LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
In Brief |
News from Here, There and Everywhere |
Anti-Gay Attitudes Breed Student-on-Student Violence The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) said recently that a new Gallup Poll linking anti-gay and racist attitudes with student-on-student violence should send a clear mandate for school administrators to address these prejudices as they work to create comprehensive safe school plans. The poll, released May 21, revealed that high school students who are aware of violence-prone groups in their schools believe these groups present a particular threat to gay students. Fifty-eight percent affirmed that violence-prone groups could be dangerous to gay students, with fifty percent reporting to have heard these groups espouse hatred of gays. Fifty-one percent of the students also stated that violence-prone groups could be dangerous to black, Hispanic or other minority students. "These findings strongly suggest that countering anti-gay bias and racism in the classroom goes hand in hand with countering violence in schools. You cant do one without the other," said GLSEN Executive Director Kevin Jennings. "Especially in post-Columbine America, school officials must realize that tolerating anti-gay bias and racism in the school community creates a learning environment that is ultimately unsafe for every student." GLSEN notes that while this poll points only to the potential for violence, studies show that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students face actual harassment on a near-daily basis. The Massachusetts State Department of Education and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found that lesbian, gay and bisexual students are more than seven times as likely as their heterosexual classmates to be threatened with a weapon at school. They are also more than five times as likely to skip school due to feeling unsafe at or en route to school. Finally, GLSEN studies indicate that the average high school student hears anti-gay epithets 25 times a day. "The anti-gay attitudes expressed in this study are not surprising, certainly not to us and probably not to the students who were polled," continued Jennings. "We can no longer afford to be surprised, or to lose these lessons on the very people responsible for keeping our students safe. Theres simply no such thing as being a little safe. Either every student is safe or theres no meaningful safety at all." GLSEN is the largest national organization working to end the damaging effects of anti-gay bias in Americas K-12 schools. For more information call 212-727-0135 or visit http://www.glsen.org. Hundreds of Gay Men Launch Gay Mens Health Movement Several hundred gay men are expected to converge on Boulder, Colorado, from July 29-August 1 for the Gay Mens Health Summit to broaden gay mens health efforts beyond its recent focus on HIV prevention to include a wide array of health issues that gay men encounter. "We are determined to transform health promotion for gay men from HIV prevention, to a focus on wellness, community building, and multi-issue health advocacy," said Eric Rofes, San Francisco community organizer and summit coordinator. "To bring down the level of HIV among gay men, weve got to develop new approaches to substance use, societal homophobia, and sexual health. HIV cannot continue as an all-encompassing metaphor for gay mens health. Weve got to build a gay mens health movement as powerful as the movement to fight AIDS in the 1980s." The summit will address a range of challenges to gay mens health and safety, including anti-gay violence, substance abuse, smoking, childhood sexual abuse, and eating disorders. Organizers describe the summit as a grassroots effort beholden to no organizations, government officials, or major corporations. "The Summit is quickly evolving into a huge, independent grassroots effort to spur community-based organizing and activism around gay mens health," said Matt Brown, of Boulder and one of the summits organizers. A series of sessions will focus on gay men in their teens and 20s, and explore this generations relationship to sexual health and HIV, interactions with older generations, and relationship to gay identity and community. Because HIV/AIDS continues to affect many gay men of all colors and generations, key sessions will be devoted to HIV prevention, treatment, service delivery, and communal response. Yet the summit is organized to encourage such efforts to occur within a broader context of gay mens mental, physical, spiritual, and sexual health, and hence will tackle issues such as homophobia and racism, hepatitis, cancer and heart disease, eating disorders, depression and suicide, domestic violence, smoking, sex addiction, sexually-transmitted diseases, and a range of anorectal disorders. Among other sessions planned are "Midlife Gay Male Sexual Replenishment: Viagara and testosterone," "Health Challenges Facing Older (Gay) Men," and "The Post-AIDS Generation." One session entitled "What Can Gay Men Learn from the Lesbian Health Movement?" will explore lessons learned from a decade of lesbian health organizing. A feature of the Boulder Summit will be an intensive focus on the health implications of the controversial party circuit, coordinated by Alan Brown, of the Electric Dreams Foundation, which promotes safer partying. In addition to tackling controversies surrounding circuit culture, workshops will focus on the drug GHB/GBL, the value of dance and celebration in gay subcultures. Seattles Gay City Health Project, whose grassroots organizing, savvy marketing, and "community building" will be featured, as will Philadelphias SafeGuards Project, which transformed itself from an HIV prevention program to a gay mens health advocacy project. Information is available on the web at http://www.bcap.org or by calling Mark Beyer of the Boulder County AIDS Project at 303-444-6121. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 9, No. 6, June 4, 1999 |