LGBTQ Breaking News Service

ROME – Chile’s president surprised friends and foes on Wednesday, when during his last remarks to Congress before his coalition government ends in March 2022, he asked legislators to treat with “urgency” a project to legalize gay marriage.

“I think that the time has come for equal marriage in our country,” said the right-wing President Sebastián Piñera. The bill, presented to Congress in 2017 by his predecessor, the left-wing Michelle Bachelet, has been collecting dust ever since.

“All people, regardless of their sexual orientation, will be able to live, love and form a family with all the protection and dignity they need and deserve,” the Catholic president said.

His request for legislators to treat this project with “urgency” goes beyond mere phrasing, as it allows speeding up the process of initiatives in Congress.

In a message released Wednesday afternoon, the Chilean bishops conference acknowledges that “no one doubts that Chile is living a complex time that demands the best of each one of us,” alluding to the referendum earlier this year that called for the re-writing of the country’s constitution.

“The deep health crisis caused by the pandemic and its economic, social and emotional consequences has placed large groups of Chileans in extreme precariousness, and they expect from their authorities measures and decisive actions to help, especially for the benefit of the most vulnerable,” the bishops wrote.

The prelates then note that in this context “of great expectation about how we will continue to face the pandemic and its effects,” Piñera set the priorities for the final months of his presidency – he cannot be reelected – including what they describe as “the so-called equal marriage law.”

“Those of us who follow Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and are guided by his teaching, hold the certainty that the marriage established and willed by God is only between a man and a woman, a communion that gives birth to life and is the foundation of the family,” the bishops write, before quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church to summarize the Church’s teaching on the matter: “the vocation to marriage is inscribed in the very nature of man and woman, as they came from the hand of the Creator.”

In their statement, the bishops also quote Pope Francis’s 2016 Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, in which the pope writes that there is “no basis for assimilating or establishing analogies, even remote ones, between homosexual unions and God’s plan for marriage and the family.”

The Church’s teaching on marriage, the Chilean prelates write, does not contradict its conviction that “every person, regardless of his or her sexual orientation, is to be respected in his or her dignity and welcomed with respect, avoiding all signs of unjust discrimination.”

They bishops also defended the preposition that same-sex couples having their rights protected through national legislations that grant “persons who decide to live together” recognition.

To date, same-sex marriage is legal in a handful of Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Uruguay, and several states in Mexico. Chile allows for civil unions.

Chile, once a predominantly Catholic and conservative country – civil divorce was only made legal in 2008 – has been undergoing a rapid process of secularization that has accelerated in the past three years, when a series of clerical sexual abuse scandals made the news.

Among the many Chilean prelates accused of wrongdoing is the president’s own uncle, the late Archbishop Bernardino Piñera, who served as Archbishop of Serena from 1983-1990 after previously serving as Bishop of Temuco. At the time of his death in June of last year, he was being investigated by the Vatican over allegations that he sexually abused a minor 50 years ago.

RELATED: World’s oldest living bishop, who is uncle of Chile’s president, accused of abuse

Soon after the Vatican’s embassy in Chile announced the archbishop was being investigated, the president said: “As a nephew, I find it hard to believe because I know his behavior, his attitude over a lifetime, and I find it hard to believe a complaint that is made against a man who’s 103 years old today, over an alleged event that occurred 50 years ago.”

The president attended his funeral together with his wife, but made no comments at the time.

Wednesday’s announcement by Piñera surprised even his own coalition, as same-sex marriage was not currently on the public agenda in Chile, it was never part of his government program.

Follow Inés San Martín on Twitter: @inesanma

“Why are you talking to them?” Hank Millbourne remembers friends saying to him during the 1980s gay scene in Detroit about other gay men. “They have the package.”

Millbourne had only a passing idea of what the “package” was, but he was quickly taught the alleged telltale signs of it: darkened fingernails from using AZT, then the only approved treatment for HIV. In Black Americans, it had the odd side effect of turning some people’s fingernails dark black. 

