New Blog

I am going to continue blogging, but about my work in general. New blog is here. I have a lot of travel coming up and look forward to being able to reflect on some of the other meetings and conferences I attend. So please check out the new blog. Thanks.

I’m not done yet

I will still be posting thoughts and info from the summit. While I’ve returned home, there is still a lot to reflect on and talk about. So keep on checking back for more stuff. (I have some text from talks, and other things to add too.)

And please add some of you own. Thanks to folks for reading and for commenting. Let’s keep it going.

Queer Disability Resources

I attended a the Disability Inclusion workshop, organized by Hawk Stone, and offered to share some resources with those attending. I also want to post them here. There are so many natural connections, and a whole lot of overlap, between queer health and disability rights issues. I was really surprised there was but one workshop that made the connection. At one of the Tobacco workshops, a person from St. Louis, talked about not being able to go to smokey bars, not because of discomfort or second-hand smoke (which are also real reasons…), but because of Environmental Illness–she, and many others, get physically sick in smokey environments. It becomes an issue of ACCESS, just like ramps for wheel chairs or ASL interpreters for Deaf people who sign. Access is a wider way to frame “can someone come to your event” and includes financial access, geographical access, cultural relevancy access. (This “politics of access” frame work is from fellow QD conference organizer Alison Kafer.)

This more broad way of looking at access was reflected in the conference evaluation, which asked “Did you have any issues regarding access to the conference?”

Anyway, here are the resources I mentioned.
Hi folks who attended the Disability Session at the Summit:

Queer Disability list serve that is active via Yahoo. Here it is:

1) This is the website to join the group, via Yahoo.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/QueerDisability/

2) And this is the address to send an email to the group:
QueerDisability@yahoogroups.com

If any of you have any problems finding the group this way, just let me know and I can connect you directly with one of the moderators. If you sign up for the list through the Yahoo site, you can look at old posts that go back four years from the Queer Disability conference.

A few other websites of interest:

The website from Queer Disability conference:
http://www.disabilityhistory.org/dwa/queer/

BENT Online, a journal for gay disabled men:
Bent devoted a lot of space to coverage of the conference itself. That material is here:
http://www.bentvoices.org/bentvoices/queer_disability_conference.htm

Current Bent material is located here:
http://www.bentvoices.org/home.htm

Also, I recommend Crip Commentary, www.cripcommentary.com, the website of Laura Hershey, disability activist and author. I know one member of our workshop was particularly interested in info for training Personal Attendants and Laura has a lot of material on helping attendants be LGBT-competent.

Thanks everyone!

T-shirts

I don’t think I can do more than one pic at a time. Here is one to give you a sense of what we were doing in the “Write Hate Speech on Us to Release It from My Life.”

Last Day

So much of a meeting like this happens not in the workshop rooms, but in the halls, the lobby, the bar and restaurant, even the hotel hot tub. That’s where the networking takes place, connections that bring us beyond the conference, taking in connections and ideas to bring back into our work and lives when we return home.

Because of making some of these connections, and having two breakfast meetings with colleagues, I missed the Closing Plenary. The last day is filled with the frenzy of departure: bleary-eyed and sleep deprived, we messily pack our suitcases and say goodbyes. The lobby had free wi-fi, so lots of people were down there working on their computers. I was a bit oblivious to the fact that many of them were checking the airport for flight information because of weather-related travel chaos. My flight is scheduled an hour late and I feel grateful. A friend is stranded in North Carolina until Tuesday!

On the shuttle to the airport, I did get a few folks’ impressions on the closing plenary. My apologies to the organizers—and whoever may be reading this—for missing it. It set the stage for a voicing of “where do we go from here” and I think there were many things about the conference that leave important lessons. Including a consideration of the resources it takes to put on a national conference at all. I tend to like more regional gatherings, and given the great expenses in time, energy and money that it takes to put a national meeting together, there have to be other options in the work for us to share important info about our work, and to help strengthen our communities.

Folks on the shuttle reflected especially on the Open Mic at the closing. Something that was missing from most workshops I attended was old fashioned group work. I was not in a single workshop that had small group break outs. Many were still offered in a didactic format. But this meeting, in my mind, is about a meeting of peers, or comrades, colleagues, who all have expertise and insight to share. I felt frustrated by the lack of basic facilitation in many of the workshops, where little space was created for people to talk to each other.

