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Social Health
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Social Health
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Both of my parents died young of cancer: my father in his 40s, my mother at 61. What that means for my future health is unclear. I don’t work at a nuclear submarine base as my mother did, or live within 30 miles of a nuclear power plant. And it’s been 25 years since I smoked the cigarettes that killed my father, although I spent 17 years as a nicotine addict, starting when I was 7 years old.
Right there are two of many health issues not unique to our communities, but that certainly have a major impact: tobacco and cancer. I know half a dozen lesbians who’ve had breast cancer in the past 5 years, and that’s the merest chip off an iceberg of breast cancer in this country. Rates for women in Vermont are among the highest in the nation, and no one really knows why. That fear of finding a lump in your breast or in your lover’s breast is a shadow lesbians live with that is not alleviated by the stainless-steel painful-but-necessary process of having a mammogram (guys: think of having a precious and sensitive appendage flattened in a two-ton vise). Lesléa Newman’s story “Keeping A Breast,” from which she has allowed us to print an excerpt, paints an all-too-realistic picture.
What constitutes “health” is different for each of us. I live with a couple of manageable chronic illnesses. My health is not perfect, and it could be better. I need to exercise more, but I consider myself basically healthy.
If “health” is a slippery concept for us as individuals, how much harder it is when we’re talking about an entire community!
Vermont is relatively a socially healthy place for gays and lesbians: few of us are being beaten or killed because of our perceived or actual sexuality. At least some of our transgender folks are making successful transitions within their workplaces and getting identity documents that match their new gender. It’s not perfect – as last month’s student harassment trial makes plain – and it could be better.
Within our communities, we’re doing basically okay. The proliferation of organizations suggests healthy growth as we find groups within our broad community to connect with. There are Crones and youth groups, gay volleyball and gay ice hockey, Chiltern Mountain Club hikers and Women of the Woods, Dyke Talks, and more. It’s diverse, colorful, basically healthy.
A few of those groups deal with our unhealthy behaviors: domestic violence and sexual practices that place us and our lovers at risk for sexually transmitted diseases – not just HIV, but Hepatitis and Chlamydia and HPV (linked to cervical cancer), and older ones like gonorrhea. Neither issue is unique to our community, but we’ve found unique ways to deal with them.
But we’re not done yet. We compromise our health with our addictions, chief among them alcohol and tobacco. Neither industry is a friend of ours. Alcohol manufacturers are busy trying to buy our loyalty by sponsoring awards ceremonies and Pride events or by buying print ads in our publications. I enjoy an occasional drink or a beer, but I can’t ignore the long trail of gay and lesbian lives wrecked by alcoholism fostered by the fact that historically our only semi-public gathering places were bars.
As for tobacco, the commercial industry has been busy for years designing ads to entice our beautiful queer youth to turn to cigarettes when their lives feel out of control, or to open conversations, or to look cool and mature and rebellious, or because in the beginning it gives them that dizzy rush, and then they’re hooked. It takes too long, decades, for them to realize – or in some cases care – that they won’t live forever, and that dying from lung cancer or heart disease is an ugly, painful, desperate, boring, repetitive fight for every breath through a tube. The connection between that dark, smoky taste, that one cigarette in the hand or between the lips to such an awful end is too hard to make without a lot of support and help.
We’re not perfect and we could be better. We need to exercise more.
We need to exercise our judgment in keeping our lovers safe from STDs and our children safe from tobacco. We need to exercise our minds in thinking about where we want to go as a community. We need to exercise our hearts and hands (and yes, checkbooks) in the service of our community’s organizations, whether it’s helping Safe Space support and protect our brothers and sisters who are in abusive relationships or organizing Pride events; whether we’re mentoring gay and lesbian youth or building a community center; whether we’re lobbying the legislature or running for elected office. We need to exercise more to be healthier.
Treadmills are fine, but exercising in the real world is where it has a solid impact on the GLBTQ bodies politic and social.
Euan Bear,
Editor