Bug Chasers: Who's Message?

Around cocktails the other night, Ronnie, MtD and I were discussing the "Bug Chaser" controversy. As this little piece of dung wrapped up as a "news story" had never assailed R's tender ears, he was unaware of the permanent damage done to our community as a result of sleazy, journalistic sensationalism and the quest to sell advertisements on the backs of PWAs.

The history of the story is simple. Jan Wenner, inveterate closet case and tabloid dirtbag extraordinaire published a piece in the February 2003 issue of Rolling Stone magazine proporting to spill the beans on a nasty little homo secret: The denizens of San Francisco's fetid "underground" nightlife have started a new trend of self-contamination with HIV. The nasty, shit-brown stain of raw buttfucking between serodiscordant partners has spread from the piss-soaked back alleys of The Castro to the world wide web, with its naferious obiquity, and thence into the bedrooms of American Youth. Oh the horror!

Quicker than you can say Chlamidia, this piece of rancid urban myth became the buzz of international media, with all the usual suspects pissing their puddle into the pool. Fellow closeted self-loather Matt Drudge posted a screaming headline on his website, claiming that a full 25% of all new cases of HIV in the City By The Bay were the result of a deliberate choice to be "seeded" with the virus. Reactionary wing-nuts such as Concerned Women of America and Focus On The Family used the article to demonize homos using Drudge's quote from the article. Salon.com even hauled out Andrew Sullivan, famed AIDS minimizer to try and counter some of the damage, but by then, the tired cliche had struck too many chords and the horses were not just out of the barn, but roaming the prairie.

Like practically every attempt by the mainstream media to report on the pandemic, this story has harmed many and enlightened no one. Conservatives of all ilk siezed on the article like a size queen in Harlem, dropping to her knees and thanking her lucky stars, referring to it in decrying the funding of prevention programs targeted to queers. The straights on the left wrung their hands feverishly, deconstructing twenty years worth of pandemic history wondering what went so terribly wrong. Gay moralists and marriage-happy heartlanders from Maine to Seattle uttered a resounding "tisk" at ghetto fags, puking out editorials on Condom Fatigue or that tired AIDS/Diabetes paradigm (all the while barebacking in the security of their "committed" relationships)and the evils of the Big Bad City.

At first even someone as depraved as yours truly was shocked. How, I wondered, could anyone actually want to seroconvert? As an AIDS widow and longtime activist the Bug Chasers seemed like sociopaths, committing a slow, ugly suicide. As someone living with HIV every minute of every day, I was crushed and demoralized at the thought of anyone actually seeking to become infected.

Then it dawned on me: This whole bullshit is yet another nail in the coffin of the joy of gay sex. It was a poisoned dart aimed squarely at the hardon of every poz top and the winking bunghole of every poz bottom. Eliminate any potential for sexual bliss amongst us, paint us as willing accomplices to some deranged psychotic in the quest to "gift" him out of his good health and seed the yearning multitudes with our toxic spew. Criminalize infection and lock up the sick so they can't spread the plague, and take a look at controlling the free dissemination of ideas on the internet while you're at it. Such irresponsible types have no use for liberty.

All this dovetails beautifully with the post-9/11 neo-con psyche. Paint the enemy, whether foreign or domestic, with the biggest and blackest brush available. Move in and take over another's culture, demonize the lot by citing absurd examples of the most terrible excesses of a very few, perform "moral cleansing" under the banner of Xtian dogma, justify the curtailment of freedom within a minority as the necessary measures needed to protect innocents. The volley was launched, and it was left to a few apologists to refute, their voices quickly lost in the cacauphany of outrage.

This entire tale reminds me overmuch of the superinfected Tina twink, Patient X who bravely bottomed in a drug-induced gangbang in the sewers of New York until she'd managed to go from healthy to "full-blown" AIDS in a matter of months. The supervirus, like Bigfoot and Nessie, is more the creation of heated minds than scientific fact. Were I of the mind and had I suffiecent volition, I could come up with a shocking expose on straight scatpigs or the ritual Satanic rape of virgin five year old girls. No one from the mainstream media whould attempt to condone such behavior, and it would be dismissed as a sad abberation, however tittilating.

So why is this merde still getting play years after it's been debunked? Because it is in the best interest of those in power to keep it in rotation. The example of out of control faggots, preferrably stoned on street-drugs, confirms the lowest expectations of anyone looking to castrate us. And that's really sick!