Sister Blessings

I really had no idea what the Sisters of Pepetual Indulgence Bar Ministry would have in store. I love the Sisters–love how they bring joy and spirituality with a heavy dose of loving sacriglege into their work and activism. This particular Bar Ministry was the brain child of Sister Constance Cravings, and there were four sisters in habit, and about 15 of us followers who all were wearing white t-shirts that as we traveled through the night were asking people to write hate words that they have withstood, words they want to see cast out, gone, so they can never hurt again.

I have some pictures which I will post a little later. But it was really a powerful experience. To take on the pain and hurt from each person, and carry that through the evening, knowing, reassuring them, that at midnight we would have a ritual to cast them off. Our shirts grew heavy with the burden, and we were up to the task. We had to be. Several people asked before they wrote: are you sure you can take this? And my answer was yes, I could, and I was very conscious about what I was taking. This was from people at the conference in the lobby, people in the bars, and people on the streets. Since it was St. Patrick’s Day night, the streets were hopping. The earliest words written on my shirt were FREAK OF NATURE, FAT DYKE, YOU’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH. As we were walking to our first bar, two (presumably) straight women jumped at the chance to write their words: WHORE and UGLY BITCH. Cast off! And the burden was lifted.

I am a little sleepy and getting ready for breakfast with a friend from California, but I really can’t thank the Sisters enough, thank all my fellow missionaries for the night. We were greeted with such appreciation, from strangers, all of whom really appreciated the opportunity to be rid of hate in their lives in this ritualized way. I highly recommend replicating it in all our communities, at Pride events and other gatherings. It was so freeing and affirming. One of our group relayed during our burning casting-off ritual that someone had said to him “I was going to commit suicide tonight. But this has made me change my plans.”

This was life-giving, life-changing work. Pics later. Blessed be.

Serenity Therapy

I’m trying to check out a lot of alternative and complementary therapies for self-help, self-awareness and self-care. For smoking cessation, we need to have tools to use in times of stress or anger or anxiety, and any way we can access methods for self-soothing without lighting up is a step towards living smoke free. For me, hypnotherapy was key to quitting my last and final time. I had relapsed smoking after 11 years! When I returned to grad school, I went right back to smokes because that was how I got through school the first time. It was my familiar coping mechanism, deeply familiar, on a primary, deep-seated level. I needed to replace that with something else, something that my unconscious mind understood, because the coping mechanism really resided in my unconscious.

So I have been checking out different workshops that have addressed self-care. Yesterday I attended a wonderful art workshop, “Color Me Queer, Color Me Fabulous” by Philip McCabe at the UMDNJ School of Public Health. Making 30-second drawings of emotions and feelings and then doing a guided visualization followed by some drawing of things that came up during the visualization helped us create some self-awareness but were also relaxing. And time-specific. In other words, we could explore some deep stuff, but knew that it would be for a specific and limited amount of time. Which frees us too.

I’ve also attendedn two rounds of the daily “Healing Sound” workshop, by Tony Morelli (link to come), which utilizes vibrations and chanting and meditation to specifically help heal as well as relax. This should be required at every conference in the world. Having a space that was dedicated to relaxation and breath work and quietness was so essntial.

These are all tools I want to be using in smoking cessation. I’m even looking into getting certified in hypnosis for this purpose, because it played such a key role for me and I think I would really like helping to guide others through that process.

Now I’m headed off to see the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence do their Bar Ministry. More on this later…

sigh…

Pooped. That’s how I’m feeling right now. A few days of over-stimulation and temperatures ranging from a balming 70-something on Wednesday to today’s slushy snowstorm are posing some access challenges. There are a number of workshops in a building across the street, so you have to reallywant to go to workshops over there right now. It is an office building, and this afternoon the handful of workshop attendees were going up but all the office-workers were coming down and heading home early because of the nasty weather.

Here’s a pic of the lovely road conditions and blustery cityscape:

Back home the Vermont state capital, Montpelier, is on high-alert for a major flood. There are four rivers that feed through town, and a narrow channel in the center of town is swelling with snow melt and run off and the river itself is so frozen so deep there is no where for the water to go. Conditions change quickly and the flood can come in an hour’s time.

