Ichthus: May 2007

This article shocked my being when I first read it on Monday. Have been trying to think of what I want to say but somehow feel too distraught to even blog about it. However, I feel it's foolish if all of us continue to live lives, not aware of things that are happening near us, slightly further from us, or on planet earth itself.

So, what exactly disturbed me till I'm lost for words? BUG CHASING.

Read on. No one writes it better than what has already been written in the article in Oracle.com. What I merely did was reparagraphed and highlighted it, so that it becomes a more bite-sized read for you.

Bug Chasing: The Shocking Quest To Become HIV-Positive

“Conversion” is a term invented in the 1990s for the fetish of a small minority of gay men wanting to become infected with HIV. Various gay websites have chat rooms devoted to “Bug Chasers,” looking specifically to have unprotected sex with HIV-positive men.

According to Didier, who tells this story, and others, there are "conversion parties" are where these like-minded people gather together to pursue their goal. It is thought that these men wish to become infected with HIV because they feel guilty or left out because many of their friends are HIV-positive.

Others have a fatalistic attitude about becoming HIV-positive and want to stop worrying about when they might become infected in the course of time. I interviewed two habitués to conversion parties, Luis and Didier. Here they give the inside story to Orato:

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.
Why did I do it? It’s never been because I wanted to commit suicide and end my life just like that. I guess I was going through a very difficult period in my life on a mental and spiritual level.
I arrived in London in 1998, when I was 25 years old. Born in a small provincial town in southern France, I decided to move to London attracted not only by its trendy gay scene, but also by the prospect of getting myself started as a professional interior designer.

After a couple of years, I realized that London was too tough a place to start my career. Instead, I immersed myself in the gay underworld.

The distractions of the gay Mecca of Europe were too many. My life turned into a series of sexual escapades that spiraled into a circle of self-destruction.

Now I see that I was hoping to get HIV in order to value more the life that I had been given. When my sister had an abortion and decided to terminate my nephew’s life no one wrote an article about it. Why? Thousands of women do the same every day all over the world and that’s not news. I’m not saying that what I did was the right thing. All I’m saying is that at least I was dealing with my own life, not somebody else’s.

*****
Didier is not, unfortunately, an exceptional case. Not long after I met Didier, I encountered Luis. Travelling twice or three times a month around Europe, Spanish-born Luis is a regular attendee at bareback parties.

He said he had looked for HIV without really knowing it:
“How so?” I asked. “Barebacking,” he said.

Luis explained me that barebacking is a term gay men use to refer to having unprotected sex. Even though mostly kept a secret from the gay mainstream, barebacking parties in cities such as London, Berlin or Paris are becoming quite common. Most of these reunions are usually linked to the roughest side of the scene, where sexual fetishes such as leather and S&M are aboard.

Here’s what he told me:

*****
Luis: I understand why these barebacking parties are becoming so popular. Ever since HIV/AIDS stopped being a death sentence, the virus slowly became another fetish. If someone produces a condom during the course of one of those parties, he will kindly be asked to leave the premises. His behavior doesn’t meet the dress-code criteria of the group.

I confess I have never used a condom. I was with a partner for 19 years and during the last seven years of our relationship, when my partner was diagnosed with AIDS until he died, we never stopped having unsafe sex.

It was my responsibility if I got it or not. But after thirty years of barebacking, I hadn’t got the bug. Then doctors discovered that I am immune to it. I have a protein in my T cells called Delta 32CRR5 that stops the virus from infecting me. They say I’m one in a million.

This didn’t stop me from attending barebacking parties. Maybe it lost a bit of the appeal, but it’s still thrilling. I believe that barebacking will continue to increase. Since AIDS is no longer such a deadly disease, lots of people are simply fed up with using condoms. There will come a time when there will be more positive than negative people, at least among gay men. The reason? As far as I know, the vast majority of heterosexual people are very puritanical and they don’t give sex the same priority we gays do. And on the other hand, they tend to be much more hypocritical.

Most HIV-positive heterosexuals don’t disclose it, whereas most gay men do.
In my particular case I get incredibly excited when having sex with HIV-positive men, even knowing I can’t get AIDS.

In bareback parties, you don’t talk about HIV because is not necessary. However, discussing about the topic during these parties adds to the eroticism of the experience.

Didier: The danger of getting other sexually transmitted diseases such as Hepatitis B or C does not frighten me. The risk is always there, but I strike a balance between having what I consider to be a low quality sex (with condoms) and risking something else. And I choose the latter. I am fully aware of the consequences. I take it as a game, and I play my part.

I do think all barebackers are a bit crazy, but on the other hand there are so many things that you shouldn’t do because they are dangerous, like smoking. With HIV re-infection, you are always gambling. They say that it is possible but not easy. See: if a person is re-infected with a strain of HIV that is different from the ones already present or if a mutated HIV type is introduced into the body through unsafe sex, treatment will be much more complex and potentially ineffective.

You can also try to get infected with the Type 2 HIV by having sex with people from Central Africa.

I know heterosexuals do bareback, but bug chasing and conversion are exclusively gay. Gays have a wider range of sexual behaviors. It is very different in the heterosexual community because they are mostly driven by what society tells them to do when having sex. Women are told not to have sex outside marriage and control when heterosexual men have sex and when not.

Luis: On average, heterosexuals get less than half the sex we gay people get, and in a much more irregular and controlled way. It is a parallel world we live in. They live in a shoe box and we live in a big room. For straight men, women are the biggest impediment to more sexual variety because women don’t allow it. That forces men to go with prostitutes. We gays are completely different.

I also know there are many people who think that we, the so called “bug chasers,” are absolutely mad. I once met one of those people. His name was José María González. He regularly attended meetings at Barcelona-based “Gais Posisitus” (Positive Gays), an organization that fights HIV/AIDS and teaches gay men about safe sex. José María had suffered from full-blown AIDS since 1991. He said once that if any gay man knew what’s like to be through what he has been through, we wouldn’t dream of playing such a dangerous game.

I don’t think he gets it. The closeness to extreme danger gives me a high. I get checked by my doctor regularly. My T-cell count is quite high and I have a manageable viral load. To be honest, I just don’t know what I will do the day science finds a cure for the virus. I guess I will have to find a new fetish. Being HIV-positive will be like having the common flu. But I can’t think of this now. Today, we still live in a society that’s very afraid of AIDS. It is possible that someday barebacking will be much less erotic. I would like to say that I’m not afraid of death anymore.

Some people choose to drop themselves from the Niagara Falls inside a barrel, others play Russian roulette. I chose to get HIV.

Bravo for reading till the end. One of the reason why this story sends a chill down my spine is because of this: If in my generation, people are already so peverse and twisted, what will happen in my children or my children's children's generation? Sigh. That's why I titled this post 'What has the world become?'

My conclusion? Change the world, or be changed.

Too ambitious? Yeah, perhaps. Well, at least I'm going to do something about it. Haha.

Hey, I'm not trying to change the world only for myself and my children. I'm doing for yours too... Think about it.