The Art of Gay Men’s Health

Charles Stephens is an Atlanta based writer and activist. He is interested in the politics of desire, gay men’s health and wellness, and black gay history and culture. Like everyone else he blogs.

LifeLube is delighted to have Charles share his ideas for a 2009 Gay Men's Health Agenda.


One of the most tragic things that our collective experience as gay men living with, among, and around HIV, has robbed us of, is our ability to imagine. We have to imagine. This is a necessity. And for this to happen, we have to bring and centralize artists in the work of gay men’s health. We have to commission artists in our movement to tell our stories, visually and textually, so we can remember where we have been and imagine where we are going. Thus, I am calling for a gay men’s health agenda that advocates explicitly for art to be core to our movement.

We need artists that can continually bear witness to what has been and what can be. There have been those artists that have been doing this, brilliantly, but we need to ensure they are able to continue. They hold our stories and our truths. Susan Sontag saw the use of metaphor as potentially problematic for how we think about illness in general, and subsequently AIDS, but as human beings we need metaphor to help us make sense of our existence. We need more meanings, more symbols.

How do we as gay men attach meaning to our bodies and bodily fluids? How do we as gay men make sense of our existence in our evolving and ever changing sexual cultures? What are the possible configurations of our relationships in the sexual contexts we operate from, in our Post Protease-Online-Gay Marriage-bareback porn-Clay Aiken gay reality? These questions are being explored by some of our more courageous researchers, particularly in the realm of the Qualitative, Gary Dowsett and many others have been breathtaking in this regard. But we also need artists to respond to these things. We need to constantly develop language to articulate our current realities. And this can happen best through art.

Public health can certainly address everything from bareback porn, bug chasing, to the meanings we as gay men attach to cum. However, it has been and will only be through the arts, that the nuance and complexities of these matters can best be tackled. In the 1980s there were artists like Joseph Beam who gave us “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act of the 80s,” and “we are worth wanting each other,” in his powerful essays. The poet Essex Hemphill who gave us “now we think as we fuck this nut might kill us,” a line that speaks to the pleasure, fear, ambivalence, and defiance that has been such a strong part of gay male sexuality. In the 90s, Eric Rofes, an activist/writer/scholar very much influenced by Cultural Studies, by art, by the Humanities, was able to imagine gay communities and sexuality in a way that still leaves me breathless. Art is indispensable to our movement. We need to nurture and support a new generation of artists so that our past, present and future will not be told only through charts, graphs, statistics, and epidemiological data.

[Click here to read previous input into the 2009 Gay Men's Health Agenda. Please feel free to comment there - or you could send in a full post of your own here. We will be happy to publish it! The feedback we receive will be featured in the closing plenary of the upcoming National Gay Men's Health Summit and will be a means of moving the community forward in the new year around issues that are important to all of us.]