Safe and Sexy: Condom Use in 1980s Erotica as Resistance

In a scene from John Preston’s 1986 gay erotica book Entertainment for a Master, two men are made to wrestle naked in front of an aroused audience of wealthy sexual sadists. The loser is then required to receive oral and anal sex from the winner, while the audience watches and enjoys. The power imbalance between the winner and the loser, and the audience and the wrestlers is deeply eroticized  (Preston 1986, 18). In his book, Preston eloquently draws the reader into a world of sadomasochistic fantasies, transgressive enough that he feels the need to frequently defend the ethical impulses behind them. Though, peculiarly, despite these scenes being intentionally transgressive, there is always a strong emphasis on strictly following the rules of condom use. While condoms serve a practical purpose in video pornography, there is seemingly no need in literary erotica. Yet Preston not only depicts condoms, he makes them sexy, incorporating them into his world of desire. The narrator in Entertainment for a Master describes in detail how the loser of the match carefully unwraps and applies a condom, noting how it “stretches glistening over the tight skin” (Preston 1986, 18).

The meticulous description of condom use in Entertainment for a Master can be usefully analyzed as a performance, according to the work of Richard Schechner, a specialist in performance studies. Something is a performance when it is commonly culturally understood as such, but can be studied as a performance when we are “asking performance questions” (Schechner 2020, 12). These questions pertain to who the audience is, the effects this has on them, and the ways in which condom use is “staged.” In analyzing this as a performance, a handful of sentences in Preston’s book reveal a great deal about the history of community-led safe sex discourses amidst the devastation wrought by the AIDS crisis. At a time when public health discourses often sought to stigmatize gay men who failed to use condoms, promoting condom use through discourses of pleasure is quite profound.

I argue that the performance of condom use in John Preston’s 1986 literary erotica Entertainment for a Master resists moralizing HIV prevention discourses during the AIDS crisis, supporting a culture of community-led safe sex discourses that work with gay men’s needs and desires, rather than policing them. To adequately analyze the performance of condom use in Entertainment for a Master, it is necessary that we first contextualize it, giving us clues as to what it does. Firstly, I do this by highlighting the framework of biopower to better understand the stigmatizing discourses Preston was responding to, followed by a few examples of these discourses. Then, I look to Preston’s other works, where he more explicitly describes how his erotica resists these stigmatizing discourses. Finally, I analyze the performance of condom use in Entertainment for a Master in depth, demonstrating how he resists stigmatizing discourses by eroticizing safe sex.

Why This Matters

Highlighting the history of community-led safe sex discourses is particularly important as safe sex “has been alienated from gay men by the public health establishment” (Haperlin 2015, 220). Public health discourses have a history of taking grassroots HIV prevention strategies, such as condom use, and turning them against gay men by stigmatizing those who fail to use condoms or have multiple sexual partners (Haperlin 2015, 220). This is explained by the theoretical framework employed by scholars who study HIV prevention discourses through biopolitical theory.

This scholarship is largely a response to the trend toward assimilatory gay activism that emerged in America in the 1970s and 1980s, which asserted that gay men should be included in dominant institutions such as marriage and markets (Furguson 2018, 5; Martinez-Lacabe 2020, 11). In the process of assimilation, discursive boundaries were set, distinguishing between “normal” gay subjects who could be assimilated and those to be disallowed (Dean 2009, 20; Ferguson 2018, 28-32). The scholarly framework I employ critiques this division and suggests that public health discourses imposed “safe sex” as a central marker of responsible gayness for the purposes of constructing this divide (Adam 2005, 334, 344-345; Aturk 2020, 8-9; Brisson 2016, 347-348; Race 2007, 100-105; Schubert 2020, 225-227; Thomann 2018, 999). Raising the history of grassroots safe sex discourses thus highlights an alternative path to safe sex education, which does not involve a moralizing framework that stigmatizes those who do not use condoms. Rather, grassroots efforts engage with gay men on their own terms, addressing their needs and desires. Thus, this biopolitical framework illuminates how the performance of condom use in Entertainment for a Master is not inconsequential. It pushes back against the workings of biopower and moralizing HIV prevention discourses.

Moralizing Discourses During the Crisis

During the 1980s, as Preston was writing Entertainment For a Master, public health agencies and (occasionally) AIDS activists groups were producing HIV prevention discourses that sought to construct the “bad” gay man in opposition to the “good” gay man who was “monogamous, ideally married, or practice only safe sex and remain HIV- at any cost” (Atuk 2008, 8). The figure of the “bad” gay man was often actively constructed through fear-mongering advertising, evident in archived posters from the period. While Preston lived and wrote in Maine and the examples I highlight are from Missouri and Texas, they demonstrate the types of discourses going around America more broadly at the time.

This poster comes from the Missouri AIDS activist group St.Louis Effort For AIDS sometime during the 1980s. Analyzed as a performance, we can see how it serves to actively construct the figure of the reckless gay man, as the threat of AIDS transmission is personified. This poster gives the threat of AIDS a corporeal form, with the words “AIDS is in town” replacing what would be a face on a disembodied torso. AIDS is not presented as a virus, but a personage. This contributes to discourses that categorize certain “reckless” gay men as disease vectors and essentially walking viruses.

