'Real Men Get Raped' Campaign Comes to London

via HuffPost Gay Voices

A new rape awareness campaign aimed at men in London is hoping to challenge the way that people think about the crime and its victims.

Posters for the campaign, launched by Survivors UK, an organization that deals with sexual violence against men, read "Real men get raped and talking about it takes real strength" and show a rugby ball being punctured by a nail.

The ads will be prominently featured on 140 escalator panels in central London Tube stations on February 20 in hopes of reaching passengers during the Six Nations rugby tournament reports MaleHealth.

The ads will also be show on two 48 Sheet billboards at Clapham Junction train station and on screens at Waterloo stations on February 25 and March 17, when England plays at home in the tournament.

Pink News notes that while over 8,500 sexual crimes against men may have taken place in London alone last year, the British government estimates that only 11 percent of men who were attacked reported the crime due to embarrassment and shame.

Michael May of Survivors UK said:

"We’ve chosen to use an alpha male sport in our advertising to challenge assumptions about the type of men who get raped. It’s just as likely to be a rugby player as a librarian, a suited city banker as a hooded gang member.

And we hope that by challenging our innate assumptions about the identity of male victims, we can make it even fractionally easier for a male rape victim to ask for help."

The National Center For Victims Of Crime reports that about three percent of men in the U.S. -- a total of close to three million -- have been raped at some point in their lives.

While many are applauding the campaign, some bloggers have raised questions about the usefulness of the term "real men."

Jessica Wakeman of TheFrisky.com writes, "Why do we have to call it 'real men'? Isn’t that just feeding into the same stereotype that there IS such a thing as 'real men'?"


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Most UK Gay Men accept PrEP!

via aidsmap, by Roger Pebody

While few gay men in England are currently aware of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), most men who are introduced to the idea support PrEP being made available.

Half would consider taking it themselves, but most would prefer to take it on a daily basis, rather than before and after each time they have sex. These findings come from a snapshot survey of gay men in England, published by Sigma Research this week.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) involves HIV-negative people taking anti-HIV drugs in order to reduce their risk of infection. Results of the iPrEX study into the safety and effectiveness of PrEP in gay and other men who have sex with men showed that, overall, it reduced infections by 43%. Much higher levels of efficacy were seen in men with good adherence to PrEP.

Recent studies with American gay men have shown that while only a minority of men is aware of PrEP, a majority would consider using it.

Most men say PrEP would not affect their own use of condoms, particularly if it is only partially effective.

To investigate the views of gay men in England, researchers put a series of questions to members of the Sigma Panel in June 2011.

The panel is made up of approximately 1500 gay men, bisexual men and other men that have sex with men (MSM) who respond to monthly cross-sectional online surveys about HIV and sexual health.

The surveys have a short turnaround for analysis and reporting to health workers.

Only men who do not have diagnosed HIV were asked about PrEP; 1259 responded.

Prior awareness of PrEP was low. Only 17% of respondents said that they had already heard of the idea of taking a pill before sex in order to prevent HIV infection.

Having informed respondents about what PrEP is and how it might be prescribed, the researchers asked whether men would consider using PrEP, should they be offered it at a sexual health clinic.

Just over half (52%) said they would consider it, while 30% weren’t sure and 17% wouldn’t consider taking PrEP.

There were no differences in the proportion who would consider its use by age, education or sexual identity. Men who had casual partners were slightly more likely to consider its use.

Men who had a regular sexual partner who was HIV-positive were no more likely to consider PrEP than others.

Men who would consider using PrEP were asked why. Generally they wished to avoid HIV infection and believed that PrEP could help reduce this risk.

Many of these men saw PrEP as providing “additional protection”; this could help bring peace of mind.

Some men who use condoms all the time expressed an interest in taking PrEP.

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Lifetime blood donor ban for gay men lifted in the UK

via Daily Mail, by Clare Bates

Gay men will be able to give blood as long as they haven't had sex for 12 months, the Government announced today.

A lifetime ban on gay men who had ever had sex was put in place in the UK in the 1980s as a response to the spread of Aids and HIV.

Most new HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infections in the UK result from men having sex with men.

But politicians have rethought the policy in light of a review by the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs (Sabto).

The change means that in future only men who have had anal or oral sex with another man in the past 12 months (with or without a condom) will be asked not to donate blood. 

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Note: In the U.S., gay men are banned from giving blood forever if they've had sex with another man since 1977. Efforts have long been underway to repeal this very problematic policy. Senator John Kerry and Representative Mike Quigley are currently leading the call for change.

Related: "Views and experiences of men who have sex with men on the ban on blood donation: a cross sectional survey with qualitative interviews" (LifeLube friend Will Nutland is one of the authors on this paper.)

