LGBTQ

Is he taking it slow or just not that into me?

/ Nicholas Velotta / Leave a comment

This article appears on the Andrew Christian website. Click here to be taken to the full-length version.

It has become a true talent to know whether the guy you’re seeing is serious about dating you or just killing time. As with most innovations in dating culture, this has a good and a bad side to it. The good: you don’t have to prematurely jump into a relationship just to lock it down before someone else does. The bad: a lot of guys take advantage of the gray area between “friends” and “more than friends” just to keep a full social calendar.

Sooner or later though, you get tired of the chase. How many dates can you go on without a clue as to where things may—or may not—be heading? If you’re to believe TV dating tropes, three dates is the benchmark, or at least that’s when sex is supposed to occur (if not earlier). But what if sex hasn’t happened yet and it’s date number six? Or, what if sex has happened but you can’t get a read on how he feels? You still like the guy, but according to all your friends (both real and imaginary), he probably isn’t as into you as you are into him.

Is this where modern daters are stuck? We either have to bench a guy for not being interested enough or be his bench warmer until he finds someone better.

Continue to the full-length article here.

The opioid crisis is hitting the LGBTQ community

/ Nicholas Velotta / Leave a comment

This article appears on the Andrew Christian website. Click here to be taken to the full-length version.

A new study out of New York University’s School of Medicine finds that LGBTQ people are particularly at risk for opioid prescription misuse. Some of us may not be that shocked by the findings—after all, gay men have been in the vanguard of recreational drug use for decades. But we aren’t talking about party drugs here.

Opioids are highly addictive painkillers that interfere with almost every aspect of human life (from eroding basic motor skills to disabling our mental capacity for undertaking important life events). The prescriptions’ potential for destroying daily life goes beyond our subjective well-being; in 2017 nearly 50,000 people died from an opioid overdose. That calculates to about 130 opioid deaths per day between 2016-2017 according to the US Department of Health & Human Services.

This new report sheds light on a rarely discussed piece of the opioid epidemic: how and why the opioid crisis is hurting LGBTQ communities more than heterosexual ones. Researchers found that reported misuse among straight men (5.3%) and women (3.7%) was significantly lower than rates reported by gay men (10%) and lesbians (6.8%). Even more troubling, bisexual women showed a markedly high misuse rate (13.5%) as did bisexual men (8.3%), though to a lesser degree than the bisexual women sampled.

NYU’s findings are particularly interesting because they illustrate how gender and sexual orientation interact to produce specific societal trends. In this case, bisexual women seem to be a sociological phenomenon. I say this because, historically, women have lower rates of drug abuse whereas men (especially single men) are considered the exemplar of “at risk” populations. However, when we use sexual orientation as a second level of analysis alongside gender, a frightening new trend is uncovered with bisexual women showing unprecedented rates of opioid prescription misuse.

Why are LGBTQ people experiencing this striking difference in opioid misuse?

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Gay marriage: Does a ring make a difference?

/ Nicholas Velotta / Leave a comment

This article appears on the Andrew Christian website. Click here to be taken to the full-length version. 

There was a lot of built up anxiety (mostly from the right) surrounding how same-sex marriage would forever alter American family and mating patterns. TV pundits, conservative politicians and religious leaders often focused on same-sex parenting, adoption rights, relationship durability, and ominous “slippery slope” scenarios where hypothetically legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to a country where humans could marry whomever or, even more perplexing, whatever they felt like. Thankfully in 2015, sanity prevailed and the LGBTQ community achieved the right to marry.

But now, nearly four years after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, can we say gays and lesbians getting married has really changed anything?

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LGBTQ Communities in the Ancient World

/ Nicholas Velotta / Leave a comment

The LGBT community has had it rough throughout most of human history. After all, it was only three years ago that same-sex marriage was legalized in the U.S. and only seven weeks ago gay sex was decriminalized in the world’s largest democracy, India. But that’s not to say there have never been pockets of “acceptance” for LGBT people around the world. Different societies and communities in the ancient world practiced various forms of same-sex unions and sexual behaviors.

Read about them here.