Illinois AIDS Advocates - Join the State Trek

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Demand sound HIV/AIDS policy in 2009! Join AIDS advocates from across the state on March 3- 4 as we boldly go where no state has gone before at State Trek: Illinois HIV/AIDS Lobby Days 2009!

The dealine to register is rapidly approaching - register before February 8, 2009.

The reluctant top

[excerpt]

...I open my door and a guy who looks basically like his photos stands there with a duffel bag. He has huge bugged out eyes (I'd guess crystal or coke) but a gentle energy. He has his own towels and massage oils, so I lay down on my stomach, and he starts working on me. It feels amazing — he knows what he is doing, it's erotic, and he doesn't talk too much, which I like. I roll on my back and he does my front. My cock is throbbing hard, so he says in a sexy voice, "You must really want to put that somewhere," and I answer "Uh... not really." Then, remembering my manners, I told him, "Oh yeah, sure, have a seat." I mean he just spent a good 20 minutes servicing me, the least I can do is let him enjoy my cock up his ass. He rubbers me up, I verify it's on right, and he rides my cock with a big smile on his face...

read the whole thing on xtra.ca

\ˈsa-dəl-ˈba-kiŋ\

After attending the Purity Ball, Heather and Bill saddlebacked all night because she’s saving herself for marriage. Unfortunately her parents found out because they got santorum all over the sheets.

CALL NOW!

Call the White House and Your Senator, Support HIV, STD Prevention funding: Ensure $400 million funding Remains in Economic Recovery Bill Why: The Senate will begin debate next week on the Economic Recovery bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives this week. The Senate bill includes $400 million in funding for HIV and STD screening and prevention. (The House version is $335 million and includes TB and Viral Hepatitis as well. We will call for inclusion of those diseases in conference). We must make certain the funding remains in the bill. 56,300 new HIV infections occur annually One state plans to close all STD clinics due to budget cuts More than 680 jobs have been lost in TB control programs in last three years At least 3 million Americans are chronically infected with hepatitis C 25% of the current public health care workforce is eligible to retire in 2012 The money should be sent to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention to address the four most common infectious diseases in the U.S. Adjusted for inflation, CDC's HIV prevention budget alone has decreased by 19.3% since fiscal year 2002. Explain to the Administration and the Senators that prevention funding is critical to the health and well-being of the country. Take Action: Contact the White House 202-456-1414 comments line Contact your Senator 202-224-3121 Tell them to maintain the $400 million funding for HIV, STD, TB, and Viral Hepatitis Prevention! Sign-on deadline: Call now and continue to call until Wednesday, February 4th Additional Information: One-time investments in the prevention of HIV, STDs, viral hepatitis and TB is an effective way to create thousands of jobs, modernize and strengthen the public health infrastructure, accelerate prevention efforts and hasten the elimination of these efforts. The nation must invest in turning the tide on these infections for a healthier society and improved healthcare infrastructure. Reach your Senators by dialing 202-224-3121 and asking for them by name. Not sure who your Senators are? Go to here to find out!

Refocusing the fight against AIDS

The new CDC figures "confirmed the worst fears" of AIDS activists and have served as a rallying cry to revive efforts, Munar said. Focus on AIDS diminished in the 1990s, and public consciousness framed the disease as an issue for sub-Saharan Africa.

"There is a new sense of optimism that the new president and Congress will act on these data and refocus attention nationally on the epidemic at home," he said. "It has not gone away."

via denverpost.com

They want condoms for school kids and prisoners, public money for needle-exchange programs, health care for everyone with HIV and prevention campaigns that aren't anti-sex.

After a decade-long lull, AIDS activists are reviving their fight.

This time, they're pushing for a science-based plan from the Obama administration targeting a disease that still kills more than 14,000 Americans each year.

Gay and lesbian activists from across the country are mobilizing in Denver this week at their annual Creating Change conference. The event marks a return to the fierce fight against AIDS and follows recent data showing that 56,000 Americans become infected with HIV each year — a 40 percent increase from what was previously estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The focus is back on HIV after political issues — mainly same-sex marriage and discrimination protection — have preoccupied the gay community the past several years.

