White Bottoms, Black Dicks, & PrEP
What did the access expansion of PrEP reveal or hide about the sexual racial hierarchy, who is treated as subject or object, and what made white tops become bottoms for black men.
A topic that has been on my mind for an incredibly long time, but I was not sure of the appropriate forum, timing, or even language to broach this topic with the required sensitivities. However, we are in PRIDE month, so I believe now is an OK time to discuss this intra-community topic.
It’s about PrEP.
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PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) is a medication people can take to prevent the transmission of HIV. It was approved by the FDA in 2012.
As a 38-year-old Black gay man who grew up in the suburbs outside of a major city, I was aware of gay people, gay sex, and the fear of HIV/AIDS my entire childhood through adulthood. I also grew up in the era of highly discriminatory profiles on gay hookup apps and lived through the pre and post PrEP eras. I am young enough to hear the tales of the mass deaths of the AIDS generation, while also happily looking at the younger generations of Queers who seemingly live without fear of what was once viewed as a death sentence.
But one thing that has sat with me about PrEP is how sexual dynamics seemingly have changed specifically as it relates to interracial sex and dating. I’m going to use some pretty candid language that is not intended to offend, but is focused on speaking as plainly as I felt at the time I thought these ideas and will be more refined where I am speaking in more present experience. In instances as it relates to Black people living with HIV, I am trying my best to avoid furthering serophobia (the fear of those living with HIV).
I am also not moralizing Black men and those they felt coerced to partner with for any reason. I am trying to share parts of my experience and the questions that had come up for me that I now feel safer to discuss.
I Lived It, I’ve Seen It
In my youth, I slept with a lot of white men. And that is not because it was my preference, I was preference agnostic. I was happy to be desired after a teenage period of no sex or desires from those who I desired. I grew up in the 90s and 2000s, if boys had crushes on boys, it was not openly discussed. And while I would say I would have described myself as not at all straight, gay as a label didn’t feel perfect. But as someone who preferred certainty, I actually just wanted to not feel like I was misleading anyone so I waited until I was 18 to attempt to have any sexual relationship. None of this is surprising, I tend to prefer certainty of self before taking actions.
I grew up in the burbs and went to college in a very white city just out of Boston. My access to Black gay men was limited by my inability to drive, the inaccessibility of Black neighborhoods via public transit, and my laziness. The part about my laziness is that I did not want to travel 30+ minutes to go find Black male partners and as a college student who was not out, I could not really “host” in my dorm. The majority of my sexual partners in my college years were not my undergrad classmates, but mostly Harvard grad students and Cambridge, Somerville and similar places that were along the red line (Boston’s train/subway system).
When I was in college (2006 to 2010), Grindr did not exist. We had Craiglists personal ads, a few websites but nothing that was mobile friendly. The phone I had freshman year was a Motorola Rzr until I got a Blackberry my sophomore year. Apps like Uber, DoorDash, and other apps that exist today to make life convenient did not exist. I sometimes had guys in Boston who would pick me up from campus to hook up at their house, then drive me back home. Yes, that is 4 trips they would make. It was super rare and more often than not, I was just finding a patchwork of ways on the red line and Harvard campus shuttles. Given these dynamics, if they were not on a campus, they were locals who tended to be over 35 or 40.
I have too many stories of my early days of no preference before I understood why preferences can be protective and reinforcing of one’s agency in a deeply racist LGBTQ community.
A Theory: Post-Prime Whites
The theory that I developed, the one that I started to internalize: post-prime whites sleep with non-white men.
Although I studied psychology in college, I was always torn between that, sociology, and anthropology. I loved the fusion of people and science so much, I worked in a research lab all 4 years of college that looked at out-group/in-group dynamics focusing on race, gender, and power. Some of those experiments included seeing how men physiologically react to being told what to do by women while being instructed to play a new video game. I wrote the protocol for that experiment.
I coded videos of white and Black women engaging in social activities, while hooked up to various machines to see their physical reactions to racial pairings. I collected saliva samples to measure cortisol levels in experiments covering aging, babies racial preferences, and more. I’ve held most roles one could have in an experiment. I share this less to say I’m a scientist but more so to indicate the ways of thinking, evaluating, and exploring how an experiment could be conducted was a core part of my life from 18 to 22.
