noizemagazine - Index

noizemagazine - Spring 2008 Issue # 55 - Index

Book ExcErpt
Advocate Guide to Gay
health and Wellness
by Frank Spinelli, MD
Dr. Frank Spinelli is a prominent New York City physician who specializes in HIV.
This work, published by Alyson Books, is the first comprehensive guide for gay
men to staying healthy, feeling great, remaining sexually active, and looking good.
Being harassed as a child, for whatever reason, leads to issues of low self-esteem.
Many gay men develop depression and social anxiety because of the years of
torment they endured as children. It was during adolescence that I became
depressed. I did not want to go to school, and my grades suffered. I would often
try to avoid school by getting sick. I would wash my hair in the sink before going
to bed and sleep with my head on the open windowsill, hoping to catch a cold.
Once my mother walked in on me in the middle of the night and became enraged
by what she found. The next day she went to my school and spoke to my teacher
in order to find out why I was trying to avoid school. My teacher offered her
no insight, even though she knew very well that I was being picked on in class.
Instead, she gave my mother rhetorical advice and suggested that I needed to
study harder. I remembered feeling angry and abandoned. After that, there was
not even a remote chance of ever getting out of going to school.
“Coming out” was my most important life-changing experience. I was in college
when I truly realized I was gay, and I decided to stop dating women completely. By
this time, I had only had sex with men indiscriminately and usually “by accident”
after getting drunk, but I had not dated any man. In medical school, I was almost
completely celibate and concentrated solely on my studies. It was only after I had
graduated from medical school and began my residency at St. Vincent’s Hospital
and Medical School – which, coincidentally, was in the heart of Manhattan’s West
Village – that I began to experiment with the gay community.
In 2000, when I moved into Manhattan, the gay bar scene was a liberating and
enthralling experience for me. I was not “out” at work. Despite the fact that the
hospital was considered to be the epicenter of the AIDS crisis, the surgical program
was not tolerant of homosexuals. I remained closeted at work and to my
family, but slowly integrated myself into the gay social scene with the aid of my
cousin Paul, who is seven years my junior and completely and utterly gay. His
attitude toward being gay was devoid of the guilt that plagued me. His ability to
come out to our family at the age of sixteen was inconceivable to me, because
we both grew up in such similar households. The only major difference between
us was our age, so it was this generation gap, I hopefully concluded, that was the
basis for why we had such different views about being gay.
Needless to say, it was not a complete surprise to my family when Paul came out
at sixteen years old. What made me so envious of his coming out was that he did
it with no remorse or any sense of apology. Even as my aunt smacked her head
repeatedly against the living room wall, I could see in Paul’s eyes that he did not
think that he was to blame. He was gay, and that was just the way it was. It would
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