Sitting in a Tampa coffee shop, “Brandon” is visibly excited about his upcoming weekend plans. The 23 year old, a customer service representative for a cell phone carrier, hopes to achieve a very important goal on the upcoming Saturday night.
“I’m going to finally get HIV!” he says with a smile. “I’ve tried before, but this is the first time I’m really boosting my chances.”
Brandon, not his real name, shares that he has plans to attend a “Conversion Party” at a private residence in Hillsborough County. There, he adds, he will “bottom” for multiple partners, most of whom are already HIV-positive.
“I found several gift-givers willing to give me the bug,” Brandon explains. “I’m excited. It’s going to be a really hot night and it will accomplish something in the process.”
Gift-givers, he explains, are HIV-positive men who prefer unprotected sex and don’t mind transmitting the disease to those who want to be infected.
To a majority of gay men who were raised on the lessons of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Brandon’s plans would seem irresponsible, or at the very least, inappropriate.
But he shrugs off criticism. He says he knows what it means to be HIV-positive and he gladly embraces the title of “Bug Chaser.”
“I know a ton of poz people,” says Brandon, who responded to a social networking post Watermark placed on a site focused on HIV infections. “I’m a good-looking guy and I’m in great shape. I love sex and I know it’s just a matter of time before I get it anyway. It’s like ripping off a band-aid. Why wait to find out in a year that you have it, when you can just get it, get on the drugs and go on with life. To me, this is the responsible thing to do. I’ll know I have it and I’ll be able to treat it.”
Although people working within the HIV arena have heard of “bug chasing” and have heard the arguments for it, most would quickly disagree with the Tampa resident’s assessment.
A misinformation battle
While there’s always a focus on raising funds to combat the disease among local populations through AIDS Walks and other fundraisers, there’s a challenge with getting those at risk to understand what living with HIV entails.
“Sixteen years ago, my clients looked very bad,” recalls William Harper, the executive director for the AIDS Service Association of Pinellas. “They were scrawny, had lesions or tremendous wasting. People looked bad and were dying.”
But with advances in medication, especially anti-retroviral drugs, appearances improved.
“Kids think you can take a few pills and you’ll be alright,” Harper says. “But there’s so much more to it than that.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the “Bug Chasing” communities seem to be much larger in major metropolitan areas like New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. However, that doesn’t mean smaller major cities like Tampa, St. Petersburg and Orlando don’t have their own bug chasing communities.
“I would say it’s very rare,” says Dr. Jay Flicker with Hope and Help of Central Florida. “But it does happen. Often times the term is used incorrectly. There is a difference between a ‘bug chaser’, someone who is actively seeking the virus, and an individual who is complacent about getting it.”
It’s rare that a client will identify himself as a bug chaser, but it does happen.
“I’ve tested someone who came in and first didn’t identify himself as a person who was looking to get infected,” recalls Abby Nicholson, Metro Wellness and Community Centers’ HIV Education & Prevention Coordinator. “When it came back positive, he was like, ‘Finally, it’s done now.’ That caught me off guard, but then he told me that he tried to get infected for a long time and that he had a lot of HIV-positive partners. He was relieved and excited.”
Nicholson adds that while she doesn’t understand the desire to become positive, she treats every case the same and wanted to make sure the client knew what living with HIV meant.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there, among the bug-chasing community and otherwise,” Nicholson says. “I wasn’t going to tell him if he was right or wrong. I just wanted to see what he knew.”
But even those who say they know what it means to live with HIV are still willing to become infected. That’s exactly what “Travis” accomplished in 2012.
“I found out I was HIV-positive on April 5, 2012, and that’s a date I plan to celebrate every year,” the 29-year-old Plant City resident says. “I’m on the right drugs, I see my doctor regularly and I always disclose my HIV status before I have sex with someone.”
Travis says he doesn’t plan to transmit the disease, but wouldn’t rule out becoming a “gift-giver” sometime in the future, if he meets someone with a desire to become positive.
“For me, getting infected was a way for me to start the next phase of my life,” Travis says. “I knew it would happen eventually, so I now know my status, I have a drug plan and I’m very healthy. It’s better than finding out later that I have HIV and starting treatment too late.”
