WC73 Owner’s Manual – Jeff Huyett

July 13, 2007 Editors Leave a comment

This regular column will explore queer health in America today. In the nursing tradition, I view health in the dynamic interplay of mind, body, and spirit within a culture, an environment, and a time. I hope to foster in the reader a sense of understanding and empowerment to move closer to health.

I came out in college, studying to be a nurse when HIV emerged in the early ‘80s. This confluence of events colored my professional and personal life. I’ll share some of my experiences of nursing queer people shaking off dis-ease by changing themselves and the world around them during, through and after that era.

Health cannot be achieved alone. It is not a commodity that someone can provide you. I hope to challenge the readers’ assumptions and encourage health action in a culture, an environment, and a time.
Like most Americans, I have found myself standing, thirsty and dazed, in front of a convenience store beverage cooler spilling over with choices. There is just so much from which to choose. The confusion starts when I begin to compare price, content, or expected result. Mass marketing impacts my selections, too. I sometimes get exasperated by all the choices, give up and buy water. Health care choices can be just as overwhelming. Flashy media images promote people, services, and “clinically proven products” as readily as grocery store selections. This writing will explore the concepts of health and the current paradigm in which it exists.

Health, the concept, is complex to define. It is experienced individually, so it eludes common description. For discussion’s sake, let’s say that health is “a state of optimal well being of the mind, body and spirit.” Factors that impact health are personal, social, genetic, economic, cultural, and environmental. These systems interact and impact on each other.

Health is multi-factorial requiring on-going upkeep, evaluation, and change in the individual, its family, culture, social structure, and environment. When neglected, health will diminish. When optimized, health will flourish. Health, then, is a practice we follow through life. It’s not static. Upkeep on a healthy path requires consciousness of the individual as well as society. Conceived in this broad sense, health considerations must permeate the individual, its people and ways of being in order to be achieved. Health of a species and its environments is then a dynamic interplay toward balance.

In the American medical model, health is the absence of illness. If we don’t get sick we must be okay. Health is something obtained like a product. If we get ill, we go to the doctor. We’re told what’s wrong and what to do. This interaction, pills or treatment costs money. Americans are set up with the paradox that if one is insured, one has health. When nothing is wrong, you don’t get assessed. Consequently, when you have no insurance, you will engage the system only when you absolutely must. In the midst of a health crisis your overall health will not likely be considered. Wide variations exist in access to health care. This model of disease treatment as health has been ingrained in the American psyche.

Entering the fee-for-service health care system is when the dazed confusion begins. There are lists of plans and lists of providers. How do you choose? Does advertising pressure affect your health choices like it does your beverage selections? When we land a job providing health insurance, a plethora of forms and insurance booklets will be presented. We’ll make decisions with little time to overview the insurance plans. A sense of “Phew, I’m employed. I’m covered” may occur. But what are we covered for? Participating providers are organized based on disease states treated like cardiology, dermatology, and gynecology. There’s something called “internal medicine.” Whatever that means! Who do we — healthy people — consult if we want to stay well? You guess who and what is right for you. Sometimes you hit it. You are provided attention pretty much only if you’re sick, right? Gay men have to argue with insurances to get specific preventative coverage like hepatitis vaccinations and human papillomavirus screening. Newborns and students get hepatitis vaccinations paid for, but gay men, who get lots of hepatitis, cannot. Millions of Americans are uninsured. Striations of health care beliefs and patterns run through our culture when access is so varied.

