Moral Sustainers and Sexual Exceptionalism - Intracommunity Panic Over Promiscuous Barebacking

• In Event: Frontiers in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

This paper will focus primarily on the data I gathered from the 43 interviews I conducted with gay men between 2020-2022. First, I provide an overview of the standard demographics and speak briefly to their potential impact on my results. In the next section I describe sample demographics relevant to this specific project: how regularly subjects barebacked, how many of them take PrEP, their HIV statuses and other relevant details. I then review the ways in which some in my sample reified respectable moral sexual behavior, sustaining the social constructs upon which this particular indigenous panic depends: sexual respectability through condom usage during casual anal intercourse. I introduce the concept of “moral sustainers” to describe those participants who present a neutral front about the disrespectable behaviors enabled by PrEP while maintaining and evincing attitudes that reify respectable sexual behavior. Finally, I discuss what I call “individual sexual exceptionalism,” where those respectable norms are internalized to the point where subjects believe their own sexual respectability is exceptional despite their personal engagement with promiscuous barebacking, all while casting aspersions on other gay men who engage in the same behaviors. Both processes help to create respectable images of gay men whose adherence to condom use constructs them as respectable in the eyes of other gay men according to the internal logic of indigenous respectability.

Author

• Benjamin Kampler, Kalamazoo College