Jäsentoby.marotta

Kokoelmat
Avainsanoja
Väline
Liittynyt
Apr 8, 2011
Oikea nimi
Toby Marotta
About My Library
I must have the world's most extensive collection of books, articles, print-outs, interviews, and confidential personal testimonies attesting that post-sex washing prevents sexually transmitted infections including HIV infections.
About Me
After romping through the Medford Public School System I attended Harvard College and enrolled in its newly renamed Kennedy School of Government. "Alternate service" allowed me to teach in ghetto high schools in Philadelphia and Boston instead of going to Vietnam.

Upon returning to Harvard I worked as a teaching fellow with its leading neo-conservative professors before writing my Ph.D. dissertation, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1981 as "The Politics of Homosexuality."
Its follow-up, "Sons of Harvard: Gay Men from the Class of 1967," personified my embrace of the radical injunction to make matters personal political. So did the formalization of my partnership with Rustam Kothavala, whom I had met when I was an undergraduate resident of Lowell House and he was the iconoclastic Professor of Geology who became its Senior Tutor.

In 1975, Rusty and I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and bought a house in the Berkeley flats. While he started Crystals of India, a business that occasionally permitted me to join his mineral-collecting expeditions on the Indian subcontinent, I pursued our interest in GLBT community-building by doing ethnographic research among "runaway and homeless youth" in the Tenderloin and Polk Gulch areas of San Francisco.

My next official sponsors were a nonprofit consulting group named URSA and then a respected twin called the Institute for Scientific Analysis. Both specialized in obtaining federal grants to conduct city-related research and training projects funded by the federal government.

At the start of the 1980s, with the American surfacing of the deadly epidemic that went from being called GRID, for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, to AIDS, for Acquired Immunde Deficiency Syndrome, my ethnographic research reports led to a visit from epidemiologists affiliated with the U.S. Centers of Disease Control.

From the get-go I had been privately and then publicly critiquing their initial approach to Prevention, the term they soon added to their official name, for failing to emphasize prevention via post-sex hygiene.

In 1987, Dan Waldorf, a veteran substance-abuse researcher based in San Francisco and Alameda, hired me to run the Castro field office we rented for the purpose of conducting interviews and presiding over ethnographic research funded by National Institutes of Health to flesh out links between methamphetamine use and "unsafe sex."

Slowly but surely I became convinced that the simple alternatives for AIDS and STI prevention that U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop advocated and institutionalized -- either abstinence or condom use -- were too remote from the realities of loved-based and underclass intimacies to be practical all the time for everyone.

The third federally funded research project I worked on required me to spend a year conducting week-long strings of in-depth interviews with politicized local adolescents who had been diagnosed with AIDS.

In public they echoed the official mantra of abstinence or condom use. In private, I soon discovered,they abandoned so-defined "safe sex" whenever they got involved with a loving partner.

What they needed was an approach to infection-prevention that could be practiced AFTER they had demonstrated and shared in the un-self-protecting ways they felt were truly loving.

I soon became convinced that in the absence of an effective vaccine, viable AIDS-prevention efforts required discovering and publicizing effective STD and HIV prevention measures that could be taken AFTER people had demonstrated their trust by "making love," which in this case they understood and experienced to mean without donning and insisting upon "protection" before "making love."

Moving to Tucson, Arizona, where Andrew Weil was incorporating holistic healthcare and integrative medicine into the medical school at the University of Arizona, supplied me with a supportive context for adding post-sex hygiene to the existing official options (either abstinence or condom use) for STI and AIDS prevention.

My Web-facilitated research into traditional nostrums and foreign customs for sex-related health, which contemporary American medical experts and their worldly counterparts came to call "alternative" and "complementary" medicine, revealed that early 20th-Century American and European efforts to prevent the spread of syphilis and gonorrhea relied on post-sex washing.

This well-documented and written about history helped me to zero in on the potential of post-sex washing to help prevent the spread of HIV infections and AIDS.

Using Internet/Web-based search engines permitted me to buttress my case in academic fashion by tracking down and writing about the handful of widely overlooked medical journal articles reporting on scientific studies that had found and documented that washing involved body parts after fluid-exchanging sexual intercourse was an effective way to squelch or at least greatly reduce the risk of getting and spreading sexually transmitted infections including HIV infections.

For this opportunity to publicly explain and document my multifaceted case for post-sex hygiene by citing and sometimes commenting on a handful of authoritative books that do the same thing I am grateful to LibraryThing.com.

Sijainti
Tucson,AZ; San Diego, CA
Kotisivu
http://Library Thing

Yhteyksiä muihin jäseniin

Ystävät