Sexual Health and Pleasure Committee Needs
The Black Gay Men’s Network next steps are to create committees based on 4 key areas identified as a priority.
By lending your expertise and lived experience to sexual health and pleasure committee, you can help educate, empower, and mobilize Black gay men to help reclaim pleasure, intimacy, connection, emotion, and love. While this includes looking at sexual transmitted diseases and infection education, HIV+ prevention and care, and consent, we also know that there’s so much more to having a satisfying sex life. This includes a healthy view of self, proper communication, and feeling safe with ourselves and our partner, or partners! Help us map out what that can look like for peers.
Contact us to sign up and learn more
Why is this a priority?
Our pillars are founded on the themes from the participants who were part of the Ontario Black Gay Men’s Summit in 2010 and subsequent African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) same-gender loving meetings that occurred in October 2018 and March 2019.
These are:
● Culture & knowledge production
● Sexual health & pleasure
● Substance use, and
● Mentoring
Background
Black gay men in Ontario have shared that sexual health needs to be as broad and dynamic as we are. Sexual health literacy needs to come from a holistic health and wellness perspective as our mental, physical, spiritual, and social health impacts the choices and decisions we make. This includes not just understanding HIV and STI prevention but also relationships, pleasure, and intimacy.
This is often difficult as sexual education often sees Black gay men through a lens of HIV, stereotypes such as being hypersexual, and homophobia expressed in the Black community while ignoring the impacts of racism, homophobia, serophobia, etc from society at large.
What could the work on this committee look like?
There are many ways that improving sexual health to speak better to Black gay men’s needs and desires can take shap in many ways. Examples include:
- Further defining BGMN’s definition of sexual health and pleasure
- Creating interventions, programming, and events that increase education and awareness
- Working with current organizations to create more holistic messaging that speaks to our community
- Helping service providers increase their cultural capacity to effectively interact with Black gay men about their sexual health
- Providing ways to access sex-positive conversations about real-life sexuality, including the role of pleasure and desire in sexual decision-making.
- Adopting community-based research approaches to have a meaningful impact on health literacy