‘Re-crisis’: Barebacking,sex panic and the logic of epidemic

Abstract

Since the ‘AIDS Crisis’ of the 1980s and early 1990s, the combination of sex between men and epidemic disease has been fertile territory for the production of sex panic. This essay examines a 2007 outburst of Australian news media sex panic surrounding a case of the alleged reckless infection of persons with HIV/AIDS and the controversial practices of anal sex without condoms, or ‘barebacking’. The rhetorical inflations surrounding these sexual spectacles may be understood via a model of biopolitical governmentality that Linda Singer (1993) called ‘the logic of epidemic’. I draw on both Singer's model and work on sex panic to describe this news coverage as an instance of what I call ‘re-crisis’. ‘Re-crisis’ involves the revivification of the discourses of an earlier moment of AIDS representation in the service of new cultural and institutional modes of managing HIV/AIDS under neoliberal conditions and in the transformed contexts of HIV/AIDS ‘post crisis’, which has evolved since the advent of antiretrovirals (c. 1996).

Keywords

Barebacking governmentality HIV/AIDS re-crisis sex panic

Introduction

When used consistently and correctly, latex condoms are widely recognized as one of several practices that effectively prevent the transmission of HIV. Since this knowledge has been widespread, the very idea of anal sex between men without latex has been saturated in the semantics of risk. For those who can access them, antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) have shifted the meaning of an HIV notification from one of almost certain death to one of a chronic but largely ‘manageable’ illness. Nonetheless, contemplating HIV seroconversion remains a contemplation of both historical and contemporary stigma, illness and potential death. As Cheuvront (2002: 8) writes, it ‘scare[s] up feelings of sadness, loss, anger, dread, guilt, and hopelessness’. Anal sex between men is itself already a practice with a long history of unspeakable, abject and identity-spoiling meanings; in the age of HIV/AIDS, it has become an even more over-determined signifier. In spite of the complex and varied situations in which anal sex without condoms occurs (situations with varied risk of HIV exposure), the practice of bareback sex tout court has become the subject of excited discussion and episodes of public anxiety that cultural historians and queer theorists call ‘sex panic.’¹

The popular fascination with barebacking is certainly not on par with the AIDS panic of the 1980s and early 1990s. In the global north, the sense of ‘crisis’ around HIV/AIDS has well and truly waned, although arguably this state of crisis has itself become chronic. Sexual spectacle and the ‘dramaturgy’ of sex panic (Irvine, 2008: 16–20) has become a quotidian and somewhat banal feature of the landscape of everyday media culture. Anxiety, outrage and disgust are routinely mobilized in response to a range of sexual phenomenon, from paedophilia to ‘pornification’, hook-up culture, non-Western gender relations, sex tourism and the internet, to note a handful of examples. The rhetorical inflations around barebacking recall the sex panic of an earlier cultural moment. They re-animate a cultural discourse of crisis – a remembering of AIDS crisis discourses, or a ‘re-crisis’ – and this ‘re-crisis’, I suggest, becomes a central logic around which the management of bodies and practices occurs. Bareback panic becomes central to the system of biopolitical governmentality that Singer (1993) called ‘the logic of epidemic’.

In this essay I examine the Australian sex panics surrounding barebacking and reckless infection in 2007 and situate these as part of the reactionary model of governmentality that Singer described. In the journalism of sex panic, anal sex without condoms was produced as a spectacular, outré sexual practice and a behaviour calling for regulatory intervention. The anxiety and repulsion roused by these rhetorical inflations – and the subsequent institutional interventions that were, I suggest, partly a response to these inflations – can be explained by what I call ‘re-crisis’. Supplementing Singer's model, ‘re-crisis’ involves the revivification of the language and images of an earlier moment of AIDS representation in the service of what Race (2007a: 11), among others, has recognized is a neoliberal shift from public health models of managing HIV toward an ‘increasing enthusiasm for criminal prosecution’, ‘escalating styles of social government’ and the ‘undermining of collective responsibility, social support and education’. An examination of media coverage and the contexts of its emergence suggest that these shifts in the management of HIV respond, at least in part, to the crisis of representation instantiated in both HIV/AIDS and anal sex, collapsed here under the sign of ‘barebacking’.

Barebacking

There are now highly evolved debates surrounding the definition and meaning of ‘bareback’. This literature is too extensive to explain here in detail; however, a brief overview of some semantic variations will provide a useful illumination of the case study to follow. The meanings of the terms ‘barebacking’, ‘bug chasing’ and ‘breeding’ are not always straightforward and, as we shall see, conflations, elisions, misuse and lack of qualification are some of the central rhetorical tools of sex panic scripts.

Anal sex taboos long predate HIV/AIDS, but the frisson of the term ‘barebacking’ is specific to the history of the pandemic. It is the fusion of condomless anal sex with notions of wilful intention, risk of HIV seroconversion and a recognized sexual identity that has made the term meaningful. Although men have doubtlessly had sex without condoms throughout the age of AIDS, barebacking became a visible practice after the advent of antiretroviral treatments (c. 1996) and the transformed perceptions of HIV infection they brought about (Davis, 2002). The term is of course derived from the equestrian world where ‘bareback’ refers to horseriding unsaddled, and is associated with experienced horsemanship and an enhanced riding pleasure derived from the added thrill of an increased risk of injury. ‘Bug chasing’, which is associated – and sometimes conflated – with barebacking, refers to condomless anal sex performed intentionally in order to expose oneself to potential HIV infection. The latter is often partnered with the term ‘gift giving’, denoting sex intentionally performed to expose another person to HIV. These practices are sometimes encompassed together in the shorthand ‘breeding’ (see Dean, 2009).

