AFRO-NETS> Chilling Article from Rolling Stone Magazine

[Lucinda Franklin <franklinl@nu.ac.za>]

Chilling Article from Rolling Stone Magazine
--------------------------------------------

Dear All

A friend in the States sent me this chilling article from "Rolling 
Stone" magazine which I wanted to share with AFRO-NETS readers. I 
hear this new kind of "behaviour change" is occurring in several 'de-
veloped' countries, and wondered if anyone has any comments? 

Regards,
Lucinda Franklin
mailto:franklinl@nu.ac.za


--
Bug Chasers: The men who long to be HIV+

Carlos nonchalantly asks whether his drink was made with whole or 
skim milk. He takes a moment to slurp on his grande Caffe Mocha in a 
crowded Starbucks, and then he gets back to explaining how much he 
wants HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. His eyes light up as he says 
that the actual moment of transmission, the instant he gets HIV, will 
be "the most erotic thing I can imagine." He seems like a typical 
thirty-two-year-old man, but, in fact, he has a secret life. Carlos 
is chasing the bug. "I know what the risks are, and I know that put-
ting myself in this situation is like putting a gun to my head," he 
says. Some of that mountain music that's so popular is playing, mak-
ing the moment even more surreal as a Southern voice sings, "Keep on 
the sunny side of life" behind Carlos. "But I think it turns the 
other guy on to know that I'm negative and that they're bringing me 
into the brotherhood. That gets me off, too." 

I met Carlos in New York's Greenwich Village, the neighborhood where 
he usually hangs out. He is tall, with a large build, and plenty of 
gay men find him attractive. His longish, curly-wavy hair is jet-
black with golden highlights, and his face is soft and just a bit 
feminine. He has a very appealing smile and laugh, and he's a funny 
guy sometimes. The conversation veers from the banal -- his fascina-
tion with the reality show The Amazing Race -- to his desire for HIV. 
Carlos' tone never changes when switching from one topic to the 
other.

When asked whether he is prepared to live with HIV after that 
"erotic" moment, Carlos dismisses living with HIV as a minor annoy-
ance. Like most bug chasers, he has the impression that the virus 
just isn't such a big deal anymore: "It's like living with diabetes. 
You take a few pills and get on with your life." Carlos spends the 
afternoon continually calling a man named Richard, someone he met on 
the Internet. They met on barebackcity.com about a year ago, while 
Carlos was still with his boyfriend. That boyfriend left because Car-
los was having sex with other men and because he was interested in 
barebacking -- the practice of having sex without a condom. Carlos 
and Richard are arranging a "date" for later that day.

Carlos is part of an intricate underground world that has sprouted, 
driven almost completely by the Internet, in which men who want to be 
infected with HIV get together with those who are willing to infect 
them. The men who want the virus are called "bug chasers," and the 
men who freely give the virus to them are called "gift givers." While 
the rest of the world fights the AIDS epidemic and most people fear 
HIV infection, this subculture celebrates the virus and eroticizes 
it. HIV-infected semen is treated like liquid gold. Carlos has been 
chasing the bug for more than a year in a topsy-turvy world in which 
every convention about HIV is turned upside down. The virus isn't 
horrible and fearsome, it's beautiful and sexy -- and delivered in 
the way that is most likely to result in infection. In this world, 
the men with HIV are the most desired, and the bug chasers will do 
anything to get the virus -- to "get knocked up," to be "bred" or 
"initiated into the brotherhood."

Like a lot of sexual fetishes and extreme behaviors, bug chasing 
could not exist without the Internet, or at least it couldn't thrive. 
Prior to the advent of Web surfing and e-mail, it would have been 
practically impossible for bug chasing to happen in any great num-
bers, because it's still not acceptable to walk up to a stranger and 
say you want the virus. But the Internet's anonymity and broad access 
make it possible to find someone with like interests, no matter how 
outlandish. Carlos surfs online about twenty hours a week looking for 
men to have sex with, usually frequenting sites such as bareback.com 
and barebackcity.com, plus a number of Internet discussion groups. 
Most of the Web sites use the pretense that they actually are about 
barebacking, which is in itself risky and controversial but still a 
long way from bug chasing. For the Web sites, that distinction is at 
best razor-thin and more often just an outright lie. "We got Poz4Poz, 
Neg4Neg and bug chasers looking to join the club," the welcome page 
to barebackcity.com, which claims 48,000 registered users, up from 
28,000 about a year ago, recently said. "Be the first to seed a new-
bie and give him a pozitive attitude!"

