Risky Business Podcast is LIVE - WHAT IS YOUR OPINION OF BAREBACKING?

via Feast of Fun

On today’s special edition of Feast of Fun, we’re teaming up with Lifelube and Project Crysp in conjunction with the 2009 National LGBTI Health Summit to bring you Risky Business- a raw discussion with a live audience at the Center on Halsted on the sex and intimacy we crave and the risk we’re willing to take.

How do adult films with bareback sex affect our sexual desires and practices?

Are videos depicting sex without condoms a hot but safe way for viewers to find pleasure or is it a dangerous normalization of risk?

We have a panel of experts here to break down the ins-and-outs of condomless sex.

Tony Valenzuela, Writer and Activist whose work focuses on the politics of gay sex, subcultures and assets based perspectives. He’s known as AIDS activism’s most misunderstood man.

Mufasa Ali, Minister and Activist, as well as co-founder of ONYX, a leather group for men of color.

Dr. Braden Berkey, Clinical psychologist whose practice focuses on gay men, and the director of the Center on Halsted’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Institute.

Chuck Renslow, the founder of International Mr. Leather Conference and Convention, was in the audience to talk about why he recently banned bareback porn at IML and the future of the ban.

This is a frank talk about the kind of sex men have in real life and how they “seroadapt” or reduce sexual harm.

For many people, this is just the start of the conversation surrounding sex without condoms, it is not the final word. If you have any questions or insight, please leave a comment and keep the conversation going. Please be respectful and refrain from personal attacks, inflammatory remarks or general hysteria.

Listen to the podcast.

Check out photos from the forum.

Daniel Reeders on "Risky Business"

The little forum that could...

via Trevor's blog, by Daniel Reeders


Check out pics from the event here.



I'm enjoying the free wifi and replica designer furniture at the Centre on Halsted, marvelling at this amazing space, and the contradictions of American culture.

On my way here, I passed a huge billboard on N Halsted, warning that hotdogs kill. Cancer, you see. The message: not eating in moderation, but total hotdog abstinence.

I'd just had breakfast, which like almost every other meal I've had here, came with a huge, unbidden helping of fried potato. The enormity of the normal serving size here is deadly -- through diabetes and heart disease -- but exception was being made of a single food.

Instead of saying "eat less, mostly vegetables", there's a billboard for a single illness targeting a single food. Somewhere else, a diabetes agency has no doubt done a billboard about corn syrup (rather than declining bottomless refills).

I've been here five days and I'm already feeling swamped by a myriad of health messages. Almost invariably they are phrased as Don't Do X. None have sought to communicate skills and ideas for managing the complexities of your own health.

On Monday night I came to the Centre on Halsted for a forum about barebacking, called Risky Business, moderated by Fausto Fernos and Mark Felion from Feast of Fun - the top gay podcast on iTunes! - featuring Tony Valenzuela, Rev Musafa Ali and Dr Braden Berkey.

And something similar was happening. Rather than talk about pleasure, unsafe sex without the label, or the complexities of sexual negotiation in a mixed poz/neg sexual world, co-presenters Fausto and Mark sought a consensus: Don't Do Bareback.

The audience rebelled. Keith Green, someone I've long admired for his contributions to Lifelube and the Gay Men's Health Summit online community, challenged the panel: the subtitle for the event is "reclaiming pleasure" - why can't we talk about that?

Read the rest.

Men Who Bareback Should Be Made Partners in Health Promotion, Not Banished

Nice post on Trevor Hoppe's blog by Tony Valenzuela. Don't forget to come hear Tony speak at Risky Business on August 17th!



The tone of the online debate has been, well, impolite following the announcement by International Mr. Leather to ban the promotion and distribution of bareback porn at the weekend event's leather marketplace.

"Fascists. No wonder they like uniforms," wrote a man identified as Liam Cole reacting to the ban on Treasure Island Media's blog "You're just a bunch of sick people who need help," countered an anonymous poster on the same blog.

