Year: 2005

“For those who have marveled at baseball’s homoerotic rituals – the butt-slapping, the excessive man-hugs – let Jose Canseco, author of “Juiced,” add a more intimate encounter. Canseco claims that while he was playing for the Oakland A’s in the late 1980s, he and teammate Mark McGwire would lock themselves in a bathroom stall and inject each other with steroids. Pause on that image for a moment. Canseco was 6 feet 4 inches and weighed in the neighborhood of 250 pounds; McGwire was 6 feet 5 inches and adding beef like an Arby’s franchise – for the two of them to squeeze into a men’s room stall must have presented something of a geometric challenge. Now imagine McGwire gently lowering his uniform pants while Canseco (“I’m a good injector”) hovers over his derriere with a syringe, and add the fact that these men are enjoying this ritual immensely, even laughing about it, and there you have an enduring image of the Bash Brothers. Back, back, back, back, back-side!” – Bryan Curtis, Slate.

I let rip on the academic Stalinists baying for Summers’ blood on the Chris Matthews Show this weekend. I cannot believe the hysteria. Well, actually, the sad things is I can believe it. But if Summers goes down, the chilling effect on intellectual freedom in this country will be intense. That’s what the far left wants – turning universities into propaganda tools rather than centers for genuine intellectual inquiry. The idea of the university, to purloin Newman and Oakeshott, is under attack. This is about far more than university politics. It’s about the future of free inquiry.

“I read your blog about the meth crisis among gay men. I am a psychiatrist in Atlanta and have a significant gay male population. Of all the mental health disorders I treat – including the most severe forms of psychosis and other affective disorders – meth dependence scares me the most. When I am approached for help by these poor souls, my heart sinks. There is the traditional psychosocial treatment (i.e., 12-step recovery programs), which is great, but I cannot conceive of a more addicting and destructive substance to curse mankind, so I worry that this is not enough. What’s more, there is very little press about meth, in the straight or gay media, which leaves the susceptible with the tragic impression that this isn’t such a big deal. Yet, the horror stories I have heard – mind you, I am a psychiatrist and I thought I had heard it all – make my knees shake with utter terror.
The progress the gay community has made with HIV awareness, research and policy is miraculous. But I agree with you: it is all for naught unless we smother this monster to its evil core. That meth is a vector for HIV is a sad reality; I fear that its potential for total descruction makes it worse than any threat HIV/AIDS has ever presented. We need to see it for what it is: mean, nasty, dirty death.”

EMAIL OF THE DAY II: “I am 34, and just old enough to remember the period when people were dropping like flies. I would venture to guess that today at least half of the new infections are directly caused by meth use, and even more by secondary infections via other people who’ve been infected by them. I think that if you removed meth from the equation, the momentum of the epidemic would drop off dramatically. Unfortunately, there is not much of a commitment within the community to stopping the crystal epidemic. I think “harm reduction” has caused more damage than most people realize. My best friend is one of the casualties. He was once very talented and fun to be with, but has descended so far into psychosis that he is barely recognizable. I expect he will be dead within a year, in some ways, he already is.
I think what’s needed is a healthy dose of peer pressure, positive and negative, among young people. Forget the people who’ve already gotten into meth, they are beyond reason until they decide to get clean. I am more concerned with the younger guys who’ve heard so many scare stories they don’t believe how evil meth really is. Peer pressure worked in the early 90s. I felt there was tremendous pressure to remain safe, but without a lot of moralizing. Whatever was going on it worked, and it kept infection rates here very low for well over a decade, until the Internet caught on in the late 90s. Nancy Reagan did have a point, you can’t get addicted to something you’ve never used. People forget that.
I am convinced that the Internet changed the nature of drug addiction in large cities. Speed has been a problem here for decades. What the Internet did was enable people to create a subculture that changed the way people used drugs. Instead of getting high to go dance, they’d get high and look for tricks online. While I’ve always been critical of excessive drug use, at least way back in the 1990s people would generally use them for social/entertainment purposes, which did a lot to limit the damage they caused. If you were single, you generally had to leave your house to get laid, and you generally had to be somewhat presentable. The Internet upset that balance, and turned drug use into a more private activity.” Yes, the Internet undoubtedly played a critical part in the new meth subculture. It is also killing gay nightlife. So many gay men are at home, cracked out online that the bars and clubs are empty. Socialization has begun to disappear. Even if HIV were not here, this would be a curse. But the combination of meth and HIV is literally deadly.

A tropical fish has been named after me! Yes: it’s a gay hawkfish. I’m a carnivore, long-nosed, and my temperament is “semi-aggressive.”

