I am blessed with a body that reacts…strongly…to mood altering drugs of any sort.  Alcohol, marijuana, whatever.  It never took much to get me blasted as a teen, and beings as I was usually zonked pretty quickly, I never really had more fun if I did more…just pass out.  I’m convinced this is why I never fell into any cycle of addiction and recovery.  It certainly kept me from becoming addicted to cigarettes.

I still vividly remember my first toke on a cigarette.  I was 11 or 12, and one day my friends and I found an unopened pack of Winstons in a construction site near our apartments.  We took it to our private hang out and passed them around.  That first puff was my last.  It felt like my entire body was under attack.  My lungs burned, my skin chilled, my head started to go Right Up Into The Stratosphere.  I was hacking and coughing all over the place and for once my friends weren’t making fun of me for not being cool because they were all doing it too.  For years after that I wondered why the hell adults smoked.  And then I became one.

I smoke the occasional cigar now.  It’s a gentler, more mellow nicotine buzz, and I don’t have to drag the smoke into my lungs to get it.  And I can tell you exactly why I do it.  Stress.  Work deadline stress mostly, but also the stress of my life at times.  I’m single, and when you’re single you don’t get the chance to have those heart to heart talks about life with someone you trust intimately.  So I paint, I draw, I blog, and I go for solitary walks, sometimes with a cigar in hand, just trying to mellow out.  And like those other highs it doesn’t take much, and that keeps my tobacco usage down.  But I’m aware of the dangers, and when I walk past the Baltimore Gay Community Center sometimes, and I see a bunch of gay kids hanging out, and at least half of them are smoking, I get angry.  Not at them, but at the stresses in their lives.  It doesn’t take much to figure why you see more gay then straight teens smoking. 

Not much that is, if you have half a brain and a functional conscience.  Which brings me to the post I saw the other day on Stacy Harp’s blog.  You’ll recall Stacy as the anti-gay activist who just the other week was pushing Guy Adams’ claims that raping babies is the newest trend among gays.  But, baby sodomizers though we are, Stacy still cares about our health.  Really.  Stacy thinks the gay community should sue the tobacco industry.

…according to The San Francisco Chronicle the gay community has a higher rate of smoking than the heterosexual community.  That shouldn’t surprise anyone, because according to the article gays smoke because of stress, they go to bars (DUH) and the advertisers are victimizing the gay community because they are intentionally targeting the gay community because they know they are stressed out more than any other community.

So much, so obvious.  For instance, you’d be kinda stressed too if you had crackpots going around telling your neighbors that you were a having sex with infants because you thought it was trendy.  But…no.   The problem with linking higher incidence of smoking (and overall drug abuse) among gay people with stress is that’s a finger pointing right back at the likes of…er…Stacy.  And the finger must always point to homosexuals.  Whatever happens to gay people, whether it’s drug abuse, suicide or violence, it must always be their own fault.  Their blood is upon them…

But this is interesting, according to the article…

Gay smokers have their own theories on why they smoke: the club and bar scene, trouble finding dates and falling in love, high alcohol- and drug-abuse rates in the community. Sometimes, smoking is related to a lack of family connections, which can cause stress and also remove pressure to stop smoking once someone has started.

and this….

"Gay people probably smoke longer because we’re not as family- oriented. If you don’t have kids and raise a family, you don’t need to stop," said John Daly, 41, who has smoked for 25 years. "We don’t have the same responsibilities. We can be reckless a little longer."

OH…okay…so now we know why the gay community smokes so much, and here I thought that we are being told constantly by the gay community activists that their lives are just like the normal heterosexual’s life.  And yet, in the gays own words they admit that they use stink sticks because they are not as "family oriented", "don’t have kids or raise a family" and "can be reckless", as well as are "drug users" and "alcohol abusers".

Right.  Our lives are just like the normal heterosexual’s life, if normal heterosexuals had multi-million dollar political hate machines working hard year after year to deny them the right to marry, the right to raise children, the right to so much as be with their spouse in an emergency room.  Our lives are just like the normal life of heterosexuals who have to live under the cloud of one relentless propaganda campaign after another, telling their parents, their siblings, their co-workers, their neighbors that, for example, they’re all busy raping babies.  Our lives are just like that of any other heterosexuals who have to listen to the sound of pulpits thumping from one end of the country to the other about how they’re going to burn in hell because god hates them, god condemns them, and everyone else should too.  That kind of normal heterosexual family life.

Stacy thinks we ought to be outraged. 

As for me, I’m not going to hold my breath (unless some stinky smoker is around) waiting for the gay community to go after the tobacco companies… or the bars or alcohol companies. But if I was gay, I’d sure as heck be very mad that these companies are targeting my community and hoping to snag my community with deadly substances that could kill my community off quicker than if we didn’t all drink and smoke.

Hmmm.  Double standard…it’s okay for the tobacco and alcohol communties to push a deadly substance on the gay community, and no outrage.  But when someone who is trying to help the gay community tells them they should stop having sex, especially sex with someone who has HIV, you get persecuted.

Not to mention being persecuted just for politely telling us not to have sex with babies please.  Yes…we’re a cranky lot.

And in fact, a casual google search turns up numerous examples of just how cranky – some of us are – about the dangers of smoking, – second hand smoke, and actvisim against smoking in our community (pdf).  But to actually dig up that kind of information, you’d first have to want to…you know…know. 

I’ve bitched about it myself a time or two…

That last one being in reaction to a news article I came across in July of 2004, about a Utah anti smoking campaign directed a gay youth that lost its funding because…well…it was directed at gay youth…

For eight months, the "Queers Kick Ash" campaign hummed along, spreading its anti-tobacco message to Utah’s gay and lesbian community with help from a state grant.
During that time, records show the Utah Department of Health routinely approved and funded promotional materials – posters, banners, T-shirts, newspaper ads, even a Web site – for the campaign by the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Utah. Then, in mid-May, several students were disciplined at Hillcrest High for wearing "Queers Kick Ash" T-shirts.

A few weeks later, the Health Department yanked the funding – an expected $200,000 over the next two years – and the anti-tobacco campaign fizzled. Ever since then, the community center has wondered why it lost the funding.

"We’ve made phone calls, mailed letters and sent faxes – and nothing," said Tami Marquardt, the center’s acting executive director. "They haven’t had the courtesy or the public decency to give us an answer. I don’t know why they won’t talk to anyone if this is all aboveboard. This is nothing but a homophobic cover-up. It’s discrimination, pure and simple."

For its part, the Health Department – in a June 1 letter from Heather Borski, manager of the department’s Tobacco Prevention and Control Program – maintains that it opted not to renew the center’s grant to "prevent the anti-tobacco health message from being overshadowed by unrelated advocacy activity."

Richard Milton, the department’s deputy director, and two department spokeswomen would not define "unrelated advocacy activity."

"Our statement speaks for itself," Milton said Friday. "It’s a question of interpretation."

Let me hazard an interpretation: You can’t target gay youth with an anti-smoking message directed specifically to them, because that might lead them to think we actually care what the fuck happens to the little faggots.

Well if I was Stacy Harp I’d be outraged that the state of Utah withdrew funding for an anti-smoking program that targeted gay youth.  Wait…no.  If I was Stacy Harp I’d have probably taken up smoking years ago, due to the constant stress of trying not to see a gutter crawling bigot every time I looked in a mirror.

[Edited a tad…]