Please Don't Give

Months have passed and I am still having a hard time losing the extra pounds that I gained during the last holiday cycle. This has meant that, with the flexibility of summer, I am trying to maintain my regular gym schedule at least until I depart for an extended trip. My time at the local sports club involves a singular vision of trying to improve my gayish figure.

My steely cold determination was briefly interrupted the other day. Two kindly older men stealthily flanked me as I scanned my membership card. If I were still in TexAss, I’d fear that they were on a mission to save my soul. Given that I was in Midwestern Funky Town, I suspected that they were on a mission to save some whales.

“Would you like to make a donation of blood today?” the eldest one asked with a pleasantly grandpa-demeanor. See? Midwestern Funky Town is so nice. “Sorry,” I responded, “I would like to, but I’m gay and they won’t take my blood.”

No sooner had the words left my mouth than a sudden wave of “stop” swept across the gym reception area. You might have thought that I had reached into my gym bag for a rubber chicken, slapped them in the face with it, and then wet the floor. They didn’t have the look of a deer in headlights. They had the look of somebody who saw a deer driving a car while smoking a cigar. Something had just been said that made no sense at all to them.



Surely many people had declined the opportunity to donate blood through the day. I couldn’t have been unique in that way. For the first time, though, they were faced with a totally unexpected reason why I wouldn’t (actually can’t) donate. They looked at me nervously before regaining their composure.

“No, that’s not true!” they exclaimed in unison. “They want everybody to donate!” Many people do not know that there is a ban on men-who-have-had-sex-with-men (MSM for short) from donating their blood. Unless you donate blood (and you should), you don't need to really think about the blood ban or be informed about it. It did surprise me, though, that the volunteers for the Red Cross were as unaware. It was at this point that I realized I was going to have a queer education moment. Man, all I wanted to do was lose a few pounds before heading to Spain. Next thing you know, I have to wade into thorny questions of health policy.

One of the nice men brought out the guidelines for blood donation. “I’m sure you’ve been misinformed,” he said to me sweetly, “All you have to do is answer these questions.” He quickly skimmed through the list and, much to his surprise, found the bit that refuses blood donations from “a male who has had sexual contact with another male, even once, since 1977.” Now, I don’t like to brag, but I have had sexual contact with another male more than once in the era post 1977.



This measure is a hold over from the bad ol’ Reagan days. The Food and Drug Administration, reacting to some real cases of HIV infection from blood transfusion, developed these guidelines circa 1983. It’s hard to remember, but so little was known about the disease and the panic so great that the FDA’s decisions appeared sensible in the mid eighties.

Much has changed since that time. Testing and screening of blood has become much more advanced. Alas, the FDA refused to revisit the ban on gay donors this past June. It seems a darn shame to me as donating blood is one of the easiest forms of community service one can do. Trust me, I’d much rather have a needle in my arm for 10 minutes than spend hours picking up trash on some highway somewhere.

I first donated blood all the way back in high school. Back then, since I was deeply in the closet and not having sex with anybody else, I had no problem answering those questions. Once I came out of the closet and my consciousness was raised, so ended my blood donating days. If the ban were not in place, I'd be more than happy to start donating again (GayProf always plays safe and has himself tested regularly like all good little gay boys).



The FDA reasons that MSM are simply too great of a risk group. I understand the logic there and the FDA authoritatively tosses out some pretty grim statistics about the prevalence of HIV among gay men. There is a pesky problem, though, that HIV is also prevalent in other populations. African Americans accounted for over half of the new HIV diagnoses in this country for the past several years. Likewise, Latinos accounted for 18 percent of new cases. I shudder to think of the FDA announcing a policy that refused blood based on one’s racial background.

About a third (31 percent) of new HIV infections occur from “High Risk Heterosexual Contact” according to the CDC. Young heterosexual women, in particular, are being diagnosed with HIV at alarming rates. Every 35 minutes in this country a heterosexual woman is informed that she has tested positive for HIV. Many heterosexual women continue to naively imagine that “safe sex” for them only involves avoiding pregnancy. They might be surprised to learn that HIV infection was the leading cause of death for black women aged 25–34 years; the 3rd leading cause of death for black women aged 35–44 years; the 4th leading cause of death for Hispanic women aged 35–44 years. Overall, HIV infection is the 5th leading cause of death among all women aged 35–44 years and the 6th leading cause of death among all women aged 25–34 years.

