Andrew Sullivan rips into the Rolling Stone’s shodding reporting on ‘bug-chasers’ – men who actively seek HIV infection. The story reports that 25% of all all new HIV infections among ‘men who have sex with men’ are from this strange pursuit. Bug chasers do exist – this kind of fetishization of the disease was inevitable after it became less of an immediate death sentence and more of a constant health maintennance concern – but 25% of all new infections… if that were the case there would a lot more obvious presence of the fetish in the chat rooms and in personals. You wouldn’t just have the ‘Poz’ chat rooms but a much larger internet presence than what I was able to dig up on Google.
In other news… I had a friend that came out to me as HIV+ a few weeks ago. I’d figured it out for myself since he’d been pretty distant for quite a while and then wanted to have go out to have a chance to ‘explain things’. He related that it is like having to come out the closet all over again. And he said that now when he is in the heat of the moment, he asks a date their HIV status point blank and said that I would not believe how many guys out there were postive and wouldn’t have brought it up unless asked.
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