Once again we renew our call for the closure of all sex clubs and bathhouses, which as, this article shows, are helping to victimize straight spouses who are unaware of their partner’s secret perversions.– Peter LaBarbera

The following is excerpted from Double Lives on the Down Low, by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, published Aug 3, 2003, by The New York Times Magazine:

…In its upper stories, the Flex bathhouse in Cleveland feels like a squash club for backslapping businessmen. There’s a large gym with free weights and exercise machines on the third floor. In the common area, on the main floor, men in towels lounge on couches and watch CNN on big-screen TV’s.In the basement, the mood is different: the TV’s are tuned to porn, and the dimly lighted hallways buzz with sexual energy. A naked black man reclines on a sling in a room called ”the dungeon play area.” Along a hallway lined with lockers, black men eye each other as they walk by in towels. In small rooms nearby, some men are having sex. Others are napping.

There are two bathhouses in Cleveland. On the city’s predominantly white West Side, Club Cleveland — which opened in 1965 and recently settled into a modern 15,000-square-foot space — attracts many white and openly gay men. Flex is on the East Side, and it serves a mostly black and Hispanic clientele, many of whom don’t consider themselves gay…

Today, while there are black men who are openly gay, it seems that the majority of those having sex with men still lead secret lives, products of a black culture that deems masculinity and fatherhood as a black man’s primary responsibility — and homosexuality as a white man’s perversion. And while Flex now offers baskets of condoms and lubricant, Wallace says that many of the club’s patrons still don’t use them.

Wallace ticks off the grim statistics: blacks make up only 12 percent of the population in America, but they account for half of all new reported H.I.V. infections. While intravenous drug use is a large part of the problem, experts say that the leading cause of H.I.V. in black men is homosexual sex (some of which takes place in prison, where blacks disproportionately outnumber whites). According to the Centers for Disease Control, one-third of young urban black men who have sex with men in this country are H.I.V.-positive, and 90 percent of those are unaware of their infection…

Many of the men at Flex tonight — and many of the black men I met these past months in Cleveland, Atlanta, Florida, New York and Boston — are on the Down Low, or on the DL, as they more often call it. Most date or marry women and engage sexually with men they meet only in anonymous settings like bathhouses and parks or through the Internet. Many of these men are young and from the inner city, where they live in a hypermasculine ”thug” culture. Other DL men form romantic relationships with men and may even be peripheral participants in mainstream gay culture, all unknown to their colleagues and families. Most DL men identify themselves not as gay or bisexual but first and foremost as black. To them, as to many blacks, that equates to being inherently masculine.

DL culture has grown, in recent years, out of the shadows and developed its own contemporary institutions, for those who know where to look: Web sites, Internet chat rooms, private parties and special nights at clubs. Over the same period, Down Low culture has come to the attention of alarmed public health officials, some of whom regard men on the DL as an infectious bridge spreading H.I.V. to unsuspecting wives and girlfriends. In 2001, almost two-thirds of women in the United States who found out they had AIDS were black.

With no wives or girlfriends around, Flex is a safe place for men on the DL to let down their guards. There aren’t many white men here either (I’m one of them), and that’s often the norm for DL parties and clubs.

Continue reading at The Balm in Gilead…

Remember when Rick Garcia of Equality Illinois told the Naperville Sun that he didn’t know what goes on in Steamworks (a Chicago homosexual bathhouse)? Maybe this story and the one above on the “down low” will help him understand:

It’s no secret that gay bathhouses are associated with gay sex, said Earl Pike, executive director of the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland.

And studies show that bathhouse users are more likely to test positive for HIV than other gay men.

– Excerpted from Bathhouse Image Worries Cleveland Gay Leadership, by Robert L. Smith, published Jun 2, 2006, by The Plain Dealer

If Garcia genuinely desires to “defend and protect” homosexual men, he should join Americans for Truth in calling for the city of Chicago to SHUT DOWN THE BATHHOUSE.

WARNING: THIS E-MAIL TO AMERICANS FOR TRUTH
IS NOT SUITABLE FOR SENSITIVE READERS

From a homosexual reader, Dr. Eric Glare, who serves on the staff of PLWA (People Living With HIV/AIDS) Victoria and as editor for their newsletter, “PosLink”…

From: Eric M Glare [mailto:__________]
Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2006 12:11 AM
To: americansfortruth@comcast.net
Subject: Informed choices

Hi Americans for “truth”

So you say that you want people to be able to “make informed choices on how to spend their hard-earned dollars.”

http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/14886.html

But you don’t want people to make informed choices about their sexuality and its expression even when the informing is not in public??

The truth is that I love my husband and I love it when he puts his fist up my arse. It does not hurt. It is extremely pleasurable. I orgasm every time. That is the truth and you can not change the truth.

Yours most sincerely,

Dr Eric M Glare PhD
Melbourne
Australia – Truth knows no boundaries!

Response from Americans for Truth…

From: “Americans For Truth”
To: “‘Eric M Glare'”
Subject: Dr. Glare…RE: Informed choices
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2006 11:39:31 -0600

Dr. Glare,

If what you say is true, then you are a bonafide pervert, and a proud one at that. You may love the pleasure that comes from your perversion, but that doesn’t make it any less perverted, or any less wrong. Whether your “fisting” is done in private or on a stage, I don’t think I could imagine any act that strays farther from the truth of God-ordained sexuality than this particular depravity. Perhaps that makes you even more proud, but have you ever contemplated how you got to the point where you, presumably an educated and intelligent man, are boasting of such dangerous depravities? Take a step back and look at how pathetic that is.

