"SEX IN AN EPIDEMIC"
Director: Jean Carlomusto
Trevor's Rating: 2.5 / 5 Stars
This documentary is a strange mix of things -- an attempt to throw everything about AIDS from the start to the present into one confused film. Archival footage is rarely identified, creating confusion over whether the interview you're watching was conducted by the filmmaker or was just rescued from the annals of history. It became clear watching interviews of people I knew were dead that the filmmaker had done little of her own work. In fact, she basically stole the entire concept of the film Sex Positive, chopped it down to 20 minutes, and inserted it into the film without credit -- the kind of thing that if done on a written work would be called plagiarism.
Indeed, this is one of those films that is well intentioned but poorly executed. There is plenty of interested archival footage, but it is sloppily stitched together without a strong narrative structure. Unlike We Were Here, this film lacks the kind of clear focus and narrow scope that made that film so powerful. It pretends to be telling a national HIV story, but it's really about New York City. What happened there did not happen in San Francisco, and those differences go unspoken in the film but were clear. ACT UP happened in New York for a reason, but we don't hear about that because the film has no concept of its geographic specificity.
This film will be a resource for those looking for archival footage, and a random array of interesting but vaguely related facts. Here's a trailer:
After a long separation, Scott and I are finally back together for a new episode of "The View From the Bottom"! We filmed this gem in Central Park, whilst visiting the Big Apple last weekend. We talk about sex in nature, food in bed, "straight acting," and other annoying online profile habits. Enjoy!!!!
Hello, ladies! I'm so sorry for the outrageous sparsity of posts for the last two weeks. I have been a traveling 'mo, headed last weekend to Toronto and then this past weekend to Philadelphia and New York City. Jeebus! There is so much to report, I barely know where to begin. Let's start with these AMAZING photos of Maxime and I that were taken by Jon -- a reader of this very blog -- at Hiro Lounge in NYC on Sunday night:
So wonderful! We had an amazing time at Hiro -- dancing the night away, stumbling home around 4 or 5 AM. If you haven't been, you really should check it out on a Sunday. Amanda Lepore throws the party, and she's fierce. Amanda was just a few feet away from me all evening! Craziness!
Scott came along for the trip to NYC. We were visiting him in Philly, as he's just moved there to begin his PhD in German at Penn. God bless him. His apartment is AMAZINGLY situated in the heart of the gayborhood, and includes a beautiful Shinto screen that may have been damaged at some point in our drunken stupor. Sorry about that:
Our last day in NYC, we made the trek to Central Park -- I had never been and was determined to get there during our 24 hour stay in the Big Apple. It was a BEAUTIFUL fall day, sunny and crisp -- almost hot in the sun, and chilly in the shade. Perfect park-touring weather, as you can see:
Clearly, Scott and Maxime had a lovely time:
And we even filmed a very special "View From the Bottom" in the park!:
By the end of the trip, we were exhausted and at our wits end. As evidence here:
All in all, it was a pretty amazing weekend. Minus some serious drama our last night, which I'm not ready to blog about -- but stay tuned there. It's some serious shit.
The Sword has conducted a quasi-scientific study of Craigslist ads to determine the perecentage of "top/bottom" (problematic language -- see comments later) advertisements in various cities' M4M sections. Obviously of interest is the variation from city to city, with Houston home to the highest perecentage of ads from guys looking to get fucked; and NYC home to the highest % of guys looking to fuck.
Now, this study is all sorts of FAIL. For one, the methodology is wholly unclear. Were they picking ads from guys who identified as bottoms? Or ads from guys who were just looking to get fucked? Or did that all get lumped into the same category? Obviously, versatile ads and ads not seeking anal sex are totally thrown out of the picture. But most importantly for me is that Craigslist advertisements are not the same as, say, Manhunt profiles. Sampling Craigslist ads tells you something about the sexual culture of those cities, but its problematic for a number of reasons: 1) Repeated posters (and you know if you use Craigslist that there are a few dozen people in each city who post multiple times a day, seven days a week); 2) The relationship between people who post and people who do NOT post is wholly unclear. For every ad you seen on Craigslist, there are at least a dozen people looking (and maaaaybe replying) but never posting themselves. So the lurkers will never get sampled in this kind of analysis.