[NEW on LifeLube] Duchess on NHS, Independence Day and family values

[LifeLube is bloody thrilled to present Duchess a new, semi-irregular column featuring the ramblings of an English Duchess. This is the first - more to come.]

Although some of my detractors will say otherwise, I was not even conceived when the National Health Service was created in the UK on the 5th July 1948.

Embodied to provide universal healthcare free at the point of access for all UK nationals, the NHS is one of the few healthcare services in the world that has held onto its socialist basis that healthcare is a basic human right, irrespective of class, age, gender or sexual orientation.

I’ve been blessed with reasonable health so my tax contributions, and those of my husbands, have been mainly spent on those less fortunate, which as a diamonte socialist is fine by me. I mean it may be awful to say, but the rich can’t afford the poor to be ill, toilets don’t clean themselves, so it is everybody’s interest really.

I should confess but completely entre nous, over the years the odd unfortunate run in with something nasty acquired in a questionably dark establishment from a handsome young sailor, has meant a visit to a sexual health clinic. I really despair at the thought of any country where sexual health services are on a payment basis, it is distressing enough to be battling with something amiss down below without having to hack the emergency credit card out of the freezer or take the family jewels into hock. Discreet and to the point, sexual health services were less traumatic than I expected and the introduction of the fast-test HIV testing means I was in and out in less time that it takes to have a facial at Aveda.

It is somewhat ironic that the NHS was founded the day after US Independence Day, not that I’m a colonialist, I mean if you want to run things yourself who am I to want to take the helm, but it is interesting how the two countries have diverged. Despite its size the UK has remained independent from Europe and has held its own on the International stage, some might say at the sake of our local best interests, but hey that’s politics.

The US is much larger and in many ways more traditionalist than the UK, the division between the two polls of politics appears to be growing and the republican rhetoric seems to be more blunt and ruthless than before, but that may all be because I was always distracted by Nancy’s pearls before. The rise of the Tea Party political movement seems in some ways similar to our UKIP and BNP parties, brutal nationalism and a return to ‘traditional’ ‘white’ able-bodied’ ‘heterosexual’ family values all veiled behind delicate cucumber sandwiches and rather questionable tea.

Personally I’ve always wondered when people start mentioning family values, it reminds me of a rather inbred branch of the family who lived in Wales and developed a disturbing and very distinctive shape to their upper dentition a little reminiscent of horses teeth. In these modern times I wonder what family means? Blood relations is the term used on medical forms these days, and the reality of modern life is that few of us spend our lives nestled in the family home. Like any dutiful child I try to have dinner with my parents at least once a month and touch base every week, but I consider my family to be broader than just my blood relations. My friends who have been part of my life for almost half of my years on this earth are family as well, they know my deepest secrets, the shame and the joys that should never been revealed until everyone is very drunk at my wake. Someone once said to me that your family are those who in your darkest moments don’t judge, don’t preach, don’t ask for anything in payment or kind, but simply hold your hand and give you love and support….and on that deep and profound note it’s time for to take the butler out for a spin…until next time!

Duchess xx

Who's That Queer [Jeremy Wolfenden]

Brought to you by Pistol Pete

Jeremy Wolfenden was a foreign correspondent and British spy at the height of the Cold War.

He won a scholarship to Eton where he was known as 'cleverest boy in England', then to Magdalen College, Oxford where he obtained a first in PPE. He was recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) before becoming the Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent in Moscow where he indulged in his twin passions for sex and alcohol and was eventually compromised by the KGB.

Interestingly, Jeremy Wolfenden was the son of John, later Lord Wolfenden, [pictured] who chaired the committee responsible for producing the Wolfenden Report in 1957 - which was instrumental in the decriminalization of homosexuality in England and Wales.

Read the rest at Gay for Today..

Black, gay ... and invisible (in Britain)

via guardian.co.uk, by Topher Campbell

 Black people need to stop treating homosexuality as if it's a white man's disease. We need to embrace the vibrant presence of gays and lesbians in our community and stop siding with bigots and racists.

Over the past few weeks the homophobic murder of Ian Baynham in Trafalgar Square and the assault on PC James Parkes in Liverpool have shocked the gay community. Every anti-gay opinion adds strength to their attackers and supports other gay bashers.

Whenever the subject of homosexuality is raised in the black community there is hysteria and denial. We who are black and lesbian or gay are considered at best a joke and at worst just plain wrong, weird or dirty. Many think we are somehow infected with a western decadent ifestyle and are undermining our race.

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Who's that Queer?

Brought to you by Pistol Pete

Alan Mathison Turing was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist. Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. He provided an influential formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. In 1999, Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century for his role in the creation of the modern computer, stating: "The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine."

