Time, Relations and Learning in Gay Men's Experiences of Adventurous Sex

Abstract

In 1998 social researchers reported that membership of a "culture of sexual adventurism and experimentation" was a predictor of HIV sero-conversion among homosexually active men living in Sydney. In this paper, we explore how these researchers have understood sexual adventurism as referring to a set of sexual practices, to a subcultural network, and to a particular sexual context. We then present an analysis of the way participants in our study recounted experiences of adventurous sex, focusing on sexual occasions that feature men playing with piss.In contrast with an approach to research that seeks to define clusters of sexual activity across surveys of gay men's sexual practices, our study analysed narratives of sexual occasions recounted by gay men in interviews. This approach produces an interactive and iterative perspective on sexual experience, which we develop in this paper by drawing on the affect theory of Sylvan Tomkins and by attending to aspects of momentum, time and relations as recounted in gay men's experiences of adventurous sex.Through our analysis of interview data, we develop an account of adventurous sex that focuses on how men learn in interaction with others during sexual occasions and over time. We find that approaches to sex research and health education that seek predictability in what men do sexually and rely on men to delimit the scope of their sexual repertoire are incompatible with the attitudes with which men in our study approached and recounted experiences of adventurous sex.