No surprise from a study exploring MSM in Barcelona, Spain:

Abstract: Currently there is a growing trend toward high-risk sexual practices with casual partners in the group of men who have sex with men (MSM) in many industrialized countries. This study offers some understanding of why a group of men had unprotected anal intercourse (UAI). A grounded approach was used to analyze 20 interviews with MSM from Barcelona between 18 and 40 years of age who had at least one episode of UAI in the past three months. The results reveal that many respondents had UAI practices with casual sexual partners because they were in search of experiences that were not directly related to sexual relations: reaffirmation of a sense of personal worth and of their own physical attractiveness, offset shortcomings and feelings of emotional loneliness, the search for connection and intimacy, being in love, conversion of the risk into pleasure for the forbidden and a desire to rebel against established rules. In these cases, concerns about sexual and health care seemed to overwhelm and were not taken into account when having UAI. It is important that HIV prevention programs include in their messages the power of these motivations that lead to practices of UAI.

Read the whole article! This is the kind of data that too often gets lost in a traditional public health sexual risk / disease model (built on the back of the medical model) that asks survey questions about number of sexual partners, sexual practices, and risk levels but never evaluates the rich layers of social meaning that make those behaviors so powerful / exciting / worthwhile / meaningful. Hopefully studies like this one are a sign that this is shifting.