For Nico, a 30-year-old American who moved to Pamplona to study and prefers to remain anonymous, sex and romantic love do not necessarily go hand in hand. After coming out in 2019, he gradually adopted a prosexual outlook that largely characterizes relationships between men queerthose whose gender identities or sexual orientation differ from the norm. “Sex is not just what we have been protecting for centuries through religious and cultural norms, as something only for procreation,” she explains by phone. “Sex is not something that should be left aside when we talk about what is queeris something central to us.”
Heterosexual culture has been marked by monogamy as almost the only acceptable model in a relationship, but men and women queer have had more freedom to explore their emotional ties. In the case of men queersex has been able to serve as a catalyst in the formation of community, a practice that, due to its visibility and its break with the established order, has been the object of greater social persecution, even today. In the United States, for example, four states prohibited sexual relations between persons of the same sex until 2003, under the so-called “sodomy laws”, and two years ago, Iran publicly executed two men for having homosexual relations.
Among men queerthe meaning of sex goes beyond the time spent with another person —or people— in a bed. Or in the bathrooms of a nightclub. Or even outdoors. The importance of sex for the community has a clear historical trajectory. One of the reasons was the repression of homosexuality, says Gabriel J. Martín, psychologist and author of several books on LGBT+ topics. When spaces queer did not exist due to institutional criminalisation, sex with strangers became a safe way to satisfy desire. “It was preferable that they were anonymous encounters, since, as it was prohibited, if the other person was arrested, they could never give you away because they didn’t know who you were,” says Martín on WhatsApp.
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In the 1970s, with the Gay Liberation movement, sex laid the foundations for the nascent community queerand men began to build what would become a social movement forged, in part, through sexual relations. The growing number of spaces queerespecially after the Stonewall riots in 1969 (New York, USA), was essential, explains over the phone Phillip Hammack, professor of psychology at the University of California and co-editor of The Story of Sexual Identity: Narrative Perspectives on the Gay and Lesbian Life Course (The story of sexual identity: narrative perspectives on the gay and lesbian life course; not translated into Spanish). “All that furtive sex that was happening in bathrooms and hidden spaces was able to be integrated into real institutions: gay bars, saunas and sex clubs.”
Sexual openness also involves accepting diversity in the multiple meanings that sex has.
The HIV epidemic put an end to these prosexual attitudes, and although the importance of sex between men queer never went away, the social openness of the 1970s was replaced by a rejection of the pro-sexual vision that characterized that era. “Sex became linked to illness,” says Michael Bronski, a professor at Harvard University and author of A Queer History of the United States (A story queer (from the United States; not translated into Spanish). “We spent years trying to figure out how to avoid that and how to completely separate it in our imagination.” In the 15 years from the first cases in 1981 to the approval of antiretroviral treatments, a positive diagnosis meant, in large part, a conviction, Hammack recalls. Even though condom-based, non-penetrative sex greatly reduced the chances of infection, the moralistic discourse prevailed, and sex and promiscuity took on a sordid meaning. You could try to be queerbut only within the margins of heteronormative respectability.
Pre-exposure prophylaxis, known as PrEP, changed everything—the World Health Organization began recommending its use in mid-2014. This treatment, adopted in countries such as the United States and Spain in recent years, prevents HIV infection by 99%, which has brought non-normative sexual relations back to the center of the conversation. queer. Thanks to this extra barrier of protection, men queer “They can finally fulfill their desires free from the anxiety of a possible death,” concludes Hammack. Sex has regained its historical place as a relational tool, causing a cultural revolution that has socially legitimized sexual practices beyond the traditional relational model: monogamy.
Excluded from the institution of marriage until recently, the population queer have explored sexual relationships more freely than their heterosexual counterparts, especially women, Bronski says, even if these non-monogamous ways of relating are more present in mainstream conversation. According to a 2021 study from Chapman University and the Kinsey Institute, people who identify as gay or bisexual have engaged in consensual non-monogamy more frequently than heterosexuals. Open relationships and extramarital sex are sometimes the standard, says Christopher Stults, a professor at Baruch College, in a phone conversation. queer metropolitan, at least in large American cities. Eric Anderson, a professor at the University of Winchester and author of The Monogamy Gap (The Monogamy Gap, not translated into Spanish), believes that the monogamous ideal still marks relationships queeralthough it is an unsustainable utopia in the long term. “Men have more sexual desire than women, they always want more sexual partners,” she explains over the phone. In a couple of two men, she says, time leads to non-monogamous models, although “they never admit that they are in an open relationship because of the stigma.”
In any case, relationships between men queer do not seem to be marked by the search for sex with others. According to a study published in 2018 in the scientific journal Archives of Sexual Behavior (Archives of sexual behavior), 45.3% of men queer who were in a relationship were in a monogamous relationship. Tyrel Starks, a professor of psychology at Hunter College and co-author of the study, says that replacing the monogamous sexual standard with a single alternative reduces the diversity of relational models among men. queer“If we declare that monogamy belongs to heterosexuals, in a way we are accepting a rather homophobic narrative,” he says over the phone. For some men, queerthe importance of sex lies in forging community with others or satisfying a sexual appetite, while for others it is a way of being intimate with a single partner. Any “rigid normative structure” regarding sex queer “is potentially problematic.”
The sexual openness that characterizes men queer It involves accepting diversity in the multiple meanings of sex — as long as one’s own and others’ terms are clear. “We will continue to explore the possibilities that feelings and sexual desire offer us,” says Martín. “We are the vanguard; whatever has to do with sexuality that is happening right now with gays, in two decades it will happen with the heterosexual population.”
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