Yes, they do.

prideHealth is holding a round table discussion this Thursday, Feb 2 at Veith House. The event starts at 7pm and runs until 9. According to Cybelle Rieber, prideHealth coordinator, the event is a way to learn how to better serve the rainbow community. “prideHealth is a program that is designed to increase access to healthcare, the broad spectrum of healthcare, to the GLBTIQ communities here in Halifax,” she said in an email to Xtra. “The program exists because of a recognition that the GLBTIQ populations are underserved in healthcare and Capital Health and the IWK want to change that. prideHealth cannot do this alone, and this program needs the input and the ideas from the community.” Many people in the queer community face obstacles when accessing healthcare, so this is a way for individuals to talk about their own needs and wants within the healthcare system.

Currently, prideHealth has outreach programs in effect at various sites within the HRM, including an open clinic held every two weeks at Menz Bar. For more information, check out prideHealth’s website, or email them.

When I was a kid, Miss Piggy was my favourite Muppet. How my parents didn’t know I was gay, I’m not entirely sure. But I digress.

I would go around pulling “Hi-ya!”s because I thought it was funny, and I even had a Miss Piggy coffee mug that I used for hot chocolate.

So imagine my surprise when I learned that the grande dame of all things porcine and I share the same journalistic ideas.

Case in point:

#Nuffsaid

If you read this blog, then you know I have a great love for the website/blog Gawker. I’m not here to write an open letter telling them how much I love them, but if I did, it would probably be directed to Brian Moylan.

Why? Because of this:

Image via Gawker

It all started about a week ago when news that Grindr, the social networking/cruising app for men who have sex with men had been hacked in Australia. People worried about their personal information being leaked, including conversations and pics that had been distributed via the app. (On a side note, looks like the person who hacked the app will not be prosecuted, or at least not at the time of this posting.)

Meanwhile, in a less sexually explicit realm of the internet (does such a thing exist?), Google has announced that it is getting rid of all its individual privacy policies for the various services that it maintains and will soon institute one umbrella policy for all. What does this mean? That Google can use the information you post in any of its various sites, programs, etc and use that to create ads that will be specific to you. Oh, and if you live under an online rock, Facebook is making its Timeline feature a permanent and non-negotiable part of your browsing experience, making all those stupid things you and your friends said on your wall in the past few years easily available for all to see.

In other words, people are starting to realize the permanence and permeability of online life. Just because what you said isn’t directly in front of your screen doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist somewhere, or that someone can stumble across it pretty easily. Christ, I once found stuff I had written on a listserv back in 1995 (don’t bother looking; it was under an alias). Things don’t disappear into the ether.

Five days after the Grindr story broke, writer Brian Moylan did something I don’t believe any other journalist or blogger has done before. He posted his Grindr profile on the web, for all to see. Comments on the story were generally positive, with the occasional doubt cast on the veracity of his stats – “All true”, he laughs. Opinions ranged from, “Wow, you're hot. Like, I would literally drag my dick through a mile of broken glass just to beat off to your shadow,” to “Dude - 6'2" and 150 lbs. I hope you get some hits on Grindr - you really need some protein.”

In the text accompanying it, Moylan jokingly admits to “whoring himself out” for viewing hits – he and his co-workers are having a contest to see who can get the most hits – but then he goes on to say something very telling:

“I'd like to say that putting the little ad I use to advertise myself on Grindr, a popular iPhone app that ranks gay men looking to meet other men for encounters of all sorts based on their proximity to the user, is some sort of comment about transparency. Since I would totally swipe a famous gay person's Grindr photo and put it on the Internet, I should make my own available.”

So I emailed Moylan and asked him for an interview. He said yes but that his schedule was busy. After missed phone calls and a few back-and-forth emails, I got him on the phone as he was waking up. “It’s raining in New York, and I’m still in bed,” he says as he stretches. When I asked him about the post in question and his reasons for posting it, he said, “I thought it would be fun and funny. And you know, I totally would, if I found George Michael on Grindr, I would totally take a screenshot of it and put it on the internet for everyone to see. If I would do it, why should my profile be off-limits?”