Let's compare this data to the data I collected last year from Adam4Adam and Manhunt in San Francisco and New York City. In a sample of ALL Manhunt and Adam4Adam profiles in both cities, I found that NYC had slightly more tops than bottoms (on both sites, about 35% tops and 28% bottoms) while San Francisco's numbers were comparable but skewed a bit more towards bottoms (33% tops and 28% bottoms -- with many more vers guys). Compare here the charts for just Manhunt for both cities:
Sure, my data from MH and A4A has its own set of problems (see original posts linked above for more on that), but I think it's MUCH less susceptible to the kinds of gross errors / data biases that come with sampling Craigslist. In short, don't get your puds in a wad over this info. Take with a big, fat grain of salt!
A new study modeling results from other data sources indicates that well over half of new HIV infections in five major metro areas (Baltimore, LA, Miami, San Francisco, and NYC) among men who have sex with men can be linked to their primary partners (e.g. boyfriends, lovers, husbands, etc.).
Here's the basic 411:
Methods: We modeled HIV transmissions, using data from MSM in five US cities from the National HIV Behavioral Surveillance System, the HIVNET Vaccine Preparedness Study, and other published data. Annual HIV transmissions were estimated by partner type (main or casual) and by sex type (receptive anal intercourse, insertive anal intercourse, or oral sex).
Results: Sixty-eight percent [95% confidence interval (CI) 58-78) of HIV transmissions were from main sex partners because of a higher number of sex acts with main partners, more frequent receptive roles in anal sex with main partners, and lower condom use during anal sex with main partners. By sex type, 69% (95% CI 59-79) of infections were from receptive anal intercourse, 28% (95% CI 19-38) were from insertive anal intercourse, and 2% (95% CI 0-5) were from oral sex. The model-based estimated HIV incidence rate was 2.2% (95% CI 1.7-2.7) per year. Sensitivity analyses demonstrated estimates of transmission from main sex partners as low as 52% (95% CI 41-62) and as high as 74% (95% CI 68-80).
Conclusion: According to our model, most HIV transmissions among MSM in five US cities are from main sex partners. HIV prevention efforts should take into account the risks of HIV transmissions in male partnerships, and couples-based HIV prevention interventions for MSM should be given high priority in the US HIV prevention research portfolio.
We've known for sometime that a great deal of HIV transmission risk can be located not just within anonymous partners (as the sex panic around HIV would indicate), but also within their primary relationships. I talk to many men who engage in short-term, serial monogamy and opt out of condom use very quickly in the relationship. I didn't find it in my quick read of the article, but it's not immediately obviously how "main partner" got defined as they use it -- e.g. how long a relationship would qualify.
Also of note here is the grave disparity between RAI (receptive anal intercourse) risk and IAI (insertive AI) risk -- 69% of infections were the result of RAI, while 28% were the result of IAI. Obviously, reporting is a concern here (stigma may push some to report IAI instead of RAI) -- but it's worth noting the chasm between the two. Although as someone mentioned in the discussion on CHAMP's listserv, this disparity isn't as a gross as we might expect it given the data we generally rely on that says that the risk disparity is more like a factor of 10 difference.
In any case, we should seriously consider implications for this data in the way we approach prevention in the US. Australia started doing couple prevention eons ago (the famous "Talk. Test. Test. Trust." campaign), and the US is quickly catching on -- there are numerous efforts being developed or already underway. But data like this highlights that the epidemic doesn't neatly fit many people's preconceived notions that link STI's with unabashed promiscuity.
If you have journal access, you can find the article here in the journal AIDS.
Lifelube has helpfully posted information on a new study published in the journal Culture, Health and Sexuality that asks 120 gay men in New York City: what exactly does the term "bareback" mean? The researchers here are trying to better understand how gay men use the term in their own lives, so I very much appreciate the spirit of the project.
The Meaning of the Term, "Bareback"
A few interesting findings about the term emerge from the project:
1) No Condoms: Obviously, most agreed "bareback" implied anal sex without condoms.
2) Natural, Intimate:Curiously, although some men defined the term using words like "natural" or "intimate", the researchers don't interrogate this at all. Obviously, I think this is a mistake because it adds another layer of social meaning onto the behavior. I would add it as another category in their findings (as I have here).
3) Intentional: Some implied that intentionality was critical. This is very interesting. For instance, when they ask a participant whether sex would be considered "bareback" if a condom breaks, one participant replies:
"Technically, I guess, briefly, unless they don’t pull out or if they continue, then yeah. But barebacking is usually a conscious choice. But I understand that is kind of complicating the situation. But if the condom breaks, then no, I don’t think so, because I think that barebacking isn’t by accident. It’s a conscious choice, unless the person’s fucked up and doesn’t know what you’re doing."
