Monkeypox is here, as we are all too well aware. The WHO aims to rename the virus “MPVX” to counter stigma and racism (notice Western media using photos of black people in stories on monkeypox?) As the time of this posting, the WHO is also convened a meeting to determine if MPVX is a global health emergency.
But what do we do about the other big issue that has arisen? The blanket association media and other voices have been making between MPVX and gay men is problematic in a multitude of ways.
From CBC to CNN, outlets have put focus on the sexuality of those who have acquired MPVX. (Funny: a disproportionate number of straight people first acquired Covid-19, yet their sexuality was not reported.)
But now it’s a disproportionate number of gay men who have acquired MPVX, and so immediately much of mainstream media coverage has been infuriating and irresponsible. Most media have wasted no time in sometimes salaciously reporting this “gay link,” with very few outlets putting effort into offering some context, let alone telling the whole story.
And that’s dangerous. We’ve been down this road to hell already. Do we want to travel it again?
Firstly, “gay men” aren’t the whole high risk group. The at-risk include male-identifying people who fit any of the following: sex workers; those who have attended a sex club, bath house, or have had anonymous / casual sex, or two or more sexual partners in general in the past 21 days; and/or those who have had a bacterial STI in the last two months.
But let’s just say “gay men” for the sake of argument. Why are we acquiring MPVX? Gay men socialize in intimate ways in large groups. We also meet and greet up-close; we hug, we kiss. We’re more sex positive, with many of us enjoying bath houses and saunas and sex parties and freely hooking up. We attend sweaty bump ’n’ grind dance events, as thousands will this Pride season, and we often travel long distances to get to them.
Given this, and that the virus usually spreads through lose contact with someone with rashes / lesions (sex, sharing contaminated bedding, hugging, skin-to-skin contact) it’s not difficult to understand why gay men are higher risk.
Experts also add two factors that explain why cases are being detected in our community first: our health providers being on higher alert, and our regular testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
But none of this is given airtime. That MPVX is moving through sexual contact but is NOT a sexually transmitted disease isn’t given airtime.
It’s reported again and again as a gay man’s thing, the subtext of which can often be read as “because gay men attract and spread disease,” the end. No further explanation.
This irresponsibility opens us all up to stigma, demonization, blame and hate, similar to what we witnessed the gay community suffer for years with HIV/AIDS. We still bear the awful collateral damage of what that did to society’s perception of us, four decades in.
Our experience with HIV/AIDS is a hard-won lesson that would behoove mainstream media, public health officials, social media voices, and our community at large to learn as we deal with this latest virus.
The consequences of not learning from the past are many: heterosexual people will assume they’re not susceptible; closeted men will avoid care so they’re not seen as gay; haters will exploit this new “gay disease” to fuel more hate at a time when hatred against LGBTQ+ people is on the rise.
And if MPVX is seen as a “gay disease,” how are governments and businesses likely to care? They didn’t with HIV/AIDS for the longest time. Conversely, look at Covid, seen as affecting us all – and seen as a virus could have affected the health and wealth of those in the upper echelons of society.
Every effort was made to get it under control in record time.
It was like being in a time machine this week, when I overheard a gay man in the Village point to the hideously long line up of people waiting to get their vaccine crack to his friend: “Look: all the sluts are lining up for the monkey pox shot.” Hearing that took me back to the not so long-ago time when some gay men were calling other gay men “Truvada whores” when PrEP first came out, and then to a time much further away, when some gay men would point out with great distain other gay men who were rumoured to fuck bareback, before life-saving meds had come along, shaming them.
We eat our own; another consequence of gay men accepting ownership of MPVX.
MPVX is anyone’s to acquire, and it’s important to warn the at-risk crowd, while not making MPVX AIDS 2.0. We’ve got to get the message out to high-risk people, without making MPVX about us.
Meanwhile, it’s important to push back against what we’re seeing in the media and elsewhere. Don’t accept that this is solely a gay man’s problem just because we’re higher risk, and because media keeps noting our sexuality, like a kind of fake news. Whether it’s your inner monologue about MPVX and yourself, or in conversation with or response to others, remind yourself it’s not a gay disease, and educate people around you.
Someone’s got to do it right, it might as well be us. And if it’s not MPVX, it will be something else. South of the border this week, the Centre for Disease Control in the US just warned of an outbreak of the serious-to-deadly Meningococcal Disease in Florida among – you guessed it… gay men.
Get vaccinated, have a blessed Pride, and don’t take ownership of this, or any other disease.
Otherwise it’s all just a miserable history repeating. Gay men deserve much better than that.
- Shaun Proulx, GGN Founder + Publisher
“The consequences of not learning from the past are many…” Bro the only ones who didn’t learn are the gay dudes that think you can live a sexually indulgent lifestyle without consequence. You’re writing a lot about the stigma of concepts, but the only stigma is against self-destructive behavior, so obviously driven by an addictive need for escape from self. You can’t eat cake and sweets all day everyday and not have consequence. Life is about balance, not indulgence, and no matter how many pills or injections we offer, there will always be a new means of balance, of stopping what is so obviously off-course.
Shaun,
Thank you for a timely call-out of this insidious linking of “monkey pox” and the gay male community. (Shades of Mediaeval Times, should we just throw in the towel now and call ourselves ‘lusty wenches’ and refer to STIs as “the [insert rival nationality here] disease”?)
If there was a time when we did not need another straw on the camel’s back of gay men’s culpability for, it seems, just about everything, this is the time. (It’s a funny old world, isn’t it, when teaching kids about queer sexuality or supporting trans teens in their desire to be their authentic selves is seen as a greater threat than unrestricted access to firearms. But don’t get me started.)
I’ve been piping in my small, shrill voice from my corner for at least a decade now that there would come a time when our North American blindness to the realities of life for queer folx in the wider world would explode in our faces. QAnon, with its surfacing and normalizing of the myth of gay men as predators (“groomers,” that hideous term), and the criminalizing of queer in Poland, Russia, Hungary and the US are the first detonations. I don’t doubt that those of malicious intent will leap on this latest public health crisis and exploit it.
And now back to my corner, to work out exactly how to push back against the ignorant and the media-illiterate using the very things they disdain: facts, common sense and evidence.