I recently blogged about this guy over at "Confessions of a Bareback Top," complaining about his most recent post which recounted his alleged rape of this younger guy. I was drunk when I wrote that post, and in the glare of daylight, I think it seems clear that the story is fiction. As are probably many of his posts. But the fact that he pushes them as truth still makes me really uncomfortably.

Anyways, I digress. My friend Nat just recently sent me a link to this posting over at "Raw Top," in which the blogger there responds to an HIV-negative reader who writes in asking what he should do about his desire to take raw loads. He says that, while he considers himself coming from an "upstanding" upbringing (ivy league education and all), all he can think about is "taking loads and being one of those gangbang bottoms in a treasure island video."

Yawn. He's certainly not the only boy who pops wood in the middle of a meeting thinking about his porn collection. The reader's interests aren't particularly noteworthy, but the blogger's response is pretty fucked up: "one option some people would probably throw stones at me for suggesting is to find a long-term non-progressor to poz you." He later refers to this (in scare quotes) as a kind of "vaccination."

Well let me cast the first stone! This raw load phenomenon has just gotten out of control. We desperately need some good analysis on this matter. I don't deny the pleasure that some gay men say they get out of taking a load. But I certainly want to question the fucked up heteronormative place that that desire comes from. And I certainly don't want to suggest that someone test-positive in order to enable a fantasy. That's what it is: a fantasy! I hate to break it to these guys, but there are many fantasies in all of our little heads that we find ways to live without experiencing every day. And others we would never dream of (or want to) actually exploring in real life! (rape, obviously, comes to mind here). I'm not suggesting that all potentially problematic fantasies should be always suppressed, but that we might want to think of other ways to deal with them than testing positive!

Furthermore, this whole "long-term progressor" thing is such bullshit. Not of course the fact that there are LTNPs, my friend in San Fran is one of them (he's been poz for 20 years now, without meds, and his viral load today is undetectable). But if you're infected with HIV through someone who's medically categorized as a long-term nonprogressor, that in no way means that you too will magically become a LTNP. This is medically false. Being a LTNP is about the host's immune system's response, NOT about the strain of the virus. While it is true that weaker strains of the virus exist today than did in the early 80s (because the hosts with more virulent strains died off before they could infect others - a kind of counterintuitive viral evolutionary adaptation), it is not true that LTNP have a different strain of the virus.

This guy blogging as "Raw Top" is being painfully irresponsible. It just boils my fucking water!