That’s a very common practice among bug-chasers, according to Dio Diaz, a prevention specialist with Metro Wellness and Community Centers.
“I have seen a lot of bug chasing over my years with the HIV community,” Diaz says. “It’s usually younger community that they have boyfriends and they want to get infected because they don’t want to worry about getting infected anymore. So they willingly contract it.”
Others may want to contract it to make their relationship “easier,” especially if one of the parnters is already positive.
Not a new trend
“Bug-Chasing” isn’t typically a topic of conversation, or even on the radar, for most of the LGBT community. However, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been an ongoing trend for decades. In fact, before anti-retroviral medicines improved the overall health of positive individuals, many saw infections as a financial windfall.
“That was when there was a lot of money in the HIV arena,” Harper explains. “There was money for housing, legal services, dental services, those kinds of things. It was very attractive to some people to become positive because they could access those services. It even helped with rental assistance and housing vouchers. So it really was a financial windfall for someone who may not have many resources. It was an attractive plan.”
And bug chasing is all about intent, explains Flicker, who is a psychologist.
“The intent of a bug chaser is to fulfill a need, whether it’s to find a sense of belonging to a group or if it’s what used to be called a ‘disability queen,” Flicker says. “It was about getting those social services that just, really, aren’t around as much as they used to be.”
In larger metropolitan areas like New York, for example, Harper explains that some HIV-related housing opportunities still exist, which could explain why there’s a larger bug-chasing community there.
“We honestly don’t hear much about it down here in Florida because there is simply no financial reward to it,” Harper explains. “Years ago, an HIV diagnosis would get you on disability. But today, medications are great as are treatments. You have to have one foot in the grave these days, or multiple diagnoses like HIV, Hepatitis C or another opportunistic infection, to get any kind of major assistance.”
Getting ‘Pozzed’
When Travis decided it was time to become positive, he looked to websites to find a person to infect him. He joined several social sites that advertised bareback sex or “conversion” themes.
“But most of the guys I was interested in were too far away,” he says. “I wasn’t going to travel across the country to get pozzed. But I wasn’t going to get infected by someone I wasn’t into, either. If I’m getting pozzed, I’m going to get pozzed by someone hot.”
Travis decided the best way to become HIV-positive was to visit a bath house. That’s a popular tactic, according to Diaz.
“A lot of people who love to go to bath houses do it in the areas of Orlando, Tampa Bay and Fort Lauderdale,” Diaz says. “It’s a place to hookup to have random sex with random men, so that boosts infection rates. It’s really a triangle for easy sex.”
And while most bath houses or sex clubs provide free condoms, if a bug-chaser wants to find a positive with whom to have unprotected sex, that’s easy to do.
“If you’re into bareback sex or are bug chasing, these are great places because it’s an environment that’s non-judgmental. There is someone there willing to do whatever you want and you’re also not forced into a situation you don’t want. If you don’t want a barrier, there’s someone there who is willing to not use one either. That’s a large part of the infection numbers.”
Travis, who was infected in 2012, believes he contracted HIV during several encounters at a bath house in Central Florida. He wouldn’t say which one, however.
“I was there for nearly eight hours,” Travis recalls. “I have a certain ‘type’ and I knew that going to this one particular bath house would provide me with plenty of opportunities to hook up.”
Travis explains that his approach to the evening was to approach men for sex by offering his “raw hole.”
“For a lot of guys the idea of bareback sex is a huge turn on,” Travis says. “They don’t want a long discussion about condom use or want to hear the reasons behind why you want raw cock. But if you approach them and simply tell them what you want, you’ll get a quick yes or no answer. Honestly, there are rarely ‘no’ answers.”
Three weeks after his night at the bath house, Travis tested positive for HIV. He says that he’s thankful for the “gift-giver” who passed along the infection, but doesn’t really care who the particular individual is.
“I know some bug-chasers who compare getting infected with getting pregnant,” Travis says. “That’s just stupid. I just wanted to get it so I could go on with life. It has nothing to do with a relationship.”