“The package” would consume Millbourne’s life for the next two decades. He was completing his master’s degree in social work at the University of Michigan when he was first confronted with the whispers of the disease. It had already washed over the large urban centers of the East and West coasts of the country, and by the mid-’80s was racing through Michigan’s population centers.

Forty years after the first published account of five previously healthy homosexual men in Los Angeles with a rare pneumonia tied to immune suppressed people, HIV remains an ongoing epidemic in the United States with thousands of Americans being diagnosed with the diseases every year. Most of the newly diagnosed people are young Black men who have sex with men and transgender women of color. 

The epidemic can be told in numbers. In 2018 — the most recent data available from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) — Black men had a new HIV diagnosis rate of 45.6 per 100,000 Black men in Michigan. White men had a rate of just 4.8 per 100,000. Black women had a rate of 8.9 infections per 100,000, while white women had just .9 infections per 100,000. 

State health officials cheer small declines in the rates of new diagnoses of HIV, particularly among young Black men who have sex with men. Those rates were highest in 2013 at 133.1 young Black men to 103.8 in 2018.

Thousands of Michiganders have died from the disease since 1981. And right now, 16,306 Michiganders are living with the virus. An estimated 13% of Michiganders living with HIV do not yet know they have the virus. 

Of those 16,306 Michiganders living with HIV, 10,437 live in the Detroit metro area, which includes the city of Detroit, as well as the remainder of Wayne, and all of St. Clair, Oakland, Monroe, Macomb and Lapeer counties.

One of every 10 people diagnosed with HIV in metro Detroit has never been linked to care, similar to the rest of the state. (Care means a person is provided an opportunity to access antiviral medications, which in turn will lead to better health outcomes and a suppression of the virus, preventing them from sexually transmitting the infection.) But for those linked to care, 44% weren’t connected until 30 days after their diagnosis, 10% less than those in the rest of the state. 

Outside of Southeast Michigan, 92% of those in care have an undetectable, or suppressed, virus. In metro Detroit, 88% of those in care have achieved an undetectable viral load. In Detroit proper, only 84% of those in care have a suppressed virus. 

The racial disparity of HIV has existed from the beginning of the pandemic. While that first Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on June 5, 1981, failed to identify the race of the men impacted, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, the Los Angeles doctor who made the report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), noted in 2011 that the men were white. In that same interview with the PBS show “Frontline,” he noted the next four cases of the rare pneumonia he treated were in people of color. First, it was two Black men, then a Haitian man, then a gay Black man. In the first nine documented cases of HIV he dealt with, 44% were in people of color. 

The disparities in who is getting HIV, and who is most at risk, are stark. Recent studies have found that one in two Black men who have sex with men will be infected with HIV in their lifetime. 

It’s a disparity that DHHS, as well as the state’s first Black lieutenant governor, Garlin Gilchrist, recognize that requires action. 

“As the Lieutenant Governor, I have been focused on making improvements to addressing health disparities, especially within communities of color,” Gilchrist said in a statement responding to the Advance’s questions about addressing racial disparities in HIV cases in Michigan. “While we have made strides towards improvements, we recognize that we have more work to do to address all health disparities.”

DHHS officials said the department is working to expand access to the HIV prevention drugs, an intervention called Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), by funding public health clinics to provide the testing and access to the expensive drugs. 

Katie Macomber, director of the Division of HIV/STD programs at DHHS, said the department is also working overtime in providing training for employees at the state and community organizations with the tools to review and address systemic racism and trauma. 

And the trauma of racism is a factor, said experts interviewed. Renee Canady, executive director of the Michigan Public Health Institute, noted that racism is a stressor that reduces the efficacy of the immune system. 

Teresa Spring, programs director for Wellness AIDS Services in Flint, said generational trauma also plays a role. 

“I don’t have any science to support it, but I do think the ongoing trauma of slavery and discrimination over generations has an impact, genetically,” she said. 

There is some evidence revealed in a 2013 study, published in the Sociology Compass, that generational trauma of racism can impact the genetics of people. 

Both Millbourne and Curtis Lipscomb, executive director of LGBT Detroit — the area’s only Black organization working with sexual minorities — said the focus of HIV has been as a “white man’s disease.” 

