Dear editor:
Over the IML ( International Mr. Leather ) weekend, I had the chance to talk with and meet many of the contestants and some of the executive board of the event. During my conversations with them, I heard the refrain of "brotherhood, community, trust," and it struck me that these were the guiding principles for the leaders of the leather community. I have heard the same thing from the members of the drag community. These are encouraging words; however, one recurring word troubles me: insular.
As head of the fundraising committee for the Imperial Court of Chicago, I have made it a point to be as inclusive as possible by inviting people into the vision of the community I feel we as an organization should be striving for. I have met Mister Chicago Leather 2014, Miguel Torres, and local drag performer Tara Hymen. We have agreed to work toward a vision of the Chicago gay community that breaks out of the insular circles we have observed. As visible leaders in our various circles we see the need for the concept of brotherhood to reach beyond solely the leather community and the need for the concept of sisterhood to reach beyond the drag/performing community. We believe it is time for the Chicago LGBTQ community to once again embrace the strength that we can provide to each other as a whole.
As we approach Pride, we are taking a look back at the history of pride during a ceremony celebrating the life and work of Chuck Renslow. During the production of this show, we have realized that from the '60s to the 2000s—as we fought for our civil rights and equal treatment and recognition—we stood together. We respected varying expressions of our personal sexuality, defining what it meant to each of us to be gay men and women, with a wide range in between.
Currently, we each have experiences of our friends telling us, "I don't go to that bar, or to that place, because drag isn't welcome, because leather isn't welcome, or those guys have attitude." The three of us believe this is counterproductive and hypocritical. Over the next several months the three of us are planning events designed to bring our circles together for two common causes: homeless gay youth and preserving gay history. We believe it is the leaders' responsibility to provide mentorship to our youth and to teach them our history. All three of us can point to an individual in our past that gave us that guidance and our people's verbal history. That gave us safe space to decide for ourselves what it meant to be gay and what kind of person we wanted to be inside our community.
Now that we are in a position to give back as it was given to us, we feel that teaching our younger generation our history—as violent and dark as it can be—is vital and essential. We must all know, at least on the edge of our conscience, that we not far from a time when we were killed for walking down the street; arrested for holding another guy's hand in a bar; denied the right to own property together; fire-bombed in our churches; and refused access to a church to hold a funeral service. Our history is so much more than the holocaust of the '80s and '90s that was allowed to happen because "it was killing all the right people."
As we celebrate marriage equality in our state, let us remember that the struggle is not over for brothers and sisters in places like Texas, Kentucky or Florida. Join us in taking an evening to remember why we have pride, and why it is still necessary.
Neil James Douglas St. James
Chicago
Women and AIDS
To the Editor:
Thirty years ago, there was a saying: "Women don't get AIDS. They just die from it."
It wasn't a joke: AIDS presents itself differently in women, including invasive cervical cancer. Women were not included in clinical trials. Because they didn't show the same tendencies towards Kaposi's Sarcoma or lymphomas, they were ignored. They were denied Social Security disability because, according to the CDC's definition ( which the Social Security Administration uses ), they didn't have AIDS.
It wasn't until 1994—thanks to the aggressive efforts of women in ACT UP NY—that the CDC changed its AIDS case definition to include the cancers and opportunistic infections that affected women.
Now, in the fourth decade of the epidemic, the Social Security Administration is moving to eliminate those woman-specific manifestations while they are studied:
"We propose to remove the guidance on HIV infection manifestations specific to women in current section 14.00F4 for two reasons.
"First, the proposed HIV infection listings do not contain criteria that are gender-specific. We would evaluate the manifestations of HIV infection using the same criteria regardless of a person's gender.
"Second, while we recognize that manifestations of HIV infection may still affect a person's ability to function, we believe that the guidance in the following sections instruct our adjudicators to consider signs, symptoms, and effects of treatment when evaluating the severity of a person's HIV infection and resulting functional limitations."
It's unacceptable that, 20 years later, we have to fight this fight again. Join ACT UP and others across the country in standing up for women's health—again.
Victoria Noe
Author: Friend Grief and AIDS:
Thirty Years of Burying Our Friends
Member, ACT UP NY