I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s watching a minimum of two-to-three hours of television a day, like most everyone else. Food and beverage advertising came streaming at me. Most of the food was boxed, canned or frozen, usually sugary or fatty, and easy to prepare. Shows on health were tucked away in obscure hours. Cigarettes and alcohol were advertised. There weren’t many brown-skinned folks in television.
In school PE was about sports not fitness. Health education was nine weeks of one-hour lessons with nothing about sex, emotional wellness, or drugs. My mother had to sign permission to take the classes on Evolution and Reproduction in Advanced Biology. If one joined 4H or the Boy Scouts you’d get great health and safety teaching. If you are gay you cannot join the Scouts. I had a basic understanding of my body but sought out that information. I got a usual middle class education and was armed to leave my mother’s home with a fairly good idea of how to take care of myself. My male college peers, I observed, were not so prepared. They had limited ability to prepare food for themselves, manage their garments, or tend to themselves when ill. In my interactions with patients I find that most people have a pretty poor understanding of how their bodies work, and have a huge range of notions about ways to take care of themselves. I also experience that Americans have a lot more reserve and shame connected with showing me their bodies. Thus people enter into the current “health care system” with limited basic operating instructions about themselves or the systems of delivery and are probably self conscious and awkward.
The development of the Internet, in the age of AIDS, allowed queer people to get information lacking in our meager health education systems. I find patients coming to me much better informed, but with much more commercially biased information. Once again mass media and marketing have a dizzying effect.

In my female-dominated profession I embrace nursing, its history and culture. Part of that history is domination by modern medicine, a mostly male profession, over the existing health delivery and beliefs systems. The “wise women” in villages, witches, Native American healers, and midwives are some of the fore bearers of the knowledge I use as a nurse practitioner. Much of that oral tradition of healing was lost with the genocide of witches and local healers. Nursing theorists discuss this time as the political beginnings of the medical associations to suppress “the women who keep the people healthy and out of hospitals” and prevent the study of disease. My feminist leanings, as well as my first-hand personal, political, and professional experience of HIV, have made me distrustful of modern medicine, the public health system, and pharmaceutical industry.

The queer health movement shakes up the American health care system in radical ways. When the needs of people living and dying with HIV increased in the 80s, legions of gay men and lesbians set up networks of care and services. Not waiting for the existing health care system to respond, we set up our own systems of support, nutrition, counseling, and financial assistance. Queer clinicians provided health care to the masses, but weren’t reflected in health statistics, research or policy. Our exploration of our own health needs now pressures the medical and public health systems to evaluate and attend to our particular concerns. Queer health consumers have invigorated “alternative” health methods, often older than modern medicine, when Western modalities fail.

Our medically-oriented, disease treatment model of health is not sustainable. We’re witnessing this with inflation of costs, reducing of service and the demise of Medicare. We could say, then, that the existing dominant medical paradigm of health care is utterly flawed. The uninsured and many others must seek out methods for health that the existing structures just don’t provide or support.

Physicians study disease; Nurses, wellness. It is time for the over-arching paradigm to be informed by a philosophy more realistic to the multi-faceted human experience health. Nursing is one philosophy. There are others that view the human as an integrated whole such as Ayurveda, Acupuncture, or naturopathy.
Let us envision a different health model. First, health teaching, not generated by the commercial industry, permeates our culture and schools. Health basics become as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. Health messages would address mind, body, and spirit. All citizens would be fed, dry and comfortable and national policy would reflect this reality. Periodic health assessment by a provider would include your image and knowledge of self, your ability to care for yourself, understanding of growth and development, aging, common afflictions and how to tend to them. The assessment is informed by cultural, spiritual, economic, and social knowledge. This patient-centered evaluation method assesses your level of health, the risks faced, and the ways to improve and prevent based on your historical, cultural, and genetic package. The assessment happens periodically when you’re well and able to comfortably interact. If you get sick, you engage this provider, informed of your being, to get advice and recommendations based on a much deeper understanding of you, not just the disease. You develop a relationship with the provider and trust them. Your health partner will not know everything, can admit that, and help you find answers when they don’t have them.

This ideal health care system isn’t close to reality today. Continue to learn about yourself, your body and each other through information and education. Be an on-going student of the human race. Take time to be conscious of yourself, those around you and your environment. Adapt and change based on the needs of you and your community. Find a healer with whom you feel comfortable. Interview and ask questions about provider and philosophy. Get referrals from friends. You want to feel welcomed, open, and prepared to share and receive. If there is no spark of connection find another. Not all healers assess mind/body/spirit. Look for someone who does. Ask questions. Manage personal risk. Be open to incorporating various modalities and professionals. Rigid belief or practice is probably as detrimental as no practice. Mostly, be sustainable. Make health a routine in your daily life through simple, ritualistic care and observation of yourself, others, and the environment around you.