And there it is. Although Moylan considers himself to be more of a writer than a journalist – although he has worked in journalism, notably for the gay newspaper The Washington Blade – he’s simply pointing out that the online world is a very public one. Just because you’re alone on your computer doesn’t mean you’re not in a public sphere. If Facebook can log all your chats and Google can send you ads based on the content of your emails, then putting your photo and having conversations on smartphone-based applications is just another dimension of the public realm.

Moylan is realistic about what his online presence means in terms of his own private life. “There are some things that I will show on the internet and some things that are just for people who are close to me. I don’t talk about my family online, just 'cause. That’s not my place to share it.” He jokes that his father often reads his work, and in this particular instance, explaining what Grindr is and how it works was “a little bit of an uncomfortable conversation to have, but in the great realm of things, it wasn’t too bad.”

Moylan himself admits to having people occasionally recognize him from his work on Gawker when he uses the app. But he likens it to being seen in any public arena. “It’s like going to a department store,” he says. “If someone sees you in a department store, you can’t be like, 'Oh, yeah, I don’t go to this department store,' because you’re there! It’s like going to a gay bar; just as many people can see you. And yeah, I go to gay bars all the time and I go to Grindr all the time.”

When discussing the issues around media personalities putting their personal, social or even artistic lives online – Sook Yin Lee almost losing her job comes to mind - Moylan isn’t concerned. “There are things I have said about people in the media industry that I think have probably been far more damaging to my career prospects,” he says. “I’ve probably pissed off a number of people who may have hired me in the future. I feel like that is more dangerous to my future employment prospects than the fact that people may or may not know I go on Grindr.”

We’ve all done it. We’ve all put our faces, personal information (and possibly more) on everything from personal ads to blogs to Tumblr posts to Facebook pages. Although we as a society are often kvetching about the lack of online privacy, I think we are arguably more suspect than those we seek to blame. Besides, who’s the one posting all this information? Really, we’re just giving it away. We treat our personal information like trash on the side of the road. We shouldn’t be surprised when someone enacts the “finders keepers” rule. But within that same frame, I think it’s time we give each other a bit more of a break when we are open about ourselves and our lives online. It's hard to fault someone for doing something that we also do, have done or would do. So I applaud Brian Moylan for posting his Grindr profile on Gawker. Now, if only a certain silver fox anchor would do so . . .

Maybe during sweeps week.

I always wondered if drunk dialling and texting had evolved into drunk Grindr/Scruff/whathaveyou.

Apparently, it has.

Two guys who go under the moniker “drunkgrindr” have started uploading videos of themselves talking to other guys on the famed social/cruising app, all the while drinking and getting drunk.

First there was “My Drunk Kitchen.” I guess now we have “My Drunk Grindr.”

All I can think of when I watch this is a T-shirt I got for Christmas.

'Nuff said.

I was a kid when the AIDS crisis began and a teenager when it exploded into mainstream media. It had "left" the greater metropolises and moved closer to home.  

When I was 15, I met a queer woman who was in her 30s.  She wore a jean jacket with a black triangle and told me about ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. I was mesmerized.

ACT-UP polarized, enraged, moved, excited and helped people from all over. Good or bad, it is arguably one of the most prominent social activism movements to happen within the queer community since Stonewall.

After years of work, Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman have produced a visual document that tells the story of ACT-UP, in a film called "United in Anger: A History of ACT-UP."

You can check out the trailer here:

 

It's a busy week in Halifax.  

It's dreary in Hali during the winter, so why not check out Queer Acts at The Company House? The theme of the night: Drag Gone Wrong.
Featuring Micheal Best, Kevin Kindred and Jeremy Doucette among others, you can find out more about the event here.

Wanna get dirty and sudsy all at once but don't always feel like you can? A collective is forming to organize bathhouse nights in Halifax for women, trans, gender-queer and other folks who can't regularly access them. The meeting will take place at The Company House this Wednesday, Jan 25, at 4pm. For more info, email halifax.bathhouse@gmail.com.

Guerrilla Gayfare is throwing one of their monthly parties and recently created a snazzy new poster.

