Body Issues at the 2010 Gay Men's Health Summit

via Mark King, of My Fabulous Disease

National Gay Men's Health Summit Begins Next Week

via David Fawcett

Hundreds of gay men and their allies from throughout the country and beyond will gather on August 25 – 29, 2010, at the Sheraton Fort Lauderdale Airport and Cruise Port Hotel to participate in the 2010 National Gay Men’s Health Summit. The theme of the event is  "Creating a Brighter Future: The Next Decade of Gay Men’s Health" and will be held jointly with the 9th annual Southeast Regional Gay Men’s Health Summit.   Over 250 gay men (as well as, bi, trans men, other men who have sex with men and their allies) will gather to reflect on and celebrate gay men’s lives while working on a brighter future for gay men’s health and wellness.

One of the key challenges facing gay men is to ensure that we continue to be involved in the strategizing and implementation phases of Health Care Reform. Another key challenge is to develop creative funding strategies and work alongside key policy makers while we simultaneously work with fellow advocates to shape policy such as ADAP and the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.

Read the rest.

Addressing Gay Men’s Health - The Script Needs a Rewrite

 The Gay Men's Health Movement is informative, empowering, celebratory, multicultural, and relationally focused. Within this paradigm, sexual health is not simply defined as an absence of disease, but encompasses wellness and pleasure, and is inextricably tied to an individual’s physical, mental, and spiritual health.

via Virtual Mentor [August 2010 edition: Sexual Orientation, Gender Identification, and Patient Care]
by Jim Pickett

Since the first cases of a strange, new illness among gay men were reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1981, the parameters and measures of gay men’s health have unfortunately been defined by a disease-centered, myopic concentration on the area between the navel and the knee.

As a public health strategy for the control of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV and syphilis, such a narrow focus has proven ineffective. We have failed to address the mental, physical, and spiritual lives of gay men and their connection to sexual health and wellness. And this failure has had consequences.

Read the rest.

Read the entire August issue.

The 2010 
National 
Gay Men's 
Health Summit 
is August 25 - 30, 2010 
in Fort Lauderdale

Learn more and join us!

Drum Roll: The 2009 Gay Men's Health Agenda

PROMOTING GAY MEN’S HEALTH 2009:
A TIME FOR ACTION
Click here for a word document version of this agenda.

For too long gay men’s health has focused mostly on HIV/AIDS, to the detriment of other health conditions that have direct and indirect ties to HIV/AIDS. These other issues are not limited to, but include: mental health, the effects of forced sexual experiences, external and internalized homophobia, substance abuse, lack of knowledge on male specific health issues (ex: anal health, foreskin health, etc), and lack of testing for sexually transmitted infections among others.
-Lee Carson, Philadelphia

We need a high-level effort at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to coordinate the inclusion of LGBT in our nation's health goals. Reform of our healthcare systems must begin with a recognition that Healthy People and Healthy Communities must include gay men, and a healthy nation cannot be achieved unless it includes all Americans.
-A. Cornelius Baker, Washington, DC

We demand that the agencies responsible for leading the federal government's response to the AIDS crisis take the lead in announcing and orchestrating as a public health priority an explicit, multi-faceted, multi-year campaign against homophobia, stigma and discrimination against sexual diversity.
-Walt Senterfitt, Los Angeles

In smaller cities, towns, and rural communities, even gay-identified men continue to live in and with communities and families of birth, a pattern which encourages secrecy, invisibility, and social isolation. This is compounded by a lack of gay-specific social infrastructure, socially supported relationship stability, legally supported stability (including legal coupling, legal family-building), religious inclusion and in a large number of cases, the additional complexities of living in the South as a person of color and/or a person living in poverty.
-Southern AIDS Coalition

The Gay Men's Health Movement consists of formal and informal collaborations of gay men, bisexual men, transgender men, and our allies, who are advocating – worldwide - for access to health care, health care utilization strategies and training, affordable and comprehensive health insurance, and effective, culturally appropriate services across the life course.

