Hey everyone! As promised, here's a copy of my remarks that I gave this morning on Wellness in the context of Gay Men's Health. Tipsy, so can't add too much more presently. But the plenary today went really fabulously. I hope y'all enjoy these remarks:

Good afternoon! I’ve been asked to provide some provocative opening remarks about Wellness – but I’m going to do something very academic-y, and talk a bit around the issue. Rather than defining what wellness looks like, per se, I want to ask us to be thinking about how Power works to structure Wellness. That is to say, how power – a concept I’ll elaborate on in a minute – works in different ways to either give or deny access to Wellness. Power gives us access to Wellness – without it, we can never hope to achieve it, collectively or individually.

So let’s dive in. It’s a rather vague word, “Power.” What ever does it mean? I want to briefly sketch out three potential meanings that have a direct impact on Wellness. First, from a Marxist or materialist perspective, we might first think about power as whether or not we have access to material resources – and by material resources I mean things like jobs, housing, health care, a down payment on a car that your parents lend you, or even the twelve dollars it costs for a monthly subscription to Manhunt.net. This is perhaps the most obvious kind of power because – especially in the last few months – we’ve seen how money and materiality can deeply impact our social worlds. But it’s not the end of the story.

There’s also another kind of power I’d like to draw on, a more sociological or anthropological notion of cultural capital. Money can buy many things, but often it’s who you know (and of course who you don’t) that prove to be your greatest assets. We see this in studies of job applicants. It’s not a resume that gets most people their first job out of college – it’s the fact that their fraternity brother’s father is doing the hiring. Or – more realistically perhaps for many of us in this room – that a friend works for the company and put in a good word. So understanding how gay, bisexual, and transgender men are networking is important to understanding the resources they have to draw on in times of need. More than just social networks, though, this kind of power also lurks around a thing we like to call in sociology “social status.” You know, the moment you turn to the guy to your left and ask him who he works for and where he went to school. Certain answers may lend him more credibility, while others may not.

So that’s two. One more to go. The final kind of power I’d like to present is more often associated with sex. And that’s the kind of physical power of brute force. Obviously, things like rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence come to mind here. We all know the serious impact that misuse of this kind of power can have on our Wellness – and the Wellness of our communities.

So, you say, “Well that’s all well and good Trevor, but what the hell does this have to do with Gay Men’s Health?” I think we’ve been relying on a very simplistic notion of power that we get from epidemiological public health data that shows HIV infections clustered among certain populations. Men of color, sex workers, etc. Most of us think primarily about race in this way – race is a rough approximation, it seems, for power relations and that has implications for Wellness. But this actually has told us very little about why this clustering is actually happening. We continue to distribute surveys, and we continue to be baffled when we get data back that indicates that, for instance, Black MSM aren’t engaging in riskier sex than their white counterparts – and yet their rates of infection are outrageously different. I have some news for you: surveys and epidemiology will never explain that difference. And I mean never.

This is because we’ve been too focused on the big picture. Let me use an art metaphor to help explain my meaning. It’s something like viewing a Monet painting. Far away, we can see a certain shape and structure to how things are operating. We think we see the picture. But as we get closer, we realize that that area of the painting that looks blue from far away, is actually composed of thousands of brushstrokes of all kinds of colors – red, green, and maybe even turquoise. To get back to race, the epidemiological data is giving us a rough approximation in the form of pie charts and time-series graphs. But this doesn’t tell us a damn thing about what’s happening up close and personal, about what kinds of variation exists within that “46% of new infections.” We know the outcome – the big picture – but we don’t have a fucking clue about the why. Settling for a macro-level “Big Picture” analysis of power does not paint a complete picture.

This occurred to most clearly while recently reading and essay written by a radical faerie by the name of Middle. The article was generally about bareback porn, but his analysis extended into relevant territory. He says:

I'm repelled when terms like bareback, pre-condom, and raw are used to brand, commodify, and attach a premium to risk. There's a human impact I've encountered first-hand - men and boys who feel their willingness is a commodity to be traded against their perceived shortcomings: age, ability, cock size, weight, femininity, HIV status. Where the vulnerable or clueless pursue fantasies fueled by glamorization of risk with little or no brotherly support, unhappy results range from name-calling to seroconversions, addiction, and worse.

Now he is making an incredibly illuminating point here. He’s noting that men online are often feeling the need to “trade” against their perceived “flaws” (judged on the gay marketplace of desire) – whether that be their old age, curvy figure, smaller cock size, race, or gender - he’s arguing that they feel compelled to trade their willingness to go bare against that perceived flaw. Too fat? Well maybe if you agree to get fucked raw, you might get laid. Too much of a queen? Just tell him how much want his load in your hole.

In this way, power is operating in all kinds of crazy ways both inside and outside our bedrooms. Though they are certainly playing a role, it’s not just about race or class – the two primary lenses through which many of us typically think about power relations in gay/bi/queer/trans male communities. It’s also about age, ability, weight, femininity, whether you’re a top or bottom, and even how big your dick is or isn’t. This is why we are in desperate need of a complicated analysis of power relations. Because – while from far away we think we understand what’s happening on the ground – the closer we get, the more muddled things become.

We need to better understand how sex and power interface to create risk disparities among different populations of gay, bisexual, and transgender men. Until we start thinking critically about these relationships, we will never understand why Black and Latino men account for the overwhelming majority of new HIV infections. And let me be clear: this is way beyond HIV. Power structures Wellness in all areas of our lives. You want a happy, healthy community? You better start thinking about housing and health care. You better start thinking about homophobia in public schools and racism in our bars. Wellness will not be achieved by knocking out one of these contributing factors. We won’t end homophobia without ending racism. We won’t eliminate new HIV infections without challenging and attacking the violent and destructive influence of masculinity in our lives and communities. Wellness is a package deal. I hope you will join with me this weekend in thinking critically about how your work moves us towards that vision. Thank you.