Within this online community, bug chasers revel in their desires, us-
ing their own lingo about "poz" and "neg" men, "bug juice" and 
"conversion" from negative to positive. User profiles include names 
such as BugChaser21, Knockmeup, BugMeSoon, ConvertMeSir, 
PozCum4NegHole and GiftGiver. The posters are upfront about seeking 
HIV, even extremely enthusiastic, possibly because the Web sites are 
about the only place a bug seeker can really express his desires 
openly. Under turn-ons, a poster called PozMeChgo craves a "hot poz 
load deep in me. I really want to be converted!! Breed me/seed me!" 
Carlos' profile on one Web site lists his screen name as ConvertMe, 
and he says he wants a man "to fill me up with that poison seed." His 
AOL Instant Messenger name is Bug Juice Wanted.

It's not uncommon to see people post replies to the profiles encour-
aging the men to seek HIV. One such comment reads, "This guy knows 
what he wants!! I would love to plant my seeds :)) Come and join the 
club. The more we are, the stronger we are." A Yahoo! spokeswoman 
confirms that the company shuts down such sites when it receives no-
tice that the subscribers are promoting HIV infection or any other 
kind of harm to one another, but the company doesn't go looking for 
bug chasers in its thousands of discussion groups, most established 
by subscribers themselves. Recently, it was easy to find two discus-
sion groups on Yahoo! that promoted bug chasing, one called bareback-
over50 and one called gayextremebareback. The first discussion group 
was established in 1998 and had 1,439 members at the end of 2002. Ya-
hoo! closed the group after Rolling Stone inquired about it.

Condoms and safe sex are openly ridiculed on bug-chasing Web sites, 
with many bug chasers rebelling against what they see as the dogma of 
safe-sex education; constantly thinking about a deadly disease takes 
all the fun out of sex, they say, and condoms suck. Carlos agrees and 
says getting HIV will make safe sex a moot point. "It's about free-
dom," he says. "What else can happen to us after this? You can fuck 
whoever you want, fuck as much as you want, and nothing worse can 
happen to you. Nothing bad can happen after you get HIV." 

For some, the chase is a pragmatic move. They see HIV infection as 
inevitable because of their unsafe sex or needle sharing, so they de-
cide to take control of the situation and infect themselves. It's em-
powering. They're no longer victims waiting to be infected; rather 
they are in charge of their own fates. For others, deliberately in-
fecting themselves is the ultimate taboo, the most extreme sex act 
left on the planet, and that has a strong erotic appeal for some men 
who have tried everything else. Still others feel lost and without 
any community to embrace them, and they see those living with HIV as 
a cohesive group that welcomes its new members and receives vast sup-
port from the rest of the gay community, and from society as a whole. 
Bug chasers want to be a part of that club. Some want HIV because 
they think once they have it they can go on with a wild, uninhibited 
sex life without constant fears of the virus. Getting the bug opens 
the door to sexual nirvana, they say. Others can't stand the thought 
of being so unlike their HIV-positive lover.

For Carlos, bug chasing is mostly about the excitement of doing some-
thing that everyone else sees as crazy and wrong. Keeping this part 
of his life secret is part of the turn-on for Carlos, which is not 
his real name. That forbidden aspect makes HIV infection incredibly 
exciting for him, so much so that he now seeks out sex exclusively 
with HIV-positive men. "This is something that no one knows about 
me," Carlos says. "It's mine. It's my dirty little secret." He com-
pares bug chasing to the thrill that you get by screwing your boy-
friend in your parents' house, or having sex on your boss' desk. 
You're not supposed to do it, and that's exactly what makes it so 
much fun, he says, laughing. 

Carlos carries another secret that he says heightens the thrill of 
pursuing HIV. Sometimes he volunteers in the offices of Gay Men's 
Health Crisis, the pre-eminent HIV-prevention and AIDS-activist or-
ganization in New York. And about once a month, he does outreach vol-
unteering in which he goes to clubs to hand out condoms and educate 
men about safe sex.

