The bravest act during a pandemic is to love

by time news

The community still remembers what it’s like to be assigned because of stigma (Illustration: pixabay)

I was ten years old when my favorite docu director, Marlon Riggs, died of AIDS. I didn’t know then what my sexuality was or what documentary cinema was, or that Marlon would be one of my favorite directors. I discovered him through his films. At the age of 33, I saw Marlon dying of AIDS in one of them. He spoke and sang to the camera in a hospital bed in California in “Black is, Black is not” (1994), the last film he directed and whose editing was completed after his death at the age of 37.

Before and since then, the AIDS disease killed many people, including friends and acquaintances of Marlon – who participated in his most famous film, “Loose Tongues”, in which they described in poetry and monologues their experiences as black gay men growing up in a conservative and alienated USA, and coming of age into the outbreak of the HIV virus, Every sexually active queer man has been threatened ever since.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the video of Marlon singing to himself in bed the past few weeks. The queer feed on social networks has been flooded in the last two months with videos of people who have been infected with a new disease that threatens the LGBT community. Although a disease that does not kill people like AIDS did, it is painful and scary.


“Loose Tongues”, Marlon Riggs, 1994

Like Marlon in 1994, men and women who until recently used TikTok and Instagram to share the beauty of their bodies and faces are sharing with the world the physical symptoms of the new disease: smallpox on the skin, which at first looks like a rash, and may swell and multiply throughout the body.

According to the American Center for Disease Control, the virus that causes the disease was first documented in 1958 in monkey communities, which were used for research purposes, and hence the disease got its name: “monkey pox”. The virus that causes the disease is transmitted by direct contact with the smallpox that has formed, contact with surfaces that a carrier has touched, and probably also contact with body fluids of a patient.

“From the moment the rumors about the epidemic started, we decided to prevent the sequence of infections and for now to close the place,” says Avi Logsi, owner of the Saraya sauna (“the hammam”) in Jaffa – a complex for men only, which normally opens between ten at night and six in the morning on the weekend. “We saw a lot of data that it passes through contact and saliva, and one of the things that was discovered the most – hot tubs, which have a very large number of people in them, are places that may be contagious. We didn’t want people to enter the hot tub and get infected, God forbid.”

In the hammam, you sometimes do more than a dip in the jacuzzi, and it is possible that Logsi alludes to another concern – that the sexual contacts in the hammam will lead to infection. Studies on the current outbreak wave indicate that 95% of the known and reported cases in this outbreak of monkeypox are transmitted through sexual intercourse, mainly in sexual encounters between men who have sex with men.

An experience of freedom mixed with fear

At this stage of the disease, the LGBT community is uncertain about the best way to protect ourselves. Because of the fear of transmitting the disease through contact or airborne saliva particles, my partner has stopped going to community parties. Some of our friends continue to go to parties, but have stopped have casual sex.

And it’s not just because members of the community aren’t sure what the right way to defend against the virus is – scientists still aren’t sure what we’re supposed to defend against. Portuguese researchers, who published a code that checks the mutations of the virus, found that the monkeypox virus has mutated about 50 times since 2018.

The study, which was published in Nature Medicine and reviewed in Israel for the first time on the ultra-Orthodox website “Be Hadari Haredim”, added a dimension to the complexity of the current outbreak of the disease in different countries at the same time. The researchers wrote in the summary of the article that future studies will be able to indicate whether the mutations they discovered are the cause of the rapid spread of the virus.

In other words, the scientific discovery points to the existence of the mutations, but the understanding of their nature and meaning will take time. And at this time, we live in uncertainty.

In Israel, the face of the information efforts in the age of uncertainty are doctors specializing in LGBT medicine. In a video shared by Dr. Ruthi Gofan and Dr. Itzik Levy from the LGBT clinic in Hibima Square, Dr. Gofan emphasizes that although the current outbreak occurs mainly through contact Sex between men who sleep with men, it can hurt anyone.

In a video by Dr. Gal Wagner Kolsko, director of the gay clinic Klalit Gan Meir and chairman of the Society for LGBT Medicine, he advises men to reconsider having sex with anonymous partners or multiple partners. The language he speaks in is polite: “If you choose to reduce The number of partners will reduce your risk of exposure,” he says.

Caution is important on such a sensitive point, but the subtext is clear: researchers in the US have shown that men who have sex with men tend to have sex with multiple partners 2 to 3 times more often than heterosexual men. We still don’t know everything about the disease, but we do know Who is most vulnerable. And we also know that the social and sexual habits of men who have sex with men heighten this vulnerability.

Life as a man who has sex with men is an experience of freedom mixed with fear, of taking advantage of opportunities that straight people don’t have, alongside low expectations from a society that still conforms to conservative norms.

I do not expect that I will ever be able to get married in the State of Israel. Even though I don’t have equal rights in this country, I manage to receive and give equal treatment in the most intimate relationship. The practices of moral non-monogamy are recognized and accepted in the community of which I am a part. Straight couples are still lagging behind.

Sexual openness in my eyes is a sign that as a couple, we are committed to being together without expecting each other to fully fulfill any desire or desire. But now, that openness is once again a threat.

Some of the responses to the threat posed to our community are characterized by solidarity. Like the owners of the hammam in Jaffa, the producers of the Tel Aviv JIZZ line decided to cancel their party this summer.

