Feel the Love...

Stop the world and melt with you

Sister Glo shares her glittery gems of love for LifeLube.

"Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul."

- Saint Teresa of Avila




Sister Glo is an HIV educator, gay men’s health advocate, and member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in Seattle. She is drawn to sparkly objects and believes that glitter and the transformative power of love in action are necessary to gay men’s health and wellness.

Men of Chicago - Tell us about your sex life

Friday is for Faeries

Every Friday

Woof Wednesday

The Center is Here for YOU

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Enough With MSM Already!

If you choose to bathe in your internalized homophobia, like a drunk with cologne, we allow it.

by Charles Stephens
Read more from Charles on LifeLube

Every idea starts out good, perhaps, even if it ends up being counterproductive in the end. And no where is that more evident than in the term “MSM” or men that have sex with men.

I get it. Those of us that work in the HIV realm, we want to be inclusive. We want to be sensitive to individuals and communities that we serve. We want to acknowledge their cultural distastes for customs, concepts, and symbols that appear foreign to their communities. Most importantly, we want to reach those individuals with our prevention messages that might not see themselves in something addressing gay men, even if they engage in the same behaviors, spaces, and communities, as those that identify as gay. So “msm” like a one-size fits all label, was created to include the gaggle of men engaged in sexual desires, pleasures, and behaviors with other men, that do not identify as gay. However, I wonder if the unintended consequence, as we try to be open, as we try to be inclusive, is to reinforce the stigmatization of gay-identity.

On one hand we say, being gay is ok, being gay is natural, being gay is normal, but then we turn around and say, if you are someone that for all practical purposes is gay, but choose not to identify with gay community, culture, politics or history, if you choose to distance yourselves from us, we support and affirm that. If you choose to bathe in your internalized homophobia, like a drunk with cologne, we allow it. If you choose to remain wounded, we meet you there, without showing you an alternative means.

Let me talk about black men for a moment. I’m not certain how rampant the MSM label is among HIV Preventionists that work with white men, but for black men the term MSM is a template. The thought is that black men, and there is research that supports this I suppose, are less willing to identify with the category gay. So what. As someone that is black and identifies unrepentantly as gay, and at times, queer, I have always found such a strategy problematic. First, one of the most important approaches we can take to HIV Prevention, and the most important work ahead of us, is to
de-stigmatize gay identity. Period.

Yes, even for black men.

And yet there is a reluctance to assert this. A reluctance to insist upon positive identity development as a tool, to facilitate more optimal health outcomes. And though I can’t prove this, I wonder if there is a racism and homophobia that upholds the apprehension of individuals working in HIV prevention around institutionalizing the normalization of a gay identity.

Homophobia because I am unconvinced that you can be all right with being gay, support gay rights, find homophobia problematic, and accept and enable others to not be ok with their gayness.

Racism, because the well-meaning white people in Public Health, that work in research, epidemiology, and education, mistake internalized homophobia for some sort of cultural difference. We haven’t invented another term for black people who don’t like the label “black” or “African-American” to describe themselves, and believe me they are out there. We would think that ridiculous. Yet we continue to enable internalized homophobia through our reluctance to normalize gay identity through our messages, in our programs, and in the discourse overall.

Moving forward, let us toss out the ridiculous label of “MSM.” We need to reach gay men with messages that target them. We need to de-stigmatize gay identity as the latest approach to do HIV Prevention. And we have to discontinue having a few select spokespeople for groups, even the loudest voices, arrest our aims because of the fear we will offend.

Charles Stephens is an Atlanta-based writer and organizer. Check out his blog.

Keep Those Summit Endorsements Coming!

So far more than 100 people have endorsed the mission of the 2009 LGBTI Health Summit coming to Chicago next August. It's a great start, but we need more support. Please keep spreading the word out far and wide. Remember, by endorsing the Summit, you are voicing your support for the health and wellness of the LGBTI community - nothing more, nothing less. So come on and sign up; it takes a village people!

Endorsers: please send your name and location to Pete Subkoviak at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago here.

