Very little has been written in the scientific literature about the practices involved in gift giving or how gift givers feel about engaging in these practices. 5 Gift giving, as with bug chasing, may be attributable, at least in part, to a desire for excitement, thrills, and rule breaking, which many people find sexually arousing. 4 Some scholars have claimed that medical advances that make HIV infection a chronic manageable disease rather than a condition that is likely to lead to short-term death have contributed to increases in bug chasing and gift giving behaviors, because some do not perceive HIV infection in themselves or their sex partners to be particularly problematic anymore. The increasing use of the Internet to find sex partners for barebacking is usually attributed to this rise. 2, 4 Recent evidence suggests that both bug chasing and gift giving are increasing in prevalence. If a distinction is made between committed or ardent gift givers – that is, those who are seeking to have sex only with confirmed HIV-negative sex partners – and passive or opportunistic gift givers – that is, those who wish to have sex with HIV-negative partners and/or with those whose HIV serostatus is unknown and unconfirmable – then the prevalence of gift givers in the barebacking population rises to 23-26%. 2-4 Bug chasers appear to outnumber gift givers by approximately 3:2 but limited research makes this ratio difficult to confirm. Both subgroups appear to be relatively small, comprising a total (bug chasers + gift givers) of anywhere from 1.0% to 9.7% of the overall population of barebacking MSM.
The latter is the focus of the present article. Little has been written in the scientific literature about bug chasers, and even less has been documented with regard to gift givers. The existence of these subgroups within the MSM barebacker culture has led some authors to conclude that bug chasers (and presumably gift givers as well) constitute an actual subculture within the broader grouping of barebacking men. The term gift giver derives from the notion that HIV-positive men have something special that can be cherished (the gift) that they can transmit to other men (giving). Bug chasers’ counterparts are known as gift givers: HIV-positive men who seek unprotected sex with HIV-negative partners, so that they can seroconvert their partners to being HIV-positive. Their active pursuit (chasing) of the HIV virus (bug) gives rise to their moniker. Bug chasers are HIV-negative men who actively seek unprotected sex with HIV-positive partners, so that they themselves can become HIV-infected. Two subgroups of the larger population of barebacking MSM are referred to as bug chasers and gift givers. Although the prevalence of barebacking is unknown among men who have sex with other men (MSM), this behavior is linked closely to the transmission of HIV in this population.
More work needs to be done to understand these behaviors, the factors that underlie them, and to determine how prevalent they are in the bare-backing population of MSM.īarebacking is a practice in which people purposely engage in unprotected anal sex. Most notably, to the extent that generationing, stealthing, and gift giving occur among MSM, they represent a very high risk of HIV transmission. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for HIV prevention and intervention efforts. Data were collected via telephone interviews conducted between January 2008 and May 2009. The research is based on a national random sample of 332 men who have sex with men, identified from 16 websites. The present study reports on the prevalence of gift giving (4.6%) in a population of men who use the Internet specifically to identify partners for unprotected sex. Stealthing is another type of gift giving in which an HIV-positive man actively tries to infect an HIV-negative man with HIV, without the latter’s knowledge or consent. Generationing is a type of gift giving in which one gift giver successfully infects a previously-uninfected man with HIV, and then the two men collaborate in an effort to seroconvert another man, and so forth.
In this paper, two specific types of gift giving – generationing and stealthing – are explained and introduced to the scientific literature. Little has been written about this HIV transmission practice. Gift giving is the process by which an HIV-positive person purposely infects an HIV-negative person with HIV, usually with that person’s knowledge and consent.