NEWSBYTODD A. HEYWOOD

I recently reported over at the Michigan Messenger about the case of a 54-year-old woman charged with failing to disclose her HIV-positive status to her 45-year-old male partner. She has plead no contest in an Isabella county court, and was sentenced to 11 months in jail, plus in-patient substance abuse counseling and five years of probation. She faces a similar charge in September in Clare county, which is just north of Isabella. (Incidentally, Isabella county is home of Central Michigan University.)

The local newspaper, the Mt. Pleasant Sun, declined to identify the 45-year-old man who brought charges, after carrying on a sexual relationship with the woman from June 2009 until January 2010. The thinking was that identifying the man was tantamount to identifying the victim of a sexual assault.

However, they had no issue splashing the name and photograph of the woman on their pages — even before she was convicted. What would have happened had she been exonerated of the allegations? She certainly could not rely on relative anonymity to go about her daily life. She was branded, guilty or not, of being HIV-positive.

So I found myself wondering aloud and in a series of memos with my colleagues at Michigan Messenger: Should we identify the woman by name, especially since in Michigan the identity of HIV-positive people is supposed to remain confidential?

As the media here in Michigan was focused on the million gallon oil spill in Marshall, a gay man was abducted and taken to an arboretum in Battle Creek. There, he was stabbed multiple times in the head and neck, and his throat was slit. He spent over a week in a Kalamazoo area hospital recovering from the attack, and his assailant remained at large until last Wednesday.

During the initial investigation, Battle Creek detectives thought the attack was an anti-gay hate crime. The reason? An anonymous person posted an ad in Craigslist's Battle Creek "M4M" (Men for Men) section taking credit for the assault. In the post, titled "I warned you, you dumb queer," the author used derogatory language about gays.

"I e-mailed and said I have something ... but you did not think it was a knife did you. Now you are in the hospital and your car is in the river. I warned you," the author wrote, reported the Battle Creek Enquirer.

That's pretty chilling, when you think about it. It sounded almost as if the assailant was bragging about the incident and taunting the police to find him. But when that news broke, the author posted a second, hate filled diatribe. The post was filled with anti-gay slurs and references to AIDS. The writer claims that the previous post was “to keep the fags out of the parks, and I am the one that did it. It is not safe to take children to parks or for a walk in the woods without running into a dick sucking party.”

I have to admit, when Judge Vaughn Walker released his ruling that Prop 8 was unconstitutional, I shrugged. When he issued his ruling on a motion for a stay of his decision, I was actually quite moved, though I still have not figured out why. But ultimately, I will admit, marriage equality is not and has never been on the top of my list of issues for the LGBT community.

First, let's look at the states that have approved marriage equality. Iowa prohibits discrimination in employment based on both sexual orientation and gender identity and/or expression. The same is true for California, and Vermont. You can chalk Washington, D.C. into the same category. Meanwhile, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

All those states and D.C. allow same-sex couples to get married (except for California, pending the appeal outcome for Judge Walker's Prop 8 decision). Those states also have anti-bias laws in place to address violence against the LGBT community.

Meanwhile, here in Michigan, we still have a sodomy law as well as a gross indecency between two men law on the books. We do not have a bias crimes law which includes sexual orientation. We have banned marriage equality through our state Constitution, and unless you live in one of a handful of Michigan municipalities, discrimination against you on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is completely legal.

While I was in Las Vegas at the end of last month, I participated in the New Organizing Institute's LGBT summit prior to the Netroots Nation 2010 gathering. In the morning, we had a chance to talk to representatives from various national LGBT leadership groups and put their feet to the fire about various issues. And in the afternoon, participants chose the top four LGBT issues they wanted to caucus on.

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised to find HIV was one of the four subjects that participants selected. So I sat in on the conversation, ably hosted by Sean Strub. During that discussion, blogger Phil Reese made a comment which really resonated for me. He said he wanted to talk about HIV, but was worried that as an HIV-negative person, he would get something wrong.

Phil and I met the next day at a bar in the middle of the casino where we shared glasses of Diet Coke and talked about it. He brought out a really important sentiment, and I think sometimes a stifling point to the issue of writing about HIV. There is a vast amount of information, and where and how to start is mind numbing.

When I tested positive in July 2007, I began a process that took nearly a year. That process took me through reading every study, every book, every post on TheBody.org in order to better understand the science, politics and sociology of my pet virus, as writer Shawn Decker calls it.

It was not until I completed that process that I felt comfortable coming out as HIV-positive, and talking about it with classrooms or blogging on it from a first-hand account. So I can imagine how overwhelming the mountains of information on the illness could cause someone whose life is not literally hanging in the balance between those mountains of knowledge.

This shouldn't be surprising news, what with the increasing number of HIV and other STIs among young gay men, and yet I admit it caught me off guard. Teenage boys, according to a new report, are not being counseled about issues like STIs and HIV.

The reason this put me off balance? The study, as reported by HIV Plus Magazine, looked at whether or not doctors speak to their patients about HIV and other STIs. Only 26 percent of teens who reported high risk behavior (like having sex with a commercial sex worker or with an HIV positive person) had received information about HIV and STIs from their doctor in the year prior to the behavior. Meanwhile, overall, only 21 percent of young men received that education from their doctor.

