MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

OUT Magazine Asks: Has MANHUNT Destroyed Gay Culture?

The September 2008 issue of OUT Magazine features a powerful article of interest: "Has MANHUNT Destroyed Gay Culture?" by Michael Joseph Gross.

Gross' article focuses on Manhunt.net, a site for men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) and the fastest growing gay website in the world, with over 1 million members and more than 400,000 unique visitors per month, all  in the USA alone - and the site serves some 100 countries. 

More importantly, the article considers how online cruising has changed gay urban social life by, for example, driving human interactions from physical spaces to virtual ones and encouraging the "pornification" of gay self-expression.   

Apparently, one UK study found that in 1993, 2.3% of gay men found their first male sex partner online; by 2003 that number had risen to 61.2%.  OUT quotes Jeffrey Klausner of the San Francisco Department of Public Health: "It means that gay men who were once socialized in brick-and-mortar establishments, surrounded by other people, are now being socialized online."

The question for conscious, spiritual LGBT people then becomes, "Is that virtual socialization creating a community of healthy, self-actualized MSM?"  The answer seems to be an obvious "No."

As Gross puts it in OUT, "If you were asked to design the perfect weapon to exploit this vulnerability as it manifests in attractive, urban gay men, you'd want something that would intensify our isolation, exaggerate our propensity to objectify ourselves - by encouraging us to believe that our purpose is to look good and have lots of sex."

Isolation.  Objectification.  Lack of genuine communication and community.  These should be issues of real concern to spiritual LGBT people, especially to LGBT-affirming body/mind/spirit resource providers like those listed on MyOutSpirit.com. 

So much of our work is about affirming that LGBT people (in this case, MSM) are so much more than just bodies - that we are not only physical/sexual, but intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual beings.  The hardest part of the job, it often seems, is convincing LGBT people themselves of that truth. 

Gross writes, "The most powerful secrets we keep on Manhunt aren't the ones we keep from the outside world.  The most powerful secrets on Manhunt are the ones we keep from ourselves.  Practically every gay man has his own version of this secret, which we learned to keep while growing up in the closet: the secret fear that, if we were truly known, we would never be loved.

"...When you came out, you did it because you wanted something," Gross continues. "Part of what you wanted was sex, but part of what you hoped for was the possibility of being loved as your true self." 

As always, online or off-line, we are choosing between Love and Fear, living fully or shrinking from our potential, shining our light or hiding it under a bushel.

I won't ruin the whole article - there's a lot more there ripe for discussion and consideration, and I hope you will choose to leave your comments on the article at OUT.com as well as in response to this post. 

With the near ubiquity of online cruising among MSM, it's important that conscious LGBT people like the readers of this Gay Spirituality Blog look directly at the problems that virtual socialization may cause and how we can remedy them before it's too late.  That said, we also have to be realistic - online social networking, cruising...these things are not going away.  We need a BOTH/AND solution, not an EITHER/OR solution.

"We need to put our heads together and try to figure out what we want normative social life to look like.  Whatever the answer turns out to be, it will involve creating social structures that serve and gratify our desire to have sex with each other and also promote and support the possibility of developing and sustaining intimate relationships."  I would add to Gross' call for our attention: whatever the answers are, they must consider the development and well-being of the WHOLE person, not only sexual and romantic.  And frankly, there's no time to waste.

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The Thousand Flowers: a guided visualization for people living with HIV/AIDS

A guided visualization specifically for people with HIV/AIDS, customized by the author for the introduction of integrase inhibitors into a combination therapy (i.e., his own situation). HIV/AIDS patients are invited to record this visualization in their own voice, making changes appropriate for their own treatment situation, and then listen to it daily as a guided meditation. Time: approximately 10 minutes.

Once upon a time there was a garden, a beautiful field of a thousand flowers. There were purple and red and golden flowers. White flowers and blue flowers. Flowers of many petals, flowers that look like radiant starbursts, and flowers so bright they make you want to smile...

Full visualization in HTML, Word doc, PDF. Feel free to copy, redistribute, and make derivative works with attribution to the author (Joe Perez).

Blokes who get it on with dudes

In his column for the Southern Voice, Paul Varnell looks at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention's coinage "MSM" (short for "men who have sex with men.") He acknowledges the utility of the term MSM for including men who don't identify themselves as gay but nevertheless engage in homosexual sexual behavior. The impetus for Varnell's look: a recently published telephone survey of more than 4,000 men in New York City discovered that MSM who deny the gay or bi labels are actually more numerous than self-acknowledged gay or bi men. That's a lot of "straight" dudes getting it on with blokes!

An irreplaceable loss: Eric Rofes, 1954-2006

The community of gay men experienced an enormous loss this Monday with the death of Eric Rofes of an apparent heart attack.

