The Sunday edition of the SF Chronicle had a front page story about the Jim Jones massacre and Harvey Milk's slaying, which happened within 10 days of each other 30 years ago.
Turns out, I just moved into the neighborhood where a lot of Jim Jones' followers came from, and another odd coincidence: one of my roommates played a bit part in a made-for-TV movie about Jim Jones. Guess I should read up on that some more. So grisly, though. I'll probably get nightmares.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Particulate matter on my commute
I got to borrow a portable air monitor from work today - it measures PM2.5, or tiny little bits of dust.
So, I figured I'd see how much particulate matter I get exposed to on my commute.
The EPA has set the air quality standard for an average day's exposure at 35 micrograms per cubic meter.
In my office, the levels were about 55, which is pretty high. The other day, they were about 5-8, and I don't know why today was particularly bad.
At the Berkeley BART station, the levels were up at 65, and spiked to 78 or so when the trains came rolling into the station.
The highest levels on my commute, 85-90, were in the Civic Center BART station, and interestingly enough the lowest levels, 25, were right outside the station at UN Plaza.
The level was about 30 in my house, and jumped up to 40 when Tuna came up to say "Hi".
Its a lot more interesting when you're biking along and watching the numbers....
So, I figured I'd see how much particulate matter I get exposed to on my commute.
The EPA has set the air quality standard for an average day's exposure at 35 micrograms per cubic meter.
In my office, the levels were about 55, which is pretty high. The other day, they were about 5-8, and I don't know why today was particularly bad.
At the Berkeley BART station, the levels were up at 65, and spiked to 78 or so when the trains came rolling into the station.
The highest levels on my commute, 85-90, were in the Civic Center BART station, and interestingly enough the lowest levels, 25, were right outside the station at UN Plaza.
The level was about 30 in my house, and jumped up to 40 when Tuna came up to say "Hi".
Its a lot more interesting when you're biking along and watching the numbers....
Saturday, November 8, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
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!
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...
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
- 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.
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.
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