1000 series: Outties
I hate people. I went to this conference yesterday about how to approach HIV/AIDS prevention with LGBTQ populations. I'm thinking this is gonna be pretty great. And the first part was really cool. Funny 'cause I was worried at first that the whole thing would be a panel discussion and the thought of sitting there the whole day just listening to people talk made me want to stab myself with a stylus. The first part was panel discussion then we broke off into workshops. The panel discussion was sooooo wonderful. They had an excellent panel that was just so refreshing and seemed to be a great pool of intelligent, insightful and innovative folks.
Then I went to the workshop on how to discuss prevention without labeling and stigmatizing. The first thing one of the facilitators does is basically ask the participants to out themselves. Ok, you lose, asshole. The shit is about moving away from labeling and stigmas and right out the gate you force folks to label themselves. Genius. I swear, two minutes into the shit I was like "yeah, I chose the wrong workshop." It was full of either unhelpful shit, off-topic shit or outright inappropriate shit.
Most of the participants were heterosexual (and I'm mad that I even know that!!!) and they started it off playing a round of "I'm the shit." All of them doing all kinds of navelgazing at how oh-so-progressive-and-'openminded' they were. I almost vomited. One actually brought up how heterosexual social service workers get stigmatized for being comfortable with their queer clients. *blink* Shut the fuck up, witch. Just stop fuckin talking... forever. The first half of the damn workshop was nothing but "I work with the geighs everyday! I shake their hands and I don't even use hand sanitizer afterward!!! yaaaaay me!!" And then someone brought up stigma within the queer community. How in the fuck are you trying to have that conversation in a majority hetero setting? How would that EVER be helpful? Ever!
And then of course the discussion was overwhelmingly male focused. Including another inappropriate discussion on how valid the label MSM is. =/
Highlights of that shitty workshop were when one of the panelists (and facilitator of the workshop that I should have gone to) popped in and made the only insightful comment that was made in the whole thing and when one of the participants told this long off-topic (yet fascinating) story about her 6 year old daughter and how she's teaching her about sexuality.
And the food was good.
Sidenote: Does anyone have any insight as to why the term "the life" is such an often used term? The girls use it to refer to their work. It's used in the queer community. And if I'm not mistaken it's used in the bdsm community as well?
Another sidenote: This was kind of a cheat 1000 series post. lol I still can't find my old class pic to make the 1000 series post that I've been meaning to make for months.
centralnote: Happy birthday, Icy Boo(boo)!!