The theory I developed was before PrEP. It helped me explain why I thought so many older white men became bottoms that exclusively slept with Black men. In particular after a middle age turning point of having only been top and only sleeping with other white men. In the libidinal economy where whiteness, fitness, wealth and other components associated with capitalism and transactional value: fit, white men have the most libidinal currency and value. That means, they get to choose who they want sexually and proximity to them confers significant social advantage for those who value prominence within the gay male community. It can be explicit or implicit. We are not always aware of our proximity especially if we happen to be lighter, fitter, or conventionally attractive by European standards without any additional effort like working out, skin lightening, hair straightening, etc.
The only thing that I could see to explain why these objectively hot white men who were over 35 were no longer being valued was that they were post-prime.
They were meat that had hit its expiration date or at least lost the peak of its value. Gay men are often very transactional and will assess your value immediately, discarding you if you are not deemed “hot” or “valuable.” Think of collecting trading cards. That is how many gay men during my early 20s were approaching sex.
So I was curious: why would a hot white man suddenly opt into sleeping only with Black men? I do not believe Black men have less worth, I am looking at this from a purely market explanation. And I am not a red (or black) pill podcast person, I had this theory well before social media was even a thing.
In my mind, other conventionally attractive white men no longer valued them as tops, so they realized if they still wanted access to sexual partners where they could still be selective and in the power position of deciding: they had to pivot to “lower value” sexual partners. And you see this with not just Black men, but Asian and Latino men who have white partners.
You’ll often notice the age gap (the white male partner often 1 or 2 decades older) or the attractiveness gap first.
For a post-prime white man, he’s only post his prime in an all-white sexual market. But if and when he pivots to other groups, he might even be seen as high value. And if he is a bottom, which is often a lower-status in the highly misogynistic gay male community, then there’s an interesting power dynamic presented. The Black male can feel a sense of power over a white bottom that is “equal” or greater, similar to how straight Black men and white women are said to be the same degrees of power away from white maleness.
All of this is before you even get to the stereotypes about endowment. Presumably the white bottom has at least a meaningful enough endowment to have been exclusively a top in his former sexual life. So that man did not because a bottom because his endowment was insignificant. And while ED and sexual performance could be possibilities, that was not what I typically saw in my experience.
The White Men in Black Neighborhoods
As a gay man growing up in the pre-PrEP era, I was adamant about condom use and maintained the serophobia that so many youth of my age had. It was the era before the awareness (and possible reality) of undetectable = untransmittable (U=U).
As a hyper vigilant, risk-averse observer I would look at the gay apps (at this point, everything was a hookup app, no dating apps really catered to gay men) and notice a pattern. The white men who lived in Black neighborhoods, the ones who showed up on the grid, the ones who would message me, the ones with the most permissive profiles of what they were willing to do sexually were often HIV+. It is also possible that those are the profiles I had remembered most, but I recall it being a consistent pattern when I lived in NYC, went to college outside of Boston, spent summers in DC, Chicago, and Berkeley, or really anywhere I could log onto a gay app and exist in a community with Black gay men.
I want to be super clear that this is not a judgment of people living with HIV or to further serophobia. I am not making a moral argument, but am trying to explain a pattern I saw to understand if this was my observation that others have experienced or might be able to counter. Some alternatives to this hypothesis include:
Older people have had more sexual experience, therefore greater exposure risk in aggregate of time
White men living with HIV like so many are disproportionately impacted financially such that Black neighborhoods are where they could afford to live
What always stood out to me, besides what seemed to be an obvious overlap, was that these men often had a clear preference for Black men. It was visible on the language they used on their profiles; often indicating they were NOT interested in other white men. A massive departure from the white men who were younger, fitter, and living in the gay hubs like Chelsea (NYC) or Boystown (Chicago). I was often shocked by why some white men were interested in me, but others had profiles that said “no blacks, no asians.”
Then, when I would receive messages from those men and I’d see their face, I would be able to spot them out at the mostly Black gay clubs or at mixed bars and clubs. And when I would see them, they were often with younger Black men. Often appearing between 20ish and 25. I started to wonder if there was a power dynamic at play, an asymmetry of information and risk.
