“Structural vulnerabilities such as racism, classism, homophobia, and heterosexual impact the lives of black gay men daily (differently from other gay men), and the intersecting forms of oppression and the social and material consequences they produce influence their sexual decision making and experiences….We must attend to the role that structural vulnerabilities, social factors, libido, pleasure, and risk play in how black gay men ascribe meaning to sex and how this influences the sexual choices they make and the options and experiences they have."
(Bailey, 2016, p.246-247)
“Dominant HIV prevention discourses are fraught with normative assumptions about gay men and gay sex. Gay men are viewed as promiscuous and in need of sexual management to ensure that members of the general population—coded as heterosexual—do not become infected with HIV or other STDs and STIs, as though heterosexuals do not get HIV and other socially communicable diseases. This, queer theories of HIV/AIDS have effectively examined the ways in which discourses of sexual pathology and disease are mapped into queer bodies and used as justification for intense sexual regulation of gay men. But what had been lacking in these queer analyses of HIV/AIDS is an examination of the ways in which. Lack gay men are confronted with regimes of racial, gendered, and sexual normativity, simultaneously, and how these regimes refract sexual desire and pleasure, and the possibilities thereof for us”
(Bailey, 2016, p.248)
“The concept of sexual health should take into account what black gay men want in terms of sexual pleasure and practice and inform a set of strategies through which they can negotiate between pleasure and risk. However, we should not be asked or required to completely forgo pleasure for ‘safe sex’”
(Bailey, 2016, p. 257)
Marlon Bailey’s “Black Gay (Raw) Sex” asks us to think about how and why some black gay men engage in high risk, unprotected sex. Moving away from an epidemiological model, one predicated on pathologization, shame, or medical surveillance, Bailey examines how pleasure and desire ought to underscore our understandings of raw sex. Rawness here names not just a proclivity for risk or self effacement. Instead it also names the kinds of connections, intimacies, and desires for pleasure held by many Black gay men. In suturing together Black gay men’s desires for raw sex with their experiences navigating racism, dispossession, and discrimination in larger social, cultural, and romantic settings, Bailey offers an intervention into public health. He demonstrates that sex positive and pleasure affirming ways of grappling with Black gay men and sexual desire are the crucial ways to frame sexual health. Bailey’s essay is a reminder that cultures of shame, pathologization, and surveillance cannot produce long lasting, and improved sexual health. Instead, medicine must be attuned to larger social factors (eg race and socioeconomic status) that shape how and why some folks have the kinds of sex they choose to have.
