Antiretroviral Time: Gay Sex, Pornography, and Temporality ‘post-Crisis’

Abstract

The introduction of combination antiretroviral therapies in 1996 brought about a radical change in the temporality of HIV infection, moving us away from the event-time of the AIDS crisis to the expanded/expansive temporality of chronic ‘undetectability’. That, and the later extension of antiretrovirals as Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, has dramatically shifted the lived temporalities of both sex and subjectivity among gay men who were able to access the new medical protocols for testing, managing, and preventing HIV. In this essay, I draw from field work carried out in Berlin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and analysis of gay pornography, to map the new temporalities of sex and subjectivity that have been catalysed by the introduction of antiretroviral drugs, speculating on their limits and queer political potential, situated as they are at the intersection of neoliberal regimes of biomedical self-administration and sex understood as both an aesthetics and poetics of existence. If modernity developed through an incessant rationalisation of time, including of lived, embodied time, I argue that antiretroviral time has triggered the emergence of sexual behaviours and subjectivities that open up new avenues for thinking 21st-century triangulations of sex, subjectivity, and resistance being experimented with in bedrooms, sex clubs, and bathhouses across the developed world.