Choosing disability: bug chasing and gift giving in gay pornography

ABSTRACT

Starting with the premise that pornography is dominated by abled (or non-disabled) porn performers, this speculative article considers the extent to which logics and figurations of disability pervade the genre of gay porn, particularly the film Viral Loads. Produced by Treasure Island Media, Viral Loads eroticizes the deliberate transmission of HIV (popularly known as bug chasing and gift giving), and, as such, powerfully conveys the permeability of abledness/disabledness. If HIV can be coded as a disability, and if bug chasing and gift giving constitute agentic sexual practices, then we speculate about the ways in which disability can be a source of sexual agency in these types of films. Central to this discussion is fantasy, as many of the performers involved are already HIV-positive or unlikely to receive the gift in the context of pre-exposure prophylaxis and treatment as prevention. The political ambition for our article is imagining spaces in which the choosing and un-choosing of disability can be de-pathologized and bringing HIV discourses and practices to bear upon Disability Studies, particularly given the disavowals that historically and contemporarily occur across and between HIV and disability discourses.

KEYWORDS:

• bug chasing
• gift giving
• gay pornography
• HIV transmission
• ableism
• crip theory

Introduction

Pornographic conventions largely require (hyper-)abled, or visibly non-disabled, porn actors. Canvassing many porn archives validates this point; moving-image pornography is dominated by abled actors. Yet recalling and invoking Derrida’s (1972, 1973) deconstructionist notions of différance and trace, it is also the case that the disabled other haunts the category of the abled and that disability must then feature as an absent presence in pornography. Derrida writes that:

no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each ‘element’ – phoneme or grapheme – being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of the chain or system. (1972, 26)

While abled porn actors dominate pornography, they are always haunted by the spectre of disability. Sometimes disability rears its head (most demonstrably in ‘midget’, ‘amputee’, and other anomalous forms of pornography that often play into disability fetishes), but constituted as secondary to primary abledness – like all other Cartesian dualisms – disability sits as aberrant and abject, and simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, present and absent (Hughes 2007).

This article traces the interweaving and circularity of present/absent dis/ability within gay pornography. While a similar argument might be made about straight porn, we choose to focus our analysis on gay porn because of the historical, cultural, and political legacies that bind same-gender eroticism and disability. Despite the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973, there remains a conceptual contingence between abledness and heteronormativity: abledness presumes straightness and vice versa (McRuer 2006). This contingence is prominently featured in the context of HIV, which carries not only connotations of gay sexuality but also sometimes incurs the experience of disability. While HIV is not necessarily or consistently disabling, it is nevertheless typically understood through discourses produced by the medical industrial complex. Regardless of any individual’s experience, all people who are HIV-positive exist within spatial, temporal, discursive, and embodied proximity to disability. HIV’s mutual imbrications with gay sexuality and disability have rendered it an important object for scholars working at the nexus of Queer Studies and Disability Studies. Indeed, McRuer (2003) introduces his famous hybridization of queerness and disability – queercrip – in the context of HIV. HIV is not reducible to homosexuality or to disability, but it operates as a consistent vector for their interanimating, rhetorical significations.

In this article, we focus our attention on the popular Treasure Island Media film Viral Loads (Morris 2014), which provides an erotic index for HIV’s jointly queer and disabled resonances. The film powerfully conveys the absent presence of disability as it represents and eroticizes HIV-positive actors and their premeditated and deliberate insemination of viral loads – that is, seminal fluid that carries with it HIV – into other performers’ rectums and mouths. Popularly known as a form of bug chasing and gift giving, these practices are noteworthy because many of the actors can be coded as disabled, yet they are rarely, if ever, recognized as such. These subcultural practices more often draw upon the pathological stigma linking homosexuality and HIV (generally as a form of homo-suicide) in order to model queer kinship and pig masculinities or to instrumentalize queer abjection (Dean 2009; Florêncio 2020; Halperin 2007). Although we could have chosen to analyze the shifting queer significations and disability statuses of any number of barebacking and HIV-positive porn actors, we ultimately decided on Viral Loads for several reasons. First, despite the popularity of bareback porn, Viral Loads remains one of the few films to explicitly display or represent bug chasing and gift-giving. Second, Viral Loads includes at least one scene with a visibly disabled actor – something that remains unusual in mainstream gay porn. Third and finally, the film’s circulation within Porn Studies, read against the absence of critical commentary on the film’s disability politics, is an important reminder of the pervasive invisibilization of disability within the field.

Importantly, we do not put forth a purely redemptive argument in this article. It is not our purpose to reveal some sublated crip liberation embedded in Viral Loads. To the contrary, bug chasing and gift giving practices, both as they are represented in Viral Loads and as they often occur in communities outside porn, often operate at the explicit disavowal of disability experience, suggesting that the eroticization of HIV occurs not because of HIV’s disabling potential but because it really is not a disability at all. This article mines this dissonance, exploring the shifting and liminal role of disability in a film that both centres disabled phenomenology while simultaneously rejecting disabled ontology. By bringing Disability Studies to bear on the film’s representations of queer kinship, pig masculinities, and instrumentalized abjection, we pursue Derrida’s (1976) call for ‘undecidables’: embracing the unstable nature of the primary (abled) and secondary (disabled) hierarchy by way of troubling the absent presence of dis/ability in Viral Loads.