I have been accused of being utopian more than once. To sustain, health requires a revolution of self and the world in which we live.
Humans, as organic beings, are capable of this change.
The story of evolution is proof…if you believe in that sort of thing.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane. We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going. So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Owner’s Manual is a new, regular health feature of White Crane. Jeff Huyett is a nurse practitioner living in NYC. His clinical work has primarily been in queer health with a focus on HIV, rectal and transgender care. He is the Radical Faerie Daisy Shaver and is involved with the development of Faerie Camp Destiny Radical Sanctuary in Vermont and can be reached at JeffANP@aol.com

Andrew Ramer, Columns, WC73 - Friends

WC73 – Praxis – Andrew Ramer

July 13, 2007 Editors Leave a comment

Praxis

I spent the first years of my life in a large vertical village called an apartment house. The summer I turned five we moved to the suburbs, where I encountered a whole new kid culture, with songs and games that were very different from what I learned in the city. Friendless, shy, I watched the kid clan around me, which inhabited an area two blocks long and up and down two perpendicular streets. You could recognize anyone in that clan because they called the last large undeveloped parcel of land “the back woods,” and the smaller lot around the corner “the side woods.” The kids who lived as far up the street or around the corners as I was allowed to go called the side woods “the front woods,” and lived too far from the back woods to be allowed to play there.

Those kids spent lots of time in shifting groups, wandering from house to house, yard to yard, woods to woods. They dared each other to break into the abandoned farmhouse on the far side of the back woods, which everyone but grownups knew was haunted. And played street games in the firefly evenings, like Ring-O-Levio, (a word I’ve never seen written, so I’m not even sure how to spell it.) They all had friends, and best friends. If two boys really liked each other, even more than even being best friends, they went out in the back woods with a pin, pricked the tip of their index fingers and mixed their blood together, which made them blood brothers — for life.

Being new to the area, and coming from a kid culture where such things did not exist, it took a while before I found out about blood brothers, and then I wanted one. I was slowly getting friendly with two boys on my block, but they were already each other’s blood brother. I spent more time with the twins, who by virtue of birth were already bonded. I tried to befriend some other boys in the neighborhood, but even at five they knew that I was “different.” The only one who wanted to do it with me was my new friend, Janie. She had never heard of two girls doing it, or a boy and a girl, but one of us stole a pin from our mother’s sewing basket, and we went out to the back woods. “You go first.” “No, you.” “I’ll do it if you do it.” In the end we spit on our fingers, mashed our saliva together, and decided that counted.

That’s the only friendship ritual I know. Sadly, blood is now dangerous to share, and even if it wasn’t, we live in a culture that has a wide range of rituals for dating, lovers, domestic partners, married couples, and everything in between, but views friendship as a second class affair. Occasionally I read an obituary that says, “Raul is survived by his French bulldogs and a loving circle of friends that include Tashi, Walid, Pat, and Marisa.” But most often we read, “Bob is survived by his husband Marco and their Jack Russell terriers.” If you go to the cemetery fifty years from now you will find Bob and Marco buried side by side. But what about Raul and his circle of friends? Will there be any monument to the way they supported each other during Walid’s long journey with HIV, Pat going back to college at age fifty, Marisa’s house burning down, or all the years they co-parented Tashi’s three children?

It amazed me when I lived in Jerusalem to see men walking in the street arm in arm, hand in hand, both Arab and Israeli. They had a different idea of friendship than we do. This is the case in many other cultures, and I’m sure that there are places where friendships are celebrated ritually. But here, weddings cost tens of thousands of dollars, and we gay people are working hard to secure the right to legally marry for ourselves. Sadly, this emphasis on marriage perpetuates the lie that we are not whole unless we are partnered, and that if we can’t be partnered we ought to at least be sexual. Times, in my singlehood, I have to stop and remind myself that I still have friends from high school, am close to two professors from college, and that two of my most beloved friends, Steve and Michael, are men I roomed with in college more than thirty years ago.

