Sex in a Pandemic 2.0

Calling Gay, Bi, Queer, and Trans Men Back into Community

As island community members, we invite you to explore connection and intimacy in the context of our intergenerational gay, bi, queer, and trans male experiences.

This event builds on the infamous 1983 pamphlet, How to have Sex in an Epidemic, which was ahead of its time as a community-based health resource. 

What is our present relationship with our community? Have we lost the cohesiveness of past movements? And how, by addressing community health and wellness needs today, can we rebuild and reconnect? 

This regional online event will provide a safer space for us to acknowledge our histories and organizational capacities of overcoming diversity during times of stigma and pandemic. As a community of peers we will acknowledge the challenges we are currently navigating, including issues of sex and intimacy, during COVID-19. 

Hosted by long-term HIV survivors and community health advocates Robert Birch and Craig Dales-Furlani.

About Stamina not Stigma events:

“Nothing about us, without us!” was the rallying cry in the early days of an earlier global pandemic. AIDS is more than a disease. From kitchen tables around the world, the most afflicted and their allies launched what eventually became the first intersectional global healthcare movement. 

Join Stamina not Stigma for multiple online events, each featuring the voices of a specific population. Allies are encouraged to attend and listen, as well as commit to integrating community-based healthcare knowledge into their lives and work. 

Stamina not Stigma offers participants an opportunity to share stories of resistance and resilience. Each event begins with a member of the Southern Gulf Islands AIDS Society telling our community story of how a small group of Gulf Islanders living with HIV self-organized for support and survival.  Each session then proceeds into discussion of how the resulting knowledge, skills, and experience can apply to other groups and situations, and specifically address the theme of each of the unique events in the series.

The Stamina not Stigma project will bring the voices of often underrepresented communities to regional rural healthcare providers in January 2022 with the intention to provide community-based healthcare knowledge as a form of role relief to rural healthcare systems. 

www.staminanotstigma.org