Ed Negron's Daily Motivation 3-9-2012

Friday, March 9, 2011

Today's Gift

I want to get you excited about who you are, what you are, what you have, and what can still be for you. I want to inspire you to see that you can go far beyond where you are right now. —Virginia Satir

The excitement and the inspiration come and go; they are seldom stationary. We can actively create the excitement and the inspiration. We need not wait for them to come to us. That's one of the choices we have as human beings, as women and men.

Passively waiting for "the good life" is past behavior. Each day, this day, we can set our sights on reaching a goal--we can take a step, or two, toward that goal. Progress is there for the making--achievement is there for the taking.

Whatever our hearts' pure desires, we can move toward that goal. We are what we need to be. We have what we need to move ahead.

Today, I will let my excitement for life's possibilities spur me on.


From Each Day a New Beginning: Daily Meditations for Women by Karen Casey©

Read more Daily Motivations at http://thework-in.blogspot.com/

Homeless LGBT Youth: The Next Battle for Equality

via HuffPost Gay Voices via AP, by Verena Dobnik

 NEW YORK — Iro Uikka clutches his throat as he describes the violent clash that led to spending his nights sleeping in New York City subway cars.

"When I told my mother I was gay, she grabbed me by the neck and threw me out," he says. "Then she threw my coat on top of me and shut the door."

That was five years ago when he was 18, still living at home in Florida.

Uikka is among tens of thousands of homeless youths across America who are LGBT – lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

Most are on the streets because they have nowhere else to go – outcasts who leave home after being rejected by family members or flee shelters because residents bully or beat them.

LGBT young people represent a dramatically high proportion of an estimated 600,000 or more homeless youths across the country – between 20 percent and 40 percent, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute.

But only about 5 percent of youths identify themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We've won battles for gay marriage and gays in the military," says Carl Siciliano, founder and executive director of the New York-based Ali Forney Center, the nation's largest organization for LGBT youth. "This is the next frontier, the next battle: helping these youths."

The White House has taken notice. Members of the Obama Administration are hosting a national conference on housing and homelessness in America's LGBT communities on Friday in Detroit. They'll discuss these issues with advocates, community leaders and the public.

Detroit City Council President Charles Pugh, who is openly gay, is one of the participants.

"I take this discussion personally because I know too many people who have been kicked out of their homes because of their orientation," he told The Associated Press.

"To get this kind of attention from the White House is exactly what we need to raise conscientiousness and to help parents find a way to deal with their kids' orientation."

Detroit has the only nonprofit agency in the Midwest that focuses on LGBT youth – the Ruth Ellis Center, co-host of the Friday conference. But the largely voiceless, powerless youth are fighting to survive from coast to coast.

They live on streets, in subways and train stations, on river piers, in parks and abandoned houses. They're robbed, raped and assaulted. Some are murdered.

And they're invisible to most Americans.

Lesbian, gay and bisexual youth are about four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers, according to the CDC.

And one in three is thrown out by their parents, according to data collected from youth across the country by the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University.

Some youth use "survival sex" to land in a warm bed, or they move from home to home of friends and acquaintances.

In the past, Ryan Kennedy resorted to survival sex. He lists his education on Facebook as "Urban Survivalism at University of NYC Streets." He adopted a rebellious middle name for his page, calling himself "Ryan TransEquality Kennedy."

"I wouldn't be alive today if I didn't get some help," says Kennedy, a transgender youth whose Connecticut family threw him out at 15. He says he was a girl who felt like a boy. He's now transitioning to male.

After years living on the streets, Kennedy, now 22, has a bed thanks to The Door, a New York nonprofit that offers shelter, food, counseling and job training programs.

On any given day, there are almost 4,000 homeless youths in New York City, and at least 1,000 are LGBT, according to a 2008 census released by the City Council.

Meager government funds and private donations cover about 350 New York beds for homeless youth. Hundreds more are on waiting lists, providers say.

In recent years, the New York state Legislature has cut funding to support homeless youth programs in general by about 70 percent.

Somehow, these vulnerable Americans survive, without beds.


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If We Knew What We Know Now...

via HuffPost Gay Voices, by Ace Robinson

Would we have stopped AIDS? It is a valid question to ask, as the world has been aware of this epidemic for over 30 years.

GMHC was passionately and courageously created 30 years ago by a group of gay men who did not know how far-reaching and devastating this disease would be to all corners of the Earth.

