The bug chaser

Months after my HIV diagnosis, I wanted to feel like things were OK. Dumb activities like chatting online helped me to escape the truth. I loved making conversations in cyberspace, a guilt-free place where my emotions wouldn’t win a game of tug-a-war with my arousal.

Eventually I struck up a conversation with a twenty-something year old guy who had excellent tattoos. He lived a couple hours away, far enough to be a buffer for realism. In our little private chat window he began describing all of the dirty things he wanted to do with me – he loved to bottom and even bareback. I didn’t want to ruin his fantasy by telling him about my own reality, so I played along as he begged me to fuck him.

“When can we meet to actually do this?” he asked. Suddenly the sex was not so cyber anymore – he wanted to live out this fantasy. My arousal immediately let go of the rope. Emotion won the game. Now with no sex drive, I wondered if I could at least turn this into a valuable lesson for the young man.

“So if we met in person, you would let me fuck you bareback?” I asked him. He confirmed. “Would you let me cum inside you?” He confirmed again. “Well, then you just contracted HIV,” I climbed on my high horse. “Good thing I know my status otherwise I would have totally given it to you.” Surely my powerful statement would remind him about the risks of barebacking and jump start his engine on the road to safer sex.

“Umm, yeah,” he said contrary to what I expected. “That is the point. I want to get HIV, especially from you.”

He couldn’t see the horror across my face. I didn’t understand what he was saying. As I asked him to clarify, he kept verifying that he indeed wasn’t looking for love, but the bug.

I closed the chat window to cut him off. How could anyone want to get a disease, especially one so serious? How could someone want the very thing that wreaked havoc in my own life? I had encountered my very first bug chaser and loathed it.

A bug chaser is a person who pursues sex with those who have HIV in order to get infected on purpose. It’s a mostly-secret subculture of mostly gay men.

I researched more online to make sense of it. These guys seemed to have their reasons – they loved bareback sex, and with modern medication, the virus wasn’t killing people anymore. To them, it was win/win. But these reasons weren’t good enough – it wasn’t fair they saw HIV as an opportunity while it was ruining my own life.

A week later, I got back in the chat rooms and the bug-chasing boy quickly found me. He didn’t apologize, and reignited the pressure to have sex. I switched the conversation and asked him what this was all about. He gave the same reasons the websites did. I argued that life with HIV wasn’t black and white like that, but my reflection didn’t seem to deter him.

“Besides,” he wrote. “This way I get to at least know who, how and when I get HIV. And you are a really nice guy. I would rather get it from you than some jerk.”

With this little flattery, he did hit close to home. So many poz people hated the fact that they didn’t know when or with who they were infected.

For this bug chaser, HIV was inevitable and he might as well have some choice in the matter. But for me and most with HIV, being infected was devastating mistake. Perhaps our discrepancy was more about perception – he wanted to put a nice face on a grimacing disease, I grimaced about a disease that could never seem nice.