Hate Crime Statistics

My dissertation was about the impact of heteronormativity (a.k.a. societal homophobia) on suicide rates. Well, really it was about how to measure local variation in heteronormativity, and suicide happened to be an convenient health outcome: it's a "hard end-point" meaning that it is captured with little error, it's assessed pretty much the same way everywhere across the country and over time, and it's probably related to heteronormative societal attitudes.
One of the first ideas I had about how to measure local variation in heteronormativity was to look at hate crimes statistics. The logic is that hate crimes are a direct and extreme expression of heteronormativity. The FBI issues a report every year documenting the number of crimes reported as being bias-motivated, and also where they happen and against whom the violence is targeted.
But a strange thing happened when I looked at the data - there were a fair number of bias-motivated crimes reported from San Francisco and New York City, and virtually none from the places I expected to be havens of homophobia. The most likely explanation is that the number of hate crimes reported is a lousy measure of the number of hate crimes committed, and is a better measure of the degree to which a person reporting a hate crime to the police is taken seriously. So, in a way, hate crimes reporting may be a decent measure of heteronormativity, but in the opposite direction of what you'd expect at first: the more hate crimes reported, the friendlier the social environment is for TBLG people.
But, it gets more complicated. There are two ways not to have much conflict between dominant and subordinate groups. One way is for everyone to get along. Another way is for the subordinate group to "mind its manners" and steer clear of offending the sensibilities of the dominant group. So even if the incidence of hate crimes were a good measure of homophobia, it would be complicated because you'd expect the number of crimes to be low in areas where gay people have learned that the best thing to do is stay deeply closeted, or to get out of Dodge. And even though areas that are "gay meccas" allow us to express ourselves more freely, this can incite hardened haters in our midst to violence, like Dan White. "Gay meccas" can also attract hardened haters with violent intentions, and thus one often sees violent hate crimes centered around gay bars and cruising areas.

Anyway, it had been over ten years since I looked at the hate crimes data, and a lot happened since then. So I was curious to see what has changed.

Not as much as I expected. There are more and more local and state police forces reporting hate crimes to the FBI, but the number of reported hate crimes hasn't changed much, except for a spike in 2001 related to the violent backlash against Arabs and Muslims. If anything, there's a downward trend when you take the growing population into account (which I have not done in these graphs).

I have to admit, I'm intrigued by data like this. I don't know what story they are telling. I anticipated that with the rapid change in societal attitudes about homosexuality, we'd see a steady growth in the number of reported anti-gay hate crimes. But, as you can see in the graph below, the number of reported anti-gay hate crimes rose pretty steadily until 2001, and has pretty much leveled off since then.

So maybe that's a good sign - of increasing tolerance, acceptance, and even celebration breaking out in some corners of the country. But it could mean a lot of things, and when you dig down into where these anti-BLG crimes are being reported from, it's still predominantly from the gay meccas - large coastal cities and also university towns all across the country. I suspect that there are lots of anti-gay crimes not being reported at all, especially in rural areas and the South.

Maybe the peak in 2001 highlights a shift in the attention of bigots, towards a new bogeyman. There's certainly plenty of evidence that anti-Arab (much of the darker orange slice in the graph below), and anti-Muslim (the bright green slice in the next graph down) spiked hard in 2001, and there has been a sustained increase in anti-Islamic crimes since then compared to the 1990's. But I think the idea of bigots turning away from the gays and towards the Muslims is at best a partial story. Also of interest to note in the graph below is that the number of anti-Black crimes reported by the FBI was definitely lower in the first two years of the Obama administration. Evidence of a post-racial America? I strongly doubt it - although the post-racial narrative might explain it if one considers that some of the more "post-racist" (emphasis on racist) police may be harder to convince that a bias-motivated crime has occurred, and thus less likely to report it as such. It would certainly be interesting to look at those trends in the wake of the 2010 retrenchment election.

 So, another interesting thing to note in the graph above, is the absolutely tiny number of hate crimes motivated by anti-atheist sentiments. As a hard-core aptheist myself, I find it hard to believe that there are so few anti-atheist hate crimes reported. Maybe it's an issue of confusion - how do you classify a religiously-motivated attack when the recipient professes no religion? But I suspect another possible explanation, that theist (after taking the double negative out of "anti-atheist") biases are so entrenched that it is hard for police to see theist motivated crimes as bias-motivated, and therefore not report them as such.

