Concentration and Lack of Concentration and, Inability to Concentrate
The CDC has narrowed that it isn’t necessarily abhorrent behavior that makes greater exposure to STDs but the concentration of people and then lack of concentrated attention.
Concentration: Sexual Networks
The logic for higher STDs, pointedly HIV throughout African Americans, Latinos and others vs. Whites has to do with sexual networks. I’ll use NYC as an example because that’s where I’ve worked for agencies and we dealt with this issue.
In Harlem there is a concentration of Black folk. Thereby a concentration of LGBT Black folk. Thereby a concentration of LGBT Black folk who are male.
We’ll use a 10 person Model.
Models?
Okay, that’s 8…2 others refused to be photographed.
Back to the point.
Within the network of 10 Black men, they all, whether through casual sex or long term relationships that have open monogamy boundaries or not (cheating) dip into each other’s wider sexual network.
Say that Chocolate Muffin on the right…no, the other one…yeah, him. John. He has 5 sexual partners a year, on average, in Harlem.
That may include Reggie, who is in the center.
Daryl who is towards the back.
Steve who is on the left.
Joey who is behind John.
And Harry who is the fine one on the end.
That’s
John’s Sexual Concentration Network.
Then Reggie, not knowing John’s list, has sex with 4 men, even less, (Black LGBT folk tend to have lower promiscuity rates than Whites or Latinos).
But…
He gets with John.
He gets with Harry.
He gets with Joey.
He gets with Dennis (who refused to be photographed.)
That’s
Reggie’s Sexual Concentration Network.
Daryl, towards the back, is more prolific and has 8 sexual partners a year.
He yay-yays with Steve.
He yay-yays with Harry.
He yay-yays with Reggie.
He yay-yays with Dennis.
He yay-yays with Lionel (who refused to be photographed due to his government job.)
He yay-yays with Daryl.
He yay-yays with John.
He yay-yays with Joey.
That’s
Daryl’s’s Sexual Concentration Network.
You can see the correlate. Even if not explicitly aware of each other, the men are overlapping in sexual partners. So let’s say the current statistic of 50% of all LGBT Black men ending up HIV+ in there lifetime holds by concentrated geographic demographic—-places where STDs are most prevalent—-large cities, with high concentrations of LGBT folk.
Now flag 5 of the above 10 men as having an STD, not even necessarily just HIV. Now run the odds of how likely it is for them to have sex with an infected partner.
Conversely….would the ten non-Black models come in please?
Ah…the gentleman in the back row? Ah, he’s there for the advanced point. Okay.
This group of men, we’ll arbitrarily throw the 50% rate of some sort of STD infection at half of them too.
They don’t stay within their immediate network. While the Black LGBT group was more likely to concentrate sexually within the same network, the above group don’t rotate through 10 people, they rotate through 10 networks. Meaning they rotate through 10 different neighborhoods in NYC rather than just Harlem. They also may not discriminate in the same ways racially, socially, educationally. So instead of each of them having a network of each other, they have a network of 100 men. Of the 100 then only about 10% are infected.
So this above soggy sexy group has a 10% chance of infection vs the chocolate studs who have a 50%.
That’s Concentrated Networks.
The Advanced Point: the darker hued gentleman in the back has a greater chance of staying uninfected because if he simply operates within the sexual network of the 9 men around him, they’re expanded sexual network, insulates him through probability to infection.
Yes, interracial gay sex increases one’s chance of not catching an STD. I know, one hell of a counter programming banner, right?
Lack of Concentration: Women
This is how men take care of their health or don’t and what presses them to, or not. The greatest push towards comprehensive male health over the past few millennia has been this:
Wives. Women. We could expand this to Mothers/Sisters.
Men are pushed by women to be more conscious of their health by the women in their lives directly who are pushed by the concern by their love for their male partner, their concern for their own interdependent sexual health and the concern for the male’s longevity to help care for children.
This saucy number that a guy might meet at a parade, a bar, a rest stop, WalMart?
