That’s also one of the reasons why the vast majority of people who identify as ‘pigs’ are also either HIV-undetectable or HIV-negative on PrEP and – I’d argue – with no investment in fantasies of HIV transmission. Yet, it is important that we note that pig had originally nothing to do with either barebacking – understood as transgressive condomless sex taking place in the context of the AIDS crisis – or bug-chasing. So, obviously in the context of the then emerging bug-chasing culture, in which gay men eroticise HIV and seek to become infected, one can understand how the term ‘pig’ also fits that sexual subculture and how it was also adopted by it. What ‘pig’ appeared to mean, then just like before, seemed to have more to do with a more general eroticisation of practices and substances deemed ‘abject’ in dominant culture. But even then, I couldn’t identify ‘pigness’ being associated with a desire to become HIV-positive or an eroticisation of the virus itself. Something that I found really interesting was that it did away with the idea that condoms had been universally adopted by gay men as a result of the AIDS crisis. Importantly, though, while they became rarer, they did not disappear completely. With the public advent of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, those references seemed to become rarer, and references to safer sex eventually started appearing in both editorials, erotic fiction, and personal ads. Those references were quite periodical and used to appear both in the personal ads section of the magazines as well as in erotic stories and other editorial pieces.Īlready, pig appeared associated with a lack of sexual limits or a curiosity to test and push boundaries, as well as being clearly associated in some cases with eroticised exchanges of bodily fluids – this was something that I found really very much present in more ‘hardcore’ German fetish magazines like Kumpel, which ran from the late 1960s until the 1980s. When looking at gay magazines from the UK, USA, Germany, and France while doing archival research, I was able to identify men describing themselves as pigs as early as the late 1960s. Have you been able to pinpoint the origin of Pig as a sexual identity for gay men? After all, writing about sex matters because sex is such a material and complex aspect of everybody’s existence and sense of self, regardless of whether one has a lot, little, or none of it. My approach was to build on experience, build on the concrete, on anecdotes, episodes or encounters I share with readers in order to then reflect on them and, only then, move towards the theoretical and the abstract. Rather than being self-indulgent, I think that aspect of the work is really important, as – I hope – it will give readers a clearer sense of where my questions and thoughts come from, while trying to avoid one of the pitfalls of a lot of recent scholarship on sex which can tend to purely exist in the realm of the abstract or the theoretical. A substantial part of the book starts from or builds on my own experiences, almost like a sexual auto-ethnography.
I also went to clubs and parties where sex took place, and I became more self-reflexive about my own sexual encounters. To complement that, I also interviewed gay men in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – some of whom were also porn models – as well as some porn producers and artists working on the edges of art and porn. Of course, that involved looking at a lot of pornography – produced mostly since the 1970s – as both printed matter and moving-image. The project involved a lot of archival research to try to understand the history of the use of the term ‘pig’ among gay men. What was the research process that you followed for this work – did it involve watching a lot of porn and going to sex parties?
I started this project to try to triangulate the ways in which these new forms of 21st-century gay male self-identification emerged in a highly-mediated context, where both prescription and recreational drugs and online pornography have helped us shape the sense of the sexually-possible and – through that – the ways in which we understand intimacy, communion, and our own masculinity. The sex that I was seeing being associated with pig self-identification amongst gay men tended to be sex that appeared centred on a transgression of bodily boundaries – both through relentless penetrations and exchanges of all kinds of bodily fluids.
Porn has historically played a very important role in modulating the sexual imaginary of queer folk, not just by showing us the sex that we have but also by almost speculating on the sex and pleasures that we could be having.
I had a feeling that such form of self-identification in sexual contexts had to do, on the one hand, with the development of antiretrovirals for the successful treatment and prophylaxis of HIV and, on the other hand, with the increasing availability of free pornography online.