“We will be influenced by our faith but we also have an obligation to take the widest perspective — to recognize that one of the great strengths of Canada is its respect for the rights of each and every individual, to understand that we must not shrink from the need to reaffirm the rights and responsibilities of Canadians in an evolving society.

The second argument ventured by opponents of the bill is that government ought to hold a national referendum on this issue. I reject this – not out of a disregard for the view of the people, but because it offends the very purpose of the Charter.

The Charter was enshrined to ensure that the rights of minorities are not subjected, are never subjected, to the will of the majority. The rights of Canadians who belong to a minority group must always be protected by virtue of their status as citizens, regardless of their numbers. These rights must never be left vulnerable to the impulses of the majority.

We embrace freedom and equality in theory, Mr. Speaker. We must also embrace them in fact.

Third, some have counseled the government to extend to gays and lesbians the right to “civil union.” This would give same-sex couples many of the rights of a wedded couple, but their relationships would not legally be considered marriage. In other words, they would be equal, but not quite as equal as the rest of Canadians.

Mr. Speaker, the courts have clearly and consistently ruled that this option would offend the equality provisions of the Charter. For instance, the British Columbia Court of Appeal stated that, and I quote: ‘Marriage is the only road to true equality for same-sex couples. Any other form of recognition of same-sex relationships …falls short of true equality.'” – prime minister Paul Martin of Canada, blazing a trail for civil rights, in the Canadian parliament yesterday.

CRUCIFIXION: Isn’t that what this particular interrogation technique amounts to? Money quote:

Al-Jamadi was brought naked below the waist to the prison with a CIA interrogator and translator. A green plastic bag covered his head, and plastic cuffs tightly bound his wrists. Guards dressed al-Jamadi in an orange jumpsuit, slapped on metal handcuffs and escorted him to the shower room, a common CIA interrogation spot. There, the interrogator instructed guards to attach shackles from the prisoner’s handcuffs to a barred window. That would let al-Jamadi stand without pain, but if he tried to lower himself, his arms would be stretched above and behind him. The documents do not make clear what happened after guards left. After about a half-hour, the interrogator called for the guards to reposition the prisoner, who was slouching with his arms stretched behind him. The interrogator told guards that al-Jamadi was “playing possum” – faking it – and then watched as guards struggled to get him on his feet. But the guards realized it was useless. “After we found out he was dead, they were nervous,” Spc. Dennis E. Stevanus said of the CIA interrogator and translator. “They didn’t know what the hell to do.”

Notice: a CIA interrogator – not some free-lance goon on the night shift. We need to know and we need to know now whether this technique – Palestinian hanging – was approved for use by the CIA. There’s a memo that will let us know. The White House won’t release it. Where is the Congress? Where, for example, is John McCain? If he won’t stand up against sanctioned torture by the CIA, who will?

What to make of the fact that two patients in two cities have acquired an HIV viral strain that appears resistant to a majority of the current anti-HIV drugs and seems also to be accelerating progression to AIDS in one of the cases? The answer: so far, not much. We know that HIV can and will resist drug treatments – it’s a mutating retrovirus. We also know that progression to AIDS varies dramatically from patient to patient. We know that the interaction between the genetic make-up of a particular HIV strain and a person’s own unique immune system makes a huge difference in how people respond to the illness. We know that use of crystal meth accelerates the decline of someone’s immune system to a phenomenal degree. Any or all of these factors could explain the New York case. To infer from one case a new species of “super-AIDS” is speculation – but one that has now prompted several major articles in the New York Times in a few days. I have to say I’m obviously concerned but also skeptical. Previous scare stories were at least always based on actual peer-reviewed studies of groups of people – not one or two cases presented at press conferences. Some epidemiological context: in San Francisco, the epicenter of the epidemic, AIDS deaths last year were 182, compared to a peak of 1,633 in 1992; AIDS cases were 245, compared to a peak of 2,327 in 1992. Both numbers were far lower than in 2003. Of course, this reflects what has happened in the epidemic, not what will or may happen. But HIV infection rates have also remained stable. We should not be complacent. But we shouldn’t panic either.

METH IS THE ISSUE: The real problem in the gay male epidemic right now is the use of crystal meth (it is hurting the health of people already HIV-positive just as much as it is contributing to the infections of people who are HIV-negative). This drug has rampaged and is coursing through straight rural America and parts of gay urban America. As many of you know, I’m a libertarian when it comes to recreational drug use (and what consenting adults do in private). But I draw the line at this drug. It’s evil, potent beyond belief, it’s destroying people’s minds, careers, lives and souls. If we don’t get a grip on it, it may undo all the progress we have made against HIV in the gay world. We gay men shouldn’t simply fund advertizing or ask health authorities to help (although that’s necessary). We should start insisting privately on zero tolerance of this drug among our friends and loved ones. We should do this informally, socially, privately – out of love and concern for one another. We should encourage every addict to get treatment. (Here’s one resource. I’ll happily post more if contacted.) We have risen to the occasion before and we can do so again. Not by stigmatizing, blaming or ostracizing. But by confronting, persuading, begging one another to overcome this menace.