Gay, bisexual and trans men are healthy, productive and vital members of the United States. The movement is committed to an expansive vision of health and wellness addressing many challenges, current and emerging. We continue to confront the HIV/AIDS epidemic which disproportionately impacts gay and bisexual men of all colors, particularly Black and Latino gay men and especially young Black gay men. Substance abuse and dependency is of high concern, as are,; mental health and other social challenges including racism, institutional and otherwise; and violence arising from homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. In addition, we focus on the harms associated with poverty and inadequate housing, incarceration, unemployment or marginal employment within our communities; and harms associated with lack of culturally appropriate and responsive services, and/or lack of services entirely.

We understand that many of our health challenges arise in complex associations with each other (e.g. HIV and substance abuse, poverty and sexually transmitted infections, homelessness and victimization to violence, stigma and mental health disorders, etc) and therefore must be assessed, treated, and managed holistically. Moreover, other social determinants impact our health and wellness, such as lack of comprehensive, age appropriate health and sexuality education in our schools, homophobia and transphobia in law enforcement practices, and unresponsive health and social service systems across most of the nation.

In addition to understanding the personal, biological, environmental, social, cultural and political conditions that challenge our well being and lead to illness; our movement is committed to understanding and sustaining those conditions that increase our health, wellness, vitality, and longevity. The syndemic, co-morbid and collateral characteristics which shape the disparities we face demand a response that goes beyond the clinical and institutional to a broad and sustained mobilization that cuts across and includes multiple communities. We have vast strengths and assets to confront these challenges. Community-building and advocacy efforts are important features of our movement. Together we must strive to sustain a movement that builds our assets and works to reduce our deficits as individuals, loving partners, and communities across a broad and diverse spectrum of gay, bisexual and transgender men.

Within our own communities, too, our members experience a wide range of access to services, resources and referrals which leads to disparate health outcomes for many. The concerns of gay, bisexual, and transgender men of color and men in rural and frontier communities are not always heard. Similary, immigrant men may struggle to join our communities even as they concurrently aim to adapt to broader American society. Men without the advantages of income, education, housing, and supportive friendships also are made invisible. While the historic and current impact of racism traditionally impacts Black gay men most directly – all of us are affected negatively. We are committed to overcoming these deficits within our own communities.

Support for well-designed and focused research into the health-related needs of our communities is a priority. Much of this research establishes with overwhelming confidence that gay, bisexual, and transgender men, often defined in public health as MSM, experience significant health disparities when compared with heterosexual men. Research must focus on which assets and programmatic interventions work to reduce disparities and produce health and wellness in collaborative and supportive ways. The lack of accurate and sensitive data collection and analysis about gay, bisexual, and trans men’s health is yet another hazard.. Few longitudinal studies exist to help guide our health care providers, or assist us as consumers. Best practices have not been articulated or disseminated. Randomized controlled trials have not included gay, bisexual, and transgender men as they should. Research regarding technologies important to our communities (e.g. rectal microbicides) has been woefully neglected. We support the need for more scientifically designed research to understand and improve our health. In addition, this research should always begin with direct collaboration with gay, bisexual, and transgender , from inception and implementation, to dissemination of findings and beyond.

One of the most tragic things that our collective experience as gay men living with, among, and around HIV, has robbed us of, is our ability to imagine. We have to imagine. This is a necessity. And for this to happen, we have to bring and centralize artists in the work of gay men’s health.
- Charles Stephens, Atlanta

Gay men are not only impacted by HIV policy, but we are also directly impacted by economic justice issues, immigration policies, and national security-- so we need to be involved in those issues. We also need to fight policies even when-- or perhaps especially when-- they don't appear to directly impact gay men, and we need to let others guide us in their movements.
- Fred Swanson, Seattle

Presently, HIV prevention in the U.S. lacks the resources & comprehensiveness that will significantly drive down HIV incidence rates.
- George Ayala, San Francisco, CA

