via TheBody.com, by Terron J. Cook

On my very first day in San Francisco I find myself in a well-known theater on Nob Hill. Downstairs there are video booths, most containing glory holes. The walls between the glory holes are truly by design, allowing for an empty, anonymous sexual act to occur, while blocking any opportunity for true intimacy.

I enter a booth next to a man I’ve made eye contact with. I pull my cock out, place it through the glory hole, and the well-built, handsome man on the other side sucks me for a while. There’s a pause, and he whispers for me to come to his booth. I enter, he strips, and I slowly turn him around. I place the head of my cock at the entrance to his ass, simply to see if he’ll stop me.

In the heat of the moment, he allows me to have my way. I slowly penetrate this hunk of a man. In the back of my mind, I know what I’m doing is wrong, and this one isolated, unprotected sexual encounter could lead to my ultimate demise. However, I proceed without hesitation.

Risky behavior has always been so appealing to me! The rush that it provides makes me feel so alive! A new city, multitudes of opportunities, and here I am willing to ruin it all, just to “bust a nut.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I ask myself, but it’s too late to think “safety” at this point. I clear my mind, wrap my arms around this man, and shove myself inside him as hard as I can and shoot my load. I pull out of him, wipe off, and realize I’ve entered a new stage of my life making wrong decisions, again.

“When will this behavior cease?” I ask myself, while trying to avoid the eyes of the stranger I’ve just fucked raw. Will it take me becoming HIV positive to learn this lesson? I dress, clean up, and feel a sense of darkness, realizing just how many years have passed. Yet I’m still partaking in the same ignorant behavior . . .

A restlessness comes over me, as I realize the covenant that I have made with myself, as well as GOD, is now in place. If this is the case, then why the hell am I continuing to behave in such a dangerous manner, and refusing to wear condoms? I have dodged the “bullet” many times. With my refusal to adhere to safe sex, I continually wonder if my game of Russian Roulette will soon come to a very unhappy and unfortunate conclusion.

Honestly, what does such behavior stem from? Being beat down mentally, physically, and spiritually during our formative years greatly contributes to it. For me, I think it all began while growing up in Columbus, Ohio. I was molested by my middle-school history teacher, who happened to be an older Caucasian man. For a while, I thought dealing with my sexual trauma was my biggest worry — until my father was murdered 11 years ago.

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By Christopher Brocklebank

Jane Lynch won an Outstanding Supporting Actress Emmy award last night for her performance in the US television series Glee.

Lynch, who married her partner Dr Lara Embry in May this year, was presented with the award for her turn as fearsome sports coach, Sue Sylvester, at the awards ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday night.

In her acceptance speech Ms Lynch said: “I want to thank my parents on the South Side of Chicago for raising us to the sounds of musical theater and being so unintentionally hilarious. I love being an actor. I love being an ensemble.”

She added: “[actors] have no choice or any marketable skills. I have to thank my lord and creator [Glee originator] Ryan Murphy for creating this role of a lifetime and the cast who are so young and fresh-faced, and when I’m not seething with jealousy, I’m so proud of you. And I love you my wife Laura and my little girl, Haden.”

Ryan Murphy also received an award for Best Direction of a Comedy. The award for Outstanding Supporting Actor went to Eric Stonestreet for playing a gay dad in ABC hit, Modern Family.

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Now whether I am eating right and exercising to appeal to the sexes (my initial reasons) or to maintain my energy and waistline (vain reasoning) or to quell the onset of diabetes or high cholesterol (my current reason), falling in love speaks to all those conditions.

How amazing is it to have an experience where the blood is engorging every vain from that intimate kiss in the car. Those countless calories being consumed and released from dinner and dancing the other night. How about the peace of mind you receive when you know that your mate has called just to see how your day is going.

And just think about the stress you release (in all facets), but primarily the stress released when you finally realize that this person loves you for you. When you finally love you for you, how peaceful you sleep, how active you become and how you can emotionally benefit from a shoulder to cry on and an affirmation of your ideals.

Undoubtedly these things really only occur when someone has tickled your fancy, but I see being in love and allowing yourself to fall in love as such a catalyst to your overall well being.

