Kensington Research Institute

Men Who Have Sex with Other Men, and Who Use Internet Websites to Identify Potential Sex Partners

(a.k.a., The Bareback Project)

The Bareback Project, as the staff working on the study refer to it, is a newly-funded initiative that is being sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.  It is a joint endeavor being implemented by Hugh Klein from Kensington Research Institute and the Drug Abuse Research Program / Center for Health Disparities and Solutions at Morgan State University.  The main goal of the study is to find men who use the internet to identify other men with whom they can have sex, particularly unprotected--or bareback--sex, and interview them about their lives, their beliefs and attitudes about a variety of subject, and their behaviors.  The study will capture very detailed data about these men's lives, including their sexual behaviors, their attitudes toward engaging in risky/protected behaviors, how they feel about themselves and how they perceive things in their lives, perceived discrimination based on their sexual orientation, and a host of other topics.

This research will entail conducting telephone interviews with approximately 300 men from all around the United States, selected at random from a variety of internet websites where men may find some of their sex partners.  One of the goals is to examine racial/ethnic differences in this population, so the research design calls for half of the men to be Caucasian and the other half to be members of various racial minority groups. 

As a project that was funded in October 2007 and that just began the interviewing process in January 2008, no preliminary data or findings are, as yet, available to be shared.