On and off for three decades I had a friend who was sometimes a lover. At a shifting point in our relationship one of us turned to the other and asked, “How do you consummate a friendship?” We can’t remember who said it, but it remains a great question, impossibly koan-ish in its implications. Why do so many of us take our friendships for granted, stop calling our friends the moment we’re in love, and only remember them when our relationship is in trouble or ended? Photo albums and videos from weddings, commitment ceremonies, and anniversary parties abound. How do we remember our friends? Sometimes it’s only on the refrigerator. With a post card Molly sent, faded, that’s been up there for years? Or the picture of you and Harold standing side by side on the beach in Maui, the time you went there with your soon-to-be ex-boyfriends, two years before he died? Do you remember your friends on Valentine’s Day? Do you fill each other’s houses on Passover, Pride Weekend, and Christmas? Do you tell stories about how you met your friends, the way we tell coming out stories and stories of how we met our lovers?

I mourn the lack of friendship rituals. In kindergarten I married Anne in her parents living room. Her mother played the piano. Her little sister was the flower girl. When I was in high school boys gave girls their ID bracelets when they were going steady. I never gave mine to anyone. It was way too soon to invite another boy to the prom. But in seventh grade a girl who liked me borrowed a bracelet from a boy named Andy who lived in the next town, and told people it was mine. I don’t know what teens do now, but I’m sure they do something. Tattoo their lover’s name on their perineum. Get a new piercing in their honor. There are engagement rings and wedding rings. “How about necklaces for friends?” I once thought. Then I realized it could become a competition. “I have more necklaces than you!” “Yeah, but yours are plastic and look like Mardi Gras leftovers, while mine are rose quartz, turquoise, and amethyst.” No, it’s probably a good thing we don’t have friendship tokens. Many of us will not have, by this society’s standards, “successful long-term relationships.” Yet we will have decades-long rich and enduring friendships that may or may not ever be celebrated. So I invite you to examine your life, to look deep into your heart for a few moments, and ask yourself the following questions:

What is the place of friendship in my life?
How do I consummate a friendship?
Do I recognize and celebrate my friends, or do I take them for granted?
What rituals or ceremonies might I create to consecrate my friendships?

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane. We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going. So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Andrew Ramer, author of the classic Two Flutes Playing (available from White Crane Books). Praxis is a regular feature in each issue of White Crane.

Dan Vera, Poetry

Great Poetfan Video

July 13, 2007 Editors Leave a comment

This is such a darling little video about a guy’s love of Mark Doty. It’s part of the American Academy of Poets’ Poetfan program.

Dan Vera

Happy Friday 13th!

July 13, 2007 Editors Leave a comment

Okay, here’s some creepy Friday the 13th fun.

Crazy Spooky Mindreader

The oddest thing here may not be the mindreader program but the fact that it’s hosted on the Institute of Health’s website.

Current Affairs, Dan Vera, Religion

The Capitol Hill Crunch…

July 12, 2007 Dan Vera Leave a comment

…Of Rightwing Nutbars

In the off chance you’ve been lulled into forgetting about the atomic level nutbars out there, please check out this video of a press conference held on Capitol Hill yesterday. Hats off to People For The American Way’s Right Wing Watch for recording this and disseminating this.

These guys are more fixated on gay sex then most gay guys I know. And the one minister who cites a laundry list of intra-species sex partners seems to be revealing alot about his own sick twisted subconscious. I wouldn’t be surprised if the grass they were all standing on was withered and dead after they were finished.

Dan Vera, Gay Wisdom

Gay Wisdom – Thoreau

July 12, 2007 Dan Vera Leave a comment

Today is the birthday of naturalist and transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau (born 1817). Famous for his writings Walden and Civil Disobedience, historians such as Jonathan Ned Katz have written about Thoreau’s deep attachments to male friends throughout his life.

