>Sullivan may be hit for advocating monogamy while still being a playboy,
but I'm not sure the barebacking angle adds much.
--Virally speaking, yes, sort of. Since barebacking does increase the odds of infection even for the top, and since any P/w HIV can contract multiple strains of the virus, it does make it marginally more dangerous and destructive.
>Culturally speaking, the barebacking angle adds to his perceived
deviance--like it's somekind of deathwish. >(That's not what it is--it's
actually another kind of fetish. But of that, more anon . . .)
Despite the hip name, I've never thought of wanting to have sex without a condom as a "fetish"- although maybe in the era of safe sex it is becoming one. If a story circulated that a hetero guy advertised for partners who were willing to have unprotected sex, would that be referred to as a "fetish"? It might be condemned as unsafe but there is an exoticism of gay sex involved in this discussion that has nothing to do with Sullivan's moralistic hypocrisy or AIDS itself.
With other writers I would note the unseemly intrusion into Sullivan's personal life, but Sullivan has made his personal life such a focus of his writing at this point that he would have a hard time making a case for a personal zone of privacy, but there is a prurience involved in this whole investigation that is unattractive.
There are lots of areas of hypocrisy and contradictions in Sullivan's public philosophy without putting his sexual tastes under a microscope.
-- Nathan Newman