risky business.

BAREBACKING CELEBRATES UNPROTECTED SEX AND RAISES DIFFICULT ISSUES ABOUT AIDS PREVENTION

They call themselves "barebackers" and they hook up on he Internet, at private parties, and through an extensive network of contacts across the country. Unlike men who, for a. laundry list of now-familiar reasons, slip up occasionally into unprotected sex, barebackers have made the conscious, often political decision to have latex-free sex every time and usually with multiple partners. Why do they do it?

Given the risks involved, the masons for raising the question seem obvious. But until recently the discussion around bare-backing has been so charged with outrage, alarm, and defiance that even talking about it has been a rhetorical minefield.

"It's been pretty difficult to have a quiet, rational discussion about this," says Richard Elovich, director of HIV prevention at Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City. "Barebacking really pushes some emotional buttons. The whole thing has been so sensationalized and misrepresented. It's really just a very small subculture we are talking about here. And gay culture, after all, is really made up of a bunch of subcultures."

Indeed, barebacking is a sensitive and complex issue that has sparked prurient interest among the media, heated arguments at gay public forums, and hand-wringing and finger-pointing inside AIDS prevention groups. It is also provoking an honest, often painful discussion about the way gay men are having sex today, a debate that many experts say is much needed and long overdue.

A series of recent studies shows that there is, in fact, an upswing in unprotected anal sex among gay men. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report of a San Francisco study of gay male sexual habits shows that the percentage of men who say they "always" use condoms during sex declined from 69.9% in 1994 to 60.8% in 1997. Among those engaging in unprotected anal sex with multiple partners, 68% reported not knowing the HIV status of all their sex partners.

The figure indicating that some men are having multiple partners is particularly disturbing. "It makes a huge difference," says Robert Perez, communications manager of the Stop AIDS Project, the AIDS prevention group that conducted the study. "What we saw in the late '70s and early '80s was an explosion of seroconversions based on lots of unprotected anal sex with lots of partners. It's the repeated anal sex that caused the epidemic in the first place."

It's impossible to know how much of the decline in protected sex is attributable to people's taking part in organized barebacking activities--like parties where condoms and any mention of HIV or AIDS drugs are strictly forbidden. Certainly San Francisco figures prominently on Web sites that promote barebacking. (New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas are also home to a significant number of barebackers.)

How many men are barebacking is impossible to tell. "Nobody knows exactly how common this is or who exactly is taking part," says Jim Eigo, a New York City-based writer and one of the founding members of Sex Panic! a group opposed to restrictions on sexual behavior.

While barebackers seem to represent a distinct minority of gay men who have unprotected sex, their reasons for doing so are often ones that many gay men share, consciously or not. Foremost among them is the belief that HIV infection is no longer a big deal.

"There's this feeling out there that AIDS is no longer a crisis," says Michael Petrelis, a longtime AIDS activist who now lives in San Francisco. "We have these expensive new drugs that supposedly will save us, and that has helped shift attitudes away from crisis and death into something of a breather, a lull in the terrible mess of AIDS."

"Barebacking is the ultimate form of complacency--that you can share the virus with other people because in ten years the medical profession will bail you out," says Mathilde Krim, founding cochair and chairman of the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, which has just launched a new AIDS awareness campaign.

But barebacking also taps into deeper, more primal feelings. For a group that turned its status as sexual outsiders into a badge of honor, barebacking seems to be part of a long tradition that celebrates risk and living on the edge.

"It's a term that implies both danger and allure," notes Walt Odets, a psychologist and AIDS prevention expert. "There's something sort of outlawish about it, and I suppose that's part of the appeal for some people."

Eric Rofes, author of Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures, agrees that "gay men have always been driven to risk and transgressive acts." Although Rofes has spoken out in support of men who bareback, he says he would never himself have condomless anal sex. Still, he adds, "I'm not surprised to find that this is a turn-on for many men." It definitely seems to be a turn-on for the dozens of gay men who post personal ads on Web sites seeking "raw sex" and "flesh-to-flesh contact." Almost all of the men who state their HIV status are positive.

The question of how many barebackers are actually HIV-negative is important to the debate. In the terminology of barebackers, there are "gift givers," who seek to infect others with HIV, and "bug chasers," who want to get infected and join the viral "brotherhood." Naturally, this is the most controversial aspect of barebacking and something the mainstream media have latched onto.

However, if there are HIV-negative "bug chasers" out there, they are few and far between. None could be found advertising on the Internet. And as A. Cornelius Baker, executive director of the National Association of People With AIDS, puts it, "They won't be negative for very long anyway."

