Work, Work and All Work.

I’ve been silent on this blog for far too long, and my only excuse is that I’ve been so busy. It’s been a combination of my job been so busy and having to sort out the sale of a flat, there’s been so little for writing and I’ve missed it. I know this sounds like a little chorus of “Poor Me”, but it’s just what happened. It is strange how much I missed writing, it’s there in my blood.

Well I’m back on the horse, so to speak, and writing a lot. Things have eased up a bit, mainly because we’re on two weeks annual leave and have time to ourselves. Martin has been taking lots of photographs and I’ve been writing.

Next week I’ve got a half page opinion piece in Nursing Times. This is about healthcare’s poor attitude to weight loss and obesity. Basically, in England, the opinion seems to be if you’re over weight it’s your fault. There is very little help for people trying to loose weight.

I have also gone back to writing a series of short stories about a vicar’s wife who solves mysteries. This may sound like a twee ripe-off of Agatha Christie but I want to grow the stories very much in modern day. These stories deal with jealousy, patricide, blackmail, murder and deception. I choose an amateur detective because I know so little about police procedure it would have been laughable but I wanted an amateur detective that was at least passably believable. With a vicar’s wife I can have a character would has a reason to be involved in other’s lives. Different members of her parish come to her with problems and she solves them, though I hope the problems reflect far more on the twenty-first century then the nineteen-thirties. There’s an American publisher I hope I can interest in them, I just have to write enough of them.

Drew.

P.S. The picture I’ve posted with this is one of my partner, Martin’s.

My Part in Lesbian and Gay History Month.

It’s the first, full week in February so it’s LGBT History Month and again I’ve been involved. This year saw the third Nursing Standard special edition for LGBT History Month and again I wrote for it. Previously I have been Guest Editor, this year we saw a Lesbian Guest Editor, but I wrote one of the feature articles.

My article was a look at homophobic violence and what nurses can do for people who’ve been victims of it (I don’t use the word victim lightly). We have seen a rise of homophobic attacks, which frighteningly seems to have increased with all the new rights we’ve won. Nurses can often be the first healthcare professionals who come into contact victims of it yet its a subject that is rarely talked about. My article was a simple guide for nurses faced with a victim, I didn’t go into any details of what causes it or how to psychologically treat the effects of it, it was just a simple guide for what to do if a nurse is faced with someone who’s been homophobically attacked. It did give me my first double page feature in Nursing Standard.

The Nursing Standard LGBT History Month special is something I believe strongly in. Nursing is seen as a “caring” profession yet there is so much ignorance about LGBT issues in it. When I was a student nurse (all those years ago) I was faced with a wall of homophobia from my follow student nurses, it was a shock at the time. During my nursing career I’ve seen so much ignorance, often not willful homophobia but ignorance driving homophobia, and yet Lesbians and Gay Men are still many nurses’ patients – even if the nurses don’t realize it. The only way to open peoples’ eyes is information, is writing about the issues in the nursing press (who still carry a lot of influence).

I started writing for the Nursing Standard with their first LGBT History Month special, now I regularly write for them as a freelancer and I’m not going to stop any time soon; but the LGBT History Month special is still so important to me. As a student nurse I could never have imaged any nursing publication having a Lesbian and Gay special, they rarely carried any articles about any LGBT issues: I don’t want to go back to that time.

Drew.

A Win At Last

Last month and back in May, I blogged about the threat to the funding of the London HIV prevention serving gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM), even though London has a lower rate of HIV infection (from men who have sex with men) then the national average. Last month there was a proposal to actually cut the funding for this by over thirty percent.

When this was announced there was an out-cry, which included lobbying of MPs, Ministers, local PCTs and a petition on the Downing Street website, and it has all paid off. NHS London (The Strategic Health Authority for London) has stated that there will be no cuts in funding for HIV Prevention, that there is plenty of money to fund HIV Prevention work to both gay men and the Black African communities. Previously London PCT’s said that there wasn’t enough money to fund both, therefore they would cut the funding for gay men’s HIV prevention. NHS London has reviewed this, at board level, and said there is enough money to fund both.

We can take a moment, sit back and give ourselves a pat on the back. If we hadn’t complained to our MPs and PCTs, if we hadn’t signed the petition on the Downing Street website, then these cuts would have gone ahead. Gay men’s HIV prevention services would have been cut by a third. I am amazed and delighted that so many of us raised our voices together in protest, we really achieved something.

The question does remain, why did the London PCTs try and cut this funding by a third? What was their agenda? I know I could get deeply paranoid thinking about this, but the question does remain.

Drew.

Some Seasonal Work

When I was a child my family went through a short period of going to a pantomime each Christmas, it didn’t that many years, but for that short while it was the only experience I had of live theatre as a child – it was a pale shadow of what live theatre can be. I can’t say the experience has scarred me for life or anything, but pantomime is not my favourite form of live theatre.