Another interesting twist to the tospy-turvy  world of hate crimes reporting is the biases for which no reporting category is even available. There were no crimes reported as being motivated by ablism before 1997. It's not that a glorious heyday of equanimity passed in 1996, but rather that there was simply no category available even to describe these bias motivations in the FBI's system. Even today (or at least up to 2010), the number of crimes reported as being directed by ablist biases numbers in the dozens per year, across the entire country. So here's another example indicating that the nature of the bias itself prevents it from being recognized and recorded.

So, that seems like a pretty exhaustive list: crimes motivated by bias on the basis of race, ethnicity, religious preference, sexual orientation, and ability. Or does it? Notice that there's simply no category to record crimes motivated by bias against transgender people yet, or intersex, or even bias against women. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of reported hate crimes would double if rapes motivated by misogyny were reported as such.
Also, in a nation where most sources of intolerance are weakening, intolerance against fat people is on the rise. Plug for a great article on anti-fat bias and media portrayals of disembodied depersonalized fatness.

I have to admit, I'm pretty ambivalent about organizing around hate crimes as a means to end prejudice. It's not for lack of trying. As my time with ActUp/RI wound down, I turned to advocacy around hate crimes - even made myself into a bit of a spokesmodel in the wake of being beaten about the head on Thayer Street in Providence (that's me standing and gesturing to another victim in that attack). I got involved in training a few police departments in Rhode Island, but I found that re-hashing my story as a hate crime "victim" was a source of re-victimization, and left me feeling dis-empowered and alienated, especially after some of the more intense police training sessions.

After I Left AIDS - Part III (more thesis)

I didn't want to study suicide.

Mainly because suicide is a bummer of a topic. It reminded me of unpleasant memories from adolescence. And whenever I talk about it, the first thing everyone does is get quiet - then they get concerned about my well-being. Which is nice and all, and I appreciate it, but after working on this stuff for a few years, I would forget the level of emotional charge the topic has, and get really excited about some finer point of data analysis, and come off sounding callous when really all I wanted to share was this exciting little piece of the puzzle.

On the other hand, epidemiologic studies of suicide go way back (to Durkheim in 1897, and before him Morselli in 1881), and unlike most health conditions associated with sexual orientation, suicide has been measured in a consistent way across the whole population for an extended period of time. So, in a sense I was stuck with it as the only health outcome that had both geographic and temporal scope, which is what I needed to look at normative heterosexuality.

So anyway, as I mentioned before, I wanted to look at how heteronormativity (a shared set of assumptions about sex, gender, and who ought to be having sex with whom) affected suicide rates.
At first, I wanted to find a data set where I could could compare gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals to heterosexuals. But the death certificates don't have that kind of information. And as I got to thinking about it, even if they did, how reliable could it be?
And that got me to thinking, maybe the sexual orientation of these people is really beside the point. Perhaps the stresses associated with dealing with assumptions of heterosexuality are greatest among people who don't identify as "gay" anyway.

So, the first study I did was to look at gay rights laws as a measure of heteronormativity, the idea being that in order to enact a gay rights law, politicians have to believe that public opinion is such that they'd be better off protecting sexual minorities from discrimination than not. The first gay rights laws were enacted in 1973, in San Diego and Austin, I believe. In 1981, Wisconsin was the first state to pass a gay rights law, and by 2003, most of the country's population lived in a jurisdiction with a gay rights law. (the gray map there has a nifty time-lapse).
I looked at three levels of gay rights protections, in order to get something like a dose-response curve - the red areas had no protections whatsoever, the green areas were protections for public sector workers only, and the blue areas had protections for both public sector and private sector workers.

And the results here are pretty compelling - at least for White males, particularly adolescents, young men, and the elderly.
Each color in this graph represents a different age group. So, among White males aged 15-19, suicide rates were 179 per million in areas with no gay rights protections, 155 in areas with protections limited to the public sector, and 131 in areas with protections for all workplaces. The only group without a step-wise dose-response was White men aged 45-64.

Among White women, the first thing to notice is that suicide is less frequent, and also doesn't increase among elderly white women, unlike men. The decline in suicide rates with increasing levels of gay rights protections is also not so pronounced, but there are declines in each of the age groups under 45.

Suicide is less common among Black men than White men in the US, but is still pretty high. And unlike White men, the peak incidence of suicide is in younger age groups. But what is strikingly different is that the highest suicide incidence among Black males is in areas with the highest levels of gay rights protections, which suggests to that public opinion among Black populations about homosexuality may not be strictly related to public opinion among White populations from the same area, and presumably the enactment of gay rights protections is, in most jurisdictions, reflective mostly of White public opinion. I'd love to do an analysis based on what might be a better measure of heteronormative assumptions in Black communities. Any ideas?

