Ask Beastly: What Do You Think About Bug-Chasing?
I won’t help you, but I won’t shame you.
Hi Alex
I am reaching out to you regarding your response to a message on November 30, 2020. The message addresses topics such as HVL, poz conversion, biohazard tattoos, etc.
Thank you for your positive thoughts on HIV-positive men, and for not discouraging 'bug chasing' and 'gifting'. I am a 55-year-old HIV-negative bottom living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. For years, I used condoms until I was educated on U=U. I have been regularly practicing bareback anal sex but haven't converted to HIV-positive status as yet.
Do you know of any websites or local contacts in Toronto that host Poz conversion parties? I am a regular member of the BBRTS (Bareback Realtime Sex) website, but haven't met anyone who would knowingly and willingly offer his poz load.
Thank you
Buddy,
I don’t damn bug-chasing, because that’s not helpful. But don’t mistake that for endorsement. Damning a real fetish that real people have is not helping to anyone. Calling it gross and saying everyone who does it needs psychological help is a) false and b) will not help them make informed, conscious decisions about what to do with this fetish. But this doesn’t mean I help them do it. You must see the difference.
I receive comments on those posts from men seeking the same thing you're looking for—all the time. I don’t respond to them. I don’t have the information you want and would not supply it if I did. I won’t help anyone get HIV. I am not part of this scene.
And honestly, it's a weird question, you know? Why would I know where to get a poz load or find a pozzing party in Toronto? I live in Berlin. I have never lived in Canada. And I have never stated anywhere on this site that I am a source for finding this stuff.
The only thing I do, really, is write about bug-chasing as a real—albeit problematic—fetish. But even though it's problematic, it makes sense that it should exist, and its practitioners are not inherently evil. They’re not crazy. They’re just people.
People tend to fetishise things our culture shrouds in shame and taboo. HIV is one of those things. HIV is something that you, as a man who has sex with men, were taught to fear all your life, and it’s something that, in no small way, has shaped gay identity over the last half-century. It is linked irrevocably to our history, community, and culture. One cannot form a gay identity without thinking about HIV in some way, and all of us must make peace—or at least reconcile—with its existence and with the fact that many men in our community have it. Our friends will continue getting it, and some of our friends will die from it. “Making peace” with something we are taught to fear can, for some, mean turning it into a fetish. Sometimes the mind has to eroticise something to bear it. I see the entire bug-chasing phenomenon as a punished, long-suffering community’s odd form of self-soothing: get the thing before it gets me.
The social psychology of bug-chasing must also be taken into consideration. Most gay men feel like outsiders in life, because we are. We grow up unable to participate in the traditions and experiences of heterosexuality. We grow up alone. So it makes sense that some of us would develop a fetish for a disease that brands the people who have it forever, gives them an identity, and makes them lifelong members of a designated populace, part of a tribe. (Phrases in the bug-chasing community like “poz brotherhood” and “poz family” are evidence of this.) People will do anything to belong. People who’ve been kicked out of their families will die to be part of one.
But even though bug-chasing can be explained with social psychology, it still crosses an ethical line. Even the wildest sex freaks see it as something unethical or at least deeply troubling. Here are the facts: HIV is a permanent, lifelong illness that, without treatment, will kill you, and giving it to someone, even consensually, means giving them a lifetime of doctor visits, blood tests, medicine, and—without medication—a slow and miserable death.
Bug-chasers die all the time. They get HIV and do nothing about it. Two men in my life have died this way. They wanted it, got it, and did nothing to treat it. And that fucking breaks my heart.
But I'm a smart guy, and smart people sometimes have to live between opposing truths. In this case, those truths are: 1) bug-chasing is a real fetish that many people have and did not ask for and cannot change, and 2) bug-chasing kills.
Accepting these truths, how can I best inform and support bug-chasers (and gifters)? How can I help my friends? Damning them is not the answer. But that does not mean I supply them with methods. I am not participatory. I just acknowledge this fetish without judgment.
You must make an informed choice about this because it’s your life, not mine. If you get HIV, you must then consider the lives of others. In sex, all people make their own decisions for their bodies, and someone else’s sexual health isn’t your responsibility. But if you choose to “gift” HIV to someone—which is, by definition, a consensual exchange, as a bug-chaser must first ask for it—you have to live with the ethical implications of changing and potentially ending their life because of it.
People engage in unhealthy behaviours for various reasons. Will you help them do it? I choose not to. I care too much about gay men. I love them too much. I want them to live. Let’s see what you do.
Love, Beastly