This is worth applause today -- and is undoubtedly the result of pressure from advocates (including the ACLU but also a myriad of HIV-positive advocacy organizations):

In a written opinion dismissing a charge of bio-terrorism against a 45-year-old HIV-positive man, Macomb County Circuit Court Judge Peter Maceroni ruled that the mere fact a person is HIV-positive is not enough to accuse him or her of unlawfully possessing a harmful biological substance.

The eight page ruling, released Thursday morning, concludes that HIV is not transmitted by saliva without there being blood present. Prosecutors and preliminary hearing testimony did not indicate Daniel Allen was bleeding at the time he allegedly bit the victim, Winfred Fernandis, Jr.

Hallelujah!

Sorry for the long citation, but I think in this case the details are so maddening and violently upsetting that it's worth knowing the details. Michigan is charging an HIV-positive man under terrorism charges ("use of a harmful device") for biting another man during an argument between neighbors:

An HIV-positive Macomb County man is facing charges created under Michigan's 2004 terrorism laws for biting another man in a neighborhood scuffle. That, HIV advocates, state lawmakers and legal experts say is "cowardly" and "nonsense" and increases ignorance and stigma surrounding the virus.

[snip]

The case arose out of an Oct. 18 fight between 44-year-old Daniel Allen and his neighbor Winfred Fernandis Jr. What happened that day is disputed.

According to a report from Clinton Township Police Department, Fernandis said Allen jumped him without provocation when he went to retrieve a football neighborhood kids accidentally threw onto Allen's yard. Fernandis, according to the police report, said Allen "hugged up" to him and began to bite him. Fernandis suffered a bite wound on the lip so severe, police say, it went all the way through the lip. Fernandis sought medical treatment and the wound was sewn shut.

The story, a man severely biting another man, drew the attention of the Detroit-area media, and Fox 2 News soon had Allen on video admitting he was HIV-positive.

That admission lead Smith, a Democrat, to say he would seek additional charges. On Nov. 2, Smith's office amended its complaint to add a charge of possession or use of a harmful device. That law is a 25-year felony and was part of a 2004 package of terrorism laws created by the legislature in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The law makes it a crime to have a harmful device, which is defined as either biological, chemical, electronic or radioactive. Smith's office is arguing that Allen being infected with HIV was "a device designed or intended to release a harmful biological substance," and that his bite was thus an attempt to spread HIV.

Smith's office is relying on a Michigan Court of Appeals ruling in a case of an HIV-positive, and hepatitis B infected prisoner who spit at prison guards during an altercation in the prison. In that case, People v. Antoine Deshaw Odom, the three judge panel found:

We therefore conclude that HIV infected blood is a 'harmful biological substance,' as defined by Michigan statute, because it is a substance produced by a human organism that contains a virus that can spread or cause disease in humans.

The three judge panel was silent on whether the hepatitis infection weighed in as a factor as a harmful biological substance. As a result of this finding, the court upheld a stricter sentencing score for Odom. In 2008, the Michigan Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal on the matter, upholding the Appeals Court decision.

As someone said to me about this case, if this is upheld, it's open season against HIV-positive people in Michigan -- and elsewhere. Read the rest of the VERY upsetting story here.

It's been a big political week for the 'mos. First Obama signed the Matthew Shepard act, and now this: the HIV travel ban is being repealed. It's about time. Here's a clip of the announcement:

Just shameful - and proving that Byzantine notions of HIV transmission are still alive and well in the good old United States:

A policy that bars HIV-positive inmates in Michigan prisons from working in food service jobs does not violate state law, according to the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. But though the policy may be legal, one leader in the Michigan Department of Corrections says he wants to change it.

The policy came under scrutiny in April when Michigan Messenger reported Michigan Department of Corrections official Russ Marlan stating the policy was in place to prevent the spread of the infection.

"A prison holds about 1,000, 1,200 people and as those 1,000 prisoners go through for breakfast, lunch and dinner, prisoners are scooping that food onto their trays," Marlan, who serves as MDOC's assistant director, said at the time. "So if a prisoner was HIV-positive and sneezed onto a food item and then a prisoner ate that food item and that prisoner had a lesion in their mouth they could contract the disease."

