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Sunday, Mar 21, 2010
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Letters |
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| SEATTLE LBGT CENTER
THANKS COMMUNITY Hello everyone!! The Center's Board and Staff would like to extend a HUGE thank you to the LGBTQ community and its allies for supporting us in our move towards a more vibrant Center. With challenges come new beginnings and energies which, with hard work, determination, and, last but not least, the input and support of the community, will make us a stronger LGBT Community Center. There is no better time than now to voice your opinions about what you as a community want to see the Center reincarnate into. Please, your comments are crucial to our strategic planning phase during this transition. We encourage you to e-mail anna@seattlelgbt.org with any input. Our most sincere thanks to Equal Rights Washington for providing us with our temporary home located at 209 Harvard Ave E between Olive and Thomas East of Broadway. A more permanent location will be announced in the next couple of weeks. The public can still access us through our website at www.seattlelgbt.org or our resource and referral line at 206.323.5428. Seattle LGBT Community Center MANY THANKS FOR "CLEAR, UNVARNISHED" LOOK AT PRIMARIES Many thanks for the clear, unvarnished and very systematic analysis by Lisa Keen in "Keen's Guide to Presidential Primaries" [SGN January 25].Keen proceeds logically, step-by-step, to review each candidate's position on LGBT issues, their voting records, and their relations to the LGBT community. She pulls no punches and shows no favorites. I'd recommend reprinting this article, or her update if there is one, in the next issue of the SGN. Readers are encouraged to bring the article to the caucuses on February 9 (starting at 1:00 p.m. - find your caucus location on www.kcdems.org by going to the map and clicking on your residence location). While the mainstream media consistently fails us by reporting mediocrity, it is a credit to the SGN to present the candidates in such a thoughtful manner. Thank you! Janice Van Cleve PCO 43/1858 43rd District Coordinator, Areas 21 & 22 CHOOSING TO BE GAY Many of us spent a considerable amount of time making a decision for our lives regarding our sexuality. Although it may have been difficult initially coming to terms with the situation, we discovered early on a choice must be made. Throughout the years our experiences determined a variety of lifestyles enhancing our ability to cope in a positive or negative manner. Today many advances have been made culturally. We, hopefully, don't have to hide from society any more, becoming imposters to ourselves. One choice available to us is to reach out to younger people and help them learn being Gay isn't a pockmark on their destiny. They too have a chance to become self-directed, happy, and productive. How long has it been since you made your CHOICE to become Gay? Buzz Flowers Callaway CHALLENGING GAY = DISEASE ASSUMPTION [The following letter was sent to veteran Gay and human rights activist Michael Petrelis (http://mpetrelis.blogspot.com).] Dear Michael, Kudos to you for publicly challenging this whole Gay sex = disease crap. I know we have the history of the entire AIDS epidemic, and like they say, "once bitten, twice shy," with these sensational news stories that sell papers and conferences. But AIDS came, it was awful, and while it is not "gone," it IS drastically better than it was, thank God, but AIDS Inc. needs to acknowledge this and stop saying that we are in the same state of alarm now that we were in 1982 just because they want to continue to make money at it. The ASOs need to tailor the need to what the need demands now, and while the need is important, it's not an emergency nor catastrophic. ASOs like AIDS Project Los Angeles are really more like Gay and Lesbian community centers now, doing substance abuse counseling and basically welfare services for the poor and quasi-homeless and mentally ill and addicted (as opposed to the sick with HIV), rather than really helping people cope with the health effects of HIV, where often even their poorest clients are often undetectable on meds (like I need to tell you this). But being in LA, I see this. And yet, APLA and AHF are among those often "sounding the alarm" just to keep itself going and not necessarily tailoring its programs to what its clients really want (which they never really have done that well; it's always been "let's give them what we want to give them, or what's funded," rather than what they really need). In a sense, what you're doing is good PR for the Gay community, because we've been maligned ever since the advent of AIDS as being a vermin scourge that brings "real people" down, kind of like Hitler's arguments against Jews in Germany in the '30s, and gee, look what happened to them. You're kind of like a one-man GLAAD, only you do a better job than all of GLAAD, who seems to be too often rather ineffectual. GLAAD really ought to have a secret, underground, radical division, like PETA's connections (I suspect) to the Animal Liberation Front. I'm sick of this whole "Gays = disease, therefore-let's-kill-them-all" mentality that the Right has that spills over all too often to those left of the Right, up to and including even some Gay men - hence the schism between poz and neg men in Gay communities all over the country now. There is now "good Gay" (negative) and "bad Gay" (positive), which has nothing to do with the specifics and practicalities of REAL HIV prevention (use a condom if you bottom), but has everything to do with social status, elitism, social power, etc. Neg guys suck cock and fuck ass, too - they just think they're doing it in some sanitized and "special" way that poz guys who dwell in the gutter aren't (even when the neg guys are barebacking). People aren't using condoms to prevent HIV, they're shunning all contact - sexual and social - with poz guys to do it. And when the guy simply "says" he's negative, when he's not, and then they bareback after giving each other the Negative Seal of Approval, bingo, that's when they both realize they were both already swimming in the poz pool after all. Of course, as long as the Christian-Right-dominated CDC has its gag order on graphic (read: realistic, effective) HIV prevention, it will be this way. Young Gay guys today have never seen an HIV prevention poster of a rock-hard cock with a condom on it the way we did 20 years ago (even under Reagan!) because that would be considered "obscene" by today's CDC. There is a correlation between sanitized, vague HIV prevention campaigns and higher HIV infection rates. And yet the staff of our ASOs who produce these vague, stupid, "HIV Stops with Me" posters do nothing to hurl shit at the CDC headquarters in protest like they should be doing. All this to say, good for you, Michael. Keep up the fight, and don't let the Gay = disease assumption go unchallenged - it may be one of the few things that keeps us out of the camps that would surely emerge during a Huckabee presidential administration. Best, Ken Howard |
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