Yo, stratighties -- Use a condom!



If the FDA was really interested in cutting down the odds of blood donations that might be HIV+, then they should start an active campaign targeting the population the least affected by HIV: lesbian-exclusive women. Imagine how differently the world would look if we depended upon lesbians for our nation’s blood supply. They could ask for everything from equal-pay-for-equal-work to a law requiring sensible shoes.

I won’t entirely fault the FDA and other agencies for taking measures that they imagine will reduce the risk of HIV infections in the nation. They also aren’t alone as the same standards are used by Canada and the EU (Yep, even Canada). It seems to me, though, that the ban on gay men provides a false sense of security and continues to erroneously construe HIV as being mainly a gay male issue. The policy also presumes that one’s safe-sex practices (among others) aren’t the real concern. Rather, it takes a short cut by implying that all man sex is scary and dangerous and hetero sex is a-okay (unless you pay for it).

Because acceptance of gay men and lesbians increased exponentially over the past decade, many people assume that the fight for our basic rights is basically over. It is important to bare in mind, though, that being treated as a second class citizen is not just about being denied rights for things you might want in your personal life (equal marriage, partner benefits, the ability to adopt human worm larvae). Second class citizens are also prevented from contributing to the collective whole, like serving in the military or participating in blood drives.

The volunteers were clearly a bit hurt to find out that I was right about the gay ban. To them, donating blood must have seemed like such an obvious social good that it couldn't possibly involve any political concern. It must have been like finding out that your favorite, sweet old aunt had secretly been sending money to the Ku Klux Klan for years.

Amazon Sisters are Doing it for Themselves

Join me today for the final section of "Inside the Blogging Studio with Bourgeois Nerd." If you are just tuning in, and surprised to find out that this blog has new content, do read Part I and II

***

Bourgeois Nerd (BN): What do you think your blog audience is? I get the impression that yours is much more diverse than mine. It’s harder to tell, since I don’t get the kind of comment feedback you do, but I’m definitely very much a gay man blog, whereas you have more women and straight people.

GayProf (GP): I have been really lucky that some mighty cool people have stopped by to read my blog. Some of the people that I have met (either virtually or in RL) through the blog have been absolutely the best (with just a few exceptions).

Over time, I think CoG’s readers have shifted a bit. Now that most of my posts tend to be about the academic world, my audience has predictably shifted to more professors and such. In the start, though, I had very few academics reading the blog. I think it depends on the content that you are producing. Your "Skimpy Sundays" probably draws a particular crowd of **ahem** fashionable men.

My truly loyal readers are my legions of fellow Amazons. Great Hera! What would I do without them?

BN: There is a very thriving academic blogosphere. It’s actually been around since I started reading blogs; academic blogs were among the first ones I read.

Are there any bloggers you wish you could be?

GP: You, darling, of course.

BN: Stop! You make me blush. (Go on!)

But, seriously, who do you admire? For me, there’s my big blog brother Scott, of course (and even if I knew he would beat me up if I didn’t include him, I’d still say that). There’s also Eric over at Sore Afraid. He writes the most beautiful, lyrical, dryly funny long-form pieces about his life and ruminations on language, gay culture, religion, and family. Plus, he’s hunky, smart, and well-traveled. Chris Sims is an incredible comics blogger; he makes me laugh almost every day; Joe Jervis and Andy Towle; and, of course, there’s you, my Amazon Sister! Who doesn’t want to be GayProf, though?



GP: You are wise to try and emulate me.

Gosh, if I have to start naming all the fantastic bloggers out there, I know that I will accidentally miss somebody. I have really enjoyed seeing Tenured Radical and Historiann develop a whole different dimension to their academic careers through their blogs. A few times in meetings, I have heard colleagues reference Tenured Radical on a particular issue. That suggests to me that her blogging has an impact. Like a Whisper and Angry Black Bitch are really great at thinking about questions of social justice in the news.