We posit that bug chasing and gift giving constitute agentic acts of self-determination and relationality, and that disability’s absent and present circularity is evidenced in such practices. Central to bug chasing and gift giving is the choosing and un-choosing of HIV and perhaps, in turn, disability. These choices, while necessarily complicated by the racism and ableism that subtend illusions of autonomy and free will under liberal humanism, may sometimes expose creative outlets for the expression of queercrip agency and the formation of queer-disability solidarity. Clare evocatively writes in the context of un-choosing:

[c]ollectively in the white Western world, we go to such lengths to un-choose disability. We wear seat belts. We don’t dive into shallow water. We vaccinate against polio and measles. Certainly these actions are about avoiding death, but our avoidance quickly mashes into the un-choosing of disability … We un-choose disability in hundreds of ways … We want to control how, when, and if disability and death appear in our lives. (2017, 129)

Conversely, in the context of choosing:

[t]here are also moments when disability is actively chosen. Prospective foster or adoptive parents fill out agency paperwork requesting a disabled child … Pregnant people decide to keep their fetuses predicted to have Down syndrome. Or they decide against genetic testing altogether, letting the crapshoot of disability run its course unimpeded. Deaf people using alternative insemination to become pregnant seek out deaf sperm donors, wanting to increase their likelihood of having deaf children. Transabled people, sometimes called disability wannabes or amputee wannabes, feel a need to be disabled. Many have sought out surgeons, planned self-amputations, or staged disabling events, manifesting their desire in actual disability … How the world treats people who, in some fashion, choose disability reveals so much. (Clare 2017, 130)

Bareback porn, particularly the kind explored in Viral Loads that entails bug chasing or the gift giving of HIV, might be conceptualized and co-implicated through this lens of choosing and un-choosing disability. Of course, ‘choice’ is problematic because it presumes an autonomous self that is otherwise fictive (see Rose 1999); thus, these practices might be better understood as conditions of possibility or improvisations within scenes of constraint (see Butler 2004). It is also important that these practices are not individualized but collectivized, thereby understood as subcultural practices that forge communities and intimacies (Dean 2009). Recognizing how choosing and un-choosing HIV can mediate the absence and presence of disability permits us to consider how the spectre of disability haunts barebacking practices – whether these performers recognize it or not.

Part of our approach in this article, then, is to supplement existing queer interventions in HIV discourse, offering a route to understanding the liberatory practices modelled by bug chasing and gift giving in pornography without stripping either practice of its connection to disability. While the popularity of bareback pornography is increasing, its mainstreaming must be considered alongside the parallel market growth for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and treatment as prevention (TasP) medications that dramatically reduce a person’s risk of contracting HIV. These medications allow people to engage in condomless sex without necessarily intending to bug chase or gift give. The rise of bareback pornography must be considered alongside these biomedical advances because the combination of rigorous HIV testing and stringent PrEP protocols mitigates the possibility of actors transmitting or contracting HIV. Even with these protective measures in place, some advocates and industry insiders continue to discourage barebacking due to ongoing fears that it endorses similarly ‘unsafe’ sexual practices in the broader community, thus subscribing to a ‘media effects’ logic that representations provide a template for (future) behaviour (Lee 2014; Shepard 2018). These fears suggest that barebacking is a practice engaged by ‘bad queers’ who are pathological, reckless, nihilistic, and self-destructive (Ashford 2015; Race 2010).

In what follows, we consider the nature of barebacking in gay pornography, particularly its fantastical elements and effects. Given that many actors in the film under examination are already HIV-positive, coupled with the increasing pervasiveness of PrEP and TasP that reduce the possibility of HIV transmission, we consider the extent to which we can or should read into questions of disability and its absent presence in gay bareback porn. This section also considers the uneasy and fraught relationship between HIV and disability. We suggest that HIV’s rhetorical and affective historicity, one tied almost exclusively to queer and trans people, has inhibited the capacity for scholars to theorize HIV within the context of Disability Studies. The homophobic significations attached to HIV have rhetorically jettisoned HIV from disability, rendering it an unlikely attachment for the field of Disability Studies (Smilges 2022). Following this section, we turn to the film Viral Loads to consider how disability operates absently and presently throughout. In so doing, we reintroduce the experience of disability to bug chasing and gift giving, demonstrating the unstable nature of the abled/disabled binary. The article concludes with a discussion of what Disability Studies more broadly might bring to bear upon queer interventions in barebacking discourse.

Representation, fantasy, and the uneasy relationship between HIV and disability

Williams (1999) argues that moving-image hardcore pornography is motivated by the principle of maximum visibility. The ‘incitement to discourse’ – that is, the imperative to talk about sex and produce knowledge about it – simultaneously created the ‘incitement to see’, and this principle of maximum visibility plays out in moving-image hardcore porn (Foucault 1978; Williams 1999). The problem or irony that arises, however, is that the principle of maximum visibility is constrained by the genre of bareback porn (Dean 2009; Williams 1999). Internal ejaculation is central to barebacking, yet moving-image pornography is compromised in its ability to visually capture this moment (which points to the proliferation of the ‘money shot’ as compensation). Williams (1999, 32) writes that ‘seeing everything – especially seeing the truth of sex – proves a more difficult project than one might think’, and in the context of bareback porn, ‘the visible evidence that is most wanted is precisely what cannot be achieved’ (Dean 2009, 123). It is in this context that barebacking (in pornography) is first and foremost a question of representation.

