Choosing disability : bug chasing and gift giving in gay pornography

Starting with the premise that pornography is dominated by abled (or non-disabled) porn performers, this speculative article considers the extent to which logics and figurations of disability pervade the genre of gay porn, particularly the film Viral Loads. Produced by Treasure Island Media, Viral Loads eroticizes the deliberate transmission of HIV (popularly known as bug chasing and gift giving), and, as such, powerfully conveys the permeability of abledness/disabledness. If HIV can be coded as a disability, and if bug chasing and gift giving constitute agentic sexual practices, then we speculate about the ways in which disability can be a source of sexual agency in these types of films. Central to this discussion is fantasy, as many of the performers involved are already HIV-positive or unlikely to receive the gift in the context of pre-exposure prophylaxis and treatment as prevention. The political ambition for our article is imagining spaces in which the choosing and un-choosing of disability can be de-pathologized and bringing HIV discourses and practices to bear upon Disability Studies, particularly given the disavowals that historically and contemporarily occur across and between HIV and disability discourses.