Another MDOC official, spokesman John Cordell, gave another explanation at the time, saying that life in prison runs on very different rules and it would be possible that a prisoner might feel an HIV-positive prisoner who was preparing and serving food was intentionally attempting to infect him. That, Cordell said, could lead the uninfected prisoner to attack the HIV-positive prisoner in "the big yard on Tuesday."

[snip]

In fact, MDOC policy does allow people with Hepatitis B and C to work in food service but under certain conditions. They are allowed to work as long as they don't have open cuts or sores, a runny nose or other obvious problems. Both viral infections which attack the liver have had infections linked to close contact, such as food service, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. HIV is only spread via exchange of bodily fluids.

Who, again, said we don't need better education about HIV?

I started feeling like crap on Saturday. The boys and I had just arrived home from the Russian River, where we spent the weekend with the bears for the annual "Lazy Bear" festivities. As soon as my friend dropped me off at my friend's house, I started to feel vaguely chilly and achy -- the kind of feeling you get when a bad cold or flu is just around the corner. I didn't think too much of it: All my friends had been sick the past week with strep throat that they kept passing around. Perhaps my turn was up. So after an episode of the Golden Girls, I passed out.

I'm not sure what time I woke up, but I immediately knew something was up. I felt feverish, with chills all over my body, and my muscles felt sore and stiff. I knew I had to get up and take some Ibuprofen to help check the fever, but getting out of my warm bed to venture into the chilly house seemed a challenge. After some procrastination, I managed the trek to the bathroom and downed some pills. And then back to sleep. When I woke up again in the afternoon I knew something was definitely the matter. I spent the day feeling terribly fatigued, feverish, and generally pretty gross.

My mind began to reel: What ailed my body? My friends had been sick with strep -- and this was definitely not strep. No sore throat. Perhaps the flu? Not likely -- I didn't have any nasal congestion of chest-cold symptoms. In the back of my mind, I knew that the last two times I had gay male friends who were struggling with flu-like symptoms in the summer months wasn't because of an unseasonable flu infection -- it was their seroconversion sickness. Essentially, it was their body sending them a memo that something was very wrong.

I began texting my friend who does HIV testing in the city, freaking out about how I needed him to bring an HIV test over immediately because I was sick and having seroconversion anxiety. He was in the East Bay, but luckily said he would try to bring one over a bit later. I tried to focus on the Golden Girls in the interim, but mostly spent my time recalling the past three months of my sexual life, detailing all the possible moments where HIV might have found its way into my body. The more time I spent crunching the possibilities, the more red flags I remembered / imagined.

Remembering -- of course -- is a process fraught with imagination, and in times like these our imaginations runs wild. Usually I reconstruct hookups' faces into some frail-like memory, focusing on a zit that could have been a sore, or a skinny waistline that at the time I thought was the result of cardio, but perhaps was a sign of a disease-ravaged body. This time, however, I was mostly focused on a passionate but short-lived affair I had with a wonderful guy I found out later had a long expired work visa and was living the US without government sanction. "His access to health care was probably zilch," I worriedly rambled to my friend who arrived with the test. "Did he get tested anytime in the last year?" I kept thinking about our sexual encounters -- mostly about how we didn't use condoms.

What I was feeling wasn't regret, per se. To say that I regret our having sex without condoms would perhaps be to indicate that I expect to act differently in the future under similar conditions. Don't get me wrong: I have sex with condoms most of the time. But it's of course the "most" in that sentence that is most operative. What separates who falls in the percentile of scrutiny is a mushy calculus that I won't attempt to describe as rational or even reasonable. To say that there is some formula that we might apply to decide such matters is of course downright silly. There are a dozen kinds of reasons Public Health research might demonstrate in action for some set of guys or another, but they're not ubiquitous nor are they likely to stay static for one guy.

You might be thinking here that I've written all of this before. And you'd be exactly right. And this is where I get so frustrated with myself -- because this anxiety is like goddamn clockwork. Is this what it's like to be a sexually active, HIV-negative gay man? A three-to-six month cycle of negative tests and a hodgepodge of sexual encounters, followed up with a fresh batch of Paxil-deserving anxiety while painstakingly reconstructing every possible "mistake" you made since you last tested negative?