Our communities must operate in the spirit of collaboration and must be reflective of RADICAL INCLUSIVITY. We must rally around our commonality and strive together. And specific to the development of leadership we must take charge through action in each step of our individual and collective daily actions. Be present in each moment, WE are together, however different we may look, act, talk and see
-Kaijson Noilmar,Seattle

Recommendations for Policymakers: Improving Gay Men’s Health and Lives

We have been hard at work. Since the early 1970s, with the formation of volunteer based STD and community health clinics, gay, bisexual, transgender men and our allies have been engaged in creating culturally appropriate health care services for our communities. These early efforts have expanded to a nation-wide system of LGBT health care centers in our major urban areas. These centers were essential to our community’s early response to the HIV epidemic. Many of these centers continue to suffer from inadequate financial support and numerous smaller cities and rural areas are in need of such services.

Since the mid-1990s, there have been a number of national and regional conferences and meetings in the United States organized for leaders in the gay men’s health movement to share information and resources, caucus, restore our energy and clarify our vision, and to develop resources and strategies for improving the health of our communities. Often, these forums have been held in partnership with lesbians, transgender women, public health providers, medical and other clinical providers, scientific and policy communities, community leaders and other activists. We have been in ongoing contact with each other to think, research, plan and work holistically and in coalition. A significant outcome of these efforts was the founding of the National Coalition for LGBT Health, the Gay Men’s Health Summits and the formation of a working group on LGBT health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Most recently, to spur the development of a gay men’s health advocacy plan, Project CRYSP – a Chicago Department of Public Health gay men's health collaboration among four agencies – began soliciting input from a variety of stakeholders across the country in April 2008.They were asked to share their vision of a 2009 Gay Men's Health Agenda – to list the objectives and strategies needed to advance our health and well-being. Twenty-one participants, representing a wide spectrum of organizations and demographically diverse individuals, submitted the policy initiatives, advocacy objectives and the activities they felt were essential to a comprehensive gay men's health agenda for 2009. Submitted in the form of blog posts, the ideas were published on the LifeLube blog – a gay men's health and wellness portal (yes, this one!) – with comments and discussion strongly encouraged.

[You may read each of the 21 submitted articles here]

An analysis was conducted of the ideas presented through this process and an overview of the process and collected input was presented to 200 gay, bisexual and transgender men’s health leaders and advocates at the closing session of the 2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit in Seattle, October,, 2008. Feedback and additional ideas were recorded during the extensive open discussion portion of the session. This entire process informs this document.

As a new Administration and Congress sets a course for America, with a focus on health care reform, leaders of the gay men’s health movement join with the National Coalition for LGBT Health and other allies in advocating for policies and resources to advance the health and well being of gay, bisexual, and transgender men.

Improve the care, housing and genuine health promotion for HIV-positive people.
- Michael Scarce, San Francisco

Our doctors are not telling us to stop smoking without reason. In case you are thinking it is just the party line that healthcare providers have to say, similar to “just lose weight”, allow me to restate it out of love. It is in each of our best interests as gay and bisexual men living with HIV/AIDS to quit smoking immediately!
-Kali Lindsey, Washington, DC

For gay and lesbian youth, for trans youth, for all youth – not having comprehensive, queer- and transgender-affirming sex education, is irresponsible, unethical and life-threatening.
-Lance Toma, San Francisco

RECOMMENDATIONS:

1. Fund and expand social, behavioral and biomedical research. Due to the health disparities gay, bisexual and transgender men endure, it is essential that more research is conducted to inform the community and clinicians as to the reasons for these disparities, find solutions to improving the health of the population, and to track and monitor health care outcomes. Sadly, research into the sexual health and wellbeing of our communities has often been demonized as morally offensive research or mischaracterized in its intent. This must end. We demand adequate funding for social, behavioral and biomedical research - including longitudinal and lifecourse studies, and random controlled trials. The research must include our diversity, as well as underserved and underrepresented communities, especially African American and Latino communities, as well as Asian/Pacific Island, Native American and other communities of color, and the impacted youth of those populations, all transgender men, and men outside urban centers as well as other other underserved regions. Attention to both current and emerging needs is paramount.

