Doing Sexual Responsibility: HIV, Risk Discourses, Trust, and Gay Men Interacting Online

This study draws from interviews with HIV-negative gay men to show how they are doing sexual responsibility online and how their actions uphold moralizing discourses around HIV. The analysis shows how gay men often engage in boundary work through stating their HIV status and “safe sex” practices on their online profile and through screening other people’s profiles for similar information. The gay men also avoid interactions with HIV-positive people, maintaining the stigmatization of HIV-positive people and constructing an HIV-positive serostatus as a status distinction. However, although the HIV-negative gay men are often invested in doing sexual responsibility, they eschew condom use with people they trust. This study then demonstrates the limitations and unintended consequences of discourses that often focus on risk and individual responsibility. These discourses ignore the relational and emotive components of sexual interactions, and hence fail to capture the complexities of people’s lives