Carlos should meet Doug Hitzel, but he probably never will. A year 
ago they might have been online buddies, both sharing a passion for 
HIV that few others understood. Now Hitzel understands all too 
clearly what bug chasing can do to a young man's life, but it's too 
late for him. After six months of bug chasing, Hitzel succeeded in 
getting the virus. He's now a twenty-one-year-old freshman at a Mid-
western university, so wholesome-looking you'd think he just walked 
out of a cornfield. 

Hitzel's experience started when he moved from his home in Nebraska 
to San Francisco with his boyfriend. When that relationship broke up, 
Hitzel was at the lowest point in his life, and alone. He sought re-
lief in drugs and sex, as much of each as he could get. At first, he 
started out just not caring whether he got HIV or not, then he found 
the bug-chasing underground and embraced it. He was sure he'd get HIV 
soon anyway. He thought he would always feel exactly like he did 
then; he was certain that ten, twenty, thirty years later he'd still 
be partying every night. It lasted only six months -- then Hitzel got 
sick with awful flulike symptoms and lost a lot of weight. A doctor's 
visit cleared him of hepatitis and other possible problems, but the 
clinic sent him home with an HIV test he could do himself. Hitzel 
waited before doing the test and decided to go home to Nebraska, to 
give up the bug chasing and the rest of the life that was killing 
him. Once he got home, he did the test and found out he was positive. 
He now wakes up each day with a terrible frustration that's just be-
low the surface of his once sunny demeanor. He hates the medication 
he has to take every day, and he realizes that HIV affects nearly 
every part of his life. While he was bug chasing, Hitzel couldn't 
imagine ever wanting to be in a relationship again. But now that he's 
getting his life back in order, he realizes that being HIV-positive 
can be a roadblock to new relationships.

"Whenever I have to deal with things like medication, days when I'm 
really down," Hitzel says, "I have to look myself in the mirror and 
say, 'You did this. Are you happy now?' That's the one line that goes 
through my head: 'Are you happy now?'" He says it with a snarl, full 
of anger. "Some days I feel really angry and guilty. I'm pretty much 
adjusted to the fact that this is my life, but about forty percent of 
the time I look at myself and say, 'Look what you've done. Happy 
now?'"

Looking back on it, Hitzel says he was committing suicide by chasing 
HIV, killing himself slowly because he didn't have the nerve to do it 
quickly. Hitzel is ashamed and embarrassed that he actually sought 
HIV, but he's willing to tell his story because he hopes to dissuade 
others who are on the same path. He gets angry when he hears bug 
chasers talking in the same ways he talked a year earlier. The men-
tion of "bug chasing" and "gift giving" sets him off.

"'Bug chasing' sounds like a group of kindergartners running around 
chasing grasshoppers and butterflies," Hitzel says, "a beautiful 
thing. And gift giving? What the hell is that? I just wish the terms 
would actually put some real context into what's going on. Why did I 
not want to say that I was deliberately infecting myself? Because 
saying the word infect sounds bad and gross and germy. I wanted it to 
be sexualized." He's particularly angered by the idea of HIV being 
erotic: "How about you follow me after I start new medications and 
you watch me throw up for a few weeks? Tell me how erotic that is."

Though he's older, Carlos lives a life that has a lot in common with 
Hitzel's in San Francisco. Carlos estimates that he has had several 
hundred sex partners throughout his life, and he routinely hooks up 
with three or four guys a week, all of them HIV-positive or at least 
uncertain about their status.

That's a common trait among bug chasers, says Dr. Bob Cabaj, director 
of behavioral-health services for San Francisco County and past 
president of both the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association and the As-
sociation of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists. Cabaj (pronounced suh-
bye) calls bug chasing "a real phenomenon." Some bug chasers are more 
likely to have a defeatist attitude, to think they'll eventually get 
HIV anyway, whereas others are more likely to add the element of 
eroticizing HIV, Cabaj says: "For kids who have had a really hard 
time fitting in or being accepted, this becomes like a fraternity."

As a public official, Cabaj is familiar with how the topic makes peo-
ple uncomfortable. Most AIDS activists prefer to deny that the prob-
lem exists to any significant extent, he says: "They don't want to 
address that this is a real ongoing issue."

