They Called Me a Slut at 82

via HuffPost Gay Voices, by David Leddick

"The 80-year-old slut." That's what a friend calls me. "82," I say, correcting him. "82."

We have to completely rethink what age numbers stand for.

Yes, I am 82, and yes, I have a lover who is well under 30, and yes, I have an excellent sex life with him. Our relationship began when he said to me, "I usually don't like guys, but you give me a boner." For someone over 80, this is good news.

I told yet another friend, a woman, in this case, "He either really is into me or he's the best actor in the world." She said, "What's the difference?" and she's right.

As the baby boomers bulge over the 65-year mark, the time has come when what we think we will be doing in the latter part of our lives will change, must change.

If you may easily live to 95, do you really plan to sit about for 30 years, from 65 to 95? That's a third of your life.

I prefer to think that 80 to 90 is just late middle age, and we have to be ready for it. We have to run our lives and not let our lives run us. Exercise.

Control all that eating. Do all these things that we always wanted to do and have not done yet. Our lives are meant to be lived, and in that final third we can do it.

Baby boomers (and even those younger) will find themselves having a shift in their thinking as to who they are and what their potential is.

The attitude of younger people in the 21st century is bound to filter upward, and those over 65 will not be living as the previous generation did when they reached that age.


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Testing and Hearing HIV Test Results Together

via The Associated Press, by Carla K. Johnson

CHICAGO — Newly dating and slightly anxious, two men bared their arms for blood tests and pondered the possibility that one of them, or both, could be infected with HIV.

An innovative program — called Testing Together — would allow them to hear their test results minutes later, while sitting side by side.

In this Jan. 5, 2012 photo, Dominic Poteste, left, and Eric Zemanovic pose before taking HIV tests together at the Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago.

Testing Together, now under way in Chicago and Atlanta, takes an unusual approach: It encourages gay male couples to get tested together and hear their results together.

In this Jan. 5, 2012 photo, Dominic Poteste, left, and Eric Zemanovic pose before taking HIV tests together at the Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago.

Testing Together, now under way in Chicago and Atlanta, takes an unusual approach: It encourages gay male couples to get tested together and hear their results together. 

.Eric Zemanovic, a dental hygienist, and Dominic Poteste, a restaurant server, had been dating two months after a yearlong friendship. In the past, they'd both practiced safe sex and got regular HIV tests.

Both are in their early 30s. They'd grown up when AIDS meant an early, horrible death. So, whenever they heard about friends testing positive, they felt pangs of fear.

Poteste explained: "There's always an anxiety that comes with getting tested, even though 99 percent of the time I've been safe and been careful, there still is always ..."

His voice trailed off.

"A slight possibility," Zemanovic completed the sentence.

"A slight possibility," Poteste agreed.

Testing Together, now under way in Chicago and Atlanta, takes an unusual approach: It encourages gay male couples to get tested together and hear their results together.

After delivering the results, a counselor talks with the couple about what to do next, including agreements they may want to make with each other about sex and health.

Are we agreeing to be monogamous? Is any sexual activity outside the relationship OK? How are we going to protect each other from infection? Couples address these questions and more.

The idea is to bring honesty to sexual relationships, said one of the researchers behind the program, Rob Stephenson of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University in Atlanta.

Relationships offer only "mythical protection" from HIV, Stephenson said. Some couples may have avoided talking about each other's HIV status, thinking, "If he were HIV positive he would have told me," or "If he wanted to know, he would have asked."

Poteste and Zemanovic, the newly dating Chicago couple, differed in their past approaches. Zemanovic was in the habit of asking his sex partners about their HIV status; he was "neurotic" about it, he said.

Poteste hadn't been as sexually active as his new boyfriend, but he hadn't always asked the questions: Have you been tested? What's your status?

"You have an assumption that if there's something this person could do to potentially hurt me, they would tell me," he said.

Zemanovic hoped getting tested together and discussing results with a counselor would build trust between them.

Poteste hoped the counselor could help them start a conversation so they could ask and answer difficult questions.

It started in Africa more than 20 years ago. Researchers believe couples testing has successfully reduced the spread of AIDS among married, heterosexual couples in some African regions.

One study that looked at couples where one spouse is HIV positive and the other is HIV negative estimated that couples testing was cutting the rate of transmission by more than half.

