For a 1980-born child, thinking of sex without thinking of rubber was to think the unthinkable. Like killing, stealing, running someone over, doing heroine, falling from the sky.

The fact that the most intimate kind of human bondage was intrinsically related to a thin substance ultimately separating one being from the other must have a million implications to the post-80s psyche. Especially to the gay one: not only we weren’t supposed to be having sex, if we actually did it, it had to be an “other” kind of sex: sex without touching.

What happens, for instance, to unconscious gay fantasies of getting impregnated by his fucking counterpart? What if that “fantasme” was the driving force behind some of gay men’s sexual theatrics?

Perhaps it would have been healthier, psychologically, to have been born before the 80s for a gay man, so he could have at least had the chance to taste what real sex feels like. But, perhaps, also more cruel given that he would have to give that up, suddenly, when the 80s hit: a rupture in the politics of sexuality that seems very under-examined from a psychological standpoint. The most fundamental of all acts becomes suddenly the most lethal of them all. The same substance carrying little fetuses also carrying poisonous viruses. The epitome of treacherous lust. In a way, the embodiment of the perverse core of Catholic blackmailing: you can have this, but look at how awful the consequences are. Using your own body for your very own pleasure? Think again.

Also an appearance of singular new tools in a gay man's psycho-sociological
toolkit: the condom as a way to classify "the other" and the kind of relationship governing them. "I use condoms with strangers, have 'real sex'
with people 'I know'". A small/large kind of power gay man begin to be able to savor. And, perhaps, a very idiosyncratic kind of power, gay men's in nature, akin to the heterosexual female power governing pregnancy.

But there is a toll to gayness over time, specially post-internet gayness. What used to be the hardest thing in the world for gays, getting a mate, suddenly becomes the simplest. The riskiest becomes so ubiquitously and anonymously risk-free -- socially. We can pick and choose mates, all the while skipping the maturing process of coming out of the closet, with the clicks of buttons.
Literally concocting our sexual personas by wording them, “acronymming” them, photoshopping them.

So there is the illusion of an identity that belongs to us: top/bottom, pnb, bb, ws, cbt, poppers, etc. All these artifacts that makes us look at a screen and recognize the various parts of something that must constitute a whole. Except a whole completely devoid of the social gaze, no trace of a heterosexual stare.

And the problem with things constructed completely away from a social gaze (the heterosexual one, its only kind) is that we risk developing ourselves into the most grotesquely primal, lethally neurotic of all monsters and no one will scream. Because no one is looking, except for those who nourish off of our very own neuroses.

So what seemed like the grossest of all impossibilities, barebacking, begins to gain a kind of omnipresence that grew into a possibility for me. Not a good one. But a possibility nonetheless. Something I would have to deal with in some way. That would seep into my bedrooms and would require me to take a stance besides simply avoiding it, or thinking it too foreign to reach my borders.

Like living in the most thuggish of all ghettos and trying to keep out of trouble. Possible to do, but impossible not to have to actively, and constantly morally, circumvent.

So they paid 63 dollars for a room. One of them had a tiny tattoo in each of his butt cheeks. An age (24) on one and a date (01/something/04) on the other.
Probably a lover who died. Or a brother. Or the day he found out he had HIV.

One shouldn’t ask.

He was constantly snorting poppers and so violently accepting the role of either a top or a bottom that you knew he was none of those. He was just an uncontrollable ball of despair, spinning so fast all the tangible things that made the world world and life life meant nothing to that needy set of limbs to which he had reduced himself into. That's the problem with yearning in the shadows of social norm -- you cannot filter.

How can one in a state of all-ID, “any touch-a good touch” retain the moral fabric of his sexual decisions.

And so he doesn’t. You could tell he wouldn’t mind if the 3rd man fucked him without a condom. The one who was late, and who could acquire the feminine aura of an old, suffering hag when he thought no one was looking. The one with the most fragile of all bodies giving a frame to the biggest of all dicks.

So tan and so thin he couldn’t be younger than 40.

And I, I. I grabbed this massive dick and I attempted to place it between the tattooed cheeks completely raw. Like real sex. Like pre-80s sex. Like a-little-bit-less-neurotic sex. Like sex with the possibility that what we are doing is legal, predictable, continuous, necessary.

The amorphously lonely man was in a state of such sexual drowning he was spanking his own self. And he saw nothing but the increasing of the intensity of outside warmth. Like babies taking any touch they can get, completely oblivious to what kind of limbs they are coming from, and much less to whom they are attached to. Too needy of the physicality of it to actually consider any other kind of implication it may bring along.

“I won’t bareback,” said the thin, disappearing man. His body so ubiquitously full of lubrication there was barely any skin left for those bodies to feel.

If he hadn’t blocked that ocean of ID-driven madness I wonder if I would feel responsible for the transaction of illnesses that may have taken place. And I think I should. Like the guy who cocks the weapon, incites a crowd. Shuts up or down before unfairness.

You can follow up with Diego in the Sexology forum: http://www.multidimensions.net/php/discussiontopics.php