[Article to read in the winter issue of the têtu· magazine, available at your newsstands or by subscription.] Thanks to advances in HIV treatments and prevention, gay sexuality can finally reclaim sperm, that precious fluid which has crystallized all fears since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.
1995, the peak of the carnage wrought on the gay community by the AIDS epidemic. Semen is feared, we do not penetrate unless well wrapped. When we dare, we content ourselves with pleasure on chests. In European capitals, mutual jerking parties among friends develop, with no penetration or fellatio. We spray semen all over the walls and the chairs, but above all not into a body.
Yet, twenty years earlier, the gay community embraced sexual liberation with full force. In a context of rebellion, taboos began to fall and practices started to loosen. Glory holes and cruising areas were in full swing: sex was a party as much as a claim. We want “to enjoy without restraint”, in both literal and figurative senses, and semen is a game, a tool, a symbol asserted in the gay identity.
Du jus, des poils et des tattoos
The arrival of AIDS, in the early 80s, came to reshuffle the cards and emptied the libertarian slogan of any seed and meaning. At the start of the epidemic, while there was still concern about whether one could kiss without fear, ejaculation into the other became a more or less conscious prohibition. For the philosopher and theorist Tim Dean, author of a book on the subculture of barebacking (Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking), semen nonetheless retains a powerful symbolism: it cements bodies concretely and unites “men in the sense that this tangible matter leaves an invisible trace, the virus”.
This shared risk forging a community bond, and semen is the material that embodies it. Marc, infected with HIV in the early 90s at the age of 20, recalls this ambivalent era: “I did not see semen as something dangerous. I had a sexuality without a particular fluid fetishization and for me, semen was not an essential component.” Boris, a 50-year-old Hyérois, recalls those years lived “in fear”, and today bears a trauma. To the point that, even with a condom, he still struggles to ejaculate into his regular partner: “I sometimes do it on his back, but never in the mouth or the butt.”
In the early 90s, after a wave of contaminations among porn actors, the entire industry shifts to safe sex (safe sex). This is the moment of an unexpected convergence between the world of pornography and the realm of sexual health, the former becoming a prevention tool while the latter borrows its codes to convey its messages. The health sociologist Gabriel Girard recalls the shock campaign by Act Up in 1999: the close-up photo of a hand holding a veiny penis in the midst of anal penetration, without a condom, and this question: “Kissing without a condom, does it turn you on?” Effect sought: “Everyone wanted to answer ‘yes’! At least, it allowed the debate to begin. This question of unrestrained pleasure was posed constantly.”
Faire du sale
The first to break these new chains are HIV-positive men who abandon the condom between themselves. “The emergence of bareback is a major turning point, notes sociologist Florian Vörös, a specialist in questions of masculinity. With an aesthetics established by Treasure Island studio, which imposed bare anal penetration ‘in the raw’ and the display of semen.” In the videos, barebackers do not only like the semen. They have hair, tattoos, piercings, human urinals and fists that penetrate deep. “This aesthetics goes beyond unprotected sex. It develops an erotization of virilized semen through the entire imaginary of semen and queer reappropriations of the procreative imaginary”, the researcher continues. So people “fill”, “pack”, “fertilize”… In this context where bareback is seen as a deviation, censorship attempts only strengthen its allure.
By the end of the 1990s, the porn culture quickly invaded the nascent internet, and major productions began gradually to loosen the condom. Meanwhile, triple therapies arrived, and with them a real hope of living with the virus. The community hovered in an in-between state, stunned by the memory of the years of ashes while dreaming very strongly of shouting again: “It’s going to splash!” Gabriel Girard, who studied the bareback debate, recalls: “For public health actors, the challenge was to remind a preventive norm with a subtext inherited from the 80s-90s: semen equals danger.”
Marc, HIV-positive, moves to the capital at this time and discovers with Act Up the debate that splits the Paris gay scene around the condom. Didier Lestrade, cofounder of the association, embodies the safe sex line, calling bareback behavior “criminal”. Across from him, the writer Guillaume Dustan, by contrast, makes bareback a symbol of resistance to social and sanitary norms, even a tool of homosexual emancipation, and openly calls for freedom and individual responsibility. In the pages of têtu· or on the set of Thierry Ardisson, everyone comes to defend their vision and slam their fists on the table. The fracture is sealed, one must choose between two camps that clash over life or death. “Dustan was my nemesis, my main enemy”, writes Didier Lestrade in his Memoirs (Stock) published in 2024, confessing to having exulted upon learning the writer’s death, in 2005, at barely 40: “I kept a poker face but inside I emitted a ‘Yes !!!’ of victory, as if his death proved my argument about the need to protect oneself. Bareback, drugs, dirty sex and the success of his publishing made him die, while I, the long-time HIV-positive, remained alive. (…) Dustan’s death was my raised finger to all those who had defended him.”
Liberté chérie
“The gay men drawn to this aesthetic that I encountered did not stop watching bareback porn or practicing it, recounts Florian Vörös, but they stopped talking about it. It was a very present fantasy, but politically incorrect.” Many restrict themselves to screens, as a sexuality without limits, free from HIV anxiety: “Pornographic masturbation is invested as a space of release, in contrast to interpersonal sexuality.” In the porn industry, where bareback has reentered catalogs, productions like Éric Vidéos or Citébeur resume this imagery with a handheld-camera aesthetic that seeks realism. “There is then the desire to show ‘real sex’ with ‘real guys,’ in opposition to the 90s porn, seen as polished and aseptic. It’s more virile and dirtier, thus perceived as more authentic. And in this narrative, semen is a central signifier, because the eroticization of virility is largely conveyed through fluids”, analyzes Florian Vörös. Everything changes at the end of the 2010s with the arrival of PrEP, which prevents HIV infection, and TasP (treatment as prevention) that makes viral load undetectable and the virus nontransmissible (“i = i”). HIV-positive people on treatment can finally enjoy without hindrance and reclaim their semen, while others have the chance to take charge of their own protection.
From 2015 onward, Pierre, a 52-year-old HR director, opens the floodgates. “As things went on, I found myself fantasizing more about games with semen,” he testifies. “Like a mental shift, a desire to free myself. And semen is the symbol of surrender.” Gabriel Girard sums it up: “With PrEP, at last a tool allowed us to regain a guilt-free sexuality, to push certain fantasies or practices to their limits without infectious consequences.” On apps, “To Fill” or “Fertilizer” become banal nicknames. Tim Dean ties the before and after: “The early years of the Internet and bareback porn created an aesthetic with a very strong visibility of semen that endures today. This meticulous fetishization and focus is a post-HIV development thanks to medical advances. But the subversive aspect of semen remains, and practices once prohibited by the AIDS crisis became popular precisely because they continue to appear transgressive.”
Today, Pierre can no longer imagine a plan without his partner coming inside him. “It’s become a sought-after pleasure, otherwise I’m frustrated”, he acknowledges. Marc, for his part, has witnessed on gay dating apps the emergence of a vocabulary previously reserved for porn: “Bukkake, gangbang, slaughter, juice vat… And to think that in 1990 you would never cum without warning!” As for Kevin, 37, after a sex life that began under latex, learns to erotize fluids again: “Seminal fluid becomes a tool of pleasure, I can enjoy a lot more than before, as if I were catching up on fantasies left unfulfilled in my youth.” Tim Dean notes that condomless sex has become a norm again among gay men, as it was in the 70s. “Yet, the philosopher explains, the memory of risk has not completely disappeared. We have not ‘returned’ to the 70s, but I would say the memories have moved to the background.” In thirty years, a lot of semen has flowed under the bridges.
