Here’s the Rolling Stone story about “bug chasers,” a subculture of gay men who actively try to become infected with HIV. These people are beyond sick. This stuff is raw, ugly evil. “Carlos,” a New York bug chaser, tells the reporter that his hobby is “about freedom.” Later, he says that if he finds out that he’s carrying the virus, he might become a “gift giver,” the term for one who passes on the virus to someone who doesn’t have it: “If I know that [my sexual partner is] negative and I’m f–king him, it sort of gets me off. I’m murdering him in a sense, killing him slowly, and that’s sort of, as sick as it sounds, exciting to me.”

There are 40,000 new HIV infections each year. Nearly a million Americans are believed to be living with HIV and/or AIDS. It costs between $10,000 and $15,000 a year to treat each one. How much will the taxpayer be willing to spend to treat and research a cure for AIDS when you have people like these scumbags running around? They should be locked up like the murderers they are. If they were going around making a game of spreading typhoid or smallpox, we’d deal harshly with them, strictly as a public health measure.

A gay friend of mine recently had an HIV scare after doing something he ought not to have been doing with a man who, as it turns out, was HIV+ but lied about it so my friend would go to bed with him. Now, my friend ought not to have taken the foolish chance he did, and he knows that now; he had the hell scared out of him, and has sobered up. Still, as far as I’m concerned, this HIV+ guy tried to kill my friend as surely as if he’d have put cyanide in his food. I wish this evil SOB were in jail.