Bi-Weekly Sexual Freedom Newsletter
Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Advocates of Color Are Creating Alternatives to Detention for LGBTQ Migrants (Rewire.News) 

Advocates of color, including Nekessa Opoti, are working at the intersection of LGBTQ and migrant rights to create alternatives to detention programs. In their interview with Tina Vasquez, Opoti says, “We are talking about asylum seekers who have experienced horrible violence and trauma. They are fleeing persecution and harm. They should not be detained. What people need is community, especially Black LGBTQ asylum seekers who are coming to the border and dealing with such widespread anti-Blackness in isolation only to be abused in detention. They need to be free, and they need a support system.” Read more.

Trump’s Reinstatement of Indefinite Family Detention Could Kill People (Truthout) 

On Wednesday, August 21, the Trump administration finalized a rule that, if put into practice, will permit federal agencies to incarcerate migrant families indefinitely while they wait to see an immigration judge. Mike Ludwig writes, “The move is the latest to put punishment—in the form of mass incarceration, deportation and austerity—at the center of the administration’s response to the humanitarian crisis at the southern border. [...] If implemented, the new regulations would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hold migrant families who cross the border without documents at immigration jails designed for families until a judge decides whether to accept their asylum claims or remove them from the country.” Read more.

We Take Care Of Our Own: Radical Aftercare for Revolutionaries (Bitch Media) 

Kim Kelly urges us to remember that while the revolution needs our fire, “it also needs our care, and shoelaces, and Bandaids.” Describing the 2017 rally-turned-tragedy in Charlottesville, VA, Kelly writes, “[the activists’] efforts and labor were effectively erased by the media who chose to linger over fight scenes and flame-throwers, giving screen time to self-declared neo-Nazis, and brushing past the survivors of the carnage they wrought. [...] There was no coverage of the aftermath: the healing, the care, and the compassion that are as crucial to the struggle as taking the streets or holding the barricades.” Read more.

Sex Work Made Me an HIV Educator (The Body) 

Alexander Cheves, a self-identified “HIV-positive, white, cisgender gay man,” was a person living with HIV before he started his career as a sex worker. As Cheves writes, becoming a sex worker also made him become an HIV educator: “Like many gay male sex workers, I primarily use websites and apps to find clients. On every profile, I explicitly write, ‘HIV positive and undetectable,’ and I will usually ask if clients have read my profile in full before arranging a meeting. It took me a few years before I was willing to educate clients about what "undetectable" means. At first, I treated clients the same way I treated casual hookups. If they had any HIV ignorance or any problem with my status, any fear or nervousness, the answer was no. That is no longer the case.” Read more.

The American Workplace Still Won’t Accommodate Pregnant Workers (The Nation) 

As Bryce Covert notes, almost 85 percent of women will become mothers during their working lives, “yet pregnancy at work is regularly treated as an aberration from the norm.” While pregnancy discrimination is relatively ubiquitous, it appears to be most prevalent in low-wage, service-sector industries: “Betzaida Cruz Cardona didn’t think her doctor’s note saying she shouldn’t lift more than 25 pounds would interfere with her work as a cashier at Savers in Henrietta, New York. But a half hour after she gave it to her manager—adding that she wanted to keep working—she was fired and told she should “stay home and take care of [her] pregnancy,” she said. She wound up homeless, moving between family members’ and friends’ houses while 32 weeks pregnant.” Read more.

I Help People Recover From Disordered Eating. Don’t Give Your Child This App. (The New York Times) 

Christy Harrison, a registered dietician that practices health at every size, writes an op-ed that argues against diets for any age, any size: “Our society is unfair and cruel to people who are in larger bodies, so I can empathize with parents who might believe their child needs to lose weight, and with any child who wants to. Unfortunately, attempts to shrink a child’s body are likely to be both ineffective and harmful to physical and mental health. [...] If we truly want to help children be the healthiest and happiest people they can be, we need to stop putting them on diets of any kind, which are likely to worsen their overall well-being. Instead, we need to start teaching them to trust their own inner wisdom about food. And we need to help them make peace with their bodies, at any size.” Read more.

Gay Men’s Obsession with Masculinity Is Hurting Their Mental Health (them.) 

Gabrial Arana explores masculinity’s impact on gay men as they “reconcile their sense of masculinity with their failure to conform to its compulsory heterosexuality,” a process that can have adverse impacts on their mental health: “While some may dismiss the reverence of masculinity among gay men as ‘just a preference,’ it has documented negative effects on mental health. Gay men who are more gender-nonconforming struggle more frequently with self-esteem and experience higher levels of depression and anxiety. Those who prize masculinity are more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies.” Read more.