Yes, God gives you the choice on how you will live, but He remains the Judge, and he sets parameters: you may want to “choose” to live eternally and go on “fisting forever”–as twisted as that may be–but alas, you like all of us will die, and then you will have to answer to someone higher and far wiser than yourself for the choices you made in life. Don’t blame your homosexual excesses or even your “orientation” on God at that point…

Consider repenting of your sins and becoming a new person in Christ (try reading the 2nd chapter of Corinthians–don’t mean to be condescending, but I’m not sure of your Biblical literacy). I believe that’s your best hope for recovering some decency in your life and leaving your reprobate mind (Romans 1) behind.

Sincerely,

Peter LaBarbera
Americans For Truth
www.americansfortruth.org

(PS. You have no “husband,” just a partner in sin, and sorry for the late response to your note)

Another tragic, untimely death…

Excerpted from AIDS Activist Jeff Getty Dead at 49, published Oct 15, 2006, by Associated Press:

Jeff Getty, a prominent AIDS activist who in 1995 received the first bone-marrow transplant from a baboon to treat the disease, has died. He was 49.

Continue reading at Forbes…

Excerpted from Surviving AIDS Can Wreak Havoc on the Brain, published Oct 2, 2006, by Associated Press:

…The AIDS virus can sneak into the brain to cause dementia, despite today’s best medicines.

Now scientists are beginning to test drugs that may protect against the memory loss and other symptoms of so-called neuroAIDS, which afflicts at least one in five people with HIV and is becoming more common as patients live longer.

With almost 1 million Americans, and almost 40 million people worldwide, living with HIV, that’s a large and underrecognized toll.

“That means HIV is the commonest cause of cognitive dysfunction in young people worldwide,” says Dr. Justin McArthur, vice chairman of neurology at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, who treats neuroAIDS. “There’s no question it’s a major public health issue.”

While today’s most powerful anti-HIV drugs do help by suppressing levels of the virus in blood — so that there’s less to continually bathe the brain — they can’t cure neuroAIDS. Why? HIV seeps into the brain very soon after someone is infected, and few anti-HIV drugs can penetrate the brain to chase it down.

Continue reading at MSNBC… 

Mr. Ninja’s obituary appeared in the October 9 edition of JET Magazine and is posted on LGBT World Daily News which states:

Willi Ninja, known as the Grandfather of Vogue, a dance form that he helped move from the New York club scene of the 1980’s to the concert stage, died on last month in Queens. He was 45. The cause was AIDS-related heart failure, said Archie Burnett, a close friend.

A woman who grew up with a same-sex-attracted father has launched an effort to help similar people deal with the pain they experience.

Excerpted from New Website Offers Support For Adult Children of Homosexuals, by Gail Besse, published Oct 8-14, 2006, in National Catholic Register:

She had every daughter’s natural need for affirmation,
but that was something her homosexual father just couldn’t give his little girl.

Now in her 40s, Dawn Stefanowicz knows there are others like her — others who as children ached with silent hunger for that missing connection. To help them, she has set up the first website that specifically addresses the impact of homosexual parenting from the adult child’s perspective.

“It pierces the inside of you when you know the truth. Men who struggle with their own masculinity cannot affirm femininity,” she said. “Six-year-olds cannot tell you how they’re being impacted. We can’t comprehend what we went through until we’re adults.

“People aren’t comfortable sharing this, but keeping it hidden hurts children,” she said. “The secular media is not carrying the message that this impacts children long-term.”

Now an accountant and home schooling mother of two, Stefanowicz and her husband of 22 years live in Ontario.

Her website, http://www.dawnstefanowicz.com, went online in early September. It outlines her childhood story, which includes being exposed to nude beaches, “gay cruising” sites and sexually transmitted diseases. The website lists scientific studies and news articles, secular and religious support groups, and confidential contact information.

Her Christian faith and counseling helped Stefanowicz come to terms with her past and with the biological father whom she loved but lost to AIDS.

In the past three years, she has testified in the United States and Canada on behalf of marriage protection laws, and she appeared Sept. 21 on EWTN’s “Life on the Rock.” Her autobiography, Out from Under: Getting Clear of the Wreckage of a Sexually Disordered Home, will be out in 2007.

She went public because children’s voices were one dimension missing from the same-sex “marriage” debate. Adults who as children had first-hand experience of the “gay” lifestyle could speak for them…

A host of parental problems can challenge children raised by those who act out same-sex attraction, according to Dale O’Leary, a writer and researcher for the Catholic Medical Association and author of ­ The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality. For example, boys reared by two “mothers” face hostility toward their masculinity within the lesbian community.

“Same-sex attraction is the tip of the iceberg,” O’Leary said. “Many such people were victims of sexual child abuse themselves and have multiple problems. Many have suicidal impulses, anger management issues, drug and alcohol abuse, a high level of partner change, serious depression and mental illness. The scary thing is, when children are raised by dysfunctional parents, they often think the problems are their fault,” she said.

Even adult children hesitate to discuss their pain for fear of hurting their parents, Stefanowicz said. Some become promiscuous, when they are really seeking love. Others become perfectionists, seeking a sense of identity through their profession.

She hopes her website will be a vehicle for mutual support and healing, and a resource to uphold marriage as the union of a man and a woman for the sake of all children.

Continue reading in National Catholic Register…

Excerpted from AIDS Campaign Calls HIV A ‘Gay Disease’, published Sept 30, 2006, by Associated Press:

…The message “HIV is a gay disease” and the tag line “Own It, End It” will appear on billboards and in magazines.

…Apathy about AIDS among gay men is a serious problem on the West Coast, where most HIV transmission is among men having sex with other men, public health officials said.

…In Los Angeles County, about 75 percent of HIV cases are among men who have had sex with other men. But nationwide, gay and bisexual men account for about half of recent HIV transmission, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta…

Continue reading at 365Gay…