There’s an article in the current Rolling Stone about an Internet subculture of gay men who have eroticised becoming HIV positive, and seek out known HIV positive men to get fucked bareback by them, in a Sadean epiphany. The journalism is thorough and clinical, by a well-regarded mainstream investigative journalist, whose last book was on an accident in the Vietnam war that killed dozens of American soldiers. He lives with his wife in Georgia.

I mention his heterosexuality because it is pertinent to the tone of the piece, which had a subtly anthropological air of detachment and a neutral “objectivity”, which I found disingenuous. The tone of the piece is understated scandalised, and therefore salacious. I doubt if a piece written about another self-destructive phenomenon on the web – websites for anorexics who encourage each other to get thinner, for example – would have quite the same tone. To my ears, there’s an icy absence of compassion.

It appears that once sex is involved in self-destructive behaviour, especially in men, it cannot warrant an empathic response. If they are “enjoying” themselves, they can’t be hurting inside. How dare they fuck up their lives and get pleasure from it! What’s missing from the piece is the dismal inescapable truth: their lives were fucked up long before they discovered how to turn themselves on. And that’s sad, in my book.

I was asked to write about this article – the first time I can remember I’ve been asked to write about any particular topic in these pages. Apart from a pithy rhetorical rant I produced for a World AIDS Day issue of HP a couple of years ago, I’ve not really tackled the issue in a personal sense.

When I clicked on the link in the email from Dublin, and realised what topic I was being asked to address, I found tears coming to my eyes. I knew the time had come to tell a particular story. Unwittingly, Our Beloved Editor had asked me to write about one of the most life-changing and painful experiences of my life; - when my boyfriend deliberately infected himself with HIV.

I’ve avoided telling it before, for many reasons – not least to protect my family. But they’re grown ups, and our family has had its share of dealing with shit since then, as most families do.

On the 3rd May 1994, in a clinic in central London, and me just a year living in the city, I was with my boyfriend of six months when he was given a HIV positive result. In the shocking aftermath of that news, looking for clues and redemption, it transpired that he had been having unsafe sex with men he knew to be HIV positive, while he had been going out with me, and long before that.

I should declare now that I was not infected by him, we had safe sex, although it took me years to pluck up the courage to get tested. I stayed with him for another six months, but his compulsive desire to have unsafe sex with strangers did not abate, it increased.

We tried couple counselling but it only provided me with the forum in which I could find the courage to leave him, wracked with guilt, traumatised, and with my trust in men, and faith that my life would turn out fine, gravely damaged. I had been burnt by getting too close to someone’s deathwish, and such an experience takes a while to integrate.

Classical mythology comes closest to describing experiences like this: I felt like Persephone, being raped and carried off to the underworld, my innocence blasted to smithereens. I lay there for quite a while, fearful, dismayed, licking my wounds.

My own self-destructive patterns, hidden in my concern for him, became apparent, and flourished for a while. It took me two years to begin to get over it, starting by getting angry, in a week-long introductory course to my counselling training – angry at him, angry at me, angry at the world, angry at fate. I was so angry I even dallied with the “HIV is not the cause of AIDS” brigade, for a while, as if by force of argument I could change the truth.

Since then, like most counsellors/therapists, my own hurt has been something that has propelled me to understand the nature of self-destructive behaviour, my own first, and then others.

In particular, I’ve been intensely curious about the way gay men relate to each other, and how they can use each other sexually, and in other ways; how emotions are so easily suppressed. How, in some circles, anything is permissible as long as it’s horny.

Sex and emotions are separate by default on the gay scene. Those who go against the tide and try to bring the two together are not made welcome. It’s worth saying that the gay scene is not representative of all gay men, but its excesses, especially in the large urban scene and in the shame-barrier-free internet, are symptomatic of a deep wounding that I’ve yet to understand fully.

I’ve become very interested in what triggers men to hate themselves, with particular emphasis on childhood sex abuse and bullying, and how powerfully our lives can be affected by our childhoods, consciously and unconsciously.

This is not about my ex-boyfriend. He is doing fine, as far as I know – he sent me a Christmas card a year or two ago and we met for coffee and he lives with his boyfriend and he hasn’t changed one bit. And he’s still healthy. We both had tears in our eyes when we parted and there was no hate left, only softness. We’ve both grown up since then. I don’t think I’d be a therapist now without the catalytic experience of knowing him. In the oddest of ways, in seeing the extent to which I could be wounded, I learned how much I could heal, too. And I’m grateful for that.

What was missing from the Rolling Stone piece, apart from compassion, was the obvious: the backgrounds of the two men he interviewed: one, Carlos, an unrepentant “bug chaser” – the other, a young man who, in his depression after a breakup, shifted from reckless apathy about risky sex to eroticising it, flirting with the bug chasing discourse for a few months. To his eternal regret, he “succeeded” in seroconverting. Without their full stories, the article seemed to be another “look at how selfishly hedonistic and sick these queers are” exercise.

In every culture there are those whose apparent mission is to self-destruct, either dramatically through suicide, or insidiously through addictions or compulsions like anorexia. When each person’s story is heard, there is usually a devastating account of abuse, or at the very least an atmosphere where emotional truth was suppressed. Suicidal or self-harming patterns almost always start by following the “lesser of two evils” rule – it is better to fix with a damaging substance/experience rather than to stay with the terror of my pain/rage/sorrow/grief/hate. That way, at least I give myself the illusion of being in control of my life. If I sexualise it, then it has the added bonus of being exciting, and pleasurable, albeit in a saccharine way.

But, bizarrely, the eroticisation of suffering/self-destruction/humiliation – perversion, for want of a better word – often serves to maintain the status quo. It’s as if the person who has endured intolerable experiences as a child has chosen not to damage anyone else with their rage, and to implode instead in private sexual fantasy. This used to be isolating and private. The internet has changed all that for ever.

The internet is exposing the underbelly of the collective consciousness in a way that has never happened before. We can see our shadow through a window that is not yet ten years old, the world wide web. We have not found an adequate response to it, and won’t for quite a while yet.

Americans, in a way that I don’t understand, seem to take sexual fantasies slightly more literally than those on this side of the Atlantic, and they do get puzzled, when visiting here, to discover that guys don’t actually match up to the bravado/threat/promise of their horny onscreen personae. But I’ve chatted to young guys on the net over the years, who want to get fucked “raw” – some don’t want a lecture, some appreciate being talked to in a non-sexual way.

Most haven’t actually done it – it must be remembered that internet sex chat rooms are populated almost entirely by men masturbating – and the hunt is primarily for the words/images/sounds that will make them cum, in the privacy of their bedroom, over their keyboard. Rarely are people in the same city when they’ve got extreme fantasies to share. And if someone wants to get infected with HIV they only have to go down to a cruising park and pull down their jeans, bend over, and wait to get fucked a few times.

We can get distracted by the words and symbols that are used in sexual fantasy, get taken in by people who are plausible in their perverse desire to dress up their pain in sexual pleasure. The bottom line is that self-destructive behaviour has its roots, always, in a lot of pain.

Should the law intervene in such matters? Should we punish those who rot their livers with alcohol, who shrivel their lungs with tobacco? Can we intervene when a girl wants to starve herself to death? Can we prevent a man from wanting a terrible illness? I don’t think we can.

But the least we can do is to try to understand the reasons why people want to do those things, and to work to prevent the next generation from repeating the same patterns.