2. Develop and fund data collection efforts on sexual orientation and gender identity in all federally funded research. Vital to successful research and intervention are adequate data.. We must be represented, along with lesbians, and all bisexual and transgender men and women, in all appropriate municipal, state, and federal population, workforce, demographic, and health studies, surveys and research. There are no reasonable excuses for excluding us, since we are part of every population, part of every school and workplace, consumers of health care and other services, residents of every community, and taxpayers to local, state and federal governments.

3. Fund campaigns to combat homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. In partnership with our communities we call for local, state and federal funding, community foundation funding, faith community funding, and other support to combat ignorance, hatred and misunderstanding. We must address prejudice and build bridges across diverse communities; increase family, school, and community acceptance for LGBT youth; reduce stigma in health care and other services; and overcome discrimination in the workplace. We call for adequate funding for these programs, and we are ready to lead these efforts.

4. Eliminate No Promo Homo. We recognize that the delivery of culturally appropriate and responsive health information is dependent on setting and context. Grounded in science-based evidence, we insist on being allowed to speak within our communities effectively. Therefore, we demand the removal of state and federal legislation that serve no scientific purpose. For example, we should immediately repeal Section 2500 of the federal Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. Section 300ee(b), (c), and (d)) that does not allow the “promotion” of any type of sexual behaviour – heterosexual or homosexual. This language debilitates programs that are funded to reach sexually active adults of all backgrounds.

5. Create an Office for LGBT Health at HHS. We request the appointment of a Senior Advisor or Office for LGBT Health at the United States Department of Health and Human Services to provide focused and sustained leadership and guidance for HHS, and other departments and agencies with connections to LGBT health. We stand ready to join advisory panels at HHS, and other departments and agencies, to complement, or in preparation, for this Office.

6. Develop and implement a strategy to reduce health disparities among gay, bisexual and transgender men through direct programmatic funding. With leadership from a Senior Advisor or Office of LGBT Health, funding from both governmental and private sources would be coordinated with the goals of reducing disparities in the health of gay, bisexual and transgender men - including HIV/AIDS, substance abuse and dependency (for example, cigarette smoking and methamphetamines), mental health and other social issues, and violence victimization (including hate violence and intimate partner violence). Improving access to culturally competent, responsive, qualityhealth care must be prioritized through community specific efforts or legislation for universal health care coverage.

7. Implement and fund sexual health and wellness campaigns directed towards the gay, bisexual and transgender men’s communities utilizing an array of public and private resources. Through both public and private sources, these campaigns should ensure that both LGBT and non-LGBT health and social service organizations support male-to-male sexuality, and bisexuality, while promoting sexual health and overall wellness for the gay, bisexual and transgender men’s communities. Distinct populations must be focused on individually and should include African Americans, Latinos, and Asian/Pacific Island men, older men, men with disabilities, men who have primary partners, serodiscordant partners, men in recovery, young men and others.

8. Develop and implement a strategy to remove barriers to health care among transgender people through legal changes and education of medical and health insurance professionals. We must revise the standards of care for gender transition to replace the "gatekeeping" model with a model of informed consent, and we must end the discriminatory practices that deny health insurance to transgender people and that deny coverage for certain procedures that are covered for non-trans people.


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GETTING INVOLVED IN THE 2009 GAY MEN’S HEALTH AGENDA

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are asking you to sign on to the 2009 Gay Men’s Health Agenda, but we also want you to own it. We consider it to be a living document, and we want your voice to be a part of it. To join in, there are three things you can do right away to get involved:

Endorse the agenda: Send your name and city/town and country to gaymenshealthagenda@gmail.com. We’ll keep you up-to-date on the next steps and actions that are taken by gay men and allies around the world. You may endorse as an individual, as an organization, or both. If you are endorsing on behalf of an organization, please ensure the organization has authorized as such. Click here to circulate a word document version of the document.

