Tony Valenzuela and I chatted it up last night about planning a workshop for the upcoming Gay Men's Health Summit, taking place October 17-21 in Seattle. Very quickly, we realized that our ideas were for something much bigger than a singular workshop -- but rather on a series of related sessions featuring smart / sex-positive content on gay men's health, risk and prevention.
So far, we've sketched out five workshops that we'd love to see scheduled for Seattle. There are many more important ideas out there. Can you add to this list? We'd love to have your input!!!
1) The Ins and Out of Transmission Risk: At two recent forums in Chicago and Detroit, I (Trevor) realized that many conversations on HIV / gay men's health get bogged down in bringing everyone to the same page on the actual data that exists on transmission / risk. This includes questions like: Is oral sex risky? Does taking ARVs reduce risk? Is superinfection likely / possible? And so on and so forth. This would be the first step in this track, just to try and get some of those questions out of the way.
2) Bareback Porn: There are many different "kinds" of workshops that might happen here, but some questions: How do we think about the proliferation of bareback porn over the past 10 years? What's the relationship between gay men's desires and porn consumption? What happens when most gay porn gets produced in a city like San Francisco -- where testing rates are high and serosorting appears to be an effective strategy for risk reduction -- and consumed in cities unlike San Francisco (where testing rates are low, thus making serosorting a disastrous strategy for risk reduction)?
3) Sex Panic! The Media and the Risk Narrative: MRSA and the "Superbug" New York Case provide two excellent case studies for 1) how public health / epidemiological research involving gay men is disseminated to the media and 2) How the media then reports / (mis)construes that data. Presentations of these case studies could prove useful springboards for how we might consider interventions to prevent another MRSA / Superbug panic.
4) Are HIV-related CBO's Actually Community Based Anymore?: Over the past 25 years, communities hit by HIV have worked hard to build robust institutions to help manage / treat / prevent HIV/AIDS. Along the way, organizations that began as community efforts have seemingly become detached public health institutions that view gay men simply as one "at risk population." Is it even possible to hold these organizations accountable for their work anymore, given this bureaucratic proliferation? Should we (as community members) expect that these organizations will produce the "best" prevention strategies?
5) Public Health Scholarship and the Risk Narrative: How can researchers design and execute studies that avoid the pitfalls described by a growing number of critical prevention studies scholars who have argued against the disease / risk model for public health research. This would be more of a "hands on" discussion for / by researchers who work with gay men.
6) Your Idea Here!
Really - feedback here would be super helpful! Are there speakers you'd like to see on this topic that might be headed to Seattle? Topics that should be covered? Let me know!
xoxox
Trevor
