Dear Editor:

Thanks for the story on the upcoming GLBT film series at MoPA—I’ve got my tickets and am looking forward to it. Further, I was gratified to hear programmer Michael McQuiggan say that he’d “...like to see the festival be at least a week long...” I’m hoping for the same—setting aside an entire weekend to see these films is tough and many other cities have week-long film festivals, so why not San Diego?

However, as I read the story, I noticed two things that merit clarification. Mr. McQuiggan is quoted as saying “When [queer] movies play here, they usually only play at Landmark, and only play for a week, so most people have to wait for DVD [to see those films]....” While this may be true for films showing at Landmark’s Ken Cinema, this is generally not true for films being shown at Landmark’s Hillcrest Cinema. As I write this, the Israeli film “Walk on Water”, which has a gay subplot, is enjoying it’s second week in Hillcrest.

And on the topic of the Ken Cinema, your article didn’t mention “FallOut”, a series of GLBT films that screened over a long weekend at The Ken back in October 2004. Therefore, the claim that “...no large-scale film festival was held in 2004...” isn’t entirely true. Although probably not as well publicized as OutFest or FilmOut, FallOut’s program/leaflet for the series did feature an OutFest logo, which suggests an association between the Ken’s series and OutFest.

Make no mistake—I don’t work for Landmark Theaters. I simply prefer independent/foreign/arthouse films to much of the mainstream “schlock” so I patronize Landmark Theaters quite a bit. Landmark’s Ken Cinema screens many GLBT films, many of which move to Hillcrest when the one-week run is over. Their contribution to the GLBT community in screening our films shouldn’t be overlooked just because they choose to do so independently of organizations/events like OutFest and FilmOut.

David A. Thaler

Dear Editor:

The April 7 edition of the Gay and Lesbian Times cited a quote from Cassell’s Queer Companion that incorrectly defined gender dysphoria as an “early term used to describe being transgender” (page 30). Confusion of gender dysphoria with gender diversity, or transgender, has kindled misunderstanding of the transgender community and the barriers that we face. Transgender, in the context of GLBT inclusion, is a community umbrella term that describes people who transcend traditional binary gender stereotypes: individuals whose inner gender identity or outer expression of gender differ from those usually associated with our birth sex. This includes those who identify as crossdressers, dual gender, bigender, genderqueer, gender questioning and transsexual and intersects the intersex, two-spirit, drag and other queer communities. Only a portion of transgender people experience gender dysphoria (from Greek dusphoros – “hard to bear”), defined as a persistent distress with one’s physical sex characteristics or their associated social roles. For some gender dysphoric individuals, this distress may be debilitating or even fatal and requires medical procedures to bring our bodies into congruence with our inner gender identities. These are known as transsexual individuals, for whom hormonal and/or surgical treatments for gender dysphoria are proven effective and medically necessary and are not cosmetic or elective.

At the root of this confusion lies American psychiatric policy that is discriminatory and scientifically unsupported with respect to gender diversity. While the board of directors of the American Psychiatric Association first voted to remove homosexuality as a diagnosis of mental disorder in 1973, most of the transgender community remains classified as mentally ill under diagnostic labels of “gender identity disorder” (GID) and “transvestic fetishism.” These diagnoses are not limited to those suffering gender dysphoria but implicate a very wide spectrum of socially nonconforming gender identities and expressions with stigma of mental deficiency and psychosexual deviance. For over 30 years, efforts by the transcommunity to urge reform of these diagnostic categories have been ignored by the APA.

All people possess a sense of gender identity, and there is no evidence that any are “disordered.” Difference is not disease and uniqueness is not illness. Again, most transgender people do not suffer gender dysphoria, or distress with our born sex characteristics or assigned social roles. For those who do, the pain of gender dysphoria may be effectively relieved with medical procedures which may include sex reassignment.

Kelley Winters

Dear Editor:

RE your editorial, “Anonymous HIV Testing in Jeopardy” (April 14): Once again, the AIDS industry is trying to have it both ways. On the one hand they equate merely testing “HIV-positive” — i.e., having a nonspecific antibody reaction to at least one (usually three to five) of the nine proteins that supposedly make up HIV — to full-blown AIDS in terms of demanding money for anti-HIV drug regimens, Social Security disability pensions and other social services for the “HIV-positive.” On the other hand, when the Centers for Disease Control comes to the common-sense position that if mere HIV seropositivity equates to AIDS then it should be treated as AIDS is — as a disease condition subject to mandatory names reporting, and possibly contact tracing as well — the representatives of California’s AIDS industry scream their heads off about how this is going to discourage people from getting tested and how this state shouldn’t have to play by the same set of rules as the rest of the country.

At a time when not only being “HIV-positive” but even AIDS itself have been defined as artefacts of lab tests — between 1993 and 1997 at least two-thirds of all “AIDS” diagnoses were made exclusively on the basis of HIV antibody tests and T-cell counts without any clinical symptoms at all — it’s time for us to demand honesty from the AIDS industry and an end to the scare propaganda that on the one hand has told Gay men they have a social obligation to be tested every six months and on the other hand has left them believing a “positive” result is itself a disease requiring immediate “treatment” with highly toxic and expensive drugs.

If the CDC’s common-sense position that if “HIV” is a disease it should be subject to names reporting scares some people away from being tested, maybe that’s a good thing. If people with one of the 64 other potential causes for a “positive” test result — including such common infections as hepatitis, herpes, malaria and flu — are discouraged from taking the HIV antibody test, maybe they’ll be allowed to live out their normal life spans without either being poisoned by “HIV drugs” they don’t need or stressed out into early graves by the ferocious social stigma of being “HIV-positive.”

Mark Gabrish Conlan