On August 17th at 6 pm at the Center on Halsted in Chicago, I will be sitting on a panel called "Risky Business? Reclaiming Pleasure," to discuss what effect bareback porn has on men's desires, fantasies and behaviors. The forum is not about IML's ban but will throw a wider net on the discussion of porn, sex without condoms and desire.

As a guest on Trevor's blog, I'd like to focus here on the IML ban that, once again, brought into focus the raw feelings that surface when gay men talk about raw sex. I should state my opinion up front: I disagree with IML's decision, don't believe it will affect behavior, and fear it will further marginalize a group of high risk men who need to be brought under the tent of community wellness, not banished.

"I never thought I'd see the day that IML is used as a vehicle for censorship," said one anonymous source at the Chicago Free Press website. "I don't like being treated like a child at an adult event." Disputing this charge was Colin at Gay Men's Social Crisis blog (GMSC) who said, "I have a hard time with this [censorship] argument. I find bareback porn in direct conflict with health education, even if it does present what can and should be recognized as a fantasy scenario."

Maybe the better question isn't whether or not IML's new policy is censorship - it is by definition - but whether censoring bareback porn from the IML marketplace, however offensively this may strike some of us, is worth the presumed outcome of "social responsibility" and health?

Read the rest at Trevor Hoppe's blog.

Accentuate the positive

[more nice press on our little campaign...]

To your health...
via The Guide, by Tony Valenzuela

My friend Bill Jesdale, an epidemiologist in San Francisco, recently told me about preliminary research revealing that a higher percentage of gay men than straight men report being in 'excellent health.'

Surprised? The notion that gay men are exceptionally healthy seems to contradict much of what comes out of public health research, namely that gay men are plagued by physical and mental health problems from drug addiction to low self-esteem. Could we finally be turning a corner from an era when disease and death defined our lives?

We may have already.

Developed by Project CRYSP, a consortium of Chicago-area health organizations, 'How Are You Healthy?' is the name of a new ad campaign that reflects this salubrious self-image. Ads on subways, buses, newspapers and posters around the city show gay men in healthy states of being: holding an apple, doing yoga, flexing a bicep, and lovingly embracing a boyfriend. You get the idea.

Jim Picket, director of advocacy at the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, told me in an email that the project 'is one of the first, if not the first, social marketing campaigns in Chicago to take an assets-based approach to gay/bi men's health.' Instead of focusing on what's wrong with gay men -- the 'deficits' approach -- an assets-based view shifts the emphasis on the things we do to thrive despite living with HIV or in homophobic and racist cultures.

'Unlike many health campaigns directed towards gay men,' Picket tells me, the new Chicago campaign 'does not resort to using fear tactics, is not directive, and does not promote hysteria.'

The gay men's health movement distinguishes itself from traditional AIDS activism by recognizing that our health is about much more than preventing HIV. I've thought about this for a long time, especially in light of having tested positive myself in 1995. By the criteria of the prevailing public health goals promoted in the gay community for a generation, I had failed.

This singular focus on preventing HIV made sense when gay men were dying en masse, but since 1996, with the advent of antiviral medications, the concentration of our community's talent and resources on one disease has come at the expense of every other.

So what are some of the ways I am healthy? To start, I have used my gym membership for more than 20 years and lately have expanded beyond weights and cardio to include mat Pilates and yoga. I eat well (often too well). I see my doctor regularly and get bi-annual STD checks and a yearly anal pap smear.

There's more to health than the physical, of course. There's social support and having a sense of purpose. In this vein, 'How Are You Healthy?' is profiling regular guys at LifeLube.org (check it out for some of the web's best eye candy). In their own words, these men describe their healthful strategies. 'I remember the phrase, 'Don't sweat the small stuff,' says one guy with a sweet smile. 'The most important way I keep myself healthy,' says a sassy looking cutie, 'is by surrounding myself with energetic, fun people with a zest for life.'

