That didn't stop the writer, a freelancer whose latest book is about a fire on a Navy ship, from writing a piece that implies gays are heading toward another selfish, disgusting and sickening AIDS Armageddon. The entire lead of the piece is written in a prose style that reads like Jerry Falwell channeling Hunter S. Thompson. Freeman's pseudonymous bug-chaser's eyes "light up as he says that the actual moment of transmission, the instant he gets HIV, will be 'the most erotic thing I can imagine ... But I think it turns the other guy on to know that I'm negative and that they're bringing me into the brotherhood. That gets me off too.'" Freeman elaborates: "HIV-infected semen is treated like liquid gold." Here's one quote from an apparent infecter: "If I know that he's negative and I'm fucking 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." But then you realize this quote -- relished by Sean Hannity -- isn't from anyone who has infected anyone. It's from Freeman's key source, imagining what it might feel like to be on the other side of the equation. How do we know this guy isn't delusional? We don't. He's clearly deeply disturbed, but we are supposed to believe every word he says. Freeman doesn't actually substantiate a single episode of unsafe sex between someone HIV-negative allegedly seeking infection and someone HIV-positive knowingly passing it on. His source offers to prove it on one occasion. Freeman says he declined to witness the encounter.

The piece is also riddled with unbelievably shoddy work. Take this snippet: "With about 40,000 new infections in the United States per year, according to government reports, that would mean around 10,000 each year are attributable to that more liberal definition of bug-chasing." Huh? The 40,000 figure is a Centers for Disease Control number for all HIV infections per year. Anyone with the faintest knowledge of the HIV epidemic knows that men who have sex with men make up a declining number of this group -- now 42 percent, according to the CDC. So even if you buy the bizarre 25 percent figure, you don't end up with 10,000, you end up with 4,200. I mention this obvious point, not because 4,200 is somehow more credible than 10,000. No one, I repeat, no one, has any solid evidence for either figure. I mention it because no serious AIDS journalist would ever write such an ill-informed and obviously fallacious sentence.

Any other evidence -- besides the now debunked 25 percent figure -- that the bug-chasing phenomenom is widespread? The piece points to various Web sites where unsafe sex is fetishized. (Oddly, the only Web site cited where bug chasing is allegedly explicitly encouraged no longer carries that message. We are asked to believe that it "recently" did so.) But we knew that already. You can find Web sites all over the place with all sorts of fantasies. And online, our fantasies rule. Just because some people fantasize online under screen names about HIV transmission, it doesn't follow that they actually carry out the act. I'm not saying they don't. I'm just saying we can't tell. Online many people express fantasies or adopt identities precisely because they are an escape from reality. What any serious piece of journalism would do is ask some hard questions and provide some real answers about how widespread this practice actually is. No such answers are found in the piece. None.

Again, I'm not saying we should be unconcerned about this phenomenon. It's not made up. It's been out there for years now. It is a problem, as many actual HIV counselors and officials cited in the piece clearly acknowledge. But the first thing a journalist has to do is find out if the phenomenon exists to any real extent, how significant it is, and how widespread it is -- especially when it deploys the most sensational language to describe an already beleaguered and feared subculture. That's why this piece isn't journalism. It's hysteria, wrapped in a homophobic and HIV-phobic wrapper. Sean Hannity and other gay-haters are pleased as punch. Jann Wenner should be ashamed.

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