Announcing a Call to Action
Please join us for
LGBTI Health Through the Life Course
The 2009 National LGBTI Health Summit, in conjunction with
the BiHealth Summit
August 14 – 18, 2009 in Chicago

About the Summit

The 2009 National LGBTI (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Intersex) Health Summit is an event dedicated to preserving and improving the emotional, physical, spiritual, intellectual, psychological, environmental, and social health and wellness of LGBTI people, a population that continues to experience significant health disparities because of its members’ sexual orientations and/or gender identities.

We welcome all individuals who support the health and well-being of LGBTI people as well as all members of the community (no previous health experience necessary) to explore what it means to be a healthy LGBTI person, living in a healthy LGBTI community.

We invite you to spend a few days in Chicago working intensively with colleagues from all over the nation and world who are grappling with similar challenges, and engage in deep thinking and extended discussion about innovative programming related to the theme of “LGBTI Health Through the Life Course.”

We are especially excited to be holding this summit in the year marking the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the event frequently cited as the beginning of the LGBTI rights movement. The Stonewall Riots was a series of spontaneous, raucous demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn of New York City. in response to a government-sponsored system that persecuted homosexuals, and started the modern gay rights movement in the United States and around the world.

This summit is different from traditional health conferences. Our LGBTI Health Summits (previously in Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and most recently in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) have been described as nurturing retreats, exciting and intense think tanks, and an event of great enlightenment. Participants come away with a renewed passion for the cause, energized and inspired to tackle the problems confronting LGBTI health and wellness.

The Summit is a chance for all participants to reach out across differences in sexual and gender identity, ethnicity, race, age, and socioeconomic status and begin to work toward common goals. We avoid a focus on celebrities and big names, and we take plenty of time to relax, have fun, and make meaningful contact with other participants.

While the summit will include speakers, panels, workshops, pre-summit institutes and organizing meetings, it will also include interactive exercises, such as experiential education activities, yoga and other forms of self and communal care, as well as creative festivities. The Summit will address a range of topics that includes, but is not limited to:

· LGBTI health through the life course

· Understanding LGBTI history and its health impacts

· Wellness for all of our communities

· Bisexual visibility & well-being

· Health leadership

· Health care access

· Frontiers in HIV/AIDS and STD prevention and care

· New HIV prevention technologies like microbicides and PrEP

· Youth and elder strategies

· Tobacco and LGBTI health

· The role of alcohol and other substances in LGBTI communities

· Universal Health Care and other paths to good LGBTI health

· LGBTI Spirituality and its role in the health of individuals and communities

· Culturally competent LGBTI mental health research and programming

· Self-care for the community organizer

· Marriage equality as a health strategy

· Addressing racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia to enable healing

· Diversity of family structures as a part of LGBTI health

· Understanding our identities and our bodies: what does it mean to be L,G,B,T or I?

The BiHealth Summit

The BiHealth Summit will bring together professionals, advocates, activists, and allies of bisexual health concerns for updates on the field, movement-building, and strategizing about future directions and collaborations. The BiHealth Summit will be both a concentrated event and a broader presence within the LGBTI Health Summit.

Who We Are

The LGBTI Health Summit includes a diverse group of health educators, healthcare providers, policy makers, activists, grassroots organizers, advocates, people with HIV, and members of diverse LGBTI communities with powerful concerns about the ways current health challenges and sociopolitical trends will impact our communities in the months and years to come.

We come from different locations, cultures, class backgrounds, generations, and professions, and we identify in myriad ways, but we share a common interest in improving LGBTI health and wellness, strengthening our local communities and subcultures, and enlisting service providers, activists, health professionals, researchers, sex workers, spiritual leaders, writers, allies, and cultural workers in our efforts.

We know that language can be problematic, and that many people do not identify with terms such as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Our summit strives to welcome those who identify otherwise--as queer, genderqueer, same-gender loving, and a wide diversity of other sexual and gender identities. We also embrace those who may not fit any of the above, but are allies in this cause.

We believe it is critically important for all of us to join together, commemorate our collective triumphs, and strategically address in new and innovative ways the core challenges facing our communities.