“We have a responsibility,” said producer Nadav Kein in an interview with Mako. “We cannot run a sleazy space and encourage blatant sexuality, while this puts our community and the rest of the public at risk.” Cain testified on his party line that “there is no JIZZ without dark rooms” – rooms where it is legitimate to have sex, and it is also legitimate to go through them and watch.

Dr. Gal Wagner Kolsko, director of the gay clinic Klalit Gan Meir and chairman of the Society for LGBT Medicine

What Cain said about adopting safe behaviors echoes insights from the outbreak of the Corona disease. The public was asked to protect themselves from the virus by keeping their distance, covering their faces and getting vaccinated. And now Cain – a leading organizer in the LGBT community – is showing similar caution in the monkeypox outbreak.

However, not all members of the community demonstrate a similar degree of responsibility. Dr. Kolesko reports that he still has many patients who have not come to receive the vaccine. According to him, some of his patients consciously avoid getting vaccinated. About some patients he says: “They hope it will be okay. There are those for whom it is more important to stick to their lifestyle – not to give up going on a cruise or to a festival in Madrid” (where the disease is at its peak after major contagion events in a sauna in the city and a festival in the Canary Islands)

In other words, we also have those who are able to make a concession for the common good, and those who are not interested in making the effort. As in any community.

Taking the spread of the disease seriously

The labeling of who is and who is not protected against monkey pox is seeping into the Grindr app, which is used by LGBT people to meet and arrange sexual encounters. People have started describing themselves on Grindr profiles as having been vaccinated against monkey pox.

For as long as I’ve known the app, Grindr users have used their profiles to share clinical information, such as their HIV status. In addition, many profiles write “tested”, and next to it is the date when the owner of the profile did a panel of tests for sexually transmitted diseases and came out negative.

In the first year when people got vaccinated against corona, it was common to see the corona immune status (vaccinated, twice vaccinated and sometimes triple vaccinated) in Grindr profiles. In Grindr, queer sexuality is often accompanied by some clinical characterization.

I emailed a Grindr spokesperson, asking what role they think the app plays in this outbreak. The spokesperson, Patrick Leahy, told me that Grindr is taking the spread of the disease seriously, and is working with public health officials to disseminate information to its users. According to him, since August, forty-nine messages about monkeypox have been distributed to users.

I gave him the examples of the Hammam and JIZZ, which they closed to protect the community, and asked if Grindr would consider shutting down its operations. “Closing the app could isolate our users,” Leahy said, “and could eliminate the most effective channel for users to get accurate information about the disease.”

In the screenshot he sent me as a reference, you see a main menu where users have three options, in addition to editing the profile: learn about monkeypox, share their photo album, or pay $9.99 to share the profile with more people. He didn’t send me statistics on which of these options gets the most clicks from users at two in the morning.

Screenshots of monkeypox information on the Grindr app (Grinder spokespeople)

Screenshots of monkeypox information on the Grindr app (Grinder spokespeople)

Even if many community members do not agree with it, the way most of us can avoid monkeypox in this period, when there are only a few thousand vaccine doses available in Israel, is to minimize sexual encounters. The fear is not only about the disease – our community still remembers what it’s like to be singled out because of stigma.

Just last year, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz and the Advisory Committee to the Ministry of Health for Transfusion Medicine changed the policy for accepting blood donations, So you will finally include men who have sex with men. Minister Horowitz, an out-of-the-closet gay man, was accompanied by cameras when he went to donate blood, probably for the first time in his adult life.

I remember reading the old blood donation questionnaire as a teenager, who thought he was very far from sleeping with men, and I remember the sadness I felt when I read the question. But along with this sadness there was also a boyish, ignorant thinking, which on the whole makes sense; After all, gays, I thought, have diseases that others don’t have.

This was the common sense of the street public for many years, even when HIV treatment improved to the point that HIV carriers whose viral load was minimal (undetectable) became non-infectious (untransmittable).

The clinical stigma attached to queer male sexuality has never gone away. As forty years of withholding blood donations from trans women and men who have sex with men attests, its social implications are resistant to scientific developments. In fact, we live in a society where broad factions still debate whether our sexuality is legitimate.

Two months ago I received a photo from a Palestinian friend from the Galilee. In the photo, a private house with a huge sign in front of it, in which a painting of a black umbrella, with the inscription in Arabic: “Sharia”, protects two parents and two children from mud in the colors of the rainbow, which represents the LGBT community.

In Jewish society, the word “LGBT” signals that those who use it resent the success of the struggles for LGBT rights, even though they still cannot marry in Israel, or adopt in Israel, or receive recognition of their gender in meetings with service providers and the authorities. The organizations that protect our rights in times like this as a vulnerable population attract more fire from those who do not want to accept our existence.

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My cinematic hero, Marlon Riggs, died when AIDS was still considered a disease of gay men and trans women. Even if he was afraid or tired, he made films about people from his communities – LGBT and African-American – until the day he died. He ordered those who came after him to know their past, and to be proud of who they are.

In times when friends and people from the community are afraid of a new disease, and some of us change our lifestyles because of it, there is a place to remember “loose tongues”: in the midst of the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, this film showed monologues and scenes of homosexual and transsexual passion. He carried the message that the bravest act during the virus outbreak is to love.

Today I understand that this courage is required not only so that we can approach others and love them during the outbreak of a threatening virus. Courage is also required so that we can currently love ourselves.

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