Tornwordo, VUBOQ, and Someoninatree are some of the more personal blogs that I still keep up with as much as I can. Dorian at Postmodern Barney remains the undisputed queen of gay comic bloggers, I am pretty sure. Down and Out in Denver is a newer blog that has some sly wit.

All these many years later, I still, still, still miss the Ninth Circle of Helen. She was fabulous.



See? It’s just too hard to narrow down the list because there are so many people out there rocking the blogosphere.

BN: You once commented that you could be “nostalgic for what I had for breakfast this morning.” Light-hearted self-deprecating hyperbole that it is, I actually really identify with that statement, because I sometimes feel I’m one big walking pit of nostalgia. I’m nostalgic for things I didn’t experience or was even alive for. Do you think nostalgia is intrinsic to nerdiness? Do you think this inclination had something to do you’re your becoming a historian?

GP: Breakfast this morning was so great. The coffee was just the right temperature. I had a banana that was perfectly ripe. Such a breakfast will never happen again. **Sigh**.


Actually, I think becoming a professional historian is a good cure for romanticizing the past. I mean, I don’t really want to go back to an era where my sexuality would have resulted in my being sent to jail or given electroshock therapy.

BN: This extreme nostalgia is one of the reasons I’m obsessed with memory, why I find books so important. To lose memory is to lose a world. Books are the only way to capture an individual’s thoughts and feelings and point of view, even if only in a limited, edited way. You’re in the business of reconstructing memory. When you’re working on NERPoDs, do you feel like you’re resurrecting people and times? Do you regret that you can only do pale shadows, because you’re limited to what was written and recorded?

GP: I think NERPoD and NERPoD: The Sequel are both creating a type of memory more than they are recovering memories. It seems to me that making arguments about the past helps us to think about our modern concerns. So, even though I am writing history, it is always a product of the present.

In terms of the actual (now dead) people, I would like to think that they would see themselves in the things that I write. They were people who were trying to figure out how to deal with race and racism in a remarkably hostile nation. I doubt that they imagined any historian would really care about their lives 150 years later. Their goals were more immediate: How do I feed my folk when ravenous Texans keep snatching my land away from me?


BN: Do you ever feel like a “bad gay”? I feel like I’m “missing” certain things. Yes, yes, yes, gay life isn’t and shouldn’t be nothing but a sea of hedonism, parties and sex and debauchery. This is stereotype, and not how all, or even most of us, live, or should live. But, you know, I wouldn’t mind some hedonism.



GP: Don’t dream it, be it!

I feel like I’m a great gay! Though, more sex with other gay men is always welcome.

BN: I think gay people should be able to be who they are, whether it’s a screaming queen or a boring-ass suburban like me. It’s good we’ve moved away from stereotypes. But I feel we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water. Suburban conformity shouldn’t be a goal, simply a choice. And the whole fetishizing of “straight-acting” and “masculinity” is maddening, especially when it turns on those who do conform to old stereotypes. There are people out there who are genuinely effeminate: there are show queens, there are drag queens, there are queens who just love Ethel Merman and Cher, and they’re just as much a part of this community as any gay couple with 2.3 adopted children and two SUVs in the driveway. To deny them is folly. Straight people aren’t going to accept us if we purge ourselves of the “bad” images and act like good little drones; many straight people will never accept us at all. If we are accepted, it must be for all of us, not just those who can “pass.”

GP: After all these many years, we still haven’t learned the lessons in the sacred text Free to Be You and Me. A hungry nation calls out, “Marlo Thomas, where are you in our hour of need?”

It seems to me that the whole nation has taken a slow veer towards the conservative side. The queer community isn’t alone in valorizing the nuclear family. Over the past decade, I have been saddened by the number of straight people I have met who unquestioningly adopt some pretty retrograde gender notions in their marriages and families. During the 1990s, it felt like there were more people critiquing assumptions about relationships and being quite critical of narrow ideas about "family."

Nowadays the nuclear family has become a type of competitive sport. Middle-class folk are on a mission to raise the “perfect, genius, super special” children. It disheartens me that people define their identity through these types of familial relationships.



