Bareback

Fucking without a condom, also called BB or raw: once the most controversial word in gay life, now routine in the age of PrEP.

Bareback means fucking without a condom. Barebacking is the practice, a barebacker is a man who does it, and on the apps the whole thing is often shortened to BB or simply called raw. In gay life the word carries more history than almost any other on this list, because for a generation of men, sex without a condom was the line between life and death.

It describes the absence of the condom, nothing more. Whether the top finishes inside is a separate question, and that is what breeding and creampie are about.

Where it comes from

The image is a rider on a horse with no saddle: skin on skin, nothing in between. As slang for condomless sex it is older than most people think: Green's Dictionary of Slang finds it in Mordecai Richler's novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, in a passage dated 1959, and "barebacking" turns up in 1974. Those early uses were mostly straight.

The gay sense took off in the 1990s, when effective HIV treatment arrived and some men began to choose condomless sex deliberately after years of safer-sex rules. Green's records "bareback riding" in a Sydney gay paper in 1996, a 1997 article in the HIV magazine POZ, and a 1998 dictionary of queer slang that describes barebacking as used mostly by gay men. At the time the word was a scandal. Barebackers were accused of betraying everything the community had fought for during the AIDS years.

How it is used today

The fight has largely gone quiet, and the reason is medicine. PrEP, taken as prescribed, greatly reduces the chance of getting HIV from sex, and a man with HIV who has an undetectable viral load does not pass it on: in the PARTNER study, 782 gay couples had about 76,000 acts of condomless anal sex with zero linked transmissions. That is U=U. Today many gay men bareback as a matter of course, and BB sits on app profiles as a plain statement of preference, often next to "on PrEP" or "undetectable."

In porn the shift was even more dramatic. The condom era of the big studios gave way to bareback as the default, and the old niche of the bareback studio became the mainstream.

The health side

PrEP and U=U deal with HIV, but PrEP does not protect against other STIs. Gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis spread easily through condomless anal sex, so men who bareback usually test every three months with throat and rectal swabs. If you think you have been exposed to HIV in the last three days, or want to start PrEP, see a doctor or a sexual health clinic.

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