Posted on 02/03/2007 6:48:43 PM PST by FairOpinion
Four men in King County have been diagnosed with a strain of HIV that is extremely hard to treat, and health officials are concerned it could spread further.
At least two types of HIV drugs don't work against the strain, and another type has limited effectiveness, officials from Public Health — Seattle & King County said Thursday.
"It's conceivable there can be more infections, and the gay community is at highest risk," said Dr. Bob Wood, the HIV/AIDS program director for Public Health.
All the men were diagnosed with the strain as soon as they tested positive for the virus — unlike other HIV patients who develop drug resistance over time, often from taking medications inconsistently, Wood said. But there is no evidence the strain is rapidly spreading.
The four known cases were found over the course of more than a year. These were the only such cases reported in the state.
Wood said all of the infected men are gay and have had multiple partners, most anonymous. They also used methamphetamine, which tends to increase sexual activity.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
"Gift-givers and bug-chasers definitely exist," said Libey. "But in my experience as an HIV-prevention worker and as someone who does pre- and post-test HIV counseling, it's not the most common thing that I see."
Libey dismissed as suspect the controversial Rolling Stone magazine article that suggested 25 percent of new HIV infections result from bug-chasing -- the deliberate seeking out of HIV infection by having unprotected receptive anal sex with an HIV-positive "gift-giver."
Rofes said there's no simple answer to the problem of people who get off on infecting someone or becoming infected.
"Punitive approaches to gay men often get us what we don't want," he said. "So I wouldn't advocate closing down those [gift-giver/bug-chaser] Web sites, and I wouldn't advocate discouraging people from advocating those practices. I would, if I believed discouraging the most-at-risk gay men would make them not do it, but I don't believe it works that way."
The Web sites actually are a good thing, Rofes said.
"Web sites are really great places for people to get off without creating much risk to themselves," he said. "I think that's true in extreme sex in general."
Some are recruited, but I can't help observing that some gay males have effeminate features. The reason for being gay isn't relevant to the issue of intentionally spreading an incurable disease. If you engage in known risky behavior and make no attempt to ensure that you haven't been infected before engaging in another act, then you have engaged in negligent manslaughter if you infect someone else. If you know with certainty that you are infected, that is murder with malice aforethought. Prosecute accordingly.
I touched base with several AIDS experts, and all of them felt that if bug-chasing was responsible for a significant rate of infections, the medical community would be aware of it—and hopefully be trying to counteract it. Due to the current atmosphere created by the Rolling Stone article, the experts I spoke with asked not to be quoted.
But I was struck that no one I spoke to denied that bug chasing was a reality. The consensus seems to be that it happens, but probably in very small numbers.
Before sitting down to write this, I got on AOL, a popular meeting place for gay men, and did a random, unscientific search for “bug chasers” and “gift givers.” It didn’t take but a few seconds to come up with about 40 profiles that mention one or the other. I found only three profiles where men were seeking such behavior. In all the others, the profiles specifically warned “bug chasers” to stay away. Still, if men are putting those terms in their profiles, even to ward off hunters, it suggests that the practice is out there and real.
I understand why the gay and AIDS communities have come out in such full force to counter the flawed and inaccurate Rolling Stone article. By choosing sensationalism, Rolling Stone forfeited its chance to take a cold, hard look at bug chasing and what it means for gay men. We shouldn’t fall into a similar trap. In our fury over the article, it isn’t enough to just give Rolling Stone a slap on the wrist, and then continue to look the other way because the topic of bug chasing makes most of us feel awkward. I hope we don’t miss this chance to take a serious look at the uncomfortable issue of bug chasing, evaluate its impact, and figure out what we might be able to do as a community to counter it.
One young, sex-obsessed man, "Kenboy," throws himself a "conversion party." "I hate condoms, man," he says. "I'm a bug chaser. I want to get the bug. I'm not afraid of AIDS." Insouciantly, he adds: "People know it's not really a death sentence anymore. There'll be a cure soon." When Kenboy tests positive for HIV in 2000, he says he's happy and relieved. A year later, he has unprotected sex with 40 to 50 men at a dungeon party for his 28th birthday.