4) Risky: Risk is a critical component of the definition for some men. For instance, they asked some participants if sex would be considered "bareback" if sex without condoms between a monogamous couple where both partners are HIV-negative. Some said it would, but others said things like this:
"That’s not bareback … (Why not?) It’s not because these two guys are in a relationship. They’re in a monogamous relationship. They love each other. They’re both HIV-negative. They know their status. They’ve – it’s natural, I mean, for the gay world … But it’s just natural for them to have sex without a condom, if they know neither one has HIV or has an STD, or whatever, and they’re not sleeping around on each other."
Bareback Identity
They move from this linguistic investigation to an investigation into bareback identity. A few possibilities here:
1) "Yes, I'm a Barebacker": About 1/3 of the men involved identified as barebackers, and these men were more likely to be HIV-positive than negative. For instance, in this exchange:
I: Do you think of yourself as a barebacker?
R: Yes.
I: Is that an identity?
R: That’s an identity. That’s the truth. The truth … is the light. So I’m a barebacker, baby. And I ain’t going to sugar-coat [it] – I’m a barebacker [singing], I’m a barebacker! [laughter] OK?
I: That identity, is that, is that a private one? Is that something you –
R: I would want somebody to know? Yes, I’m a barebacker. I feel…it, it, it gives me a sense of empowerment, so to speak. I feel good about [that] shit. Yeah, I like the ass, I like to fuck and I like to get fucked. You know, and I like to be explicit. And I can get to the exact nature of what I’m about, so it empowers me. Barebacker, huh? You know, that is that term.
2) "No, I'm not": Around 1/4 of participants said that, in fact, they were not barebackers. A variety of reasons existed, including the stigma attached to the term, some men's desire to use condoms, or -- very interestingly -- "because labeling oneself as such would make others think, ‘Oh, sure, he’s a barebacker, so he’ll accept my dick inside him’." This is fascinating language here, but again the researcher's stop short of a more in-depth analysis, which is a shame. But curious that this quote is about being a bareback BOTTOM, and not a top.
3) "Maybe I am": Some indicated that they might be, or that they were only partially a barebacker because of the frequency of their having sex without condoms. For instance:
I: Do you consider yourself a barebacker?
R: Sixty percent of the times, yes, I do, mm-hmm. Yes I do. You know, because like I say I do…my best to practise safe sex, but once, you know, I meet a certain person or – it’s like – it’s like something that will go off in me that I’ll be, like wow, I would just love to feel him inside, you know? Or I would just love to run up in them and – stuff like that.
You can download the PDF of the report here, thanks to IRMA.
In the spirit of my posts on racial diversity on Manhunt.net and Adam4Adam (see NYC; SF; Atlanta posts) -- and my recent post on positional identity on A4A and MH for San Francisco (see here) -- comes this post about the variation in tops, bottoms, and versatile-identified (what I call "positional identity") profiles on these websites for New York City!
As a recap, what I've done here is reconstructed the two website's database by doing repeated searches of profiles using narrow categories. For instance, if I want to know how many top-identified profiles exist among 18-21 year-olds, I did four searches (one for 18 y/o tops; 19 y/o tops; etc). Note that profiles ARE NOT people. And this technique for amassing data is somewhat vulnerable to human error. So take this data with a grain of salt. We need more research on this topic, to know how these identities are distributed in our communities. This is just a shot in the dark, really.
Also note that this data does not include anyone who did not identify as top/bottom/versatile. People who identified as "top/vers" were categorized as "top" here; "bottom/vers" also as "bottom." Without further ado, here's the data. There are 36,104 profiles from Manhunt documented here, and 41,738 from Adam4Adam.
Adam4Adam
As I did last time for race, I've gathered data on the distribution of positional identity categories by age group. I've dropped the last data point (58+) because: 1) it includes very few profiles; and 2) it is incredibly vulnerable to bias because of the number of people who put "99" or "69" as their age instead of their real age (a rather common practice).
The trends here are very similar to San Francisco. Like SF, there is a high percentage of bottoms in the 18-21 age group. Unlike SF, there's a similarly high percentage of versatile guys in that age bracket. This shifts quickly: by the next age group (22-25), bottoms have become the smallest group, and in the following age group (26-29), tops have become the largest group.
And here's the breakdown for all the profiles, overall. It's a slightly more even distribution than SF overall, with 35% of profiles ID'ing as vers; 36% as top; and around 29% as bottom.