Beyond the problem of internal ejaculation, several other factors mediate the in/visibility of bareback porn and its representation, particularly in the context of bug chasing and gift giving. First, HIV is invisible; it cannot be recognized by the naked eye, and thus, the viewer can never be certain of the extent to which gift giving and bug chasing might be taking place (Dean 2009). The invisibility of HIV, coupled with the desire to visibilize its insemination, leads to alternative strategies that attempt to show what conventionally cannot be shown (these strategies are discussed later). Second, many of the actors appearing in these porn films are already HIV-positive, or assumed to be so, and this constrains the ‘reality’ or ‘authenticity’ of possible seroconversion that these productions explicitly or implicitly promise. Third, it can take weeks or months for seroconversion to be identified, so it is often unclear which particular encounter, scene, or moment resulted in seroconversion. Fourth, given the advent and prevalent usage of PrEP and TasP in the porn community, as already discussed, the risk of seroconversion is minimal or perhaps, in some contexts, non-existent (Florêncio 2018). The point here is that many of the factors intrinsic to the subculture of barebacking are difficult to visibilize due to pornographic conventions. As Dean (2009, 104) acknowledges, ‘[d]espite the impulse to “show it all” and leave nothing merely implicit, pornography is a genre governed by conventions that regulate what may – and may not – be shown’. It may very well be that pornographic conventions are better equipped to visibilize the fantasy of barebacking and its eroticized risks/risky erotics than to depict the phenomenological success or failure of bug chasing and gift giving as seroconverting practices.

But fantasy is a powerful force. Much in the same way that the transmission of HIV cannot be seen, it also cannot be immediately felt, meaning that the desirability of barebacking, both while filmed and while experienced, lies in its imagined potentialities rather than its guaranteed deliverables. What eroticizes gift giving and bug chasing is not only the desirability of HIV itself – that which we can choose through serosorting and other risk-enhancing strategies – but also the indeterminacy of transmission, the unbreachable distance between what is chosen and what is offered. As Dean (2009, 25) has argued, barebacking subcultures and practices produce queer forms of kinship and intimacy that emerge through an ‘ethics of alterity’. This ethics is less interested in ‘the moralism of trying to legislate others’ sex lives’ (2009, 26) than in the generativity of vulnerability, of ‘engag[ing] otherness’ for the uncertain pleasures it might yield (2009, 205). Bug chasers make HIV central to their (erotic) lives and transform it into a pathogenic symbol of human vulnerability, a badge that gift givers can bestow on/in another in recognition of their shared humanity (Dean 2009). Dean suggests bug chasing and gift giving involves:

embracing risk as a test of masculinity, counterphobically reinterpreting the pathogen as desirable, diminishing fear of HIV/AIDS, increasing doubts about HIV as the cause of AIDS, eliminating anxiety by purposefully arranging seroconversion, and resisting mainstream health norms. (2009, 51)

Bug chasers and gift givers reorient themselves to HIV so that it is understood not as a certain threat to their lives but as an uncertain hope for their livelihoods. HIV becomes desirable because it promises – through its risk – the possibility of negotiating difference, of joining a community by blood, of having a family. It need not matter whether HIV transmission is likely, only that it exists as a fantasy of seminal intimacy charted towards a bound community.

The fantasy and eroticization of HIV transmission, whether real or imaginary, tells us a great deal about disability. In fact, we might read a pornographic account of bug chasing and gift giving as a rare and important non-pathological representation of a character’s journey into disability. Just think of any story that journeys the trajectory from ability to disability (i.e. the story of becoming disabled), across any medium, and it is almost always told in pathological terms to some extent (Gallop 2019; Smith and Sparkes 2008). Pity, tragedy, and mourning, no matter how brief or partial, feature somewhere in accounts of becoming disabled. As Oliver (1990, 1) has noted, personal tragedy is the ‘grand theory’ of disability, and Campbell (2009) suggests that the identification of disability is often met with three options: amelioration, cure, or elimination. And yet the bug chasing community constitutes HIV as positively desirous. Bug chasers open themselves up to a virus that is typically medicalized as a precursor to disability, one that carries entrenched cultural connotations of death and disease. Bug chasers glimpse a liberation grounded in a crip erotic – a way of deferring pathology by fucking your way into disability.

Of course, the relationship between HIV and disability is somewhat fraught. HIV is not commonly understood or conceptualized in terms of a disability in and of itself, and the two categories maintain their own unique, even if overlapping, histories. In fact, it is these unique (and at times antagonistic) histories that explain the dissonance between HIV and disability. Queer communities, including gay men in this context, have long resisted the pathologization of their identities that posited homosexuality with sickness, mental illness, or some other disability category (Baynton 2001). Such practices were intensified and compounded with the emergence of HIV – many gay men were compelled to reject the idea that they were diseased, sick, and dying (whether they were HIV-positive or not) (Smilges 2022). This helps explain, even nearly 40 years later, the rampant ableism that operates in many gay communities (Hrynyk 2021).

However, when examining the effects and lived experiences of living with HIV, the absent presence of disability rears its head. HIV can be disabling, whether episodically or continuously.¹ HIV-positive people can be coded as disabled, and in the following section we trace the circularity and signification of presence and absence and choosing and un-choosing of disability through the bug chasing and gift giving practices suffusing Viral Loads.