Accentuating our positive behaviors as a health philosophy is not intended to replace valid prevention messages with uncritical gay male boosterism, but instead asks us to recognize that being healthy is a holistic endeavor that depends as much on what you do as on what you try to avoid doing.

Incidentally, the 'CRYSP' in Project CRYSP stands for 'crystal prevention.' Its overall aim is to curb the spread of HIV, but this singular goal is deliberately underplayed and is not explicitly stated in the campaign.

'While HIV is very much a gay man's disease in this country, gay men are tired of having this be their defining health issue,' Picket tells me. 'We're seeing the forest here, not just the trees.'

Amen to that.
Source

How is Tony Valenzuela healthy?

Joy Makes Me Healthy.

If happiness contributes to health, than joy is its fountain of youth. Joy is my heart elated, when I feel I could live in a moment forever. I learned joy from my mother who used the word often in relation to her family. If I’m not experiencing joy in my life, something needs to change. Joy is a special kind of happiness, found in certain activities with certain people.

In my twenties, being a community organizer brought me joy. I lived and breathed activism, hardly made any money, and felt as if I could die tomorrow a happy man.

In the late nineties, doing designer drugs in clubs with my friends brought me joy. Dancing in a trance while my mind exploded in thought and color, life had never felt so tactile and meditative.

Now I’m forty and I like that. What brings me joy is cuddling with my husband, Rob (at right in above picture), or walking our fifteen year old pup, Boo, or toiling as a writer, spending all afternoon with a complicated feeling and attempting to translate it into words.

-- Tony Valenzuela
Los Angeles


How are you healthy?
Tell us. Send a pic.
And we'll blog it.
Read past posts.

Via POZ - Sex Tourism and HIV

by Tony Valenzuela on Poz.com

I don’t consider it paying for sex. It’s giving them what I call a ‘money donation,’” says Drey, an American moderator of popular website gaytravelbrazil.com, referring to Brazil’s “rent boy saunas”—a combination of bathhouse and entertainment complex where tourists and locals go to socialize and hire sex workers. “It’s kind of like a gentlemen’s club,” explains Drey, who speaks Portuguese and travels to Rio several times a year for business—and pleasure. “It’s not about going down and getting discounted sex,” he says in earnest. “It’s really about getting to know the people, their lifestyle, their culture. [I] treat them with respect.”

Besides helping gay male tourists book vacations and teaching them the essentials of safely navigating Brazil, Drey’s site also hosts online forums where gay men discuss and share photos of the country’s most popular sex escorts. “Some of the guys have really tough lives,” Drey says. “Some guys take a bus for an hour from the poor sections outside Rio, just to come in to make a little bit of extra money.” Drey claims much of the sex is safe and that the saunas’ management provide condoms and lube to customers who hire the men by the hour. “I absolutely adhere to condom use,” Drey says. “I don’t really have an option. That’s the only way that [the sauna boys] will do it.” He pauses then adds: “The reason they’re very careful is that a lot of them have wives and girlfriends. They don’t want to bring anything home.”

To some people, Drey’s rosy depiction of respectful attitudes and safe-sex practices may sound as realistic as a travel agent’s sales pitch. But whether its reality is darker than its depiction, sex tourism—defined as travel with the intention of hiring sex workers—is a booming industry especially popular in the warm, tropical nations that also suffer higher prevalence rates of HIV and rampant poverty. The industry is full of tales of pleasure and danger; it juxtaposes the levity of vacationers with the gravity of the existence of those who serve them. The sunny side of sex tourism is clouded over by the risks both parties take if the sex is not safe.

Sex tourism encompasses a complex variety of activities and behaviors that facilitate—for a price—social and sexual interaction between people. Around the world, the names for those looking to get paid for sex are as varied as the locations in which they work; in Brazil, they are “sauna boys”; in Jamaica, “beach boys”; and in the Dominican Republic, “bugarrones” or “sanky pankies.”

