I'm enjoying the free wifi and replica designer furniture at the Centre on Halsted, marvelling at this amazing space, and the contradictions of American culture.
On my way here, I passed a huge billboard on N Halsted, warning that hotdogs kill. Cancer, you see. The message: not eating in moderation, but total hotdog abstinence.
I'd just had breakfast, which like almost every other meal I've had here, came with a huge, unbidden helping of fried potato. The enormity of the normal serving size here is deadly -- through diabetes and heart disease -- but exception was being made of a single food.
Instead of saying "eat less, mostly vegetables", there's a billboard for a single illness targeting a single food. Somewhere else, a diabetes agency has no doubt done a billboard about corn syrup (rather than declining bottomless refills).
I've been here five days and I'm already feeling swamped by a myriad of health messages. Almost invariably they are phrased as Don't Do X. None have sought to communicate skills and ideas for managing the complexities of your own health.
On Monday night I came to the Centre on Halsted for a forum about barebacking, called Risky Business, moderated by Fausto Fernos and Mark Felion from Feast of Fun - the top gay podcast on iTunes! - featuring Tony Valenzuela, Rev Musafa Ali and Dr Braden Berkey.
And something similar was happening. Rather than talk about pleasure, unsafe sex without the label, or the complexities of sexual negotiation in a mixed poz/neg sexual world, co-presenters Fausto and Mark sought a consensus: Don't Do Bareback.
The audience rebelled. Keith Green, someone I've long admired for his contributions to Lifelube and the Gay Men's Health Summit online community, challenged the panel: the subtitle for the event is "reclaiming pleasure" - why can't we talk about that?
Earlier this year, I helped organise a community forum at Sircuit Bar in Melbourne, Australia, called Ifs and Butts -- the Raw Truth about Bareback Porn. We had Chi Chi La Rue and Keith Webb from TitanMedia, but nobody speaking FOR bareback porn. Our audience members challenged us on that: this is not a real debate, they said, because there's nobody speaking for the other side.
That was for two reasons. First, I was told by their handler, Chi Chi and Keith would no longer sit on a panel with a bareback porn producer. The debates in America had become too toxic and they just weren't up for it anymore. Second, I could not have found anyone in Melbourne willing to take that position -- it would have been credibility suicide.
In this light, Tony Valenzuela is a huge asset to HIV prevention and gay men's health in America. He has come under intense personal attack as a socially distributed punishment for saying that he practiced and valued safe, unprotected sex.
Like so many other gay men. But, as Fausto would read out from his script, Tony "confessed" to it, and so became the flashpoint for a firestorm of judgment and controversy.
It is really important to permit that conversation, not treat it as a religious war. At the Summit, I was really impressed by the gentle, respectful treatment of a dissenter in a workshop about radical sexuality who criticised 'promiscuity' in quite sharp language.
"That was the queerest thing I've heard all weekend", said @4Lark, complimenting that participant on speaking out across the grain. Unfortunately, the same respect has not been extended to Tony Valenzuela in the post-forum discussion.
This stuff needs talking about. The rush to proclaim a consensus against it does damage. Peter Keogh cited work undertaken by Sigma Research in the United Kingdom, asking HIV-poz men who had unprotected sex with negative or unknown status partners what they thought about 'serosorting' (having bareback sex only with known same-status men).
And they'd reply "Oh God no, I would never serosort, that's so disgraceful", because the gay papers and commentators had heaped so much shame and scorn on people who serosort, stigmatising them as barebackers and blaming them for the HIV epidemic.
Yet among those poz guys, serosorting -- choosing other poz guys for unprotected sex -- is EXACTLY what we'd prefer they did.
It's one thing to criticise a practice. It's fine to discourage unsafe sex. But when this crosses over into attacking the person speaking up about the complexity of an issue, the personal cost becomes too high, and it does harm to our community.
Tony Valenzuela has been vilified for too long. It's time to back off and let him be. People are seeing it happen and leaving the LGBTI Health Movement because of it.
And you really won't like what messages and strategies start coming at you when that process is complete and there's no longer any space for conscience or dissent.
I got a very snippy response to my criticism of the way Feast of Fun conceived their role as facilitators. ("Pushing a barrow" means "pushing an agenda".) I have some longstanding concerns about our reliance on the media and entertainers to communicate about complex issues like HIV and sexuality, and for me this experience only confirms those misgivings.
But I'd like to suggest another way they could have approached the task of facilitating the forum: less like Judge Judy ("our court, our rules") and more like trustees, responsible and accountable for nurturing that conversation for the sake of our community.
There are signs of hope -- the next forum will pick up that question, asked by the audience, about how we can reclaim pleasure. (Hopefully including the pleasure of fucking, from the puritanism of risk-obsessed public health.) There's bottom-up programming, right there, and I'll be sure to tune into the podcast and see how it goes.
Hey Daniel,
I'm sure you know how much respect I have for you, so I feel comfortable saying this - if you're going to throw punches, you'd better have a thick skin.
Perhaps it's reminiscent of Saint Oscar Wilde's quote "Two {Three?} great nations separated by a common language", but your initial comment to Fausto sounds quite snippy and dismissive to me, and I assumed that it's intent was to be inflammatory and not to encourage dialog. So his response is not surprising (to me) in that context, if anything it sounds a bit tame.
I've come to expect a certain amount of jocular pushiness from the hosts of that podcast, including their attempts to come up with compromise solutions for problems where compromise won't solve it, where having the problem and on-going discussion is much preferable to trying to resolve it.
By the way, you had me chuckling with delight over that hot dog as cigarette ad. It was a very peculiar sight. Your commentary reminded me of visiting England and Wales, and being shocked to see this tiny speck of food on my plate called a meal! (and paying twice what I would have here for it).
Hey Bill, I hope this doesn't read as if I'm upset about the response I got from Marc Felion -- it came as no surprise and I'm not in the least bit offended. I'm new to Twitter and still learning not to Tweet what I think without politifying it first. Unfortunately, as the response to Tony's presentation shows, you can be gentle and thoughtful and well-reasoned, and still cop a headkicking -- so I guess I prefer to signal upfront that I'll kick back.
The Feast of Fun makes a great contribution to the discussion and I am happy they are at the table, even if I do not agree with them all the time. I guess I came away from the evening and didn't see Tony under attack. Different perspectives, but isn't that what it is all about?
I didn't necessarily think that Tony was under blatant attack during the forum either (although that remark should not be misconstrued to give the impression that I was overly impressed with much of what I heard or witnessed during the forum. I absolutely appreciate Jim and lifelube all their collaborators for creating the event...but I found much of the commentary that was offered problematic and I do think Tony was often put "on the spot" or in a somewhat defensive position).....but I think the real issue Daniel is raising here is not just the behavior and attitudes present in the forum itself, but in its aftermath----and even more problematically, how the reactions he has read/witnessed are so in keeping with a history of vilification of Tony for not towing the "party line" on what constitutes "healthy" or "normal" sexual expression....for daring to question a sexual normality (& pathology) that has been forced upon many and to, instead, offer to give queer men the space and freedom to define their sexuality/ies for themselves. And in the end, Daniel is spot on: this isn't something for which we should be persecuting Tony (and the many others who have joined his voice in speaking out), it something we should be celebrating...even if one doesn't always 100% agree...because it adds to the richness of dialogue about our necessarily rich queer and sexual lives.