Hogarth lets such words unfold without narration or judgment.
From the subjects' comments, it emerges that bug chasing is tied to a culture of political correctness surrounding those who are HIV-positive. Hogarth says the gay community courageously rallied around people who had HIV and AIDS in the early days of the virus. But over time, that support has evolved into an atmos- phere of being cheery about being positive and a don't ask, don't tell approach to sex by many. "Negative men have to start taking pride in being negative," Hogarth says. "And they don't; they're ashamed of it."
Hogarth shows that bug chasing isn't rare or isolated by displaying numerous Web sites, chat rooms and online ad postings by those who want "the gift." "I think that bug chasing and gift giving is definitely on the increase," Hogarth said. "I've seen it in the three years that I've been making the film. It started on the fringe, then it starts moving into the community."
The most poignant moment in the film comes when Hitzel says, "I've made an awful mistake and there's no fixing that." "Now Doug gives blood every two weeks -- 21 vials. All of his veins are collapsing," she said. "He's in very ill health. He's gone through two of the cocktails, and he has one drug option left. "And he just turned 21."
If the etiology is unprotected anal sex with multiple partners, then it's a crisis and these poor victims must be saved.
Interesting. The degree of severity of the problem is inversely proportional to the morality of its underlying causes.
Even more frightening is a parallel new trend toward eroticizing the virus, where men actually talk about desiring both to infect others (if they are positive) or to become infected (if they are negative). One HIV-positive man I talked to, a proctologist from the Midwest, told me that he'd love to give me "the gift," meaning HIV. Under a pseudonym, I had told him that I was negative but tired of using condoms. "That's just it," he said. "You don't have to use them any longer. With the new drugs, being HIV positive is not a major problem any more. It's a miracle. That's why, at this point, HIV is a gift."
On a Web site called XtremeSex, gay men in fact talk of "gift-giving" and of receiving "that hot poz load." Some men lament their difficulties in getting infected: "Guess I haven't gotten the right virulent strain yet." Recalling one bareback sex party, where negative and positive men came together without revealing their status, one formerly HIV-negative man recounted how he tested positive two weeks later. At home with his boyfriend, he writes, "one thing led to another. We fucked some, talked some. 'So are you infecting me?' he asked, real quiet. 'Yeah, I am.'"
John McCoy, a gay reporter for the Dallas Voice, wrote a piece about the Web site last April, and interviewed the man who founded it, who goes only by the screen name PigBotm. PigBotm told McCoy that he knew of men who threw a party when they seroconverted. Gary Shelden, a 45-year-old computer programmer from San Francisco, whom McCoy describes as a "willing HIV convert," told McCoy that he intentionally ignored safer-sex precautions with men he knew to be HIV positive. "I was certainly not accustomed to having safe sex," said Shelden, who had just come out of a 16-year monogamous relationship in which he did not use condoms. "I found that being HIV negative was standing in the way of my sex life, and my sex life is very important to me." Shelden got on protease inhibitors, paid for by private insurance, got his viral load down, and told McCoy that HIV "hasn't had a noticeable effect on my life."
Like quite a few of the bareback men I have interviewed and chatted with, Shelden and PigBotm spoke of HIV infection as now being a minor inconvenience. Similarly, McCoy found the bareback men had a disdain for AIDS prevention advocates and for the government, deeming as sex-negative "traitors" those who criticized their behavior.
"Our sex lives are not dispensable," a Washington, D.C., man told me, defending bareback sex. He's still HIV negative, he says, and gets tested every six months. His plan should he seroconvert is to get on protease inhibitors right away. "It's homophobic for you to tell me that I should not put my sex -- my homosex -- as a top priority in my life. Heterosexuals take similar risks in order to have babies. A lot of women are told by their doctors, for example, that, for whatever reason, it's too risky for them to have a baby. But they have it anyway. That is considered a justifiable reason to take a risk, but this is not. To me, that's just homophobia."