"People will have a hard time choosing marriage if they are sick and dying," said Sue Hyde, director of the conference, which is sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "AIDS and HIV have never lost their grip."

Read the rest.

Boldly Go Where No State Has Gone Before...

click to enlarge

Demand sound HIV/AIDS policy in 2009! Join AIDS advocates from across the state on March 3- 4 as we boldly go where no state has gone before at State Trek: Illinois HIV/AIDS Lobby Days 2009!

The dealine to register is rapidly approaching - register before February 8, 2009.

Feel the Love...

[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.]

Keeping it Sane

Sister Glo shares her glittery gems of love
with LifeLube each Friday.
Click here to read them all.

"Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence."

~Erich Fromm

Friday is for Faeries

Every Friday

The Chicago Black Gay Men's Caucus Invites You!

February 5 - marking National Black
HIV/AIDS Awareness Day

click to enlarge for RSVP instructions

Who's That Queer?

Brought to you by Pistol Pete

Following the country's banks collapsed and last Monday's resulting resignation of Iceland's conservative-led government, the two parties forming Iceland’s new coalition Government backed Johanna Sigurdardottir, 66, a Social Democrat and an open lesbian, to take charge as interim Prime Minister, until new elections are held, probably in May. Sigurdardottir would become the country's first woman prime minister, and the first ever openly gay leader.

Sigurdardottir entered politics through the labor movement, serving as a labor organizer when she worked as a flight attendant with Loftleidir Airlines — now Icelandair — in the 1960s and 1970s. She was first elected to Iceland's parliament in 1978. She became a minister in 1987 and has held her current post since 1999. Despite her veteran status, many Icelanders regard her as a maverick and respect her work promoting the welfare of minority groups.

She is perhaps best known for her reaction to a failed bid to become chairman of the Social Democratic Party — a forerunner of the current Social Democratic Alliance Party — in 1994. Despite a heavy loss, Sigurdardottir predicted: "My time will come." In 1995, she quit the Social Democrats and formed her own party, Tjodvaki — translated as "Waking The Nation" — which won four parliamentary seats. Sigurdardottir later rejoined her old party when it merged with three other center-left groups in 1999 and 2000.
She lives with journalist Jonina Leosdottir, who became her civil partner in a ceremony in 2002. Sigurdardottir was previously married to a man and has two sons.

Taken from the David Stringer at the Associated Press http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hZ1wxzD54Wq_zFF4tPsAaRRgLm6QD960643O3

Peter Pointers is here for you

NEW: Ask Peter for Pointers!

Backed up by a team of Chicago experts from Project CRYSP agencies and beyond, Peter can answer your questions around physical health, mental health, sexual health and spiritual health - anything a gay guy might want to know, with a Chicago focus.

Check in with Peter now, and don't be shy. He will make it worth your while :)

Peter Pointers is a brand new, deluxe feature on the LifeLube mothership. Beyond asking Peter for pointers, you can find a whole host of info there on Sex&Drugs, Physical Health, Spiritual Health, Relationships and Emotional Health.

The 'Work-In" - Today's Number is 12

Brought to you by Ed Negron, a former drug user, turned gangbanger, turned drug dealer, turned own best customer, turned addict, turned recovering addict (still there), turned activist, turned business manager, turned student, turned Substance Abuse Counselor, turned better and happier person, turned someone who can love and be loved (Love you Patrick), turned blogger. Check out Ed's own blog here.

Featured Every Thursday [USUALLY] on LifeLube --- check out all of Ed's "Work-In's" here.


The 12 Steps: A historic and analytic explanation

I received this series from someone a while ago. It breaks the 12 Steps down in a totally different way then how we are used to hearing it. I know the 12 Step programs are not for everyone, although they do work for millions of people. Some people say that applying the 12 Steps to other aspects of their life, not just addiction issues, has helped them to change their life. I am not here to sell the program to you. I just thought I would share this series that I enjoyed. Happy Reading!

The 12 steps make up the defining recovery process of those belonging to Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.). Bill Wilson and Bob Smith first developed them. Together Wilson and Smith developed a program to help alcoholics recover. This included working the 12 steps, and then later assisting other recovering alcoholics to practice the 12 steps.