When I asked about bug chasing, leaders of groups such as Gay Men's 
Health Crisis in New York, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the 
Stop AIDS Project, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defama-
tion weren't interested in providing much education or increasing 
public awareness. To the contrary, most were dismissive of the issue 
and some actively dissuaded me from writing the article at all. A 
spokeswoman for the Stop AIDS Project, Shana Krochmal, characterized 
bug chasing as "relatively minor acting-out" and aggressively encour-
aged me to drop the article idea altogether, saying the issue is "not 
big enough to warrant a trend story." Krochmal cautioned against fo-
cusing on "just a bunch of really vocal guys who want to continue 
this image of being reckless, hedonistic gay men who will do anything 
to get laid. I think that does a disservice to the community at 
large." The San Francisco AIDS Foundation labeled the issue "sensa-
tional" and would not provide further comment. GLAAD spokeswoman 
Cathy Renna was more helpful, saying she had heard enough about bug 
chasing to be concerned, emphasizing that her group's focus would be 
whether people use bug chasing as an easy way to disparage all gays 
and lesbians as sex-crazed and reckless. "The vast majority of the 
gay community would be just as surprised and appalled by this as any-
one else," she says.

At GMHC, where Carlos is one of more than 7,000 volunteers, spokesman 
Marty Algaze calls bug chasing "one of those very underground subcul-
tures or fetishes that seems to have sprung up in recent years." The 
assistant director of community education at GMHC, Daniel Castel-
lanos, acknowledges that bug chasing exists but claims there's not 
much need to discuss it because it involves such a small population. 
But would he try to talk a bug chaser out of trying to get HIV? "If 
someone comes to me and says he wants to get HIV, I might work with 
him around why he wants to do it," he says. "But if in the end that's 
a decision he wants to make, there's a point where we have to respect 
people's decisions."

Cabaj, the San Francisco psychiatrist, says those arguments sound fa-
miliar. Then, without being asked, he adds, "But I don't know if it's 
an active cover-up." He pauses for a moment, then continues, "Yeah, 
it's an active cover-up, because they know about it. They're in de-
nial of this issue. This is a difficult issue that dredges up some 
images about gay men that they don't want to have to deal with. They 
don't want to shine a light on this topic because they don't want 
people to even know that this behavior exists."

Public-health officials also tend to dismiss the bug-chasing phenome-
non, he adds, assuming that it is just an aberration practiced by a 
few, nothing more than a curiosity. Cabaj adamantly disagrees, though 
he admits numbers are very hard to come by. Some men consciously seek 
the virus, openly declaring themselves bug chasers, he says, while 
many more are just as actively seeking HIV but are in denial and 
wouldn't call themselves bug chasers. Cabaj estimates that at least 
twenty-five percent of all newly infected gay men fall into that 
category.

With about 40,000 new infections in the United States per year, ac-
cording to government reports, that would mean around 10,000 each 
year are attributable to that more liberal definition of bug chasing. 
Doug Hitzel says he fits that description. Though he now says he was 
a bug chaser for six months, he explains that he would not have ad-
mitted it to anyone outside the subculture, and he sometimes even 
lied to himself about what he was doing. Even if you consider only 
the number of self-proclaimed bug chasers and not the overall group 
of men seeking HIV, Cabaj still sees cause for concern because of the 
way one bug chaser's quest can spread the virus far beyond his own 
life. "It may be a small number of actual people, but they may be 
disproportionately involved in continuing the spread of HIV," he 
says. "That's a major issue when you're talking about how to control 
the spread of a virus. A small percentage could be responsible for 
continuing the infection. The clinical impact is profound, no matter 
how small the numbers."

The problem is not restricted to any one community. Cabaj's counter-
part in Boston reports a similar experience with bug chasers. Dr. 
Marshall Forstein is medical director of mental health and addiction 
services at Fenway Community Health, an arm of Beth Israel Deaconess 
Medical Center that specializes in care for gay and lesbian patients. 
Forstein is on the medical-school faculty in psychiatry at Harvard 
University and chaired the American Psychiatric Association's Commis-
sion on AIDS for eleven years. He says bug chasers are seen regularly 
in the Fenway health system, and the phenomenon is growing. He adds 
that bug chasers can be found in any major city, though officials 
might be reluctant to discuss the issue either because it is unseemly 
or because it has escaped their notice. A spokesman for the Los Ange-
les County Department of Health confirms that bug chasers are known 
in its health system. Public-health officials in New York refused 
multiple requests for comment.