To accurately identify what barebacking is, the sexual activities between gay men need to be divided into several categories. First, there are the guys that use condoms every time they engage in sexual activity. The second are those that make a conscious and deliberate decision not to use a condom. Most people would agree this category of people would be called true “barebackers.”
“Barebacking is not just defined by not using a condom. I think of it as a trend of people who have information and knowledge and they are making a decision to have unprotected sex,” said Jim Zians, project manager for UCSD’s Edge Research Study. “I would like to think that most men [that do not use a condom] are not part of that group. They are struggling with condom use.”
The third category, those men struggling with condom use, is a little vague because it is the gray group in the middle of the first two. They use condoms most of the time, but not all of the time; or, depending on your perspective, they bareback most of the time, but not all of the time. Are they barebackers?
“Is barebacking a struggle around condom choices or is barebacking a decision not to use condoms?” Zians asked. “I think both things are going on.”
“Barebacking scares people because there’s a whole community of people that will do it and whole community that will not do it, and there’s a whole community in between,” said Michael Scarce, an HIV prevention activist, in the 2002 documentary Our Brothers, Our Sons.
Not knowing the size of each of these barebacking communities is what scares people the most. It’s difficult to track sexual practices, and the surveys that do ask questions about sexual safety differ in their results. Yet every indication shows an increase in barebacking activity. “What we are seeing now is about 60 percent of the population is practicing safe sex most of the time, and about 40 percent of the population are barebacking or not practicing safe sex,” Zians said.
Those figures are down from the late ’90s when 80 percent practiced safe sex, and even down from 70 percent just a few years ago. These national numbers are staggering, but San Diego’s demographics may be even more drastic – one local survey shows that barebackers encompass up to half of the San Diego gay population.
Factors contributing to the condomless numbers include a larger number of young gay men not hearing or relating to the safe-sex message, a surprising older population of guys abandoning condom use due to safe-sex fatigue, and a new epidemic among IV drug users.
Drug use: A story about barebacking would not be complete without discussing crystal meth, said one source. Although drug use in the gay community is a story itself (see Gay & Lesbian Times issue 907, May 12), there are direct connections to the barebacking phenomenon.
“Alcohol and other drug use is often a factor in unsafe sexual behavior,” the Family Health Centers survey cited. The “other drug use” is crystal methamphetamine.
“Link Between Methamphetamine Use and Sexual Risk Behavior,” a study released by the CDC in January 2005, concludes that meth use is consistently associated with unprotected anal sex among gay men. More than 80 percent of meth users are barebacking, according to the CDC study.
“We know that if you use methamphetamines, you have twice the rate of HIV sero-conversion than non-methamphetamine users among men who have sex with men,” Zians said. “There is the theory that the drugs impair your judgment, and therefore it is because of the drugs that people aren’t using condoms.”
I like your post.
If it reflects a mega slice of who you are God Bless you.
Is the Xtreme Sex Web site a haven for HIV+ gay men or a deadly misstep?
P>Is the Xtreme Sex Web site a haven for HIV+ gay men or a deadly misstep?
"I don't understand how these people do what they do," Dan Perreten, managing editor of the Windy City Times, a Chicago gay newsweekly, tells me by phone. He calls the site "deeply irresponsible and breathtakingly immoral. How do they look themselves in the mirror, knowing that they are the cause of people dying?"
Xtreme doesn't sugarcoat its mission: to provide a forum for HIV+ gay males interested in unprotected sex. "Pozcum-the Fuck of Death" one banner on the site reads. At a time when everyone is concerned about the spread of AIDS, the 300 or so regulars here revel in condomless fluid exchange and even the risk of infection.
And the site takes heat for it. In the last month two gay newspapers, the Windy City Times and the Dallas Voice, both sharply criticized Xtreme for promoting "bareback" or "raw" sex.
Those frequenting it have a different take, arguing that Xtreme provides a sanctuary in a world in which HIV status can take a personal as well as physical toll. It's a forum in which "HIV status is not considered important," as the site's introduction reads. One HIV+ participant praises the site in its comments section: "You have helped me in showing me that there is LIFE after all this. . . . Thank you for once again giving me back the freedom that I felt had been taken from me."
