Condom era

The years, from the late 1980s to the 2010s, when the big gay porn studios shot anal sex only with condoms, before bareback took over.

The condom era is the stretch of gay porn history when the big studios shot anal sex only with rubbers on. It runs roughly from the late 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic pushed the established studios into a condom-only rule, to the 2010s, when bareback took over the market. When someone says a scene or a performer is "from the condom era", they mean exactly that: glossy, tanned, shaved, and wrapped.

It is said with nostalgia or with a shrug, depending on who is talking. For some of us those films are the classics we grew up on; for younger viewers raised on raw scenes, a condom on screen looks almost like a costume from another century.

Where it comes from

Before AIDS nobody thought about it: gay porn of the 1970s and early 1980s was condomless because almost all gay sex was. Then the epidemic hit performers, crews and audiences alike, and through the late 1980s the established studios agreed to shoot only with condoms. For about twenty-five years a condom in a studio scene was simply what responsible gay porn looked like, and it doubled as a public health message: the men we fantasized about were using them, so we could too.

The phrase itself is a looking-back word. Nobody called it the condom era while it was happening; the name only made sense once it was over.

How it ended

The end came slowly and then all at once. Bareback studios grew from a niche into a big share of the paying market, and condom rules loosened even at the companies that had kept them longest. In 2014 Michael Lucas, whose Lucas Entertainment had been a condom-only studio, said openly that bareback was hotter, that viewers wanted it, and that his performers were tested before shooting. By then HIV treatment and PrEP had changed the risk picture, and the rest of the industry followed the money.

How it is used today

On forums and tube sites the condom era is a period label, like "the 90s" for music. People use it to date a scene, to praise the production values of the old exclusive stars, or to explain why a classic film looks so different from what is online now. Some viewers actively look for condom scenes, and a few studios still shoot them, but they are the exception.

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