vERMoN1i'svoicE FOIR TH-E

WILB
ix QUARTO

V

    
  

r. Paul Jarris, the new commissioner of
Vermont’s Department of Health
(DoH), presents an opportunity sexual
_ minorities have not had in the last ten years of_
-former commissioner Jan Carney (see side.
bar). I sat down with Dr. Jarris to discuss the
Vennont Department of Health and sexual
minorities. In additionto being an accom-
plished administrator, Dr. Jarris brings an open-
ness and a willingness to deal/with gay and les-
bian issues. It will not be an easy journey for
the commissioner or the community.
" After the first decade of AIDS. DoH
had an adequate program to provide AIDS
services and prevent HIV through education. In
the l990s, following a nod from the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, which was
paying the bills, DoH broadened its HIV pre-
vention program and contracted with gay and
AIDS community organizations to prevent HIV
by employing a succession of behavior change
theories aimed at stepping beyond the educa-
tion of gay men and actually changing their
sexual behavior. DoH also worked to ensure
people living with AIDS had a safety net which
_ would provide drugs, housing, and other forms
of care when they could no longer provide for

, __themselves. _ _ ,
I .  ' However, attention to gay health .  ,
;‘..never~wen,t,_beyond; HIV and other sexually

transmitted diseases. A lack of information
about gay health, questionable cultural compe-
tency, a seemingly aimless Office of Minority
Health, and deep philosophical differences
between the gay community and the broader

I field of public health pose a handicap Dr. Jarris
must overcome in order to be successful serv-
ing Vermont’s sixty thousand sexual minorities.

Information Please
When asked about what DoH is doing to

' improve the health and wellbeing of sexual‘
Ininorities, Dr. Janis said, “What are the key
indicators of health among the population?
That means understanding what are the health
and safety risks to the gay and lesbian commu-
nity. Some of the obvious ones are STDs or
HIV. What are we doing? What programs do
we have to address prevention, identification-,
and treatment of STDS?

“I can’t give you that answer right
now, but there are people in the department
whose job it is to identify those things. 
Vermont recently was found to be top in the
nation of notifying people who had an HIV test
of the results of that test. There is an indicator
of success. But there need to be other indica-

    

inside out:

this issue's contents

V A Million Dollars

P. 2 Samara hears a
milestone in leveraging
lgbt funds.

V LGBT Dreams

p. 3 NGLTF marches on
Washington with

Martin Luther King lll.

rriptin For

Neglect

LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY

Gay Heatth Activist Ric Kasini Kadour Looks At
What Might Strange wider New Department of
I-leaith Commissioner fPaul Jar:-is

tors of success.”

The sad truth is DoH knows very lit-
tle about the health and wellbeing of sexual
minorities. With a few exceptions — the

Safespace

V It's All Anti-Violence,
But . . . p. 12 Statewide
network closes its doors to

Vermont Youth Risk Behavior Survey and sta-
tistics related to HIV transmission — DoH does-
n’t gather statistics on sexual minorities. The
Vermont Cancer Registry, the Vermont Oral

Except Carson.

V Gay “Reality” TV
p. 19 Bennett Law finds it
all .a bit earnest and boring.

Health Survey, Vermont Hospital Discharge
Data, or the Vermont Behavioral Risk Factor
Surveillance System either fail to identify the
sexual orientation of respondents or rely on
data from other sources who do not. The result
is that the DoH does not know how many gay
men smoke, how many lesbians have breast or
ovarian cancer, whether or not heavy drinking
is an issue in the transgender population, and
so on. "
This ignorance has far reaching con-
sequences for Vermont’s sexual minorities.
Public health is the degree to and the
manner by which individuals in a society are in
a state of complete physical, social and mental
wellbeing as represented by a collection of stu-
tistics called health indicators —' number of dis-
ease eases, rate of risk behaviors, mortality
rates, and so on. I
a Health is about information. On an
individual level, one needs to know what the
risks are, how lifestyle affects wellbeing, how
to prevent disease, and how to get more out of
life. But on a community level, public health
relies on health indicators to address emerging
_issues and improve the quality of health and
life on existing issues.
The reason we live twenty years

«longer than our great-great grandparents is

because govemmentuthrough -public health, has
systematically made improvements in the envi-
ronment (cleaner drinking water, fewer toxins
in the air, removal of lead paint and asbestos
from buildings) and showed people how to live
healthier lives. We don't eat, smoke, or drink
the same as our great-great grandparents and,

as a result, we are healthier.

V Health departments use these statis-
tics to monitor and improve the wellbeing of
the population. DoH’s ignorance of sexual
minorities — their failure to gather data on the
health and wellbeing of gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender Vermonters — means they are
incapable of monitoring and improving the
wellbeing of the sexual minorities.

Bang For the Buck

Asked about how the Department of Health is
addressing the disproportionate rates of smok-
ing between sexual minorities and the general
population, Dr. Jarris said, “I don’t know the
answer about, for example, if there is a higher
incidence of smoking among gays than there
are among straights or heterosexuals, but we
might be able to get at that. Then, the question
is, Are the 8
messages we continued on 

News 2-3
Editorial 4
Letters 5
Features 1, 6, 8-13
Views 14 - 18

Arts 19-20

Calendar 22
Community Compass 22
The Source 25
Classifieds 28

Gayity 29

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