Like Whitman and Emerson, much of Thoreau’s meditations on the higher meaning of male friendships can be found in his writing, specifically Thoreau’s notebooks which he kept throughout his life.

From Thoreau’s Notebooks:

[Nov. 5, 1839]
These young buds of manhood in the streets are like buttercups in the meadows, —surrendered to nature as they.

On June 17, 1839, Edmund Sewall of Scituate visited Concord for a week. After five days of sailing and hiking with Edmund, the twenty-two-year- old Thoreau fell in love with him, writing in his journal:

[June 22, 1839] Saturday. I have within the last few days come into contact with a pure, uncompromising spirit, that is somewhere wandering in the atmosphere, but settles not positively anywhere. . . . Such [spirits] it is impossible not to love; still is their loveliness, as it were, independent of them, so that you seem not to lose it when they are absent, for when they are near it is like an invisible presence which attends you.

Two days later, after Edmund’s departure, Thoreau writes a love poem.

from Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History, Meridian, 1992. pp. 481-494

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This entry was also this day’s Gay Wisdom email.
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Franklin Abbott, Poetry

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

July 10, 2007 Editors 2 Comments

T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" read by the great English actor Michael Gough.

Dan Vera, Gay Wisdom, History

Gay Wisdom – Hadrian, Proust & Rofes

July 10, 2007 Dan Vera Leave a comment

Today’s Gay Wisdom

This entry was also this day’s Gay Wisdom email.

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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

On this date in the year 138 BCE, the Roman Emperor Hadrian, (b. 76) died. On a visit to Claudiopolis to survey damage from a recent earthquake and to dispense his largesse, Hadrian met the beautiful Antinous, a young boy who was destined to become the emperor’s "eromenos" — his beloved. Sources say nothing about when Hadrian met Antinous, however, there are depictions of Antinous that shows him as an exquisitely beautiful man of 20 or so. As this was shortly before Antinous’s drowning in 130 Antinous would more likely have been a youth of 13 or 14. Antinous may have been sent to Rome to be trained as page to serve the emperor and there rose to the status of imperial favorite. However it happened, he became Hadrian’s lifetime love, and upon his mysterious death by drowning in the Nile, spawned a rival religious movement to the early Christians, that also focused on a martyred youth, dying on behalf of the people, and providing restoration to life. Hadrian was grief struck and ordered cities to be named after the boy, medals struck with his effigy, and statues erected to him in all parts of the empire. Temples were built for his worship in Bithynia, Mantineia in Arcadia, and Athens; festivals celebrated in his honor and oracles delivered in his name. The city of Antinoöpolis or Antinoe was founded on the ruins of Besa where he died.

[Suggested reading: Royston Lambert Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous. (1997) ISBN 1-85799-944-4]

On this day in 1871, the intellectual, novelist and essayist Marcel Proust was born. One of the first European writers to treat homosexuality at length, Proust is best known for his novel, Remembrance of Things Past. André Gide was the first to point out that Proust made certain characters female when he meant them to be male in the novel. For example, the character of Albertina was really based on Proust’s own chauffeur-lover Alfred Agostinelli. The book was first translated into English by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff between 1922 and 1931 in a bowdlerized version that removed many of the sexual aspects of the work. The work was recently retranslated from authoritative French originals to recover what had been lost.

On this day in 1954 Neil Tennant was born. Tennant, who, with his colleague Chris Lowe, make up the pop duo, Pet Shop Boys. Although Tennant avoided the issue of homosexuality in the 1980s, preferring his lyrics to be androgynous, shortly after the release of 1993’s Very he publicly came out in Attitude, a UK Gay publication. According to the musician Tom Stephan aka Superchumbo, they had a two-year romantic relationship. Tennant was most recently the executive producer for Rufus Wainwright’s album Release The Stars, released in May 2007.