Manhunt
Now let's turn to Manhunt. As I asked for SF, the important question: is there any obvious differences from Adam4Adam, as was found with racial diversity (A4A's profiles were consistently more racially diverse than Manhunt profiles)? While there were some minor differences in the SF data, the NYC data is pretty consistent. The trends are similar. Here's the data:
Overall, the data is also about identical:
With this data, I've presented further evidence for the case that there is some correlation between age and positional identity. Obviously, this relationship is unclear. There could be generational cohort differences, although I doubt this explanation. I think a more likely explanation is that these relational identities shift over time in gay men's lives. But we need to understand why. I presume many 18 year-olds identify as bottom because many men who want to have sex with them presume and want them to be bottoms. The converse may be true for 40 year-old guys. We obviously need some "real" social science research here to explain this variation with age.
I'll be back soon with the Atlanta data to complete the trifecta!
I was having lunch today with my longtime friend Jon Darcey -- who I met online via IRC when we were both confused gay 14 y/o's in North Carolina -- and we were talking about his potential upcoming move to New York City. He was excited because his good friend Grasan has offered to let him stay with him for a while if he makes the move -- after, that is, Grasan wraps up his national tour of The Color Purple. Well damned if I didn't come home from lunch to find JMG had posted this video of Grasan and two castmates performing Beyonce's Single Ladies on the set of their tour. Jeebus. It's a super small gay world. They tear it up -- but the cameraman cut out one of the poor fellas. Grasan's that lovely man in the middle. Enjoy!
GayCityNews is reporting that several arrests of gay men have been made this year by the Manhattan South Vice Enforcement Squad at NYC porn shops. One bizarre story is that of Robert Pinter, who was arrested at Blue Door Video in the East Village earlier this month:
Robert Pinter was looking for a DVD and perhaps a good time when he visited Blue Door Video on First Avenue in the East Village. He was approached by an attractive young Asian-American man.
"He is smiling, he's really a cute guy, very friendly," said Pinter, 52. "He initiated the conversation and drove the whole conversation."
Pinter said they agreed to have sex and the young man, who told Pinter he was 29, suggested they leave the shop and go to his car, which was parked outside. As they were exiting, the young man, who never told Pinter his name, mentioned money for the first time.
"He sort of threw in 'Oh, I want to pay you $50 to suck your dick,'" Pinter said. "When he offered me the money my first thought was he wanted me to pay him the money. When I realized that it wasn't that way I thought it wasn't logical."
Pinter said nothing in response and continued walking with the young man. Once outside, they were surrounded by a group of men who Pinter soon learned were police.
"At first I thought it was a gang because they didn't say anything, they didn't identify themselves as police," Pinter said. "They took my bag, started going through my possessions. I must have asked them four or five times, 'Why are you putting me under arrest?'"
Pinter, who has no prior arrests, was charged with prostitution. He was held handcuffed in a van for hours while officers made additional arrests around Manhattan, then photographed and fingerprinted at a Lower East Side police precinct, and finally arraigned on October 11, roughly 24 hours after his arrest, in the criminal courts downtown.
His arrest -- and others like it -- should be cause for outrage. It's clearly homophobic, selective entrapment targeted against gay men. It's straight out of a 1950s Police Officer Manual. Disgusting.
The New York Times has an interesting article on the rising trend of decreasing caloric content in popular food items across the country -- particularly in NYC, where recent legislation mandated that stores with more then 15 outlets post the calorie content next the price. Suddenly that Big Mac ain't so appealing! Evidence of the trend, they note, can be seen in chains from Starbucks to -- gasp! -- Dunkin' Donuts!:
Evidence of the calorie’s resurgence is everywhere. The makers of Coca-Cola and M&Ms will soon print calories on the front of packages. Consumers, too, are paying more attention, like the diners who discovered that some meals at Applebee’s had more calories than advertised and filed a class-action suit this fall.
New Yorkers got a harsh dose of calorie reality this summer when restaurants with 15 or more outlets were forced to post the calorie content of food next to the price. The resulting sticker shock has brought parts of a great city to its knees, often to do push-ups.
The campaign has inspired lawmakers around the country to follow New York’s lead.
Restaurants and food companies are lightening recipes and portion sizes. Starbucks, for example, claims to have saved the nation 17 billion calories since last October by swapping 2 percent milk for whole. The 100-calorie snack is this decade’s answer to the fat-free SnackWell cookie, as more brands introduce tiny portions of things like Cool Ranch Doritos and Clif bars.
