“…AIDS gave gay men new reason to be curious about what’s inside our bodies and how it got there… HIV entered [gay men’s] bodies, via a sexual means, before they knew it. I’m not sure that the traumatic significance of this historical sequence has been fully appreciated: HIV got inside the bodies of individual men and inside the gay community before we were aware of its existence. Bodily and psychic barriers thus were breached on a massive scale… Irrespective of his own serostatus, every gay man was urged to erect and maintain prophylactic boundaries between his body and others, especially those with whom he was intimate. But what kind of intimacy insists on maintaining an impenetrable boundary between the persons involved? And what is at stake in maintaining a barrier against something you cannot see, something that thereby becomes particularly susceptible to fantasmatic investment?”

-Tim Dean
From, Unlimited Intimacy