We know through retrospective epidemiological data that the first confirmed American AIDS death occurred in 1969: a 15-year-old, sexually active young man in Saint Louis, Mo. who had never traveled abroad.

And by the time HIV was isolated and identified in 1981, it had already found its target communities: people who have engaged in anal sex, injection-drug users, breastfed infants, and individuals who received medically sanctioned human tissue (i.e., donated blood or organ transplants).

During the early '80s in the States, a strong cultural shift had just occurred, from "free love" and "live and let live" to the conservative Christian movement led by Jerry Falwell.

The Moral Majority had become a major player in the political field, which led to the election of President Ronald Reagan. The policies that would shape America for the next eight years would also mold America's response to the introduction of AIDS into the lives of countless individuals and the American lexicon.

Due to advances in diagnosis and treatment of the virus, in addition to the political activism of the direct and indirect victims of HIV/AIDS, the virus is no longer a death sentence for the estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million Americans who are affected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

But lest we forget, these data, which seem so large, are a measure of the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in 2011. Thirty years ago, that number was exponentially smaller.

Imagine an America that only had around 10,000 to 20,000 persons with HIV/AIDS, and a world that may have had about 70,000 to 100,000 total cases.

Couple that information with the knowledge that a muted health care response would eventually lead to 2 million deaths annually. Would it have been morally acceptable to demonize particular populations?

We have all heard countless justifications for why some people "got it," without any level of sympathy. These sentiments are based on racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and/or prejudice against addicts.

Typically, bleeding hearts only pour out to individuals who are considered without fault in their HIV status, such as newborns or hemophiliacs.

After 30 years of AIDS, we know what works and, more importantly, what does not work. We know that first and foremost, education is the greatest deterrent to infection (if one is HIV-negative) or infecting another person (if one is HIV-positive).

Furthermore, we have seen the effect of readily available medication (anti-retroviral drugs) on the level of impact that HIV/AIDS has on an individual and on a community. And we have seen effective public health initiatives that have saved countless lives, domestically and internationally (e.g., syringe needle exchanges).

Moreover, after 30 years of AIDS, we know that our leaders have a choice of when, how, and to whom any and all interventions are available. To the ultimate detriment of 20 million people each year, those interventions are often not available, sometimes due to funding, and sometimes due to normative culture values that punish those most in need: the world's outcasts.

It is not being cynical to suggest that if we knew then what we know now, all possible barriers to the spread of HIV/AIDS would have been enacted.

Even in 2011, Congress has taken actions that will diminish headway in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Reinstating the federal ban on syringe-exchange funding, coupled with funding for abstinence-only education, unfortunately shows a trade of proven-effective health policy for proven-ineffective actions.

As HIV public health advocates, our hope is that the correct actions are taken so that in a few decades, we do not look back and wonder why the tools that we have today were not utilized. There is no viable excuse for knowing now what we already know and still not doing the right thing.


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When a Gay Boy Loves a Girl

via HuffPost Gay Voices, by Justin Huang

They say that behind every great man is a greater woman. As a gay man, I'm an exception to this. You see, I have multiple greater women standing behind me.

When I first came out to my mom (the foremost Great Woman in my life), she asked me why I didn't love women. "You don't understand," I said. "I love women more than anything.

That's why I don't want to have sex with them." And this statement remains true to this day. I believe that the most shining, transcendent, sublime human bond occurs when a gay boy loves a girl.

There's something remarkable yet completely sensible about the union between a gay man and a straight woman.

On a shallow, heteronormative level, you seem to have a traditional romance of sorts, in which a boy and a girl care greatly for each other.

But look more closely at this dynamic and the layers become more complex, intertwining like strands of DNA. Without sexual tension and social norms, the love between the two of them is not clouded by expectations or unwelcome erections.

Something deeper, something magical, something liberating happens, and the rest is history.

It all started for me when I was a sexually confused teenager in high school drama club. Drama club, it turned out, was the mecca of sexually confused teenagers in high school.

I was obese and unhappy, defined mostly by my good grades and utter lack of social skills, when I was cast as Mr. Van Daan in The Diary of Anne Frank. (By the way, Anne Frank proved that teenagers can still find time to be sexually confused even with Nazis trying to kill you.)

Mrs. Van Daan was played by a beautiful young girl named Julie. I was in awe of her. Julie was everything that I had wanted. She was smart and popular.