I’ve had a very seasonal short story published on the You Read Online Dot Com website, called Prince Charming. It is set around an amateur dramatic society’s production of Cinderella and focuses on Harriet, the woman playing Princess Charming. She finds this role eye-opening in many ways. The story can be found at: http://youreadonline.com/short%20stories/fiction/prince%20charming.htm .

Please have a read of it, it’s only short, and leave your comments about it on the website.

Drew.

Based on a True Story

Many times I’ve met other writers who claim that their fiction is just that, fiction, that they never write from their own experience. I could never make that claim. So much of my life makes its way into my writing, even when I’m writing fantasy fiction, and my short story He Said To Me (corrected link: http://www.drew-payne.co.uk/index_files/Page327.htm ) is no exception.

When I was a teenager I was an evangelical Christian, and in this environment I realized I’m gay. Even back then it was a deeply homophobic environment, simply being gay was an automatic sentence straight to hell and I believed in hell – fear of it would keep me awake at night. I received no positive gay images (This was before Queer as Folk) but I doubt my own self-loathing would have seen them as anything positive, so much did I believe what they told me. It was in this environment that I came across the Ex-Gay Movement, in the form of the British organisation The True Freedom Trust. The Ex-Gay Movement believes that someone Lesbian or gay can change their sexuality to heterosexual, be “cured”, by prayer, faith and a whole bag full of “quark” psychological therapies. The True Freedom Trust told me I was ideal material to be “cured” because I was young, a virgin and hated myself for being gay (my words). Two and a half years later I ran away from them and the evangelical church, no more straight then the next gay man but deeply screwed up by the whole experience (when my church found out I’m gay they tried to cast “daemons” out of me and then dropped me like a hot stone. The “counsellor” at the True Freedom Trust, when I told him what had happened to me, actually started to justify those people’s actions).

It took me over ten years to accept what had happened to me and to come to terms with it. I am now no longer that screwed up person but still hundreds of lesbians and gay men are being damaged by evangelical Christians using homophobia to try and “change” them.

There has been quite a lot written about the harm and damage the Ex-Gay Movement does but, with the short story He Said To Me, I wanted to write about how you build a positive self-image after leaving the Ex-Gay Movement. The focuses is on one gay man’s journey after he’s turned away from evangelical Christianity and all their homophobic crap. It’s not a pretty short story but it contains many of the themes very close to my heart.

Only today I read that American evangelical and rightwing Christians are putting pressure on the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to accept faith-based “treatment” programs for lesbians and gay men as legitimate psychiatric therapies. They want their unproven quackery seen as mainstream treatments. Do they have no caring or compassion, I don’t know, but they do have a great ability to ignore the evidence.

Drew

Sign, Sign, Sign

It’s all happening again.

Back in May there was a proposal to completely change the way HIV Prevention was delivered in London, to scrape the current multi-branch approach and replace it with a system was only designed to was waste money. Well, thanks to the public out cry, that wasn’t steam-rolled through and we still have an approach that is working. But not for long, it seems.

The latest funding proposal for HIV prevention serving gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) is to be only £1,145,960 (£1.1 million), that means there will be a cut in the money for HIV Prevention next year (the new funding will start in April 2008). This will work out at £7.64 a year for every MSM in London – that’s how much London PCT’s value MSM’s health. Back in April 1998 the funding was £2 million, so ten years later we’ve see a 55% reduction in HIV Prevention funding. This is a scandal, especially when we’ve actually seen a fall in HIV infections in London’s MSM – the opposite of the national trend.

But we don’t have to take this lying down. Firstly, there is a petition to the Prime Minister to oppose this, and we can sign it online at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/hivprevention/

Also we can write to our MP, which can be done online at http://www.upmystreet.com/commons/l/ , and tell them how much we oppose this.

We won back in May, we need to do this again. One voice, shouting on its own, can easily be ignored; many voices all speaking together will grab attention.

Drew.

It’s Me Again.

I’ve finally found some time away from working (the non-creative world of audits) to do some writing of my own, and some of it is getting published.

I’ve had another very short story published on the Gay Flash Fiction website (http://www.gayflashfiction.com/ ). Its a very brief short story, called Once More With Feeling, about a man who find his lover is being unfaith but does behave in the expected way. Unfortunately, I can’t post a direct link to the short here, because of the format Gay Flash Fiction all the pages have the same address, if you go to the Stories Page of the website the story is about halfway down. Enjoy.

Nursing Times has accepted another of my comments pieces, which is due for publication in December, and Nursing Standard has commission me to do another book review.

I have also started to post articles on Shvoong website, which is like a showcase for free lance article writing. Editors can view abstracts of my articles and buy them if they want to publish them. I have one article already up on it (http://www.shvoong.com/medicine-and-health/1696951-step/ ), so fingers crossed that can generate some more publishing chances.

Drew.