A Pill for Promiscuity

Gay Sex in an Age of Pharmaceuticals

Edited by Andrew R. Spieldenner and Jeffrey Escoffier

SERIES: Q+ Public

Rutgers University Press

For a generation of gay men who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, becoming sexually active meant confronting the dangers of catching and transmitting HIV. In the 21st century, however, the development of viral suppression treatments and preventative pills such as PrEP and nPEP has massively reduced the risk of acquiring HIV. Yet some of the stigma around gay male promiscuity and bareback sex has remained, inhibiting open dialogues about sexual desire, risk, and pleasure.

A Pill for Promiscuity brings together academics, artists, and activists—from different generations, countries, ethnic backgrounds, and HIV statuses—to reflect on how gay sex has changed in a post-PrEP era. Some offer personal perspectives on the value of promiscuity and the sexual communities it fosters, while others critique unequal access to PrEP and the increased role Big Pharma now plays in gay life. With a diverse group of contributors that includes novelist Andrew Holleran, trans scholar Lore/tta LeMaster, cartoonist Steve MacIsaac, and pornographic film director Mister Pam, this book asks provocative questions about how we might reimagine queer sex and sexuality in the 21st century.

The arrival of PrEP and biomedical prevention helped rescue a public centering of gay men's desire, pleasure and sex that was becoming marginalized in the fight for same sex marriage. By returning to the all-but-abandoned anthology as a necessary strategy of critical queer community dialogue, A Pill for Promiscuity: Gay Sex in the Age of Pharmaceuticals offers a compelling collection of voices on the complicated cultural and political dynamics of sex in the era of PrEP. Kenyon Farrow, Managing Director of Advocacy & Organizing for PrEP4All

A Pill for Promiscuity is a necessary collection, in a time where pharmaceutical culture and public health are too often narrating proper ideas of sexual practice and sexual intimacy. This volume speaks back to these problematic frames, through a rich offering of diverse voices from multiple genres of writing, which explore the complexity of sexual life in eras of disease. Jeffrey McCune, author of Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Polities of Passing

ANDREW SPIELDENNER is executive director of MPact: Global Action for Gay Rights and associate professor of communication at California State University San Marcos. Openly living with HIV, he writes about LGBTQ community, HIV and disability, serving as co-editor for the collections Intercultural Health Communication and Post-AIDS.

JEFFREY ESCOFFIER (1942-2022) was a research associate and faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He was one of the founders and the publisher of the pioneering LGBTQ journal OUT/LOOK and is author of the books Bigger Than Life, American Homo, and Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography (Rutgers University Press).

CONTENTS
Introduction to Q+ Public Books by series editors E.G. Crichton and Jeffrey Escoffier
1 Introduction: Why Promiscuity Matters by Andrew Spieldenner and Jeffrey Escoffier
2 Notes on Promiscuity by Andrew Holleran
3 Perspective: Fear
4 Safety by Steve MacIsaac
5 How I Learned to Stop Worrying: Or,The Straight Panic Defense by Daniel Felsenthal
6 Perspective: Sex
7 Reluctant Objects: Sexual Pleasure and HIV Prevention by Kane Race
8 Learning How to Fuck on PrEP by Nicolas “Nic” Flores
9 Gay Sex is Our Superpower by Alex Garner
10 Perspective: Pharma
11 “Heard about it before, but don’t know where to get it”: A Black Gay Man’s Journey to Securing PrEP by Deion Scott Hawkins
12 PrEP in the Porn World by Pam Dore, aka Mr. Pam
13 Auto-Pharmakon: Prescribing Utopia by Addison Vawters
14 Perspective: Trauma and Healing
15 S(t)imulation by Lore/tta LeMaster
16 Playing in the Shadows: Cycles of Trauma by Ariel Sabillon
17 When We Touch: A Reading on Queer Intimacies by Justice Jamal Jones and Andrew Spieldenner with Photographs by Justice Jamal Jones
18 Epilogue: Promiscuity for the Non-Promiscuous by Andrew Spieldenner and Jeffrey Escoffier
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Index

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