the feminist librarian reads

Although AIDS did not signal the end of sexual liberation, the epidemic did change the meaning of sex for many gay men, mixing potent feelings of fear with otherwise pleasurable acts. In Tim Murphy’s recent piece on PrEP for New York Magazine, Sarit Gloub, a psychology professor at Hunter College, described her research findings that half of gay men think about HIV most or all of the time during sex. This fear is in part a result of the very “sex-positive” programs that gay men’s groups developed in the 1980s, which eroticized safer sex for gay men but also represented sexual contact between men as dangerous.