I met him at an ACT UP protest, I remember he came right up to me in the sun with such a sweetness we were both 19 I liked the tiny little silver dot in his nose the way his eyes sparkled even his braces I thought they looked cute. We got arrested together and we did runway to RuPaul and then we got bashed together, we were kissing and these guys said what are you doing? I said kissing and we went back to it then pepper spray directly into my eyes so red I thought it was spray paint, right next to the 24 hour restaurant I used to go to in high school. I ended up in the hospital getting saline pumped into my eyes filled with pain they said it was lucky I came quickly because otherwise I might have lost my vision. All of this was big, these were big things, but then I went back to San Francisco and he went back to Michigan and we wrote letters, beautiful elaborate letters that's what people did in the early '90s.

If he was my first boyfriend, the first person to hold me when I was having incest flashbacks, we broke down a lot then broke up and broke down and everything was difficult but we knew we were building something in the ruins, that was us the ruins. We wanted to create a world we could live with. A lot of the people I believed in then I no longer believe in now, of course we've all changed and some of us have different dreams. So it's not unique that my first boyfriend and I don't talk anymore, don't talk because I stopped believing in his promises, his promises that we were family not just ruins it took me almost 10 years. I mean 10 years to let him go, not as a boyfriend I mean that lasted a year but as something more: hope. Now I'm okay with running into him from time to time, but there are no more dreams.

Today I heard something that I'm still trying to process. I mean it makes me sad and I don't know what else to think. Maybe I feel conflicted, conflicted because it makes me so sad and then I think it shouldn't make me so sad, why this investment in his life choices? In this case, it's a barebacking video.

I want to back up for a moment and say that when we went out, we were absolutely meticulous about safe sex. Soon it would be called safer, and that made more sense, but at the time we even used Kiss of Mint condoms for sucking cock. Looking back, I wonder if our dedication to the rules could only exist in such a pure form because we came of age almost certain that we'd die of AIDS, isn't that what happened to everyone like us? Still we wanted to beat the odds, and we wanted to dream, remember dreaming? This wasn't monogamy or anything silly like that, we didn't believe in such ownership spectacles, we were sluts and sure, soon enough our ideas of sexual safety would change too, but not our ethics, I mean I didn't believe our ethics had changed until now.

As far as I'm concerned, barebacking videos participate in a culture of nihilism and selfishness that is one of the grossest manifestations of a gay sexual culture that has given up on any vision of communal care. I won't pretend that barebacking videos don't turn me on -- lots of things that disgust me turn me on. What frightens me is the way in which they actively promote loyalty to condomless sex as the One True Vision of sexual satisfaction. And not condomless sex as part of a safer sex regimen, but the type where come must be unloaded deep within stretched anal orifices, as the camera waits for it all to squirt back into our vision. A negotiated decision to have sex without condoms is a different story, a story never portrayed in the unquestioning, masculinity-drenched fantasies of bareback porn.

I can't help thinking that bareback videos are about giving up, even if I watch them and I don't give up. I mean I'm still committed to safer visions of sexual splendor. I'm struck by the thought that nothing was missing from the sex I had with that first boyfriend. Because anything was possible.

Mattilda also blogs at nobodypasses.blogspot.com