In Washington, D.C., where the rate of HIV infection rivals some African nations, some community agencies allow couples to test together. Family and Medical Counseling Service Inc. has been testing about 145 couples together annually since 2008. Most are heterosexual couples.

In Chicago and Atlanta, Testing Together, funded by the MAC AIDS Fund, hopes to test 400 couples by the end of the year.
___
Each participant in Testing Together signs a consent form that addresses receiving counseling, testing and results with a partner in the same room at the same time with a trained counselor: "I hereby consent to allow my partner to know the results of my HIV test," it begins.

The program challenges conventional practices in the United States, where HIV testing is usually private and for individuals only. At most other clinics, a man who asks if his partner can be there when he hears his test result is denied because of patient confidentiality concerns.

There are two trends fueling Testing Together. One, the number of gay Americans telling the U.S. Census they're living with same-sex partners nearly doubled in the past decade, to about 650,000 couples. About half those same-sex partnerships are gay men.

What's more, a new line of research suggests that up to 68 percent of new HIV infections in gay men come from a main sex partner, not from casual sex, in part because main sex partners are more likely to forgo condoms.

Counselors are trained on how to deliver test results, with particular emphasis on how to tell partners the most difficult news: one partner has the virus and the other doesn't.

With these so-called "HIV discordant" couples, counselors have a great opportunity to reduce the spread of the virus by helping the couple learn ways to protect the uninfected partner, primarily through correct and consistent condom use.

Counselors are trained to dispel myths. If the couple thinks the test result means one partner has been unfaithful, the counselor might point out that the infected partner could have acquired HIV before the partner became a couple.

If the couple believes the virus is "sleeping" and can't be transmitted, the counselor might explain that HIV can be transmitted even if there are no signs or symptoms.

If the couple believes their status is proof that precautions aren't needed, the counselor might explain that HIV could be transmitted in the future as the infected partner's virus levels rise.

Sam Hoehnle is a counselor in the Chicago program. "It never becomes easier emotionally" to deliver the news to an HIV discordant couple, Hoehnle said. He tells the HIV negative partner his results first, then spends more time and attention on the HIV positive partner.

He's seen partners support each other, but he acknowledges he can't read minds. A show of compassion could mask anger or fear.

"You don't know what's happening internally, in their heads, about how they're feeling about each other," he said.


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Why Gay Parents May Be the Best Parents

via Yahoo News, by Stephanie Pappas

Gay parents "tend to be more motivated, more committed than heterosexual parents on average, because they chose to be parents," said Abbie Goldberg, a psychologist at Clark University in Massachusetts who researches gay and lesbian parenting.

Gays and lesbians rarely become parents by accident, compared with an almost 50 percent accidental pregnancy rate among heterosexuals, Goldberg said. "That translates to greater commitment on average and more involvement."

Adopting the neediest

Gay adoption recently caused controversy in Illinois, where Catholic Charities adoption services decided in November to cease offering services because the state refused funding unless the groups agreed not to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Rather than comply, Catholic Charities closed up shop.

Catholic opposition aside, research suggests that gay and lesbian parents are actually a powerful resource for kids in need of adoption.

According to a 2007 report by the Williams Institute and the Urban Institute, 65,000 kids were living with adoptive gay parents between 2000 and 2002, with another 14,000 in foster homes headed by gays and lesbians. (There are currently more than 100,000 kids in foster care in the U.S.)

An October 2011 report by Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute found that, of gay and lesbian adoptions at more than 300 agencies, 10 percent of the kids placed were older than 6 — typically a very difficult age to adopt out.

About 25 percent were older than 3. Sixty percent of gay and lesbian couples adopted across races, which is important given that minority children in the foster system tend to linger. More than half of the kids adopted by gays and lesbians had special needs.

The report didn't compare the adoption preferences of gay couples directly with those of heterosexual couples, said author David Brodzinsky, research director at the Institute and co-editor of "Adoption By Lesbians and Gay Men: A New Dimension of Family Diversity" (Oxford University Press, 2011).

But research suggests that gays and lesbians are more likely than heterosexuals to adopt older, special-needs and minority children, he said.

Part of that could be their own preferences, and part could be because of discrimination by adoption agencies that puts more difficult children with what caseworkers see as "less desirable" parents.

