Over 30,000 opt-in to Gaydar's STI Notifications

via sayencrowolf, by Sayen CroWolf

31,714 Gaydar members in the UK have opted in for the Sexual Health Messaging Service in the three months since it launched on 29 November last year.

The messages are also available on Fitlads, Recon and Manhunt.

But with 2.2 million Gaydar profiles registered in the UK, gay men’s health charity GMFA is urging more to opt in to the service.

GMFA’s Matthew Hodson said, “If you’ve ever been diagnosed with an STI you probably will have been encouraged to get in contact with as many shags from the last few months as possible.

“This can be really hard for some people, and no-one likes to ring their buddies, lovers or one-night stands to let them know they may have an STI.

Our partner notification service is designed to make the task that much easier and now, with so many gay men on Gaydar opting into the system, the chances of contacting your partners are better than ever.”

The Sexual Health Messaging Service, sometimes referred to as Partner Notification, is funded by a grant from the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

Men diagnosed at a participating clinic can be given a unique code for use on the website.

There, contact information for recent partners can be typed in: mobile phone numbers, email or a profile name from a participating dating website.

They are then sent an automated message, alerting them to the fact that they should get themselves checked out.

The messages can be anonymous if you prefer, but backers say recipients are more likely to take action if the sender is identified.


Read the rest

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White Buffalo's Return to Emerald Island

by Tedd Kerr

All Hail to the Queen
The fags bash the bulbs to make the starts brighter

All peace to the Earth
As orbs of white light moat Emerald Island

2,000 years ago a young woman appeared in the shape of a white buffalo and gave a family a sacred pipe and made them guardians of the Black Hills. Before leaving, she prophesized that one day she would return to purify the world, bringing back spiritual balance and harmony. The birth of a white buffalo calf would be a sign that her return was at hand.

In 1994 a white buffalo was born in Wisconsin. In many communities there is an aboriginal renaissance occurring, a return to the land is manifesting.

In 1998 Dry Bones Breathe: Gay Men Creating Post AIDS Identities and Cultures was published. Writer Eric Rofes put forward the idea that the AIDS-As-Crisis-Model was long outdated and a new era of focusing on gay men’s wellness had arrived.

Its now 2009, 200and mine and I wander the urban Canadian terrain for white buffalo tracks and modern gay male culture.

A pull back-A pull forward,

A pull within-A look outside.

Dry Bones Breathe
Gay men break backs
First Nation women get ignored
The land heaves and sighs.

PAUSE.
I got my panties in a knot a few months ago when I started visiting gay guy social networking sites like MANHUNT and DUDESNUDE. At first I was just jealous of all the lovely bodies that will never be mine, that I will never have.

Here they all are,
stretched,
flexed
out
aching to be clicked,
hooked,
favorited,
chatted and
poked.
I found myself heavy and full with minor outrage.
THE GAUL- WHERE DO THESE GUYS GET OFF?

But then I got over myself and I meant it…

Where do these boys get off?
Where is public sex?

Do these dudes nude know that their flesh is for the viral masses (if so GREAT)

Or do websites create a sense of enclosed space so they think that they are in some version of inside?

I had up into that point never seen a cock just hanging out for all to see
so sexually,
so publicly,
so in the realm for of all.

But there one was, attached to a barista I kind of knew, but now knew better. Tomorrow when I order my coffee I wondered, Would I feel a new intimacy with him? I kept clicking- there was his cock rock hard, there was him smiling with his arm draped around a friend (did she know that she was on this website?), there was his cock again.

With every image I saw I was getting to now him better. I knew what his bedroom looked like, that he had gone to Paris (and taken a dirty photo in the Louvre’s washroom) and that he was uncut. Is this now how gay community is formed? Is this the new 70’s? (if so great [?])

Last summer I was accepted to do a video curatorial residency in which I would use the moving image to explore how sites like MANHUNT and DUDES NUDE were changing the sexual landscape for gay men.

I had it on my mind that in the face of AIDS, in the face of the internet sex had not only gone underground, it had gone post-ground and now cruising existed only in the ether.

I was wrong.

The beauty of me is my ability to be wrong, my ability as a vegetarian to eat bacon and crow.

