A discussion on bareback porn on another site got me thinking… Barebacking is a lot like smoking. It’s addictive and it can kill you. So how does it compare?

According to UNAIDS/WHO, 21,000 people died of AIDS in North America and 12,000 in Western and Central Europe. That’s 58 people a day in North America and 33 a day in Europe. By comparison the CDC reports that 418,000 people die just from cigarette smoking every year in the United States alone. That’s 1145 a day.

I get that some of the people who are dying every day of AIDS acquired HIV by barebacking. But I bet the people who are bothered by young guys barebacking don’t think twice when the same guys light up a cigarette… I’m not trying to say they’re being willingly hypocritical – personally I think society is having a moment of group think where the big killers don’t get the attention they deserve and smaller ones that are seen as somebody else’s problem get all the attention. HIV is a popular one ’cause people see it as avoidable. But smoking deaths are avoidable too and kill so many more people. But HIV is seen as something that affects unpopular minorities like gay guys and drug addicts so it gets focused on.

On the other side of the coin, as a community this does affect us greatly and it’s something we need to come to grips with. Personally I think one of the huge issues is how ineffective the safe sex message is these days. It needs a total rethink but it’s such a touchy subject people don’t want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. Some people will cry foul if the message is anything but “use a condom every time”. On the other hand I’ve seen guys get addicted to barebacking in a monogamous relationship and then not be able to quit barebacking when the relationship ends. So who knows what the message should be. I know I don’t know…

But for me, as with smoking, it comes down to personal choice. People choose to smoke and some die as a result of that choice. Likewise people choose to bareback and some die as a result of that choice. The difference of course is that the damage from smoking builds over time where with barebacking the damage happens all of a sudden and you don’t know when that will be. So a teen could smoke for a year or two and stop without much consequence. But if they bareback it’s an all or nothing game. The damage may have been done by the time they decide to stop.

Just as we don’t bar people from smoking, we can’t bar them from barebacking. But society has put limits on things like advertising of tobacco and alcohol, and the sale of those products. The issue is what limits, if any, are appropriate for barebacking?

Some people have suggested a system similar to straight porn where there’s an industry sponsored non-profit testing agency who monitors all the models. But I don’t know whether that would even work in our case since so many models are poz or like me – neg and don’t mind fucking poz guys.

Personally, I think the important thing is that the guys in bareback porn do so with informed consent. That they understand the risks and consequences. If they do, then it’s all OK in my mind… The question is how do you know some Eastern European guy who doesn’t speak your language had decent sex ed in high school? The concept of informed consent is great. The implementation is a bitch…

UPDATE

I was thinking about this a little more… Canada has about 10% of our population, so let’s guess that 19,000 people in the US died of AIDS. Let’s also guess that 75% of them were gay (I think that’s actually a higher number than what’s true), so that would mean about 14,000 gay guys died of AIDS last year. Now, if we’re 5% of the population (10% of the men), then that means if the entire US were made up of gay men then 280,000 of us would have died of AIDS. That 280,000 number is comparable to the 418,000 that died of smoking.

Those are really rough numbers, but the bottom line is that it appears smoking kills more gay men than HIV/AIDS. Think about that for a moment. Smoking is a bigger problem for our community than HIV. I wish someone could get hard data to prove that, but with high rates of smoking in the gay community, I’m almost certain it’s a true statement.