Viral Hauntology:Specters of AIDS in Infrastructures of Gay Sexual Sociability

In recent years, HIV treatment has become so effective that a patients’ viral load can become so low that it is undetectable, which in turn reduces the risk of viral transmission to zero (Eisinger, Dieffenbach, & Fauci 2019). At the same time, for people who are HIV negative, the use of the medical regimen “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” or “PrEP,” reduces the risk of HIV infection by 92%-99% (Anderson et al. 2012). The PrEP regimen typically targets people at high risk of HIV infection and consists of taking HIV medicines either daily or through event-based dosing (“PrEP” 2019). These innovations are celebrated as key in the fight against AIDS, and rightfully so. They offer hope to affected populations, that they might engage with the AIDS epidemic in a way that is more commemorative than somatically threatening. Thus, modern HIV medication promises access to a gay subjectivity that expands notions of sustainability otherwise made unavailable by the AIDS crisis. This access potentially alleviates stigma and enables a reorientation of mostly gay male sociability and politics across and beyond the viral serostatuses of “HIV negative” and “HIV positive.” Such medical innovation does not erase the trauma of the AIDS crisis. Such trauma continually impacts gay cultures today, in the minds and on the bodies of survivors, and more broadly by informing how gay communities imagine gay sexual sociability to be virtuous, sustainable, transgressive, dangerous, etc. Contemporary gay sexual sociability is informed by the socio-technical interventions of condom use, regular STI testing, and sexual serosorting, practices that were negotiated during and after the AIDS crisis in order to retain access to gay somatic pleasures. These practices of vitality are not individual endeavors but rather socially negotiated responses, put in place and governed through an ethic of collective, cultural sustainability (Rofes 1998). The biomedical potential of this medical regimen, in the same way antiretroviral therapy (ART) made HIV positivity a manageable chronic condition, should and does invite hope. But the fact remains that while attitudes seem to be changing, there is a persistence of wariness and negative responses to the emergence of sexual cultures informed by the affective affordances of PrEP. These affective orientations do not align with the phantasmagoric futures that PrEP makes available; rather, they seem to reinstall modes of relationality based on fear of HIV. It is this persistence or “temporal drag” (Freeman 2010, 95) that this chapter concerns itself with. To further understand the relationship between the lingering fear of HIV and new prevention methods, it is necessary to interrogate how the HIV crisis materialises for gay people and their communities. Additionally, it is crucial to understand how affective sedimentations impact contemporary material and structural innovations that sustain, support, and change gay sexual sociability beyond and after the time/s of the crisis. Drawing from queer theory (Freeman 2010) and HIV/AIDS sociology (Decoteau 2008; Gordon, 2008; Gill-Peterson, 2013; Petrus, 2019), we take hauntology (Derrida 2006) as a useful framework for a diachronic and synchronic analysis of how past and present materials and ideas affect and might affect those living “post crisis” (Race 2001; Kagan 2018), particularly when the effects of the AIDS crisis (for some) manifest as distant affective echoes. This chapter leans on Derrida’s (2006) concept of “hauntology” to develop what we call a “viral hauntology” coterminous with the development of new HIV prevention methods. This affect-driven intervention closely examines how the affective economies of circulation, as described by Sara Ahmed (2004), are embedded in current material infrastructures of HIV prevention technologies. We argue that viral hauntology allows us to think deeply about how ‘old’ technologies and their social lives fold over and into new ones, and how the folding process ‘drags’ in order to imagine other, more inclusive, gay socio-sexual futures. In this chapter, we think about HIV/AIDS not only as a somatic condition affecting a body, but also as a socio-technical matter. With HIV/AIDS’s production of virality, certain norms and ideas about what constitutes “good” sexuality have emerged (Kagan 2018), norms that are then enforced, contested or modulated through the production and use of material infrastructures of gay sociability. Such materialist thinking is inspired by Kane Race’s (2018) mobilization of Actor-Network-Theory, in which he considers how HIV/AIDS work on gay life through complex flows of chemical, digital, and communal infrastructures. Extending this research into the field of affect theory, we analyze two case studies to demonstrate how these infrastructures change through viral hauntology. The two case studies are used to unpack how socio-technical responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis play a role in the cultural and interfacial responses to the availability of the PrEP regimen. In the first case study, we examine the ‘PrEP whore’ figuration. We look closely at the circulation of anti-PrEP and anti-promiscuity sentiments, and how the condom’s materiality and historicity—as a ‘preferred’ safer-sex technology for men who have sex with men (MSM)—is intertwined in this particular discourse. In the second case study, we compare how the gay hookup apps Grindr and Scruff (two of the most influential digital platforms for contemporary gay sociability) frame discussions of safer-sex practices and HIV status. In the following section, we will detail a conceptual framework for thinking about what could be called the affective ‘haunting’ of these HIV-impacted infrastructures, and how certain feelings ‘haunt’ interpretations of the HIV virus, the minds of gay people, and central infrastructures of gay life