I’m told the blogger segment on Charlie Rose will air tonight. I hope this time, they’re not mistaken.

What is it good for? My Sunday Times column is up.

ON VALENTINE’S DAY: May I renounce and disown my once dyspeptic essay against romantic love of a few years back, and wish all couples in love or marriage or both the full happiness that intimacy and responsibility can give. And that goes for straight couples and gay ones. And one day, we will not be making invidious distinctions – legal or moral – between the two.

QUOTE OF THE DAY I: “They say most parents would be thrilled to have a child who doesn’t smoke, have sex, do drugs, hardly drinks … does well in school, gets good grades, gets into the Ivy League … goes regularly to church, spends free time mentoring kids.” – Maya Keyes, daughter of Republican activist Alan Keyes, on being cut off from her family for being gay. Maya worked hard for her father’s election campaign, despite disagreements with his politics. Now who exactly is pro-family in this instance?

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “The Daily Mirror is a far-left tabloid whose contributors include America-hating polemicist John Pilger. Its report of Harith’s claims is as ludicrous as it is lurid: ‘A British captive freed from Guantanamo Bay today tells the world of its full horror–and reveals how prostitutes were taken into the camp to degrade Muslim inmates.'” – James Taranto, March 12, 2004, refusing to believe what we now know was true: interrogators dressed as prostitutes were indeed part of the interrogation techniques at Gitmo, and included acts that were designed to degrade the inmates’ religious faith. I too disbelieved the early reports. I know better now. Does James?

RESISTANCE WITHIN: An account of some JAGs trying to prevent torture at Guantanamo – over-ruled by Pentagon officials.

A brave and moving defense of equal marriage rights from Colbert King. Yes, this is the civil rights struggle of our time. Notice particularly the uncanny resemblances between the arguments against inter-racial marriages in the last century and those against same-sex marriages today.

Yet another harrowing account of a terror detainee tortured in a secret prison by Pakistani and American soldiers. Money quote:

The next night, he said, the Pakistanis took him to an airport where he saw 15 or 20 beefy men wearing masks, black T-shirts and combat boots. From their voices, he said, he knew they were Americans. Mr. Habib started to fight with the Pakistanis, he recalled, and “then the Americans came and started beating me.” They beat him quiet and stripped him naked, he said. Men in black masks came into the room. One had a still camera, the other a video camera. “They make picture of everything in my body,” he said. He said he was handcuffed and shackled and put on a plane. Then, he said, the men put duct tape over his mouth, a bag over his head and goggles over the bag.

There’s more along the same lines that we have seen time and time again, at the hands of American interrogators:

In Afghanistan, he said, female soldiers “touched me in the private areas” while questioning him. “They was swearing at me, ‘you criminal,’ ‘you terrorist,’ ” he said. Interrogators also put a helmet connected to wires on his head, Mr. Habib said. When they did not like his answers, he said he would feel a jolt, and his body would start shaking.
He spent only a week at Bagram before being flown to Guantánamo in May 2002. He arrived sick and faint. “I was really scared,” he said. “I don’t know who I am.”
When his interrogators asked about his treatment in Egypt, he said, he told them about the psychological abuse using his wife and children. Soon, he said, his Guantánamo interrogators were doing the same.Three or four times, he said, when he was taken to an interrogation room, there were pictures doctored to make it appear that his wife was naked next to Osama bin Laden. “I see my wife everywhere, everywhere,” he said.
He said that during one interrogation session, a woman wearing a skirt said to him, “You Muslim people don’t like to see woman,” he said. Then she reached under her skirt, Mr. Habib said, pulling out what he described as a bloody stick. “She threw the blood in my face,” he said.

These are now the values of the United States of America. The president continues to lie about what he is sanctioning and has sanctioned. The least we should demand is an honest public debate: what techniques are now permissible for the CIA and other agencies? Do they constitute torture? What is in the second Bybee memo that explicitly details these approved techniques? Who has approved the use of religious abuse as part of anti-Muslim interrogation practices? We are in a surreal situation where reports of torture come in every day, where the administration denies what is patently true and where the Congress and even the blogosphere is deliberately looking the other way. One final question: how can this president ask Egypt to liberalize while he is depending on its security forces to torture American-captured inmates?