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TODAY’S GAY WISDOM

In 2005 White Crane published a special themed issue, "Our Bodies, Our Selves" in tribute to the groundbreaking women’s health book of the same name. At the time, we invited Eric Rofes, author of numerous books, including Reviving the Tribe, to write an essay on health and Gay men’s lives. Rofes amazing article, Gay Bodies, Gay Selves: Understanding the Gay Men’s Health Movement can found seen in the archives of White Crane.

That article grew a collaboration between White Crane Institute and Eric that became the Gay Men’s Leadership Academy [ http://gaywisdom.org/academy.html ] Now in its second year, it continues on both coasts under the creative and inspired management of White Crane Project Partners, Chris Bartlett, Kevin Trimell Jones, P. Scott Pegues and Fred Lopez.

Eric’s idea of an "academy" was to create an on-going dialogue among leaders from across various disciplines to bring in creative thinking. He posited that the origins of virtually all of the modern LGBT liberation movement wasn’t the result of "professionals" but of young people who didn’t know that things couldn’t be done, agitating and organizing to create new institutions to take care of LGBT people

Yesterday we began an excerpt from Eric Rofes visionary Reviving the Tribe and offered the first four prescriptions he offers at the end of that book. We continue with the next three today:

4. Support Both Separate and Mixed Spaces for HIV+ and HIV- Men

Few people deny that HIV-infected Gay men and people with AIDS need venues for support and discussion with men who share their status. From the early days of the epidemic, a peer model of emotional support has developed and entire organizations and networks of people with HIV/AIDS have coalesced around the need for shared wisdom to emerge out of a convocation of peers. In epicenter cities, social organizations, mental health support groups and even dating services have been established focused on the needs of HIV-positive Gay men.

Parallel organizing by uninfected men has met a great deal of resistance, but not always from HIV-infected men. Support groups for HIV-negative Gay men have been discounted, mocked and derided. Social programs which can fill a wide range of needs of uninfected men have been accused of "viral apartheid." In one Midwestern city, local activists protested the creation of services for HIV-negative Gay men, taking out advertising in the local media demanding that not one cent of AIDS-related funding be used to support these efforts. One therapist’s proposal to convene a workshop for HIV- men at a national Gay conference was met with derision. "Isn’t that like Germans getting together after World War II to congratulate each other on not being Jews? He was asked."

Survival is a critical issue for the Gay men’s community at this point in its development. It is a matter which deserves to be on the mind and lips of every Gay man, regardless of antibody status. People with HIV disease need to discuss long-term survival issues, treatment strategies, sex matters, and the natural history of HIV disease, as well as the torrent of feelings which accompany living with a life-threatening illness. HIV- Gay men need to discuss long-term survival issues, sex matters, and the impact of the epidemic on their psyches. Both of these discussions are valuable and both need to occur among peers of similar antibody status. By shaming uninfected men away from creating community with one another, a powerful message is delivered: you must be infected to merit attention and concern in this community.

Offering separate services and venues for Gay men of differing antibody statuses does not preclude a commitment to dialogue between men with HIV disease and uninfected men. In fact, such dialogue is essential for continued community building. While some have concluded that the Gay community has become fractured along antibody lines, my own experience with Gay men throughout the nation reveals a vast number of men of differing statuses in relationship together – either romantic, sexual, friendhip, political or professional. Few men have carved out lives entirely with men of the same antibody status.

In an ongoing epidemic we need spaces to come together and spaces to be apart. Individual men will find that certain times they will need to speak with others in similar situations to their own, and at other times, need to speak to a broader, more diverse group. For any community to fulfill its function as a place of support and sustenance amidst a continuing avalanche of loss, these differing needs unabashedly must be affirmed and supported.

5. Support Gay Men’s Involvement with Children and Youth

A common response to mass catastrophe which brings about loss of life and causes survivors to experience great amounts of infirmity and death, is to focus on affirming life through the reproduction of the species. After Hiroshima, Japanese culture experienced a fierce – almost obsessive – focus on reproduction, child-rearing, and the creation of the next generation of Japanese. Many populations which have suffered genocide during the 20th century have emerged from the experience to replenish their ranks and ensure their population’s survival in the face of decimation.

