Blood

Give Life. Give Blood.
Blood brothers.
"One drop" rule.
Blood on your hands.
What does blood mean to you?

Blood fascinates me. It tastes great, it feels great. It is vibrant and alive like nothing else.

The sweet gush of warm, salty liquer that erupted in my nose after a punk on Thayer Street clocked me 'cuz I said he'd look good in a dress, too. The blood is what made it come alive. I was afraid for my life, and not without reason. The blood, though, that's what told me "this is real". The pain told me too. But the blood, the blood made all of my senses jump into hyperdrive. At the same time, the blood was a secret joy in the midst of the pain.

I don't have a fetish around blood (though hats off if you do). I don't seek it out. But blood is a lovely thing.

And yet.
When I bleed, I'm very conscious to make sure that my blood doesn't come into anyone else's life. I hide the fact that I'm bleeding, and I clean up more carefully than I would, say, sweat or tears. Or for that matter, snot. Or cum.

And blood makes me queasy, too.
I don't think I could watch surgery on TV. Getting blood drawn makes me wince.

Blood has so many fascinating associations. It means so many different things. Often contradictory.

I wish I could talk about giving blood and what it means. But I can't. Not yet.

What does blood mean to you?

Make it Better!

Here's the perfect antidote to the "There's nothing you can do now, so just wait until It Gets Better" campaign.
There's real hope in these messages.


What are some specific things you can suggest for queer and pre-queer youth to make it better? Right now?

It Gets Better

Today I took a stand against gay youth suicide.
Sort of.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not in any way in favor of youth suicide, gay or otherwise.

I was inspired by the "It Gets Better" campaign, and when I heard that they were doing some shooting today within a few blocks of where I live, I decided to go over and lend a hand.
The most popular of the videos in this series presents Dan Savage and his partner Terry, with the aim of telling queer (or pre-queer) kids in high school that it may be rough now, but it gets better.



But I was also concerned about a couple of themes in this video that didn't sit well with me.

For one, I remember when people told me "don't worry, just wait. It gets better."
There is nothing more frustrating to a t(w)eenager than telling them to wait and sit on their hands. It makes it sound like everything it out of their control. All you have to do it wait - but waiting may be the one thing a young person cannot do well.
When people told me to wait and that "it gets better", I wrote them off as out of touch and out of options.

For another, I think it is potentially quite damaging to suggest that the best thing a queer (or pre-queer) kid can do is nothing, to sit back and wait for things to get better. What about coming out? What about taking a little bit of control over their lives? What about living authentically? I don't think that Savage and crew are suggesting that the best thing to do is nothing, but it's easy to read that message out of what they are saying.

Another thing that bugged me was the suggestion that the best thing you can do is tough it out, then leave everything behind and move to the big city. Well, the truth is, the big city sucks for a lot of people. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to living in San Francisco who moved here thinking that they would fall into the lap of a sweet landlady bearing magic brownies and get swept up into a fabulous and unstoppable social life, only to find that, just like everywhere else, you've got to build your social network from the ground up.
And when you don't have a solid grounding of who you are, the big city can chew you up and spit you out faster than you can say "doublemint".

OK, enough with the negativity!

So, I decided to go on over to the taping, and do my best to shift the message, a little bit. I wrote out a couple pages about what I wanted to say on my phone while walking over there, read & re-read it, and then shoved the phone in my pocket & spoke into the camera. I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was something like this:

Hi, I'm Bill. And you are awesome.

It will get better. It will. But that's not much help to you now.

There's a couple things you can do to make it better now.

One is that you can write, and read, about everything. Reading about history, how people have overcome amazing obstacles in the past.

And you can make things better now. For yourself and others.

To make things better, be yourself. When you are you, authentically you, then it doesn't matter what other people think or say.

And one more thing. 'It gets better' doesn't mean you have to leave everything you know and love behind and go to the big city. To be honest, the big city can be a pretty lousy place for young people.

But all across this country, from Portland Oregon to Portland Maine, from Austin Texas to Helena Montana, there are great queer communities. And when you do something to make things better, you make your home town better, too.

Things have been changing so fast in this country, all over the country.

So, it will get better. You can make it better.