It seems to me that there are two possible ways to get out of this unhappy cycle. One -- testing positive -- is obvious. The other, I guess, is to be the perfect Public Health princess and manage to reduce your risk of contracting HIV to absolute zero. I shouldn't be so flip; this actually is feasible for many HIV-negative gay men and I know many guys who do in fact use a condom every time. I applaud their commitment! But -- for probably hundreds or maybe even thousands of reasons -- this goal has eluded some of us. Some wish they could achieve it, but for whatever reason find it difficult or impossible to do so. Others never shared this goal at all, and instead prioritize pleasure over risk (and I mean that in the most literal, non-judgmental of ways).

I guess I'm just frustrated to find that in the five years since I wrote a piece strikingly similar to the one you're reading, I still find myself in the same cycle of fear. Perhaps this is just the cost of being promiscuous in the face of a sexually transmitted disease. Perhaps it is just a reality of this thing we call risk. But I can't help but think that I have no similar anxiety about getting in my car to drive home at 2:00 AM, despite the fact that I'm taking a risk that I will be injured or perhaps even die in a car crash. I don't think I'm naive about the risks of driving at night, just like I don't think I'm reckless when it comes to HIV. All I know that of all the many risks I'm bound to incur in my life (driving, jaywalking, checking my luggage on a domestic airline, etc), only one seems to sit so close to home at the intersection of identity, health, and sexuality. And that is one messy fucking intersection.

Saturday I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would do if I tested positive. Who would I tell? Would I blog about it? I felt frustrated not by the immediate reality of the health of my body, but rather by the possibility of having to disclose that seropositivity to potential sexual partners in the not-so-Poz-friendly state of Michigan. Or better yet, of being branded HIV-positive and how that might inflect / affect my future identity, research, activism, or employment.

After another negative test, I find myself back at square one. What I want is a sexuality without this kind of maddening, cyclic anxiety. A way to live my life, have great sex, and quit spending days or even weeks freaking out about seroconverting. Perhaps that's too much to ask.

Disgusting. We're seeing a spat of this criminalization of HIV-positive people happening all over the world -- including the United States. Now this from Indonesia:

Lawmakers in Indonesia's remote province of Papua have thrown their support behind a controversial bill requiring some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips -- part of extreme efforts to monitor the disease.

Health workers and rights activists sharply criticized the plan Monday.

But legislator John Manangsang said by implanting small computer chips beneath the skin of "sexually aggressive" patients, authorities would be in a better position to identify, track and ultimately punish those who deliberately infect others with up to six months in jail or a $5,000 fine.

The technical and practical details still need to be hammered out, but the proposed legislation has received full backing from the provincial parliament and, if it gets a majority vote as expected, will be enacted next month, he and others said.

Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country and has one of Asia's fastest growing HIV rates, with up to 290,000 infections out of 235 million people, fueled mainly by intravenous drug users and prostitution.

But Papua, the country's easternmost and poorest province with a population of about 2 million, has been hardest hit. Its case rate of almost 61 per 100,000 is 15 times the national average, according to internationally funded research, which blames lack of knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases.

Looks like fucked up "safer sex" campaigns aren't limited to the United States. Tulipan Condoms in Argentina has just released this fucked up campaign, directly linking sex to death. The simple message: "Be Careful."

I don't know about you, but I fucking sick of this tired bullshit. This does one thing: promote shame and fear. Social marketing folks have yet to realize (despite mounting outcries from the communities that violate and manipulate) that fear and shame do not promote healthy behavior; they only serve to, 1) make people distrust health officials and, 2) make people deeply ashamed of their sexuality and body.

It's part and parcel of a kind of political climate filled with nasty images of the potential outcomes of sex, and VERY little practical education on risk and sexual health. We're teaching kids that: 1) you can get AIDS; and 2) if you have sex, you probably will get AIDS; and 3) Then you will die. Call me crazy, but this isn't useful information. It's fear-mongering.

I am SO OVER IT!

