Washington Blade - June 25, 2004

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.

More Ontario gays practicing unsafe sex: report

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.

Zoologists: Monkeys in China show propensity for gay sex

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."

Study: Gays over age 50 involved in family care giving

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.

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