No matter how you slice it, Brodzinsky told LiveScience, gays and lesbians are highly interested in adoption as a group.

The 2007 report by the Urban Institute also found that more than half of gay men and 41 percent of lesbians in the U.S. would like to adopt.

That adds up to an estimated 2 million gay people who are interested in adoption. It's a huge reservoir of potential parents who could get kids out of the instability of the foster system, Brodzinsky said.

"When you think about the 114,000 children who are freed for adoption who continue to live in foster care and who are not being readily adopted, the goal is to increase the pool of available, interested and well-trained individuals to parent these children," Brodzinsky said.

In addition, Brodzinsky said, there's evidence to suggest that gays and lesbians are especially accepting of open adoptions, where the child retains some contact with his or her birth parents.

And the statistics bear out that birth parents often have no problem with their kids being raised by same-sex couples, he added.

"Interestingly, we find that a small percentage, but enough to be noteworthy, [of birth mothers] make a conscious decision to place with gay men, so they can be the only mother in their child's life," Brodzinsky said.

Good parenting

Research has shown that the kids of same-sex couples — both adopted and biological kids — fare no worse than the kids of straight couples on mental health, social functioning, school performance and a variety of other life-success measures.

In a 2010 review of virtually every study on gay parenting, New York University sociologist Judith Stacey and University of Southern California sociologist Tim Biblarz found no differences between children raised in homes with two heterosexual parents and children raised with lesbian parents.

"There's no doubt whatsoever from the research that children with two lesbian parents are growing up to be just as well-adjusted and successful" as children with a male and a female parent," Stacey told LiveScience.

There is very little research on the children of gay men, so Stacey and Biblarz couldn't draw conclusions on those families.

But Stacey suspects that gay men "will be the best parents on average," she said.

That's a speculation, she said, but if lesbian parents have to really plan to have a child, it's even harder for gay men. Those who decide to do it are thus likely to be extremely committed, Stacey said. Gay men may also experience fewer parenting conflicts, she added.

Most lesbians use donor sperm to have a child, so one mother is biological and the other is not, which could create conflict because one mother may feel closer to the kid.

"With gay men, you don't have that factor," she said. "Neither of them gets pregnant, neither of them breast-feeds, so you don't have that asymmetry built into the relationship."

The bottom line, Stacey said, is that people who say children need both a father and a mother in the home are misrepresenting the research, most of which compares children of single parents to children of married couples.

Two good parents are better than one good parent, Stacey said, but one good parent is better than two bad parents. And gender seems to make no difference. While you do find broad differences between how men and women parent on average, she said, there is much more diversity within the genders than between them.

"Two heterosexual parents of the same educational background, class, race and religion are more like each other in the way they parent than one is like all other women and one is like all other men," she said.

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[VIDEO] It's Time

via Advocate

GetUp! in Australia released a commercial on Thursday from the perspective of one half of a gay couple in love. It builds to the big moment that they want legalized — a proposal to get married.

Filling the Void: Interracial/Inter-Cultural Dating 101

by Lee Carson, MSW, LSW (and LifeLube pal)

Excerpt:

I think that many of us who have dated interracially or inter-culturally can attest that often times there are things we may deal with in the context of our relationships that may not present themselves in relationships where both partners in the couple are of the same racial and/or cultural experience.

Some examples of things that may come up include: issues around your partners race from family and/or friends; dating someone of a different religious experience than your family’s belief (ex: someone of the Islamic faith dating a Christian); dating someone from a different country among other things. Cultural differences can be even as nuanced as one partner coming from a smaller more reserved family and the other from a larger family where they are more boisterous and socially aggressive. The possibilities of the varying cultural differences that could present themselves are endless.

Read the whole thing.

Hey Peter, Is it true Howard Brown let's you get HIV tested with your Boo?

Peter Pointers is Chicago's most trusted source for gay, sexy, healthy info with an all-access pass to nationally known health and wellness experts. Go ahead, ask Peter for Pointers. Visit his page on the LifeLube site and read answers to commonly asked questions too.



Q: I heard that Howard Brown Health Center has a program that encourages male couples and sexual partners to get tested together for HIV.  Is that true?
 