As with previous summits, the 2009 National LGBTI Health Summit, in collaboration with the BiHealth Summit, is a grassroots organizing effort with very ambitious aims. It is organized by dedicated volunteers from all parts of the country who work together to handle logistics, program planning, fundraising, publicity, and housing.

It is imperative that everyone plan now to attend this event.

We Need You

The Summit needs the input of those who face daunting questions and formidable challenges as well as those who have succeeded in creating effective programs and campaigns related to LGBTI health and wellness. We welcome activists as well as researchers, doctors as well as holistic health practitioners, religious and spiritual leaders as well as sex workers. Most of all, we request the participation of ordinary LGBTI-identified people who will share their valuable experiences, questions, and energy as we build a movement around community health and empowerment. We welcome all individuals who support the health and well-being of LGBTI people and all members of the community (no previous health experience necessary) to explore what it means to be a healthy LGBTI person, living in a healthy LGBTI community.

Registration and a call for abstracts will be announced in the first quarter of 2009. In the meantime, you can stay abreast of our work by contacting Cat Jefcoat at CatJ@howardbrown.org or Jim Pickett at JPickett@aidschicago.org. We will be disseminating information about the Summit widely as details are finalized. Please stay tuned.

Thank you, and see you in Chicago, August 14 – 18, 2009!

The Chicago Host Committee of the 2009 National LGBTI Health Summit

We ask that individuals endorse the Summit, its philosophy,

and its objectives. By endorsing the event, you are simply voicing your backing for the mission embraced by the Summit, and no other form of sponsorship or participation is required.

Endorsers

Stephan Adelson, Boston, MA

Kadiri Audu, Lagos, Nigeria

Sameena Azhar, Chicago, IL

Lark Ballinger, Seattle, WA

Hope Barrett, Chicago, IL

Chris Bartlett, Chester, PA

Earl Battles, Chicago, IL

Deborah Benford, Chicago, IL

Wendy Bostwick, Chicago, IL

Latifa Boyce, Washington, D.C.

Cecilia Boyd, Chicago, IL

Elizabeth Bowen, Chicago, IL

Robin Brennan, Philadelphia, PA

Doug Bruce, Chicago, IL

Vanessa Brocato, New York City, NY

Hadiyah Charles, New York, NY

Michael Cook, Chicago, IL

Alanna Costelloe-Kuehn, New York City, NY

Patti Daschbach Chicago, IL

Julie Davids, Providence, RI

Nicholas Deroose Philadelphia, PA

John Dinauer, Chicago, IL

Liudmyla Dmytriieva, Chicago, IL

Kevin Downer, Chicago, IL

Julie Ebin, Cambridge, MA

Rob Ferrante, Los Angeles, CA

Beverly Fitzgerald, Chicago, IL

Barry Floore, Cincinnati, OH

Rebecca Fox, Washington, D.C.

Joseph Franklin, Chicago, IL

Lonnie Fulton, Maywood, IL

Rick Garcia, Chicago, IL

Howard Gelb, Chicago, IL

Jennifer Glick, New Orleans, LA

Jeff Glotfelty, Chicago, IL

Lorraine M. Grabinsky, Cohoes, New York

Beau Gratzer, Chicago, IL

Jamison Green, Oakland, CA

Howard Grossman, Boston, MA

Johnny Guaylupo, Brooklyn, NY

Doreen Hardy, West Chester, PA

Bess Hart, Chicago, IL

Eric Heilbronner, San Francisco, CA

Donald Hitchcock, Washington, D.C.

