In my writing I’ve often focused on the negative aspects of hookup culture, because, well, there’s a lot of negativity in that space. So much so that apps like Grindr, Scruff, and Jack’d have all recently launched initiatives to make their community of users behave less awfully to one another. The jury’s out on how that’s working for everyone. But there is some positivity to be gleaned from this advent in modern dating, along with the introduction of pre-exposure prophylaxis, otherwise known as PrEP.

In a recent study out of UCLA’s Williams Institute, lead author Phil Hammack, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reasoned that the rise in STIs is not a direct result of the use of PrEP, but rather, a cultural shift in views around sex, from the ease of apps to dwindling fears about HIV/AIDS.

“More people are having sex today,” Hammack said. “We’re in sort of a quiet sexual revolution when it comes to new identities, new labels, and sexual behavior.”

For my friends and I, our sexual awakening came just before the rise of Grindr, which launched in 2009. At the risk of too much “back in my day” nostalgia, in our later college and early post-college years, gay bars were the main way of meeting guys. And I hated them. For someone like me—black, yes, but also shy and soft spoken—bars were never an ideal environment to whisper sweet nothings into the ear of a comely stranger. As a result, I rarely got laid. With sites like Adam4Adam and apps like Grindr and Scruff, I was able to sidestep the awkwardness of seductively yelling into someone’s ear and skip directly to the awkwardness of a hookup.

“I have never been the one someone chooses at a club to go home with. I’m just not,” says Alan*, 33. “Nor was I the person to pick someone out as the ‘initiator.’ I think Grindr and other apps have allowed me to feel more confident in doing that and also have found that more people are interested in me online than perhaps at a club.”

Online dating opened up an entirely new world to me, one in which I could, for the first time in my life, feel desirable. The high from attention heaped upon me by strangers became addictive, in part, because like most highs, I felt emboldened. I felt freer to explore my sexuality, what made me tick, what turned me on, and who turned me on. Still, I felt guilty at some of my indiscretions, worried that I would pay the price for enjoying sex just as my foregays had. While I began to enjoy sex, it also reminded me that, technically, I wasn’t supposed to.

“For my clients, I think it’s been a mixed bag,” says Leon Setton, LCSW, a therapist who treats men who have sex with men. “Some people are feeling much more free and comfortable having sex as the stress level is reduced and others actually find it more stressful as the rules are shifting. Do I need to wear condoms now? What does safe sex look like now? In a way, the ‘rules’ were more clear cut before, even if people weren’t always living by them.”

In 2012, my friends and I experienced a sort of second sexual awakening when the Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada for reducing the risk of HIV infection. Growing up in the generation sandwiched between (the first FDA-approved antiretroviral) AZT and PrEP, I was deathly afraid of AIDS. Even after significant improvements in medications that made living a healthy life with the disease a possibility, the damage had been done. Every “very special episode” of a TV show in which the protagonists learned Important Lessons and every AIDS poster blanketing the walls of a doctor’s room or nurse’s office instilled in me a fear of sex. Because, as a gay man, sex and HIV/AIDS were synonymous. The idea that I could have sex and not be exposed to death was foreign to me.

“Sex doesn't feel dangerous anymore,” says Grant, 35. “Do I still have regrets afterwards sometimes? Oh, of course. But I'm never afraid afterwards. I still get tested for STIs every three months, but the atmosphere is totally different—it's a social call with my gay doctor. We catch up, we laugh, we talk about our summer trips. We don't sit there, in silence, as I wring my hands in a panic, on the verge of tears, as he looks on sympathetically, as we wait, wait, wait for the timer to run out, to find out whether now's my time.”

So with Truvada’s sudden but relative availability—dependant on your insurance, if you had any—sex became a lot less scary. And the guilt that I had previously associated with sex began to dissipate. Always a proponent for condom use, I found myself gleefully eschewing a rubber for the naked pleasure of bareback sex—which I had thought wrong and gross, but heterosexuals had thought normal behavior. See, those fear-mongering AIDS posters in the doctor’s room never really seemed directed to straight people. Sure, they featured straight people, but it was understood that the true audience was those poor faggots who had been wiped out in the ’80s and ‘90s. Meanwhile, my straight male friends would brag about not using condoms, almost wearing their STIs as badges of honor. As long as their partner didn’t get pregnant, everything was cool.

“Previous to PrEP I wouldn't even consider not using a condom for sex,” says Mario, 35. “I don’t think it has made me more likely to hook up, though. Maybe more likely to have anal sex. I never really thought about that aspect. But I think that's normal and not just a gay thing. I was always struck by how many straight people I knew in my 20s that rarely used condoms. It blew my mind since I wouldn't ever have considered it pre-PrEP.”