HIV, disability, and Viral Loads

Produced by Treasure Island Media and directed by Paul Morris, the 2014 release of Viral Loads resulted in an uncommonly significant level of public attention for a porn film and has been subject to much scholarly analysis over the past couple of years (Clark-Flory 2014; Dean 2015; Florêncio 2018, 2020; McCasker 2014). Most of the public and scholarly attention thus far has centred on one central element of the film: the eroticization of HIV transmission. The title has a double meaning that refers both to the particles of HIV positive blood and to the slang term for semen (i.e. load). The description of the film on Treasure Island Media’s website curiously omits the film’s central focus:

Mansex is a virus, one that uses men as its host. Some try to resist it. Others embrace it as the source of life and meaning. We live to breed the sex-virus, to pass it on to every random anonymous dude we meet and fuck. It’s how we reproduce, man.

We shoot viral loads every time. Our jizz ain’t for making babies. Our sex spreads like wildfire, squirting out of one man’s dick, shooting deep inside another, then another and another.

Join in, buddy. You’ll never look back. (Treasure Island Media 2014)

This opaque description proposes ‘virus’ as a metaphor for ‘mansex’, sneakily omitting direct reference to HIV. Florêncio (2020, 147) suggests that while Viral Loads is intended to be controversial, it is also intended to make ‘viewers realise that their fears of HIV infection are, after both TasP and PrEP, anachronic’. Florêncio (2020, 281) also argues that porous pig masculinities are formed through a ‘community cumming together’. For Florêncio (2018, 2020), the giving and exchanging of bodily matter helps redefine masculinity as impure and porous, creating a queer future and ethics built on ‘cummunity’. Morris, the director, suggests the film rewrites the stigma of HIV, transforming it from pathological to something worthy of pride, thereby imagining a post-AIDS future (Florêncio 2018; McCasker 2014). Dean (2015) suggests that PrEP and TasP, and an attendant ‘undetectability’, complicates the meaning of ‘raw sex’ and the positive/negative (and thus, ability/disability) binary. For Dean (2015), Viral Loads tells us a great deal about contemporary biopolitics and the workings of fantasy working in and through bug chasing and gift giving subcultural communities.

Our reading of Viral Loads builds upon this existing commentary but in a dis/similar vein. We are interested in tracing the presence and absence of disability throughout the film, attending particularly to the ways it contests the abled/disabled hierarchy. The task of deconstruction ‘is to keep a watchful eye/ear for that which might otherwise be missed’ (Jackson and Mazzei 2012, 17). Mazzei writes that deconstructive methodology:

considers not what the text tends to say, but engages a deconstructive openness to expect, even encourage, another interpretation of the text, a competing interpretation of the text, an attention to the ‘echoing’ voices in the layers beneath the surface. (2007, 15–16; emphasis added)

We are compelled to find a way of reading texts for what they refuse to include, or, more particularly, of exposing the absent becoming present and the presence in absence. Jackson and Mazzei (2012, 18) write that the ‘absent presence is that which has been ignored in an attempt to preserve the illusion of truth as a perfectly self-contained and self-sufficient present’, and our tracing of dis/ability’s presence and absence serves to deconstruct and destabilize that which is seemingly considered fixed and stable. Viral Loads, like any text, contains polyvocal and uncontainable meanings, and this reading serves to identify ‘that which resides outside/within the significant chunk of the data that has previously been left out, ignored, not counted’ (Mazzei 2007, 19). We search and haunt Viral Loads, looking for the previously unheard, and turning the previously (un)thought absent into an articulated present.

Viral Loads comprises nine scenes presented as different chapters in a story. Each chapter is introduced by a title on screen, and the story is presented mostly chronologically over its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Scene one, ‘Adult Bookstore Basement Fuck’, introduces the viewer to the film’s main actor, Blue Bailey. The opening shot shows Bailey on his knees in a basement receiving irrumation from Steven Richards. This act of irrumation, which is ‘performed by the cock of the penetrator’ and distinct from fellatio (which is ‘performed by the mouth of the penetrated’), signals the roughness and dominance/submissiveness of the scene that unfolds (Brinkema 2017, 131). Richards is ‘sir’ and ‘daddy’ while Bailey is ‘boy’. Amidst the alternating positions (oral and anal), emphases (close-ups of penetration and Bailey’s face), and grunts and groans, two observations can be gleaned from the scene: exchanges of power and bodily fluid. Regarding the former, while Bailey is submissive in the scene, as Florêncio (2018) observes, this representation becomes complicated when Richards asks Bailey: ‘You all good? Yeah? Is that okay?’. This is not a minor point but emphasized deliberately with subtitles, and it demonstrates how care is central to (the fantasy of) submission (Florêncio 2018). The movement between dominance and care, from (hyper-abled) fucking to fucking in slower rhythms, illuminates what our bodies can and cannot do in particular moments. So too, the scene features the exchange of bodily fluids and the connection that these practices create. Bailey licks up Richards’ sweaty balls, slurps up his own saliva that he himself gagged onto Richards’ cock during irrumation, and tastes his own ass during ass-to-mouth (A2M/ATM) moments. Eventually, Richards ejaculates with a compromise shot (see Dean 2009). Not done, however, Bailey ejaculates on himself, and Richards collects the semen with his hand and puts it into Bailey’s mouth to swallow. This latter act makes Richards call Bailey a ‘good boy’, and with their connection affirmed, they embrace and kiss as the scene ends.

