Frontdesk

by David Waggoner

If you’ve leafed through a current high school yearbook lately, you may have noticed something different. The drama and math clubs are still there, ROTC is still going strong, but, more and more, Gay/Straight Alliances have been popping up across the country. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, questioning, and straight students come together to talk through issues such as identity and discrimination and support each other in the process. It’s a way of coming together and a show of solidarity that we adults could learn from.

That’s what I like about the Bravo television show, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. As Kyan Douglas, the show’s “grooming guru” and this month’s cover interview, describes it, gay and straight men come together on the common ground of self-improvement—nurturing their passions, love life, and style all in one fell swoop. We have plenty of images of straight women and gay men forming friendships—just turn on Will & Grace—but we rarely see gay and straight men as anything but enemies or people from completely different worlds. With connections like these being made on Queer Eye, it’s nice to see that even something as “light” as style doesn’t have to be devoid of substance. I’d like to see more of this type of bridge-building when it comes to the AIDS community.

If you listen to the CDC, you would think that people living with HIV/AIDS are all separated by risk category and never the twain shall meet. Certainly, some issues can only be effectively addressed by focusing on a particular community. Thus, we often have positive gay retreats, Latino AIDS conferences, and prayer weeks for the healing of AIDS. The media certainly covers AIDS as if gays are over here doing their thing and the straights are over there.

Gay men have a lot to teach straight people and straight people have a lot to teach gay men about living with HIV, community organizing, and prevention methods. Maybe this is happening in smaller, less noticeable ways everyday at AIDS service organizations, churches, and college campuses. But, yet, we still have support and social groups segregated by gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Obviously there are good reasons for this. You might be more comfortable talking with others who have shared similar experiences. Or you might have tried the general group and found that your needs weren’t being met or that your voice was being stifled. You might find that, as a gay Latino, you are constantly pulled in different directions, between communities. We might, however, work toward mixing it up a bit. We might learn that people who seemingly come from completely different worlds actually can find common ground. And we might truly discover how limiting those categories are. When is the summit where all the different communities come together as a united front? Am I asking too much, too soon?

With the Presidential elections looming on the horizon, I keep hearing pundits talk of  the “women’s vote,” the “Latino vote,” and so on. Now we all know that all women do not share the same politics and pull many different levers come November, but at least candidates are aware that there are some core issues out there that many women have organized around. Wouldn’t it be something if one day we hear about the “AIDS-affected vote”? Who knows what we could achieve if we manage to come together like that.