Xtreme Sex was started by a group of like-minded men who bonded last year on America Online. Webmaster "Pigbotm," a North Dallas software engineer who asks that his real name not be used, tells me by E-mail that he wanted extend the men's newfound sense of community by creating a Web page.
The participants lustfully romp, as if still living in the days before AIDS rubbercoated the party. The personal ads are uninhibited and the storyboards are filled with raunchy tales of bareback sex, all of which adds fuel to the criticism.
"I have no doubt that the site would be praised if the introductions oozed milk and honey with timid, lovelorn, lonely, depressed HIV+ people with flickering candles lighting their way, looking for the love of their sad, shortened little lives," Pigbotm writes. "The queer public doesn't seem to like healthy, sexually active, happy" people with AIDS.
But the site's frankness doesn't sit well with Perreten, who is concerned about the growing return to unsafe sex in the gay community. Maintaining condom use as the norm is difficult enough, he says, without media that glorify unprotected sex. He accuses Xtreme participants of engaging in a "twisted rationalism"-along the lines of, "For us it's too late, so why shouldn't we party?" as one site contributor writes-to promote unsafe sex as a logical choice. Perreten points out that unprotected sex between HIV+ people is dangerous because of potential reinfection which might breed new, drug-resistant strains of the virus. And other diseases could be transmitted-say, syphilis, which could devastate someone with an impaired immune system.
The Dallas Voice article touches on these issues and notes that "unsafe sexual adventures" such as those touted by Xtreme could "destroy the gay community's credibility as a partner in AIDS prevention."
Pigbotm agrees that most of these issues warrant discussion, but he does not feel the Web site should be taken to task over them. "The site provides a forum for all kinds of behavior," he says. "Most of it is not responsible nor irresponsible, it just is. One cannot blame the medium . . . for what people actually do. I would rather err on the side of having the discussions-all sides of them-and letting people sort out what they believe."
As a Webmaster, is Pigbotm abdicating his responsibility to his fellow human beings, as Perreten charges? Or is he acting with an empathy and openness seemingly missing elsewhere? The question becomes particularly pertinent when considering that a small number of people on Xtreme seek HIV infection. "I've tested negative six times. Guess I haven't found the right virulent strain . . . yet," one writes in a personal introduction. He has no lack of potential suitors. Another writes, "Attention neg men! Why stay locked in a boring world of sterile sex when you can join the ranks of the AIDS Freedom Fighters. Let me give you my gift and set you free." Why would anyone want to do such a thing? The titillation of danger? The thrill of giving yourself completely to your partner? A suicide mission? Combatting the feeling of being left out when all your friends are infected? There seems to be no definitive answer.
Pigbotm speculates-based on his contact with some contributors-that most HIV-infection requests come from people who are really already HIV+ and want to experience the fantasy of being infected. But he won't pass judgment, much less censor, those who do wish to actually contract the virus: "I cannot in clear conscience editorialize on the private habits of other people, as long as the participants both give informed consent to the activities. Each person makes his own decisions and lives or dies with the consequences."
Tip o' the hat: Ed Stevenson
--Joab Jackson
In gay circles, in the last few years, there is a new term doing the rounds. Called barebacking, it means having anal sex without protection. Nothing new about this as unsafe sex has actually been in vogue for a long time (especially in gay circles) but what is new is that it’s now being marketed and promoted as the only ‘real’ way to have sex.
A small, albeit, growing subset of gay men are also now indulging in the practice of something called Gift Giving and Bug Chasing. The gift is nothing less than HIV. Bug chasers are people who go out and seek infection, through unsafe sex and Gift Givers are those who gift them the infection. In my opinion, men who bareback are really bug chasers anyway as they make themselves vulnerable to infection and disease. However, what’s really scary is the conscious efforts being made to get infected with HIV, imply that being HIV+ is fast becoming an initiation rite of the gay community.