You can find out more about their upcoming shindig here.

***

Also, today would be Klaus Nomi's 68th birthday. I've written about Klaus before in this column but feel that there's nothing wrong with a little extra Klaus in our lives.

 

S Bear Bergman is in need of a little bit of help.

Bergman recently launched a site on kickstarter.com to help fund a project called Flamingo Rampant! Gender Independent Kids Books. The project would help fund the publication of two books, entitled The Adventures of Tulip, Birthday Wish Fairy and Backwards Day.

Image from Bergman's Kickstarter page.

Bergman describes the reasoning behind the creation:

"As a writer and parent, my goal in writing these stories was to create books that would not only open up opportunities to talk about trans issues but also offer great stories - the kind I could imagine my own son asking to have read a second, third, or ::sigh:: fourth time before bed. The stories themselves fold issues of gender in seamlessly, making them great for any kind of kid."

In a video on the Kickstarter page, Bergman includes interviews with librarians, educators, trans families and more, all of whom highlight their desire to see these books - and books about gender variance - published. Children, and the families who read books to them, want to see themselves represented in books. It's that simple. 

Check it out.

 

As previously reported in this space, prideHealth, an organization within Capital Health, Halifax's health authority, launched an It Gets Better video today, Friday, Jan 20, at noon.

The video is already up and running on YouTube. Check it out.

I don't think I can make it any clearer: I love Carol Channing.

Yes, I know that by saying so, I am fulfilling some grandiose cultural stereotype as a gay man, but come on: how can you not love someone who is known for saying something as silly as:

So I was deliriously happy to hear about a new documentary about the grand dame. Aptly titled Larger Than Life,  the film chronicles Channing's life on stage and screen. At a spry 90 years of age, Channing is still making us smile.

Bonus: Two of my fave dames, Miss Piggy and Carol Channing, together on The Muppet Show.

It’s a subject that gets people hot and bothered, no pun intended.

It was recently announced that the city of Los Angeles is passing a ruling stating that condoms must be used on the sets of all porn shoots. It came about after a recent surge of pressure from healthcare practitioners, former and current performers, and, arguably, the media interest in this subject.

Porn is a multibillion-dollar industry, and Los Angeles – or rather, the San Fernando Valley, which is part of the greater metropolis of LA – is considered one of the biggest producers of it in the world. Various organizations have been campaigning for this regulation make condom use required by law, groups such as the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, as well as certain performers in the industry who have said that the industry doesn’t care about the health and safety of their performers. The detractors have argued that this is an example of state-sanctioned censorship and a removal of their rights to free expression. Already, the mainstream media is picking up on this story, even discussing the idea that some porn producers may simply move their productions to jurisdictions where such regulations don’t exist. Companies such as Treasure Island Media, which is arguably one of the biggest producers of bareback porn in the US, wouldn't be affected by the law since it is based out of San Francisco. Does this mean everyone will move to San Fran? Or even just outside of city lines?

The problem with the regulation is that it isn’t perfect, and depending on how it is enforced - as well as who enforces it - the entire situation could quickly become moot. In fact, The Globe and Mail even reported that there already is a law on the books in California, but that it isn’t properly enforced. The Globe quotes Ged Kenslea, of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, as saying:

Let's make one thing clear: condom use on adult film sets is, and has been, the law in California under blood-borne pathogens regulations,” he said. “It is just a law that has not been uniformly enforced or followed. This film permit ordinance that the city council approved today provides another enforcement mechanism to make sure that adult film producers are complying with existing California law.”

It’s essentially the same law as those that protect actors, stunt men and others on film sets from being put in possibly harmful situations. Precautions are followed to ensure their safety. I recently had a discussion about this very subject with a friend of mine, a former sex worker and porn enthusiast who put it to me this way: “Are building contractors permitted to allow their construction workers on-site without a hard hat, safety goggles or steal-toed boots? No! And if they do, their industry’s regulatory body fines them, or worse yet, shuts down their project.”

It comes down to job security, something most people in the porn industry don’t have. Workers are workers, and workers deserve safe working conditions.