I don't know if they will use it, or how they will edit it, but if it makes the cut, I'll post the video here.

More theory...
My thesis was about gay youth suicide. Well, actually, it was and it wasn't.
I was frustrated by seeing people amplify the statistics about gay youth suicide up into the scariest monster possible. Their intent was good - they wanted to draw attention to the plight of queer youth in order to do something to prevent suicide.
But, then the question is what do you do? Most of the boys who are struggling the hardest are not open about their sexuality, many may be completely unaware that they have a sexual orientation at all. Some of them don't want to be gay and are trying to find another way to be in the world.
So reaching out to queer youth is good for all kinds of reasons - but preventing suicide may be the least of them.
What is likely to be a lot more effective is changing the culture we live in so that it produces less stress in the first place.
So that's why I did my thesis about measuring heteronormativity in the social environment, and specific ways to improve the social environment (like passing gay rights laws), rather than trying to identify the individual-level risk factors that affect queer and pre-queer youth.

Legal Pot. Public Health. Queers.

Pot is going to be legalized in California. No matter what your stance on the voter proposition, legal marijuana is coming, and Public Health will probably be in the mix in ways it has not been until now. I myself haven't decided how I will vote, but that's not the point. My point is that as marijuana slowly moves from the eagle eyes of law enforcement, public health is the natural next step for surveillance, monitoring, and control.

A couple weeks ago, I had a great conversation with a former (and future?) student about, among other things, what will happen once pot is legalized in California. He's been involved in the efforts to identify tobacco use as a health concern for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans folks for many years, and we were wondering about how the activists who have built such a strong network around tobacco and smoking will react to legal joints in California.
Will the queer tobacco activists see themselves as primarily focused on tobacco (including smokeless tobacco like snuff & snus), or on smoking, which could potentially include pot, or both (which could possibly include vaporizers, brownies, etc.). Or will the idea of sounding like a negative Nancy on pot mean that we will just ignore the health consequences of smoking marijuana on queer folks?

Then, the other thing that got me thinking was looking into the environmental impacts of growing pot, because I'm looking for good material for my upcoming class on environmental health, and I figured that topic might engage some of the students.

At any rate, there are a lot of issues to think about there...
One can hope that the legalization of marijuana in California will lead to more environmental growing conditions - fewer diesel-powered generators, fewer diesel spills, less pesticides and more sustainable farming practices all around. But if there is an increased demand with no change in Federal enforcement efforts, there will still be a lot of pressure to grow pot in ways that are extremely damaging to the environment. What will the role of public health and environmental health be in developing policy and regulations? Will "organic" pot be certified by the same rules as USDA has developed for food?

For many years now, marijuana has been promoted as "medicinal". I'm sure it is for many people. But there are unintended consequences of promoting marijuana as medicine.
For one thing, a lot of people seem to be convinced that smoking marijuana is healthy, is good for you, even if you're not treating any health condition with it.
For another, a lot of people seem to think that smoking marijuana is just not dangerous compared to smoking tobacco.

If marijuana has been promoted as good for you, and now it becomes legal, it is complicated to modulate that message to be honest about ways in which it is not good for you, too.

So, where does public health come in on legal marijuana? We've gotten a pass because regulating marijuana has been the province of law enforcement. The "soft power" of Public Health has not been called on, and the research, as stunted at the field has been, is very polarized, with some researchers claiming that marijuana has virtually no down side, and others saying that marijuana smoke is more hazardous than tobacco smoke, and most researchers just not making much of it one way or another, because being illegal, it is assumed to be a bad thing anyway.

But that brings up another point - it is really hard to get any decent epidemiologic data on the health effects of smoking marijuana. On the one hand, the illegality of pot has led to the polarization above: the researchers are often so devoted to one side of the debate or the other that it is hard to trust their work. On the other, the illegality of pot makes asking questions about people's use a bit more ethically complicated, and also hard to trust people's self-reports of engaging in an illegal activity. And then on the third hand, there's the simple fact that most (but certainly not all) people who smoke marijuana also smoke tobacco, which makes teasing apart the effects of marijuana on health very tricky.

