I visited Gay City on 500 E Pike last week. I was planning on going there anyway, but then I saw an ad on craigslist looking for Seattle bloggers to write about gay rights in other countries. I saw an opportunity to get publicity for S.B. but when I responded, the guy said it had to avoid politics and religion.
America is probably the only country in the world that can separate politics and religion from any debate and still act like the argument is legitimate.
I do not know why I bothered to write. Anyway, I did not know the guy Eleazar was a staff member at Gay City, but when that came out I started asking him a lot of questions. He was polite enough to divert me to the health director, Miles Glew, and that led me to the head of Gay City Fred Swanson. Fred told me about Robert, a community educator and Jeff, their marketing director.
Miles does not have formal medical training other than doing government-sponsored three-day workshops. He and about three others do all rapid HIV testing at the office. Their method is to do a short intake, take blood for the test, then do an interview with intervention for the twenty minutes it takes to do the test. Testing kits are $60 a pop and they do ten a day. They take mostly walk-in clients. Miles said that if someone tested positive, then they take blood at send it to King Country Public Health at Harborview Hospital, who does western blots. He told me that his office had never seen a case where someone tested positive for the rapid test then negative for the more precise test.
I asked Miles to tell me about the counseling process that he goes through during the wait. He told me that he focused on gay men’s health issues – for some reason, I often get the impression that people at these places interpret me as clueless and heterosexual and therefore an outsider – and I pressed him further. He told me that his office (Gay City) was a bit different from Lifelong because they do not take a hard stand promoting condom use for all times – he said in his own words that they do not think that it is possible to get guys to do this. I asked him if he knew of any place that straight people could go to get the same kind of counseling. He told me they should go to lifelong. I asked the people at Lifelong the same thing – Lifelong caters to all types, but Asia in marketing there specifically had told me that she had no funding for straight people and all funding for all people. Miles did tell me about programs for minorities – blacks, native Americans, and Hispanics. I knew about those already, though. I asked him some questions about Lifelong and some aspects of Gay City mission and he took me to see Fred.
Fred was polite and ready to tell me whatever I asked. He explained their mission, hierarchy, and funding. Unlike Lifelong, Fred told me that Gay City is about 40% funded by private donations (LL is something like 15%). Fred told me that they were starting some kind of regular video program which they were going to run off their website. He told me that I could come back anytime, and that the other staff members would help me also. I could say more, but I have been talking to people like him for a while and all the behind-the-scenes non-profit healthcare systems I have seen have a lot in common. I would encourage anyone who wants to understand these places to do what I do and go visit them.
Gay City has great ad campaigns. Their posters are excellent. Unfortunately, they are not available for download on the website in high-quality versions. Fred told me that the ads were not proprietary and that I could have good pdfs of any of them if I wrote to Jeff.