Long story short: Helio, now of of Follows The Sun, was contacted by a partner who in turn had been warned about a possible STI exposure. The partner had already made a clinic appointment for himself and reserved a spot for her so they could go in together. She wrote a post about the problems she ran into trying to confirm her appointment. Here’s her conclusion. (Emphasis mine.)
What pisses me off most, here, is not that they were disorganized, listened to him and didn’t listen to me, assumed that when I wanted testing it was because I had done something irresponsible whereas his appointment was just common sense. No, what pisses me off is that the operator who spoke to May must have assumed that his partner was male. Otherwise they wouldn’t have told him there were such consecutive appointments, because appointments are apparently just made differently and along different schedules for women and for men. Which is fine, but fuck you operator for assuming my lover only sleeps with dudes because he’s responsible about his sexual health and he has a soft-toned voice. Fuck you long and hard.
I’m more sanguine about the possible reasons for the mix up. To name but one problem, accountability requirements imposed by dedicated-funding grants on non-profit service providers can make it fiendishly difficult to do what might otherwise be the most sensible things. It only gets worse when you add in regulatory constraints, medical/ethical limits, budget constraints, clerical overload, and plain old provider burn-out.
Still, I’m just so tickled that Helio stands up for the possibility of hetero men’s responsibility! Humans have an admirable ability to rise to meet expectations but have a disappointing tendency not to exceed them. Expecting sexual responsibility from hetero men, and expressing impatience when others fail to expect responsibility, are two good ways to actually get responsibility from hetero men.
Submitted by 3053 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-07-11 12:00.
Doesn't New York have something like California's FPACT (Family Planning, Access, Care & Treatment Act) which will provide for free or limited-fee reproductive health care? One requirement is that the client be "at risk of pregnancy or of causing a pregnancy to occur", and such concerns would primarily be handled through Planned Parenthood. Since MayMay chose an LGBTI-oriented facility, the assumption was that his concern was probably NOT related to potentially-procreative sex, and, well, the idea of going for an STI-test WITH your opposite-sex partner in a consecutive appointment is not one that fits a heterocentric ethos as clearly as going for a PREGNANCY test with your partner. The commodity view of sex makes an STI something you have "done to" a woman while getting one over on her, rather than something of a shared challenge to get through together, so while there are some unpleasant assumptions at play, some of them are about heterosexual attitudes towards risk and pregnancy as well.