In response to the US Supreme Court ruling allowing closely held corporations to deny insurance coverage of contraceptives to their employees based on religious beliefs, GLMA executive director Hector Vargas issued the following statement:

“We are disappointed at today’s troubling ruling. This decision opens the door to employers interfering with the healthcare decisions that should be between the employee and their healthcare provider. We are very worried about the potential implications this decision could have on LGBT-related healthcare, such as HIV and transgender-related care.

“Earlier this year, GLMA joined Lambda Legal and Pride at Work in submitting a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court because we know all too well how allowing personal beliefs to interfere with healthcare services can result in biased care or departure from scientifically sound standards of care, and can have disastrous effects for LGBT patients.

“The Affordable Care Act (ACA), which includes the contraceptive coverage provision at issue in this case, is incredibly beneficial to the health and well-being of the LGBT community, including important non-discrimination provisions covering LGBT people. A decision, like the one today, chipping away at benefits provided by the ACA is extremely concerning.

“The attempts by the majority decision to limit the effect of its ruling are of little comfort to LGBT people and make GLMA’s educational and policy work to expand access to healthcare for LGBT people, including ensuring non-discrimination in healthcare, all the more critical.”

From the Huffington Post…
by John-Manuel Andriote
Journalist and author, ‘Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America’

Thirty years ago, in an April 23, 1984 press conference in Washington, D.C., the world learned that American microbiologist Robert C. Gallo and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute had proved that a retrovirus first seen by their counterparts at Institut Pasteur in Paris was the cause of AIDS.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler also announced that day that the Gallo team had created a blood test to detect antibodies produced by the body to fight infection. With it we finally had the ability to know who was infected, to screen donated blood and to track the spread of the virus.

By the time of the announcement, 4,177 AIDS cases had been reported in the United States across 45 states. New York City alone accounted for more than 1,600 cases. San Francisco, far smaller than the nation’s largest city and the East Coast’s biggest gay mecca, had more than 500 cases. The majority of these cases were among gay men of all skin tones.

Although the HIV test was originally intended to screen the blood supply, it became available to the public in early 1985. After early uncertainty about what, exactly, a positive test meant, it became clear it meant that a microbial time-bomb was ticking inside you, set to explode at some unpredictable time in a nightmare that would eventually lead to your death from the cancers, dementia, brain infections and other horrors that attack a body when HIV has destroyed the immune system.

Continue reading on the Huffington Post.

From Jim Eigo, writer and activist, posted on the Huffington Post Gay Voices…

Between 2008 and 2010, new infections rose 12-percent for gay men while falling or remaining stable in all other populations. Transmission for young gay men spiked upwards 22 percent. MSM faced 30 times the HIV risk that straight guys faced. A gay African-American man was six times likelier to be infected with HIV than a white gay man, and a Hispanic man was three times likelier. Researcher Ron Stall’s 2009 prediction that more than half of young gay men would be HIV-positive by age 50 suddenly seemed a chilling underestimate.

In the early 1980s, faced with seeming extinction, gay men invented safer sex. Supported by pamphlets, videotapes and workshops, promulgated across gay sexual networks, safer sex emphasized lower-risk sex acts and using condoms for high-risk anal sex. Empowered to take control of their lives in the face of a deadly virus, gay guys drove HIV incidence down by 75 percent between 1984 and 1993. Believing that safer sex was all the prevention we’d ever need, we who were AIDS activists never fought for prevention research or the development of new prevention tools. We focused on securing treatments for the sick and potentially sick.

But we were wrong to think the original community consensus behind safer sex could survive an evolving epidemic. As early as 1993, even as AIDS deaths mounted, HIV incidence for gay men began a slow upward drift. Combination antiretroviral therapy, introduced in 1997, would make HIV a manageable disease for most who received treatment. The term “barebacking” came into use to refer to a conscious decision to discard condoms, at first an exceptional position that soon spread. Most ongoing prevention programs, unequal to the new epidemic, simply tinkered with the safer sex workshops of an earlier generation. A slow rise in HIV incidence for gay guys continued until the recent acceleration captured in the latest incidence report.

Read the full article on the Huffington Post.

The HIV Shame Game: What Role Do You Play?

Tyler Curry – Freelance columnist and fiction writer; creator, The Needle Prick Project

[…] According to the Center for Disease Control, 44 percent of people who are HIV positive are unaware of their status. Unfortunately, the people who may be perpetuating the shame game may soon find that it is they who need the bath. This is where the real danger lies. Allowing language like this to permeate our culture only serves to promote the continuation of the HIV epidemic and enforce a second viral class among the gay community.

Of course, the burden of change rests on the shoulders of those affected the most by the shame game. It may seem easier for HIV-positive men to retreat into the shadows when friends and strangers alike unknowingly use language that make them feel like a pariah in dignitaries’ clothing. However, many of these accidental offenders are victim of the same phenomenon that was the basis of so much prejudice against gay men and women. They simply don’t have a personal connection to the disease. HIV-positive men owe it to themselves to speak out against language that demeans their worth. They also owe it to their HIV-negative friends to educate them on the reality so that they don’t continue to proliferate stigma or believe that they are removed from risk.

HIV-positive men aren’t victims, vampires, zombies or martyrs. The social and psychological factors surrounding infection are complex, difficult and impossible to simplify into one category.

Of course, the language we use and terminology we’ve chosen to isolate one another is just the one element of the shaming that goes on within the gay community. Combating HIV stigma is a multifarious problem that will require numerous endeavors and will take time before we start seeing measurable change.

Read the full post on The Huffington Post Blog.

From the Huffington Post…

Until very recently, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have been invisible in health care. Most providers do not ask about sexual orientation or gender identity, nor are they trained in the unique health care needs of LGBT people or the health disparities they experience. Many LGBT patients are not “out” to their providers; as a result, they are not screened for issues that may disproportionately affect LGBT people. Moreover, sexual orientation isn’t just about identity. For example, a recent study found that nearly 10 percent of men who identified as straight had had sex with another man in the past year — and these men were less likely to use condoms than men who identified as gay. This underscores the need to ask questions about sexual behavior as well as sexual identity.

[…]Asking about sexual orientation and gender identity in clinical settings is a critical step that will enhance our knowledge of LGBT population health and improve patient-provider interactions. There are important health reasons to ask about sexual orientation and gender identity. For example, providers who know that a patient is a sexually active gay man can warn him about a recent syphilis outbreak and test him for sexually transmitted infections more common among gay men.

Read the full article on the Huffington Post.

From the Huffington Post Blog…

To End AIDS Among Black Gay and Bi Men, There’s a Need for Action

The face of AIDS as imagined by some in America is that of a black gay or bisexual man. Indeed, black gay and bisexual men, or men who have sex with men (MSM), have the highest HIV rates in the country. Black MSM are commonly portrayed as as “down low brothers” who transmit the disease to women by having unsafe sexual relationships with men on the side, or even as carriers of the disease by default, somehow. These stereotypes treat the epidemic as a result of ignorance about safe sexual practices, or of homophobia, and in doing so they offer an overly simplistic solution to a far more complex problem.

What all too often goes unaddressed is the fact that black MSM tend to be at the intersection of multiple identities and challenging circumstances — racism, homophobia and economic disenfranchisement — that adversely affect their access to HIV testing, prevention and treatment. That intersection is a very dangerous place, and our various communities and the federal government have yet to respond adequately to address our health and service needs.

Continuie reading here.