Your piece of mind is your ultimate goal for health. Having your mind right can alleviate a lot of issues, both physical and mental, but when you fall in love. Oh when you fall in love. Those feeling are heightened and the benefits can be amazing. So whether it been 2 years or 10 years, continue to believe in love, because love (despite being on its own terms) still believes in you.

– Craig DossChicago

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In October 2008, racing against California’s gay marriage ban, Chloe and Frankie Frankeny wed legally in San Francisco with one chore already done: Chloe had taken her wife’s name two years before.
“It was the only way we had to fit into a mainstream role that was understandable to anybody,” said Chloe, managing editor of a fashion website. “When I told my father I was taking Frankie’s name he was sort of blown away because I definitely consider myself a feminist.”

With a battle over the state’s ban on gay marriage possibly headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s likely more same-sex couples will do the same. For the Frankenys, the name switch couldn’t magically grant all the marriage benefits denied same-sex couples when compared to one man, one wife, but it was one more way to express their union. It’s a symbol rendered even stronger now that legal gay marriages are on hold in California, and for partners who’ve never had the option.

Logistically, a name-change for gay couples isn’t always as simple as trotting out a marriage certificate, the proof most required in heterosexual marriage. Emotionally, the journey is about love, commitment – and a way to ease anxiety over being misunderstood as non-relatives in emergencies or considered less-than as parents.

Kirsten Palladino, who runs the online gay wedding ‘zine Equally Wed, shed Ott for the surname of her partner, Maria, last year without benefit of a state-sanctioned union in Georgia. She’s seeing more couples go to court for name changes, settling on hyphenation or one partner’s surname over the other. [Editor's note: Read Palladino's wedding advice every Wednesday on 365gay.com]

“We have grown stronger and are speaking out for ourselves in this way,” said Palladino, 32. “There’s nothing stopping us from taking each other’s names, even if we can’t get a marriage certificate.”

After a five-year courtship, the Palladinos had a wedding at an antebellum mansion in Decatur, Ga. Kirsten became a Palladino after running a newspaper announcement of her intentions once a week for four weeks and appearing before a judge, just as people going through a formal name change for reasons other than marriage must do.

“I was nervous. I didn’t know how the judge would feel, but he was great. Personally, I had to deal with some identity issues after, but becoming a family unit with my wife trumped anything else for me,” she said.

College sweethearts Kathryn and Heather Kraft of Newton, Mass., just celebrated 12 years together and have a new baby. They had a church wedding five years ago in white gowns with 10 bridesmaids after obtaining a marriage license under their state’s gay marriage law.

Whose name did they choose? Kathryn said her Kraft over Heather’s Cole “because we’re very close to my family and wanted to add to that family in a noticeable way.” They had considered combining names into a new one that “represented both of our ancestry, but in the end we’re very traditional people.” Cole is now a middle name for the entire family, including baby Esther.

Making the switch with a legal marriage certificate was no trouble for Heather, until she tried to get a U.S. passport ahead of a trip to Europe. “We were shocked when Heather’s application was denied,” said her 32-year-old partner, a family therapist. “The passport office would not recognize our marriage certificate as proof and insisted that she had to go in front of a judge to have a court-ordered name change.”

After six months, she was issued a “known as” passport identifying her by both names. “It’s a small thing that isn’t noticeable when you look at her passport, but the process was long and an unnecessary reminder that things aren’t exactly equal,” Kathryn said.

Jason and Anthony Cline committed to each other in 2001 during a hotel ceremony in their native Indiana, where gay marriage is outlawed. They thought about heading to a state where their union would be legal but decided not to bother knowing they’d return home to suburban Indianapolis without that recognition.

Jason, 33, legally changed his name, going through a newspaper notification process and enduring questions from a judge as Palladino did.

“The process seemed cold but it helped prove our relationship to our friends and family that maybe weren’t as advanced in their thinking on the topic. It helped solidify our relationship to the people that we knew and to the world,” he said. “It starts a conversation. It tells a story.”

Chloe Frankeny sees other practical outcomes to changing her name, including proof of family status in case of a medical crisis.