Among Black females, the incidence of suicide is lower than the other populations above, and like White females, declines among older women.
The differences between areas with and without gay rights protections are not large, but in general, suicide rates among Black women tend to be slightly higher in areas with gay rights protections. So these results also raise questions about whether gay rights laws are a good measure of heteronormativity for all populations. Or alternately, if the social forces leading to suicide are perhaps not identical among White and Black populations - perhaps heteronormative assumptions cause more distress in White populations, particularly among White males, while economic issues and racial discrimination play a larger role in Black populations.

Another consideration is that perhaps the stresses induced by heteronormativity are largely related to the performance of masculinity, which is why men turn violent against themselves under these pressures. Perhaps men under heteronormative pressures also direct violence outwards towards the women closest to them, and thus homicide, rather than suicide, might be a more strongly related outcome among women. That's foreshadowing to an analysis I'm thinking about doing next...

The patterns I noted are virtually unchanged after adjusting for a wide variety of potential confounders, namely population density, region of the country, unemployment rate, poverty rate, and measures of social isolation (proportion living alone, proportion who moved in the last five years).
Also, when I looked only at those areas that changed status (went from no protections to having gay rights protections), the same trends held up, so in order to explain these results, some other factor would have to be changing at the same times in the same places, which seems like too much of a coincidence to be possible.

The trends above are very similar when I looked at how people vote on the restriction of marriage to "one man and one woman" as a measure of heteronormativity, but as I mentioned before, the strong trend towards people being less likely to endorse a restrictive definition of marriage makes this measure a bit more complicated, so I'm trying to figure out how best to represent it.

Why I Left AIDS

I left AIDS in the mid-late 1990's.

I made a conscious decision to stop working on HIV/AIDS, and to stop referring to HIV/AIDS when talking about gay health.

In short, I was over AIDS.

I wanted to force myself into a new idiom, a new way of thinking. I had no idea what it would be, but I had come to the conclusion that continuing to work on HIV/AIDS would be detrimental to me personally, and might well not be helping anyone else either.

I wish I could say that I had some inspired moment, that I had some vision of the future of queer health, some goal in mind, some grand theory. But in truth I had none of those things. Gradually, I began to realize that working on HIV/AIDS felt increasingly distant from my personal experience I noticed that it was harder and harder to interest my friends to get active, it was even hard to know what to get active about.

But maybe I should start a little earlier.

I was a little fagling in 1987, a momentous year in queer history. In 1986, my freshman year of college it began to dawn on me that it was not a passing œdipal phase, that my attraction to other guys was not merely admiration of their physical form, to be replaced at some point in the future with an attraction to the voluptuous female form, marriage and children.
This was distressing to me, because my only image of an adult gay man was not what I wanted to become. Don't get me wrong, I didn't want to be "normal", I just didn't want to be lonely, depressed, and ridiculed for the rest of my life.
I quit the crew team, partly because I was not going to be competitive at the level required, but mostly because I just didn't see any possibility of being happy, healthy, and vibrant as a gay man.

I slowly began meeting other gay men, particularly Chris Bartlett and Stephen Gendin. Then in October 1987, Chris invited me to vanpool down to DC for a March on Washington. It totally blew my mind. For the first time in my life I saw happy, healthy, vibrant gay men. I kissed one of them, for about six hours, while driving around from one spectacularly lit patriot monument to another.

I came back to Providence transformed. I realized that I could do this gay thing after all.
My then (and current) roommate calls it my militant phase. I painted pink triangles on the back of my hands. I gave out "queer fries" at the snack bar to anyone who would publicly say they were gay or lesbian. I proselytized to anyone and everyone.

In early 1988, Stephen invited me to "come get arrested". I said "sure" and then it took me a week to ask "what for?" He told me it was about gay rights, and only during the civil disobedience training did I learn that it was really about AIDS, about trying to keep the Health Department from doing widespread mandatory HIV testing, and compiling a list of everyone who tested positive for some as yet to be determined intervention. I kinda freaked out. I had begun to come to terms with the gay thing, but I was scared to death of AIDS and didn't want anything to do with it.

But Stephen was inspirational, and I stuck with it, becoming one of six people arrested in H. Denman Scott's office on the fourth floor of the Health Department. I'm the one in the purple shirt with a green knapsack.