So where am I after thinking about all this?
Not much farther from where I began. I don't see myself likely to get very engaged in this debate. But, I will be interested to see what happens as the desire for society to somehow curb and contain the use of this substance moves from law enforcement to public health. And I will be curious to see how the message that "marijuana is medicine" gets tagged with the small print we're now familiar with from ads for pharmaceutical drugs, and tobacco products, for that matter. What will the Surgeon General's warning be? What will the breathless, low volume pitch-man sound like when rattling off the unpleasant side effects? And when will the large cohort studies needed to answer the fundamental health questions get funded?

invalid votes

I've been thinking a lot about similar gender marriage lately. And its proponents.
I followed the prop8 trial very closely, even going to observe it two days. I watched every second of the proposition 8 trial re-enactment on YouTube. I've even listened to Family News in Focus to try to understand where the other side is coming from, and how they've interpreted the trial.

I've been absolutely mystified by the approach that the prop8 defendants (protectmarriage.com) took during the trial. It seemed like they opened up a shotgun on one foot, then the other, then still not satisfied, started gnawing off their hands. Their defense was really that incompetent. It can't be unintentional. They must have wanted to lose the case. But why?

I still don't have a good theory on that.

Were they just so cocky that they are going to win in the Supreme Court that they decided not to invest any resources in the trial? That doesn't make sense to me. Why sabotage their own trial if they thought they might have to defend it in the Supreme Court?

Were they hoping to portray the trial as a miscarriage of justice - in essence setting up Judge Walker to take on the unwitting role of an "activist judge"? That makes some sense to me, because they certainly have been making hay in their news broadcasts about how San Francisco justice is about to be foisted on the whole country. But how often (if ever) would they get the opportunity to get a new trial rather than have it appealed up to the 9th district? And is it worth losing the war in order to get a few bucks out of scaring people with the threat of having an activist judge force everyone in the country into a similar gender marriage?

In a related vein, maybe they really need a new front in this battle in order to keep donations up. Now that every state with a voter initiative process has had a marriage restriction amendment of some sort on the ballot, they need a new bogey man, and have found it in this trial. But that is just too conspiratorial for my taste. I believe that these people are earnest in their beliefs. I think that there are some people like Karl Rove who have done some truly cynical manipulation of them, but I think that the vast majority of them, the people giving money, even those running television ministries and organizations to "protect" marriage, are honest and heartfelt, if (from my perspective at any rate) misguided.

And that brings me around to the thought that I started out with when sitting down to write tonight. In the circles I travel, it is easy to be flip and dismissive about the millions of people who voted for proposition 8. I mean, what were they thinking, right?
In response to claims that one wacko judge in California had just over-ruled the entire voting public, I recently posted on FaceBook:

"Correction: one judge AND THE CONSTITUTION invalidated the votes of millions of Californians".

Hey, it's good for a laugh, but after posting that, I've been thinking, you know, invalidating the votes of millions of Californians is really no laughing matter. It's pretty serious business.
It was the right thing to do, but it's also unreasonable for our side to just think, OK, no biggie, now that's over and we're on the right path again. A lot of people did vote, and a lot did vote against us. And now they've just been told that their votes were wrong, unconstitutional, un-American.
It shouldn't be surprising if a lot of them resent having their votes invalidated, and there will probably be some who might be swayed to the right side of the issue, but will resist it just because they feel like their vote was stolen from them.

And that got me thinking about how should we go about acknowledging the hurt of having their votes taken away from them, and still trying to convince them that their position was wrong in the first place? Its thoughts like that that make me glad I'm not a political consultant. I mean, how can you square that circle?

day of decision

This is moments after Judge Walker's decision was announced, before the "whoop" that you've probably heard on TV.




And this is after the "whoop", as the cameras were swinging around trying to find some "human interest".

Then, of course, there's the inhuman interest...


A procession towards City Hall to try to get a couple married. The judge's stay was ordered while these folks were en route.

I had a chat with this lovely couple, who were thrilled to share their special day.

Seth is beaming.

Internalized Homophobia - Why Measure it?

Recently I saw an article that suggested that measuring internalized homophobia might be a waste of time.

I was intrigued. I have to admit, I've never been a big fan of internalized homophobia. Measuring it, I mean. But I never stopped to think out why the idea made me a bit queasy.

