What Do Gay Men Want? 

What is the queerest space of all? I say it’s the space of subjectivity. What’s our inner world like? How do we describe our own interiority? What do we mean when we try to speak about what goes on inside our minds, inside our souls, inside ourselves? Where is that queer “inside” located, exactly? How is it laid out? How do we go about charting, mapping, defining that inner space, the queer space of the mind?

For much of the twentieth century, the job of mapping the space of subjectivity was left to psychology—both the formal science of the individual subject and the more diffuse discourses of our modern psychotherapeutic culture. Psychology used a medical model to chart the space of interiority, distinguishing the unhealthy dimensions of our inner lives from the healthy ones. That is why psychology has been a tainted category for lesbians, gay men, and other sexual dissidents: Our supposedly queer sexual subjectivity has led generations of psychologists and psychiatrists to characterize us as sick. Hence the importance for queer thought of Michel Foucault, who produced a theory of sexuality that removed sexuality from the realm of psychology, and who even quipped, in a 1981 interview, that “the entire art of life consists in killing off psychology.”

The problem with killing off psychology, though, is that psychology, and later psychoanalysis, have come to provide us with our chief means of access to the space of human subjectivity. The price for killing off psychology, therefore, is to lose all access to queer subjectivity as a realm of possible exploration. That has been the point of much queer politics: to make the world safe for lesbians and gay men by promoting the category of gay identity, by defining it as a psychologically empty category, by focusing attention on the political outside of gayness, and by shifting attention away from its lower depths—from the disquieting and potentially discreditable details of gay subjectivity.

But what if psychology were not the only means of access to the space of subjectivity? Even during the period of their hegemony, psychology and psychoanalysis were shadowed by an alternate tradition, perhaps not a consistent tradition so much as a persistent impulse in the work of a number of gay male writers. In their different ways, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Marcel Proust, Jean Genet, and Roland Barthes all attempted to imagine and to represent human subjectivity without recourse to psychology or to the already familiar and increasingly trite conceptual categories of psychoanalysis.

If there were ever any doubt about the urgent political need to find ways of representing the inner life of homosexuality without necessary or automatic recourse to psychology and psychoanalysis, the merest glance at contemporary discourses about why some gay men have risky (or “unsafe”) sex would suffice to dispel it. The topic of gay men’s sexual risk-taking has opened new perspectives onto gay male subjectivity and occasioned a multitude of inquiries—by scientists, journalists, community leaders, and activists—into what gay men want, into what goes on “inside” gay men. Nearly all of those inquiries have taken the form of psychological speculation about gay men’s motives for taking risks in their sexual practices.

It is not clear exactly how many gay men engage in sex that carries a real risk of transmitting HIV, or how many of us take what kinds of risks, or to what extent we succeed in minimizing those risks to others and to ourselves. Even the most sophisticated statistical analyses of gay men’s risk-taking tend to be based on partial, incomplete, unrepresentative, or flawed information. Nonetheless, and despite recent panics over barebacking, it seems to be clear that only a minority of self-identified gay men in the industrialized world currently put themselves or others at significant risk of being infected with HIV.

To be sure, the last decade has witnessed a growing alarm in both popular and scientific circles about increased sexual risk-taking by gay men. And some recent upturns in infection rates among men who have sex with men do provide a motive for fresh concern. But it seems that a good deal of the alarm over barebacking has been exaggerated or misplaced. For one thing, initial reports of barebacking often referred to condomless sex among men who had already been infected with HIV. All subsequent research has consistently shown that barebacking is practiced more frequently by men who are HIV-positive than by men who are HIV-negative. Furthermore, those HIV-positive men who bareback do it most often with men who either are or are assumed to be HIV-positive, or who are assumed to know that their partner is or is likely to be HIV-positive (very few HIV-positive men are willing to bareback with men they know to be HIV-negative). Medical authorities have cautioned against unprotected anal sex between HIV-positive partners, fearing the possibility of “superinfection,” the reinfection of an already infected person with a different and possibly more virulent or drug-resistant strain of HIV; accordingly, safe sex campaigns in the United States and Europe have often urged HIV-positive men to use condoms in anal sex with one another. But no hard evidence has so far materialized to justify the extreme caution of that conservative prevention message: The authors of a recent literature review conclude that “the true rates and consequences of HIV superinfection have yet to be well delineated,” and they point out that superinfection, though it can occur and has been documented, is nevertheless extremely rare (only 16 cases reported worldwide between 2002 and 2005).

