Viral breedings: HIV as pregnancy among bugchasers

ABSTRACT

Bugchasing is the fetishization of HIV among some gay men. Bugchasers, who thrive in online forums and social media, have generated complex subcultural narratives of the virus as a vehicle for intimacy, connection, and masculinity. While this practice has been addressed from public health and media studies, relatively little analysis has been conducted on their sex stories. In this article, I use the sex story ‘Andy is HIV+’ to explore how bugchasers appropriate the language of both HIV prevention and heterosexual reproduction to narrate new forms of vertical and horizontal kinship. These new forms are articulated through HIV infection: bugchasers ‘breed’ each other with their ‘poz babies’ and become ‘brothers’ and ‘lovers’. While other scholars have already discussed bugchasing kinship, I explore the practical implementation of these forms of relationality to address existing gaps in the literature.

In the second part of this article, I also complicate existing research on bugchasing kinship by considering how the fictional nature of the materials under analyses problematizes our theoretical developments and our assumptions about the men producing the texts. In particular, I suggest that theoretical research on kinship should be accompanied by in-depth consideration of how fictional narratives translate into lived experience.

KEYWORDS:

• HIV
• masculinity
• queer
• family
• bugchasing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Jaime García-Iglesias is a PhD candidate in sociology at The University of Manchester. His research explores bugchasers’ motivations, their social relations and their use of social media and PrEP through online ethnography, interviews and creative writing. He has a background in English (University of Oviedo, Spain) and Critical Theory (University of Nottingham). He is particularly interested in HIV and its role in gay sexuality, creative writing methods, stigma and taboo practices, and the use of online technologies for sexual wellbeing.

Notes

1 ‘Bottom’ refers to the receptive partner in anal intercourse, ‘top’ to the penetrative partner.

2 The forum excerpts have not been edited, but usernames have been modified for anonymity. The stories are publicly available online.

3 Effective anti-retroviral medications make it possible for people living with HIV to manage the replication of the virus in their bodies and, in many cases, attain ‘undetectable’ status, meaning they cannot pass the virus onto others. PrEP—pre-exposure prophylaxis—is an HIV prevention strategy that uses anti-retroviral medication to protect HIV-negative people from the virus. People take PrEP when at risk of exposure to prevent infection if exposed (Peabody & Nutland, 2018). Unlike anti-retroviral therapies used to treat someone living with HIV, which have to be taken for the rest of a person’s life once infected, PrEP is only advised for people during periods of risk of HIV (Carlo Hojilla et al., 2016).

4 Strategic positioning is the act of choosing different sexual ‘positions’ (e.g. receptive or penetrative partner in anal intercourse) depending on the partners’ HIV status, as different positions imply different risks of transmission. Serosorting is the practice of choosing sexual partners based on HIV status or perceived status.

5 Gift-giver is a term used by bugchasers to refer to men living with HIV who infect others.

6 ‘Twink’ is gay slang to refer to young (or young-looking) men, generally with little to no body hair or beard, and slim build.

7 Due to the latency period (between infection and potential diagnosis) of HIV and the number of partners that Andy has in the story, it would be impossible to determine reliably the source of infection. Phylogenetic testing (which tests for similarities between two people’s HIV viruses) can identify similar viruses but is not yet proven to identify directionality of infection (see http://i-base.info/htb/31573 for the latest updates on this [last accessed February 24, 2020]).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the School of Social Sciences at The University of Manchester and by the Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at The University of Nottingham. Special thanks to Dr Hongwei Bao and Dr Sebastian Mohr.