A: Yes, you are correct! Getting an HIV test can be difficult, if not downright scary—and having a conversation with your partner(s) about HIV results can bring up a lot of other issues. Thanks to a new service developed by researchers from Emory University and funded by the MAC AIDS Fund, Howard Brown Health Center, and two clinics in Atlanta, can provide an opportunity to lessen those challenges among sexual partners.

I spoke with Sam Hoehnle, Project Coordinator of “Testing Together” at Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago.  Mr. Hoehnle said that “Testing Together” provides an opportunity for gay and bisexual men in relationships to get tested and receive their results together (at the same time, in the same room), with a trained counselor present to discuss the results. Testing with your partner and receiving your results together is a great opportunity to start (or continue) a healthy conversation about HIV in your relationship, and allows you to talk openly about building a plan to address HIV (and other STI) risks. The service is designed to focus on the future, not on what each person has done in the past.

Different types of couples can also benefit from this intervention. In the United States most infections occur between men and their primary sex partner. You or your partner may be infected with HIV and not even know it. Testing Together gives an opportunity for you and your partner to discuss how HIV may impact your relationship.

If you are positive you can still use the service. If you meet the screening criteria, Testing Together can provide an opportunity for you to share your status with your partner, in a controlled setting, with a trained counselor who will help start a discussion with you and your partner to discuss the realities of HIV in your relationship.

Some people may be concerned about how this service will affect their relationship, especially if they have different results.  While, there is no way to know what direction your relationship will take after finding out each other’s HIV test results, in Africa, where the service was started, most couples with different results stayed together. Every relationship is different. Knowing your partner’s status will start a conversation with honesty and trust.

The process of testing is relatively easy. You and your partner will be screened separately to see if you are eligible for testing. If you are eligible and agree to be tested together, then you will meet with a counselor to start a discussion about the testing process and how HIV impacts you in your specific relationship. The counselor will then provide the results for the test with you and your partner, at the same time and in the same room. Once you both know your status, the counselor will work with you both to determine the best way to minimize the risk of HIV in your relationship.

Only four clinics in the U.S. are offering this service for male couples. The two locations in Chicago are Howard Brown Health Center and the Broadway Youth Center (for people under 25 years of age).

Howard Brown offers the service during regular Walk-in Clinic hours and the Broadway Youth Center on Tuesday and Thursday from 5pm-8pm.

In Atlanta, services are offered at our partner sites AID Atlanta and Ric Crawford Clinic (formerly AID Gwinnett).

For more information about Testing Together you can go to www.testingtogether.org or check the program out on Facebook. You can also follow us on Twitter @TestingTogether.

TOMORROW - Howard Brown is hosting a community forum at their Sheridan location (4025 North Sheridan Road, Chicago) on Thursday, November 3rd - TOMORROW - from 6:30p - 8:00p. 

 

This forum is an opportunity for the community to learn more about the service. A representative from Emory University and Howard Brown Health Center will be there to present on couples HIV counseling and testing. The forum will also feature a question and answer portion. And light refreshments!

 

Hope to see you there!

 

Be well,
Peter Pointers
peterpointers@lifelube.org
www.lifelube.org/experts.php

Testing Together

via thegavoice, by Ryan Lee

The sexual transmission of HIV is often believed to be associated with promiscuity, but gay and bisexual men are far more likely to contract the disease while in a relationship than from a casual sex partner.

“If you look at new HIV infections among men who have sex with men, about two-thirds of new HIV infections come from main sex partners,” said Patrick Sullivan, an associate professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.

Sullivan and Emory researchers have adapted a strategy that has been used since the late 1980s for heterosexual couples in Africa, where HIV transmission often takes place within marriage, to help gay male couples in the United States learn their HIV status alongside their partners.

After a year of research conducted at AID Atlanta, “Testing Together” was officially launched in September, and “gives people a forum and a supportive place in which to have conversations that may be more difficult to raise individually,” Sullivan said.

“We made some important changes in the intervention [that has been used to test couples in Africa] to make it appropriate for male couples in the US,” Sullivan said. “For example, one of things that is addressed in the intervention is the issue of agreements.

“We know that most male couples in the United States have some kind of explicit agreement about whether or not they can have sex with partners outside their relationship.” he said.