Thus began a long and industrious career with ActUp/RI.

We never needed to get arrested again, it just doesn't take much of a fuss to get on TV in Rhode Island. We disrupted Ed DiPrete's gubernatioral candidacy announcement, we protested the high price of AZT, we joined in national actions at CDC and FDA. I started writing a weekly summary called Bill's News Headlines, a 'zine about all things HIV/AIDS, with a few spicy pictures thrown in for interest.

Under the Reagan Administration, AIDS was largely ignored, until it wasn't. In the late 1980's all kinds of scary talk was coming down, including threats of quarantine. We had a clear and obvious enemy. Those of us young enough and pissed off enough rose up in anger and began a confrontational style of political action that the generation before us was too overwhelmed to undertake.
But when George the first took office, things began to lose traction. Many of our initial demands were being met (AIDS drugs cost less, mandatory testing and quarantine were mostly averted, some government resources began to flow into aid programs, some of the egregious ethical violations inherent to clinical trials of new medications were being abated). The newer issues we were grappling with (needle exchange, anonymous HIV testing) just weren't as sexy. We had a few more big demos (notably a big coalition bash at the Providence Journal, and a fun hootin' and hollerin' when Dan Quayle came to town), but things were starting to taper off. We started meeting with the Health Department, in addition to chastizing them. I even worked there on an internship one semester.
And by the time Clinton came along, all the air got let out of the balloon. Don't get me wrong, Clinton the first did as little as possible to advance the cause of people with HIV, and was arguably one of the worst presidents we've had on gay rights. But the community had had enough. It just wasn't possible to gather a crowd of pitchfork-wielding townspeople any more.

By this time, I was working in HIV/AIDS clinical research. Doing some statistical presentations of data from clinical trials, and medical record abstractions. I began keeping a list, for the medical researchers, of everyone that had been treated for HIV in Rhode Island, what major infections they had had, when they started treatment, etc. I felt pretty conflicted about that, and at the same time fascinated by the stories I was reading between the lines of lab reports and hospitalization records.

The job took me to an AmFAR conference in San Francisco. I fell in love with the city instantly, despite having an earthquake knock my hotel bed around the room my first night in town. I loved how it smelled. I loved the hills and the views. It seemed impossibly magical.

I vowed to move to San Francisco at the next opportunity, quit my job in HIV clinical research, and had all but bought the plane ticket when I got invited to take a job with the tuberculosis and HIV basic immunology lab at Brown. The pay was good, very good. And I figured, what the heck, I can do this for a couple years more, then go out to San Francisco. In the meantime, for several years I got in the habit of taking a month-long vacation in San Francisco every January, staying at the YMCA on Golden Gate & Leavenworth. Everything I needed to pack for a month fit in one bike messenger bag.

Well, I worked on that stuff for a few years, developed a mathematical algorithm for predicting amino acid sequences that would be likely to trigger an immune response, and had a lot of fun while doing it. Got to work with some very motivated and bright undergrads. Got to travel to a bunch of conferences. Even got a pat on the back from Tony Fauci at one point.

But at some point, I realized I needed a break from the frantic pace of HIV research.
HIV/AIDS was the most important thing in the world, or so it seemed. Everything was urgent. HIV/AIDS was an exception to every rule. But after the better part of ten years on the cutting edge, I got weary of being cut. I needed a break.

I began looking for another job, and quickly found it, in the much tamer field of gerontology. I got to work with incredibly bright, talented, and caring people. People who were interested in getting things done carefully, slowly, correctly, not living in a state of perpetual emergency. I had an amazing boss, who really helped me work much more effectively with other people (do you remember the 7 habits of highly defective people - I had probably 4 of them - I was not an easy person to manage).

So at first, I was just taking a break, not really thinking about HIV/AIDS, except about how futile it seemed to be to think about it.

