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Opinion From the Editor
Listening
I had a small window of opportunity to attend last week’s National Gay Men’s Health Summit so I chose to go to a session titled “Listening to Crystal without Prejudice.” Gay men’s health guru Eric Rofes moderated the session as two other panelists read from articles they had written on the topic.
Psychotherapist Jean Malpas read vignettes of three men’s lives with meth, but then dug deeper to get at the root of ‘why’ they became addicted.
The easy answer that most cling to and never progress beyond, he says, is escapism and gratification. Malpas asks if there is also an element of homophobia at work. Social attitudes shape our self-esteem, self-respect and self-worth.
“Few talk about how external and internalized homophobia, with its ‘stigma-shame-acting out’ nexus, might be the catalyst to crystal addiction and to risk-taking behaviors leading to HIV infection,” he writes. For one of the men, “doing crystal was a way of adhering to the norms of the group he wanted to be part of. [He] found in the ‘rituals’ of sex parties and circuit parties an environment that supports his identity as a gay man.”
The other panelist, Tony Valenzuela, read from an article so powerful that each word seemed to plunge through my heart like a saw-toothed blade.
“Ours is a culture of death beautified. Our organizations’ boardrooms and community fund-raisers are rife with professional mourners eliciting the gay plague with every new predicament we face. It takes a strong will to believe in longevity, even in defiance of the HIV that may run through your veins. It takes a discerning mind to filter the bombardment of frightful messages concerning our sexual choices; a mind that resists the perpetual reminders from many of our activists, our health organizations, that peril is everywhere … This paradigm of terror always looming over our intimate lives is an inescapable reality. But it is worth noting that in the gay community, the sky is always falling — because it did once, because we fear it might again, and so we shouldn’t be shocked when an alarming number of us respond to endemic fatalism by practicing nihilism by rote.”
“One doesn’t have to have a problem with drugs or be infected with HIV to feel the painful legacy of AIDS or to know the slow suffocation of homophobia. These cataclysms reside beneath the surface of our skins and come up as boils every time another state writes anti-gay discrimination into its constitution, another school board erases us from textbooks, or more parents teach their children to revile us. The future of drug addiction is all but guaranteed in a population of gay kids growing up in today’s savagely anti-gay, Constitution-hating age of hyperbole.”
We talked in the session about how many gay men feel very isolated, that they don’t belong to the community. They, in turn, join the ‘cland’ of PnP parties or alcholism or über-sex. Don’t we all look pretty great when we’re high or drunk or in the hormone-miasma that permeates through hot sex?
Society is forever feeding us that we are not worthwhile human beings. The name-calling, the institutionalized hate, the “love the sinner, hate the sin.” The sin is part of us. It is an important part of us.
Valenzuela continued about a panelist at a West Hollywood event.
“[He] held his head down when asked to pose a solution to the “crystal pandemic,” as one panelist called it. For a moment, I thought he was about to cry. Finally, he looked up and said, ‘I’m not sure what the answers are.’”
We didn’t get to answers in the session either, but it gave us all a great deal to think about.
And I only had an hour and a half.
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