What Next? How Sick Can One Be?

From bug-chasing to denial..........

One of my friends recently confided in me that he has unprotected sex with guys who want to contract HIV," writes a Health24 user on the gay, lesbian and bisexual expert forum.

So-called "bug-chasers" actively set out to become infected with HIV, while "gift-givers" are HIV-positive people who oblige bug-chasers by trying to infect them. They are part of an underground world of ritualistic conversion parties – a world where infected semen is perceived as a kind of liquid gold, and where becoming infected makes you part of a sacred brotherhood.

There is, however, only scant evidence that such parties actually occur outside of anyone’s imagination, and similarly slight evidence that bug-chasing has much of a life anywhere outside some marginal subcultures in the US and Europe.

Why people do it
Some people – particularly gay men - argue that they are going to get infected anyway, and that “chasing the bug” is a way of taking control of the situation and relieving the consistent stress of worrying about infection.

In other cases, as in a much-cited 2003 article in Rolling Stone magazine, there is a suggestion that bug-chasing or gift-giving is about making sex more dangerous or exciting.

Glenn de Swardt, Health24's gay, lesbian and bisexual expert and the psychosocial manager at Health4Men in Cape Town, says he hasn't had any direct contact with men who consciously want to become HIV infected during his ten years of counselling gay men.

De Swardt says the much greater problem is bare-backing – men having unsafe sex with other men.

He views bare-backing as a complex and paradoxical ritual of denial, where the existence of HIV, and the risk of contracting it, is denied. "The concept of HIV is completely denied in such settings. The reality of HIV simply doesn't exist in this scenario, often due to various fears and anxieties. Two people thus collude and engage in a dangerous ritual of barebacking. This is very different from someone consciously wanting to be infected, but it is equally dangerous."

One might say that this ritual of denial is the flip side of the self-conscious "seeding" of bug-chasing and gift-giving. In either case, though, the greater problem is simply men having unsafe sex with other men.