“The information we were providing early on didn’t speak to people like me,” said Millbourne. “It didn’t have pictures of people who looked like me. We had to recreate that information to distribute to the community.”

Lipscomb recalls the rise of the radical AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in New York City in the mid- to late ‘80s. 

“I knew what they were doing was important for me, and about me, but it was not a space where I felt welcome,” he said of ACT UP activities. 

Both men told stories of the racial segregation in queer spaces in Detroit and New York. 

Tim Retzloff, a professor at MSU with a doctorate in history for Yale, is an expert in the pre-1985 history of gay cultures in Michigan. He said that most gay nightspots were segregated, with one clear stand out. That place was called Todd’s and was owned by an interracial gay couple. They made the space safe for black and white patrons.

But racial segregation and a fear of the so-called “tipping point” of allowing too many people of color into white queer spaces kept spaces separate for Black and white communities. 

Millbourne and Lipscomb spoke of Menjo’s, a popular gay nightspot in Detroit, that was infamous for having stricter identification requirements and dress codes for men of color, limiting how many Black men could get into the bar on a night. 

“And once you did get in, if you did,” said Millbourne, “all the Black men were in this corner of the bar, together.”

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That segregation meant Black men who were engaging in risk-related behaviors for HIV were not getting information about HIV, said both Millbourne and Lipscomb. 

Treatments were released in 1996 that helped make living with HIV a manageable chronic disease. However, those interviewed for this story said community-based organizations in some ways failed to recognize the lack of access to resources to pay for the expensive, life-sustaining drugs. Prevention messaging continued to focus on white, gay men. And HIV continued to spread in social systems for Black men who had sex with men and transgender women. 

A study published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that while Black cisgender men who have sex with men do not engage in any more risky behavior that white men who have sex with men, they still have a significant likelihood of contracting the virus. No definitive explanation has been arrived on to understand this phenomenon, but literature points to significant racism, poverty, housing instability and higher prevalence of the virus within Black and Brown communities as likely drivers. 

“We have to deconstruct those race systems if we are going to address HIV and end it,” said Canady. “I tell my team leaders here all the time that if we are still doing something the same way we did five years ago, we are failing. We have to change. We have to evolve.”

It’s not easy being a teenager. Teens have to cope with the often chaotic onset of physical, psychological and emotional changes. For teens in high school, there’s the added pressure to perform academically. LGB (lesbian, gay, bisexual) high school students face additional stress factors, including stigma and discrimination due to their sexual orientation and gender identity.

A group of medical students at the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine wondered if LGB high schoolers were more likely to use illicit substances.

“Studies have demonstrated a disparity in sexual minority adolescents and substance use, possibly due to factors contributing to minority stress,” said Juan Oves, a fourth-year medical student. “We set out to investigate the association between self-identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual and illicit substance use compared to those who identify as heterosexual.”

As part of a medical school research course, Oves and classmates Jessica Fernandez and Roberto Gonzalez (with the help of HWCOM research staff) performed secondary data analysis of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). The survey has been administered to youth in grades 9 through 12 biennially since 1991. The most recent data is from 2017 and includes more than 12,000 adolescents attending public and private U.S. high schools. The YRBS asked students to identify as heterosexual, gay or lesbian, bisexual, or unsure. Illicit substances probed included marijuana and cocaine, among others.

“Our data revealed that high school students who identified as bisexual or “not sure” of their sexual identity were more likely to use illicit substances than their heterosexual counterparts,” said Oves. The HWCOM data study was recently published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Participants who identified as bisexual were 1.65 times as likely to use illicit substances than heterosexual high school students. Those who identified as “not sure” of their sexual identity were 1.37 times as likely. There were not enough replies among the gay and lesbian students to reach a scientifically significant conclusion.

Oves hopes this and other studies that have reported a similar association leads to further research and a better understanding of the health disparities associated with sexual and gender identity.

“We need to start shaping the way we practice medicine to address factors influencing the health outcomes of LGBT youth.”

The HWCOM data study revealed some interesting secondary findings. Most notably that cigarette and alcohol use each had a statistically significant association with illicit substance use.