Indeed, the conscious and deliberate practice of confining unprotected sex to relations between men who have the same HIV-serostatus is now being hailed as a new “safe sex” technique called “serosorting.” Last November, the Department of Public Health in San Francisco actually started promoting serosorting as a form of HIV prevention. But Kane Race (a researcher at the National Centre in HIV Social Research in Sydney) has astutely pointed out that much of what was vilified as “barebacking” in the mid-1990s, and is often denounced today as evidence of gay men’s pathological self-destructiveness, is in fact precisely what is now being celebrated under the revamped designation of “serosorting.” The different valences attached to the two terms do not necessarily result from any difference in the nature of the sexual behaviors to which they refer. After all, as Race observes, in many cases “barebacking” and “serosorting” are simply alternate names for the same practice. The two words differ less in what they describe than in their respective interpretations of what condomless sex is all about. If “barebacking” alarmingly presents unprotected sex as a sign of irresponsible, hedonistic, reckless abandon on the part of gay men, Race argues, that is because it ignores the sexual protocols being worked out within HIV-positive communities and treats the rejection of condoms as an expression of unconstrained, libertine individualism. “Serosorting,” by contrast, reassuringly implies a set of communal, hygienic arrangements for containing the virus within stable relationships, and it generates an image that foregrounds not the pleasure-seeking individual but the prudent, conjugal couple.

Serosorting is safest as a prevention technique when it is practiced among self-identified HIV-positive men, since they are the only ones who really know what their true serostatus is—and someone who tells you he is positive is probably not lying to you. Serosorting is a much riskier option for HIV-negative men, for a variety of complex reasons, summed up by the most recent Annual Report of Trends in Behaviour from the National Centre in HIV Social Research when it scathingly redescribes the kind of serosorting practiced by many young, seronegative gay men as “seroguessing.” That is the kind of thing that Kane Race and the Canadian sociologist Barry Adam have in mind when they worry that some harm reduction techniques may actually produce harm increase. But although there does appear to have been a rise in condomless sex among men who have sex with men, it does not follow that there has been an increase in deliberate risk-taking. Some of the new harm reduction techniques that have been substituted for the use of condoms may not be as effective as they are intended to be, but the data does not require us to conclude that gay men have massively renounced safe sex as a goal, that they have accepted new levels of risk as a matter of course, or that their behavior reveals the symptoms of a collective psychological affliction. On the contrary, as the authors of the National Centre’s Annual Report of Behaviour 2005 put it, “In general, the majority of homosexually active men [in Australia] have sustained a ‘safe sex’ culture [since the advent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic] even though sustaining safe sex over such a long period is difficult.” (That poker-faced final clause is a masterpiece of understatement.)

Gay men have rarely gotten credit for those life-saving accomplishments, however, either in scientific or in popular writing about the epidemic. Gay men are more likely to see the continued existence of male-to-male HIV transmission (at the unacceptably high rate of 1-2% a year in major U.S. cities, for example) used against them, while their scattered departures from perfect adherence to safe-sex protocols typically occasion global judgments about their impaired or abnormal psychology.

In order to explain why some small proportion of gay men continue to take certain risks in their sexual practices, even in the third decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, both scientists and journalists have to reckon with gay men’s motivations for risk-taking, which means in turn that they have to address the topic of gay sexual subjectivity, the inner life of male homosexuality. HIV/AIDS prevention has now come to be the one genre of public discourse in which gay male subjectivity, far from being bracketed or sidelined, is a continual subject of discussion. The focus on gay subjectivity is sharpest in the case of white, socially privileged gay men, whose agency and autonomy are not likely to have been compromised by political oppression or external constraint and whose behavior therefore cannot be explained by social factors. What is it that goes on inside the minds and hearts and psyches of such gay men? And what picture can we draw, on that basis, of the inner life of male homosexuality?

In order to answer that question without re-medicalizing homosexuality, we need non-psychological ways of talking about human subjectivity. That is what I argue in What Do Gay Men Want? I believe that queer culture already offers us some of the alternative models we need. We just have to learn how to recognize, how to value, and how to champion the queer cultural traditions that have come down to us. Those traditions provide us with eloquent examples of how to think about sexuality beyond and outside of psychoanalysis—and how to think about sexual subjectivity without psychology. Queer thought may not have the same sheen of scientific objectivity or sophistication of psychology or psychoanalysis. In fact, it may seem utterly laughable as science. But that, in our current context at least, is entirely to its advantage.

For what HIV/AIDS prevention requires is not more pseudo-science but a non-medicalizing, non-disciplinary model of subjectivity. Only such a non-disciplinary model of gay subjectivity—that is, a subjectivity which is not a subjectivity of risk, an object of social hygiene, or a target of therapeutic intervention—can provide the basis for the imaginative, resourceful, non-psychological, and non-moralistic strategy that HIV/AIDS prevention requires, both in the realm of personal practice and in the realm of public policy. Then gay subjectivity, far from having to be bracketed, denied, suppressed, or closeted, can do one of the many jobs it has often done. It can impel political resistance. But it can do that only if we take the space of subjectivity out of the individual mind, and return it, once again, to the world.

David M. Halperin is the W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan, where he teaches English, women's studies, and comparative literature. He is the author of Saint Foucault and How to do the History of Homosexuality among other books, and an editor of Before Sexuality, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, and Gay Shame. He also co-founded and co-edited GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. His most recent book is What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity, from which this article is taken.