It is really hard, or has been for me, to strongly insist on condom usage when someone you think desires you does not want to use one. Especially when that person is nice to you and does not seem like they might physically harm you. I remember having several conversations in my 20s with mostly white men who would use science speak, passive aggressive language, and other powered communication tactics to make me feel guilty for wanting to use condoms.
I remember telling one guy who I spent the summer of 2009 with that I preferred to use condoms, and he insisted that he couldn’t use them because they irritated his insides. And he was very persuasive. I was a rising senior at Harvard, formerly pre-med and someone who knew a little about the world, and I still un empowered to say no. Why? This man had an incredibly nice condo in Boystown, was in impeccable shape, “didn’t look sick” in the sense of that time what we think HIV/AIDS looks like, and he seemed to be the type of white guy that I had never gotten attention from in my 3 priors years in Boston.
He was hot.
He was also a liar.
When we first met, he told me he was 40 years old. He would later reveal once we met that he was actually 50, a 29 year age between us. The summer we spent was nice at times. His nice condo and his taking me to see parts of Chicago was a welcome distraction from my internship in the Chicago suburbs and in my nearby sublet that was a true shit show. I felt like surely, this man cannot be someone who would be HIV+.
And then, he started to tell me stories of his preferences for Black men. He would tell me about his past exes (all Black). But some were masculine, others feminine. Some tall, some short. He, the bottom in every dynamic. And I had asked if his preference was always this way and he said he used to be a strict top when he was in his hey day (also back then he was an alcoholic) who mostly dated and slept with white men.
I started to realize, this man was a collector of all things Black in a way that did not feel like he had discernment. He was also on steroids, which led to massive mood swings, arguments rooted in jealousy, and a way of operating that made me feeling guilty for not being exclusive with him despite him not wanting exclusivity.
My own experience in Chicago was not super different from my time with an Italian man who would say he was once a strict top that dated white men but was now 100% a bottom for black men. It was he that I asked even more questions about how these preferences seemed to shift so much for so many older white gay men. He shared for some there’s fear of what their friends will think or actual fear that gets reduced over time. Even when I was at HBS in the PrEP era, I had a man tell me that condom use didn’t protect against the other STIs so him being on PrEP meant I didn’t need a condom.
I found myself wondering what conversations (if any) were actually happening around risk, protection, disclosure and power. If the other black men where anything like me, then they might have also struggled to say no. I also remember my first boyfriend had shared that he had “survival sex” when he was under-housed and moving through the foster and youth homelessness system in NYC. I started to reframe my Chicago experience as survival sex even if it was one a higher class and income rung, I was still sleeping with a man as a form of escape from my internship summer from hell.
I really started to look at every older white man and Black male public interaction with a weary eye: were they equals, or was this similar to what I had experienced?
Important Note on Serophobia
I want to be super super clear that I am not implying that people living with HIV are post-prime. That is not an analysis I can meaningfully support given its biased nature. But also, HIV+ men have their own communities where they prefer or only sleep with other HIV+ men.
I cannot make any conclusions about that in good faith that I would say is my belief. I can only say that serophobia is a real stigma that even I held before I fully understood U=U and have no problem with sleeping with or dating HIV+ men. Someone’s sero-status is not a dealbreaker in any of my dating in the last 10 years and I do not expect it ever will be. I fully understand that people’s seroconversion and the context around it is not my business or concern. A partner managing their health and me managing my health are what are the priority for us as a unit.
The PrEP Era Shifted Things
PrEP hit the market in 2012, but I did not become aware of it until I was at HBS in 2014 about to head to NYC for the summer. In my pursuit to get on PrEP ahead of an internship, I was met with a lot of medical discrimination that later led to me getting reimbursed for copays and other things after speaking to a patient advocate at my insurance company.
Although I was now on PrEP, I still used condoms. I never told the men I was on PrEP because I was afraid they would try to coerce me into condomless sex and I was sure of my ability to say no. If this seems hard to understand: imagine this. I spent a full year in Boston being rejected by men who aren’t that attractive or interesting for 4 years during college, only realizing my actual beauty and appeal when I would spend a summer away. And then when I returned to Boston after 4 years living in NYC, I was back to feeling undesired and overlooked.
What was different now was that there were fewer white men saying “no rice, no spice, no fats, no fems” on their profiles.
Something had shifted in the community.