Unsurprisingly, the occurrence of these practices is far more complex than the foregoing definitions suggest. In aid of a more nuanced discussion, Junge (2002: 189–190) proposed six conceptual axes around which variations of the term ‘bareback’ can play out. These axes include: intention (i.e. does barebacking denote any anal sex without condoms or does it only describe the conscious discarding of them?); consensus among partners; the serostatus of the partners (are they both negative? both positive? sero-discordant?); the distinction between fantasy and practice; and, the distinction or lack of distinction between sexual practices and sexual identities. The latter underpins the tendency to glide unselfconsciously between barebacking and the barebacker, a slippage that bedevils discussions of condomless anal sex in spite of decades of efforts by HIV educators to transform representations of sexual risk from a characterological model (‘risky persons’ or ‘groups’) to a behavioural model (‘risky practices’). The elusive categories of behaviour and affect render the task of defining barebacking even more complex. Orange (2002: 48), for example, argues that risk-taking is not a ‘behaviour’ at all, but the ‘property of a relational system’ – not a discrete ‘conceptual atom’ available for isolated analysis, but the upshot and the agent of complex historical and interpersonal contexts. While researchers increasingly agree that the relationships between acts, feelings and meanings in sex are important (Adam et al., 2005; Crossley, 2004; Davis, 2002; Ridge, 2004), these intersubjective contexts are contingent, dynamic and rapidly changing.

Merely defining what ‘bareback sex’ is, therefore, can be a fraught process, and one that has rarely been free of moral adjudications. For example, Race (2007b) has pointed out that behaviour labelled ‘barebacking’ may often also be ‘serosorting’ – that is, consciously seeking condomless sex with partners who are of the same HIV status as oneself. Serosorting is now widely recognized as an effective mode of HIV risk reduction. Both ‘barebacking’ and ‘serosorting’ are sex acts that deliberately eschew condoms but they have different connotations. For the serosorted (monogamous) couple, barebacking may be a mundane, even normative sex practice; elsewhere, it's a scandal. ‘It is telling’, Race observes, ‘that the valorization of serosorting … rests on the ultimate erasure of gay anal sex as well as an invocation of matrimonial norms’ (2007b: 111). Race's distinction here reminds us that sexual labels and categories have affective and material implications, and very often function to distinguish between types of sexual personae and practices positioned on a hierarchical spectrum of risk, normativity and responsibility that recalls the ‘erotic pyramid’ identified by Rubin (1984: 279), in which the ‘prudent conjugal couple’ are always in the ‘charmed circle’ at or close to the top of the hierarchy.

The ever-expanding literature on barebacking has been an extremely fertile site, instigating ‘discussions about the meanings of gay male sexuality and epidemic disease … the articulation of new sexual identities … [and] the ongoing complexities of HIV prevention’ (Junge, 2002: 210). This archive of sociological, anthropological, epidemiological, psychological and queer research, as well as op-ed and journalistic accounts in gay community and mainstream publications may be considered a discursive field of sex talk in the manner that Foucault famously described in The History of Sexuality (1976). We might, I suggest, consider barebacking literature as a contemporary strain of ‘sexology’ inasmuch as sexology has traditionally been interested in ‘dysfunctions’ and ‘variations’ of sexual behaviour – bringing aberrance into increased visibility and specificity. A pathologizing and taxonomizing sexology was one of the central disciplines Foucault identified in the ‘scientia sexualis’, ‘the machinery of power’ underwriting the modern system of sex (1976: 44). To be fair, contemporary researchers are often acutely aware that such knowledge production is implicated in the maintenance of certain power structures and the creation of other as yet unrecognized ones. That said, some studies are surprisingly pathologizing: Moskowitz and Roloff (2007: 22), for example, reported ‘the results of a study that casts bug chasing as symptomatic of sexual addiction’; they found that ‘bug chasers are suffering at the most severe level’ (2007: 26). Tewksbury claims to have provided ‘the most complete profile of bug givers and bug chasers to date’ (2006: 390). Apart from illustrating the impulse to code and organize aberrant sexual bodies and behaviours, the function of such profiling remains questionable (see Dean, 2009: 71). The fascination with condomless anal sex and seroconvertive discourses is indicative of the way in which, as Adam (1992, cited in Altman, 1996: 105) writes, ‘AIDS has ushered in a further development of sexual speech which cannot but partake of the larger twentieth century “obsession” with sexuality and its colonizing by the professions, the media and the state’.

The influence of the sexological is discernible wherever condomless anal sex is approached as an epidemiological, cultural or psychological riddle. As Tomso (2004: 90) argues, accounts of barebacking, from pop journalism to qualitative social research, often respond to the organizing question ‘What makes them do it?’ Why, that is, do men who are aware of the potential risks involved continue to fuck without condoms? Answers to this question are about as manifold as the definitions of ‘bareback’ are varied, but the epistemological framing remains the same: the ‘why do they do it?’ question apprehends barebacking as a problem or mystery in need of solving.