Kert Hubin, Chicago, IL

Mark Ishaug, Chicago, IL

Peter Jabin, Seattle, WA

Catherine Jefcoat, Chicago, IL

Jeffrey Jenne, Philadelphia, PA

Bill Jesdale, San Francisco, CA

Tobi-Velicia Johnson, Oak Park, IL

Inova Juniper, Springfield, Virginia

Gay Krishna, Andhra Pradesh, India

Ben Kudler, Boston, MA

Kevin Kukoleck, Chicago, IL

Stewart Landers, Boston, MA

Rabbi David Lazar, Tel Aviv, Israel

James Learned, New York City, NY

Kali Lindsey, Silver Spring, MD

Gwen Mastin, Chicago, IL

Dan Matos, Stony Brook, NY

SoJourner McCauley, Bronx, NY

Ali McDonald, Chicago, IL

Michael McFadden, Chicago, IL

Denise Miles, Washington, DC

Sonji Miller, Chicago, IL

Jason Mitchell, Portland, OR

James R. Moser, San Francisco, CA

Elise Niedermeier, Chicago, IL

Will Nutland, London, England

Davide Obonyo, Kericho Town, Kenya

T. Scott Pegues, Denver, Colorado

John Peller, Chicago, IL

Julie Peugeot, Chicago, IL

Jim Pickett, Chicago, IL

Mark Pineda, Chicago, IL

Frank Pizzoli, Harrisburg, PA

Guy Pujol, Atlanta, GA

Leo Rennie, Washington, D.C.

Manuel Rodriguez, Chicago, IL

Victor Rollins, Nassau, Bahamas

Guido Sanchez, Jersey City, NJ

Christina Santiago, Chicago, IL

Michael Scarce, San Francisco, CA

Kathleen Schlagel, Chicago, IL

Scout, Boston, MA

Erick Seelbach, Seattle, WA

Nurit Shein, Philadelphia, PA

Shane Snowdon, San Francisco, CA

Anne Statton, Chicago, IL

Byron Stewart, Chicago, IL

Pete Subkoviak, Chicago, IL

Fred Swanson, Seattle, WA

Pendo Tamu, Kericho Town, Kenya

Joseph Taylor, Chicago, IL

Michelle Taylor, Chicago, IL

Josh Thomas, Providence, RI

Lance Toma, San Francisco, CA

Roxy Trudeau, Chicago, IL

Tony Valenzuela, Los Angeles, CA

Modesto Valle, Chicago, IL

Dr. Justin Varney, London, England

Dr. PD Wadler, Chicago, IL

Bill Westervelt, Philadelphia, PA

Laurie Wettstead, Chicago, IL

Jamie Williamson, Chicago, IL

Andre Wilson, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Will Wilson, Chicago, IL

Rae Wright, Chicago, IL

Michael Woodford, Ann Arbor, MI

Serena Worthington, Chicago, IL

Marisol Ybarra, Chicago, IL

Bo Young, Brooklyn, NY

Endorsers: please send your name and location to Pete Subkoviak at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago.

Tell us about your sex life - Chicago men

Monday Morning Perk-Up: Does YouTube Give Out Oscars??

Brought to you by Pistol Pete

This is priceless and, hopefully, only the beginning of something beautiful.

Need to find a gay friendly doc?

Check out the GLMA Provider Directory

Are you lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender and looking for a healthcare professional you can trust?

GLMA’s online Provider Directory can help. Search for primary care providers, specialists, therapists, dentists, and other health professionals in your area.

The service is free and you do not need to register.

Study explores verbal and non-verbal communication in unprotected sex between men

“When he pulled like the lube out, he put a couple of condoms on the table. So I was given the choice… However, we never actually discussed condoms and as the sexual encounter progressed, we just kind of took it at the silence of not saying anything about it and that it’d be okay and or it was going to happen”.

HIV-positive gay men who have unprotected anal intercourse think of themselves as being in settings where ‘everybody knows the rules of the game’, but these understandings are not shared by all gay men, report Barry Adam and colleagues in the November 2008 issue of Culture, Health and Sexuality. Tacit miscommunication, faulty assumptions and differences in decision-making processes are all extremely common, and this raises questions of how to develop HIV prevention messages for specific micro-cultures, they write.

The researchers from the University of Windsor and the AIDS Committee of Toronto conducted in-depth interviews with 34 men who have sex with men. All men reported that their sex was unprotected most or all of the time, although there was one respondent who did maintain consistent condom use, with some difficulty. Ten of the men were HIV-negative, and the rest HIV-positive. The interviews focused on unprotected sex, and examined “the narrative sequences, verbal and nonverbal communication and tacit decision rules” surrounding the practice.

In common with many other studies, the researchers found that many HIV-positive respondents expressed a strong desire to avoid passing on their HIV infection. One respondent said: “I don’t want to put anyone through what I went through when I found out I was positive”.