Increase your Awareness: Become acquainted with some of the participants and ideas of the gay men’s health movement. Check out http://gaymenshealth.ning.com.

Weigh in on the agenda at the Gay Men’s Health Agenda workgroup on the Ning: http://gaymenshealth.ning.com/group/2009gaymenshealthagenda.

Take Action: You can get involved. Make healthy decisions for yourself. Bring these ideas to your local community and organize, organize, organize. Talk to your friends. Write a blog article. Discuss gay men’s health on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking means. Advocate with your elected government officials at the local, state and national levels – tell them you want to see gay men’s health prioritized. Check in with local organizations to find out what they are doing for gay men’s health. Organize a project to end smoking, create a social group to fight isolation, give voice to the particular health issues of HIV positive men, create safe places to celebrate HIV status and many others. You have the power to create something new yourself.


We believe that gay men and their allies can cause a revolution in health care access and awareness. We want you to be part of the work.

In solidarity,

The 2009 Gay Men’s Health Agenda Workgroup

List of endorsers in formation

Email your endorsement gaymenshealthagenda@gmail.com

Gay Men's Health Summit Featured on Ning

Ning.com, the network site for community advocates, wrote a nice piece highlighting the Gay Men's Health Summit Ning site - a place where gay men's health advocates log on to brainstorm and share ideas on how best to confront the many health concerns of gay men.

Blogger Laura Oppenheimer writes, "The focus of the network is engaging and empowering gay men to make both good decisions in their own lives, and to promote healthy living for others, as well. Network members have a group to create a strategy for advancing a pro gay-men's health storyline in the media. In the forum, they’re discussing ways to reduce risky health situations and debating different organizations’ approaches to dealing with HIV."

The stated mission of the Summit is, "Building a multi-issue, multicultural, gay men's health movement." Any and all are welcome to join!

Connect with the Gay Men's Health Movement via Ning

Click here to engage every which way but loose with the gay men's health movement. This fabulous new web portal, put together by Stephan Adelson, is a wonderful, fresh, functional way for all the folks working on gay men's health to stay connected with each other - to share, inspire, encourage, challenge, enrage, debate - always moving forward.

Visit the site and sign in - join the conversation and take action for yourself and your communities.

Flickr pics from the 2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit

Click for more

Want to include your pics from the summit in this set? Send them to us!

The Interface of Sex and Power

The opening plemary at the 2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit unpacked the gay men's wellness construct. Trevor Hoppe, pictured, was one of the panelists and has made his prepared remarks available.

Good afternoon! I’ve been asked to provide some provocative opening remarks about Wellness – but I’m going to do something very academic-y, and talk a bit around the issue. Rather than defining what wellness looks like, per se, I want to ask us to be thinking about how Power works to structure Wellness. That is to say, how power – a concept I’ll elaborate on in a minute – works in different ways to either give or deny access to Wellness. Power gives us access to Wellness – without it, we can never hope to achieve it, collectively or individually.

Read the rest of Trevor's remarks here.

And of interest as well, here is the link to download Trevor's PowerPoint slides from his presentation on qualitative research investigation into bottom identity at the Gay Men's Health Summit.

A Summit of Engagement: Engaging Ideas, Engaging Emotions, Engaging Communities

Days 1 and 2

by Chris Bartlett [pictured above center at the opening plenary on Saturday, Oct 18 - with plenary moderator Jim Pickett, left, and Fred Swanson, right.]

The 2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit is the fifth in a series of powerful community organizing efforts around gay men's health. Earlier summits in Boulder (1999, 2001), Raleigh (2003), and Salt Lake City (2005) created models for bringing activists, academics, public health staff, community organizers, doctors, and other health stakeholders to dive into lively conversations about what the gay men's health agenda is and should be. Those summits led to numerous outcomes, including new gay men's health organizations, new organizing efforts in Europe, Australia, Canada, and Asia, and a growing international cadre of gay men and allies who are taking a stand for our bodies, our selves, and our communities.