The briefest foray into some of the explanations that have been offered will, however, also help to analyse the case study to follow. Early accounts explained barebacking as complacency, ‘safe sex fatigue’ or the failure of health promotion to change with the times (Crossley, 2004: 225). Barebacking is also given a historical and technological elaboration by somatechnical developments, including drugs and other techniques of disease management (Kippax and Race, 2003). Psycho-social accounts have explained the disregarding of condoms as the effect of a ‘mangled social identity’ that is a symptom of gay men's problematic socialization in a homophobic society and the historical trauma of HIV/AIDS (Odets, 1995; Rofes, 1998). More profitable, I suggest, are universalizing studies that consider dominant ideologies in addition to subcultural practice. Adam (2005: 334), for example, argues that barebackers ‘adapt some of the major tenets of neoliberal ideology by combining notions of informed consent, contractual interaction, free market choice, and responsibility in new ways’. Other researchers (Carballo-Diéguez, 2001; Ridge, 2004) have looked to the function of masculinity in barebackers’ self-reported descriptions of sex and identities organized around barebacking. Particularly fruitfully, Dowsett et al. (2008: 131) found a complex recalibration of masculinities and endless possibilities for ‘doing gay’ in the online world of popular bareback sites. They call for a queer ‘rethink[ing of] how gender and sexuality intersect’ based on the variety of gendered orientations their research uncovered (2008: 135), orientations that include the (re)construction of gay men's subjectivity in terms of the desiring anus (2008: 130), models of relationality that are not ‘easily mapped onto heteronormative expectations’, and the decentring of the penis (2008: 135). Radical interpretations of bareback have also been offered in queer, psychoanalytic and biopolitical critiques, where bareback has become a complex topos for a rejuvenated and very situated queer theory.²

There is large diversity of accounts seeking to explain condomless anal sex between men. The complexity of registers involved – subjective, (sub)cultural, biological, affective, epidemiological, historical and commercial – make it impossible that any one account could sufficiently explain it. As Watney famously wrote (1987: 9): ‘AIDS is not only a medical crisis on an unparalleled scale, it involves a crisis of representation itself, a crisis over the entire framing of knowledge about the human body and its capacities for sexual pleasure’. The outbursts of sex panic surrounding barebacking – in addition to the explosion of research into it – are themselves an example of ongoing crises of representation that have come to constitute the history of HIV/AIDS.

Against the type of nuance that has emerged from the discussions just reviewed, a cruder portrayal of bareback emerges from mainstream journalism. In this arena, barebacking has often been conflated with breeding and has been portrayed as the practice of a subculture of gay men who are reckless, murderous and/or suicidal. In the coverage of the 2007 Neal hearings, condomless and seroconvertive sex practices were framed in the sensational spotlight of a recrudescence of AIDS crisis discourses – a ‘re-cisis’. Though there are transformations in these discourses, as I will point out, the coverage recalled AIDS media from the 1980s and 1990s, suggesting that the ‘dirty little story of gay male promiscuity and irresponsibility’ (Crimp, 1988: 241) is still marketable.

The Neal hearings

In 2007 the terms ‘barebacking’ and ‘bug chasing’ began to appear in mainstream Australian media during the coverage of a controversial criminal case of the alleged reckless infection of persons with HIV. Though discussions of barebacking had existed in the gay community and among AIDS Service Organizations (ASOs) for some time, this coverage was the first sustained account of a subculture of gay men (and non gay-identified MSM) deliberately engaging in condomless anal sex that crossed over into mainstream news media.³ The topic was not handled delicately. At the nucleus of the controversy were the legal hearings of Melbourne man, Michael John Neal, whom journalists nicknamed ‘HIV man’ and who was at that time alleged to have knowingly and recklessly attempted to infect at least 16 men with HIV between 2000 and 2006. The terms ‘barebacking’, ‘bug chasing’ and ‘breeding’ began appearing in news reports, features and editorials, where they were conflated with both the emergent criminal category of the ‘reckless infector’ and with a reported 25-year record high in Victorian state HIV notifications. ‘Reckless transmission’ and ‘escalating epidemic’ were collapsed under the sign of ‘bareback’.

The hearings coverage provided considerable mileage for the production of a renewed moral panic surrounding sex between men and HIV/AIDS, presenting consensual anal sex without condoms as high-risk, criminal, sexually violent and a form of self-harm. Parts of the coverage extrapolated these characteristics to gay men in general, though for the most part it developed the image of a seething subculture of sexual outlaws, siphoning off the once-illicit aspects of homosexuality into the new identities of barebacker, bug chaser and breeder. This mirrors a broader tendency to distinguish between responsible, good gay citizens and reckless bad queers, a hierarchical distinction that is in part an effect of the neoliberal management and representation of responsibility and safer sex, but also the effect of the broader culture of homonormativity (see Warner, 1999). To unpack these trends, I draw here on print and online reports and editorials published between March and May of 2007 in two major Australian daily newspapers, The Age and the Herald Sun. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, one of Australia's largest diversified media companies, The Age is a broadsheet newspaper targeted at an ‘influential and discerning audience’ that, at the time, reached approximately 668,000 readers each week (The Age: Audience, 2011). Its competitor, the Herald Sun, a morning tabloid published by The Herald and Weekly Times (a subsidiary of News Limited, itself a subsidiary of News Corporation), is still the highest circulating daily newspaper in Australia. If these newspapers’ coverage was reminiscent of the panic discourses of the 1980s and early 1990s, this suggests that AIDS crisis discourse has an afterlife – an ongoing currency and utility in the altered political, cultural and epidemiological scene of ‘post-crisis’ (see Sothern, 2006). A key feature of this afterlife is the still somewhat irresistible popular ‘fascination with gay sex as an erotics of suicide and murder’ (Tomso, 2004: 89). However, there are also transformations in these discussions that reflect shifts in the understanding and management of HIV.

