Dear Lydia, a Pro-Healthcare Reform Message

    
I received an email from my friend Shon. He was being harassed because someone didn't like his support of healthcare reform. He IMed me and asked me to send her a letter telling her why I support it. Below is the letter. (Her name has been changed.)

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Dear Lydia:

You sent a message to a friend of mine commenting on his support for healthcare reform. I, too, support healthcare reform, and I would like to share my story.

I have been a working stiff since I was 11 when I started babysitting. My family is like a lot of middle American families, we struggle to get by. My mom worked various jobs as a cashier, Catholic school secretary, running an in-home day care, and as a biller for a medical billing company. Now she works as an administrative assistant for a hospice. None of those jobs offered health insurance (including her current one). Luckily, my dad worked for a grocery store in produce and his union provided insurance. (Now, he is a janitor in a school, and still provides the health insurance.) So we all had coverage.

Then, I grew up and was no longer covered by my father's insurance. I ended up working different jobs trying to find my way. I worked mostly in youth service or education jobs and was only lucky enough to get insurance when my employer provided it. When an employer didn't provide it, I went without. It wasn't because I didn't want health insurance. It was because I couldn't afford it. Not only couldn't I afford it, but I had serious back problems in high school, am clinically diagnosed with ADHD, and have a heart murmur. All of these so-called "issues" (aka pre-consisting conditions)  increase the price of my premiums.

I have been lucky. I haven't needed serious medical attention since losing my health insurance again last July 2009. Recently, I developed a cold along with a very serious fever of 101.4. I panicked. I didn't know what I was going to do. I could go to the emergency room, but that didn't seem worthy of a trip to the emergency room or seem to me to qualify for the financial burden of an emergency room visit. I waited and my fever reduced but stayed at 99.4 for three more days. I had to see the doctor. If noting else to rule something more serious out.

I live in San Francisco, and we have a public health system here. Instead of running to the emergency room or to urgent care, I decided to see if I qualified for the program first. I make about $3000 a month before taxes. Luckily, I squeaked in as a qualifying participant. After a little explanation of cost (it will cost me $450 every three months plus $20 for urgent care visits and $10 costs for doctors visits and $200 for any overnight admittance to the hospital regardless of how long I stay or what services I receive), I went home for the evening because I was exhausted.

I returned the next day for urgent care. I waited. I waited a fairly long time (from the time I entered until I left it was about 6 hours). I saw a nurse practitioner; I got a chest x-ray because they thought it might be pneumonia (it wasn't); I got my prescriptions. I left with only having to pay $37 out of pocket for everything including the medications.

Before becoming uninsured, I had Kaiser. I developed a similar sickness and had to go to Kaiser's urgent care. I had to pay a $30 co-pay, and $20 for prescriptions. I waited in the waiting room for two hours. Once I was admitted, I waited in my room for another hour. I only saw a nurse practitioner. I never got a chest x-ray. My employer covered the monthly healthcare bill of $300 per month.

When comparing these two systems, I actually prefer the San Francisco option. It is just as simple or just as complicated depending on how you look at it. It provides the same level of coverage, arguably better. I got well in the same amount of time. And it costs less.

This is what healthcare reform is about. It is about ensuring that all Americans have access to healthcare. It is about making it affordable. It is about making sure that someone with a simple case of the flu or a cold doesn't get worse and drain the system. It is about reform.

I believe this isn't the complete answer, but I believe that doing nothing is way, way worse. I know that this will help a majority of Americans. Including you.

Peace,
Jason

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A Youth-Led District 6 Candidate Forum

  

Dear Community:

   

I hope this post finds you well. I am reaching out to you because this is an important year for elections in San Francisco's District 6. I am passionate about making sure youth and voters are educated on all the possible candidates, and where they stand regarding issues important to young people. And I am seeking your support for a youth-led candidate forum.

I have a strong background in helping run and manage youth-led candidate forums (as well as over 20+ years in youth development). It started in 2000 when I worked for the OMI/Excelsior Beacon Center, and it was the first year for district elections in San Francisco. I partnered with Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth’s John Avalos (now District 11 Supervisor) and Balboa High School’s Matt Alexander (now co-Principal of June Jordan) to bring the first and only youth-led candidate forum that year. In 2003, I worked as part of the Beacon Initiative’s team of youth workers that supported young people in successfully running and organizing a fabulous youth-led mayoral candidate forum. In both of these efforts, youth ran many, if not all, of the aspects of the forums from inviting candidates to researching and asking questions to greeting guests. Now, I want to bring something similar to the district I live in, District 6.