Since writing the 12 steps in the A.A. “Big Book,” as it is termed, the steps have been somewhat adapted to recovery of other forms of addiction. Narcotics Anonymous uses 12 steps almost identical to A.A. Others may use a modified 12 steps program to recover from gambling, sexual addiction, or to quit smoking.




The 12 steps must initially be worked step by step. The first step is admitting one has a problem and recognizing that one is powerless to fix that problem. The second step is believing that a higher power could help restore one to sanity. Next the alcoholic turns the problem over to the higher power in Step 3.

A higher power does not have to mean God. The phrase is a higher power, as we “understand it.” Thus many atheists and agnostics are able to work the 12 steps without having to embrace a form of organized religion. How much the higher power is a religious figure depends very much on each individual A.A. group.

Some groups are very religious, and may end an A.A. meeting by saying the “Our Father.” Other groups forgo this. Almost all A.A. meetings end with people holding hands together, and at least observing their fellowship as a group. The group itself can be the higher power.

Step 4 is a difficult one, where one takes a moral inventory of oneself. This means recognizing faults, behaviors, and patterns that lead one to drink. A sponsor usually guides this step.

Step 5 takes the moral inventory further. One must acknowledge and admit one’s faults, confess them to a higher power, and also to a person. Usually the sponsor acts as a confessor in this case.

Step 6 is a statement of readiness to a higher power, and to perhaps a sponsor. One recognizes again, as in Step 2, that a higher power can remove one’s faults. Step 7 then asks the alcoholic to “humbly” ask the higher power to remove faults.

In the 12 steps, 8 and 9 are active steps. One acknowledges wrongs one has committed to others and asks their pardon. Step 9 specifically calls for restitution to be made, where possible, to those one has harmed.

Steps 10 and 11 continue the process of moral inventory and of closer connection to a higher power. Step 12 is another very active step in which one commits to helping other alcoholics.

People in A.A. continue to work the 12 steps, perhaps for a lifetime. Some find they have sufficiently recovered to only attend meetings occasionally. Others find they need regular meeting attendance to remain committed to recovery. Additional study groups may be offered on each of the steps. There are also books that elucidate each step in further detail, which may direct study groups.

Working the 12 steps is an intensive and committed process. It has been found effective however, and many people owe their recovery from active alcoholism to working the 12 steps and to the philosophy and support of A.A.

To read daily motivations visit my blog at thework-in.blogspot.com or to receive daily motivations via email join our Google group Back To The Basics Please .

(Usual disclaimer applies: The suggestions on this blog are just that “SUGGESTIONS.” My words cannot heal your pain and or addictions. Nor can I change your life. Only you can.)

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
- President Barack Obama - 44th President of the United States of America 2009

Increase in serodiscordant casual sex among Sydney gay men at a time when HIV diagnoses have not increased

via Aidsmap

Between 2003 and 2006, there was an increase in the numbers of HIV-negative gay men in Sydney who reported having unprotected anal intercourse with casual HIV-positive partners, report researchers in the online edition of AIDS and Behavior. However the researchers do not believe that these men form "a core group of high risk men".

Iryna Zablotska and her colleagues from the University of New South Wales analysed data from two cohort studies among Sydney gay and bisexual men: the Positive Health cohort of 760 HIV-positive men, and the Health in Men cohort of 1427 HIV-negative men. Both studies asked identical questions about sexual behaviour in annual surveys from 2003 to 2006, including questions on sex with partners of a different HIV status (rather than, as in some other studies, sex which could have been with a partner of a different HIV status).

Among the HIV-negative men, whilst the number having sex with casual partners decreased from survey to survey, there were small but statistically significant increases in the numbers having serodiscordant sex. Those having sex with casual partners they believed to be HIV positive rose from 11% to 13%, and the number specifically having unprotected anal intercourse with those men increased from 3% to 4%.

The number of HIV-positive men reporting serodiscordant casual partners did rise, but there was no statistically significant rise in unprotected anal intercourse with them.