In March 2007, 48-year-old Neal went before the Victorian magistrate's court facing charges of attempting to infect at least 16 men with HIV between 2000 and 2006 while he was subject to Department of Human Services (DHS) orders not to have unprotected sex or attend public places where men have sex with men (Medew, 2007a). Neal was charged with attempting to infect a person with a serious disease, intentionally infecting a person, rape, reckless conduct and possession of child pornography (Medew, 2007a). He allegedly had unprotected sex with 200 men in one year (Gould, 2006). From the outset, journalists covering the hearings also noted that increases in Victorian HIV notifications were at a 20-year record high. In one article, the 17% increase from the previous year was noted just after a witness's testimony that Neal had targeted teenage boys in toilet blocks in order to ‘breed’ them (Medew, 2007a). Throughout the coverage, the reckless infection allegations and Victoria's escalation in HIV notifications were repeatedly connected (Kissane and Medew, 2007; Medew, 2007b, 2007c; Medew and Kissane, 2007; Roberts, 2007a), reinforcing a cause and effect logic in which ‘reckless’, condomless sex was responsible for increasing rates of HIV.

From the earliest reports, barebacking and breeding were also associated with the idea of recruitment. At the first committal hearing, prosecutor Mark Rochford said that ‘in conversations and other material Mr Neal has demonstrated an intention to infect people with HIV’; ‘He indicated’, the Prosecutor continued, ‘that his reasons for doing that is for more people [to be] introduced to a particular group of HIV-infected persons actively participating in unprotected, or “bareback” … sex.”’ Neal allegedly held ‘conversion parties’ where he offered crystal methamphetamine to HIV-negative men who were ‘targeted for deliberate sero-conversion’ (Herald Sun, 2007). ‘Deadly Party Game’ (Roberts, 2007a) reported that ‘an HIV positive man organized sex orgies known as “conversion parties” where gay men would be recruited and deliberately infected with the deadly disease’; ‘Mr. Neal also bragged about “making 75 people pos” and referred to one lover as “Daddy's little pos boy”’. Neither of these reports explained that HIV is not necessarily ‘deadly’. Using the online name ‘filth pig Melbourne’, Neal ‘lured men on gay websites’, he ‘was a regular at several Melbourne gay “sex-on-site” venues … and was involved in a lifestyle of sexual deviance, rampant drug use and sexual maliciousness’ (Roberts, 2007a). The coverage reported a witness's testimony that Neal had hosted a conversion party at which ‘a 15-year-old boy was injected with crystal methamphetamine and then “bred” by about fifteen HIV-positive men’ (Robinson, 2007c).

The Herald Sun ran the statements of Neal's former lover that constituted the first ‘bug chaser’ as a speaking subject:

[A] gay man has admitted in court [to] harbouring fantasies about becoming HIV positive, years before he was diagnosed with the virus …

‘([T]he fantasy) was intermittent. Most of the time I had a rational approach to remaining (HIV) negative and at other times I had other inclinations … I didn't set out to become HIV positive but my will to remain (HIV) negative had lapsed on some occasions.’ (Roberts, 2007b)

The man admitted to having unprotected sex with Neal in moments of ‘passion and intoxication’ but didn't blame Neal for exposing him to HIV, saying ‘anything I did with the defendant at any time was consensual’. He added that there were HIV negative men in the gay community dubbed ‘bug chasers’ who actively set out to become infected ‘so they could indulge in sex with other infected men without fear of catching the virus’ (Roberts, 2007b). Another of Neal's partners – one of six men that Neal allegedly dominated – testified that he had been registered as a dog with the local council as a sign of commitment in their master-slave relationship. The man reported being tricked by Neal who assured him that he couldn't transmit HIV because of his low viral load (Robinson, 2007d).

As the coverage also reported, Neal used ropes, slings, snooker and golf balls and pegs during sex (Robinson, 2007a). He allegedly wore a ‘genital meat grinder’ – a large penis piercing – in order to damage his partners’ tissue and thus increase the likelihood of HIV transmission during unprotected sex (Robinson, 2007e). Police discovered child pornography at Neal's home, including a photograph of him standing beside his six-month-old grandson's cot with ejaculate in his hand. A tendered report from a psychiatrist testified that Neal was ‘the most evil man’ he had seen ‘in 20 years’ (see Robinson, 2007b). The court heard that Neal himself deliberately contracted HIV by having sex on the altar of a Catholic Church with two men he knew were HIV positive (Robinson, 2007e). By the end of March 2007, magistrate Peter Reardon ruled that there was sufficient evidence for a jury to possibly convict Neal of 106 charges and he was committed to stand trial in the Victorian county court. When Neal was brought to trial in June/July 2008, the jury found him guilty on 15 counts, including nine of attempting to infect a person with HIV, two of rape, three of reckless conduct endangering a person and one of procuring sex by fraud. In October 2008, Neal was sentenced to 18 years and nine months jail with a non-parole period of 13 years.

