Days 1 and 2
by Chris Bartlett [pictured above center at the opening plenary on Saturday, Oct 18 - with plenary moderator Jim Pickett, left, and Fred Swanson, right.]
The 2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit is the fifth in a series of powerful community organizing efforts around gay men's health. Earlier summits in Boulder (1999, 2001), Raleigh (2003), and Salt Lake City (2005) created models for bringing activists, academics, public health staff, community organizers, doctors, and other health stakeholders to dive into lively conversations about what the gay men's health agenda is and should be. Those summits led to numerous outcomes, including new gay men's health organizations, new organizing efforts in Europe, Australia, Canada, and Asia, and a growing international cadre of gay men and allies who are taking a stand for our bodies, our selves, and our communities.The Seattle Gay Men's Health Summit, taking place now(from October 17-21st, 2008), seeks to continue this tradition of generating ideas and energies that will create the next generation of gay men's health organizations and efforts.
In the program book for the Seattle Gay Men's Health Summit, summit convener and Executive Director of Gay City Fred Swanson said, "We hope that this weekend challenges and inspires you, makes you angry, joyful, and gives you an opportunity to engage." After two days, that mission has been accomplished for me. I'll give a few highlights here.
I swung into Seattle on Thursday, and met up with Josh Thomas, superorganizer from CHAMP, and we had a great talk over dinner about what brought us to our work-- what personal experiences, who inspired/inspires us, and how we maintain our commitment in the face of challenges. The Summit puts a premium on these face-to-face get-togethers, where we can really discover who those fantastic people are who exist on the other sides of conference calls and listserves. Josh and I are just about the same generation, though he is much younger. ;-), and we discovered that we came to the movement in similar ways: out of confronting the deaths of friends and family from AIDS, and out of our belief that we could make a difference. The conversation with Josh reminded me that it is largely the relationships I currently have and have had, with people both alive and dead, that have keep me powerfully engaged over so many years. I come to the Summit in part largely to bump up against these incredible gay men and allies who are committed, for the long haul, to creating opportunities for health.
DAY I-- LEADERSHIP ACADEMY: Key ideas: leadership, importance of relationships for organizing, secret mentoring,
Friday morning, I was up early to co-facilitate the Gay Men's Health Leadership Academy pre-institute with Kaijson. We had over 40 gay men and allies show up bright and early at 9:00, and we spent the day examining what it takes to BE a leader, with the accent on BE. We discussed why we do what we do, and what makes us passionate about it. We explored how that passion is a magnet for people to join our cause. We discussed paradigm shifts that are required of a leader in gay men's health:
1. Shifting from a focus on HIV/AIDS as the exclusive realm of health for gay men, to a much broader picture that includes HIV/AIDS as an important (and sometimes primary) issue, but does not default to HIV as a metaphor for gay men's health.
2. Shifting from a focus on gay men's deficits and weaknesses to a focus on assets and strengths.
3. Shifting from a focus on disease and pathology to one of wellness.
In the afternoon, we also got into some great conversations about the particular skills that gay men and their allies could bring to leadership. In particular, we looked at developing intergenerational links between youth, adults, elders, and ancestors. It helps to lead in the context of being connected to those who came before and those who come after.
In this light, we discussed the idea of "secret mentorship", in which people create a list of people whom they are mentoring, and by whom they are mentored, but they keep the list a secret to everyone but themselves. The idea is to create a network of people to whom one is intentionally connected-- for service, support, and wisdom.
DAY II- Internet Organizing, Wellness Plenary, GMHC's crystal meth campaigns, and dinner with a gaggle of gays. Key ideas: Gay Men's Health needs to be aware of the impact of jobs/our needs for jobs/ economic issues on our organizing; we have to be very clear about who (people of color, transpeople, rural gays) are invisible in the ongoing organizing. Also how can we create outputs for our communities that are not always dependent on outside funding: the revolutionary work will not be funded by the usual suspects.
My first workshop was Stephan Adelson's terrific presentation of the state-of-the-art of gay men's health organizing on-line. Adelson is a former key staff person from Manhunt, so he was able to tell us about the ways that Manhunt has educated and provided access to health services. He also took us through a tour of the huge number of websites that now serve as potential venues for gay health organizing. His PowerPoint is a terrific resource, and you can find it here.
The opening plenary engaged the audience around the ways that wellness is and can be constructed within our communities. The audience was particularly charged up about how to engage conversations around race, gender and class, as well as the impact of class itself (and income/jobs) on our abilities to organize. We also discussed how best to use the Summit itself as a vehicle for wellness organizing- that a Summit is meant to be different from a conference in providing opportunities for actual planning, debate, and action steps.
Post-plenary, I went to Francisco Roque's wonderful presentation of GMHC's crystal meth campaigns: "Hurricane Tina" and "How Obvious Does It Have to Get". Both campaigns aimed to present a diversity of community views about meth, without pathologizing or demonizing users. The campaigns represent a significant improvement from some of the first-generation campaigns (from other agencies/entities) that were filled with finger-wagging and scare tactics.
In particular, these campaigns go beyond the social marketing efforts themselves to work across programs and generate/support healthy social networks. I left impressed by GMHC's work in this area, and wondering at the same time (as I always do) about the long-term impact of social marketing campaigns that treat community members as a market for a product called "health", as opposed to a social network empowered to create its own health. GMHC's efforts strike me as stronger than most precisely because the campaigns are plugged into efforts to build/strengthen communities and the individuals that are a part of them.
I spent the evening of Day 2 having dinner with bunch of gay health advocates. We sat around and shared some of the things we didn't know about each other: one of us had been an actor on the 700 Club (a Christian fundamentalist TV show); another shared his story about coming out at a gay bar in the South, and I talked about my very close relationship with recently deceased Grandmother. The stories we shared were again part of an effort in relationship building-- one of the key goals for me in insuring that I surround myself with a network of gay men and allies who can help me in all of the challenging work we face. The Gay Men's Health Summit reminds us that gay men's health also applies to us organizers, and that gay men's health leaders must make the effort to get the support they need to themselves remain healthy. For me, this is always an important take home.
-- Chris Bartlett will post his thoughts from Day 3 and Day 4 of the summit in the next few days. You can follow his real-time postings about the summit - and there are a lot of them - on Twitter here.
Check out pics from the Summit here.
Connect to the Summit today and everyday forward on the new Gay Men's Health Summit portal.
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