The Seattle Gay Men's Health Summit, taking place now(from October 17-21st, 2008), seeks to continue this tradition of generating ideas and energies that will create the next generation of gay men's health organizations and efforts.

In the program book for the Seattle Gay Men's Health Summit, summit convener and Executive Director of Gay City Fred Swanson said, "We hope that this weekend challenges and inspires you, makes you angry, joyful, and gives you an opportunity to engage." After two days, that mission has been accomplished for me. I'll give a few highlights here.

I swung into Seattle on Thursday, and met up with Josh Thomas, superorganizer from CHAMP, and we had a great talk over dinner about what brought us to our work-- what personal experiences, who inspired/inspires us, and how we maintain our commitment in the face of challenges. The Summit puts a premium on these face-to-face get-togethers, where we can really discover who those fantastic people are who exist on the other sides of conference calls and listserves. Josh and I are just about the same generation, though he is much younger. ;-), and we discovered that we came to the movement in similar ways: out of confronting the deaths of friends and family from AIDS, and out of our belief that we could make a difference. The conversation with Josh reminded me that it is largely the relationships I currently have and have had, with people both alive and dead, that have keep me powerfully engaged over so many years. I come to the Summit in part largely to bump up against these incredible gay men and allies who are committed, for the long haul, to creating opportunities for health.

DAY I-- LEADERSHIP ACADEMY: Key ideas: leadership, importance of relationships for organizing, secret mentoring,

Friday morning, I was up early to co-facilitate the Gay Men's Health Leadership Academy pre-institute with Kaijson. We had over 40 gay men and allies show up bright and early at 9:00, and we spent the day examining what it takes to BE a leader, with the accent on BE. We discussed why we do what we do, and what makes us passionate about it. We explored how that passion is a magnet for people to join our cause. We discussed paradigm shifts that are required of a leader in gay men's health:

1. Shifting from a focus on HIV/AIDS as the exclusive realm of health for gay men, to a much broader picture that includes HIV/AIDS as an important (and sometimes primary) issue, but does not default to HIV as a metaphor for gay men's health.

2. Shifting from a focus on gay men's deficits and weaknesses to a focus on assets and strengths.

3. Shifting from a focus on disease and pathology to one of wellness.

In the afternoon, we also got into some great conversations about the particular skills that gay men and their allies could bring to leadership. In particular, we looked at developing intergenerational links between youth, adults, elders, and ancestors. It helps to lead in the context of being connected to those who came before and those who come after.

In this light, we discussed the idea of "secret mentorship", in which people create a list of people whom they are mentoring, and by whom they are mentored, but they keep the list a secret to everyone but themselves. The idea is to create a network of people to whom one is intentionally connected-- for service, support, and wisdom.

DAY II- Internet Organizing, Wellness Plenary, GMHC's crystal meth campaigns, and dinner with a gaggle of gays. Key ideas: Gay Men's Health needs to be aware of the impact of jobs/our needs for jobs/ economic issues on our organizing; we have to be very clear about who (people of color, transpeople, rural gays) are invisible in the ongoing organizing. Also how can we create outputs for our communities that are not always dependent on outside funding: the revolutionary work will not be funded by the usual suspects.

My first workshop was Stephan Adelson's terrific presentation of the state-of-the-art of gay men's health organizing on-line. Adelson is a former key staff person from Manhunt, so he was able to tell us about the ways that Manhunt has educated and provided access to health services. He also took us through a tour of the huge number of websites that now serve as potential venues for gay health organizing. His PowerPoint is a terrific resource, and you can find it here.

The opening plenary engaged the audience around the ways that wellness is and can be constructed within our communities. The audience was particularly charged up about how to engage conversations around race, gender and class, as well as the impact of class itself (and income/jobs) on our abilities to organize. We also discussed how best to use the Summit itself as a vehicle for wellness organizing- that a Summit is meant to be different from a conference in providing opportunities for actual planning, debate, and action steps.