Read the rest on Aidsmap.

Feel the Love...

Free to be

Sister Glo shares her glittery gems of love for LifeLube.

"The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom..."
- Bell Hooks




Sister Glo is an HIV educator, gay men’s health advocate, and member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in Seattle. She is drawn to sparkly objects and believes that glitter and the transformative power of love in action are necessary to gay men’s health and wellness.

Friday is for Faeries

Gay Men's Health Summit Featured on Ning

Ning.com, the network site for community advocates, wrote a nice piece highlighting the Gay Men's Health Summit Ning site - a place where gay men's health advocates log on to brainstorm and share ideas on how best to confront the many health concerns of gay men.

Blogger Laura Oppenheimer writes, "The focus of the network is engaging and empowering gay men to make both good decisions in their own lives, and to promote healthy living for others, as well. Network members have a group to create a strategy for advancing a pro gay-men's health storyline in the media. In the forum, they’re discussing ways to reduce risky health situations and debating different organizations’ approaches to dealing with HIV."

The stated mission of the Summit is, "Building a multi-issue, multicultural, gay men's health movement." Any and all are welcome to join!

Tunnel of Love Podcast is Up!

The Tunnel of Love podcast is now available at the Feast of Fools website, along with some awesome pictures from the event!

Remember, you can easily subscribe to the Feast of Fools podcast through iTunes.

Whitewashing Research?

Do scientists self-censor in politically charged grant applications?

If you study prostitutes, would you tell the NIH?
via Scientific American

Half of scientists whose federally funded research — most of it about sex and AIDS — was subjected to extra scrutiny by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2003 after conservative members of Congress questioned its merits say they now censor wording in their grant applications that might raise "red flags" at the agency, according to a new survey.

Five years ago, Rep. Patrick Toomey (R-PA) proposed a bill amendment that would have pulled funding for five grants. The legislation failed by a 210 to 212 vote, but after that, members of a House and Senate committee asked NIH Director Elias Zerhouni to explain the “medical benefit” of those and five additional grants. Because of a clerical error, those ten grants turned into about 250 grants by 157 investigators that Zerhouni ordered reviewed.

That review led to Zerhouni to say the research was valid in a January 2004 letter to members of Congress, and no funding was pulled.

Still, the scientists were still skittish in the years after. When 82 of them were surveyed in 2005 and 2006, more than half said they leave out words in their funding requests such as "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," "sexual intercourse," "anal sex," "homosexual," "homophobia," "AIDS," "bare-backing," "bath-houses," "sex workers," "needle exchange" and "harm reduction," according to the survey published in this week's PLoS Medicine.

Read the rest here.

Shooting the Elephant

by Charles Stephens

Read more from Charles on LifeLube

First, let me clear the air, I really hated the film Crash. I found it disgustingly sentimental. Contrived and absolutely overindulgent in it’s political correctness. It was one of those movies that sought to dispel stereotypes, and yet managed to reinforce the most simplistic notions of race since Driving Miss Daisy. It also reminds me of why I cringe at discussions of race in general. It was ultimately a movie to make politically correct white people, and people of color that are thrilled by any acknowledgement of racism, feel good. Even if it’s still racism, just with lipstick on it.

It’s funny to me how awkward discussions about race can be, even among the enlightened, even in 2008, even among the Gay Men’s Healthitocracy. Like the film Crash, this leads to a superficiality in the conversation, one that limits the possibilities of how we can think about, and interact around our racial differences. In conversations about race, we are far too reliant on creating victims and villains, roles that lack the categorical complexity to address the nuanced roles we play.

White people, especially of the liberal variety, are usually terrified of saying something racially offensive. This makes for superficial conversations at best, or self-righteous posturing at worst. They are afraid of being accused of racism. This unfortunately arrests any capacity to have meaningful dialogue and strips away the honesty.

And then there are approaches to race that I’ve witnessed, especially in progressive movements. There is the “I don’t see race, everyone is human” approach. The problem with this model is that it attempts to ignore the impact race had and continues to have. Just because you put a bag over your head, or cover your faces, or close your eyes, doesn’t mean something ceases to exist. Further, we are all exposed to and socialized around notions of racial difference and racial hierarchy. Saying you don’t see race, also suggests you don’t see racism, your own or someone else’s.

