“Low Risk Doesn’t Mean No Risk”: The Making of Lesbian Safer-Sex and the Creation of New (S)experts in the Late Twentieth Century

This chapter explores the creation and dissemination of lesbian safer-sex as an idea and set of practices between 1980 and 2000 in Britain. The chapter considers how lesbian safer-sex was defined, discussed, and practiced by drawing on textual sources which disseminated and contested new knowledge about sex and risk to women who had sex with women in Britain during the AIDS crisis. It is argued that lesbian safer-sex constituted a set of practices and knowledges designed by queer women responding directly to perceived risks by drawing on personal experiences, a variety of expertise, and the transatlantic exchange of queer health advice. The chapter interrogates who these “experts” were, where their expertise came from, how they defined safer-sex, and how these definitions were adapted and resisted across the late twentieth century, resulting in plurality and ambivalence which persists to this day. In doing so, the chapter tracks the emergence of the dental dam as both an object and signifier of lesbian safer-sex as a set of practices, and a site of expertise which transgressed borders, national, personal, and political.