Sitting after dark in Toronto’s Queen Park I befriended a man who had been cruising this park all his life. The year that Rock Hudson died of AIDS, he decided to come out. It has made him, if he does say so himself, an expert at giving blowjobs.

He tells me how he calls this park Emerald Island- cause it is- basically we are sitting in a large traffic circle in the middle of a city, permitered by trees, our feet thick in luscious grass and roots aching to come up.

Every few years he tells me the city tries to make the park less welcoming by taking down trees or adding more lights. He laughs and says it doesn’t matter- the fags just bash the bulbs to make the starts brighter.

Sitting there frustrated by the lack of play, the willy-nilly fear of men to man up and hook up we start talking. Darting hungry eyes shoot us dirty looks. “WHAT?” I say with my mouth and shoulder, its not like you are doing anything.

We watch for a while as the little guy who wants to be the big guy circles the big guy who wants to get with the little guy.

It is as boring as shit but counts for action tonight.

Finally against a tree, the big guy lets go (did I mention he is on roller blades), the little guy wins and a crowd gathers to watch, stare and play.

The beauty of dry bones breathing is tempered only by the fact that parks such as this still echo all that is hurt inside of gay bones.

Not only is this place a hunt for the great white cock, leaving brown, yellow red cocks dangling in the wind- there is no room for dudes without cocks or cocks without dudes.

Desires are still so repressed that getting laid under the stars, white buffalos winking from the road, is still a revolutionary act. And there is no room for openness, no room for further transgression. We have done our part by coming out they seem to say.

Before I ever went to cruising park I romanced the idea that in such places you fucked what was there. That beauty became relative and a bell curve of hotness was recreated every time someone came or left.

And this is true.
And this is not true.
Our culturally informed idea of beauty still permeates past the trees.
Old guys walk around with nary a wink,
Fat guys sit dejected, staying in the background instead of being rejected.

White buffalo breath revives dry bones.
But animals we are not.
But just spirits we are not.
But online profiles we are not.
But post-AIDS we are not.

Take off your shoes, your socks, your shirt and your pants.
Walk barefoot on the land. Naked.
Find a place to lie down in the grass.
Press your sex to the ground and feel the flex flux of 6 billion souls.
Get off
Get up
Keep going.

White buffalo breath revives dry bones.
Fucking strangers revives faith in humanity.
Being outside reminds you that you are human.

Take off your shoes, your socks, your shirt and your pants.
Walk barefoot on the land. Naked.
Find a place to lie down in the grass.
Press your sex to the ground and feel the flex flux of 6 billion souls.
Get off
Get up
Keep going.

Take off your shoes, your socks, your shirt and your pants.
Walk barefoot on the land. Naked.
Find a place to lie down in the grass.
Press your sex to the ground and feel the flex flux of 6 billion souls.
Get off
Get up
Keep going.

Why Are We...

Thanks to Manhunt Cares for featuring this great video by Eric Leven.

Why are we... from Eric Leven on Vimeo.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know: How can I test if my son is gay?

Good question; better answer.



- Via Manhunt Daily

Healthier hook-ups

via Bay Windows, by Ethan Jacobs


David S. Novak brings serious public health credibility to his new role as coordinator of Manhunt Cares, the men’s health offshoot of the Cambridge-based hook-up site Manhunt.net.

From 2004 to 2007, while serving as syphilis elimination coordinator at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), he literally wrote the book on online STD outreach to gay men, pioneering the department’s work in doing outreach to Manhunt members and authoring a guide on Manhunt outreach for use by other states and agencies. He moved on to serve as national syphilis elimination coordinator for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where he continued promoting online outreach as a means to prevent HIV and other STD infections among gay men.

At first glance leaving the CDC to work for one of the world’s biggest gay hook-up sites might seem like an odd transition. But Novak said Manhunt has carved out a role for him to push forward with new strategies for online health outreach without the constraints of red tape and bureaucracy of the public health field.

"I’ve been doing this work for over five years, on the government side, state, federal, and moving into the industry side. ... I can do some things here that public heath would probably take a long time to figure out," said Novak, who joined the Manhunt team at the end of last year.

Manhunt has been working with public health agencies on its site for about the past five years, inviting them to create profiles on the site and provide information and referrals to members with concerns about HIV and other STDs. Under Novak Manhunt has expanded that work, creating Manhunt Cares, a dedicated public health website, and, said Novak, the company is working to strengthen the partnerships it has with public health agencies. Novak also hopes to experiment with new media to do HIV prevention work.

