Kathleen DeBold heads the Mautner Project, one of the few organizations nationwide
dedicated to lesbian health issues. (Photo by Leigh H. Mosley)
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Friday, June 25, 2004
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Accustomed to neglect from much of the medical establishment,
lesbians are assigning themselves the task of assessing the distinctive array
of health problems gay women face. Even without a specific crisis as grave as
the AIDS epidemic, the diagnosis is sobering: Compared to heterosexual women,
lesbians appear to have higher rates of smoking, obesity and alcohol use. Often
lacking health insurance or wary of unsympathetic doctors, they also may be less
likely to undergo routine medical exams that could identify cancer and other
problems at early stages. Complicating all these factors, researchers say, is
a glaring shortage of comprehensive data, resulting from the fact that most health
surveys don’t account for sexual orientation. “We don’t know
the mortality rates, we don’t know the suicide rates,” said Dr. Patricia
Robertson of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. “Lesbians
are invisible.” Robertson is co-director of UCSF’s Lesbian Health
Research Center, founded in 1999 to fill the perceived void in the study of lesbians’ medical
problems. Other relatively new organizations have undertaken similar efforts,
including the San Francisco-based Lesbian Health Fund and the Washington-based
Mautner Project, which focuses on lesbians with cancer. A national conference
on lesbian health was held in Chicago last month. Several researchers said in
interviews that they were derided by some colleagues for entering the field and
still encounter skepticism, both within the medical profession and among Bush
administration officials who influence priorities for federal health grants. “Only
just recently has there been a feeling that lesbian health is a legitimate specialty — but
you still face inequities in funding,” said Dixie Horning, executive director
of UCSF’s National Center for Excellence in Women’s Health.
NEW YORK (AP) — Like the baby-boom population at large, gay New Yorkers
over 50 years old are heavily involved in the care of sick or frail family
members — and are often expected to shoulder more of the work, a new
study says. It concludes that such caregivers are handicapped by policies that
discriminate against same-sex relationships. “Despite the fact that they
are taking care of parents, children, partners and siblings in need, LGBT caregivers
are not provided with the same social, emotional or financial support afforded
to other caregivers,” the study said. The report, called “Caregiving
Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender New Yorkers,” was released
last week by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute. The
study found that 46 percent of those surveyed have been caregivers at some
time in the past five years, compared to 44 percent among all people over 50.
TORONTO — In the last decade, the rate of unprotected sex among Ontario’s
gay and bisexual men has nearly doubled, according to a new survey, the Toronto
Star reported. The University of Toronto questioned 5,080 men in the Ontario
Men’s Survey of 2002, and about 40 percent of those surveyed said they
had unprotected anal sex at least once in the previous year, the Star reported.
That compares with 20 percent of respondents in the 1991 Canadian Survey of
Gay & Bisexual Men who said they had unsafe sex in recent months, according
to the newspaper. The 2002 study also tested 3,635 respondents for HIV, after
asking the men if they had the virus, and more than 25 percent of those who
tested positive were unaware, with 15 percent of those testing positive telling
researchers they were HIV-negative, the Star reported. “What we would
do is encourage any gay or bisexual men who either haven’t been tested
or have tested negative but have since been engaged in risky behavior to get
tested as soon as possible,” Ted Myers, director of the university’s
HIV Social Behavioral and Epidemiological Studies Unit, told the Star.
BEIJING — In one Chinese province, monkeys show an “intimate” way
of relating to each other, zoologists said, Gay.com UK reported last week.
Across the Baihe Protection Area, the Sichuan Golden Monkeys puzzled U.S. and
Chinese experts by having gay sex, media reports indicate. In field research
on the monkeys, which live across four Chinese provinces, zoologists found
that “strong” males were most likely to have sex with each other,
news outlets reported. Scientists have discovered gay animals in other species,
such as gay penguins Roy and Silo in New York, and lesbian and bisexual monkeys
observed in Japan, Gay.com UK reported. “In some populations, female
Japanese macaques sometimes prefer same-sex partners,” Dr. Paul Vasey
told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver last
year, Gay.com UK reported. “That occurs even when they are presented
with sexually motivated, opposite-sex alternatives.”
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