Here’s the link to the city website, with up to the hour info informing the populace about the flood waters. Tense stuff in the nation’s only state capital without a McDonald’s.

Know Your Gay History

A theme emerging is one of knowing our histories, stories that are hidden and denied but that shaped who we all are as L, G, B, and T folks. One workshop yesterday showed a part of the film “Hope Along the Wind,”, about Harry Hay, founder of the Radical Faeries, but also a founder of the Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay rights groups. Harry worked on the Henry Wallace campaign, trying to get homosexual rights on the agenda for the Progressive Party, saying in 1948 that homosexuals “are an oppressed cultural minority, and as an oppressed minority, have rights under the constitution of the US.” He identified then, in 1948, that “the problem isn’t being homosexual, the problem is how society treats homosexuals.” Well. That’s the same thing Bill Jensdale was saying about teen suicide back in my earlier post about the opening plenary. In the early 1950s, when Harry started the Mattachine Society, it was through secret connections of 4 or 5 men that the movement was started.

In the discussion following the film, several people said how upset they felt about not knowing any of this history. That is was a source of shame and loss. Well, since our health movement is about overcoming shame and loss, let’s pay attention to our history, learn it and teach it to others.

Someone from Chicago said that he found showing the film was a great health intervention for queer youth: “Using this film and others pieces of Gay and Lesbian History to work with queer youth gives them a sense of their past. You can’t envision a future without having a past. This is an effective health intervention.”

First night plenary: What is Risk?

It’s only the first day and I’m already way behind on my blogging experiment.

The opening plenary last night was a pretty successful opening for the conference, with speakers each musing on the question “What is Risk?” And also, lots of use of the words “paradigm shift” in referring to how we think about risk, because after all, this is a conference for thinkers and activists, folks who know what “paradigm shift” even means even if we are really all at some kind of loss in terms of how to create it.

One fundamental point of the discussion is that there are differences in how we look at the term “risk”–in some cases it is only seen as negative, i.e. people making “bad” individual choices that put them at risk. Then there is the idea of “risk taking” as heroic or just personally challenging one’s self, turning it around to a “good”, admirable thing. It certainly depends on who is doing the risk-taking, and around what they are taking risks, that will lead to if one’s risks are perceived as “good” or as “bad.”

So of course, much of the discussion infused power inequities into the equation. Lisa Bowleg, a social psycholgist and professor at the Drexell School of Public Health, spoke to the need to shift the discussion from “individual action” to *context* for action–poverty, incarceration, or wealth and privilege, all impact how much choice we have in the first place regarding how and why we take risks. She spoke of a “social construction” of risk, and that gender, race, ethnicity, class all overlay risk. This made me think of the Harm Reduction model of “Drug, Set and Setting” which puts drug use into a context of individual meaning for the person using, the “set” of comforts, coping mechanisms, familiarity, past contextual experience, etc. that go into use. Making change is about looking at so many broader links than just the action itsself.

I really liked Bill Jesdale, an epidemiologist and researcher on gay issues, who spoke quite beatifully to the need to move from an individual, pathologizing view point to a social model, from shame to community wellness. “Gay youth are at risk for suicide, but the risk is not about being gay, it’s about being despised. The risk isn’t gayness, it’s homophobia.” Bill was very clear about the need for focusing on social changes, what he called “the airbag solutions” because with the introduction of airbags in cars, risks from car accidents were greatly reduced, but no individual has to lift a finger to create that risk reduction. It’s a contextual, social change.

Shane Snowden from SF talked about revolutionary change, the kind of change we make in the face of crisis with “life and death stakes.” She talked about the risks of *not* fighting for our rights, not accessing health care because providers suck, of not loving ourselves, not experiencing joy.

The discussion got a little hotter when an audience member brought up the fact that for many “risks” themselves are attractive because they’re “bad.” That the naughtiness is part of the fun, pleasure and sexiness of risk.

From there the organizers moved into a nice meet and greet exercise, but I had to leave in the middle of getting to know someone because I was late for at Tobacco Group meeting.