The study examined a number of behaviours that have been previously found to be associated with sexual risk-taking, and confirmed that serodiscordant unprotected anal intercourse with casual partners was more common among men with higher numbers of sexual partners, men who met partners online or in sex clubs, Viagra users, those who injected drugs, men who used 'party' drugs regularly and those having ‘esoteric’ sexual practices (fisting, sex toys, water sports, bondage etc).

However the researchers note that men who had risky sex did not do so consistently. Over 85% of the men who reported having serodiscordant unprotected anal intercourse only reported it at one of their annual interviews, and they typically reported that behaviour with just one or two partners in the previous six months.

Read the rest on Aidsmap.

Canary in the Coal Mine of Crazy

LifeLube's Jim Pickett joins the Feast of Fools today to talk health, politics, CRAZY, and more.

Read the post, listen to the podcast.

Woof Wednesday

Ignorance and stigma provide foundation for gay men's support of criminalisation of HIV transmission

via Aidsmap

The majority of gay men in the UK support the use of the criminal law to punish people who infect a sexual partner with HIV, a new report published by Sigma Research shows.

Overall, 57% of gay men supported the prosecution and imprisonment of people with HIV who had recklessly infected a sexual partner with the virus.

The report, titled Sexually charged, showed that men who had never been tested for HIV were the group most likely to support the use of the criminal law in this way. Earlier research has shown that men who have never tested for HIV are the group of gay men least likely to know somebody with HIV, and often feel that HIV is not present in either their social circles or everyday life.

Men who supported prosecutions generally regarded the responsibility to prevent HIV infections during sexual encounters as being vested solely with the HIV-positive partner. They also held strongly stigmatising views about HIV and appeared to have little appreciation of the effectiveness of HIV treatment.

The report’s authors note that few gay men thought that prosecutions would help reduce the transmission of HIV and express concern that such cases have created unrealistic expectations that people who know they are HIV-positive will disclose this to their sexual partners.

Read the rest.

Cop a feel - and keep the package healthy

Thanks to David Fawcett for putting this issue - and this great video - back on the LifeLube radar. We have posted it - and other testicular info - before. As you will see, the vid is worthy of multiple postings... and viewings. Practice makes perfect boys.

Every year between 7500 and 8000 men in the United States are diagnosed with testicular cancer. About 1 in 250 men will receive such a diagnosis over the course of their lifetime, but it is most common in men between the ages of 15 and 35, and particularly for men in their twenties. The good news is that is has an extremely high cure rate of 90%, a rate that is even higher if the cancer hasn't metastasized.

African-American men ‘on the down low’: a stigmatising and counter-productive description?

via Aidsmap

The uncritical use of the term ‘on the down low’ in HIV prevention strategies is likely to undermine efforts to understand the nature of HIV risk among African-American men, write researchers in the January 2009 issue of Social Science & Medicine. The term is used to describe black men who identify as heterosexual but have secretive sex with other men, but the authors believe its use stigmatises and exoticises this behaviour as an issue unique to black men.

In the United States, HIV infection rates are seven times higher among African-American men than they are for white men, and twenty times higher for African-American women than white women. In discussing the issue, the media have frequently focused on the possibility that men ‘on the down low’ have high-risk sex with other men and may also be responsible for HIV transmission to their female partners.

Moreover, some public health and HIV prevention professionals have used the term in order to highlight a subgroup of men whose needs may be overlooked in programmes for gay men.

The authors highlight the origin of the term in African-American communities in the early 1990s. At the time it simply meant a desire for discretion or secrecy, and there was no specific reference to sexual behaviour. However it was later appropriated by African-American men to describe secretive same-sex behaviour, as an alternative to terms such as gay or bisexual which are stigmatised in black communities. Appropriating the term “has functioned to reinforce men’s sense of masculinity and membership in the African-American community,” the authors write.

However authors believe that there are several problems with outsiders such as public health professionals using this terminology:

• It suggests that there is something unique and peculiar about African-American men’s same-sex behaviours that merits special language, whereas similar behaviours are found in men of other ethnicities.

