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from Medical Issues
'The Advocate' Surveys For-Profit
Minority-Only Barebacking Parties
September 7, 2006 -
The gay magazine, The Advocate (August 29, 2006) featured an article about a growing trend in New York City of raw sex/condomless barebacking parties for minority gay males.
Advocate writer Sean Kennedy visited one of these for-profit sex parties in Brooklyn and noted that such barebacking parties are routine in such neighborhoods as East New York, Crown Heights, and Spanish Harlem.
Self-promoters charge fees ranging from $5 to $25 for entrance and provide minority gays with the option of wearing condoms. The emphasis, however, is on condomless sex at these gatherings.
The operator of Raw Dukes, a barebacking event in Harlem, banned the use of condoms at his event. Several black gay leaders protested outside of Raw Dukes and the event was canceled -- but only briefly.
Terry Evans with the Positive Health Project told Kennedy that he'd heard of at least 16 different barebacking parties in New York that year.
According to Kennedy, "Barebacking is certainly nothing new, and it's certainly not limited to men of color. Since the early days of the AIDS epidemic, some gay men of all stripes have shunned condoms, whether at 'conversion' parties as chronicled in the 2003 documentary 'The Gift,' or simply because they don't like the feeling of wearing them."
Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, says that the promoters of these parties are "peddling death." New York health department statistics show that new HIV infections are much higher among black gays than men in other ethnic groups -- and two to three times as great than among white males.
Wilson observes: "If the white 22-year-old only socializes in the context of other white men, he is going to encounter HIV let's say one out of 10 encounters. The black gay man, if all his sexual encounters are in a black male context, he's going to encounter HIV 50% of the time. So even if they both have only one sexual encounter and they do the exact same thing, the black gay man is more likely to get infected than the white gay man."
Wilson maintains that "the behaviors of black gay men as a whole are no worse and sometimes slightly better than the behaviors of white gay men."
He is critical of the white gay community for not taking a stronger stand against these kinds of barebacking parties. "The white gay community has taken a stand against crystal meth, but this kind of in-your-face on barebacking, I don't recall happening."
Additional Reading: Medical Issues;
A Psychoanalyst's Perspective: AIDS And The Death Wish.
Updated: 13 March 2008
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