At some point, though, I did make a conscious decision that I would not work on HIV/AIDS again. I wanted to force myself to think differently, to force myself to be more creative, to develop a new language and vocabulary, and whole new mindset.
As I was struggling to do that, I put together a forum at Brown about the Post-AIDS phenomenon. I invited Chris and Stephen as panelsits, after getting re-connected with Chris at the Boulder Gay Men's Health Summit, and also invited Justin Smith, a next-generation activist. It was a fantastic discussion, and there was plenty of passionate but respectful argument.
I made an analogy at the outset that Post-AIDS, in my mind didn't mean that AIDS was over, any more than Post-Modern means we are no longer modern. But the shock of modernity is largely over. The automobile has gone from being a bizzarre new sight on our city streets, crowding and running over pedestrians and cyclists, to being banal, a fact of life (though still running over pedestrians and cyclists - I've got the chronic pain to prove it - it's just banal and mundane now). Electric lights are no longer a showy extravance. It is not that modernity is done modernizing, but rather that the progressive development of wonderful, exciting, and dangerous new technologies is expected and welcomed.
My analogy to the term Post-AIDS was that the shock of AIDS was over, that we were now living in a world where AIDS is part of life, and that public health prevention efforts revolving around HIV as new, threatening, and catastrophic may have worked in the past, but would no longer work in the future. We needed to find new language, new ways of thinking about public health's role in prevention, because the tools of fear and hyperbole have run their course. We are in Post-AIDS now, but HIV prevention has yet to catch up to that reality.

Some ten years later, there are some exciting new developments on the gay health promotion front, such as Chicago's How are you Healthy? campaign, which is all about tying the three words "Gay. Sexy. Healthy." together in new and interesting combinations. The I Am Gay And... campaing in New York City is another one I like a lot. But these two are exceptions.
We're still bombarded with ad campaigns like this one, this one, this one, and this one that either play on fears and negative imagery, or treat us like we're just not knowledgeable enough to know what's good for us.

Well, I've wandered and rambled quite a bit here, and I'm not sure that I've adequately answered the original question - why I left AIDS. But it's a start.

I'm really curious about what some of the stories of the thousands of gay men who have left AIDS work - what did it feel like? What are you doing now instead? Do you, like me, feel conflicted about abandoning the AIDS work, even if what you're doing now is much more productive and forward-looking?

No on 8, strategy & the origins of modern biostatistics

Last night when I got home, I was delighted to see a bunch of young queers blocking Market Street at Ninth street, right outside my building.
I grabbed Tuna and went out to join the fray.
It became clear that this was a side-show to the main event, and so we walked towards Dolores Park, but by the time we got there, things were winding down quickly, so I headed up Church Street, and by chance caught the tail end of a re-march headed down to City Hall.
It put a spring in my step.

I want to start out making it clear that I'm thrilled to see street activism directed against the homophobia inherent to the Proposition 8 campaign, but I wanted to comment on some tactics that I felt might be counter-productive.

counter-productive?
I saw a bunch of signs making explicit ties to the Black civil rights movement (such as "I have a dream, too!") that made me a bit uncomfortable. For one thing, these signs were always wielded by White marchers, which should be a tip-off right there that the elision of the Black civil rights movement and the current struggle over marriage equality is not without complications.
I understand the parallels that these marchers were trying to make, but in making these parallels, they are inviting other comparisons that are not necessarily apt.
I've often heard people make arguments paralleling the bans on similar gender marriage with bans on inter-racial marriages that existed formally in this country (and still persist informally), and while I do get the similarities, I think that there is an important consideration that is often not recognized by the (usually White) commentators making these comparisons.

The main issue in the current debate on recognizing similar gender marriages seems to be about recognition first and foremost, equality in the recognition, legally and socially, of similar gender unions.
And that in itself, it seems to me, is sufficient cause to be entirely in support of legal recognition of similar gender marriages.

But, when we start making comparisons to legal bans on inter-racial marriages, there is another key element that is often overlooked: that anti-miscegenation laws were not so much intended to block recognition of inter-racial unions, but had an explicitly eugenic basis, not necessarily geared towards the elimination of racial minority populations (although that was presumably also a desired end), but primarily to prevent the "dilution" of the White race. That's why they were called "anti-miscegenation" laws.
So I think there's a strong potential for being counter-productive when making parallels that (unintentionally) primarily invoke a eugenic element that is largely missing from the current debate on recognition of similar gender marriage.

Origins of Modern Biostatistics
At the risk of making an incongruous jump, the whole topic of anti-miscegenation brings me to one of my favorite subjects, the origins of modern biostatistics.

Ever wonder where the term linear regression came from?

If you go back to the papers describing its original development, the technique was originally used to describe the physical characteristics of the offspring of Englishmen and racial degenerates (their term, not mine), such as Chinese women. The term linear reflects the fact that various physiognomic characteristics of these "racially degenerate" children were, on average, linearly half-way between similar measurements made on their parents. The term regression refers to the fact that these charateristics were racially "regressed" from "English" in the direction of the "racially degenerate" form of the child's mother.
Scary stuff, eh?
I don't mean to say that linear regression and various other methods of modern biostatistics that have been developed should be thrown out as morally indefensible, but I think it is helpful to carry forward the history of where they originated.
Myself, I try to use the term "linear modeling" rather than "linear regression", but I think that's still only papering over the truth.