“With the same last name we could say we were sisters,” she said. “We’ve all heard stories of partners kept apart in emergency rooms. That was a precaution we wanted to take.”

From nearly 80 percent to 95 percent of heterosexual couples marrying for the first time legally adjust their names as the age of the average bride has risen to about 27 over the last 20 years, according to research. Professional identity before marriage motivates others – in same-sex and hetero couples alike – to keep their original names informally or incorporate them as middle names.

Elisa Hebert, 32, wasn’t attached to her surname before she traveled with partner Megan from their home outside Denver, Colo., to Rehoboth, Mass., a plus since most of their friends and family are from New England. Back home, Elisa appeared in court to complete her legal name change before a judge managing a roomful of ticked-off parents and their kids hauled in for truancy. “I felt like a 12-year-old who was in trouble,” she said.

Marni Kahn, a doctoral candidate in sociology in Atlanta, took partner Casey Brown’s last name after a marriage ceremony that blended their Jewish and Southern Baptist roots. “It really did tie things up nicely,” said Casey, a marketing analyst.

Actor and writer Marcos Mateo Ochoa, 29, of Los Angeles chose to hyphenate instead. He goes by Cermak-Ochoa after marrying partner Frank Cermak on Oct. 4, 2008, a union legally recognized in California with 18,000 other same-sex marriages there before voters approved Proposition 8 and ended the practice. He plans to make the name switch legal once the court case is resolved.

“We want to identify ourselves as being united, but with California being so flip-floppy on this, it’s just a matter of when we go about the process,” Ochoa said. “Is this going to be another obstacle, another hurdle for us to go through?”

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According to new national research, Americans have become more accepting of homosexuality of the past 16 years, with over half of those polled saying they support civil unions.

As reported in the Desert Sun, a 1994 Pew Research Centre poll had found that under half its respondents agreed that homosexuality was “a way of life” that should be accepted by society.

But the Public Religion Research Institute’s new report, released last Friday and compiled from a selction of public studies done over the last 20 years, said support for same-sex civil unions had risen from 45 per cent in 2003 to 57 per cent in 2009. The increase in support for same-sex marriage was more modest, but still showed an rise in support from 30 per cent in 2003 to 38 per cent in 2010.

Among religious respondents to the recent polls, Latino Catholics showed more movement toward supporting gay marriage (at 57 per cent) than Latino Protestants (at 22 per cent).

National polls by the Pew Centre have apparently found that younger Americans are much more accepting of LGBT people, and researchers reportedly say that the generational divide over the issue will eventually bring about a collision.

Daniel Cox, director of research for the Public Religion Research Institute and co-author of the report said, “The clergy risk alienating a significant number of young folks if they take a real hard line approach on same-sex marriage”.

Despite such encouraging statistics, in the Proposition 8 issue, 52 per cent of Californians voted for the constitutional amendment which bars gay men and lesbians from marrying. When District Judge Vaughn Walker recently ruled that the ban was unconstitutional, it was expected that same-sex couples would be able to resume wedding plans last week, but opponents were successful in their plea that the ban should remain in place until they have appealed.

The ruling is currently being challenged in federal court, and the ban will remain until December when further proceedings against its lifting are to take place.

Experts believe it will be another two years before the case comes before the Supreme Court.

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How do we choose a mate? What scientists are learning from online dating.

By Courtney Humphries  |  August 22, 2010

To be single these days is to face a sea of advice about how to attract a partner. Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to wealth and prestige. Or are they? There’s no shortage of impassioned opinion about what men and women want, yet there is little real evidence to support it. Even though finding love is one of our primary preoccupations, it has always been shrouded in mystery and guesswork. Adages like “opposites attract” feel comforting, but it would be even better to know what qualities actually entice potential partners in the real world.

To really answer the question in a scientific way, we’d need to be able to observe the behavior of thousands of single people and see whom they choose to pursue and whom they pass over. We would need a peephole into the dating world.

