A few weeks ago, I got an email from Jim Pickett (who runs the lovely gay mens' sexuality website and blog, LifeLube.org) over one of CHAMP's listservs about a conference on gay men's health in Chicago. I wanted to present, but by the time I found out about the event, all the slots were full! But I decided to go and network with the Chicagoans and see what was happening there.

I arrived in Chicago on Friday night around 8 PM and met up with my friend from UNC, Spencer Derrico. He was kind enough to offer me a couch to crash on for my night in Chicago! We went to dinner with some of his friends, and then out for a second to Roscoe's for some dancing. The crowd was a lil thin, I had to wake up early, and the music was so-so - so we didn't stay long.

I did pick up a copy of "Gay Chicago Magazine," though, and flipped through it to get a feel for the city. I was struck by the obituary for a Detroit native, Danny Majewski (pictured at right), who was also one of the co-owners of a Chicago bar called "Cell Block." Majewski used to bartend at the Detroit Eagle back in the late 80s until he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in 1994, when he decided to make Chicago a more regular home. Danny passed away on October 20th at the Detroit Eagle, a death described in the obituary as almost idyllic, really:

"According to [his partner] Frank, “We were in the middle of the best Saturday night we’ve had in over two years. Many guys were in who we hadn’t seen in a long time, and Danny was talking and catching up with many of them. We had been at the bar since 5:30 that evening, and at 1:25 I walked behind the bar and said to Danny that I’d see if the guys could close up and we’d leave at 2 a.m. He looked at me surprised and said, ‘Why?,’ as if it would somehow interrupt everything. Five minutes later, a heart attack took him.'"

This image of Danny's passing stayed with me into the conference the ManAlive next day. In general, I thought the conference had some good programming - though it seemed to be not well attended. I went to a "Creating Dialogue Between Gay Men Across the Ages" session where my friend Tim Stewart-Winter (a University of Chicago graduate student in history) was a panelist. We touched on a few themes, and I regurgitated some of my recent musings on mentorship and gay men.

The highlight for me, though, came after the workshop when I had a lengthy conversation with one of the older guys in the workshop. I believe his name was Tom, but I honestly can't remember. We had a fantastic discussion about the changing nature of the gay ghettos - and in particular the increasing decentralization and privatization of gay life (via the Internet). Halfway through the conversation he mentioned that his lover had recently passed away, and it turns out that his lover was none other than Danny Majewski - whose obituary I had just been reading the night before. Wow.

From that fantastic discussion I headed over to Jim Pickett and Will Wong's Sero-Adaptation workshop, which ended up be extremely useful for me. They both did a *fabulous* job detailing not only the latest data on sero-adaptation, but also the potential benefits and drawbacks to those practices. I really enjoyed the way the discussed sero-adaptation, which basically means a range of practices that reduce HIV risk by employing strategies other than condom use for safety. These can include practices like serosorting (choosing partners based on like sero-status), strategic positioning (e.g. if I'm HIV-neg and having sex with a poz guy, I would choose to top), "dipping" (or just putting your dick inside for a moment without a condom, but not actually fucking), using a lot of lube (since "dry" sex carries a much greater risk of bleeding and thus transmission), and even discussing viral load with Poz partenrs (since greater viral loads generally translates to greater potential for transmission).

Also, Will Wong presented a really fabulous table that I thought was incredibly important and useful for describing HIV risk. Basically, he translated per-incidence risk data (that I cite in my essay, HIV Panic) into relative risk data. Fabulous! His table looked like this (I added the GaySpeak!):

So, basically this relates every sex act to a base risk of "1" for getting a blowjob without a condom. Thus, getting fucked bareback for gay men is 100 times as risky as getting that blowjob without a condom. I think this is pretty useful, as it gives gay men a more clear sense of risk per sexual activity. Helpful, I think!

After the conference, I met up with Spencer for wine and cheese at a lovely Wine Bar. We got into a great discussion about gay sex, and I actually was finally able to articulate my Master's thesis underlying assertion: That a lack of relevant sex education for young gay men leads to their irrational fear of contracting HIV (what I call HIV panic), which then leads to a desire for boyfriend relationships because its the only place they feel safe having anal sex. I'm interested in the relationship between poor HIV education and heteronormative / conservative ideas about sex and relationships. Yay for clarity over wine!