‘HIV man’

The portrait of Michael Neal that emerged from the hearings coverage was of a monstrous, hybrid type of sex offender – a polymorphous composite of deviant and criminal personae including drug user and pusher, paedophile, rapist, S/M practitioner and reckless infector. Because Neal was identified as both a father and grandfather, and because of the recurring trope of youth recruitment, there was a strong whiff of intergenerational sex. While it is not clear whether Neal identified as bisexual, bisexuality as a vector of disease (its ‘crossing over’ from the homosexual to the heterosexual community) has a potent history in AIDS discourses. The intimations of both bisexuality and intergenerational desire made Neal seem omnivorous and particularly contaminating. The coverage also presented someone insidiously mobile: Neal had two houses, regularly attended nightclubs and sex-on-premises venues and prowled the viral, difficult to police realms of cyberspace. His Gaydar profile photo (see Figure 1) functioned in the coverage as a kind of self-produced mug shot, reproduced much like an artefact of colonial anthropology or criminology. His much fixated upon ability to have sex with hundreds of partners and to seduce men into subordinate roles in S/M-style relationships suggests a charismatic and almost mind-controlling power.

Figure 1.

‘Seedy World Unravels’, Herald Sun, 31 March 2007.

Organizing these disparate deviant and criminal tropes and types into a semi-unified whole is the category of the ‘AIDS Monster’, a spectacular figure who moves beyond the pale of quotidian sex crime into the exceptional cultural space reserved for monstrosity. In Notorious H.I.V, Shevory (2004) examines the media of moral panic surrounding a 1997 USA case of reckless HIV transmission. The case involved a young African American man called Nushawn Williams who allegedly perpetrated reckless transmissions in heterosexual encounters. In contrast to the Neal coverage, where Neal's whiteness remained uncommented on, the Williams case demonstrates how racialized epidemic sex panic can be. Beyond this key difference, the Williams case sheds some light on the production of the ‘AIDS Predator’ (Shevory, 2004: ix) in the Neal case – both examples illustrate the transformation of a ‘real life’ alleged criminal into an imagined cultural monster. How is it that the alleged reckless infector crosses over into the special realm of monstrosity, and what role does HIV/AIDS play in this transformation? In the Neal coverage there are myriad forces at work, including the long entangled history of homosexuality and the Gothic monster, and the perception of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus as itself a malevolent force. In the Neal case, the AIDS Monster is a queer type of social menace because of its perceived disruption of the status quo. The meanings – or, rather, the utter meaninglessness – attributable to HIV (see Williamson, 1989) plays a part in what propels these figures of sexual, racial and criminal deviance from the banal to the extraordinary, from garden-variety sex criminal to ‘AIDS Monster’.

Early AIDS representations borrowed from Gothic literary conventions and from the fin-de-siècle monsters and vampires of the Decadent novel. Images of the (gay male) Person With AIDS (PWA) drew from a lineage that included the decadent anti-hero of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), a text with a privileged connection to the figuration of male homosexuality in western culture. The portrayal of Neal recalls these ‘Dorianesque’ characteristics, including: a proximity to drugs, violence, perverse sex and other identity-spoiling vices; an unfixed gender-of-object-choice; intergenerational sexual relations; a super-human promiscuity; irresistible powers of seduction; and, a complete abandonment of the moral self to the pleasure principle that has homicidal effects. Neal's lovers’ testimonies also invoke the seductive, lascivious vampire, a figure with the capacity to blur the paradigm of criminal/victim by refiguring the latter as unable or unwilling to resist (Neal's partners exposed themselves to him/HIV consensually). Indeed, the Neal media spectacle recalls Hanson's (1991: 325) critique of AIDS crisis media as a discourse peopled with ‘spectacular images of the abject’ and a ‘late Victorian vampirism’: gay men and PWA were depicted as ‘sexually exotic, alien, unnatural, oral, anal, compulsive, violent, polymorphic, polysemous, invisible, soulless, superhumanly mobile, infectious, murderous [and] suicidal’. Not only can Neal apparently move between places, persons, generations and sexual categories, but because of the advent of HIV medications, he does not die. The extended temporal horizon of HIV brought about by the advent of ARVs revives the vampiric metaphor – the idea of death inhabiting life.

Extending the picture of monstrosity, the recurring use of the name ‘HIV man’ suggests a desire to personify HIV, recalling the ‘Patient Zero’ and ‘superspreader’ mythologies of AIDS and other epidemics. In journalistic and fictional crime genres, abstract monikers are often used to describe serial killers, child abductors, sex criminals and fictional super villains. The latter is often a single genius or sociopath imagined to be the central architect of social dis-ease, despite the fact that these phenomena can never be reduced to the machinations of a single individual.

‘Re-crisis’

The coverage of the Neal hearings gave way to the discussion of a seedy underworld, a subculture of reckless barebackers, suicidal bug chasers, murderous gift-givers, and an entourage of risky-sex-addicted, drug-addled gay men. The terms barebacking and bug chasing emerged from the coverage as signifiers of a criminal and pathological (homo)sexuality that connects HIV/AIDS, risk and perverse sexuality in a chain of metonymy. Though these conflations recalled earlier AIDS representations, this newer sex panic responded to the changing technologies and identities of the pandemic. In particular, the earlier depiction of gay men as AIDS victims, as infected, was recalibrated somewhat to gay men as infectors.