Read the rest.

MANHUNT Launches MANHUNT Cares; Hires Senior Public Health Strategist from CDC

PRESS RELEASE

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Ken Herron, Chief Marketing Executive at Online Buddies Inc., the parent company of MANHUNT, announced today that David S. Novak of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will join the team at Online Buddies, Inc. as the site's first Senior Public Health Strategist. MANHUNT, the leading social networking site for gay men, with 2,000,000 members worldwide, is the first social networking site to address the ever-increasing spread of sexually transmitted infections via the Internet by funding a health position. No other site, including Facebook and Myspace, has a similar staff position.

In his new role, Mr. Novak will oversee sexual health-related issues pertaining to MANHUNT and its members through the site's new online health center, MANHUNT Cares. Mr. Novak will act as MANHUNT's spokesperson and ambassador to the CDC and will work hand-in-hand with state health departments and community-based organizations to assist them in notifying men who may have been exposed to an STI.

Read the rest.

Struggling to imagine in 2009 …

It's ironic that we've concluded sex is our problem after decades of insisting otherwise...


by Tony Valenzuela


[Tony is a Los Angeles writer and activist in the international gay men's health movement.]


In the television drama, Mad Men, about early 1960's advertising executives in New York City, ad wiz Don Draper has a beautiful wife, Betty, who sees a psychiatrist for anxiety. She has presumably everything she could ever want: a beautiful home, two beautiful children and a successful and handsome husband. What more could a woman ask for? The spectacled psychiatrist listens to her discontent as she lay on the leather daybed while he jots down notes on a pad. He rarely talks to her. There isn't any of the "how did that make you feel" or affirmations of Betty's emotions that she might encounter in therapy today.

Instead without her knowing, the psychiatrist calls her husband to consult over the phone his wife's elusive progress. "We're basically dealing with the emotions of a child here," he tells Mr. Draper after a couple of sessions with his wife: woman confides in doctor, doctor speaks to husband to determine wife's diagnosis: immaturity.

I watched that particular episode and thought about gay men today, our lives interpreted by experts as stunted and adolescent. But what I've found disheartening lately is that gay men, as far as I can determine, seem to agree. Here are some examples. I was recently asked to sit on a panel about "hot sex" during a one-day city of West Hollywood sponsored gay men's health conference. A therapist from the L.A. Center sat to my left and he opened the discussion by relaying the many problems he sees that gay men have with "sexual addiction." No one in the audience blinked an eye. Though I tried to interject that gay men are also sophisticated, ethical and yes, adventurous, perhaps more than most groups regarding sex – we celebrate different body types like bears, muscles, older, younger; and lifestyles like leather, fetish, nudist, non-monogamous – the audience, when it came down to it, preferred to discuss struggles with intimacy and low self-esteem.

I was stumped. A forum designed to discuss hot sex became a group therapy session on unhealthy sex. Next, I recently met a producer with one of the gay networks who is going to do a series on gay men's sexuality. The producer told me the series, "would not be celebratory" in the way they had already produced a series on lesbian sex. Instead, he, a gay man, wanted to "hold up a mirror" to our unhealthy behaviors. No matter what I offered for balance, it was clear the kind of series he wanted to make. He seemed astonished that I would object.

Finally, I just read an article in OUT magazine that poses the question: has Manhunt destroyed gay culture? The article, written by a guy who clearly felt bad about the many hours he wasted cruising online over the past decade, presented the views of therapists, researchers and famous gays who all pretty much agreed that Manhunt is the devil that makes us do it. I almost expected to be asked to sign a petition at the end of the piece seeking to put a measure on the ballot to outlaw online cruising.

It seems hard to imagine for 2009 a gay men's health movement that affirms the good in gay men's lives when what we hear, read and discuss – the movement far more gay men seem to want to be a part of – is how unhealthy we really are. I know it sounds as if I want to deny the real problems we face in our lives. On the contrary, I know how too many gay men struggle with drugs, depression and the challenges of safer sex. But it's ironic that we've concluded sex is our problem after decades of insisting otherwise. Tellingly, the OUT magazine article pointed out that Manhunt has more members than all our national LGBT organizations combined.