Post-plenary, I went to Francisco Roque's wonderful presentation of GMHC's crystal meth campaigns: "Hurricane Tina" and "How Obvious Does It Have to Get". Both campaigns aimed to present a diversity of community views about meth, without pathologizing or demonizing users. The campaigns represent a significant improvement from some of the first-generation campaigns (from other agencies/entities) that were filled with finger-wagging and scare tactics.

In particular, these campaigns go beyond the social marketing efforts themselves to work across programs and generate/support healthy social networks. I left impressed by GMHC's work in this area, and wondering at the same time (as I always do) about the long-term impact of social marketing campaigns that treat community members as a market for a product called "health", as opposed to a social network empowered to create its own health. GMHC's efforts strike me as stronger than most precisely because the campaigns are plugged into efforts to build/strengthen communities and the individuals that are a part of them.

I spent the evening of Day 2 having dinner with bunch of gay health advocates. We sat around and shared some of the things we didn't know about each other: one of us had been an actor on the 700 Club (a Christian fundamentalist TV show); another shared his story about coming out at a gay bar in the South, and I talked about my very close relationship with recently deceased Grandmother. The stories we shared were again part of an effort in relationship building-- one of the key goals for me in insuring that I surround myself with a network of gay men and allies who can help me in all of the challenging work we face. The Gay Men's Health Summit reminds us that gay men's health also applies to us organizers, and that gay men's health leaders must make the effort to get the support they need to themselves remain healthy. For me, this is always an important take home.


-- Chris Bartlett will post his thoughts from Day 3 and Day 4 of the summit in the next few days. You can follow his real-time postings about the summit - and there are a lot of them - on Twitter here.

Check out pics from the Summit here.

Connect to the Summit today and everyday forward on the new Gay Men's Health Summit portal.

Body, Mind, Soul - and more in Seattle this October

2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit

Have you registered for the National Gay Men's Health Summit?

The National Gay Men's Health Summit is coming to Seattle October 17-21.

With over 100 workshops, films, and local activities, you won't want to miss out!

Registration is $150 and covers all five days of activities. They have also hooked up a discount on American Airlines and at the host hotel.

More information on this and more can be found here and be sure to check out the cuuuuute promo.

LifeLube will be there, and hopes to see you there too!

Register NOW for the 2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit

Register before September 1 and receive 10% off!

The 2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit:
Building a Multi- Issue, Multicultural Gay Men's Health Movement.

The 2008 Summit will take place October 17-21 at the Renaissance Seattle Hotel, located at 515 Madison Street in Seattle.

Register now or book your travel or hotel!

Register today for the 2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit

Click here for more info and to register.

National Gay Men's Health Summit - Registration Open

Will we see you in Seattle?

Registration is now open for the 2008 National Gay Men’s Health Summit in Seattle, taking place October 17-21. Registration costs $150, and covers your participation in all five days of workshops. Plus, if you register before September 1, you'll receive 10% off!!

Click here to register, to book your hotel, and to book your travel! Special rates from the host hotel and American Airlines.

Proposals for the National Gay Men's Health Summit: due June 15

If you care about creating healthy, sustainable, multicultural communities for queer men, join us in Seattle for the 2008 National Gay Men's Health Summit, hosted by the guys at Gay City.

“Gay men and our communities are stronger than ever, yet there are parts of our communities that continue to be left behind. The Gay Men’s Health Summit will provide a vehicle for regrouping, celebrating our collective strength, and refocusing our efforts on the very real needs that exist.”
- Fred Swanson of Gay City

Proposals for workshops of all kinds are being accepted until June 15.

If you are interested in developing a speakers panel, workshop, organizing meeting, an interactive exercise, experiential education activity, yoga class or another other form of self-care, or some sort of creative festivity - click here now.

Proposal forms are short and sweet - please add your spice to what is always a tasty, finger-lickin' Summit.

Illuminating the hidden assets and strengths of our communities

October 17 - 21 in Seattle
LifeLube will be there. Will you?

Learn more