Sythensis
I don't really see a way of tying these two topics together in some nice pithy conclusion, except to say that history is important, even when one isn't aware of it.

Premature blame on 8

Wednesday morning, I awoke fresh and ready to tackle the day. "The occupation is over!" I regaled anyone who would listen. Barack Obama's victory left me feeling like I was once again in America, a country that had been stolen out from under our feet.

I could hardly wait to get on the internet and find out how much Proposition 8 had been defeated by, and was surprised to find that the race hadn't been yet called. My concerns grew as I got deeper into the numbers, looking for hope amongst the county-level returns. Often the larger cities are slower in getting their voting returns together, so it seemed reasonable to hope that the margin would shift once the more densely populated precincts finished reporting.

But, after an hour of sifting through the partial returns, it became clear that the only likely outcome was that Proposition 8 would pass.

My day was ruined!

I was honestly shocked. In 2000, a similar measure passed in California handily, but by 2006, an anti-gay amendment was shot down in Arizona, and passed in South Dakota by only the slimmest of margins. I assumed that history was on our side, and that despite the polling data in California, we had passed a tipping point. I figured that any talk about similar gender marriage rights, even the most rabid ravings about it, would by now have made most voters immune to the shock of the idea.

In the wake of Proposition 8's passage, there has been a rush to "explain" why it happened. The most common explanation I've heard, from gays and straights, friends and radio pundits, is that the high turnout for Barack Obama energized racial/ethnic minority voters, who as church-going folk, tipped the balance in favor of 8.

This explanation just rubs me the wrong way, and I don't buy it. The conventional wisdom is that Black, Asian & Hispanic voters are against gay marriage, but I'm not convinced. My recollection from going over data for my thesis showed that rural people are by far the least likely to support gay marriage, and rural people are overwhelmingly White.
My recollection is that in several public opinion polls, racial minority groups were less likely to oppose similar gender marriage than Whites, but I'll need to dig those up if I want to bolster that point.

I spent much of the day today poring over results from Los Angeles, which is the only large county in California to break down results by congressional districts. After excluding the 30th congressional district (which contains West Hollywood, a bit of an outlier), the racial/ethnic makeup only explains about 0.4% to 3% of the variation between how people voted across the districts, depending on how you crank the numbers.

So, I remain unconvinced of the "explanation" that somehow racial/ethnic minority voters did the gays in.

So who does it serve to pitch these constituencies against one another? And why were so many people ready, with the barest shred of evidence, to believe it? This rush to blame seems entirely counter-productive. Who are the ones vehemently behind the anti-gay agenda? Get clear on who our real opponents are: White fundamentalist Christians.

Another potential explanation is about voter turnout. Here again, the conventional wisdom is likely to be misguided. Usually people assume that the anti-gay agenda has been used to whip up enthusiasm among the religious right, and that their increased turnout is what contributed to the passage of so many anti-gay measures.
While I suspect that whipping up anti-gay frenzy probably does raise money and enthusiasm for the Christian right in this country, if you take a good hard look at the numbers, it does not seem to increase voter turnout. In several of the past elections, high turnout has correlated fairly well with not supporting the anti-gay agenda of the Christian right.

In the recent California election, another suspect was the low voter turnout in San Francisco, so I took a look at how voter turnout correlated with support for Prop8, and again there's just not a lot going on there.

I suspect that the story is a lot more complicated, and I'm looking forward to delving in to try to figure it out.

Dear Governor King

There is an obvious starting point for my activist lifestyle.
Starting in 1973, a battle between Massachusetts Governor Edward King and sensible people was waged over whether a 5 cent surcharge on beverages sold in bottles and cans should be enacted, redeemable when those bottles and cans were returned for recycling. The legislature passed the bottle bill three times before finally over-riding the Governor's veto in 1981.
I remember the fierce arguments over the issue now some thirty years later.
After one of Governor King's successful vetoes in the late 1970's, I wrote the Governor with an impassioned argument comparing the relative beauty of Vermont's highway shoulders to those of Massachusetts.
Apparently, my argument did not win him over, a crushing blow to a tween who thinks he knows all the answers.
In fact, his letter in response indicated that he hadn't even heard my argument at all. His reply thanked me for supporting his veto of the bottle bill. I was upset, thinking that my letter was somewhere in his office, sitting in the wrong stack on the scales of justice.