 “We feel like ‘Testing Together’ is an important opportunity for guys to have a safe place to talk about that agreement and clarify it.”

According to data collected for the initiative, about 90 percent of gay male couples have had discussions about whether it is acceptable to have sexual partners outside of the relationship, with more than half of the couples identifying as strictly monogamous.

Of those monogamous couples, one quarter of partners acknowledged having sex outside of the relationship within the past year, and only one quarter of those men informed their primary partner about the lapse in monogamy.

“So the reality is that although most male couples in our research report that they have agreements toward monogamy, people are human and sometimes people step out of those agreements,” Sullivan said.

 “One of the things we do in this intervention is we give couples the chance to talk openly about what they want to do if that slip-up happens, and this isn’t a conversation that’s always comfortable to raise with your partner.”

The “Testing Together” intervention — which is financed by the MAC AIDS Fund and currently available at AID Atlanta, the Ric Crawford Clinic (formerly AID Gwinnett) and a gay health clinic in Chicago — emphasizes a “future forward” approach that helps it avoid being a high-anxiety “confessional” for partners, said Lamont Scales, prevention programs manager at AID Atlanta.


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Unprotected sex 8x more common in serious relationships than casual, US gay youth study finds

via Aidsmap, by Gus Cairns

The strongest single predictor of not using condoms in anal sex in a group of young US gay men was that the relationship was regarded as ‘serious’, a study has found. Unprotected sex was eight times more likely in serious relationships than in casual encounters.

This study, conducted conducted by Northwestern University in Illinois, USA (Mustanski) reinforces previous findings that over two-thirds of HIV transmissions between US gay men happen between primary sex partners and only a third between casual partners (Sullivan).

In this study, the researchers comment, “there was almost no unprotected sex occurring in relationships classified as casual”. This suggests that HIV prevention strategies amongst US gay men may need to focus more on HIV risk and safer-sex negotiation within couples than on individual risk-taking decisions.

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Maybe I Do And Maybe I Don't

via The Village Voice, By Steven Thrasher

Kevin Beauchamp, 49, and Howard Orlick, 50, are both legally blind. Kevin is thin and wiry; his vision loss is degenerative, and eventually he'll go completely blind. For now, he sees a little through one eye, making out shapes when there is enough contrast. With the aid of adaptive software, he's able to read modified text when he's not too tired.

Don't Ask, Don't TellBrian BrownKevin BeauchampSame-Sex MarriageLGBT IssuesHoward is broad and muscular. Because of a genetic condition, he sees nothing in daylight. The sun's light acts on him like snow blindness. But at night, he has some vision. During the day, Kevin's dwindling vision is enough for him to get by with a cane. But at night, it's Howard who guides Kevin as they walk together.

For nine years, they've been together, relying on each other to get down the street and up steps and around corners, so that they could do what had been a major part of their forties—protesting for the right of gay couples to marry.

They carried a banner together in the National Equality March in D.C. (Howard admits that he worried about falling in a manhole.) And Kevin was arrested last March while participating in a demonstration that shut down the intersection of Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street at rush hour, even though police didn't seem interested in cuffing a blind man carrying a white cane.

"The cops looked at me and passed me right by," Kevin says, laughing as he adds, "Of course, I didn't know that at the time."

The NYPD officers handcuffed Kevin only after another of the protesters complained, "He's with us! Arrest him, too!"

Both men have been hard at work fighting for gay rights in their forties. They each buried previous partners in their thirties.

Howard says that when his late partner, Peter, died, his family didn't treat him like a widower, even though "we were just like a married couple—the only thing was that we couldn't get married."

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A look at gay adoption

via So So Gay, By Claire Connor

It has become almost impossible to get from cover to cover in an LGBT magazine without being confronted by advertisements that claim to assist the community in creating a family.

Countless services declare their ability to make the process not only seamless, but also, in their glossy spreads, glamorous. Photographs of cute, giggling babies veil the serious side to starting a family.There are a great many children in care who need to be adopted.

And what are these advertisements offering? Rarely adoption. These agencies want to make money. Purchase a womb in the form of a surrogate, purchase some sperm, purchase a turkey baster (or rather, ‘insemination kit’); purchase pretty much anything one needs to create a baby. What gets forgotten, however, is the option of starting a family with a child that already exists. There is a danger of people who read these magazines getting the impression that adoption no longer happens.