I have been a resident of District 6 for almost 10 out of the 12+ years I have lived in San Francisco. In that time, I have seen this district change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. It is a swiftly developing neighborhood with lots of children and youth that are often unseen because of the neighborhoods in which they live. I believe that a youth-led candidate forum can put children and youth front and center in this District 6 election, and I believe that this is crucial for the healthy development and growth for our District and San Francisco at large.

I learned a lot helping run two youth-led forums. First, I learned that while having a youth-led forum is an excellent idea it is only empowering and truly beneficial if both youth and voters turn out for the forum. Second, shared vision and accountability across multiple youth-serving organizations of and for the event is essential for success, including organizations committing to youth leading all aspects of the event from logistics to issue identification to facilitating and running the event. Third, a single coordinator who helps facilitate accountability ensures all collaborators and young people have a positive, educational, and empowering experience.

I posting this here because I need help to make this come to life. I need voters, youth workers, and youth-serving organizations to work together to make this event a huge success. I am hoping to pull together a team of youth, youth workers (the professionals who work with or for youth) and voters that want to help craft the vision and share accountability for the successful execution of this event in early May through a kick-off meeting at which organizations and people can learn more and get involved. The bulk of the work will be from June to September with the event (tentatively) at the beginning of October. The number of people that participate will dictate the scope and scale of the event.

To be clear, I am organizing this without compensation and as a voting resident of District 6 because I believe youth voice is crucial to this election. As such, I am seeking people that share this vision and value youth leadership. I currently do not work for a youth-service/development organization and to achieve this vision I need your support.

If you are interested in being a part of this historic and important event, please let me know in the comments below or at by emailing me at jason@ywcollective.org. Additionally, please let me know if you have any other comments, questions, ideas, or feedback. I am definitely interested in hearing from you.

Peace,
Jason

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Where Are Queer Men in Fabulis' 2010 Survey of Gay Men's Online Habits?

  
I love my community of queers, freaks, youth workers, and artists. I love the non-conformity, questioning of authority, and out of the box thinking of these folks. They are my brethren and comrades. They are the people I am proud to be among.

Today, a friend posted through Facebook the following Fabulis online survey about gay male online habits.

There was a problem at the outset for me. It came on slide 3 with the statement "The results that follow only include responses from the 94.5% of survey participants who described themselves as gay or bisexual men. All other responses were discarded."

I'm not gay or bisexual. I am queer. I am proud to be queer, and I identify this way partly because I don't believe in a binary gender construct and partly because I want to stand in solidarity with people not of the same gender as me. It is a nuanced identity that doesn't fit neatly into boxes.

I knew by seeing the title of the survey that I would probably not find myself among the respondents. I am used to that. I am used to the a large segment of the LGBT community not understanding the nuance of queer. I am used to being somewhat invisible.

There is no other note as to what the orientations of the 5.5% of the discarded respondents were. There is no mention of why those responses were discarded. They just vanished from the data set leaving me to question where do I fall within the gay and bisexual male community.

I posted this comment on the Fabulis blog "What were the sexual orientations of the 5.5% of the discarded respondents?" bradfordshellhammer, someone I assume to be from Fabulis, responded that those rejected were either straight identified or lesbian. I then asked if queer male was an option. There was a moment of confusion, and bradfordshellhammer posted the categories available during the survey. Queer was not an option.

As mentioned above, this questioning and lack of visibility is nothing new for me. It is why the meta-blog that JW Reports is a part of is called Queerly Complex. Life doesn't fall within black or white or binary codes. It is dynamic, intricate, multi-faceted and -dimensional, and messy. It holds many truths.

I don't derive self-worth from these types of reports, surveys, or news. I don't need it to justify my existence. I am happy doing that myself. What I do need from these types of surveys is an understanding that we live in a much more complicated and interconnected world. We need to stop the reductivism of one versus the other. We need to find ways to build broader based coalitions.

And this can be done simply. It doesn't need to taint a potential data pool. If the survey is concerned only with the opinions from gay men, fine. I don't need to be counted among them because I am not one. But I do need an acknowledgement from that community of my existence. This can include acknowledging queer as a category, writing "we are not including queers in this survey because...",  teasing out queers from the rest of the data pool and showing differences between gay male identified respondents and queer respondents, being completely clear that one only cares about gay men. Any of these solutions at least acknowledge that there is a community out there that is not gay identified and not straight identified.

I appreciate greatly what Fabulis is trying to build: "a social network that connects gay men with amazing experiences down the block and around the world." I also appreciate their openness to the conversation. In that effort for connection and conversation, it is important to not forget those of us who don't fit neatly into the "gay male" label. For we may be married to (or partnered to or dating or having sex with) someone who does.

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Women's Health in Healthcare Debate

  
Last night, I was watching The Rachel Maddow Show, and Melissa Harris-Lacewell was a guest on a segment related to women's health and religious bigotry. While watching, I was dumbstruck by the provision to not fund women's reproductive health in the current healthcare reform bill proposed by President Obama.

