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Editor, The Front Page
"During the past decade it's felt as if control of an LGBTI health agenda was moving away from our communities and more and more towards governmental bodies," said Rofes, who convened this year's summit. While not disparaging the efforts "to professionalize our movement," Rofes pointed out that these individuals "cannot do the work of people on the street making demands and holding public officials accountable." Rofes envisions a health movement "that's not just focused on doctors meeting with doctors, and social workers meeting with social workers, but all kinds of health professionals, queers and queer allies within the public health system, grassroots activists, queer journalists, regular rank and file people who are affected by health delivery to queer people." A Five-Year Revolution
He approached various organizations, including the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), and two major LGBT community centers, about assuming sponsorship of the event. There was little interest. While all agreed the loss of the conference left important gaps, these organizations were already deeply committed to other projects. At the same time, Rofes approached several lesbian health leaders to explore reconceptualizing and reviving the annual conference via pre-existing organizations. Almost unanimously, women told him that, while they might be interested in the future, at that particular point, their organizing was just gathering energy and they were more eager to pursue a lesbian-focused health agenda than work in coalition with gay men. One leader, Marj Plumb, added an important suggestion. "The area that really needs organizing is gay men's health beyond HIV/AIDS," she told Rofes. "Why don't you go out and organize a gay men's health movement? Once that is in place, we can talk about working again in coalition to resurrect the conference." For a variety of reasons, that seemed to hit the nail on the head. Rofes shifted his focus and began working with gay men to develop a multi-issue, multicultural gay men's health movement. This resulted in the Gay Men's Health Summits held in 1999 and 2000. Under the fiscal sponsorship of the Boulder County AIDS Project (BCAP), these events drew 300 and 500 participants respectively. These summits sparked a broad range of activity focused on gay men's health and wellness, and triggered the organizing of local/regional gay men's health summits during 2001 -- including the Southeast Regional Gay Men's Health Summit and the North Carolina Gay Men's Health Summit. These were intended to "bring home" some of the dialogue and information generated by the national summits. At the same time, organizing was occurring among bisexual, transgender, and intersex activists. The groundbreaking Intersex Society of North America began to transform U.S. medical practice. Transgender activists created a variety of health-focused groups and campaigns, including UCSF's studies of transgenders of color, the first broad-based research into transgender health. Lani Kaíahumanu joined with other leading bisexual organizers to develop the model Safer Sex Sluts Project, while Boston's Fenway Community Health Center initiated a pioneering bi-focused health project. After the Gay Men's Health Summit 2000, Rofes began to network and bring together colleagues to begin conceptualizing a gathering of health organizers from LGBTI communities that would be dramatically different from the NLGHA-sponsored events of the late 1990s. Over the following six months, a 10-member volunteer collective was formed that worked -- almost entirely by email -- to develop a vision and create a mission for what became known as LGBTI Health Summit 2002. Challenging Discussions With over 175 institutes, workshops, panel discussions, and plenary sessions featuring many well-known researchers, authors, and health advocates, the summit covered the full gamut of LGBTI health issues, from the needs of queer youth, to same-sex parenting, to the issues of lesbian and bi women facing menopause and aging gay men. Body image, depression, same-sex domestic violence, and healthy anal sex were among the many topics discussed. The first conference plenary was devoted to intersex issues and why they matter to the queer health movement. Several summit participants remarked that this was the most challenging discussion of the weekend.
"So the idea that identity is not the only basis for community was a challenging one in this context -- rather than a shared identity, intersex people are looking for allies among the LGBT community. And of course the major challenge to society is to learn to tolerate ambiguity when it comes to sex and gender," he said. "The intersex sessions were very well attended, and I think some people were surprised to hear that the Intersex Society of North America is not advocating intersex as an identity," said Jamison Green, chairman of Gender Education & Advocacy, Inc. "Often people who organize based on sexual orientation as an identity-based movement project identity-based models onto other populations; with intersex and trans issues, identity-based models don't always work, even though many of our issues -- including healthcare access -- overlap with those of the gay and lesbian communities. Besides many intersexed and transgender and transsexual people are ALSO gay, lesbian or bisexual." "I got a huge amount out of the speakers at the Intersex plenary and I heard the same from many other gay men," Rofes added. "I think what was powerful for us was coming once again to the realization about the ways in which sex and gender are struggles for all of us against a medical establishment and legal establishment that is determined to constrict and control us. "And I was especially moved by the ways that children who experience the trauma of medical intervention against their bodies face huge challenges to intimacy later in life. " Stretching Personal Limits Many summit participants took to heart the organizing collective's exhortation to step outside their "comfort zone" to learn about other segments of the LGBTI community. Dialogs between bisexual and gay men, and between queer FTM transmen and non-trans gay and bi men, offered the opportunity for participants to discuss their misconceptions, fears, and desires regarding the other group. Several workshops encouraged such cross-pollination, including a session on how "gay community" is defined differently by men of different generations, a dialog between gay and bisexual men, and a conversation between queer female-to-male (FTM) transmen and non-trans gay and bi men. "The presence of trans-men, many of whom brought both their history as feminists from back when they were lesbians and a current, testosterone powered enthusiasm for gay male sex, were a particularly great and instructive addition," said Daniel Wolfe, author of Men Like Us: the GMHC Complete Guide to Gay Men's Sexual, Physical and Emotional Well-Being. "I got a chance to co-facilitate a session on the history and meaning of the public restroom," Wolfe added, "which got some very interesting and complicated dialogue going between gay men and transgender folks about whether bathrooms were sites of pleasure, trauma, or both." Beth Firestein, a psychologist from Colorado and editor of Bisexuality: the Psychology and Politics of an Invisible Minority, noted "the key role bisexual people play in bridging gay