The gay press undoubtedly has a responsibility to recognise the fact that, due to their need for revenue, they are in danger of becoming responsible for a trend in expensive surrogacy and co-parenting arrangements when there are a great many children in care who need to be adopted. It is a particularly important issue to address, when the process is now simpler than ever for gay people.

In 2002, the Adoption and Children Act passed into law and it became legal for unmarried couples, including gay couples, to apply for joint adoption. The law came into effect in 2005. Since 2007, other laws have been in place which make it unlawful for any providers of goods and services to discriminate on the grounds of sexual orientation. These continue to be protected under the Equality Act 2010.

Although gay men and lesbians will face a number of the same issues when thinking about starting a family, the obvious biological advantage that women hold means they are far more likely to go down the ‘natural’ route. Sadly, adoption is not always the first choice.

Gay men are more likely to consider adopting a child. Peter, 50, and David, 46, met in a London nightclub in 1997. Peter was living in Scotland at the time, but had been considering moving to London. Meeting David was the push he needed. After a few years together, the couple started to seriously think about starting a family. ‘Heterosexual contemporaries were starting to have kids so you start to feel that it is that time in your life’, Peter says. Over three years ago, the couple adopted biological brothers Carlos and PJ when they were six and two and a half years old respectively.

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Gay Judge's Ruling on Prop. 8 Upheld

 via The Christian Post

A federal judge ruled Tuesday to uphold Judge Vaughn Walker's decision to strike down California's same-sex marriage ban.

Proponents of Proposition 8 – which defines marriage as between a man and a woman – had asked that Walker's 2010 ruling be vacated, given that he has been in a same-sex relationship and thus had something to gain from the case. But Chief U.S. District Judge James Ware rejected that bid.

"The sole fact that a federal judge shares the same circumstances or personal characteristics with other members of the general public, and that the judge could be affected by the outcome of a proceeding in the same way that other members of the general public would be affected, is not a basis for either recusal or disqualification," Ware concluded.

Read more.

New Medicaid policy is more important than it may seem

 via Hunter of Justice by Nat Hunter

The Obama administration issued guidance last Friday delineating how same-sex couples can be financially protected if one becomes Medicaid eligible in the process of securing long-term care for a serious disability (often age-related).

As the letter explains, married heterosexual couples have a variety of legal mechanisms that allow the non-disabled spouse to retain some basic assets such as their home. Because of DoMA, same-sex marriages cannot be recognized. Thus no same-sex couples have had access to the same options for preventing spousal impoverishment.

The new guidance letter on Medicaid rules for same-sex couples suggests a variety of ways that the same kinds of considerations can apply to same-sex couples, whether married or not.  This may sound like a mush of bureaucratic legalese, but it is much more than that. Aside from the smart lawyering involved in producing this analysis (kudos to the HHS legal staff), this development is important in both the short and the long term.

In the short term, along with every other baby booomer in the U.S., more and more same-sex couples are entering the final third of life.  Medicaid, originally set up as a health insurance system for the poor, including the "medically indigent," now pays more than half the total costs of long-term care in the U.S. Given the expense of nursing homes even for middle-class Americans, Medicaid has been necessary for millions of elders to receive decent care.  For senior same-sex couples, the new Administration position is a huge and immediate change.

But there is another, potential long-term effect of the new guidance as well. It's less obvious but, with a little investment of energy, one that could help end routinely anti-gay policies in social services agencies.  Here's why -


Read more.

California Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Questioned Because Proposition 8 Judge Was Gay

via Huffpost Politics by Lisa Leff

San Francisco-A federal judge is deciding whether a gay judge's ruling to strike down California's same-sex marriage ban should be overturned because he failed to divulge his own marital intentions before throwing out the voter-approved measure.

Chief U.S. District Judge James Ware said he would issue a decision within 24 hours after a hearing Monday in which lawyers trying to salvage the ban posed an unprecedented legal argument questioning Judge Vaughn Walker's impartiality when he issued last year's landmark ruling that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional.

The lawyers insisted that Walker, who was chief judge of the Northern District of California at the time, should have recused himself or disclosed his relationship because he and his partner stood to personally benefit from the verdict.

