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Where We Are Now: National Gay Men's Health Summit
Where We Are Now:
National Gay Men's Health Summit Carries Agenda Forward Despite Hostile Political Climate
by Ric Kasini Kadour
People involved in gay men’s health work are an odd bunch. On one hand, we share a deep concern for our gay brothers and a desire to be in a world where disease and despair do not define identity, community, and sex. We are fierce advocates of a sex culture too often swept under the rug by political groups hoping to impress politicians and corporate America. We are also a little nerdy – a single conversation can leap from syphilis rates among HIV-positive, non-gay identified, men who have sex with men to J-Lo to social support needs of older gay men to Madonna’s new movie or who has the best low-riding, box-cut swim suit.
From May 7th to May 11th, over 300 of us concerned, nerdy, fierce advocates and community members met in Raleigh, North Carolina to discuss emerging health issues facing the community. The National Gay Men’s Health Summit was five days of education, information-sharing, community-building, and activism centering around issues of health and wellness for us – gay, bisexual, trans, and queer men.
This was the third national summit of its kind over the past five years and it brought participants from all over the country and the world, including New Zealand, Canada, England, Ireland, and Switzerland. Having attended the first two Summits, held in Boulder, Colorado, I was fortunate to experience the gathering of some of the greatest thinkers on gay men’s health and culture and to participate in a dialogue that sought to hash out what was going on and where gay men needed to go in the future.
The late 1990s were a bumpy ride for HIV prevention and gay men’s health. Anti-retroviral therapy was dramatically altering gay men’s relationship to AIDS and prevention. HIV-positive men were making 180-degree turnarounds, from deathbed to employment line in a matter of months. The success of HIV prevention among gay men was unprecedented, with the rate of condom use increasing from nonexistent to close to 70 percent in some surveys. But new challenges were emerging.
Gay men were tired of being reduced to disease vectors, and in light of new HIV treatments, they were experimenting with new identities – barebacking being the most common and controversial (see box below).
Also around this time, the National Lesbian and Gay Health Association collapsed, and its annual conference – the only gathering of queer health professionals and activists – died along with it. In 1999, writer and activist Eric Rofes convened a meeting of “street activists and lobbyists, doctors and social workers, academics and journalists, service providers and party producers, nurses and psychologists, and ministers and grassroots organizers.”
Rofes challenged the more than 300 men who took up his call to “go beyond gay men’s health 101 and take on new and challenging issues and confront barriers to community mobilization and health activism.” The meeting was known as the “Boulder Summit,” and after five days, a multi-issue, multicultural gay men’s health movement was launched.
It is not everyday you are engaged in a debate with someone about whether or not increasing gonorrhea rates among young, urban gay men indicate a second wave of HIV infection (they don’t), and a few hours later you are watching the same person spinning to “Dancing Queen” – especially when the person is the Under-Secretary of Health and Human Services. But this was the sort of experience the Boulder Summits offered. This year, Raleigh continued the tradition.
In Raleigh, the Summit’s mission to “build a multi-cultural, multi-issue health movement for gay men’s health” drew a broad range of participants, including activists, medical providers, community advocates, and social service providers. But gay men’s health is not like cardiology or nutrition. Powerful cultural, political, and social forces define both the problems and the solutions.
A willingness to deal with the underlying social and cultural forces is a key difference between the Gay Men’s Health Summit and other national health conferences. Attending does not mean checking your identity at the door. Participants are both learned professionals and gay men, or bi men, or trans men, and even a few straight women and lesbians. Conclusions reached tend to be more appropriate solutions for gay men’s health problems and as a result more successful at effecting the changes we as a community need to make to stay healthy. The belief that this process is a fundamentally better way to create health policy drives the philosophy underpinning the Summit.
For example, Chris Smith, Associate Director of Prevention Services for the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation led a session titled “The Seminal Truth” in which participants explored the role of cum in gay men’s sexuality. I have often witnessed public health officials’ dismay at why gay men feel the need to eat cum or take cum up the ass. They ask, “Are gay men so hedonistic that alternative forms of pleasure are insufficient?” No, suggests this workshop. Pleasure is only a small piece of a much broader puzzle, which also includes spirituality, celebration, and pride.
A number of other sessions reflected this holistic approach to gay men’s health. Gay Warrior authors Jim Fickey and Gary Grimm led “Transforming Betrayal into Wisdom: Helping Gay Men Move from Emotional Adolescence into Powerful Manhood.” By examining the experience of betrayal, Fickey and Grimm led a discussion about addiction, depression, self-esteem, and relationship difficulties that come from a state they describe as emotional adolescence. The point was not to underline the faults of gay men, but to use these lessons as a road map for encouraging and supporting other gay men in their quest for fulfillment and self-worth.
This asset-based approach to health promotion works from the belief that success comes not from focusing on the death and despair facing a community (leading to the implementation of draconian public health measures mimicking historic oppression), but from identifying, understanding, and disseminating the assets of a given community.
For example, Chris Bartlett, the former executive director of Safeguards in Philadelphia, led a session in which participants discussed possible responses to the dramatic increase of staph infections among gay and bisexual men and the resulting media-fueled public health scare. In addition to discussing the epidemiology of Staphylococcus aureus, Bartlett facilitated a discussion of the gay community’s existing ability to respond to the public health crisis Staph may present in the future.
While the previous two summits focused more generally on laying the groundwork for a gay men’s health movement, the objectives at Raleigh were more narrowly focused. With funding from the Ford Foundation, a “Men of Color Institute” addressed the unique challenges related to health and racism. Participants in the institute created and distributed a draft document summarizing “critical issues that were identified to serve as a set of priorities for gay men of color that can be considered for future organizing efforts.”
Gender was a key topic of the summit in Raleigh, with greater participation from transgender men. At issue was how to incorporate relevant aspects of the trans movement into gay men’s health work. Plenary moderator Hugh McGowan of New York City summarized this point saying “The work of dismantling the gender machine is not for trans people alone, and the work of changing the world does not belong to someone else.”
The third theme of the Raleigh Summit addressed how to move forward in the current political climate. In the face of reductions in HIV prevention funding for gay and bisexual men and Center for Disease Control-led ‘witchhunts,’ participants pondered the next steps for the movement. In his plenary, Eric Rofes stressed the need to make a nationwide paradigm shift from a gay health movement that focuses exclusively on AIDS to one that includes HIV as one component in a more comprehensive and holistic menu of needs. At issue is how to encourage HIV prevention projects to include the full breadth of health issues gay and bisexual men present. Or more accurately, how will gay men’s health be defined in the future and by whom?
Further enhancing the summit experience were a number of social activities, including receptions, a pool party, and collaborations with local nightclubs for “nights out on the town,” and a mini film festival screening several queer titles donated by Frameline, San Francisco’s film distributor.
As the week wrapped up, participants were charged with bringing the energy and message of the summit back to their communities and organizations and with creating similar summits at the local level. Additionally, discussions are already underway for the next in what will likely be many follow up national summits – tentatively scheduled for Salt Lake City, Utah in 2005.
More information about the Gay Men’s Health Summit can be found at www.gmhs2003.org.
Ric Kasini Kadour is a gay men’s health activist living in Shoreham.