My friend Tony Valenzuela -- made gaymous in 1999 in the Poz Magazine Cover Story, "They Shoot Barebackers, Don't They" -- has just published yet another fabulously incisive piece of journalism about the alleged "superbug" scare of 2005. To catch you up to date on the gist of that story, Tony writes:

"A slew of chilling claims was made about this man – that he carried a new, more virulent strain of HIV dubbed a “supervirus” that progressed from infection to AIDS in as little as two months; that his meth-induced promiscuity would instigate a deadly epidemic potentially undoing a quarter century of progress against HIV; that he signified what many in the gay community had been dreading would occur, given that gay men—stubbornly, recklessly—refused to give up their uniquely nefarious brand of promiscuity."

Tony's basically arguing here that there was a lot at stake in this case -- his case quickly came to represent a kind of perverse nexus of multiple crises in gay sex politics. His life -- his story -- came to be the gay media's whipping boy.

Tony has written a gorgeous, important piece here. Notably, he got to sit down and actually chat -- for the first time on he record -- with "The New York Patient" whose case became so controversial. What he does here is build a story of an HIV-fueled moral panic, something I think is important and builds on the arguments many of us have been making for years now (perhaps inspired most by the late Eric Rofes).

I can't say enough this piece. It's fucking brilliant. It is at the same time investigative journalism and thoughtful self-reflection (two things that almost never go hand-in-hand). For instance, Tony describes the Patient's coming-of-age story, and then notes:

"As I listened to the New York Patient’s story I noted the parallels of his life to my own—both Latino, gay, HIV positive. I have many friends like the New York Patient—gay and immigrant; one foot in American culture, the other in a country left behind; a life of adaptation and struggle, of inimitable self-invention that redefines community and home. I don’t mean to say we’re alike as much as the worlds we inhabit overlap in places that have drawn me to his story, and here’s the most compelling part: Our obscure but considerable common denominator is the strangely intimate experience of withstanding the punishing glare of scandal."

Read it all for yourself here. It will change your life. You MUST read this article!

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

Controversial and longtime SF AIDS activist Michael Petrelis has just posted this video from a recent meeting of the San Francisco Dept of Public Health's HIV Prevention Planning Council below on his blog. Petrelis, despite his long history of being a real douchebag (see any number of accounts on this - even in Urvashi Vaid's book, "Virtual Equality"), makes a few decent points. I actually really debated whether to even cite this video, because it draws attention to him, but I think the video provides some insight into the issues / emotions at hand.

I haven't yet blogged about these matters, because - well - plenty of voices have already chimed in on the topic. There are two issues here. The most significant here is the recent alleged "outbreak" of treatment-resistant staph infections in San Francisco which have been hyped up in the media in part due to institutions like UCSF and other gay community-based AIDS organizations.

Now, it's not to say that these infections have not indeed occurred. But, well, like my friend Chris Bartlett remarked to me last weekend, it seems like at least twice a year health organizations have to come out and scare the shit out of gay men. I only need to draw your attention to the ridiculous media frenzy over the alleged "superinfection" case in New York City that was blown way out of proportion in 2005. That patient, of course, is now responding to treatment.

Similarly, a few staph cases among gay men has been disgustingly overhyped in media reports. Any potential link between gay sex and disease is readily eaten up and spat out by media outlets who love to remind us of the danger that is always lurking around the corner in our sex lives. Take this ABC news story from just a few weeks ago. And I quote:

Flesh-eating bacteria. A drug-resistant menace, spreading silently through hospital hallways.

If one were asked to come up with a recipe for a panic-inducing disease, it would be hard to come up with something more horrifying than methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus -- or MRSA.

But even as new research suggests that the disease may be spreading though the homosexual community -- and could even be developing into a full-blown epidemic -- health experts studying MRSA say panic over the disease may be premature.

Even though they're reporting here that perhaps the panic might be premature, the damage is already done. The title of the article "The Great MRSA Epidemic: Is It Time to Worry?" and its opening line ("Flesh-eating bacteria") does all the talking. The title in fact matter-of-factly states that there is indeed an epidemic already, and just asks us to consider whether we might want to start taking action.