As it turns out, for the first time in history such a thing exists: It’s called online dating. Research presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association found that 22 percent of heterosexual couples surveyed met online, and researchers believe the Web could soon eclipse friends as the primary means of finding mates. As dating interactions have moved from the privacy of bars and social gatherings to the digital world of websites and e-mails, they are generating an unprecedented trove of data about how the initial phases of romance unfold. Online profiles contain detailed personal and demographic information about website users, and their interactions are indelibly recorded in digital form.

Unlike participants in a dating research study, online daters are behaving candidly, not modifying their behavior for an audience. “It gives us a window into the difference between what people say they want and what they actually do,” says Andrew Fiore, a social psychologist at Michigan State University.

This mountain of information is beginning to yield intriguing findings. The dating website OKCupid has begun publishing statistics about its users’ behavior on its blog, and using the numbers to generate real-world advice. For example: Men get more responses from women if they don’t smile in their profile pictures, and women find most men below average in attractiveness — but write to them anyway. More recently, the site has begun inviting collaboration with academics to do more thorough studies with the data. And in the past few years, several other researchers used data from other online dating and speed dating companies to uncover insights into what makes men and women actually respond to each other. The sheer number of interactions makes it possible for the first time to get a detailed look at how different characteristics — weight, height, race, income, age, appearance, and political leanings, to name a few — influence a person’s ability to get a date. Researchers have found, for example, that a man needs to make several extra tens of thousands of dollars to compensate for being an inch shorter, and that race matters more than people admit.

All of this information promises to give singles advice based on real evidence rather than anecdote. But it also raises questions about how much we can learn about the intricacies of individual relationships by taking a bird’s-eye view of the dating world. Does the opportunity to catalog the flirtations of thousands of daters really tell us what makes two people choose to be together?

The moment of attraction between two people used to be an unpredictable and mysterious event: a mutual spark felt in a glance exchanged at a party, a spontaneous meeting at a coffee shop, or a connection blooming gradually through work or a social network. But the Web has streamlined the dating process, concentrating singles into enormous online pools with a structured framework for searching and interacting. You can now go looking for attraction as easily as you can shop for shoes. The result is a dating scene based more on searchable features than on je ne sais quoi. Before that first glance is ever cast in person, two people often already know each other’s age, height, religion, political leanings, hobbies, and favorite bands. They have usually exchanged e-mails and decided whether or not the other person is worth pursuing. And unlike a private conversation in a bar, all of it has been recorded.

OKCupid has led the way in plundering this information for insight into what makes one human being attracted to another. The free dating and social networking website was founded by a group of former math majors at Harvard who developed a series of personality quizzes to match users based on compatibility. It now publishes a blog, OKTrends, that delves into its database of more than 1 million users to analyze their interactions. (The company has been careful to remove personal identifiers from the data so that individuals are anonymous). Sam Yagan, cofounder and CEO of OKCupid, says that OKTrends grew out of the company’s own interest in statistics and its brand’s emphasis on putting faith in algorithms to find romance.

Recent posts have tackled topics from appearance to race. OKCupid asks users to rate other people’s photos, which gives the company a measure of who’s good-looking and who’s not. The company found that while men rate women’s attractiveness in an even curve — most women being average — two-thirds of men’s messages go to the best-looking third of the women. Women, on the other hand, are more harsh on men, rating the majority as below average, but are more likely than men to send messages to people they don’t find attractive. The blog has also uncovered some intriguing trends about lying: In their online profiles, for instance, all users add an average of two inches to their height and a 20 percent raise in salary.

The data debunk some dating myths. In analyzing 7,000 user photos, the company found that women get more male attention when they flirt into the camera or smile, while men, surprisingly, did better when they looked away from the camera and didn’t smile. Even more surprising, not showing their face in their photos didn’t affect the number of messages users received.

The company can also analyze user communications to see what works and what doesn’t. The word choices most likely to kill your chances of getting a reply are bad grammar and “netspeak,” like saying “ur” for “your.” Physical compliments also appear to be counterproductive: Messages that used words like “fascinating” and “awesome” fare much better than those that used “sexy,” “beautiful,” or “hot.”