The frightening truth is that as women, children and men lie ravaged with AIDS there is an abundance of websites and men out there who are dedicated to becoming infected with HIV. Whereas fear, depression and a severe lack of intimacy seem to be some of the reasons that infection is being sought out, the slightly less obvious and insidious reason seems to be the concerted effort to proliferate, what is often referred to in gay circles as ‘raw sex’. Gay men have begun talking about the subtle forms of coercion that they are victim to and how there is an increasing pressure to get infected. They are slowly beginning to talk out loud about how when they even want to use a condom they have to go through endless rejection by other gay men.
I really can’t get my head around this one. What is it? Does gifting death to someone make you feel special, like you’re God? Or is it that the fear is so intense that you want to take others down with you? Or is it just pure rage? Are Bug Chasers so desperate to ‘belong’ that they’re willing to commit suicide? Is intimacy truly such a lost art? Where is the love folks? Where is the love?
========================================
To share another tragic/horrific tale. One of the groups of gay men we helped grow into a healing centre in Pune had a colleague who broke away because they discovered he was HIV positive. He had always been living in mortal fear of contracting it. Once that happened, rather than access his own group for healing himself he took off. Finally when they tracked him down some 6 months later, he had full blown AIDS, sores on his body and he was hunting down young boys at night forcing them for sex. His mother had meanwhile found out and she tried to poison him to death in anger and despair. When his colleagues asked him why he was infecting young boys he said "I'm not going down alone."
Understanding the rage, guilt and self-loathing which defines a sexual self and practice is critical before we can even begin to engage in discourses on sexual safety. The psyche which invites HIV as a gift, may sound macabre to many but the fact of the matter is that until we understand and accept that it exists(and not in small numbers) we cannot even begin to assess how potent the epidemic really is.
And as for your critical last question -where is the love? Exactly the point that we need to understand and accept. Much of what is sexuality (especially male homosexuality) is not fuelled by love but by the basic, primal instinct for penetration. Until this truth is accepted we will continue to veer into sexually morphed patterns.
Oh God help us.
As if my generation didn't have enough to deal with and clean up.
Well, I for one am going to get my ribbon out to once again "raise awareness".
</sarc>
It's the "privacy" for the uber elite known as "sexual beings".
The ways that HIV/AIDS has been handled by libbies, long ago, made me think of a stealth bomb operating under radar.
A pal had repeated problems with his identity being stolen. Because of the "no profiling" laws in CA, no one in LE could connect the dots NOR halt the problems. It worked similar to the Gorelick Wall. Anyway, problem got resolved, truly connected and figured out once Homeland Security got involved. Homeland Security was able to cut through the CRAP laws devised by those who hate America.
AIDS/HIV is so darned costly, I think it behooves us to get at the bottom of what's causing the problems. (No pun intended).
I'm glad to hear that you are completely abstinent, are at zero risk for rape, and do not travel in the third world.
How do you quarantine 36 million people? I support maybe quarantining the four with the resistant strain, but chances are that it is already out, and we'll never catch up to it. People who engage in anonymous sex probably have multiple partners. It'll be around the world in no time flat, and probably already was before the new strain was identified.
OMG I laughed so hard I woke up my daughter in the other room!
"We'll put it at both ends then."
LOL..Yup, Tattoo the chin and the rump!
I think you're on the right track. Like Dr. Peter Duesberg says: TB diagnosed by itself is always TB; TB in the presence of HIV is always AIDS, Pneumonia diagnosed by itself is pneumonia, in the presense of HIV they call it AIDS. These diseases have been around since the dawn of homonids, yet now the government gives them a new name: AIDS. It is now well accepted that the early AIDS drugs like AZT were actually responsible for the high death rates --- not HIV. As soon as they stopped administering AZT the death rates went down. As soon as homosexuals learned that extremely high-risk behaviors like unprotected anal sex, anal "licking", regular recreational drug use, sharing of dirty heroin needles, over use of anti-biotics (which weaken the immune response), poor nutrition, etc. leads to multiple infections, sickness and disease, the death rates began to drop. HIV doesn't kill, it's the behavior that does.
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