She lived in a gorgeous cabin up in the mountains, surrounded by thoroughbreds. All the boys had crushes on her -- including the precocious gays.

But instead of taking a look at me and writing me off like everyone else had, the "bond" between us occurred instantly that first day of rehearsal. Never had a friendship blossomed so easily for me. And when she made me grab her boob backstage and it did nothing for me, our eyes locked, and we knew we were meant to be.

It didn't matter that I had put up my walls of insecure self-defense and gay teen self-loathing. It was a matter of destiny; there was no stopping her.

A gay boy and a straight girl fell in love. I slept over at her house and became close with her equally wonderful sister Amy. We went shopping together. We played The Sims a lot (these were the early 2000s).

Julie made me feel beautiful for the first time in my life. It isn't easy being a double minority. But instead of feeling weird, she made me feel special. And yes, she was my prom date.

I wore a pink vest, and it was one of the best nights of my life. You might snicker, but some stereotypes are beautiful.

This past Valentine's Day, I spent it with Julie. She cooked dinner, and I brought her the last bunch of dozen red roses at the flower shop, which I had to wrench out of another guy's hands.

We ate too much, then passed out on adjacent couches. At 25, I've known and loved her for eight years now.

Could this have happened if I was straight? No.

Would it have needed to happen? I wouldn't have it any other way.


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Ed Negron's Daily Motivation 3-8-2012

Thursday, March 8, 2012
Today's Gift

Before the rain stops we hear a bird. Even under the heavy snow we see snowdrops and some new growth. —Shunryu Suzuki

The signals that new growth is underway are often very small at first. It's sometimes discouraging when we are trying to remake our lives and all we can see for our efforts is minor growth. That is how the natural world works, and we are part of this world. When the little sprouts of growth first develop under the snow in spring we don't even see them unless we search. Yet, they signal the beginnings of a total transformation. Time will bring vast changes, but only little signs are showing first.

Today, we may search for signs of progress in our lives. The little things we see may signal bigger transformations yet to come. To be true to them in the long run we must accept them - even welcome them - as they are today.

I will notice the subtle movements toward health and renewal in my life. Welcoming them will encourage them.

From Touchstones: A Book of Daily Meditations for Men©

Read more Daily Motivations at http://thework-in.blogspot.com/

Ed Negron's Daily Motivation 3-7-2012

Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Today's Gift

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands. —Anne Frank

We must take responsibility for ourselves, for who we become, for how we live each day. The temptation to blame others may be ever present. And much of our past adds up to wasted days or years, perhaps, because we did blame someone else for the unhappiness in our lives.

We may have blamed our own parents for not loving us enough. We may have labeled our partners the villains. Other people did affect us. That's true. However, we chose, you and I, to let them control us, overwhelm us, shame us. We always had other options, but we didn't choose them.

Today is a new day. Life has opened up our options. We are learning who we are and how we want to live our lives. How exhilarating to know that you and I can take today and put our own special flavor in it. We can meet our personal needs. We can, with anticipation, chart our course. The days of passivity are over, if we choose to move ahead with this day.

I will look to this day. Every day is a new beginning.


From Each Day a New Beginning: Daily Meditations for Women by Karen Casey©

Read more Daily Motivations at http://thework-in.blogspot.com/

Ed Negron's Daily Motivation 3-6-2012

Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Today's Gift

If you let go a little, you will have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you will have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you will have complete peace. Ajahn Chan XX century Buddhist Monk


Anxiety is often our first reaction to conflict, problems, or even our own fears. In those moments, detaching and getting peaceful may seem disloyal or apathetic. We think: If I really care, I'll worry; if this is really important to me, I must stay upset. We convince ourselves that outcomes will be positively affected by the amount of time we spend worrying.

Our best problem-solving resource is peace. Solutions arise easily and naturally out of a peaceful state. Often, fear and anxiety block solutions. Anxiety gives power to the problem, not the solution. It does not help to harbor turmoil. It does not help.

Peace is available if we choose it. In spite of chaos and unsolved problems around us, all is well. Things will work out. We can surround ourselves with the resources of the Universe: water, earth, a sunset, a walk, a prayer, a friend. We can relax and let ourselves feel peace.

Today, I will let go of my need to stay in turmoil. I will cultivate peace and trust that timely solutions and goodness will arise naturally and harmoniously out of the wellspring of peace. I will consciously let go and let God.


From The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie ©

Read more Daily Motivations at http://thework-in.blogspot.com/