Dunkin’ Donuts recently added a low-calorie egg white breakfast sandwich, Così is using low-fat mayonnaise and McDonald’s large French fries have dropped to 500 calories this year from 570 last year. Quiznos is testing smaller sizes and less-caloric sandwich fillings in its New York stores. Cathy Nonas of the New York City health department said this is all a reaction to public-health pressure.
Restaurant corporations say consumer demand, not the threat of legislation, made them change. That’s why Yum Brands, which owns KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and other fast-food restaurants, will start voluntarily posting calorie counts for individual servings in its restaurants nationwide later this year, said Jonathan Blum, a company spokesman.
Personally, I think this is a great idea. Consumers should be able to make informed choices about the food that they eat. Unfortunately, I think there's been a kind of classist attack on fast food, as if were the worst offender in fattening up Americans. But let's be real: any meal eaten in full at practically any sit-down American restaurant is likely to have more calories than a Bic Mac. We love to blame poor people for America's fatty woes, but I mean, c'mon! It's total fucking bullshit.
Let's say, for example, that you sit down for a meal at Olive Garden, chow down on a three of their breadsticks (150 calories / pop) and polish off one of their oversized potions of pasta -- Chicken Parmigiana, for instance, at 1090 calories / dish -- in that one meal, you've just gorged on over 1500 calories, more than a full day's worth for many people. Even if you downed a Big Mac, a Large French Fry, and a Large Coca-Cola at McDonald's, you'd only hit 1350 calories. Cut the soda to Diet and you'd be at around 1000 calories -- 33% less than the meal at Olive Garden.
I don't mean to pick on Olive Garden here, a meal at just about any American restaurant would be similar in caloric content. Obviously the public health efforts to get people to change their behavior and "eat right" aren't working. More structural efforts (like in NYC) have got to be made.
I'm not sure that of all the issues at hand right now, CNN's front-page coverage of this is the most appropriate really.... but anyways:
Public school officials in Chicago, Illinois, are recommending approval of a "gay-friendly" high school because harassment and violence are causing gay students to skip class and drop out at alarming rates.
The School for Social Justice Pride Campus, which officials say will not be exclusive to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, is aimed at being safe and welcoming for any student looking for another school option, said Josh Edelman, executive officer in the Chicago Public Schools' Office of New Schools.
"It is not going to be a 'gay high school,' but yes, in a way, it is meant to target kids who feel they have been victims of bullying for their sexual orientation or perceived orientation," Edelman said.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan announced his recommendation Wednesday. Officials said Pride Campus would be separate physically but be attached administratively to the School for Social Justice.
It's an interesting idea. Certainly homophobia has a terrible effect on many gay students, forcing some to drop out or worse. But I'm not sure giving them their own gay-friendly campus is the best long-term solution. It will ease the problem for students who are willing to opt-in to such a system, but there are surely countless young queer folks who are either not out / comfortable with doing so, or who strongly desire to stay at their designated school for other reasons (sports, theater, friends from elementary, etc). It also just lets the problem -- homophobia and bullying -- continue to fester inside the classroom.
I'm torn about how to receive this news. CNN ran a similar story back in 2003 when the Harvey Milk High School opened in New York City, which was more explicit about being for LGBT-identified students (the Chicago School is billed as just "gay-friendly"). It would be useful to hear stories from students at Harvey Milk High, to see how useful it has been for them in escaping homophobia and achieving academic success.
Adbusters has a *scathing* piece this month on hipster culture, citing is a "suicidal" and evidence of an American culture "lost in the superficiality of its past." It was when I moved to San Francisco in 2005 that I first got my taste of this thing called "hipster," a nebulous term indeed, but it generally seemed to be an attempt at ironic skewering of pop culture.
Unfortunately, in my experience, hipster "scenes" tend to reproduce all the nasty things that made them hate pop culture in the first place: exclusionary practices, pretention, and egomania. Most of them are the losers and nerds from high school (my people), intent on getting a piece of the popularity pie in college and beyond. But at some point along the way, they forget just how it awful it felt to be constantly looked down on in primary school, and wind up doing exactly the same thing to others. It's like bitchy gay boys. Same thing.
Now, this of course is not all hipsterfolk. There are many kind / generous / thoughful / intelligent / politically savvy people who would be labelled for style of dress as a "hipster." Many of my friends in SF might be categorized under that label (though of course they probably would not identify as such). And many of the most scenestery, pretentious hipster-looking boys and girls are probably incredibly wonderful people outside the scene, one-on-one. But the scene is awful. It kills. The beady-eyed, foamy-mouthed glee for outrageosly clever irony must end. Counter-culture, it is not.