It’s hunters like Travis that may have helped HIV make history in the summer of 2013. In July, the CDC released that for the first time, every state in the United States had reported cases of HIV. Locally, the communities of Orlando and Tampa saw substantial growth in the prevalence of HIV. So much growth, in fact, that both cities now rival infection rates of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
It’s frustrating for those battling HIV, especially when people still believe that a positive test result means the end of safe sex.
“There’s an assumption that ‘I’m already positive. What’s going to happen, I’ll get HIV again?'” says Flicker. “Actually, yes, you can get a different strain.”
And those strains affect medications, which makes treatment even more of a challenge.
“If you’re positive with one strain, you may have an option of 30 medications to sort through to find treatment,” Flicker says. “But if your strain changes, you may suddenly find you only have 10 medications to work with.”
And, as with a case Flicker encountered several years ago, one client had a strain of HIV that was resistant to all known anti-retroviral drugs.
“He was essentially untreatable,” Flicker says. “He had to remain untreated until a new class of medications came out.”
Common misconceptions
As he talks about the conversion party just days away, Brandon is visibly excited. He’s excited to contract HIV, but also about the act of doing so.
“Everyone knows barebacking is way better than wrapped sex,” he says. “It feels better for the top and for the bottom.”
And Brandon believes that becoming HIV-Positive will improve his sex life because he won’t have to use condoms or worry about getting infected. However, that isn’t necessarily true, according to Nicholson.
“A lot of gay men, unfortunately, see getting infected as a means to an end,” she says. “‘I got it, I don’t have to worry anymore’ is a popular myth. But you do have to worry because in addition to Sexually Transmitted infections (STI) and opportunistic infections, there are co-infections. You don’t just to go do what you want because you’re infected.”
Medicines, she explains, affect people differently. If you have a strain of HIV, your medications have to be tailored to combat the disease. If someone gets a different strain of HIV from another positive partner, the original medicine regimen won’t work anymore.
“And there are certain kinds of medications you just can’t deal with,” Diaz explains. “If you have sex with people who are positive and are on different meds, the strains of HIV get combined and those meds are essentially ineffective.”
Medicine has come a long way since the 1980s, when HIV and AIDS was killing people daily in the United States. It’s both a blessing and a curse, since it’s saving lives but creating an appearance that HIV belongs in history books.
“There’s a perception that meds are all but a cure,” Nicholson says. “Young gay men see older gay men on meds and going to the gym and in great shape. They think it’s no big deal to be positive as long as you take your meds. There’s no concept of the side effects of those medications and what those hot men in the gym are dealing with at home and in private. They also don’t understand the severity of other illnesses that exacerbate when HIV is involved.”
Harper is quick to point out that a majority of HIV positive people are responsible, and disclose their status to potential sexual partners. Gift-givers, he says, are a minority.
“The majority take care of themselves and live a healthy lifestyle,” Harper says. “Positive individuals should not be characterized as anything other than everyday folks, just like a diabetic taking their meds. They have to be more careful with sex and other activities, but there are many responsible HIV-positive people out there.”
Awaiting the results
Just days after his “conversion party,” Watermark reached out to Brandon via a social networking site dedicated to HIV infection to ask about his experience.
“It was awesome,” he says of the party, where he shared he had “at least” four partners. “But I did the rapid HIV test and it came back negative. I’m guessing that the infection is just too new to show up, so I’ll go again next week.”
The rapid test uses a simple finger prick of blood that reacts to a chemical in a vial if a person is HIV-positive. That “reactive” test is then sent to the state for further analysis and confirmation. It’s after that two week period that HIV service organizations like ASAP, Metro, Hope and Help and The Center, help clients navigate living with HIV.
There may be more to Brandon’s thought process than simply wanting to get infected, according to Flicker. There could be mental health issues at play.
“He thinks becoming positive will fulfill a need, and I would want to find out what is that need,” Flicker says. “It sounds like it’s a case of learned helplessness that he’s going to get infected anyway. But we have a choice today and make those choices through our actions. HIV is not a guarantee if you act responsibly.”
But Brandon isn’t interested. In fact, he’s more determined than ever to get his positive test result.
“As soon as I get the positive test back I’ll let you know,” Brandon says. “But if it doesn’t happen this time, I know I can always go to another party.”
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