There is, within racial discourse, the chronically appalled model. One keeps score in the discussion or meeting of the various racial offenses. For some white people, this provides them the opportunity to “out anti-racist” each other, creating a hierarchy not of race, but of anti-racism. They each compete to show the others how much they “get it.” And before you know it, after the score has been tallied, the meeting turns into a support group.

There is the “I am too evolved to be a racist,” approach. Humor, or an attempt at it, is the key ingredient of this model. The best example of this model in pop culture is Sarah Silverman. Meaningful dialogue is substituted with provocation, and if you don’t “get it,” then you don’t have a sense of humor. And though humor is useful, and satire can be illuminating, every time one acts out or reinforces racial stereotypes, doesn’t mean they are shattering some taboo, and isn’t always funny.

What I would propose is rather than seeing race as something to transcend, wallow in, or make light of, we should seek to acknowledge racial difference without reinforcing racial hierarchy. At best this is done by recognizing racial difference and rejecting racial mythology. Insisting upon racial complexity rather than falling into notions of what constitutes good or bad versions of racial representation. Institutional discrimination is contrary to democracy and must be banned. Whiteness has to be talked about and called attention to, so it’s not seen as a standard, a universal, where everything else is a deviation. As gay men in particular, we must vigorously seek out ways to grapple with racial difference, be it erotically, politically, or socially. We also might have to invent models from failed past ones in our movement, models that have worked for other movements, and dare to imagine new ones.

Charles Stephens is an Atlanta-based writer and organizer. Check out his blog.

Who's that Queer?

brought to you by Pistol Pete

Former AIDS Activist is Taking Over Cable News

They've done it again. As part of their agenda of eventual world domination, the gays are taking over the media in the form of Air America Radio and MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. The Rachel Maddow Show, airing weeknights at 9/8 central, is kicking the ass out of its competitors at CNN and Fox News. So who is this new queer superhero?.......Well, she actually kind of looks like Clark Kent.

The brilliant and affable Maddow grew up in the Bay Area; she came out just before college in 1990 and became an AIDS activist at the epicenter of the epidemic. She earned a degree in public policy from Stanford before beginning work with ACT UP and the AIDS Legal Referral Panel. In 1995, Maddow became the first openly gay person to win a Rhodes scholarship and used it to obtain a Ph.D. from Oxford University, writing her dissertation on the intersection of the AIDS epidemic and the prison reform movement. For more about her life and career, check out this great column in the Nation. , and check out the Rachel Maddow Show weekdays at 9/8 central and via podcast.

Sexual Disorientation: Am I Gay, Bisexual, Straight or Somewhere in Between?

Differences Between Gay, Bisexual and Straight Men Who Have Sex With Men (SMSM)

by Joe Kort, Straight Guise

There are major differences between SMSMs and gay and bisexual men. Straight men who admit and come out as having sex with other men are usually not anti-gay or homophobic. They do not tell their therapists or people they trust, “I hate fags!” In fact, they usually have gay friends, support and affirm lesbians and gays they know and the gay civil rights movement in general.. They’ve often have read books on coming-out process to see if they are going through that process themselves and to understand what it is to live as a gay man.

Whatever shame and self-hatred these SMSMs are coping with does not arise from homophobia, but from their acting on impulses that are incongruent with their heterosexual orientation.

In other words, they are experiencing something like an addiction, a mood disorder, a chemical disorder or some other compulsion that causes them to go against their own will, repeatedly, and is interfering with their life. They cannot accept it, not out of denial regarding their true identity, but because it is not their true nature the way it would be if one were truly gay or bisexual.

True, some SMSMs are anti-gay and homophobic, straining their masculine muscles to ward off any trait that may appear gay or effeminate. This, too, parallels the dynamic gay men display who resist their homosexual identity and so “protest too much” to attempt to disown that there is anything gay about them. But these are not the SMSM’s who seek treatment and who I write about on the Straight Guise website and blog.

Read the whole thing on Straight Guise.