‘Damning’ Toronto BY VICTORIA GRAY • No one wants to tell Meghan Stoeckle how to have safe sex because she is a lesbian. At least that is the conclusion the 28-year-old reached after a week of seeking answers from the professionals. “It’s just a continuation of feeling like you’re on the outskirts,” she said. “Even gay men are more accepted than lesbians. They’re cute and everyone loves a gay guy, but everyone’s afraid of a butch dyke. So, it just kind of continued that thought – that we’re not included because people don’t understand us.” Stoekle had her first sexually transmitted infection (STI) test recently, despite being sexually active for the past 13 years. She came out as a lesbian 14 years ago and only uses protection when using shared sex toys.
When she asked a doctor at the Scarborough Health Centre how she could protect herself, she didn’t get the answer she was looking for. Instead, she was given phone numbers for other clinics and told to look elsewhere. Stoeckle called nine different clinics in the GTA and says she received inadequate information from all of them. “When it comes down to it, it’s really because nobody has any information about it,” she said. “They tell you, if you’ve been tested you’re OK. But nobody knows a damn thing because nobody looks into it. It’s not on the same concern level as, say, gay-male sexual health, or even heterosexual couples’ sexual health or anything like that. It isn’t given the same respect or regard.”
Photos by Victoria Gray, Sexposé
20 | Sexposé
Donna Turner, 40, communication coordinator at Rainbow Health Ontario, an organization dedicated to teaching health care professionals about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) sexual health, said the lack of knowledge is something they see all too often. “That’s what we find over and over: that health care professionals are either giving the wrong information or just don’t know,” she said. “We have a lot of problems with it. There are certain things that lesbians are at lower risk for...but there are sexually transmitted infections like herpes, HPV – they are transmitted quite easily during sex.” Rainbow Health Ontario is trying to change this lack of awareness. The organization is responsible for going into GTA classrooms and medical schools to educate young doctors and improve access for LGBT people. “Health-care professionals are not trained. There is no LGBT focus at all in most curriculums, in med schools and nursing schools,” Turner said. “It’s sort of a sad state that a lot of health-care professionals are giving that (inaccurate) information.” However, Rainbow Health Ontario doesn’t see patients and Stoeckle found that even clinics listed as queer-friendly weren’t able to tell her how to protect herself. Charm Porres, a counsellor at Toronto’s Hassle Free Clinic, said the clinic advocates for pleasurable sex that can minimize risk. “If you’re sexually active, you’re at risk for STIs,” she said. “It depends on your partners in terms of their own risks as well...in comparison to men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women only are probably a lower risk. To be honest, not a lot of people have protected oral sex. The first thing to do would be to have a conversation.” Jane Greer, a fellow counsellor at the Hassle Free for 20 years, said oral sex and ‘fingering’ are considered safe activities for lesbians. “Dental dams are unavailable, thick and hard to use,” Greer said. “So why would (lesbians) use them?” Greer and Porres agree lesbians are often left out of the safe-sex conversation. They said there should be reforms made to sexual health curriculum so people like Stoeckle can receive the help they want. Lyba Spring, 62, an instructor for the Sexual Health Promotion program at Toronto Public Health, believes lesbians are left out of that conversation due to lack of research. “Everyone admits that the amount of research done on women having sex with women and the risk for STIs is really limited,” she said. “Everybody is starting from the same point of ‘we don’t know a lot.’ It’s
unfortunate because it means that everyone is at a disadvantage: clients and health-care providers.” Stoeckle spoke to four different employees at the Sherbourne Medical Centre and was frustrated that she was sent to the intake mental health counsellor. She left a message, but didn’t expect much from him. “All the resources, I think, are good; they’re just hard to use,” Stoeckle said “They don’t
make it really accessible and the people there don’t really know what they are talking about when it comes to the questions I have about lesbian sexual health.” That Mental Health Counsellor Asish Purushan said that lesbians should be very careful about bacterial infections which can occur when vaginal fluid is swapped during mutual masturbation. He suggested using female condoms and dental dams to protect against herpes, but stressed it depended on the type of sexual activity. “If you have a lot of sexual fluid on your hand and then you touch your genitals’ a transmission can happen fairly quickly,” Purushan said. “So it’s strictly what kind of activity that person is involved in.” However, Turner, of Rainbow Health Ontario, said that kind of transmission is rare and that lesbians need to know their own risks. “If the health-care providers don’t know the right questions to ask and the right tests to do, then women who have sex with women are at much higher risk for things like cervical cancer,” she said. “If they’re not being tested, they’re not going to catch it early enough to be treated properly and it’s kind of a vicious circle.” Meanwhile, Stoeckle’s search for information left her frustrated and questioning Toronto’s inclusive mandate. “There are so many resources and not one of them can offer me what I need, whereas they all think they might be able to,” she said. “It was a whole other world that I came out into and it wasn’t nearly as nice and fluffy and accepting as today’s world is of gay people. And that’s leaps and bounds ahead, and it still blows.”
Sexposé | 21