Also, and maybe this is only me, but the term ”barebacking” just sounds off-putting. I mean, it doesn’t really seem appropriate unless there’s a horse somewhere missing a saddle. Even “raw,” which has some healthful connotations when proceeding the words “food” and “diet,” gives me pause. Maybe that’s one area where I remain somewhat conservative. While I’ve certainly grown to enjoy sex, the verbiage often used still makes me blanch. But semantics aside, the actual act was, like Nicole Kidman in everything, transcendent.

“PrEP has changed the way I approach sex 100%,” Alan says. “It has given me the confidence to experience sex in anyway I choose. I feel liberated. I would never say I was a prude, but I certainly have had more sex, and more importantly, more uninhibited sex since I started taking PrEP.”

“Personally PrEP doesn’t change the way I approach sex because I’m not on it, but I feel like the conversation has shifted,” says Jared, 27. “I actually feel in the minority now which is interesting. Like on apps like Scruff, when talking about sex and I mention condoms it’s like, ‘Oh, I guess that’s OK,’ as if they’re making an allowance for me.”

The first time I fucked without a condom, I had waited the recommended time, and then some, for my body to get used to the PrEP because I tend to follow the rules when it’s convenient to me. The sex, though, still felt like breaking the rules, as if the Safe Sex Police were about to break in at any second, shame me for neglecting everything I’d been taught since I was old enough to grasp the idea of sex, and invoke the thousands of gay men who had died for indulging their own base desires. Longtime AIDS activist and noted curmudgeon Larry Kramer, before reversing his position, once said there was something “cowardly about taking Truvada instead of using a condom.”

That was during the rise of the "Truvada whore," a term used to shame gay men who enjoyed condomless sex while on the drug, or a term reclaimed by those very men upon giving little to no fucks. But PrEP also changed how gay men approached sex even if they didn't have the luxury, or rather, the ability, to use it.

“When we talk about gay hookup culture and/or PrEP, I don’t think people often consider the effect it has on people who are HIV-positive, which I think is really significant,” Setton says. “In my experience, the normalization of PrEP and knowledge of what undetectable means has been very liberating. There’s a lot less fear of disclosure and a lot less reporting of experiences that are stigmatizing.”

"I think for many years there was a lot of behavior that I engaged in that I didn't find shameful but a lot of other people did and they no longer feel that way," says Vince, 32, who was diagnosed with HIV in 2011. "It seems like people have fully embraced that a lot of the serious negative consequences to sex and promiscuity have gone away. And when people start using Truvada, they understand much better what the revolution in treatment has been about. The people who don't know that they're HIV-positive are often the ones you have to be most wary of. If a person tells you [they're positive], they're probably taking care of themselves."

I’ve thought extensively about what it means to forego condoms as a gay man in the 21st century. I think about it almost the same way I think about the kind of life that I’m living as a black man aware of the sacrifices my ancestors made. Just as I am “the dream and the hope of the slave,” to borrow from Sister Maya, I represent what Kramer, and Marsha P. Johnson, and Bayard Rustin, and Harvey Milk, and countless others dreamed and hoped for: the ability—the right—to love and live freely.

“As gay men I think one of the gifts is that we get to explore sex and relationships more than straight people,” Mario says. “There are so many good friends I've met through hooking up and I have experienced varying levels of intimacy and connection that aren't a full blown relationship or just a friendship. Being able to have those experiences and connections is really an amazing part of being gay.”

The gays never really got to see true liberation come to fruition. There was a post-Stonewall gay sexual revolution (honestly, do yourself a favor and watch the 2005 documentary Gay Sex in the ’70s), but that was unaccompanied by full civil rights.

And of course, the AIDS epidemic in the following decade curtailed the progress the LGBT community had made, as attention and resources had to be diverted to a truly life or death matter. The ’90s and early ’00s were about repair and visibility so that now, on the brink of the third decade of the new millennium, I, as a self-identified queer black man, can safely have sex without a condom; I can marry another man if I can ever trick one into falling in love with me; in all of the states that I would actually consider living in, I can’t be fired for simply being gay.

“Bottom line, there is still a stigma around gay male sex for a lot of people, especially from religious or conservative communities,” Setton says, “and while medical advances like PrEP allow for shifts in behavior or intellectually, people can still carry with them stigma and shame and find ways to work it into the current sexual landscape.”

Is barebacking the final frontier in gay liberation? No, because, honestly, liberation isn't a finite goal; it's something that requires constant attention and energy. And unless all of us are free—to be, to live, to love—then none of us are free. But the "quiet sexual revolution" to which we are witness and participant is a part of that liberation. It's a liberation from judgment, from fear, from stigma, from shame, from labels, and a liberation of the spirit. Sex is one of the things that makes life worth living and to be uninhibited in its practice and in its enjoyment is to feel, like a shitty movie that wastes Annette Bening, life itself.

*All names have been changed to protect the sexy.