Suddenly I was seeing many more white men who seemed completely comfortable pursuing Black men sexually. The thing that fascinated me wasn’t the sex itself, but this new racial openness among white men under 40. Before PrEP, many of the white men I encountered appeared highly concerned about HIV risk and asked me a lot of questions about the last time I was tested, etc. After PrEP, that concern seemed dramatically reduced.
Now, obviously, there are other sexually transmitted infections. This isn’t an argument that PrEP eliminated risk altogether but PrEP changed the HIV conversation. It also shifted responsibility in a way that I think really speaks to the root of the racialized concerns: selfishness.
The PrEP Era Accelerated Racialized Sex
This is where I struggle to know exactly what is my opinion versus what is likely to be a racialized mechanism at play.
I now see so many white men who are into anonymous sex, are load collectors or cumdumps (lookup these terms at your own risk). They have decided who they have sex with is no longer a risk if the main community fear, HIV, is effectively mitigated with PrEP. I’ve seen white young men who are collecting loads from Black men and all men. A weird racialized dynamic that you also see in straight porn where white bottoms have slotted into the role of Blacked or Brazzers.
The abandon of sexual fear from many white men (to me) reveals that the fear in the past meant Black men were viewed as objects of disease. Possibly pleasure but only after the white subject was effectively post-prime in the libidinal market. It also doubles down on the hyper-masculinization of Black men and the softening of white men in the dynamic.
In an incredibly fascinating turn, we can see this trend in two groups that are considered white by US census standards. In France, where racial census data is prohibited, this dynamic exists with white French “Europeans” and those of North African & Arab descent (be they French citizens or not).
In the article, “Top or Bottom: How do we desire?: What do queer memes of a top shortage reveal about the racialized orders of desire and new directions for gay critique? (article)” we get language that equates topping with being the savage, the brute, the outsider, the hyper sexualized.
It is a dynamic we’ve seen in the United States with Black people (male and female) that was part of a fear of the Black body going as far back as slavery to the present day.
It is not clear to me if the onslaught of messages that I receive unsolicited from white men is purely racialized, though I’ve come to learn white men relate to each other often in very transactional ways that feel racial when it involves Black and white men (compared to just two white men).
But the new messages in this era is very depersonalized. Some of the common things you’ll get:
Dick pics?
Hung?
How big?
I’m a submissive ready to be used
Looking?
There’s a complete omission of pleasantries that did exist in the pre-social media era, that waned over time, and is now completely gone. What I’ve experienced is what feels like a flattening of me to a human dildo. It does not matter if I am a top or bottom personally because many of the men do not read that my profile clearly stats that I am not into submissive men or any dom-sub dynamics. And nearly all of my Black friends who are bottoms are always assumed tops the same as many of my Asian friends are assumed bottoms no matter what their profile explicitly states.
Concluding Thoughts
And while interracial hooking up appears to be progressive, I am often skeptical of the power dynamics that exist in these cross-race, age-gap dynamics because of what I saw and experienced for myself. The conclusion I’ve been arriving at: PrEP has unmasked the racial preferences that have existed globally to reinforce racialized, colonial dynamics.
For a very long time the access gap to get PrEP was of course racialized given the US healthcare and insurance system. PrEP requires testing every 3 months and is very expensive unless you have good insurance or are eligible for Medicaid. The reach in communities of color is worse than in the white gay communities where PrEP (and now DoxyPEP) is like the world post Polio or Smallpox vaccine. You can truly see how much the privilege gap exists in looking at PrEP adoption rates from 2012 to the present.
When I discussed what I viewed as selfishness was a belief of several white gay: “I am taking PrEP, so you being HIV+ is not something that impacts me, therefore we can have sex that is high-risk.”
All of this seems to be rooted in the focus on the white person and their sexual health and safety. It does not have as much regard for the sexual health of the other party/partner.
Disclosure conversations ( ones that discuss testing, other safety practices) are mostly gone. The lack of discussion always means some of the racialized bias that was present in the past has been replaced with a view that says “I cannot be racist, I have sex with Black men.” But none of this assumes the person having sex with you views you as a full person, believes in your rights to exist in anyway outside of the pleasure you can provide to them and their needs.
What has been your experience? What elements of what I wrote resonates is vastly differently for you?
What do you attribute to the white exclusive top of other white men to becoming an exclusive bottom and only for Black men among the older white gay men?