But Bailey is still not done. ‘20 minutes later’, the text tells us, ‘Before leaving the bookstore, Blue needed the taste of more cock’. As the text disappears, scene two – ‘Blue’s Gloryhole Dessert’ – commences, and this entails a close-up of Bailey’s face sucking dick(s) at a gloryhole in the dark. The sounds of other men, through their coughing and moaning, are heard in the background. The anonymity of the gloryhole impersonalizes and depersonalizes the relationship between Bailey and his sexual partners (Dean 2000). Dean writes that:

[g]ay public sex is often thoroughly impersonal in a way that throws into relief how relationality involves other persons only contingently. Men having sex through a gloryhole reveal that sexual relationality is as much about the Other and the object a as it is about interpersonal connection. Sometimes the gay man relates to his partner not as a person but as an object – and there is something to praise as well as lament in this form of relating. (2000, 274)

In thinking about these anonymous cocks on the other side of the gloryhole, we are struck that they are presumably designed to facilitate anonymous encounters only between abled people or at least those with particular motor skills.² The height of the hole caters to people who can stand to insert their penis, and the vertical divide requires someone who can lean forward or backward to receive a penis into their mouths or anus. Just as cisgender heterosexuality is presumed ‘unless otherwise stated’ (Swain and Cameron 1999, 68), abledness is also presumed unless otherwise stated (McRuer 2002b). Yet recalling the viral loads central to the film, we cannot ignore that some of the actors are HIV-positive gift givers who, despite their abled appearance, hold a potentially disabling virus. While anonymous cruising via a gloryhole may constitute an ‘openness to alterity’ (Dean 2009, 176), that alterity is mediated by a range of individual and collective forces and structures, including the construction of gloryholes.

Scenes one and two make way for scene three: ‘Blue’s Man-Worship Gangbang’. The Treasure Island Media website provides the context:

Blue got in touch with me the next day and said he wanted some kind of man-worship initiation. So I took a few days to set it up. When he enters the room, he knows he’s in for a real rite of passage. The willing, hungry lad gets gang-fucked by a roomful of studs. Most are poz, some are neg. Who the fuck cares? Not Blue, that’s for fuckin’ sure.

To finish up his man worship initiation, we bring out a brimful jar full of more than 200 poz loads. Blue’s good buddies Dayton O’connor and Drew Sebastian carefully squirt every fucking drop up Blue’s knocked-up ass. Max X slurps Blue’s jizz-leaking ass throughout, establishing himself as the new world’s felching-champeen. (Treasure Island Media 2014; original emphases)

This scene commences not at the beginning but the end: the first shot opens with Bailey’s open rectum, where a pighole – a large hollow butt plug sex toy – is keeping it agape. A cross-dissolve takes place, and Bailey is on a bed on all-fours surrounded by several men. The camera cuts to Dayton O’Connor, who approaches Bailey’s ass with a jar full of what is presumably semen. O’Connor then uses a large plastic syringe to deposit large quantities of the semen into Bailey’s gaping rectum. As the semen is being inserted, echoing background voices are heard saying ‘Yeah, yeah’, ‘There you go’, and ‘Drink it up’ as the scene fades to black.

A jump cut occurs and the text ‘one hour earlier’ appears on screen. As the text disappears, several men – including Bailey – congregate around a bed while slow motion editing is used, and rhythmic atmospheric music starts playing. Suddenly and simultaneously, as the slow-motion stops and ‘real-time’ commences, Richards (from scene one) bends Bailey over and starts fucking him vigorously while several men kiss and jerk in the background. What then transpires is a gangbang where Bailey is fucked by many men. Central to this scene, just like scenes one and two, is the exchange of bodily fluids, almost exclusively semen. Internal and compromise money shots saturate the scene as Bailey is loaded again and again, sometimes multiple times by the same person (this is emphasized with subtitles: ‘Logan’s second load’, ‘Tom’s second load’, ‘Steven’s second load’, ‘Logan’s third load’, etc.). Another performer, Max X (also known as Max Cameron), serves the role of cum collector, felching³ and licking any cum he sees that might otherwise be ‘wasted’.

Eventually the scene catches up to where it initially started: the jar full of cum and Bailey’s gaping rectum. This time, however, the viewer sees the words ‘POZ CUM’ written on the lid of the jar before its contents are syringed into Bailey’s rectum. What was invisible and seemingly absent is now visible and noticeably present, recalling Dean’s (2009) earlier observation of the strategies used to overcome the invisibility of HIV. Once all of the HIV-positive semen is deposited, the scene ends with Bailey smiling and the men laughing.

This scene is noteworthy for Bailey’s athleticism, endurance, stamina, and dis/abledness. Dean (2009, 2015), Florêncio (2018, 2020), and Lee (2014) suggest these types of scenes and practices, which require tremendous energy and physical strength, rewrite understandings of masculinity, where something typically considered as effeminate (bottoming) is instead constituted as an impressive masculine feat. Florêncio (2020, 103) argues that ‘by heroically enduring relentless penetrations and accumulations of bodily fluids, Blue Bailey reiterated masculinity as athleticism and endurance’. Simultaneously, ‘by reframing masculine athleticism as relentless bottoming’, Bailey and his fellow cohort of pig bottoms reproduce and queer masculinity itself (Florêncio 2020, 103). Noting, too, that he is already HIV-positive (a realization that disrupts the ‘reality’ of the scene but nevertheless highlights the fantasy of HIV/disability), Bailey upends Clare’s (2015, 130) observation that ‘to be male and disabled’ is ordinarily understood to be seen ‘as not quite a man’. This conception is ordinarily understood in deficit terms, but noting their agentic sexual practices and subcultural membership, they have rewritten their masculinity in different non-pathological ways.

