I normally don’t like the genre of cherry-picking conference schedules for ridiculous-sounding workshops, but Oliver Kamm takes a look at the Gay Men’s Health Summit and I have to admit that he has a point. Part of it comes with the cutesy conventions of panel titling ("Bears & Health: Untangling the Fur and the Stethoscope"!), but equally at fault seems to be the summit’s objectives: eclipsing actual health education and health policy issues with questions of cultural politics, particularly of the touchy-feely psychopathologizing variety. (Why would one go to a conference to rejuvenate?) Now, there are times when the cultural politics are crucial to the health policy, e.g. AIDS-prevention education efforts aimed at gay communities will often miss non-gay-identified men who sleep with men. But what we have here seems to be something else: various subcultures who are disgruntled (rightly or wrongly) with majoritarian gay male/lesbian cultures and who present their ressentiment as if it were the genuine health concern at hand.
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