"I don't think HIV is a gift," Odets says. "That's a denial of what has to be very obvious to everyone: Life is not improved by having HIV, all else being equal. And that is almost an inflammatory statement, which is extraordinary in itself."

"The issue is complicated," Baker agrees. "But the idea of people who are negative who are seeking to get infected is appalling and repugnant to us because our work is about ending the HIV epidemic. And people who live with HIV know it's no picnic. And it's certainly not a club."

But that point may be lost on young gay men who have lived in an environment where being gay and having AIDS have seemed virtually synonymous. The feeling may have been compounded by the heroic status afforded people battling HIV disease, even as the fierce and terrifying battles that people fought to earn that status are beginning to fade from memory. Moreover, unlike an earlier generation of gay men, who had had the experience of unprotected sex before having to rely on condoms, those in the latest generation are expected to remain committed to latex from the moment they come of age. For some young men, that restriction seems too onerous to bear.

"In the past there was slippage and forgetfulness about safe sex, but they were basically rare occurrences," Krim says. "What is new and disturbing is that it has become a philosophy of pleasure, a credo. That is very dangerous because it is a movement that might be particularly seductive to young people. It's based on the romantic notion that closeness can be assured only through the exchange of bodily fluids."

Opponents of barebacking say that the lore surrounding the activity glamorizes a very dangerous practice and opens the door for a wave of infections that will equal or surpass that of the early days of AIDS. "It's a fetishization, like turning the Nazis' pink triangle death symbol into earrings," Petrelis says. "It trivializes AIDS to make HIV-infected semen desirable to some gay men. It no longer carries its original meaning."

Others say that unsafe sex, even between two HIV-positive men, is ill-advised. They fear that sexually transmitted diseases like anal gonorrhea (whose rates are already skyrocketing among gay men) and hepatitis will cause additional health problems. Some experts worry that people can be "reinfected" with a drug-resistant virus, a potential public health nightmare that could ultimately create an untouchable superstrain of HIV. So far, however, there is no scientific evidence to back those fears.

The challenges that barebacking presents to AIDS groups are enormous. "It's caused us to wrestle internally with many things," Baker says. "Our prevention work is now very much centered on informing people on the difficulty of living with this disease. We want people to not want it. They need to know it's like virginity. You lose your negative status only once."

Baker says people with HIV "have a moral and ethical responsibility to disclose their status to sexual partners. So what we're doing now is dealing with the rights and responsibilities of people with HIV. We are developing HIV survival programs with a whole track about relationships so people can learn the skills to disclose and to negotiate healthy sex that won't transmit HIV."

But Elovich says educators have to walk a narrow line. "We've learned you can't tell men what to do," he says. "All we can do is give them the information and help them make better decisions. And we need to broaden HIV prevention to be about all kinds of sexual health. Instead of damning or defending barebacking, we need to talk about our own mixed feelings, about our desires and the way we put them into practice."

Some AIDS prevention activists fear that the very existence of a barebacking movement creates a climate that might cause other gay men to have unprotected sex, with an "everyone else is doing it" rationale. Still others wonder if that same climate has simply made it more comfortable for men to admit to researchers that, in fact, they don't use a condom every single time they have sex.

Critics of AIDS prevention programs contend that the programs themselves are a contributing factor in the rise of unsafe sex. "I believe the rigid shame-based absolutism of many safe-sex campaigns has created the desire on the part of many men to get fucked without condoms," Roles argues. "And rather than being community saviors, I think the absolutists are engaged in harmful public health practices if they do not attempt to understand gay men's motivation for unprotected sex in its full complexity. By crying out that barebackers are young, dumb, drugged, or lacking in self-esteem, they repeat a long-standing practice of demonizing gay men's sex."

The barebacking debate may be distracting activists from other important issues. "My fear is that we will stop looking at the things we really need to be doing because this small subculture has gotten the attention," Eigo says. "Those in AIDS prevention can get sidetracked into a fury over barebacking even though they know that most men aren't barebackers making a conscious choice but get blindsided by desire into doing something in the moment."

Indeed, Petrelis wonders if barebacking is not as much a media invention as a behavioral phenomenon: "It's what the media and the gay community seem to go through every few years. We find a new hot-button issue, we coin a new term for it, and then it becomes this dirty secret let out on Fox News."

Even so, the discussion itself may ultimately benefit gay men, whether they are barebackers or not. By understanding the allure of unprotected sex for those who engage in it, gay men and educators can only learn more about how best to respond to the changing challenges before them. As Eigo puts it, "These men have the right to talk, and anyone interested in gay sex in the '90s and HIV prevention could benefit from hearing from them."

Kirby is a regular contributor to The New York Times.