In the late '80s, public-health organizations in urban centers reacted to the AIDS epidemic by launching campaigns to eroticize safe sex. Gym-buffed hunks posed with condoms, and sultry-eyed models advertised the virtues of keeping a clear head by avoiding drugs and alcohol before sexual encounters. In the past couple of years, however, a specialized group of online meeting places has been created for men seeking potential sex partners who share their particular interest: sex without barriers -- also known as "barebacking" -- even between HIV-positive and HIV-negative men.
Most startlingly, a lexicon of new terms has been coined on the Net to describe men wishing to have unprotected sex. HIV-positive men are calling themselves "giftgivers" -- that is, men willing to give the "gift" of HIV -- while those seeking to have unprotected sex with HIV-positive men are called "bugchasers."
The father of these chilling neologisms, a software engineer from Dallas, hosts a site called Xtremesex, where giftgivers and bugchasers run personal ads. Other sites hail the joys of barebacking and offer unsafe-sex mailing lists free of cautionary talk of health risks.
The engineer, who wishes to be known only as Mike, is no stranger to the agonies and grief caused by HIV infection. Mike lost the man he calls his second husband to AIDS 12 years ago, back before the new mixtures of anti-viral drugs known as protease cocktails extended the lives of the infected for years. Mike's lover lived only six months after diagnosis.
HIV-positive himself, Mike launched Xtremesex three years ago after running into men in chat rooms on America Online who were "into fucking bareback as a fetish," he says. Heated debates over the practice of barebacking have exploded in the gay media in the last couple of years, most recently when New York-based POZ magazine put an attractive model on its cover riding a horse with no saddle.
Mike says the terms bugchaser and giftgiver just came to him. "They seemed to convey the precise mindset of the people involved" in looking for unprotected sex online.
A search on the terms in the AOL member directory confirms that Mike's jargon struck a nerve. One self-proclaimed blond bugchaser lists his marital status as "needing all your critters in me." A man from New York who calls himself a "pig for the nasty seed" says he's looking for "aggressive dudes with poz [positive] attitudes about sharing gifts." A Star Trek fan from San Diego specializes in "giving bugchasers the gift," while a 24-year-old declares he "loves spreading it."
Some of the personals on Xtremesex are even more outrageous, a public-health official's nightmare, such as one ad from a self-proclaimed speed addict with a yen for swapping all "toxic manfluids" and any sex and drug kink "this side of the wrecking ball."
If it all sounds a little too blood-curdling -- say, like a Blade Runner skin flick directed by the late William Burroughs -- the power of fantasy undoubtedly plays a strong role in the development of this community, says Eric Rofes, author of Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post-AIDS Identities and Cultures.
Rofes sees sites like Xtremesex in a lineage of self-conscious transgressiveness and erotic role-playing that is not limited to gay men.
"There have always been people -- heterosexual people, lesbians, as well as gay men -- who are drawn to transgressive acts and extreme sex like S&M," Rofes says. "Sites like these evolved out of phone sex as people found ways of realizing their desires that may or may not result in physical meetings."
Simulated participation in forbidden sex acts online, he observes, allows people to widen their ideas of what is erotic without actually endangering themselves or others.
Though courting infection would seem to be the ultimate extension of the bugchaser's fantasy, Mike refuses to run ads from HIV-negative "bottoms" seeking HIV-positive "tops." Most of the bugchasers listed on the site are already infected. Nor does Mike run ads from uninfected men seeking other uninfected men for unprotected sex. Mike says he filters out 10 to 15 ads from uninfected men a week.
"If they do that, the day will come when they get infected," he says. "They need to be slapped in the face and told, 'Here's what you're doing.'"
Many authorities believe that sex even between people who are already HIV-positive can be dangerous. Unprotected sex increases the risk of re-infection with mutated strains of HIV, and other infections perilous for those with suppressed immune systems can be passed along as well.
Xtremesex has a dark poetry of its own, with references to mystical union, and phrases like "accept my gift, my brother," floating in an X-Files-ish setting. Though discussion of AIDS, protease inhibitors, and protection strategies is not welcome on most areas of the site, Mike holds forth on the harsh realities of HIV infection in a section called Fact versus Fantasy.
"If your partner is uninformed about your [HIV] status or does not give informed consent for the activities you engage in with them," he writes, "then you are fucking lame, and now is the perfect time to grow up."
One of the reasons Mike stopped running ads from uninfected bottoms, he says, is that some of the correspondents were "very clearly not educated enough to make the decision" to participate in unprotected sex. Still, Mike gets email from extreme-sex devotees who accuse him of censorship and "selling out."
It's been a difficult year for Mike. He is regularly accused of being "evil incarnate" by self-appointed "saviors of society" who have never even seen the site, he says.
Last New Year's Eve day, Mike's lover of over eight years died suddenly and unexpectedly from a condition unrelated to HIV. He ponders his own level of complicity in creating an arena for the celebration of unsafe sex, but he believes that the behavior chronicled on the site would be occurring elsewhere, in other online communities.
"It's a forum that I have the talent, the Web-server space, and the inclination to provide," he says. "A sizeable segment of people just don't like sex with barriers."
Advocate editor Michelangelo Signorile, author of Life Outside, believes the dangers of unprotected sex are becoming "abstract" to a generation of gay men growing up in a time when protease cocktails would seem to have made HIV infection a survivable, manageable condition.
"They haven't seen their friends dying horribly in the hospital," he says. "People don't walk around telling each other about their [protease] regimens."
Though HIV-education programs have been highly successful in reducing the rates of new infections in cities like San Francisco, Signorile believes that one obstacle in getting gay men to feel that safer sex is hotter sex is the fact that sexual restraint is associated with repression.
"You're trying to institute safe sex in a group of people who've been told about control from a homophobic perspective," he says. "Transgression has been very much built into gay activism, from breaking out of boundaries and boxes to the metaphor of the closet itself."
As society becomes more accepting of gay people in the future, he says, "maybe transgression won't be the only way we can come out."
Signorile compares the "glamorization of barebacking" -- including the controversial POZ spread -- with splashy magazine covers about "girls who go all the way" in Cosmopolitan.
"The message is, these are the girls leading the exciting lives, and you're a wimp unless you can, too," he says.
The challenge for everyone, observes Rofes, is to "enact your desires -- no matter how transgressive -- with minimal risk to yourself and others. If you're a bugchaser who has a fantasy of getting infected, I'd rather you get infected in cyberspace."