It should not surprise observers of community response to catastrophe to note increased Gay male interest and participation in becoming fathers, working with children and teenagers, and serving as sperm donors for Lesbians. Gay men’s interactions with children and youth have long been considered controversial due to the stigma of child molestation which society confers on Gay men. Despite progress made by the Gay movement, recent sex panics surrounding adult-child sex issues (charges against Michael Jackson, North American Man/Boy Love Association controversies) may have strengthened the linkage between Gay men and pedophilia in the public mind. Homosexual men have been involved in the lives of children for a long time – as child advocates, teachers, school administrators, social workers, children’s book authors, and the leaders of social, fraternal, and athletic networks – yet the majority of Gay men in these professions have remained closeted. Today Gay men working with children wrestle with overt discrimination and whispered allegations that arise when the relationship between children and gay men enters the public sphere.

The involvement of Gay men with children has changed dramatically since the start of the epidemic and may reflect both the natural development course of Gay liberation and a response to Gay men’s premature and overwhelming experience with death. Gay men’s increased involvement with fatherhood – as sperm donors, co-parents, adoptive parents and full-time fathers – has been commented upon extensively in the popular media which have cited in particular Gay men’s roles in the continuing "Lesbian baby boom" of the 1980s and 199s. Less visible has been the increased participation by Gay men in the creation and development of a wide range of educational, social and health-oriented services focused on Gay, Lesbian, bisexual and transgender and questioning youth.

…Lesbian and Gay community support for children and youth is likely to continue as the epidemic deepens. Yet the stake which Lesbians and Gay men have in these concerns appears to be distinct from that of certain ethnic, religious, and racial groups whose blood-line is threatened by genocidal action. Because Lesbian, Gay men and bisexuals need to neither reproduce nor "recruit" to ensure the survival of the queer tribe, the fear that AIDS will wipe out future Gay male life seems difficult to substantiate. Efforts aimed at fostering the health and well-being of future generations of queer youth focus less on reproducing the species and more on altering key institutions – schools, family, media, Boy Scouts, military, organized religion – which exert a powerful influence over the self-image and self-esteem of sexual minority youth. The increase attention and resources devoted to these matters in recent years represents an affirmation of life and a commitment to the future of the community.

6. Encourage The Celebration Of Life

During recent years concerns have surfaced amongst the leadership of Gay organizations and on the pages of the Gay press about the penchant which Lesbians and Gay men appear to have for parties, festivals, and mass celebrations. This is not a new debate. For many years, annual events marking Lesbian and Gay Pride Week were the subject of fierce debate about whether the convergence of the masses was to focus on either a "march" or a "parade," a "demonstration" or a "festival." While often the overt discussion focuses on politics versus culture, the conversation’s subtext concerned the increasing commercialization of Gay culture, the relationship of the movement to traditional American social change movements, and judgments about Gay male culture’s focus on sex, costumes, and gender play. The political status quo of the Gay community has long harbored conflicted feelings about celebrations.

The March on Washington in 1993 raised this debate to an entirely different level. As the national Lesbian and Gay community was placed center stage during a brief period of unprecedented media visibility, several factors caused leaders of established organizations to question the "propriety" and usefulness of aspects of the weekend’s events. C-SPAN’s uninterrupted coverage of the rally at the U.S. Capitol exposed to millions of viewers bare-breasted Lesbians, flagrantly sexual Gay men, and one Lesbian’s declaration of desire for the First Lady. Religious extremists unveiled and mass-distributed controversial videotapes such as Gay Rights, Special Rights and The Gay Agenda, which included footage of local and national marches with special focus on controversial segments of the community (leatherfolk, sadomasochists, NAMBLA, clubkids.)