Read the rest.

Sex and the sojourner - Tony Valenzuela reflects on the erotic joys of travel

In the summer of 1987, right around my 19th birthday, I discovered the bathhouse. At Club San Diego I met a deeply bronzed Swiss tourist named Rene, who was 10 years and a lifetime of experience older. Rene invited me on a weekend trip to West Hollywood. We stayed at the Coral Sands motel and friendly men kept their doors open. Then we were off to Palm Springs, to clothing-optional bungalows where our rented car got stuck in the sand and roaming around naked seemed both unremarkable and exciting...

...It comes down to this: the unfamiliar can be erotic. Being anonymous in a foreign milieu is a role we've cultivated for centuries, keeping our sexual desires clandestine from childhood onward. To witness male sexual or romantic intimacy in public is still rare (and dangerous) except for a very few neighborhoods scattered worldwide. Perhaps because gay men for so long have felt we don't quite fit in, the role of tourist suits us well. Sex under the radar of the everyday is not just possible but as many of us know, very hot...

Read Tony's entire piece at The Guide.

This is the first of a regular column on gay health that he will be writing for The Guide. And we must say, he is off to a fabulous beginning. And we're sure, many happy endings...

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

Killer Gay Sex!

Below is an essay, an AMAZING and MUST-READ essay, by LifeLube's very smart, very articulate and very fabulous pal Tony Valenzuela (remember him from the cover above?)

Just published in POZ, it centers on the controversy from a few years back regarding the New York man with the so-called HIV "supervirus." With it, he hopes to be a part of, as well as encourage, a dialog concerning the pathologizing of gay sex and the extraordinary need for an assets-based, holistic approach to gay men's lives and health.

Why do we, members of the LGBT community, continue to stigmatize one another, point fingers and shriek at "bad gays?"

Why do we continue to allow public health authorities, the media and others outside our community to whip up hysteria and terror at our expense?

Killer Gay Sex!

by Tony Valenzuela

The clueless tabloid and public health hysteria over man-on-man sex may be hindering HIV prevention efforts. From an imaginary "super strain" of HIV to the sci-fi MRSA superbug: What is it about gay sex that makes U.S. health officials want to play Chicken Little with AIDS prevention and public safety?

In February 2005, a New York man with a multidrug-resistant strain of HIV and a crystal meth dependency became the source of the most reported AIDS story of the decade, but he had never, until now, spoken about his trying ordeal. A slew of chilling claims was made about this man – that he carried a new, more virulent strain of HIV dubbed a "supervirus" that progressed from infection to AIDS in as little as two months; that his meth-induced promiscuity would instigate a deadly epidemic potentially undoing a quarter century of progress against HIV; that he signified what many in the gay community had been dreading would occur, given that gay men —stubbornly, recklessly— refused to give up their uniquely nefarious brand of promiscuity. It is, then, no less remarkable that these allegations that gripped the world with renewed fears of gay plague proved comprehensively false, yet the cycle of alarm that equates gay men with disease—as seen once again this past January in San Francisco with a drug-resistant "gay staph" scare—continues unabated to this day. By the time the man with the "supervirus" disappeared from the headlines, those still paying attention would learn he did not have a never-before-seen strain of HIV nor did he set off a new epidemic. Instead, he carried a very rare and difficult-to-treat multidrug-resistant virus that is today fully suppressed as he adheres to a complicated regimen of antiviral medications.

In Paris, the same year the "supervirus" story broke, the late gay-rights pioneer and scholar Eric Rofes declared to an audience of international activists, "The pathologizing of gay men's communities and cultures and spaces is the most powerful challenge we face to promoting gay men's health." Three years later, this man's story lays bare how far too many who work and report on gay health narrowly imagine the sex lives of gay and bisexual men inside a realm of disease and dysfunction.

Read the rest on POZ.

And please come back to LifeLube, your sweet spot, and leave a comment. Surely, Shirley you will have opinions about this essay!