I am also disappointed that the gay marriage debate hasn’t prompted a wider discussion about whether “traditional” marriage is really working for the majority of people. Given the ever escalating divorce rate, I would sorta think it isn’t.

It seems to me that queer folk are actually quite involved in negotiating the terms of their relationships that are markedly different than their hetero counterparts. Many gay men, for instance, openly reject monogamy as a hallmark of a stable relationship. That discussion, though, gets lost in the effort to make sure that everybody imagines that gay relationships are “the same as” straight relationships.



This is a strategy that most civil rights groups adopt at some point or another. Certainly some members of the African American community at the turn of the twentieth century or members of the Latino community in the 1940s and 1950s openly advocated for an adoption of “middle class" values and practices as a means to obtain equality in the nation. So too are some gay men and lesbians putting out the idea that if everybody was the same, then we wouldn’t be different

It’s not that I oppose gay marriage. For some people, that type of relationship really is the best suited for their personality. We also have to fight the fight given it was handed to us by the radical right. Maybe, though, my own experience has made me more skeptical about marriage’s overall value and durability. I always say, the best thing about legalizing gay marriage would be gay divorce.


BN: You said it, GayProf! I’m a product of a rather traditional middle-class upbringing, and I’m more than proud of it, but it should be an option, not a diktat. I think it’s great that many gay couples negotiate non-monogamous relationships, and hate when other gay people especially tut-tut such things.

Well, I think this blog conversation has run its course. I must say, I enjoyed it immensely! We definitely have to do it again.

GP: It has been my pleasure. Now, let's break out the cocktail shaker and dance, dance, dance.

Conference Living

Greetings from High-Altitude-Urban-Center! HAUC is a lovely city, even if it is currently covered in ice. It’s much more stylish than I anticipated. People are friendly and the downtown is actually functioning.

Did I mention the ice, though? Well, let me say again, it's much colder than I anticipated. My hotel doorman looks like he borrowed an outfit from Nanook of the North.

Aside from the cold, HAUC's airport also needs some serious work. One wonders why they bothered with an airport at all? Why not just have the planes dip to 10,000 feet, hand out some parachutes, and tell the passengers to take their best aim? What a mess!

And it’s a faraway mess at that. My new measure for the quality of a city is whether it has been wise enough to connect its airport to the downtown via public transport (other than buses). If you can get to your hotel using a subway or light-rail, you get an extra star from CoG. If, on the other hand, you have to break out a sextant and use astronavigation to locate the downtown core, you get downgraded. Still, even with that shortcoming and the ice, HAUC is a pleasant place to spend some time.

There also seems to be a solid queer scene, which further scores my approval. Still, there was something a bit quirky about it. When in another city, I often like to take a looksee at what’s happening in the usual queer online haunts. Consider it a low grade form of voyeurism on my part.

I was surprised by a significant number of HAUC gay men advertising that they had a “glory hole” in their house waiting for visitors. That was new to me.

Now, GayProf has seen many gapping holes in public restrooms in his life (No, I have never used one – I’m not that type of gay), but I have never encountered one in somebody’s private residence. I suppose it makes sense for those who want the glory hole experience without all the inconvenience of being arrested or censured by the U.S. Senate.



MFT and Decaying Urban Center simply haven’t caught up with this new gay interior design trend. Since I would never be likely to answer such an ad (Again, not that type of gay), it did make me wonder, where did they put the hole in their house? Do they hide crouched in a closet? Behind the bathroom wall? In back of the partition between the dining room and living room? Can one buy a “Do-It-Yourself-Drywall Glory Hole” kit at Home Depot? Or do you need to call a contractor to have it installed? Does having a built in glory hole raise or lower the resale value of a house?

Too much? Hey, this blog isn’t for kids. Go somewhere else for Chutes and Ladders and Candyland.

You be asking yourself at this point, “Why has GayProf landed in HAUC?” And you might also ask, “How did he get to be the Most Desirable Man on the Blogosphere when he posts so rarely?” Both of those are tough, but fair, questions.

To answer the first, I am here for a brief stint in a major-minor conference. It was either that or serve on the Noble Prize board.

Originally I thought it would be a great chance to hang out in HAUC for an extended weekend. I was certainly glad to see blogger buddy HistoriAnn.