With the Turing test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence asking whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the Automated Computing Engine (ACE), although it was never actually built in its full form. In 1948, he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the Manchester Mark 1, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers.

During the Second World War, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, known as Britain’s code-breaking center. Turing devoted much of his time to Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. As the department’s head, he devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers.

Turing was homosexual, living in an era when homosexuality was considered a mental illness and homosexual acts were illegal. Subsequent to being outed, Turing was charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years prior. At the time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents, and although Turing was never accused of espionage, his prosecution essentially ended his career. He died not long after from what was officially declared self-induced cyanide poisoning, although his mother (and some others) considered the circumstances of his death to be suspicious.

Pupils Told: Sex Everyday Keeps the Doctor Away

Times Online
By Jack Grimson

A National Health Service leaflet is advising school pupils that they have a “right” to an enjoyable sex life and that regular intercourse can be good for their cardiovascular health.

The advice appears in guidance circulated to parents, teachers and youth workers, and is intended to update sex education by telling pupils about the benefits of sexual pleasure. For too long, say its authors, experts have concentrated on the need for “safe sex” and loving relationships while ignoring the main reason that many people have sex, that is, for enjoyment.

Read the rest at the Times Online

The plague is over, let's party

by Elizabeth Pisani in Prospect

Pisani is an epidemiologist and the author of The Wisdom of Whores. Check out her blog by the same name here.

She has been stirring the pot on a number of listservs that LifeLube is on - we thought we'd let you lick the spoon on this provocative essay about HIV/AIDS and gay men in Britian.

Taste good?

-------------------------

An HIV diagnosis in Britain is no longer a death sentence—
thanks to costly new drugs.
But as the spectre of death fades, so do the
most visible reasons to avoid risky behaviour.

Now the Aids prevention industry has a whole new set of problems .

I'm in a bar in Soho. A message flashes up on the plasma screen on the wall behind me: "Tom, I want to nibble your biltong." A guy leaning against the banisters makes a show of putting his mobile phone away while making eye contact with a cute blond boy at the bar. Cute blond blushes. Soon, they're smooching in a corner. How Tom's biltong fared that night I don't know, but I can guess.

This is London's gay scene in a world without Aids. Since treatment for HIV became available in the mid-1990s, Aids has all but evaporated in rich countries. Annual deaths among gay men in Britain have crashed from a peak of over 1,162 in 1994 to just 153 in 2007. "Aids? I've never met anyone with Aids," says Tim, an engineering undergraduate who's sitting under the plasma screen, nursing a nasty pre-mixed drink. When I ask how many of the guys around us might be infected with HIV, he looks shocked. "That's not a nice thing to talk about. I don't know, 4 or 5 per cent?" Actually, the government estimates that around 9 per cent of gay men in London are HIV-infected, against 5 per cent elsewhere. But we're not looking at all gay men in London. We're looking at guys in a pick-up bar at 1am on Friday night; I'm probably the only person here who will leave without being propositioned. Many of the men eyeing each other up are in their 30s; they've had plenty of time to get infected. My guess is that 25 per cent of the men in this room have HIV, possibly a lot more. In 2006, 2,640 gay men were diagnosed with HIV—making up nearly two thirds of the total diagnoses of HIV infections that were acquired in Britain.

You don't have to be an epidemiologist to work out that if 2,640 people are diagnosed with an incurable disease and only 153 die, the number of people known to be living with the disease will rise. The number of gay men living with HIV in Britain is probably around 31,000.

But these days you never see a cadaverous looking 35 year old in an armchair surrounded by friends trying not to notice that his face is covered by the black splotches of Kaposi's sarcoma, a cancer that feeds on people weakened by HIV. And as Aids disappears, so does the most visible reason to avoid unprotected sex. Just under half of gay men say they had some unprotected anal sex in the last year, up from under a third in 1996, when treatment became widespread. But if HIV isn't fatal any more, does it really matter if lots more people get infected?

The relationship between HIV treatment and prevention in the gay community is not straightforward. Virology, psychology, drugs and gay activist ideology play their part. Let's start with the virology. HIV is not very infectious. It is only easily transmitted when there's a high "viral load"—lots of free virus in the blood or genital fluids—and that is usually only for the first couple of months after a person gets infected, and then, years later, once they get sick. That means that people who have unprotected sex with several people in a three-month period are far more likely both to contract and spread HIV than people who have the same number of partners over a longer period. And gay men are far more likely than straight people to have lots of partners at once. A recent study of people who go drinking and clubbing in nine European cities found that gay or bisexual men were four times more likely than even out-to-have-fun heterosexuals to have had five or more recent partners.

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