Bailey’s performance in this scene also complicates conventional notions of one infamous figure in disability studies: the supercrip. Associated with overcoming, heroism, inspiration, exceptionality, and extraordinary narratives and representations (Schalk 2016), the supercrip plays into abled people’s tendency to moralize disability, to imagine that disability is little more than an obstacle, a test of virtue that a person must overcome on their hero’s journey back into the fold of normativity. Clare provides several examples:

[a] boy without hands bats .486 on his Little League team. A blind man hikes the Appalachian trail from end to end. An adolescent girl with Down syndrome learns to drive and has a boyfriend. A guy with one leg runs across Canada. (2015, 2)

Central to many supercrip narratives and representations is the idea that disability and its effects can be erased if the individual simply works hard enough to overcome their situation (Schalk 2016). On one hand, Bailey is a superbly masculine cumdump pig who aligns with supercrip qualities: despite his HIV-positive status, he gets fucked and filled relentlessly, and his reputation for these qualities within the porn and gay communities precedes him. Bailey can do things that so many others cannot. On the other hand, when situating his actions within the porn barebacking medium and genre context, his actions and abilities are rendered normative (and indeed expected), thus revealing the contingency of the supercrip stereotype. While among other sexually active people with HIV, Bailey’s supercripness is softened – for it is only when read against the expectations of abled, heteronormative others that his behaviour becomes exceptional. This dynamic once again exposes the fraught relationship between HIV and disability: his status as HIV-positive paired with his extraordinary bottoming skills make him a supercrip among ableds, but within bug chasing/gift giving contexts, HIV is considered nearly inevitable, and rigorous bottoming is expected. HIV, in this latter context, is not an obstacle that requires overcoming. Put simply, genre ‘alter[s] what we count as a supercrip narrative’ (Schalk 2016, 83), HIV does not sit comfortably within supercrip (or disability) paradigms, and Bailey defies easy categorization. Just as Bailey and his bottoming cohort queer masculinity, they also crip understandings of dis/ability and HIV.

Florêncio (2020) considers Bailey’s gangbang the defining scene in the film. For Florêncio (2020, 103), it is not just the sex contained within the scene, but the ways in which Morris ‘made use of intertextuality to play with presence and absence, visibility and invisibility’ that makes the scene and film so interesting and controversial. In thinking with and about the presence and absence of ability and disability, this scene is noteworthy given its ritualized nature. As mentioned earlier, Bailey is already HIV-positive, and while Florêncio (2018, 2020) argues that this fact is concealed to help enable the fantasy of gift giving and bug chasing, it is also interesting to note how Bailey’s seroconversion is recreated and ritualized. While it is the case that seroconversion can only occur once, bug chasers find ways to repetitively perform the unrepeatable (Dean 2009). Whether it be refusing HIV tests, or in this case recreating the moment of transmission, bug chasers are invested in the fantasy of recreating the gift (HIV) that was given to them. The multiple scenes depicting gift giving are rituals, re-enactments, cathartic and hauntological moments, and exemplary and fantastical recreations of disabled becoming. Bug chasers and gift givers expose efficacious forms of community and kinship, and in so doing, Bailey teaches us that the rectum is not a grave associated with death or shattering, but a womb that produces gifts, opportunities, and communities (see Bersani 1987; Dean 2009).

The next six scenes are often omitted from detailed analysis, but it is worth briefly describing them, before emphasizing the central importance of scene seven – ‘Complete’ – that helps make the movie, well, complete (for our purposes at least). Florêncio (2018) suggests that these scenes are ‘unrelated’ to the broader (Bailey) narrative, but this is only true to an extent. These scenes all contain the ‘viral loads’ promised in the title (they are just not contained in the jar) and contain internal cum shots and compromise money shots. HIV and disability thus permeate these scenes as absent presences. While Viral Loads contains non-normative practices such as felching, double anal, the eroticization of HIV transmission, multiple exchanges of bodily fluid, and so on, it is perhaps not until scene seven’s ‘Complete’ that the viewer witnesses something so explicitly different from other aspects of the film. Disability has been lurking in the background of every scene, becoming noticeably present during the ‘POZ CUM’ insemination moments, and yet rears its head in scene seven in a slightly different register.

Commencing with the text ‘15 months after the accident’, ‘Complete’ begins with a standing Drew Sebastian getting sucked off by a crouching Nick. After a short period, the camera fades to a new angle, and Nick, facing the wall and away from Sebastian, removes his prosthetic leg and clothes. The invisible absence of disability pervading Viral Loads is suddenly visibly present. Once naked, Nick turns around and climbs atop a nearby bed and starts sucking Sebastian’s dick – all the while the prosthetic leg, noticeably and deliberately present and visible in the background, leans against the wall. Eventually, the scene leads to fucking, and Nick lays on his back while Sebastian holds on to Nick’s stump for better grip and rhythm. The absence of a leg apparently lends itself to easier and better fucking. While the presence of a disabled person – rendered visible through the absence of a leg – might ordinarily be assumed incompatible with ‘good fucking’, Sebastian and Nick prove otherwise. Nick’s stump in fact enhances their fuck, offering Sebastian added stability for more powerful thrusts. As Sebastian leans back, Nick pushes himself on top to ride Sebastian’s cock, and the enjoyment for Sebastian is immediately apparent. Sebastian joyously proclaims ‘Yeah, fuck yeah, ride that cock’, and Nick says, moments later, ‘You can ride my third leg’. After a little more fucking the scene ends with a compromise money shot, and Nick sucks Sebastian’s cum-covered cock.