Most other companies keep their information secret, but a few academic researchers have been able to study it more deeply. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and author of “The Upside of Irrationality,” used data from a different website (he promised the site’s owners anonymity) to analyze which attributes determine the success of men and women in getting responses from the opposite sex. For both sexes, the attractiveness of the photo was the most important trait (users’ profile pictures were rated separately to determine how good-looking they were). Beyond that, men’s height was the most important feature to women. In fact, the researchers were able to put the value of height into numbers. By comparing height to salary, they found a man who is 5 feet 9 inches tall needs to make between $35,000 and $40,000 more per year to get as many responses as a man who is 5 feet 10 inches tall.

For men, they found, a woman’s most important feature was body mass index. “It turns out that men like women who are slightly anorexic,” Ariely says. And unlike a man’s height, there’s no amount of money a woman could earn to offset the effect of higher weight. Pursuing degrees doesn’t help either; education beyond a bachelor’s degree for women or a master’s degree for men did nothing to increase desirability. Another surprise: Smoking cigarettes actually increases a woman’s popularity on dating sites, which Ariely speculates may be because men associate smoking with promiscuity.

Fiore and colleagues at University of California at Berkeley looked in detail at the profiles and messaging behaviors of online daters on a major (anonymous) American dating website. They confirmed some conventional gender roles: Men tend to look for younger women, while women look for older men; women were pickier than men about what they were looking for; and over 75 percent of messages were from men to women. They also found that responsiveness matters in messages: The faster someone replies to an initial message, the more likely he or she is to get a follow-up message. Fiore has also been one of the few researchers to study what happens in the weeks after online daters actually meet. He found that daters tend to like one another less after meeting. The judgments they formed about each other before meeting didn’t predict who would continue to date, though they sometimes predicted the quality of the relationship in those who formed one.

Psychologists and social scientists have studied relationships for decades, but their ability to do so has gotten a boost from these new sources of data. Typical relationship studies in the academic world involve recruiting volunteers — usually college students — for an experiment or survey. In contrast to this rather artificial approach, users of online dating sites are acting in their own self-interest, unaware that they’re being evaluated. “The behavior is honest,” Yagan says. That’s especially useful in investigating touchy subjects like race, because “what people say they believe and the way they act are not the same.”

Indeed, some of the strongest findings from multiple dating sites have revealed discrepancies in how we talk and act in relation to race; while most people profess to being colorblind, the numbers show something quite different. Race influences the number of responses aspiring daters get, with white men having the clearest advantage.

Dating companies offer something else that researchers salivate over: large sample sizes. “You can end up with just gorgeous data sets that would be pretty much impossible for a researcher to get on their own,” says Eli Finkel, who heads the Relationships Lab at Northwestern University. He explains that having thousands of dating interactions lets researchers study “low-frequency events,” such as the behaviors of minority groups. He has used data from speed-dating companies to analyze the effects of race and political orientation on daters’ preferences. (He found that among white users, liberals are more likely than conservatives to date a black partner, whereas among black users it’s conservatives who are more likely to date outside their race.)

“Even if you don’t care about dating,” says Neil Malhotra, a political economist at Stanford University who is looking at using OKCupid’s data in his research, “it’s a really nice laboratory for looking at human interactions generally.”

These websites yield beautiful statistics because they let people categorize themselves according to a set of defined attributes. Which points to a potential problem with studying online dating. By setting up romantic interactions as a marketplace, online dating sites may actually fuel the somewhat superficial behavior seen in some of these analyses. In one study, Ariely and his colleagues tried to quantify how valuable people were in the dating market; they then created an algorithm that artificially paired people with others of equal “market value” according to these factors. The real-life behavior of daters corresponded very well with the ideal scenario they created; given a list of characteristics, daters are very good at figuring out where they fit in the social hierarchy and seeking out those who match their own value.

But is that necessarily a good thing? “Within this system — and this system is about searching on these attributes — people function quite well,” Ariely says. “But it doesn’t say they’re really doing the optimal thing. It doesn’t say that they understand who will be their soul mate.” Instead, online dating may create a situation in which people can methodically shop for the best “match,” but miss out on the qualities that lead to good relationships when the interaction moves off-line. Studying these sites may tell us who catches our eye in a profile, but it takes more to tell us who makes us happy in the end.