Here is the segment I watched:

It seems to me that this may just be a first step in repealing healthcare rights disguised as reform. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't seek out hidden messages or back room shenanigans and try to find out how the government is pulling the wool over my eyes. But this made me take a huge pause because here is a concrete example of how easily it is to take something away through compromise, and it exemplifies everything that is wrong with our current political structure.

Everyone has a different perspective on what good policy is. Everyone has a different perspective period. But there are some things that should be non-negotiable in my mind's eye. If we are talking about healthcare reform, we should be talking about healthcare reform for ALL people. Abortion is legal. Let me reiterate that: abortion is legal. In fact, the Supreme Court ruled on it.

And yet, here women are caught in the crosshairs of political expediency and "coalition building" to move a piece of policy forward that Republicans don't even support and will never support. It seems like an abject failure of government to not create policies that are in line with what is currently legal. I don't care who the president happens to be.

A converse example of this is when Bush Administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee wrote memos legalizing torture. Torture is illegal. Once again, torture is illegal. Yet the Bush Administration found a convenient way to make everything they did legal: issue a memo reinterpreting the law.

All of this interpretation, reinterpretation, and re-imagining of policy is on one level understandable. There is always room to interpret something differently than someone else. It is how pluralism works. However, if healthcare includes your body, it should cover all aspects of your body including reproductive organs. And, if the law states that abortion is legal, it should be legal in all iterations of policies around healthcare. Conversely, if a policy is already written that outlines what torture is and states that torture is illegal, an executive memo shouldn't be able to quickly overwrite that policy.

I worry that this encroachment on women's reproductive rights are just the tip of the iceberg. I worry about what else might be chipped away. I worry that my family that is HIV positive will see their rights whittled away with a simple justification of, "Hey, you could've prevented contracting it in the first place." I worry that my family that has depression might be told "You're mental health isn't covered because your brain is different." I worry that my family that is sick and dying will be told "You can't end your life because that's immoral." These all seem like far-fetched ideas. But so does removing organs from a healthcare bill.

Organs that already have laws protecting them.

For more information on the current healthcare bill as related to women's health, read Ann Nueman's "Rationing, Abortion Funding Are Back: Debunking “Pro-Life” Criticism of the Health Care Bill."

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Promoting Dialogue about Gender and Queerness

I am privileged to be connected to so many different people, organizations, companies, news feeds, and ideas that I sometimes find myself overwhelmed and overstimulated. But these connections provide a unique opportunity to find intersections among diverse and independent movements happening the world over.

Take for example LYRIC's new campaign Gender Dialogue.

LYRIC worked with Intersection for the Arts to create posters that open up the dialogue around gender. The posters were the culmination of a multi-week workshop that "explored gender-based oppression, identity, and expression". These posters are now displayed in enclosed cases at the 16th Street BART Plaza in San Francisco to encourage others to think critically about what gender is and how it is expressed. It is a call to action for exploration and challenging assumptions and bias. And they are visually arresting thanks to support from a professional graphic designer.

I received notice of this new campaign in my email inbox from the Transitional Age Youth Task Force, and I immediately started thinking about my own assumptions. Sure, I identify as a queer so that does mean I am more predisposed to actually look at and reflect on the images. It is also not a given that I would. The reason I took pause and reflected was because I saw pieces of myself reflected within the graphics. I may be male identified but too often that gets conflated with masculinity and manliness. I am not manly. Nor am I particularly masculine. And it was wonderful to see something that acknowledges this complexity. Especially something that looks like pop culture. 

Then, while perusing Twitter, I came across this gem of a video Queerer Than Thou.

And I fell in love. This video brings the conversation of gender, sparked in me by the ad campaign, to a whole new level. It uses humor to delve into the constructed identities we build around ourselves. Who is queerer: The fembot dyke MTF who throws aside all gender conformity or the polyamorous lisping queen who loves boxes (albeit nontraditional ones)? Neither and both is the answer I found.

We all have unique characteristics that make us who we are and those characteristics are interpreted by others using their own cultural, familial, historical lenses. Often those lenses see us not as we see ourselves. And this is where conflict comes in.

What is important is that we have this dialogue; that we open up a conversation between our friends, family, loved ones, colleagues, co-workers, and those we pass by. We must be willing to be uncomfortable and take risks. And those of us that "look" stereotypically "gender normative" (I use quotes here because what really is gender normative?) need to support our brothers and sisters that are defy gender boxes. We have a burden to be their allies and support their struggle by being proactive.

I truly believe that we as queers will not be free until all people are free. Because after all what makes a queer? Nothing and everything.

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