Far from being unrelated to the broader narrative, ‘Complete’ can be read as the climax to Viral Loads. While disability has been lurking in the background throughout the film, the substitution of invisible disability (HIV) with visible physical disability (a ‘missing’ leg) creates a dramatic effect. Treasure Island Media’s description of the scene reads:

It’s a little more than a year since Nick’s leg was torn off in one horrific highway crash. Truth be told, he’s lucky to be alive. But he finally got his new leg and now, well, he’s ready to feel complete again. How d’you do that? Here’s how. Believe it. (Treasure Island Media 2014)

According to the summary, a highway crash has left Nick (physically and/or emotionally) incomplete. To feel complete again, Nick needs to engage in sex generally and receive a viral load particularly. A viral load can make Nick feel complete again, implying that the addition of one disability (becoming HIV-positive) might remedy the effects of another (losing one’s leg). In this sense, gift giving is presented not only in non-pathological terms but additionally coded as rehabilitative. Nick survived his accident, but the viewer is instructed to believe that the loss of his leg coincided with a greater loss of self: amputation as metonymic for annihilation. Mollow (2012, 287) refers to this particular logic as the ‘disability drive’, wherein the event of disability entails a ‘self-rupturing force’. Echoing the antisocial strand of Queer Theory led by Bersani (1995) and Edelman (2004), Mollow argues that ‘in the cultural imagination (or unconscious), disability is fantasized in terms of a loss of self, of mastery, integrity, and control’ (2012, 297; original emphasis). While Mollow proposes a ‘counterproject’ that channels these fantasies towards liberatory ends, she also acknowledges the ‘rehabilitative futurism’ that typically follows disability’s shattering intensity (2012, 308 and 309). We see this rehabilitative futurism take shape in ‘Complete’, where Nick’s amputated self can be allegedly reinstated through seroconversion. Pig masculinity, homo-desirability, and entrance to poz community are all queer prosthetics made possible by barebacking that overwrite or, at least, sublimate the rhetorical intensity of Nick’s material prosthetic leg. Even if Nick remains physically disabled, he can be erotically recapacitated by the virus and its social offerings.

It is worth examining how this rehabilitative framing of HIV affects the putative desirability of disability more generally. Nick did not ‘choose’ the accident that took his leg, and despite he and Sebastian gleaning pleasure from his stump, the scene’s narrative arc suggests that Nick’s amputation is a problem to be overcome. In contrast, while many people do not ‘choose’ HIV, Viral Loads presents it as a desirable option in part because it can fix the gender deficit occasioned by Nick’s physical disability. Whereas a missing leg is an absence that must be ‘completed’, HIV is a viral membership to queer community. The crip erotic made visible when Sebastian grabs Nick’s stump is overshadowed by the poz erotic intended to compensate for Nick’s incompleteness. The scene’s crip potential is both revealed and renounced, made present and absent, by the broader framing, which ironically positions crip pleasure as a tool for disability’s disavowal. Nick’s stump is regarded as a sex toy that hastens seroconversion; seroconversion subsequently serves as the biomarker for Nick’s rehabilitative future. The scene ensures that Nick can find a queer identity through HIV but not a disability community through his amputation. In short, Nick can be a crip so long as its on the way to being a queer.

Following ‘Complete’ is scene nine, and it includes all the common traits and practices featured throughout the film: hard fucking, double anal, viral loads, and bodily exchange. The viewer then arrives to what is purportedly the end of the film. As the scene turns to black, the following postscript, which turns out to be more of an epigraph (and also which appeared at the start of the film), appears:

He who makes a beast of himself removes the pain of being human.

– Samuel Johnson

The quote disappears and some credits appear (‘Paul Morris – Treasure Island Media – Viral Loads’). Treasure Island Media’s logo appears on screen with a jester image superimposed on top and the eyes momentarily flash red. As the logo/jester fades, the viewer is confronted with something they were not forewarned about, neither in the film’s description (there is no further scene advertised on their website), nor in the way the (not-yet-)closing credits are presented. What appears is a 3 × 3 split screen where nine men, all shown from the chest down and sitting on a chair, are in varying states of undress and masturbation. Each man masturbates before eventually ejaculating into the jar – which we immediately recognize from scene three. This suddenly explains where the 200 ‘POZ CUM’ loads came from. Each man ejaculates into the jar, gets dressed and leaves the camera shot, all as the scene fades to a close-up of the ‘POZ CUM’ jar, nearly fully populated with viral loads. The film ends.

Discussion and conclusion

In Disability Studies, it is a critical and well-established practice to comment upon the supposed invisibility of abledness against the hypervisibility of disability (McRuer 2003). In our alternative reading of Viral Loads, we have in some senses done the opposite: exposed the invisibility of disability in the context of HIV and pointed to the absent presence of dis/ability that haunts the barebacking community. Approaching disability as both a lived experience and an analytical category, we wanted to consider what Disability Studies and politics might add to conversations about bug chasing and gift giving in gay pornography, as well as to HIV discourse more broadly. While Dean (2009) notes the relevance of disability to HIV, he issues it as a passing aside, instead choosing to foreground homoerotic forms of kinship. In much the same way that Viral Loads gestures towards HIV’s proximity to disability while simultaneously disavowing HIV’s own potential for disablement, existing scholarship on barebacking and poz pornography tends to obfuscate or outright deny the possibility of queercrip solidarity in the context of HIV. This article is meant to reveal the grounds on which these disavowals and denials occur. What is it about the dynamics of the barebacking community that necessitate disability’s undesirability? How is it that the transmogrification of HIV into a gift to be given and chased can take place alongside the rehabilitative futurism implied by the scene Complete? Why is HIV something to want, whereas other disabilities are something to fix?

