Circuits of Power, Circuits of Pleasure: Sexual Scripting in Gay Men's Bottom Narratives.

Public health scholarship on same-sex male sexualities has tended to focus on the acultural category of "men who have sex with men," and their agentic abilities (or lack thereof) to make rational decisions to prevent HIV transmission. This has impeded investigations into how social-structural factors may shape these decision-making processes. This paper explores the meanings gay male participants attributed to their identity as "bottom," a signification generally thought to express a preference for receptive anal intercourse. However, in this paper I argue that participant's conception of this "positional identity" category reflect a much more complicated understanding of their bottom identity. Based on focus group and interview data with 18 HIV-negative self-identified gay male bottoms living in San Francisco, this paper explores two dominant "sexual scripts" attributed to bottoms: first, that bottoms are men who desire to produce pleasure for their partners; and second, that bottoms are men who desire to submit sexually to their partners. Implicit in their narratives was an understanding of power and pleasure that was circuitous, in that they were described (to varying degrees) as flowing back and forth between bottoms and their partners. I argue that these two, often overlapping scripts structure the way that participants interpreted their sexual practices and desires. I conclude with a discussion concerning a minority of participants for whom these pleasure/power scripts for bottoms conflicted directly with public health scripts concerning safer sex behavior -- what I term "pleasure/risk dilemmas." ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]