• Discussion often assumes, but does not demonstrate, that men ‘on the down low’ engage in behaviour that is particularly risky for HIV transmission.

• It may also be assumed that these men are inherently gay, but are yet to embrace that identity. This characterises men’s self-understanding as flawed and dishonest.

• The way African-American men use the term is likely to change over time, and not all will agree on its meaning. However outsiders’ use of the term does not reflect this.

• The term is used as a simple label, without understanding the social, cultural and historical factors that drive behaviour.

The authors don’t deny that there are African-American men who have secretive sex with other men, and suggest that qualitative research could further clarify their HIV prevention needs.

However they underline the importance of poverty, racism and social inequality to the HIV epidemic, and note that few HIV prevention interventions address these structural factors. Moreover, targeting interventions to men who fit the ‘down low’ profile “conforms to a narrow, individual-level approach to HIV prevention”.

Reference
Saleh LD & Operario D Moving beyond ‘the Down Low’: a critical analysis of terminology guiding HIV prevention efforts for African American men who have secretive sex with men. Social Science & Medicine 68: 390-5, 2009.

What We Can Learn From Our Artists

by Charles Stephens

Read more from Charles here on LifeLube.

Essex Hemphill begins his brilliant poem “Now We Think” with the lines “now we think as we fuck... this nut might kill us.”

This simple and provocative line has haunted me since I’ve been involved in gay men’s health. Words that for me speak to the ambivalence, urgency, pleasure, necessity and caution gay men experience in our sexual lives. Art has that power, to convey the complicated and contradictory feelings we experience. Language especially, spoken and unspoken, is an important tool, because it gives us the raw materials to imagine ourselves in the world, and imagine what’s possible. Through language we can also create meaning, develop new narratives to guide our experiences, and acquire greater precision in thinking about ourselves, our feelings, and the world around us. As gay men this is particularly important, because for generations we have been invisible and silenced. Collectively this has meant creating our own language, our own categories, meanings, and definitions for ourselves, our artists being on the forefront in this regard. However, surveying the curricula being disseminated to respond to gay men’s sexual health needs, one is definitely left wanting a far more robust engagement with art.

I am thrilled with the possibilities of HIV prevention in the age of Obama. We have the opportunity to achieve so much. However, there seems to be, at least in the conversations I’ve been a part of, a thrust toward the empirical, the scientific, the evidence-based. Perhaps, this is largely in reaction to HIV/AIDS during the George W. Bush years. Years where ideology impacted and ultimately hindered many of our efforts to adequately address HIV/AIDS in our communities. To counter the unchecked ideology, and unhinge ourselves from this puritanical regime, many of us especially in the behavioral realm, want to get back to designing interventions that are rooted in our best Public Health theories, behavior models, and are realistic for the communities we serve. And I believe this is important. However, I do have a bit of a concern. There are clearly advantages to relying on Behavioral Science, Public Health and Psychology to provide insight into our experiences as gay men, and giving us tools to reduce our risk for HIV and other STIs. We should invest in sexual health educational tools that can provide models and strategies to optimize our sexual health. But I want us to go further.

Certainly, at least in the HIV prevention interventions I’ve come across, there are some questions that are answered, and areas covered quite effectively. But there are other questions that I don’t think are answered as well. Areas that are referenced or signaled, but not explored fully. And maybe, I would argue, it’s due to the limitations of the disciplines that behavioral interventions draw from, at least the most replicated and upheld behavioral interventions.

So we are banging down the doors of the CDC and NIH to research and create more interventions, more interventions, more interventions.! We complain that some groups have fewer “evidenced based” interventions than other groups. Meanwhile, I wonder what it would mean for us to try and get the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop HIV prevention interventions. There is as rich of a body of knowledge produced by artists and writers from Edmund White to Marlon Riggs, as there has been by the Psychologists, Sociologists, Epidemiologists, that are overrepresented in the creation of HIV Prevention tools. Eric Rofes begun the project of seeking to utilize and learn from the social and behavioral sciences, but also opened himself to pull from Cultural Studies, Philosophy, and so on. We have to continue this work. David Halperin certainly does an amazing job of this in his work “What Do Gay Men Want?”

