View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Wellesley College Wellesley College Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive Faculty Research and Scholarship Spring 2010 Tracking the Bugchaser: Giving "The iG ft" of HIV/ AIDS Octavio R. Gonzalez Wellesley College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.wellesley.edu/scholarship Version: Post-print Recommended Citation Gonzalez, Octavio R. “Tracking the Bugchaser: Giving ‘The iG ft’ of HIV/AIDS.” Cultural Critique, no. 75, 2010, pp. 82–113. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40800643. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Research and Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 1 Tracking the Bugchaser: Giving The Gift of HIV/AIDS And the love, whatever it was, an infection.—Anne Sexton Introduction: MSM = HIV? It is a fact universally acknowledged that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is one of the most destructive public-health emergencies in human history. Famously called “the plague” by no lesser authority than Larry Kramer, the virus and syndrome of human-acquired immune deficiency is normally seen as a scourge laying waste to human life. Moreover, more sensitive recent HIV-surveillance methods indicate that the incidence—the annual rate of new infections—and, hence, the scope of the epidemic is greater than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had previously calculated, rising from an estimated 40,000 new infections to a figure closer to 60,000 newly infected in the U.S.