Oh, he’ll polish your apple, he’ll even ketchup your fries and slice your bagel but he doesn’t have the same level of concern for your well being now and in the future as a sexual encounter/partner and even as a long term partner he too may suffer for masculinity blindness that men, unless visibly dying, are strong. He doesn’t think about going to the doctor unless something is absolutely wrong and bleeding so he really doesn’t think about getting tested for STDs. Lack of regular testing means that there are at least 20% of LGBT males who are infected with something and don’t know it, so pass it on.
Heterosexuality on some levels promotes care for a partner because it could potentially lead to propagation. Homosexuality is very self centered because it leads to connection and companionship but not the same level of social pressure responsibility for or to a mate.
Literally the social nature of
Concentration of men/sexual partners and the
Lack of Concentration of women affects how LGBT males engage health care. Which is why you see so many vans outside of high concentration LGBT spaces to push the health care, STD screening to the forefront of people’s minds who may not think about themselves as “sick”, infected or read that as weak.
Interestingly enough, just a few blocks up from Harlem, in Washington Heights, where I live, a friend owned a night club/lounge. It was called
No Parking. WH as a neighborhood is predominantly, at least, 75% Latino so the concentration of people to the club were Latino. It had the highest concentrated rate of infection of gonorrhea in the country, Washington Heights, at one point, because of the night club concentrating Latino males there.
And LGBT Latino males doing this…
(*This is actually a club in Queens, NY but No Parking pretty much looked like this…)
So they replicated a Concentrated Sexual Network like Black men have (increasing Black male HIV infection rates) and increased their gonorrhea infection rates.
Inability to Concentrate
The third challenge we found as an agency was the sex itself that men were having leading to STD infections. There is a huge gap in the sexual knowledge that LGBT folk, particularly males, have about their bodies and what they can do, can’t do, and how their bodies actually work.
With Black/Latinos males
- the free NYC condoms would break and tear because Black and Latino penises tend to have more girth than their White or Asian counterparts. …which lead to more unprotected sex.
- Or sex that, in the middle, became risky. Blacks and Latinos also tended to stop practicing safe sex once in a confirmed relationship——and then something happened, someone crept, they had a three-way, something—their partner had sex within their Concentrated Network and brought an infection back to the closed relationship.
- the sexual acts preferred by, experienced by and offered by differing cultural groups affects and increases concentration of STDS. Gonorrhea happened a lot because of analingus/rimming, HIV infections due to anal penetration/bottoming, etc..
With Whites males who practiced safe sex were also more likely to be of a higher social class. Which translates to several greater advantages:
- less of a reliance on “free” condoms so their condoms were of a better quality and more likely to accommodate their size
- higher educated meant they would have a deeper/broader understanding of their own male bodies which strengthened their safety routines
- better resources which translates to better health care by having health care insurance and more “health care” money which translates to seeing a doctor more because you can afford it and thereby being more exposed to a physician who would tell you about Prep, test you regularly and explain sexual safety.
- multiply this exponentially throughout “neighborhoods”/networks and there will be more White men as a mass number who are less infected.
Men’s Inability to Not Engage
- a society whether big or smaller—family, church, work—-that is less accepting of a man’s sexuality pushes him to have riskier behaviors for sexual pleasure.
- sex is stress relieving so it will be done regardless of potential dangers as men are constantly pressured by testosterone to be sexual but are inhibited by the society around them not to be. LGBT communities offer something that only certain privileged men (younger, rich, single) in society get to have: unlimited amount of sexual partners every single day if one wants through casual encounters, night clubs and online hooks ups.
- the majority of the sexual act itself involves the pink parts of the body and a penis—-exposed absorbent skin/mucous producing areas—-anus, mouth (gums, throat), cut skin, whereas comparably in heterosexual sex there is less pink part exposure to the male partner with a female partner to the best transmitter of STDs—the penis.
These three factors build, correlate, multiply and intensify the exposure, infection and risk of men who have sex with men by the very nature of their sexuality, what it concentrates, what it obviates and how it socially operates.
As a social tableau, seeing all of the correlates is fascinating in it’s complexity. But that complexity is what makes it difficult to change.