"It now appears that Judge Walker, at the time the complaint was filed and throughout this litigation, occupied precisely those same shoes as the plaintiffs," attorney Charles Cooper said.

Ware, who inherited the Proposition 8 case from the now-retired Walker, asked why Cooper assumed Walker had any intention of getting married, just because he was in a decade-old relationship.

Read more.

Adoptions by Gay Couples Rise, Despite Barriers

via The New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise

Growing numbers of gay couples across the country are adopting, according to census data, despite an uneven legal landscape that can leave their children without the rights and protections extended to children of heterosexual parents.

Same-sex couples are explicitly prohibited from adopting in only two states — Utah and Mississippi — but they face significant legal hurdles in about half of all other states, particularly because they cannot legally marry in those states.

Despite this legal patchwork, the percentage of same-sex parents with adopted children has risen sharply. About 19 percent of same-sex couples raising children reported having an adopted child in the house in 2009, up from just 8 percent in 2000, according to Gary Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“The trend line is absolutely straight up,” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit organization working to change adoption policy and practice. “It’s now a reality on the ground.”

That reality has been shaped by what advocates for gay families say are two distinct trends: the need for homes for children currently waiting for adoption — now about 115,000 in the United States — and the increased acceptance of gays and lesbians in American society.

The American family does not look the same as it did 30 years ago, they argue, and the law has just been slow to catch up.

Read more.

Love alone won't keep you HIV-

via The Bilerico Project, by Anthony Carter

Most of the HIV positive people I know became infected in the course of a relationship.

hiv-test.jpgAfter talking with a good friend from overseas, I was informed of this incredible theory. My brilliant ally and I discussed at length the risks people are willing to take and for what reason.

The mutually agreed upon theory is as follows: people will take greater risks in the context of a relationship because the assumption is that since we now have added love to the mix, we have more than enough information to trust our paramour.

This is in direct contrast to not knowing or trusting a trick, which means we better be on guard for any bit of foolishness (ours and theirs) that might occur.

Personally, I have been willing to take unbelievable and highly stupid risks with people that I was in "love" with. I have had unprotected sex. I have been lied to and yet was willing to engage in sexual activity with the person lying to me.

I could have easily been affected and was not. My initial HIV test was very traumatic.

Read the rest.

Brazil Supreme Court awards gay couples new rights

via BBC

Brazil's Supreme Court has voted overwhelmingly in favour of allowing same-sex couples the same legal rights as married heterosexuals.

The decision was approved by 10-0 with one abstention.

The ruling will give gay couples in "stable" partnerships the same financial and social rights enjoyed by those in heterosexual relationships.

Brazil is the world's most populous Roman Catholic nation and has an estimated 60,000 gay couples.

The ruling makes Brazil one of very few South American nations, after Argentina and Uruguay, to allow gay unions with benefits similar to those afforded a heterosexual married couple.

"The freedom to pursue one's own sexuality is part of an individual's freedom of expression," said Justice Carlos Ayres Britto, the author of the ruling.

Gay activists welcomed the decision, saying it marked an "historic day" for the country.

"The degree of civilisation of a country can be measured by the way people in a nation treat their homosexual community," Claudio Nascimento, head of Rio de Janeiro state's Gay, Lesbian and Transsexuals Committee said, according to O Globo.

From now on same sex couples will be able to register their civil partnerships with solicitors and public bodies, giving them proper inheritance and pension rights.

However, the landmark ruling stops short of recognising gay marriage, which could involve public or religious ceremonies.

Brazil's Roman Catholic Church had argued against the decision to allow civil unions, saying the only union referred to within Brazil's constitution was that between a man and a woman.

But the country's recently elected President Dilma Rousseff has made the issue one of her big social policy reforms.

Health Insurance and Same-Sex Couples

Looks like there's a new reason to join the marriage equality movement?

A new study out of UCLA is documenting the disparities in health care coverage for same-sex couples. Partnered gay men are less than half as likely (42 percent) as married heterosexual men to get employer-sponsored dependent coverage, and partnered lesbians have an even slimmer chance (28 percent) of getting dependent coverage compared to married heterosexual women. As a result of these much lower rates of employer-provided coverage, partnered lesbians and gay men are more than twice as likely to be uninsured as married heterosexuals.

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