At the beginning of this post, I said that there was an obvious starting point for my activist lifestyle. But honestly I'm not sure. Why did I choose to act at that moment in my life, in history, on that issue? What, in the subsequent years, kept that activist streak alive?
Or maybe, my activist life didn't start then at all, and writing Governor King was just a one-off thing that any kid might have done, foretelling nothing.

If you had asked 18 year old Bill, several years later, if he was an activist, he would have said "certainly not!" In my college essay, I went to great lengths to make it clear I was interested in the pursuit of knowledge, of truth, and that I had no interest in politics at all.

People had tried to explain the differences between Democrat and Republican to me, but since everyone seemed to describe a different set of differences, nothing stuck in my head. It was all too nebulous for me to make sense of.
I thought science was inherently good, math even better, and that the only troubles arose when politics was used to interpret science.
Boy did I have that backwards!

My Life as an Activist

Well, this blog started out because I wanted to document my cross-country move, so that friends could follow along with me as I journeyed from Providence to Ann Arbor to White Sulfur Springs to San Francisco, and many points in between.
In the year that I've lived in San Francisco, what the purpose of the blog is has been less clear to me, but I did use it to help develop some thoughts on ITBLG health issues, such as thinking about national vaccine strategy as it relates to HBV/HPV/HIV, and the remifications, personal and political, of routinizing HIV testing...
I'm going to move it to a new phase now, documenting my own life as an activist, and reflecting on it from my current vantage point.
Below I've listed some of the groups, activities, etc. I've been involved with over the years.
Any feedback on what you'd like to hear more about? Let me know...

The early years

• letter to Governor King about the Massachusetts Bottle Bill
• letter to the editor about seatbelts in school buses
  

The high school years

• Don't shut down the press
• Energy conservation
  

The college years

• 1987 March on Washington
• Not Guilty
• Brown's anti-discrimination policy
• Yale Queer Studies Conference
• Report for RI Department of Health on Needle Exchange efficacy
  

The ActUp years

• Bill's News Headlines
• Health Department mandatory testing demo - my first (and only) arrest
• AZT demo at CVS
• Network/RI
• Ed Diprete's campaign for governor
• Jesse Helms = Philip Morris = Bill of Rights = trouble
• Pat Buchanan visits TF Green Airport
• Dan Quayle visits the Biltmore
• Providence Journal editorial policy
• so many more...
  

The transition years

• Needle exchange
• CPG planning process
• RI gay rights law
• Hate crimes & anti-violence
• Warwick sex sting
• River Road public cruising sting
  