and straight members of erotic subcultures and creating a welcoming environment for people of all orientations and gender identities. "I think there's a similarity between bisexual and transgendered and transsexual people in that people struggling with gender identity issues and people coming to terms with bisexual identities are both moving beyond the binary categories of gender and sexual orientation," she said. "We need to keep moving. We've made one paradigm shift, from an illness model of homosexual to gay and lesbian affirmative models. But we need to go further and make that next shirt to more fluid and continuous models that are gay lesbian bisexual and transgender affirmative." Jamison Green commented, "The pre-conference Transgender Institute was a great all-day session where healthcare advocates strategized a number of 'next-steps' to improve access to healthcare for gender-variant people, regardless of their sexual orientation. Gay and lesbian health advocates are often unaware that HIV infection rates are outrageously high among transgender and transsexual women (male-to-female transpeople), particularly transwomen of color in large metropolitan areas." A Wide Range of Workshops Workshops on the lesbian health movement and AIDS activism explored the lessons to be learned from earlier movements. Organizers and participants expressed the desire to build a diverse, grassroots queer health movement -- and to push LGBTI groups include health issues and health organizations include LGBTI issues. Another new feature was a full track of workshops focusing on drug use, harm reduction, and treatment in the queer community, including a session on the history and meaning of drug use in the gay circuit party scene. "These sessions argued persuasively if provocatively for a wider conversation beyond abstinence-based treatment and abuse-biased research," Shewey said, "Drug-treatment approaches that ignore the ways people successfully manage the pleasures and risks of substances are unlikely to reach the people they're attempting to serve. "In our conservative political environment, this is a perspective that there is a lot of pressure to squash and silence. At the Boulder summit, individuals spoke very courageously and personally in a way that opened up the conversation in a very illuminating manner," he added. Richard Elovich, professor of public health at the City University of New York, who coordinated the track, said "We need to address pleasure and desire as well as risk. Harm reduction is not about ideology, it's about facing reality." Pleasure and desire were themes throughout the conference. Anna Forbes of the Global Campaign for Microbicides and Chris Bartlett led a session on the development of microbicides and how they might be used by gay men to prevent disease transmission during anal sex. For example, do men who bareback simply dislike condoms, or does unprotected sex hold deeper meanings? Might anal microbicides offer a compromise between condom use and throwing caution to the wind? "Microbicides are harm reduction," said Forbes. "Studying and funding microbicides is a no-brainer, even if they do not provide 100 percent protection." Looking Beyond HIV and Cancer A theme of the earlier gay men's health summits was looking beyond AIDS to other health issues that affect the community. At this year's summit the focus was even broader, looking beyond pathologies and problems to address wellness and strengths of the LGBTI community -- what organizing collective member T. Scott Pegues called an "empowered, asset-based, wellness model of health." "For the last couple of decades gay men's health initiatives have focused overwhelmingly on HIV/AIDS and lesbian health centers on breast cancer -- both important to focus on, but when approached from a crisis mentality they override all other health issues in gay men's and lesbians' lives," said Shewey.
"It's one of the few events I've ever been to where leading researchers, female to male trans activists from San Francisco, outreach workers from Butte, Montana, and clinicians from all over the country are talking to each other as colleagues, rather than from opposite sides of the podium," he added. "If the 'movement' could figure out how to capture some of the attitude-free, constructive spirit of the Boulder Summit, 'the movement' would be the better for it." Shewey noted that this was an event in which "participants paid their own way and which was not dominated by star speakers flown in for the occasion." Rofes added: "While I'd be the first to argue that we continue to draw on the wisdom and experience of lesbians and gay men who're been doing this work forever, we have also got to draw on new leadership and new thinking about gender, sex, and health that have been produced more recently. "If this movement is to become meaningful to future generations of queers, we cannot tokenize bisexual, transgender, and intersex issues, but must understand the profound ways in which leaders from these communities are transforming the ways we look at gay and lesbian health itself." Monica McLemore of Stanford University put it this way, "My focus, being bisexual, is on bisexual research agenda. In order to put together that bisexual health agenda, we have a lot to learn from gay men, and lesbians, and transpeople and intersex people. For all of us not to be working in tandem is a waste of resources." "The Summit was a great opportunity to network with people developing programs in diverse areas, to exchange knowledge, and to get particular issues onto the community radar screen," Green said. "The young people at the summit (under 35) clearly had an entirely new, fluid approach to understanding gender and sexual identity, highly influenced by queer theory, pop culture, and the emergence of the transgender community," Shewey said. "I can't begin to speak for these new ideas, but they were very much in the air."
Conference participants also heard reports from the International AIDS conference in Barcelona and the Queer Disability Conference held in June. Several sessions looked at international aspects of the LGBTI health movement, with presenters from Australia, Canada, Japan, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Participants came away from the summit with plans to organize separate gay, lesbian, transgender, and other meeting in odd-numbered years -- the next Gay Men's Health Summit is already being planned for 2003 -- and unified LGBTI summits in alternate years. The summit, hosted by the Boulder County AIDS Program, was sponsored by the Gill Foundation and Bristol-Myers Squibb; the Astrea National Lesbian Action Foundation provided scholarship support. All rights reserved |
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Eric Rofes at the Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, and Intersex Health Summit 
LGBTI Health Summit 2002 convener Eric Rofes, Pat Dunn of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, Bisexual Foundation director Luigi Ferrer, and Monica McLemore of Stanford University discuss the status and future of the LGBTI health movement 
Emi Koyama (left) and Cheryl Chase (right) of the Intersex Society of North America, and psychiatrist and historian of science Vernon Rosario discussed the concerns of people with intersex conditions and why these are important to the LGBT community 
Eric Rofes 
Bisexual Foundation director and LGBTI Health Summit 2002 collective member Luigi Ferrer