Evidently doctors are a wee bit icky about talking about sex, sexuality and STIs. Which is irritating considering in 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended all people between 13 and 64 years of age be tested annually by their doctor. But conducting those tests requires a physician to have an actual conversation with their patient about his or her risk level. That conversation might broach such uncomfortable subjects as homosexuality, anal sex, oral sex, and what not.

Penny Gardner, president of the Lansing Association for Human Rights (LAHR), got a call from a man that a Williamston, Michigan Church was excommunicating because he was gay. And she is not happy about it.

Gardner said that while the outed man has approached LAHR for assistance, the group has not yet made a decision about what, if anything, to do about it. But she is personally outraged.

"I was horrified at the specter of shame that the outing was supposed to put on him," Gardner said. "I was proud he responded with anger rather than shame."

The situation came to light when the gay man contacted me about a four page letter church leaders sent out (which you can read at the end of this post). The man did not wish to be publicly identified, but the letter named him and another member of the Lighthouse Community Church. The other person was outed as an adulterer.

Sadly, it is not illegal for a church to discriminate in this way, nor are the Williamston Public Schools, where the church meets, obligated to deny them access to their facilities to continue their discrimination.

In an email, Lighthouse Pastor Thurm Payton, tells the gay man:

"I wa

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Saturday recognized Lt. Dan Choi prior to diving into a speech at the Netroots Nation conference.

In what many LGBT bloggers at Netroots are calling "powerful" and "classy," Reid acknowledged Choi and told those gathered he should not have been booted by the U.S. military.

Choi came out on the Rachel Maddow Show to oppose the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Since then, Choi has been active in several acts of civil disobedience, including one Tuesday where the group GetEqual shut down a major thoroughfare in Las Vegas to put pressure on Reid to move the U.S. Senate on the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA).

Reid's honoring of Choi was greeted by a standing ovation. Choi reluctantly stood and waved to the crowd. But interestingly, Reid never looked in Choi's direction -- and Choi was strategically located in the front row about 100 feet from the Leader.

But that moment was not to be the only moment involving Choi and Reid here in Las Vegas.

A man from Williamston Michigan is battling her church over his sexuality.

The man, who wishes not to have his name used, says that by discussing her sexuality with the pastor of Lighthouse Community Church in Williamston, a small bedroom community east of Lansing, he has been targeted for excommunication from the church.

In a June 28 email to the man, Pastor Thurm Payton wrote, "I want to make one more appeal to you to turn from the lifestyle you've chosen to deal with the feelings you have wrestled with for many years. I can't escape the truth that you've taken a severe detour in God's plan for how your life is to be lived."

He further states,"I would deeply regret it if the effect of my trusting friendship with you was to slowly enable you to accept a lifestyle that is against God's Word."

But the man was not interested in denouncing his homosexuality, as Payton plead with him to do.

So when the man declined, Payton, evidently worried with accidentally "enabling" his homosexuality, decided in conjunction with pastoral leaders Jimmy Gretzinger, John Newman, Mark Harbison and Tom Blaylock that it was necessary to excommunicate the man.

As heroin addiction starts gaining a toe hold on the African continent, researchers are reporting a new — albeit rare — behavior. Drug users, sharing their needles, are actually injecting each others'  blood into themselves, reports the New York Times.

Researchers admit the activity, called Flashblood or flushblood, is not wide spread. Here's how the Times says this works. Intravenous drugs users usually draw a flash of blood into their syringe to make sure they have hit a vein. Once they have that, they then inject their drug of choice — generally heroin — then draw more blood into the syringe, and flush it out. This is repeated three or four times, to completely drain out the drug.

But what researchers say they are seeing with the new practice is one user injecting the drug into their system, drawing their blood into the syringe and passing it to the next person, who then injects it into themselves. Researchers say they are not sure the practice actually leads to a person getting high, or if it is entirely a placebo effect. They do note that because the syringe is not flushed several times, it is possible trace amounts of the drug remain.

When President Barack Obama's Office of National AIDS Policy released the first ever National HIV/AIDS Strategy this past week, it marked several new markers in the battle against HIV/AIDS.

First, Obama has fulfilled a campaign promise to re-create and re-imagine the way we fight HIV here in America. It is ironic, and a bit sad, that while President George W. Bush was doling out billions in aid to African nations, he was demanding they have national HIV strategies, but the U.S. had never — in the 29 years of the epidemic — bothered to do that for itself.

Second, the plan is ambitious. Obama calls for reducing the number of new infections by 25% by 2015, increasing the number of people getting tested for HIV and increasing the number of people gaining access to early treatment if they test positive. Incredibly thoughtful goals, until you consider this: there is no increase in domestic HIV/AIDS spending planned.

“There’s a political calculus here that they’re absolutely terrified to spend any money,” Ged Kenslea, spokesman for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation told Bloomberg Business Week. Kenslea says unless the Obama administration ponies up for the costs which are surely to come from such an ambitious plan, "there's not a lot to this plan."