This poster by the Dallas County (Texas) Health Department from the same period further contributes to the stigmatization of those considered promiscuous, part of a broader discourse through which the “irresponsible” gay men is constructed. It warns that having multiple sexual partners (“sleeping around”) will get you a “bad reputation,” shaming gay men who are not adhering to strict monogamy. These posters support the theories presented by scholars on biopolitics and HIV prevention discourses, and highlight the types of messaging Preston was responding to at the time.

What Preston’s Other Works Reveal

Preston’s non-fiction demonstrates implicitly and explicitly that he sought to create his own safe sex material because of his issues with these moralizing HIV prevention discourses. His issues with the biopolitical divide that these discourses constructed is implicitly evident in his 1989 book Personal dispatches: writers confront AIDS. This book is a collection of pieces by prominent gay writers, detailing their experiences living and writing during the AIDs crisis. In one chapter, author Scott Tucker embarks on a scalding critique of the moralizing divide being constructed between “good” gay men who engage in safe monogamous sex, and “bad” gay men who do not. Tucker (1989, 124) notes:

“Good gays can find a place in this society if we play by the rules of marriage and monogamy — and presumably by the rules of adultery and divorce. Bad gays will remain outsiders, identified with promiscuity and plague.”

We can assume that Preston, as the collator of the book, shares in some way with Tucker’s frustrations. Preston’s views are then made even more explicit in the section on gay men’s sexual health in his 1993 book My Life as a Pornographer: & other indecent acts. In a scalding critique, he highlights the issues with these moralizing HIV prevention discourses as “almost to prove how little gay men’s sexual needs and desires were understood, there were many declarations that gay men should simply become monogamous” (Preston 1993, 162). As these suggestions rarely acknowledge gay men’s needs and desires, Preston suggests that safe sex education must be developed by gay men for gay men “with a point of view developed from our own experiences” (Preston 1993, 162). He states quite explicitly that this was his “motivation to begin writing safe sex materials…[after having] seen the effects of the first wave of sex-negative messaging” (Preston 1993, 163). Thus, by looking at his other non-fiction works, we can see that John Preston was critical of the moralizing biopolitical divide between “good” gay men and “bad” gay men, and that this drove him to create sex-positive safe sex materials that sought to actively acknowledge gay men’s wants and needs.

What This Teaches Us About Entertainment For a Master

Preston used literary erotica as a medium for better safe sex education that sought to work with gay men’s desires rather than stigmatizing them. Safe sex wasn’t imposed by Preston, it was eroticized. This is evident in the performance of condom use in Entertainment for a Master. Safe sex is made sexy, as Preston uses condoms in the book to build anticipation for the penetrative sex to come. In one scene, he describes how a character puts a condom on another character with drawn out narrative timing. He builds this erotic tension by describing how “he carefully opened the foil and pulled out the latex…[working] at it carefully and methodically until the entire shaft was covered” (Preston 1986, 51). To then really drive home the tension and anticipation that condom use brings, the character notes how they “could both make out the seeping precum as it was pressed up against latex” (Preston 1986, 51). In addition to being an erotic tool for building anticipation, the condom itself is eroticized in the book. This is evident in the scene described at the beginning of this piece, as Preston notes how the condom “stretches glistening over the tight skin” (Preston 1986, 18). Thus, condoms are deliberately eroticized in Entertainment for a Master, incorporating gay men’s desires into safe sex education.

Why This Still Matters

While condom use in Preston’s erotica reveals little on its own, understanding it as a performance, contextualized within the stigmatizing discourses he was exposed to and his broader works, allows us to more comprehensively analyze what it does. This performance resists moralizing HIV prevention discourses during the AIDS crisis and importantly contributes to community-led safe sex discourses that take gay men’s needs and desires seriously. Although Preston was writing during a flurry of discourses around AIDS, these community-led safe sex discourses are no less important today then they were during the 1980s. In 2011, the New York Department of Health ran an ad campaign called “It’s Never Just HIV,” highlighting how stigmatizing HIV prevention discourses in America have continued into the 21st century.

This video from the campaign depicts several men, presumably gay, looking mournful and ashamed. It then cuts to a body scan of one of these men, zooming in on a grotesque image of a cancerous anus. When contextualized within the history of stigmatizing HIV prevention discourses, the fear mongering in this ad is clearly directed at “irresponsible” gay men. The bizarre assumption of this video is that gay men engaging in unsafe sex are so reckless that the threat of AIDS is not, in and of itself, enough to motivate them to use condoms. They are presumably unperturbed by AIDS and therefore need to be frightened with the message: “it’s never just HIV.” This highlights how community-led safe sex discourses are as vital now as they were when Preston was writing. The solution to the epidemic is not found in shaming gay men as reckless hedonists. If we are truly committed to their wellbeing, our discourses on safe sex must take gay mens wants and needs seriously.