…While critiquing the focus, position and public relations of Gay community parties and celebrations is merited, leaders should resist any temptation to excoriate celebrations from its central position in the movement. Every oppressed group has created social and cultural outlets which affirm life and community values, even in the midst of extreme historical cataclysms. Any Tan, in The Joy Luck Club, provides rationale for celebration through the powerful voice of one of her central characters who struggled to survive the Cultural Revolution in China:

People thought we were wrong to serve banquets every week while many people in the city were starving, eating rats and, later, the garbage that the poorest rats used to feed on. Others though we were possessed by demons – to celebrate when even within our own families we had lost generations, had lost homes and fortunes, and were separated husband from wife, brother from sister, daughter from mother, Hnnnnh! How could we laugh? People asked.

It’s not that we had no heart or eyes for pain. We were all afraid. We all had our miseries. But to despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable. How much can you wish for a favorite warm coat that hangs in the closet of a house that burned down with your mother and father inside of it? How long can you see in your mind arms and legs hanging from telephone wires and starving dogs running down the streets with half-chewed hands dangling from their jaws? What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with proper somber faces? Or to choose our own happiness?

While it might seem to some like a bizarre transmutation of reality to witness huge dance parties, upbeat street fairs, and endless parades of community celebrants while the epidemic rages among us, Gay men need not harbor any feeling of guilt about celebrating life when we are immersed in so much death. Rather than a denial of the ugliness and sorrow which intrude upon our daily lives, mass celebrations may affirm commitment to community and life, and offer a vision of ourselves broader than our illnesses and victimization. Gay men are caregivers, but more than caregivers; we suffer tremendous pain, but our pain is not all of who we are; we are surviving, but for our communal lives to have meaning, we must find ways to be more than survivors.

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This entry was also this day’s Gay Wisdom email.
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Bo Young, Current Affairs, Religion

The French Get It Right…Bénédictions sur leur mariage.

July 7, 2007 Editors Leave a comment

I was trawling through the muck of the internet today, and of course, THE most important thing happening, other than Live Earth is…Eva Longoria’s wedding at Chateau Vaux le Vicomte.

First of all, talk about real estate!

Anyway, someone said something about a beautiful dress, and while I could care less about Desperate Housewives, I like Eva well enough, and I’m as queer as the next fellow about a pretty frock, so I went looking for it.

And found this:

"He praised Longoria’s choice of dresses and designer – the 32-year-old wore a pink Chanel mini dress on her way into the town hall, but changed into a white dress in the district mayor’s office. French law requires a civil ceremony even when couples marry in a church."

Wow! What a concept…religious folks get their God’s church blessing on the whole matter if they want, but somehow, it seems, the French have acknowledged that the state has a stake in this that is separate from and different than the church’s.

Imagine that…some kind of separation of the church’s interest and the state’s. What must it be like to live in a society like that?

Bénédictions sur leur mariage.

Bo Young, Community, Culture, Elders, Gay Wisdom, Literature, Religion

Andrew Harvey at the NYC LGBT Center

July 3, 2007 Editors Leave a comment

Out at the Center’s Chris Dawes was involved with both shooting and editing this segment and had this to say about his experience: "I initially chose to produce the Sacred Activism segment because of the spiritual element inferred by the intriguing title. I am very interested in religion and spirituality, so I tend to gravitate towards such stories. After hearing Andrew Harvey speak however, it was his empowering message to the LGBT community that struck me the most; we are unique and gifted and special and we have the power to change the world for the better and better ourselves in the process if we so choose. During my coming out process, I read somewhere that you eventually come to feel glad that you were born Gay instead of straight, because you are different and special. I could never fathom myself feeling that way, but after hearing Andrew Harvey speak, I can now see it. It was difficult to edit his powerful message and his wonderful wit and sense of humor down to just five minutes. White Crane thanks Richard Davis for providing this clip. We will also shortly be posting an interview done by Out At the Center with Mark Thompson on the occasion of the opening of the White Crane sponsored Fellow Travelers exhibit.

Building Connections & Community for Gay Men since 1989