Ariely’s interest in dating as a market grew out of a personal tragedy. When he was 18 years old, he was badly burned in an explosion. During his long and painful recovery, he realized that his status had dropped; he would no longer be as valuable to potential mates because of his disfigurement. He worried he would have to settle for someone less desirable who would accept him. Not many of us think about dating as a market — a place where buyers and sellers compete for transactions. But, as Ariely says, “The moment you understand that the other people you’re interested in have other options, you understand that you’re in a competitive situation and you’re in a market.”

But while it’s useful for researchers to view dating as a marketplace, Ariely admits that in our own lives, that line of thinking can be harmful. At some point, a relationship isn’t about trading up for the best mate, it’s about falling in love with another person. And that involves seeing qualities in someone beyond the superficial ones that catch people’s eye in the dating market. For all his concerns about his own market value, Ariely ended up happily married — and he didn’t have to settle.

Courtney Humphries is a freelance science writer and the author of ”Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan…And the World.”

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A study has found that one third of gay and bisexual men diagnosed with HIV show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Researchers from the NHS Foundation Trust in London surveyed 100 gay and bisexual men who had been diagnosed with HIV. The study results were published in the latest edition of the journal AIDS Patient Care and STDs

They found that 33 per cent of the men met the criteria for having PTSD, which is a psychological disorder that can develop in people who have experienced or witnessed traumatic events.

Symptoms can include flashbacks, guilt, depression, addiction and physical complaints such as headaches.

The researchers were surprised to find that beginning antiretroviral therapy was marginally the strongest trigger for PTSD developing and theorised that this may be because the men feared how a medication regime could affect their lives.

They concluded: “Such appraisals could include catastrophic expectations about the limitations a medication regime may impose on social or occupational functioning thus leading to traumatic fear, or the perceived failure of alternative medicines and lifestyle remedies leading to traumatic helplessness.”

Other triggers were feeling physically ill as a result of infection or experiencing the death of a loved one from HIV.

Significantly, the actual diagnosis of HIV was described by 55 per cent of men as traumatic but this was not in itself a trigger for PTSD.

Matthew Hodson, head of programmes at GMFA, the gay men’s health charity, said the study was a “sharp reminder of the huge emotional stress that HIV infection can cause”.

He said: “If you become infected, you will probably have to take medication every day for the rest of your life to keep your immune system functioning. In addition to anxieties over treatment failure, or fear of how it will affect their social and work lives, people with HIV have to deal with stigmatisation. There is the constant knowledge that there will always be the possibility of them infecting partners. If they discuss their status with partners, they face rejection. If they don’t discuss their status, they are vilified.

“Amongst my own friends, I see how devastating it can be to be diagnosed positive, and how starting medication in itself is often traumatic. We need to get to a point where, as gay men, we are supportive of each other and where we can openly discuss HIV status and safer sex.”

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GMDVP direct services include:

• Legal advocacy and court accompaniment
• 24-Hour emergency hotline
• Crisis intervention and safety planning
• Housing and employment advocacy
• Emergency safe home
• Emotional support and support groups
• First/Last month’s rent program

GMDVP advocates ready to help.  Call 800-832-1901 for more information or click here to learn more.

See more on www.dcfukit.org.

The LGBTI Health Summits are an opportunity for individuals working for the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex people to meet and share ideas.  The LGBTI Health Summits grew out of a resurgence in queer health movements which looked beyond a victim deficit based model of disease, using an asset based approach built on the World Health Organization definition of health as a state of physical, mental and social well-being not just the absence of disease.

This summit is different from traditional health conferences. LGBTI Health Summits (previously in Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, and most recently in Chicago. ) have been described as nurturing retreats, exciting and intense think tanks, and an event of great enlightenment. Participants come away with a renewed passion for the cause, energized and inspired to tackle the problems confronting LGBTI health and wellness.

All members of the LGBTI Community and their allies are invited to participate in beautiful, Bloomington, Indiana. July, 2011.

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