Bug chasing became fertile territory for the heightened language of sex panic. An article called ‘Seedy world unravels’ (Roberts, 2007c – see Figure 1) reported that:

detectives had little knowledge of the Pandora's Box they were about to unlock when they began investigating a Melbourne grandfather over child pornography charges in May … What appeared to be a run-of the-mill investigation turned out to be a much wider probe that took police on an eye-opening journey through the seedy underbelly of Melbourne's gay community … It opened up a perverse world of high-risk sex where the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, HIV, was often an accepted risk, sometimes worn by carriers, such as Mr Neal, as a badge of honour … Exposed was a bizarre culture inhabited by ‘bug chasers’ – healthy men actively seeking to be infected with HIV – and ‘breeders’ who infected them at depraved ‘conversion parties’ … One by one, a procession of shirt-and-tie professionals detailed a lewd lifestyle far removed from their daytime occupations as lawyers, tram drivers, teachers, nurses and computer technicians.

Here, knowledge of how HIV may be sexually transmitted between men, as well as unsubtle anal puns like ‘wider probe’ and ‘opened up’, places the scandalous but unmentionable image of sodomy centrally in mind. The Pandora reference invokes the exotic, ‘bizarre’ nature of these sexual practices, as does the portrayal of an underground culture (‘seedy world’; ‘seedy underbelly’; ‘perverse world’) – an only partially visible spectacle, rendered more titillating through this mode of keyhole peeping. The seedy underworld is positioned in stark opposition (‘far removed’) to the daytime respectability of ‘shirt-and-tie’ professionalism – the benign, quotidian occupations of the witnesses.

The reader is solicited to consume the spectacular image of (condomless) anal sex – the ‘black hole’ of AIDS discourse’ (Edelman, 1994: 105, 114) – at the centre of this narrative in a mode of spectatorship that is surveillant and voyeuristic. In a familiar line-up of risky personae, Neal's photo was published beside an image of Solomon Mwale, a Zambian-born migrant who was then also facing charges of reckless infection. Another story of HIV and boundary trespassing (African migration to Australia), the intersecting coverage of the Mwale case symbolically linked criminal sexualities with criminal migration, creating another gendered, racialized and geo-politically specific AIDS Monster.

A breakout quote from a ‘veteran police officer’ models the implied reader response: ‘I had no thoughts about how wide this issue was until investigating the matter. I’d describe it as surprisingly shocking’. The tautology, ‘surprisingly shocking’, is almost a breakdown in language's capacity to register the sexual phenomenon under discussion – a literal crisis of representation. As is the typical convention of sex panic, what the actual phenomenon is remains somewhat opaque: is ‘this issue’ that has spread so ‘wide’ the culture of men engaging in condomless anal sex, the seedy gay underground more broadly, or the HIV pandemic? There are numerous slippages here, as the descent into the dark and corrupting spaces of a gay underworld are conflated with the mysterious, abject space of the anus.

‘Seedy world’ paints an impressionistic portrait of a ‘perverse world’, a clandestine, unregulated, sexual underground whose capacity to nurture epidemics is based on the idea that sexualities are shaped by the contingencies of environment (Davidson, 2005: 23). Sexual demonization is cultivated through ‘deeply unpleasant sensory images’ and what Miller (1998) calls ‘the idiom of disgust’ (quoted in Irvine, 2008: 20). These images recall the ‘expose-like mode’ of ‘ghetto noir’ (Davidson, 2005: 58), in which the point of identification is typically that of the law enforcer encountering the criminal underworld firsthand. Simultaneously ethnographic and hardboiled investigation, the generic qualities of ‘ghetto’ or ‘homosexual noir’ function to ‘extract a substantial frisson quotient from their revelatory strategies’; they are prompted by and contribute to the increased ‘visibility of urban gay culture’ (Davisdon, 2005: 26). This combination of enhanced surveillance and the pleasure of looking combine to produce the ‘palpable frisson of pleasure’ that Irvine (2008: 10) identifies as a key emotion in the production of sex panic. Recalling the dynamic that Foucault called ‘the pleasure of the pleasure of surveillance’, emotions ‘not only attract individuals to moral conflicts such as sex panics … they may perpetuate them’ through the pleasures of augmented sociality, the ‘passionate emotional arousal’ and the sense of righteousness promoted by moral sentiments (Irvine, 2008: 10).

This inflated style of reportage also developed over a series of editorials in which authors drew generalizations about a particular contingency of the gay community in the context of rising HIV infections. An investigative article ran on the front of The Age’s Saturday ‘Insight’ supplement called ‘Dance with Death’ with a by-line reading: ‘AIDS: Recent criminal charges over the alleged deliberate spreading of HIV have called public safety into question and exposed a worrying subculture within the gay community’ (Kissane and Medew, 2007, see Figure 2). The feature was typeset around the image of a fraying HIV awareness ribbon dangling from the scythe of the Grim Reaper, combining Australia's two most recognizable AIDS images.⁴ The image seems anachronistic but is potent in its capacity to remind Australian readers of a terrifying public campaign from a moment when AIDS was a source of sexual terror. It is an almost literal instance of discursive return, or ‘re-crisis’.

Figure 2.

‘Dance with Death’, The Age, 21 April 2007.

The ‘Dance with Death’ exposé is primarily based on the testimony of one anonymous gay man and one anonymous HIV worker. The anonymous HIV worker asserts that probably at least 50% of HIV positive gay men will not disclose their HIV status before having sex with you. Despite the fact that this does not mean the partners of these non-disclosers are being exposed to HIV (they may be using condoms; they may have negotiated other practices that don't involve disclosure), this assertion leads to another unverifiable assertion: ‘The majority of people that I have known have all been recklessly infected’. The alarming generalization is that sexually active HIV positive men are reckless and dissembling. Though this charge is then contradicted by several quoted and named experts in the HIV sector, the anonymous worker accounts for this contradiction by claiming that the sector propagates a public relations line that denies the existence of the bug-chasing culture. The implication is that corruption is endemic within the gay community more broadly and the institutions charged with ‘managing’ HIV. The article also describes the infamous sexual heroics of gay men, ‘jumping off chandeliers’ and having ‘500 sexual encounters over six months fuelled by the priapic powers of methamphetamine’.