We need to create educational resources for gay men, that seek not to merely correct, reinforce, and ultimately control behavior, but help gay men grapple with the complexities of their feelings, fetishes, pleasures, desires, and yes, ultimately their behaviors. It’s troublesome for a variety of reasons, but a trap many preventionists fall into, of seeking to privilege a normative behavior, and not creating room or space for all sorts of relationships we might have with other bodies, sensations, and bodily fluids. As David Halperin and Camille Paglia have both argued for the most part, our desires and our sexual behaviors aren’t these rational places that behavioral interventions can map themselves onto, nor are they Danielle Steel novels where everything is a long walk on the beech, making love by the moonlight, and being swept off our feet. Desire can also look like the fetishist protagonist of Samuel Delany’s

The challenge before us as we develop HIV prevention educational materials is how we can affirm the sexuality of the gay men we work on behalf of, without pathologizing their desires, reinforcing normative standards of behaviors, and yet advocating for an ethic of mutual responsibility and self-care. This is certainly a riddle, but if we look at figures like Dowsett, and Rofes, and Halperin, and artists like Samuel Delany, Essex Hemphill, Edmund White, Marlon Riggs, they provide the blueprints.

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

Martin Delaney - The accomplishments of people living with HIV/AIDS

by Mark Hubbard

Last Monday, the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases awarded a Director’s Special Recognition Award to Martin for his many contributions to the fight against HIV/AIDS

By now, many of you know that Martin Delaney (of Project Inform) died peacefully Friday morning surrounded by friends and family in San Francisco.

At last year’s Positive Living conference in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, Martin provided the annual treatment update. Martin only missed one meeting in the conference’s eleven-year history, having had a heart attack a week before the event. Positively Living is one of very few U.S. conferences remaining that are targeted specifically (and almost exclusively) to PLWHAs. A member of the audience was so inspired by Martin’s remarks concerning the role of activism in the history of HIV/AIDS that he approached Martin and conference organizer Butch McKay about creating a session on the subject for this year’s event.

As the gentleman and Martin began emailing back and forth, they copied Butch with the product of their efforts. For some reason the correspondence petered out in March of this year. Earlier this week, as a member of the conference planning committee, I volunteered to help format the rough document. This year’s Positive Living will feature a special tribute to Martin. I can’t think of a better way to honor his memory than to pass on this version of what Butch has deemed the “Delaney Declaration.”

The Delaney Declaration
(March 2008)

By Martin Delaney

The entire human population benefited from the way AIDS first struck the gay community. Many people wanted to blame the spread of AIDS on gay people, but the facts are exactly the opposite. The epidemic would have been dramatically worse if it had struck any other group than gay people.

Most diseases uniformly strike an entire population, spreading lightly across all economic, geographic, racial, and gender groups. As a result, nothing really unifies the patient population other than the disease itself. As a consequence, people do not bond together or organize to fight the disease because they have nothing in common that connects them.

You can see this in virtually all other major diseases. There may be millions of people who have a disease but they fail to organize to fight it. They don’t demonstrate, they don’t group together to influence the Congress, they don’t develop media strategies. They just go on with their various local groups and families and fight the disease simply as individuals.

In great contrast, when AIDS hit the gay community with unparalleled specificity, it struck a group that already identified itself as a community across the entire nation. It struck a group of people who were already organized politically with skills to influence both local and national government; it struck a population that that already knew it had to fight for its rights, even fight to survive. It knew how to use the media. It knew it had to take care of its own because no one else would. It knew it had to fight back or die.

We [the gay community] were in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and every other major country, yet linked together. Wherever, we were a part of a whole. We were in the scientific community; we were in the NIH (the United States’ medical research agency, the National Institutes of Health). We were in the drug companies and in Congress. Because of this unique situation, AIDS faced a far more formidable and organized enemy than had ever before been the case. Had AIDS simply hit across all the general segments of society, like other diseases, it would have encountered far less resistance. People getting the disease would have had nothing in common with each other, no underlying links or abilities, or any need to see itself as a fighting force. It would have been just another disease and it would have been treated like just another disease.

