"C'est Votre Choix" or, Private Identities and Public Militancy in the Second Decade of the AIDS Epidemic in France: The Case of Gay Porn Magazine Projet X

Abstract

Historians of the gay movement have tended to privilege activist records and publications and to overlook erotic and pornographic media as sources in their telling of how a community came together as a politicised critical mass (Florêncio and Miller, forthcoming). Unsurprisingly, the same phenomenon is also to be encountered in existing cultural histories of HIV and AIDS, which have tended to favour activist organisations and/or heroised activist leaders as historical actors. Yet, throughout the history of the movement, gay men were coming together less through engagement with activist organisations or activist magazines, and more through sex and the consumption of gay sex media (Waugh 1996; Johnson 2019). In this article, I look at the history of the French gay hardcore magazine Projet X (1994–2000) to shine some much-needed light on the complex and often contradictory manner in which gay men—and subcultural gay sex media—responded to the AIDS crisis. In so doing, I add to the growing literature that complicates the myth of immediate and generalised condom adherence among gay men in the aftermath of AIDS. While such myth did indeed provide gay men with a seat at the negotiating table by portraying them as good subjects and citizens, continuing to insist on it despite growing evidence of the contrary will only serve to hinder the development of more capacious and less judgemental understandings of the importance sexual pleasures can have in our lives, subjectivities, and communities.