You cherished the pleasure because you remembered how much you despised your body's yearnings as a kid. Other teenagers fumbled in the back seats of cars and made out at drunken graduation parties, but it took you years to ease into the rhythm and flow of desire.

You remember, when you were 22, the first time you set foot in Man's Country -- a New York bathhouse on West 15th Street. The place took your breath away -- nine floors of naked men doing all the things Jerry Falwell could never have imagined. You wanted to indulge and did, but gingerly. You were squeamish. You shed that quality in fits and starts, but by the time you were ready to shed it for good, the epidemic had blossomed. And it was too late. You ached for what you thought you might have missed, but it was too late.

After that you sometimes found it hard to get hard. You felt like your body was bound tight in Saran Wrap. A few of your friends didn't have sex for years. Others did whatever they wanted and managed not to worry about it. You weren't sure if they were liberated or insane. You and Andy, your next boyfriend, attended a workshop designed to "eroticize" safe sex. You read porn stories centered around condoms and tried to trick yourselves into believing that putting latex on each other could be an exciting part of the evening's events.

It didn't work. Condoms were not sexy to you. They've never been sexy. Nothing will ever make them sexy. No matter how much you experimented with different brands, you couldn't feel anything with them on. Some guys didn't seem to mind, but others had the same complaint. Still, for the better part of a decade, people generally obeyed the primary rule: No intercourse without latex.

Blow jobs were another matter. Doing it with condoms was like sucking on a garbage bag. You missed the taste of rubbery flesh, the trail of tongue on naked shaft. Everyone knew it was safer than anal sex; how much safer they couldn't tell you. So you stopped doing it for years. But eventually you found that, like kissing, you couldn't do without it. Apparently nobody else could, either; you can't remember the last time you or anyone else donned a condom for oral sex. You know the risk is real, but you're also sure it's tiny, because otherwise everyone you know would be positive by now.

You've still maintained some blow-job limits. You won't do it for a long time, and you won't swallow anything. You stop if you taste much pre-cum, but for really sexy guys you've made exceptions and gone on for a few minutes more. You interrogate your periodontist about all the dental work you've had and what state your gums are in now. You try to remember not to floss beforehand. And somehow you've learned to live with it all.

Because you figure sucking is a lot safer than other things you do. Like crossing the corner at Market and Noe Street -- the most dangerous intersection in San Francisco, where a pedestrian got killed last month. Like hang gliding off Fort Funston, which you haven't actually done but intend to someday. Like reporting from Russia and whipping around in decrepit Aeroflot planes flown by possibly vodka-laden pilots. Your family worries about that, but you don't. You figure if you can do that, you can indulge your oral desires.

It's funny, the tricks your mind plays. You parse the fine points of every encounter and constantly make little deals with yourself. If you don't know the guy's sero status, you'll push things a little further than if you know he's positive. You hope, since he looks healthy, that he's negative, though you know it's absurd to make that judgment. You tell yourself that, if he's positive, whatever meds he takes must have pushed his viral load down to undetectable levels. You hope, if his viral load is down, that it reduces the risk of transmission. The doctors and researchers think that's so, but you know no one knows for sure. You decide to believe it anyway. You hope that the condom doesn't break, and so far it never has. You hope he listens when you tell him not to come inside you, even with the condom on.

You think negatives being penetrated without condoms is nuts, but you're a little nuts yourself so you sort of understand it. You're horrified that people are still sero-converting, but it horrifies you more that the last time someone asked to fuck you without a condom you ached to say yes. It horrifies you how much the edge of danger appealed to you. How much you wanted sex to be, once more, just sex; not barriers and planning and limits and control, but skin and lust and spontaneity.

Maybe some of those who do say yes are depressed because their lover and five best friends have died. Maybe, being young and having never seen anyone waste away, they confuse being gay with having HIV -- as if infection is a mark of adulthood or community. Maybe they're so worn out from years of restraint that something inside them breaks. Maybe they thrill to flirt with the forbidden. Maybe they don't believe HIV causes AIDS. Maybe they think if they get infected, they won't get sick for 10 years, and then new drugs will save them.

Maybe they're in love and have an overwhelming urge to merge.

Can anyone but gay men understand this? Probably not. Still you want to tell your straight friends to think about performing the sexual act they love the most with the person they love the most, and then imagine never experiencing that again for the rest of their lives. You want to tell them that everyone -- straight or gay or somewhere in between -- takes risks all the time, and risks the lives of others, and finds ways to justify it. The other day you were driving to the airport on the freeway in your clunky old Toyota and kept within the speed limit. Everyone else zipped and whizzed right by you. Were they putting you more at risk for serious bodily injury than the HIV-positive man you had sex with the night or week before? Or the guy whose sero status you didn't know?

You think they were. But would they see it that way? You doubt it.

So that, in the end, is your dilemma. You need to touch men and make them feel good, and so do most of the gay men you know. You tangle with each situation and do what feels most comfortable -- or rather least uncomfortable. You know the only way to avoid risk completely is not to have sex at all. You also know that's not possible.

You've heard straight people say that gay men must have some sort of death wish. And at times, when you plumb your own dark depths, you almost agree. But then you wonder at how passion still thrives, in you and your friends and other gay men. And you feel awed at how heroic it is, and how strong you have to be, to sustain heat and desire after so many years of illness and decay. You believe you're brave to want to touch anyone at all. But you're not really sure.

Recent Stories