And Manhunt is the problem?

Obviously there's something in that hook-up site many of us enthusiastically partake in. It makes me wonder, are gay men truly masochists, do we love to be ashamed, or do we find it inconceivable to imagine our sex lives as anything but compulsive, diseased and dirty? Have the homophobes been right about us all along?

I'd like to imagine for 2009 a gay men's health movement where we create two lists: Healthy and Unhealthy, to discuss all the ways we live our lives that fall under each category. Then I'd like us along with media, researchers and activists to reflect in our conversations and work the substance of those lists. We might be surprised by what we find.

[pictured above, Tony Valenzuela, in dark suit, met Rob Ferrante on Manhunt nearly four years ago. They were married in San Diego on June 22, 2008 before 100 family members and friends]


*** LifeLube has been asking folks around the country to weigh in on what a 2009 Gay Men's Health Agenda might look like. Click here to read some of the ideas that have been circulated. Please feel free to comment here - share your own ideas, or spout off on whether you agree or disagree with Tony - or, you could send in a full post of your own here. We will be happy to publish it!

Related links on LifeLube

- Key word: internet
- Podcast: Driving Tips for Sex on the Superhighway

Sex on the Superhighway - The Podcast

How do you get off and have a good time on the internet superhighway without a fender bender?







The Center on Halsted last month was the site of the LifeLube/Project CRYSP forum - Driving Tips for Sex on the Superhighway - which featured a Feast of Fools moderated conversation with three delightful experts (Stephan, Beau, Brian) and YOU talking about the expanding boundaries of sex, love, lust, the hunt, addiction, safe spaces, health, porn, photoshop and more, more, MORE internet fun, frolic, and fantasy you can shake your stick repeatedly at.

Just let your fingers do the click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click

Click here for the Feast of Fools podcast and listen for yourself.

Click here for more Sex on the Superhighway photos.

Also of interest - click here for a recent development in the relationship between the internet and gay men's health.

Then leave your comments - keep the conversation going!

And do join us, won't you, for the next forum on tap from LifeLube and the Feast of Fools - "Let's Take a Glass Together" - focused on the LGBT community's complex relationship with booze. Wednesday, July 23 at Sidetrack.

Manhunt behind closed doors

For most gay men the name Manhunt.net conjures images of late night hookups and pages upon pages of profiles of hot (and not so hot) naked men. Since its launch seven years ago the company has extended its steamy, sweaty grasp from Boston across the country to become one of the largest gay websites in the United States. In the last few years it has gone international, helping men hook up in Mexico, South America, the U.K., Western Europe and Australia, among other far-flung locales.

But while Manhunt has made its name selling sex, you’d never know it visiting the company’s corporate headquarters on the outskirts of Kendall Square in Cambridge. Walk through the front door of the offices of Online Buddies, Inc., Manhunt’s corporate moniker, and you’ll find a large open reception area decked out in stylish wooden furniture and tasteful accents. There are no naked men prowling the foyer, no video screens showing porn films, no oozing lube dispensers. The vibe it gives off is decidedly more "neat" than "meat."

Read the rest on Bay Windows.

Feds seek to limit sexual images online

by Heather Cassell for Bay Area Reporter

A proposed amendment to a federal recordkeeping law could force adult social networking Web sites and other Internet sites to gather and maintain users' identification.

Civil liberties organizations have slammed the proposal, and have submitted comments to the U.S. Department of Justice on behalf of adult social networking and adult entertainment Web sites that could be severely crippled by the amendment to the federal labeling and recordkeeping law.

Public comment about the new rules and regulations to Section 2257 of the recordkeeping law closed September 10. The new regulations are a product of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which is designed to prevent sexual and other violent crimes against children, and regulate sexually explicit digital images online.

"The proposed amendment to the federal labeling and recordkeeping law will surely at the least have a chilling effect on users of social networking Web sites, and at the worst [is] an outright and unacceptable invasion of privacy," wrote Roberta Sklar, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

Read the rest.

We heart Manhunt...

... for many delectable reasons, some of which not as obvious to the average cybergay as others... such as the fact they work with community organizations like SHX (proud papa to LifeLube) and Project CRYSP in Chicago to help disseminate health messaging far and wide... for FREE...

On behalf of all those you help in our communities,
THANK YOU MANHUNT