And then of course a few lines down they again repeat that "the disease may be spreading though the homosexual community," despite the fact that deaths due to MRSA are primarily among other groups (elderly, hospital patients, etc). This isn't another gay epidemic! Puh-lease. When a few hundred black folks in South Carolina come down with the flu, we don't suddenly see press releases about a potentially dangerous Black flu epidemic.

Give the media any fodder to remind America of the intrinsic link between gay sex and disease, and they lap it up. Researchers and institutions have got to start being much more careful and considerate in the way they disseminate new, *preliminary* data on gay men's health. Recklessly throwing it out to the public is something like throwing a kitten to a pack of wolves. They will chew it up, mangle it into something unrecognizable, and spit it right back out. This isn't news, for God's sake! We've seen this time and time again - and yet here we are again, in another situation where the media is doing disgusting violence against gay men's communities -- often times with the full support of AIDS organizations. Shameful.

The second issue at hand here is the recent release of a Swiss study that argues that HIV-positive people on HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) with undetectable viral loads cannot sexually transmit the virus to their partners. This isn't news to many of us -- the Swiss study wasn't, after all, original research. It was instead a review of already existing literature, some of which has been around for years now. You can find the study here in French and now a rough English translation here.

SF's DPH and the SF AIDS Foundation issued a joint statement saying that they "do not endorse" the Swiss Study. Well of course they don't! I mean, I hate to break it to everyone, but as a sociologist things couldn't be more clear: AIDS organizations have an interest in promoting panic and suppressing evidence of good news. It's how they get their money. This is not a revolutionary statement. It's the name of organizational / institutional politics - and part of the growing pains associated with community organizations being swallowed up by government agencies / funding priorities. You want CDC money? Show us a crisis - and follow our rules. Health departments and CDC-funded agencies everywhere happily oblige. They want to keep their jobs, after all. It's fucked up - but it's the name of the game, folks!

Now this isn't to say that the Swiss study is conclusive evidence. It's not. And we should all acknowledge that. And I certainly appreciate the tricky situation that agencies are in when confronted with this kind of data. How do you promote data that can be easily misinterpreted, thus leading to potential new infections? I don't have the answers here.

But I do know that there is plenty of data on HIV transmision out there that is kept out of gay men's hands, I presume because they think we're not capable of making informed decisions about our sex lives. But if the home-grown trends in seroadaptation in San Francisco and other urban center teach us anything, it's that gay men are quite ingenious in developing innovative approaches to prevention - without the help of prevention organizations. Which is a good thing, since our organizations often times don't do much to help us out in that regard.

Phew. I admit this post is a bit reactionary - but I had to get some steam out! So, without further adieu, here's that Petrelis video I mentioned at the beginning:

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Jim Pickett (who runs the lovely gay mens' sexuality website and blog, LifeLube.org) over one of CHAMP's listservs about a conference on gay men's health in Chicago. I wanted to present, but by the time I found out about the event, all the slots were full! But I decided to go and network with the Chicagoans and see what was happening there.

I arrived in Chicago on Friday night around 8 PM and met up with my friend from UNC, Spencer Derrico. He was kind enough to offer me a couch to crash on for my night in Chicago! We went to dinner with some of his friends, and then out for a second to Roscoe's for some dancing. The crowd was a lil thin, I had to wake up early, and the music was so-so - so we didn't stay long.

I did pick up a copy of "Gay Chicago Magazine," though, and flipped through it to get a feel for the city. I was struck by the obituary for a Detroit native, Danny Majewski (pictured at right), who was also one of the co-owners of a Chicago bar called "Cell Block." Majewski used to bartend at the Detroit Eagle back in the late 80s until he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1994, when he decided to make Chicago a more regular home. Danny passed away on October 20th at the Detroit Eagle, a death described in the obituary as almost idyllic, really:

"According to [his partner] Frank, “We were in the middle of the best Saturday night we’ve had in over two years. Many guys were in who we hadn’t seen in a long time, and Danny was talking and catching up with many of them. We had been at the bar since 5:30 that evening, and at 1:25 I walked behind the bar and said to Danny that I’d see if the guys could close up and we’d leave at 2 a.m. He looked at me surprised and said, ‘Why?,’ as if it would somehow interrupt everything. Five minutes later, a heart attack took him.'"

