There is an increase in HIV infection among gay men, according to recent news reports. I know that it's a disease that affects far more heterosexuals than homosexuals; I know that by banging on about gay men s attitudes to sex and emotions that I am guilty of ignoring the bigger picture. But my column is not about a disease, it's about gay men, and how I find them.

The rise in HIV seroconversion among young gay men makes me despair; and of course there are thousands who work to combat AIDS who must be feeling the same. The last AIDS charity spokesman I saw being interviewed about this increase on television spoke of the need for education, saying that the message wasn t getting through to young people, that they weren t getting information about condoms. My experience is different, and starker. Young people are looking for risky sex because it s pleasurable; the pleasure outweighs the worry as one young guy told me on the Net.
Bareback, as fucking without a condom is trendily called, is on the increase. A Dutch website, with a public diary written by the owner of a nightclub, writes that bareback has found its way to Delft, and that increasingly in the darkrooms there, guys are not using condoms. He writes: I personally do see the glamour of it and have occasionally fucked a bare ass. I must add to this: I know my recent HIV status, so I m pretty sure I'm not giving gifts.
In fifteen years, I have shagged without a condom only three times, and had one condom burst. It s a record I m proud of. But there is a part of me that yearns for the incomparable intimacy of it. The last time was with someone whom I trusted was HIV negative, and it s a night I won't forget. Does this mean that I encourage risky sex? No, far from it. But I d be a hypocrite if I gave the party line on safe sex without acknowledging I m human too. There are no easy answers; desire defies politics or the law or morality.
The party line is the kernel of the problem, it seems to me. Too often, AIDS activists seem to think that it is technical education that will make a difference; that if you bombard kids with informative leaflets and distribute condoms that the message will get across . But I think the message has got across about condoms; I think the problem is psychological, which is far more difficult to work with on a collective scale.
The problem is also to do with a strange metamorphosis of community among gay people, into something hard and commercialised and sex-centred; the old solidarity is dead and gone, if it ever really existed. And the internet adds to isolation on a soul level. There is still a forceful homophobia around when kids are learning about sex and this means age 12-13, when puberty hits, not just when the legal age of consent, in whatever jurisdiction, comes into effect. And the Pope is still on about grave moral disorders.
When sexual desires are not normal then there seems to be no hope of talking them through reasonably with anyone else; young gay kids spend years nursing their shameful secret and the psychological results of this are dramatic and inevitable. The desire in their fantasy life increases for more and more intense, perhaps unconventional sex, while on the outside they spend much time and effort pretending to fit in, to be normal . It s a situation I found myself in when I was a teenager; and when I m chatting on the internet now I realise it hasn t changed one bit.
The internet is the way these kids now reach out and explore their sexuality; by exchanging fantasies and having a good old wank in the computer in their bedroom.
There are chatrooms called Bareback now and they are always busy. I ve been chatting to a few kids there, and the young ones are usually grateful to find that someone is treating them with some respect, asking about more than their bodies. Invariably these are kids who were introduced to sex at a young age 9 is the earliest I ve been told by uncles, brother s friends, or men in public toilets etc; they got the taste of being used as a sex object and want more of it and, morality aside, they claim to have enjoyed it. If desire is the only measure by which one judges one s relationships, then of course they enjoyed it. Trouble is, it s only when one gets older that one can see how much more to life there is than desire.
Some of these chats, of course, are pure fantasy if I can disguise myself for research then so can anyone else but at least when I called myself Tim 15 in one of the chatrooms, to see who would talk to me, I found that I was banned within half an hour, without explanation. Someone was watching, which was reassuring. However, within 5 minutes, I had changed IP address and was online again. And someone was saying they were 14 years old the next day.
All of these kids have no friendly face to talk to about their sexual tastes; most are completely closeted, unable to heal the drastic split between their private and public life. All of them consider that bareback sex is worth the risk. They don t know anyone with AIDS they re too young and the only contacts they make through the net are those who are completely focused on sex, who lose all inhibitions when faced with a vulnerable, lonely youth. Even a boy in an isolated rural area is likely to find an older man nearby only too eager to drive over and have sex with him.
I remember the queasy/excited feeling I had when I was a teenager, when men would follow me around and want to have sex with me not because of what sort of person I was, but because I was young and pretty, and had long wavy brown locks. For the most part I resisted; but it dented my self-confidence when I did succumb, and realised afterwards that it wasn t me inside they were interested in.
When I was a teenager, however, I did not know about a fatal disease; word about AIDS reached me when I was 21. I m lucky I wasn t in one of the world capitals getting up to what I got up to then, otherwise I wouldn t be alive now. Maybe it was just me; others in Dublin weren't so lucky, I know. But I have survived to tell these tales. And it breaks my heart that, in this new century, there are plenty of young men out there who don t care about whether or not they survive into their thirties.
And what s worse, there are plenty of older men who don't care whether they do or not either.