Maybe I should back up a bit. One of the leading theories about how homophobia affects people is that homophobia operates simultaneously at multiple levels: societally, institutionally, interpersonally, and internally.

Multiple levels of homophobia
At the societal level, homophobia (often called heteronormativity in this context), is the shared set of beliefs and assumptions about who ought to be porking whom. But more than that, it is a nexus of assumptions about what family structure and kinship should look like, about what gendered identities are possible and how they should be expressed. That's one reason why the debate over same sex marriage has been so contentious within the gay community - one the one hand it is about equality of opportunity, on the other, marriage is practically the very definition of heteronormative values.

Institutionally, homophobia can be expressed in official policy, or less official actions that intentionally treat sexual minorities differently than heterosexuals, or that result indirectly in the same effect.

Interpersonal homophobia is probably what most people think of when they hear "homophobia" - it's the disparaging words, the punch in the nose (then the gut, the groin, the kick when you're already on the ground, need I go on?). Interpersonal homophobia is the expression of prejudice from one person directed at another.

Internalized homophobia can mean a couple different things depending on who you're asking. Usually it refers to a form of self-loathing among gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals, the internal application of societal views on homosexuality on oneself. Sometimes people talk about internalized homophobia in anyone, including heterosexuals, as the result of internalizing the societal homophobia as being what one believes about homosexual and bisexual people.

So all these levels are in constant interaction with each other as well. A person is unlikely to let off a string of interpersonally homophobic slurs unless they have internalized societal views about homosexuality. They are unlikely to internalize these assumptions unless there is a shared ethos of homophobia in which that person lives, or grew up, and so on.

And all these can be in conflict with one another. For instance, one may live in a relatively non-homophobic society (like Rhode Island) with relatively few institutional policies that hinder people with same sex desire, but be in a more homophobic institution within this (such as a Catholic school), which nonetheless has a strong tradition of supporting individuals within the institution, and exposing them to very little interpersonal homophobia, so long as they maintain an internalized sense that their homosexuality is wrong.

So what's wrong with measuring internalized homophobia?
Based on the above, I obviously think that internalized homophobia is an important part of how homophobia/heteronormativity affect people. If nobody internalized homophobic assumptions, then it could not survive at a societal level either.
So why not measure it?

The article I read said that measures of internalized homophobia had very little predictive value for why some gay men get HIV and others don't. Not only that, but what predictive capacity it once had is rapidly diminishing. So, their argument was that it doesn't predict much, so measuring internalized homophobia may be a bit of a futile exercise.

But that wasn't entirely satisfying to me as a reason to avoid measuring it. So what if internalized homophobia has relatively little impact on HIV transmission - maybe it still plays a big role in some other health issue, like depression.

No, what I've decided bugs me about measuring internalized homophobia is the "internalized" part. I mean, describing "internalized homophobia" as a major health risk may in some sense be an important mechanism, but what sort of intervention does it lead to? How does one use that information to try to prevent disease, or better yet, promote health?

By describing "internalized homophobia" as a major health threat to sexual minority populations, the implication is that there are some of us who are in trouble (those of us who have internalized societal degradation as just), and others of us who are fine (we've coughed up the furball of societal hatred). Then what? Either the people who have internalized societal homophobia need some sort of intervention (which is paternalizing if that person is not actively seeking help), or they have some how brought these problems on themselves, failed to do what they need to do to take care of themselves.

The problem, as I see it, is that a focus on "internalized homophobia" focuses the potential for interventions internally, and doesn't take into account the full spectrum of the levels at which homophobia operates. Focusing on identifying and intervening with individuals who have internalized homophobia in no way explicitly challenges the broader social context within which these internalization processes occur.

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Michael E. Newcomb, Brian Mustanski. (2009). Moderators of the relationship between internalized homophobia and risky sexual behavior in men who have sex with men: a meta-analysis. Archives of Sexual Behavior Epub aread of print 04 Nov 2009.

Michael W. Ross, B. R. Simon Rosser, Derek Smolenski. (2010). The importance of measuring internalized homophobia/homonegativity. Archives of Sexual Behavior Epub ahead of print 12 May 2010.