This image of Danny's passing stayed with me into the conference the ManAlive next day. In general, I thought the conference had some good programming - though it seemed to be not well attended. I went to a "Creating Dialogue Between Gay Men Across the Ages" session where my friend Tim Stewart-Winter (a University of Chicago graduate student in history) was a panelist. We touched on a few themes, and I regurgitated some of my recent musings on mentorship and gay men.

The highlight for me, though, came after the workshop when I had a lengthy conversation with one of the older guys in the workshop. I believe his name was Tom, but I honestly can't remember. We had a fantastic discussion about the changing nature of the gay ghettos - and in particular the increasing decentralization and privatization of gay life (via the Internet). Halfway through the conversation he mentioned that his lover had recently passed away, and it turns out that his lover was none other than Danny Majewski - whose obituary I had just been reading the night before. Wow.

From that fantastic discussion I headed over to Jim Pickett and Will Wong's Sero-Adaptation workshop, which ended up be extremely useful for me. They both did a *fabulous* job detailing not only the latest data on sero-adaptation, but also the potential benefits and drawbacks to those practices. I really enjoyed the way the discussed sero-adaptation, which basically means a range of practices that reduce HIV risk by employing strategies other than condom use for safety. These can include practices like serosorting (choosing partners based on like sero-status), strategic positioning (e.g. if I'm HIV-neg and having sex with a poz guy, I would choose to top), "dipping" (or just putting your dick inside for a moment without a condom, but not actually fucking), using a lot of lube (since "dry" sex carries a much greater risk of bleeding and thus transmission), and even discussing viral load with Poz partenrs (since greater viral loads generally translates to greater potential for transmission).

Also, Will Wong presented a really fabulous table that I thought was incredibly important and useful for describing HIV risk. Basically, he translated per-incidence risk data (that I cite in my essay, HIV Panic) into relative risk data. Fabulous! His table looked like this (I added the GaySpeak!):

So, basically this relates every sex act to a base risk of "1" for getting a blowjob without a condom. Thus, getting fucked bareback for gay men is 100 times as risky as getting that blowjob without a condom. I think this is pretty useful, as it gives gay men a more clear sense of risk per sexual activity. Helpful, I think!

After the conference, I met up with Spencer for wine and cheese at a lovely Wine Bar. We got into a great discussion about gay sex, and I actually was finally able to articulate my Master's thesis underlying assertion: That a lack of relevant sex education for young gay men leads to their irrational fear of contracting HIV (what I call HIV panic), which then leads to a desire for boyfriend relationships because its the only place they feel safe having anal sex. I'm interested in the relationship between poor HIV education and heteronormative / conservative ideas about sex and relationships. Yay for clarity over wine!

I have the great privilege of writing from my hotel room in Philadelphia, PA where I'm attending the 2007 LGBTI Health Summit. This was an annual organizing event and, really, political movement that Eric Rofes worked hard to put together year after year. In his absence this year, there's a great deal of rumbling over what the future has in store for this conference, and the movement for LGBTI health as a whole (gay men's health, in particular of course).

I also had the great privilege of spending a great deal of time getting to amazing, wonderful, and inspiring activists and thinkers like Tony Valenzuela, Michael Hurley, Bill Jesdale, the French activists from WARNING, and Amber Hollibaugh. These folks made this summit one of the most academically rich and thought-provoking weekends of my life. I owe them a great deal. If America had just one HIV social science researcher like Michael Hurley from Australia, we would be a much better place. His thoughtful presentation on gay men's intensive sex culture was mindblowing. What a treat!

I also was honored to present my thesis work here at the conference under the title "HIV Panic and Young Gay Men: Preliminary Results from an Exploratory San Francisco Study." It really turned out to be a lot more about gay communities, sexual shame, and then of course about fear of HIV for young gay men. I was really pleased with how my presentation came together - I kept making changes in the days during the conference before my own workshop was scheduled. Add some sex here - a bit more about desire there. The feedback and support from my colleagues was nothing short phenomenal. I hope I can post the slides from the presentation here soon!

Anywho, must sleep. More conferenceing tomorrow! Then back home to SF tomorrow night.