated sense that I am using the term. back to text
In addition to reviewing specific gay male safe sex projects, we looked at theoretical work on sexuality (especially, Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance [Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19841, 267-519), on gay liberation (John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19831; Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 19841; Dennis Altman, The Homosexualization of America [Boston: Beacon Press, 19831), on AIDS politics (Dennis Altman, AIDS in the Mind of America: The Social Political and Psychological Impact of a New Epidemic [Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 19871; Cindy Patton, Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS [Boston: South End Press, 1985)), and on pedagogy (Paulo Freire The Politics of Education [South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1985). back to text
All of the major urban gay communities have gone through a phase of sexual austerity in the exaustion from the epidemic. Boston has long been viewed as a more sexually conservative city, and if debates on public cruising, bathhouses, and "the new monogamy" are any indication, then Boston's "phase" may be more extreme and last longer than those of New York and Son Francisco, which seem now to have recovered their sexual adventuresomeness. back to text
The cum shot Is the "climax," in which the actor "pulls out" or disengages from mutual sexual activity and masturbates to orgasm. In fact, I have found several younger men whose porn viewing experience has occurred only in the context of a world in which safe sex was already thematized and who believed that the cum shot was in fact a specific technique of safe sex within the films. Lacking any other explanation for this convention, they interpreted the cum shot as a form of safe sex representation. back to text
Unequivocal, but not univocal: the "education" for gay men was initially offered as a mode of breaking the silence about AIDS promoted by the mainstream culture. It was recognized that information could and should be offered in a variety of forms. As control over this enterprise of "spreading the word" shifted away from a small number of well-informed and politically engaged groups to mainstream news media and as divisions in strategy arose between AIDS groups, educators began seeking something like "teacher/ learner-proof" ways of communicating about safe sex. The media and government — and many gay groups — were initially criticized for their silence.
After about 1985, safe sex informational materials were criticized for overlaying "neutral information" with coded moral judgments — for example, use of the term promiscuity, with its long-standing cultural meanings, was said to misdirect risk reduction efforts toward reducing partners and producing an unefficacious "trust." The problematics of safe sex information have shifted overtime in relation to the investments of the producers of the information. But, as I have argued elsewhere, nearly all positions were based on a belief in the potential neutrality of information as well as the belief that antibody testing produced a relatively uniform experience. back to text
In 1983, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic a forty-two-page pamphlet, was published by longtime gay activists involved in health organizing in the newly described epidemic. Beginning in 1984-85, workshops and events with titles like "Hot, Horny, and Healthy" attempted to counter the growing perceptions of limitation and de-eroticizing associated with safe sex. These workshops continue and are probably useful in initially proposing interpersonal and conceptual categories that facilitate change in sexual behavior and normative shifts in the communicative requirements of sexual relationships.
In my view, however, they overemphasize verbal negotiation and reconstitute the late 1970s as a mythical time when "anything went,- implying that gay male culture was restrictionless and normless. There is an uncomfortable assumption that sexuality must be tamed by "mature" and rational limit-setting. While components of these programs foreground nonpenetrative sexual options, the overall context situates intercourse as a telos now problematized, rather than viewing the range or sexual possibilities as a menu. I now believe that differences in perception about what constitutes "real gay sex" are a key underlying problem in accomplishing normative changes. Too much safe sex education is constructed against the -old style of gay sex, idealized (or idolized) as the abandon of the 1970s. Thus, safe sex practice is overdetermined by its role in demarking transgressive sex from "mature" or natural (safe) sex. For men who viewed gay sex as intrinsically transgressive (of cultural or particular psychic norms), the loss of transgressiveness that safe sex ("Bambi sex") now implies means that a critical component of erotic performance (desire) has been eliminated. back to text
Whatever the numerical realities of the latter, the rise in concern about excesses of pleasure marched in lockstep with the mainstream, Reaganite views on drugs and sex. Some effort was made to articulate drug/alcohol abuse as an effect of homophobic oppression rather than individual pathology ("addiction is a disease"), but this view was difficult to assert relative to sex (no doubt because of its centrality to gay identity) without appearing to claim that gay men are in some essential way self-destructive. Within the gay community, sex was perceived to be more importantly linked with HIV/AIDS, both as the precondition for the epidemic and as the mechanism — as "safe sex" — for stemming the epidemic. Thus, "sexual compulsiveness" had a different valence and was less accepted as an "issue" than gay substance abuse, although the latter appeared as a separate issue. Indeed, the ad for a major gay operated detox and therapy unit (Pride Institute) claims that more gay people die each year from chemical dependency than from AIDS, an obviously problematic set of rhetorical equivalences. This stands in marked contrast to the claim of the Black Power movement in the 1960s, and to a lesser extent of the African-American political infrastructure, that drug control patterns have resulted in a disproportionate degree of drug use and trade within the urban African-American neighborhoods. back to text
I take up this complex issue of the cultural-political economy of safe sex education in Inventing AIDS (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), Chapter 2. back to text
Kay Welling, "Preliminary Report on a Pilot Study," Social Aspects of AIDS Conference, South Bank Polytechnic Institute, London, February 1989. back to text
It is common for "sensitive" educators to buy the line "we don't talk about sex" offered by many subaltern groups when confronted with outsiders who try to get them to talk about sex in colonialist terms. Rather than incite subalterns to (Western) discourse, truly sensitive educators discover how sex is understood locally, how sexual concepts and practices are learned and communicated. It often turns out that what counts as "sex" is radically different across microcultures. back to text
It is important to the history of the political economy of both AIDS education and access to clinical trials and prophylaxis that we recognize the ideological significance, in 1985 and through the present, of linking antibody testing with "risk behavior change." It was assumed with this first funding requirement that knowledge of antibody status would change behavior; no data supported this view, and health education wisdom was divided on this "confrontation with reality" style of education. The original testing mandates were an experiment in social engineering, one that most current data suggest failed. Studies by the Centers for Disease Control and more recently by the National Cancer Institute find no reliable correlation between knowledge of antibody status and behavior change. Certainly, such knowledge affects individuals in a wide variety of ways, related to health beliefs, social and psychological support, community attitudes, to suggest only a few. With new calls for early testing in order to take advantage or regimens that boost the immune system and prophylaxes for pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and other opportunistic infections it is critical to understand how behaviorist ideas are embedded within the testing system and in public attitudes toward HIV policy development. It will be a difficult task politically and educationally to transform the testing system, designed as a sexual behavior change experiment, into a system for early diagnosis of HIV disease. The relationship between the testing system and AIDS/HIV policy is pursued at greater length in my Inventing AIDS. back to text
I want to be clear that heterosexualities also have local vernaculars, but users' relations to state and psychiatric policing are different, since all heterosexuals, at least in the contemporary era, are viewed as enacting variations on a sexual category viewed as normal. With the exception of extreme forms of sex linked violence and overt child-oriented sexualities, liminal heterosexuals are largely considered "kinky" rather than pathological. back to text