Eric was a scholar and an author (Dry Bones Breathe, Reviving the Tribe). He was an outspoken advocate for gay male sexuality at a time when the AIDS crisis was causing many to submerge the importance of the erotic in the face of the epidemic.  At the same time, he fought to help the medical establishment and the gay community understand that gay male health couldn't be reduced to safer sex education.  His concern led to the formation of the gay men’s health movement.

New hope in AIDS fight

As most of you surely know, too few drugs that show early promise ever pan out, so it's wise to remain cautious. There's been too much hype and false "AIDS cures." But this BYU study, reported in the Salt Lake Tribune, sound hopeful. If future tests confirm the early promise of a new compound, it could be the first drug that actually kills HIV. The compound may also be effective against other viruses ranging from herpes to influenze. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for the link.

All I Want is a Cure and My Friends Back

There's a t-shirt in my closet at home, black with white lettering, that bears the words above. It expresses the sentiment that's in my heart today. It's World AIDS Day, and a day on which I can't help thinking about all the people who have been lost; the ones close to me and the people never knew but who meant something to someone.

It was on my mind this morning when I picked my son up and carried him downstairs, and it was on my mind when I kissed him and my husband goodbye and made my way out the door. It wasn't until I was on the train that it truly hit me. I was sitting, reading and listening to music, and the next song that played was Warren Zevon's "Keep Me In Your Heart for a While," written before his own death from lung cancer.

Shadows are falling and I'm running out of breath
Keep me in your heart for a while
If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less
Keep me in your heart for a while

When you get up in the morning and you see that crazy sun
Keep me in your heart for a while
There's a train leaving nightly called when all is said and done
Keep me in your heart for a while

Sitting there on the train I did something I almost never do. I wept. I closed my book, bowed my head, covered my face so that no one would see, and quietly wept. Sentimental, I know. But I couldn't help it.

Technorati Tags: current events, health, world aids day

HIV + HIV – and HIV ? Stories 2004

One initiative from the Gay Spirit Culture Summit is a storytelling gathering hosted by the HIV + HIV- HIV ? group. It is an opportunity for men of HIV+, HIV- and unknown HIV status to have conversations about their stories in order to experience the healing that comes from deep listening and from sharing one’s truth in a safe and caring space.

Four talented performance artists who have taken their story and their healing to a public level will share their stories and their performances that touch hearts and open dialogue that results in healing. The weekend may reveal how performance can enhance the healing power of your story!

For more information on this gathering to take place September 10-12, 2004 at Easton Mountain, please visit our HIV +/-/? page or call Easton Mountain at 1 800 553 8235.

Sex-positive sexual ethics

A dear friend -- bright, loving, sexy and sophisticated -- informed me the other day that he had recently had unprotected anal sex with a stranger. A client told me the same thing later that day. In fact, several clients have told me the same thing over the past several months. These are not stupid men. They were not seeking out “bareback” sex. Rather, they found themselves in an erotic encounter with someone who turned them on and decided not to stop it.

A former safer sex educator in Atlanta once said that gay men care more about their next orgasm than about their own lives. He expressed deep frustration over his lack of success in “educating” men to make other choices. Is he right? Are there things we gay men don’t know about safer sex? Are we such pleasure-seekers that we lose sight of our own well-being in the process?

An AIDS education divide in Seattle: 'Shamelessly gay' or 'Slow down'

A recent article in The Seattle Times explains that approaches to AIDS education in Seattle seem to be divided into two camps.

One camp urges a "shameless" approach that nurtures gay self-esteem. It doesn't challenge behaviors like anonymous sex. Fred Swanson, executive director of Gay City, helped to produce public health education messages like this one: "Anonymous sex doesn't give you HIV. Unsafe sex does."

The other camp urges less anonymous sex, accountability around disclosing HIV status, and treating one another as people rather than as disposable sex objects. Its approach was described by Dan Savage, syndicated sex columnist and editor of The Stranger, an alternative weekly in Seattle: "They need to start telling gay men the things that gay men don't want to hear."

Two-spirits present challenge for Navajo AIDS educators

An article in the Salt Lake Tribune explains that the fluidity of gender rules in Native American cultures presents challenges for HIV/AIDS and public health education. Here's a clip:

American Indians are flexible about letting people choose gender roles -- social roles rather than biological identity -- not always based on their sexual identity, Thomas said.

"The Western perspective is a binary gender class," [Wesley] Thomas [a Navajo who is co-editor of the book, Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality] said. "You're either a man or a woman. It's so inflexible; it's static. Native Americans have more flexibility."

In this world of movable gender lines, the label "gay" for men who have sex with men doesn't always fit. If a man has sex with a male who presents himself to the world as a female, he may not call himself gay.