But we know it was not just another disease. It was far cleverer, more dangerous, and spread quietly because it acted slowly. It continued to spread for decades before society would even know it was there. In contrast when it struck the gay community, our underlying culture made it visible much more quickly. Within a few short years, we were able to see that it was sexually transmitted.

The normal rules for people with life threatening illnesses didn’t work very well. Usually such people are too sick to do anything about it. We saw our entire community under siege; we knew we had to change the rules or we would all be dead.

We hollered about it in the media, we went to the FDA (the United States’ Food and Drug Administration) and the NIH, we marched in Washington, got people on committees and proposed new ideas and new ways of thinking about science and the treatment of people with terrible diseases. WE changed the rules, first for ourselves but ultimately for everyone facing a life threatening disease. WE wouldn’t just listen to our doctor either. We recognized that they worked for us, that we were in charge of our lives and our bodies. We taught each other to demand that our doctors act as partners, not as dictators. We changed the doctor patient relationship. We realized that patient education was ultimately going to be done either by drug companies or by the patient community itself; we organized ourselves to teach ourselves.

We became a voice that could counter, when necessary, the messages of the drug companies, drug company advertising, and everything the companies did that affected us. As activists, we formed teams to speak up for our community regarding clinical trials.

The accomplishments of people living with AIDS:

1.Having an instrumental role in changing the rules for drug discovery, development and approval for life threatening illnesses

2.Greatly speeding up access to new drugs, both in and outside of clinical trials.

3.Changing the mindset of researchers about the wisdom of providing early access to experimental drugs.

4.Patient empowerment - helping people understand that they don’t have to be victims of a disease, but can instead be leaders in the fight against it.

5.Changing the patient mindset from hopelessness to hope; helping people see that there is always something you can do.

6.Demonstrating that you don’t have to be a scientist to influence science and have it serve people.

7.Discovering how to be taken seriously by scientists, academics and government bureaucrats, and how to influence them with without making them the enemy.

8.Learning how to organize to influence government policy.

Monday Morning Perk-Up

Brought to you by Pistol Pete

Gay men likely to be highly sexually experienced before they are willing to 'come out' to obtain HPV vaccine

via Aidsmap

Gay men will have a high level of sexual experience before they are willing to disclose their sexuality to healthcare providers so they can obtain a vaccine for human papilloma virus, an Australian study published in the online edition of Sexually Transmitted Infections has shown. This could mean that many gay men would already have been infected with human papilloma virus (HPV) before they were willing to come forward for vaccination, meaning that its protective effect for these individuals would, at best, be extremely limited.

Earlier research has suggested that there is a high prevalence of genital and anal infection with human papilloma virus amongst gay men, with particularly high levels of infection seen amongst gay men with HIV. Infection with human papilloma virus increases the risk of anal cancer, which occurs with greater frequency in gay men, most notably HIV-positive gay men.

Two vaccines that offer a high level of protection against the strains of human papilloma virus most associated with cervical (and anal) cancer have recently been approved. Their use is currently restricted to women, and to ensure that they have the maximum possible protective effect, UK guidelines state that they should be given to girls aged between twelve and 13 before they become sexually active.

Studies are currently evaluating the safety and effectiveness of these vaccines in men (and people with HIV).

Researchers in Melbourne, Australia, wanted to see how acceptable gay men would find a vaccine for human papilloma virus (assuming the results of trials were favourable). Furthermore, they wanted to gain an impression of how useful the vaccine would be at preventing infection with human papilloma virus.

Read the rest.

Peter Pointers - more than just a pretty face

NEW: Ask Peter for Pointers!

Backed up by a team of Chicago experts from Project CRYSP agencies and beyond, Peter can answer your questions around physical health, mental health, sexual health and spiritual health - anything a gay guy might want to know, with a Chicago focus.

Check in with Peter now, and don't be shy. He will make it worth your while :)

Peter Pointers is a brand new, deluxe feature on the LifeLube mothership. Beyond asking Peter for pointers, you can find a whole host of info there on Sex&Drugs, Physical Health, Spiritual Health, Relationships and Emotional Health.