Here's a few choice words from Adbusters:
An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.
[snip]
The American Apparel V-neck shirt, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Parliament cigarettes are symbols and icons of working or revolutionary classes that have been appropriated by hipsterdom and drained of meaning. Ten years ago, a man wearing a plain V-neck tee and drinking a Pabst would never be accused of being a trend-follower. But in 2008, such things have become shameless clichés of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class.
This obsession with “street-cred” reaches its apex of absurdity as hipsters have recently and wholeheartedly adopted the fixed-gear bike as the only acceptable form of transportation – only to have brakes installed on a piece of machinery that is defined by its lack thereof.
Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.
For many years now, there has been a mobilization against vaccinating small children based on shaky evidence of a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism. A new study out of Columbia University refutes that claim:
The theory was created in 1998, when British researcher Andrew Wakefield published studies that suggested the measles vaccine caused gastrointestinal problems and that those GI problems led to autism.
W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York, who co-authored the most recent study, said Wakefield theorized that the virus used in the vaccine grew in the intestinal tract, leading to inflammation that made the bowel porous. That allowed material to seep from the bowel into the blood, Wakefield's theory surmised, affecting the nervous system and causing autism.
In Wednesday's study, the researchers replicated key parts of Wakefield's original study to determine whether the vaccine causes autism and GI problems, said Mady Hornig, a study co-author. Irish pathologist John O'Leary, co-author of Wakefield's studies that supported the autism link, also is a co-author of the new study.
O'Leary and the other researchers looked for evidence of the measles vaccine in children's intestines after they had been vaccinated and sought to determine whether their GI problems and autism symptoms occurred before or after they were vaccinated.
They analyzed samples taken from 38 children with bowel disorders, 25 of whom also had autism. The investigators found only one child in each group had trace amounts of the measles virus in their samples.
The samples were analyzed at Columbia and at a laboratory of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as at O'Leary's lab -- the same one Wakefield used for his original studies.
The conclusion: "no evidence" linked the vaccine to either autism or GI disorders, Lipkin said.
Now hopefully we can have some sanity on this issue. Autism as you may know is a politically hot issue, with various celebrities lobbying (Jenny McCarthy, etc) for more awareness. Unfortunately, the guidelines for diagnosing autism have been expanding, so it's perhaps no wonder that more children have been diagnosed in the past 20 years. I find it somewhat similar to ADD (attention deficit disorder), an extremely vague and every-expanding category of "disease" that parents have rushed to treat with drugs not terribly different from cocaine. It's effectively the medicalization of our young people, and it makes me deeply uncomfortable.
Joe My God is reporting from his trek this morning out to Brookyln's Crown Heights for the reported "Straight Pride Parade," where he found an empty intersection at the alleged 10 AM starting time. The event had been planned by Reggae artists from the "Taking Care of Our Own" production label. Why, you ask?:
It was organized in response to accusations made by gay activists, specifically Peter Tatchell, founder of the activist group OutRage!, that certain reggae songs, including Stapler’s “Hit Them Hard,” incite violence against gays. “The issue is not homophobia,” explains Tatchell. “It is incitement to murder gay people, which is a criminal offense.”
Gregory Larson, president of TCOOO Productions, views the parade and song quite differently, calling it “pro-family, not anti-gay.” Adds Larson, “It just talks about a man and his wife, but the gay community takes it as a hit against them. Maybe because they can’t have children, I don’t know.”
Riiiiiiiiiight. In any case, Joe made the trek to Flatbush at Church Avenue to witness the event first-hand, but discovered upon arriving that there was no parade to be found!:
As you can see, however, I found the corner of Flatbush and Church, the parade's supposed 10am starting point, completely deserted. Damn, and here I wanted a Straight Pride t-shirt.
I did see a good number of cars whizzing by that were festooned with flags from Jamaica and other Caribbean nations, but those were probably just folks getting ready for tomorrow's massive West Indian Day Parade. Just to make sure I hadn't missed the fun, I popped into a few shops to inquire if anybody had seen a parade this morning. The manager of Raquel Shoes told me, "I've been here since 8:30am. It's been totally quiet all morning."
Hah! Joe calls it a "laughable non-event," and he's exactly right.
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Pam's House Blend
She's a fabulous North Carolinian blogging about politics, LGBT and women's rights, the influence of the far Right, and race relations. What more can I say?
