It's called "stealthing” and it is believed to be on the rise within the gay community.
What is it exactly? It is when a couple engages in protected sexual activity; however, the top secretly removes the condom without consent right before penetration. Women have been victims of this form of sexual assault for a long time, and gay men have experienced it themselves; sadly, it seems to be getting worse.
“If stealthing is prevalent in the heterosexual community then I’m telling you it’s rampant in the homosexual community,”
argued a Connecticut man who wished to remain anonymous. “Visually keeping your eye on the condom is not always the easiest thing with two men. There was more than a few times I caught or suspected the other person trying to remove the condom.”
Beyond the obvious violation of trust is the risk of STIs like hepatitis, gonorrhoea, syphilis, and HIV.
“Interviews with people who have experienced condom removal and online accounts from victims indicate that non-consensual condom removal is a common practice among young, sexually active people,” wrote Alexandra Brodsky in a study on stealthing for the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law.
“Both men and women describe having sex with male partners with penises who, during sex, removed the condom without their knowledge,” Brodsky explained. “Apart from the fear of specific bad outcomes like pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, all of the survivors experienced the condom removal as a disempowering, demeaning violation of a sexual agreement” and a violation of 'the trust they had mistakenly placed in their sexual partner.'"
The Reddit forum
ASKGAYBROS includes posts by men who have been victims of this practice.
And Jim Key, chief marketing officer at the L.A. LGBT Center, said that anecdotal reports show that an average of four to five people come to the L.A. Center’s health clinic each week after a sex partner reportedly removed his condom “without consent during intercourse.”
Whatever your choice regarding bareback sex, it's yours and no one should be able to pull the old switcheroo on you.