Will gay men be there?

At this summer's annual conference of the National Lesbian and Gay Health Association, a group of gay men and lesbians gathered for a three-hour workshop on the role of gay men in the lesbian health movement. The result was "pretty intense" in the words of workshop organizer Marj Plumb.

"There was a heated exchange between some boys and some girls," says Plumb, director of public policy for the San Francisco-based Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. "From my perspective as, a woman, I wish we could hear criticism without personalizing it."

AIDS has the red ribbon. Breast cancer, a pink one. Seldom does one see both on the same lapel. As the fight against breast cancer gains momentum in the lesbian community, many women are asking why gay men are not more involved.

Those frustrations spilled over into the workshop, where some participants screamed at each other. Says GLMA executive director Benjamin Schatz: "The predominant tension was between women frustrated at gay men's lack of willingness to write checks versus gay men saying, `Tell me what to do and stop yelling at me.'"

But progress is being made. Lesbian health activists report that some gay men have been supportive of their efforts, raising money and volunteering in the fight against breast cancer. "We did a screening with the Metropolitan Community Church in Arlington," says Connie Winkle, director of women's health services at the Young Women's Christian Association of Dallas. "Some of the men came in drag to help serve cookies and refreshments."

Linda McGehee, a cofounder of the Atlanta Lesbian Cancer Initiative, notes that her organization was helped when Bob Putnam, the head of an Atlanta production company, produced a play about breast cancer and donated portions of the proceeds to her group.

Yet, many activists lament, such help is all too rare. "It would be great if we could get a little more participation from gay men," says Andrea Densham of the Lesbian Community Cancer Project in Chicago. Fueling the frustration is the fact that lesbians have already demonstrated their commitment to gay men's health causes by their work for AIDS causes.

Not everyone is convinced that the parallel is exact, however, noting that breast cancer is not concentrated among lesbians the way AIDS has been among gay men. "When the data came out [about breast cancer among lesbians], people said, `Here's our disease--it's payback time,'" says Susan Love, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We jumped on it--maybe inappropriately. That's not to say that breast cancer is not a serious disease that we need to be concerned about. But I also feel very strongly that we need to be truthful and honest, and pretending that things are more common than they are doesn't do us any good."

While opportunities for volunteering to provide help to lesbians with cancer certainly exist, they are more limited than those at AIDS service organizations were ten years ago. The Mautner Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that provides assistance to lesbians with breast cancer, has about a dozen people in support groups now and six families to whom it is providing practical support. Underlying the entire debate are historical problems in the relationship between gay men and lesbians.

Densham says trying to pit one disease against another will ultimately hurt the fight against both. What both gay men and lesbians need to do, she says, is see how they are in the same fight together: "The less we see these as dueling epidemics and the more we see them as health crises that affect all members of our community, the stronger the community will be and the more lives will be saved."

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