LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
CAMPsafe Summer 2000 |
by Salvatore Seeley |
Phew! The Memorial Weekend rush is over. I think everyone had a great time despite the weather. The 10,000 condoms we received last week are being stuffed (what do we mean by stuffed? Hee hee!) and distributed. The first in a series of collectible postcards are available (I tried to match the buns on the cards to some of the buns that I saw this weekend). I had a great time meeting new people and talking about our CAMPsafe program. I got a lot of great feedback about our program and also some questions that have re-shaped the way I think about safe sex. We have all heard the "safe-sex" message of using a condom to protect ourselves against HIV and STD's or remaining abstinent. Are we really paying attention to that message? NO! New infection rates among young gay men are up despite the messages we hear. I have spent time thinking about this and why we tend to tune out when we hear about safe sex. In a nutshell, I think gay men tend to think of HIV prevention as something that is inherently repressive and sex-negative. So, you may ask how should the gay community approach HIV prevention. The answer lies in Sex-positive HIV Prevention. Sex-positive HIV prevention is about gaining greater self-knowledge about our sexuality, our desires, about what turns us on, and about the moment of sex. It is about starting an open dialogue among the men that it is trying to address. This calls for the need to ask open-ended questions, and to trigger reflection and critical thinking through such methods as simple conversation. It means also that HIV prevention includes ongoing discussion about a number of topics (not just about using a condom), such as image, power, trust, partners, boyfriends, casual sex, intimacy, love, serostatus and disclosure. Fostering critical thinking within HIV prevention is very important. It implies being flexible about the range of responses that individuals may give to the same questions. With a common goal in mind (in this case reducing the number of new HIV infections), gay men will find different ways to achieve the goal for themselves and for their sexual partners. Sex-positive HIV prevention is also about emphasizing the value of survival and our role in constructing communities and a future for gay men. However, just as people will come up with very different strategies to stay uninfected, or to not infect others, they will also have very different views about community and about the future. This implies the need to always talk about community and the future in the plural and to integrate our diversity of perspectives in that process. Some men see the further increase of having sex with multiple partners, others emphasize intimacy in relationships, some are considering both, and others neither. Sex-positive prevention requires the creation of multiple options. The lesson we should learn from the straight community is that a "normal" message of safe sex imposes one view of community and one view of the future on everybody. If anything, the lesson learned is that being sex-positive requires the creation of new and multiple options. Sex-positive HIV prevention also accepts that people can live all kinds of sexual lives, and still avoid becoming infected or infecting others with HIV. It calls for our making informed decisions about risk taking and for avoiding assumptions about partners that could lead to infection. It also requires an awareness about how we act at the moment of sex, and what particular situations could bring us to taking unwanted risks as a result of the heat of the moment. CAMPsafe's hope this year is to put this "idea" of Sex-positive HIV prevention into practice by offering arenas in which gay men can become educated, have a good time and maybe re-shape what they think about HIV prevention. Hopefully, this will foster an idea of community that will stay with us when we return home from the beach. I challenge all those who have read this article to: re-examine what they think of safe sex, why you may or may not take risks or how you can foster the growth of gay community in your own lives. Let me know what you think! Salvatore Seeley will keep you up-to-date on CAMPsafe all summer long. You can reach him at SalvatoreSeeley@aol.com or through CAMP Rehoboth. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 10, No. 6, June 2, 2000. |