Still, though my duties were light and I’ve enjoyed HAUC, I do wish that I had thought about how insanely, crazy busy the month of October would be when I agreed to attend so long ago. Oh well. At least I got my free tote bag. Probably the Noble Prize people don't give out free tote bags.



At one of the panels I attended here, the commentator put the smack down on all of the papers. It was painful to watch three scholars get the academic equivalent of a public spanking. It kinda got me thinking that maybe some folks are not versed in the basic conference rules.

If you are uninitiated in the mysteries of the academic conference, here are some good ideas to keep in mind (even if I, myself, don’t always follow them):

If you are presenting a paper, write it two months ahead of time. Some of you might think that it shows the “kooky and crazy” side of your personality to draft a presentation in your hotel room the night before your panel. Maybe it does; but if it does, people in the audience will only say, “Look at the kooky and crazy scholar who didn’t bother to write a decent paper.”



Deliver your paper on-time to the panel’s commentator. This is obviously linked to the issue above. "On-time" means about four weeks ahead of the conference. Some commentators are real sticklers about getting the paper to them by that four-week deadline. I have been at more than one panel where the commentator called out individual panel members for their tardiness. If you didn’t like that feeling in grade school, you will really hate it at a professional conference. Given that commentators are often senior people in your field, do you really want their memory of you to be one of irritation? Trust me, academics never forget such things.

Keep your paper brief. On average, it takes us two minutes to read one page of text out loud. You have three or four other people next to you who also want to present their work. If your paper is 30 or 40 pages long, it’s almost as bad as not having written one at all. Brevity is the soul of wit. Have a clear thesis; use one or two examples from your research; and end with a bang.

Don’t radically alter your paper once you deliver it to the commentator. Almost as annoying to a commentator as being super late with your paper is having spent a bunch of time drafting a comment only to find out that your argument has entirely changed. This is like cheating at cards.

Postpone the drinking until the very end of the day. I totally get why you might want to hit the cocktails at noon. Still, I recommend resisting that temptation. With the traveling, stress of presenting, and general exhaustion, you are going to get dehydrated. This means liquor will affect you even more. Shaking the reputation as Drunky McDrunk from Drunkville (Who Drinks A Lot) can take years. Save the cocktails until after dinner when you are headed to bed and not likely to see many other attendees.



Practice giving your paper aloud. It’s a drag, I know. Still, some things look better on paper than they do when we try to say them out loud. Short declarative sentences win the day.

Dress professionally. This doesn't mean you need to conform to gendered expectations. Don't like ties? Don't wear one. Hate the skirts? Wear the slacks. Do, though, put some effort into looking like you care about your career. Nobody is impressed by a scholar who looks like they got dressed out of the hotel dumpster.



Pack two copies of your paper in separate bags. Maybe I am overly cautious (read: OCD), but I like to have that extra paper copy just in case one of my bags is lost in transit. True, this has never actually happened, but it would be a real drag to be trying to scramble and find a place to print a new copy minutes before your presentation.

Be generous to other presenters. Giving a paper is stressful. Trashing somebody else's work during a conference doesn't make you look smart. It makes you look mean. Be sure your comments are constructive rather than cruel.

Leave the Conference Hotel and live a little. Ostensibly one of the reasons that these academic conferences move from city to city each year is that they are supposed to provide an opportunity for participants to explore new regions. Why, then, do so many of the conference attendees never set foot outside of the conference hotel? I promise that your name badge is not a type of house-arrest bracelet. The academic guard won’t descend upon you if you decide to eat at a restaurant four blocks from the conference. Take some time to explore the city you are in and leave the conference behind for a few hours.

Avoid sleeping with your other panelist members. Personally, I often experience academic conferences as a form of social trauma. So it’s a bit of mystery to me that so many people find them even remotely sexy much less an opportunity to knock boots. Anecdotally, this also seems to be more of a hetero thing more than a homo thing – Not sure why. Still, it seems like a bad idea to me. Imagine if you had to see your last one-night stand every year for the next thirty years of your life. Well, that will be the case as this person will likely always be at the same conferences as you for your entire career. Can’t you horny heteros find somebody with an at-home-glory hole?