The thesis

• Measuring heteronormative context
  

ITBLG Health Movement

• The summits & academies
  
• HBV vaccines at the baths
• Men's health action committee
  

Reputation

I just got back from the Seattle Gay Men's Health Summit, and I've got a lot on my mind. I think this is a turning point for me.
I've reached a level of prominence in the gay men's health movement that has taken me utterly by surprise. A bunch of people who don't know me personally have heard or read something about me. I have, if you will, a reputation.
Up to this point, my participation in the movement has been based on a series of individual relationships, so this is new and strange territory for me. The fact that there are people who know something about me before meeting me is both thrilling and disconcerting. Thrilling because I don't need to go through as much background with each new person, and disconcerting because I really have no idea whether what they've heard and the impression they have of it is, so I feel a bit exposed.
I think that generally the reputation I've developed is a good one, but of course a reputation is not a singular thing. I guess I never really thought much about having a reputation before. In a naive sense, I thought of it as a cloud around a person, but more or less an entity with shared meaning. But this weekend has made starkly clear to me that a reputation is not a thing, despite the use of the singular, that is we speak of a person's reputation, not a person's reputations.
It is, rather, a series of individual relationships, each its own thing between me and each individual I have yet to meet, mediated through mutual friends, a chain of friends, or my writing.
It's not that I've never had a reputation, or been concerned with what my reputation 'is'. It's just that I didn't come prepared to think about having a reputation within the gay men's health movement. As a college professor, albeit a recent one, I'm very interested in what my students think of me. Of course I want all of them to love me, but I also walk into class on the first day expecting that some won't. We are after all strangers with no expectation of shared ideals or values, and I'm asking them to work hard, and my evaluation of their work may well not match their aspirations or expectations.
One day, when I was googling myself (I guess maybe I'm more concerned with my reputation than I was conciously aware of), I saw that there was a page at RateMyProfessor.com about me. Everyone had warned me not to bother looking at RMP, but I was too curious, and had to check it out. I braced myself for some bad reviews, but was pleasantly surprised to find one relatively positive review. Later (after the grades went out), there were more... and braced as one might be, being called "the worst professor ever" carries a bit of a sting.
So, I'm not new to having a reputation, and not new to the idea of it being highly variable from one person to another. And not new to learning what I can from criticism, but not dwelling on the emotional weight of it. But walking into a classroom, you know you're a public persona, not a private person.
But at the health summits, I had gotten used to being a fairly private person. At the first summits, I went to some sessions, flirted on the sidelines, and nobody 'important' payed attention to me, and I was fine with that. If somebody came up to me and said "aren't you the guy who..." it would have been about my runner-up performance in the pool party kissing contest. I have to say, I'm still proud of the stagecraft K_____ and I employed for that.
Even at the Philly LGBTI summit, where I was on the opening plenary panel, helped design that panel, and helped develop the program, thereby having at least an email relationship with all the presenters. I had a couple of sessions myself, "Queer Blood" was one of them... the other is escaping my little brain at the moment, but I'm sure it had something to do with risk narratives in public health. More people knew me, or knew of me, but I didn't have any sense of people talking about me without also talking with me. It felt like my series of individual relationships was just getting bigger.
So in the wake of this summit, there are things that went on that made me aware of having a reputation, and it's taking me a little time to get used to that.
In the end, I think I like having a reputation. Even if someone hyperbolically believes that I am out to destroy the way they individually practice public health.
Because I am, after all, interested in fundamental change in how public health research is conducted, and how public health interventions are undertaken, by pretty much everyone in the field, especially me.

20 years of gay

Today was a momentous day, and I didn't realize it until I heard on the radio that it was National Coming Out Day. 20 years ago on this very day, I went to Washington, DC, under the nurturing wing of Chris Bartlett and friends. At the time, I was resigned to being gay, but not the least bit excited about it. I could only imagine a life barely skirting depravity and insanity, if not worse.
We arrived in DC on the eve of the March on Washington in 1987, and walked around Dupont Circle.
Before long, I met a handsome blond named Bruce from Cincinnati, and I kissed a man for the first time in my life.
We kept kissing for another 8 hours or so, sitting in the back of a van that some people were driving around from one monument to another.
And my life changed forever. All in one rush, I came to realize that it would be possible to be gay and, well, gay in the 1920's sense of the word. And since I'm not a secretive person, I came out. I went through a bit of a militant phase, painting pink triangles on the back of my hands, talking about being gay with everyone. Including my family. That didn't go over so well at the time, but things have gotten much better since, and there has never been a moment of doubt about the love that binds our family together, even when things were at their most stressful.

20 YEARS LATER
Well, as I mentioned, I heard on the radio that it was National Coming Out Day. On my favorite morning radio show, the gay shock jocks Fernando and Greg, were asking if the day really means anything special, does anyone really pick this day to come out just because it's National Coming Out Day?
They asked for anyone to call in who wanted to come out on the radio. I decided to call in with my story, since I figured that coming out on the very first coming out day might be interesting enough. I didn't get on the radio, which looking back on it is best after all, but Greg chatted with me for quite a while about the whole situation. He was such a sweetheart, and has such a great voice, he's very expressive and natural, not butched up like most guys, and he's got a Texas twang rolling over the top of it. I've never understood the South, but the accents make me feel all gushy inside.

NOW THAT THE CLOSET'S GONE... WHAT'S THE NEW METAPHOR?
Above, I described my experience as "coming out", which is a term that refers simultaneously to "coming out" in the sense of a debutante, presenting oneself to the public as eligible, and "coming out" of the closet, a space where gay men hid like skeletons.
But really, I didn't "come out" except out of the fog I myself was in. It was never really a matter of hiding myself from others, it was only about hiding myself from myself, and others as a corollary.
These days, I'm quite convinced that the term "coming out" has lost all reference to its metaphorical roots. Now that being gay is seen as a possibility for pretty much anyone, there isn't really much difference between "coming out" and just plain old growing up. No longer is there nearly as much need to differentiate oneself from the norm, as being gay has become essentially part of the norm.
And now "closet" and "coming out" get applied to everything, usually things that have a twinge of scandal, but not always.
For many years, I've been describing college environments as post-closet, if not completely post-gay. I don't know what metaphors have stepped in in place of the closet and coming out, if any. Anyone have any ideas?