One standout in public-health circles is the Miami-Dade County Health 
Department in Florida, which is taking steps specifically to address 
bug chasing. Evelyn Ullah, director of its office of HIV/AIDS, read-
ily admits that bug chasing is "a definite problem" in the Miami 
area, having become more common and more visible in the past few 
years. Miami health officials regularly monitor Internet sites for 
bug chasing in their community, and they keep track of "conversion 
parties," in which the goal is to have positive men infect negative 
men. The health department also is launching new outreach efforts 
that include going online to chat with bug chasers and others pursu-
ing risky sex.

Cabaj and Forstein stress that more should be done, particularly on a 
national level. For starters, federal health officials will have to 
familiarize themselves with the problem. Dr. Robert Janssen, director 
of the division of HIV/AIDS Prevention at the Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention in Atlanta, says he has never seen the Web 
sites that promote bug chasing and does not know of any organized ef-
forts to spread the virus. There is virtually no research on people 
who intentionally seek HIV, he says, but he notes that several stud-
ies have shown a growing complacency among gay men and the population 
in general about the risk of HIV and a misconception that HIV infec-
tion is completely manageable. Ongoing outbreaks of syphilis and gon-
orrhea (which Carlos recently had) in large cities indicate a ten-
dency to forgo condom use, he says. Recent data from the CDC show 
that syphilis rates among men in the United States rose 15.4 percent 
between 2000 and 2001, which the researchers attribute to outbreaks 
among gay and bisexual men in several U.S. cities. Janssen says the 
CDC has not addressed bug chasing in any way but might if researchers 
determine that it is a significant method of spreading the virus. 
"I'm interested that you're saying there's that much out there on the 
Web and that it's easy to find," Janssen says. "If we can confirm 
that it's happening to any real degree beyond just an anecdote here 
and there, we may need to address it."

What frustrates health-care professionals the most, Forstein says, is 
that "gay men who are doing this haven't a clue what they're doing," 
he says. "They're incredibly selfish and self-absorbed. They don't 
have any idea what's going on with the epidemic in terms of the world 
or society or what impact their actions might have. The sense of be-
ing my brother's keeper is never discussed in the gay community be-
cause we've gone to the extreme of saying gay men with HIV can do no 
wrong. They're poor victims, and we can't ever criticize them."

Furthering the epidemic doesn't bother Carlos. Bug chasing requires a 
great deal of self-delusion, and he easily acknowledges the contra-
dictions in what he's doing. He notes that while he seeks HIV, he 
doesn't eat junk food or smoke, and that he drinks only socially. "I 
take care of myself," he says proudly. He also notes the hypocrisy in 
his doing volunteer work at GMHC, in which he tells other men to use 
condoms and practice safe sex, while he's hunting for partners for 
his secret hobby. The conflict doesn't bother him in the least.

Forstein says that attitude is disastrous for gay men. "We're killing 
each other," he says. "It's no longer just the Matthew Shepards that 
are dying at the hands of others. We're killing each other. We have 
to take responsibility for this as a community."

After several phone calls to work out a time, Carlos is ready to go 
see Richard. He's had sex with Richard about thirty times in the past 
year. "Knowing he's positive just makes it more fun for me," he says. 
"It's erotic that someone is breeding me." Richard is in the enter-
tainment business, in his mid- to late forties. 

"Lots of guys want to know who breeds them," Carlos continues. "When 
I have sex, I like to always make it special, a really good time, 
something nice and memorable in case that is the one that gives it to 
me."

Carlos offers, not for the first time, to have me come along and 
watch him and Richard have sex, but I decline. In the taxi to Rich-
ard's place, the conversation falls silent. He hasn't been tested in 
a couple of years, and he's reluctant to get a test now. He might 
very well be positive already. But as long as he doesn't know for 
sure, he can always hope that tonight is the night he gets the virus. 
Every date is potentially The One. Stepping out of the cab into the 
rain, I ask what he will do if he finds out one day that he has suc-
ceeded in being infected -- ending the fun of being a bug chaser. He 
stops, then says he might move on to being a gift giver: "If I know 
that he's negative and I'm fucking him, it sort of gets me off. I'm 
murdering him in a sense, killing him slowly, and that's sort of, as 
sick as it sounds, exciting to me."


Gregory A. Freeman
Research Fellow 
Health Economics & HIV/AIDS Research Division 
University of Natal
Durban 4041, South Africa
Tel: +27-31-260-2796 
Fax: +27-31-260-2587 
www.und.ac.za/und/heard

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