Didier: I had to look for a while before I found a way to get HIV. Then, finally, I got the “opportunity” I was hoping for. I read in one of the chat rooms for gays I used to check out that there was going to be a "conversion party" on the weekend. I told them I wanted to go and, after a few e-mails back and forth, I was given the green light.
We agreed to meet at a council flat in south London. The night was cold. The furniture in the flat had been rearranged in order to accommodate the crowd - fourteen muscular gay men in their mid- thirties. A flat screen television, which dominated the room, was playing porno movies. Drinks and snacks were set out in a big coffee table, just as in a regular party. Six frenzied hours of uninterrupted sex, drugs and alcohol. At the end of the night, the crowd began to slowly dwindle. Some left, a few fell asleep on a couch, the master bedroom, or any other suitable corner. But I was in the toilet. Even though the small tiled room was cold, I was sweating because of the cocktail of Ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana and vodka I had taken. As I looked at myself at the mirror, I knew that I had got what I had come for.
Two months later, the doctor in the Saint Mary’s Hospital told me I was HIV-positive.
"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."
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."
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.”