The answer, in part, may be that HIV’s desirability among bug chasers and gift givers is hinged on its exceptionality made possible by disability’s abjection. In order for HIV to remain desirable, particularly in the context of bareback pornography like Viral Loads, it must appear untouched by disability. The invisibility of the virus may be an obstacle for the visual demands of the genre of pornography, but its invisibility on the body – its apparent absence of symptoms – is key to its eroticization. At no point during Viral Loads is there any indication of HIV’s disabling potential, its capacity to develop into AIDS. The actors are all apparently healthy and, with the exception of Nick’s amputation, abled. This non-threatening, non-disabled portrayal of HIV must also be read alongside the overwhelming whiteness and cisgenderedness of the film’s actors. With the exception of one Black actor who appears midway through the film (and who is not named in the credits), all of the performers appear to be white and cis. These observations are worth noting, given that HIV is more common among racialized and trans people (Avert 2019, 2021). Shildrick (2019, 597) has suggested the term ‘bioprecarity’ to identify the risks of debilitation for particular precaritized bodyminds. For those with access to adequate healthcare, social support systems, and economic stability, HIV is a manageable condition and thus, even as a chronic illness, does not entail noticeable impairment or debilitation. For others, however, especially for those who are multiply marginalized and less likely to know their HIV status or have the necessary resources to treat it, HIV presents a real threat to liveability. In Viral Loads, HIV’s desirability is contingent on the assumption that it will not debilitate, much less kill. That all of the credited actors appear white, cis, and non-disabled is notable because it is only in the absence of racialization, transness, and visible disability that HIV can be stripped of its bioprecarity. The virus stays sexy so long as the viewer is not reminded of the populations for whom it continues to pose a consistent threat.⁴

This critique notwithstanding, we remain hopeful about the queercrip potential that lies nascent in the barebacking community and its pornography. There is something irresistible to how committed gift givers and bug chasers are to a crip erotic, even if they deny its cripness. There is something truly remarkable about the sheer size and complexity of the discourse that has emerged around barebacking – a discourse that just 30 years ago would have been unthinkable. It is true that many people with HIV may not associate themselves with the disability community, and it is not our intention to demand affiliation where it is not wanted. In this respect, we follow Linton’s (1998, 12) definition that ‘you are disabled if you say you are’. Yet we are also mindful of Grue’s (2017) observation that Disability Studies includes, considers, and theorizes many experiences among people who do not consider themselves to be disabled. So while we resist the impulse to dress poz people in a disability identity, we remain interested in the fantasy of queercrip community in the context of HIV. We remain turned on by the prospect of barebacking crip porn, where queers, crips, and extant queercrips openly chase and give disability. Admittedly, this fantasy of ours comes with conditions. It is a fantasy subtended by other fantasies of universal access to adequate healthcare, of a medical industry that has been emptied of its racism and cissexism, of a world where disability can be enviable because pain is manageable and access is everywhere. But these are fantasies through and through. We would be remiss to propose a crip eroticization of HIV or any other potentially disabling condition without also insisting on the liberation work that must accompany it. Sex, as many barebackers well know, is political (Rubin 2011).

But politics are also sexual. And this is the truth to which we cling in our lingering hope for queercrip filiation among gift givers and bug chasers. We do not deny the uneven distribution of HIV or the healthcare required to manage it. We do not ignore the legacy of ableism that pervades queer communities, including many poz folks. We do not suggest that solidarity is as simple as claiming a new identity category. All we believe is that bringing disability to bear on barebacking, on a practice and community where it already shifts in and out of focus, can gesture towards coalitional pleasures yet to be explored. Viral Loads shows in so many ways that disability is just outside the frame, waiting off camera to deliver a performance none of us can expect. Herein lies the tandem beauty and terror of any new solidarity: the risk of it not working, the hope that it will, the chance of it succeeding, the anxiety if it does. HIV has always been an uncertain virus that spreads with viral uncertainty. But as Viral Loads makes overwhelmingly evident, uncertainty is hot, no matter how many tries it takes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 It is surprising that HIV/AIDS rarely features in disability studies literature (see McRuer [2002a] and [Hrynyk 2021] for two noteworthy exceptions).

2 This perception stems from our viewing of the short film Hole (Edralin, dir. 2014). This film follows the relationship between Craig, a support worker, and Billy, a gay disabled man. Craig helps Billy visit gloryholes to suck men off. Perhaps unbeknownst to these men, Billy is presumed abled due to the accessibility issues attending to these gloryholes (Billy’s pursuit would perhaps be impossible without the support of Craig).

3 This refers to sucking semen out of someone’s ass (Tollini 2017).

4 Dean’s (2009) work is influential to this topic, yet it is worth noting that his analysis of queer barebacking in San Francisco – which is the basis of his book Unlimited Intimacy (2009) – is predominately focused on white men. See Bailey (2016) and Johnson (2016) for important critiques.