The affects of anxiety and outrage invoked by these articles illustrate what Irvine calls the ‘dramaturgy’ of sex panic. As she explains, ‘sex panic scripts rely heavily on tales about sexual groups or issues that use distortion, hyperbole, or outright fabrication’ and ‘evocative sexual language and imagery’ (Irvine, 2008: 19). Barebackers, bug chasers, reckless infectors, black heterosexual migrants, HIV positive gay and bisexual men appear here as a cast of folk devils in this dramaturgy – minority sexualities that are demonized via their association with stigmatized sexual practices and the spectacle of sex itself (2008: 20).

This instance of sex panic is an example of what I call ‘re-crisis’ because it is directly reminiscent of the styles, images and logics of earlier AIDS discourses that created a division between the ‘general population’ and particular ‘at risk’ or ‘willingly’ risky sexual identities, like barebackers and migrants. The most inflationary aspect of ‘Dance with Death’, for example, is its unqualified conflation of the rise in HIV seroconversions with the alleged recklessness of gay men. The dramaturgy of sex panic is oriented toward the production of spectacle at the expense of analytical complexity. Deliberate or not, the logic insists that the increase in HIV notifications is the direct result of deliberate or reckless exposures, a logic that then overlooks the complex range of scenarios that I described earlier in which people may find themselves having anal sex without condoms.

Sex panic also paves the way for less equivocal declarations of blame. An editorial in the national news broadsheet, The Australian, asserted that ‘someone has to take the blame for this outrageously long-lived, unbelievably reviving, preventable epidemic’ (Heard, 2006). This article called for ‘accountability’ and ‘a proper sense of personal and collective shame’:

It is time to state that a reasonably well-educated, Western gay man who contracts HIV in 2006 because of sex is at least a reckless fool, and if he deliberately brings it upon himself, at best a suicidal sociopath.

Yes, believe it or not, there is a whole gay subculture that rests upon ‘bug-chasing’, or the despicable sport of actively seeking out or passing on HIV infection for the satisfaction of sexual or other perverse fantasies. (Heard, 2006)

Assertions like these indicate the slippage from the lurid coverage of the Neal case to the wholesale blaming of gay men for the continuation of HIV/AIDS.

As sex panic studies have frequently shown, such images and opinions have the power to shape public feelings. Shortly after the Neal hearings, The Port Phillip Leader, a municipal newspaper, reported on local objections to a planning permit for an all-male, sex-on-premises venue planned for the area. The article quoted the distressed protest of an objector who said that ‘“bug chasers” – people who get a thrill out of unprotected sex – and “bug-spreaders” – HIV-positive people who try to infect others – would make it their own’ (Sauna bid sleazy, 2007). The objection, as mediated by the Leader, exemplifies the sloppy misuse and conflation of these terms (‘bug chasers’ here is incorrectly defined), and illustrates the way sex panics may then crop up in localized contests over space (see Warner, 1999).

The logic of epidemic

If these rhetorical inflations produce an atmosphere of ‘generalized emotional combustibility’ (Irvine, 2008 24) and ‘an affect of paranoid dis-ease’ (Davidson, 2005: 33), they may also become part of an incitement to increased surveillance and the disciplining of bodies in the name of public welfare. Recent work has theorized the role of emotions as both the function and effect of panic, and as a force implicated in structures of domination. Ahmed (2004) and Cvetkovich (2003) have been influential in this ‘affective turn’ in sex panic studies, exploring, respectively, how affect shapes public culture, and how emotions function in the governance of the self. In sex panics, emotional publics engage in moral politics. AIDS panic, like sex crime panic and sex panic more generally, has been a key site for the expression of late 20th-century and post-millennial social anxieties. The heightened moments of sex panic are implicated in the ‘transmogrification of moral values into political action’ (Irvine, 2008: 2). ‘Collective emotion, evoked discursively’, writes Irvine, ‘brings publics into being, organizing diffuse, sometimes inchoate beliefs and moralities in political action’ (2008: 11).

The Australian barebacking sex panics may be understood as part of the model of governmentality that Singer has called ‘the logic of epidemic’ (1993). In Singer's formulation, ‘epidemic’ is ‘a phenomenon that in its very representation calls for, indeed seems to demand some form of managerial response, some mobilized effort of control’ (1993: 27). An epidemic, she argues:

is already a situation that is figured as out of control, hence at least indirectly a recognition of the limits of existing responses, hence a call for new ones. Because the destabilization effect is also represented as a threat, a threat to the very order of things, epidemic conditions tend to evoke a kind of panic logic which seeks immediate and dramatic responses to the situation at hand. (1993: 27)

Barebacking and bug chasing constitute a ‘threat to the very order of things’. As the ‘Dance with Death’ feature asserts, these practices ‘have called public safety into question and exposed a worrying subculture in the gay community’. This ‘worry’ calls for a response. Under epidemic circumstances, the production of sexual anxiety is conducive to conservative political agendas and interventions like law reform, surveillance, criminalization, mandatory reporting and quarantines. In the logic of epidemic, Singer argues:

[a]nxiety becomes mobilized around the connection of sex to death [and] entails an increased fetishization of life as such. Hence, the anxiety produced through the epidemic is displaced and condensed in the regulation of sexual reproduction and the promotion of the family as the supposedly exclusive site of safe sex. (Singer, 1993: 29)

Singer's model helps illuminate events in Australian HIV policy that unfolded after the Neal hearings. In the wake of the coverage of the Mwale and Neal cases, then Prime Minister John Howard announced that new government policies could see HIV-positive migrants banned from entering Australia, and that, if admitted, their movements would be tracked (Stafford, 2007). The Victorian State Health Minister Bronwyn Pike recommended that the Federal government introduce a mandatory HIV test for refugees (Hinde, 2007) and called on limitations to the immigration of HIV positive persons, scapegoating HIV positive migrants in an attempt to distract attention from what the coverage of the Neal hearings had made to appear was an inadequate system for preventing and disciplining potential reckless infectors (see Reeders, 2009; Robinson, 2007e). In turn, the Federal health minister recommended the introduction of mandatory reporting by doctors of ‘risky’ HIV patients to state health authorities (Medew and Nader, 2007). At the same time, a research team was established at Victoria's Monash University to ‘scrutinise national clusters of infections’ in order to ‘track down what groups or behaviours are responsible for the increasing rate of HIV infections over the past three years’ (Medew, 2007c).

It warrants noting here that Howard's threatened ban on HIV positive migrants was highly racialized and wasn't focused on gay migrants per se. The extent to which media and policy debate beyond the Neal case was targeted at gay men exclusively should not be overestimated. The role of bareback panic in this series of policy statements exemplifies the logic of governmentality that Singer describes. Once created, anxiety must then be allayed by strategies aimed at addressing the problems so named. The scandalized accounts of barebacking and breeding consisted of ‘rhetorical inflations’, ‘scary rhetoric’ and ‘heightened media coverage’ (Irvine, 2008: 24), creating fertile atmosphere for the types of law enforcement, legislative and policy interventions that have occurred internationally around the criminalization of HIV transmission (see Weait, 2007). The logic of epidemic, as Singer writes,

thrives on the perpetual revival of an anxiety it then seeks to control, inciting a crisis of contagion that spreads to ever new sectors of cultural life which, in turn, justify and necessitate specific regulatory apparatus which then compensate – materially and symbolically – for the crisis it has produced. (Singer, 1993: 29)

As well as material interventions or threats of intervention, the spectacularization of sexual individuals and subcultures as monstrous and/or criminal is part of a more diffuse model of neoliberal governance through which good sexual citizens are encouraged to recognize themselves in relation to – and ideally against – figures of public menace, like barebackers. As the Neal case study suggests, sexual spectacle may function alongside public health responses in which good (gay) citizens are those that prioritize the maximization of health, and the ‘evil irresponsible barebacker … embodies the transgressive pleasure of unprotected sex’ (Russell, 2005: 145).

Conclusion

Although a discussion of the legal frameworks surrounding the category of the ‘reckless infector’ have not been within the scope of this analysis, Singer's formulation offers us some insights into this figure's relationship to the rhetorical machinations of re-crisis.⁵ Her model sheds particular light on how the reckless infector transitions from ‘everyday’ sexual criminal to AIDS Monster. The reckless infector is a high-visibility sexual persona whose ideological utility is threefold: (1) As a criminal spectacle, s/he reinforces the myth of the nuclear family as the optimum social and sexual space, and, by contrast, all alternatives are correlated with danger and risk; (2) S/he manufactures a highly marketable excess. Sex crime is good business for tabloid, broadsheet, online and alternative media alike; and (3) S/he becomes a template for the creation of a criminal class that ‘justifies the mobilization of various disciplinary and even militaristic forces’. Criminality is troped as disease and disease is figured as criminal. So-named ‘high risk sexualities’ are conflated with contagion, and HIV becomes the associative link between them (Singer, 1993: 43).

Finally, this case study in which the logic of epidemic is revived via the genres of sex panic reflects the simultaneously spectacular and mundane status of crisis discourse in the spaces where HIV/AIDS is both ‘post-crisis’ and where ‘crisis’ is part of the logic of the mediatized everyday. In other words, while sex scandal is part of our mediatized quotidian, the rhetorical inflations of a sex panic stir up a sense of crisis that creates the potential for states of exceptionality. This paradoxical alliance of the exceptional and the mundane is part of the ongoing apparatus of representing and managing HIV under neoliberal conditions: rather than episodic, crisis has become chronic. This is, perhaps, what was meant by the late William Haver (1996: 3) when he wrote that ‘[w]e have erected … structures of intelligibility and comprehensibility on and around the pandemic, structures that themselves render AIDS normative and routine: the business of AIDS, constructed and carried on around an impossible object, has become – like genocide, nuclear terror, racism, misogyny, and heteronormativity … business as usual’.

Footnotes

Notes

Dion Kagan is a lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Melbourne. He is currently researching cultural responses to HIV/AIDS across film, TV, literature and the performing arts. His book, Positive Images: Gay Men & HIV/AIDS in the Culture of ‘Post-Crisis’, is forthcoming in 2015 from IB Tauris in their Gender and Popular Culture monograph series. Dion writes arts criticism for a range of Australian magazines and literary journals including Australian Book Review, The Big Issue, Metro and Kill Your Darlings. He is the queer columnist for The Lifted Brow and a regular voice on fortnightly Australian culture podcast The Rereaders.

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