Healthy Altitude: Valuing Health at the Summit

Abstract

My partner of 20 years and I had been looking forward to the National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) Health Summit 2002. Good news about the past Boulder (Gay Men’s) Summits presented a good recommendation, and I especially appreciated the opening of the 2002 program to leadership and participation of other communities (LBTI). I registered early, and sent out word to friends and colleagues (hoping to boost participation, since the South, and particularly the rural South, is not usually well represented in such meetings, though we represent, and understand, the region that has elected the last several presidents). I was coming to the Summit to explore what this unique gathering of sexual minority communities and individuals would share about themselves and their health values. I was bringing a workshop to learn more explicitly about our diverse values for happiness and health, well-being and wholeness. I am keen on knowing my own and others’ values. Trained in the disciplines of philosophy and ethics, I have a habit, and desire, for exploring meaning and values in human affairs; working with physicians and attorneys, I am practiced in listening for standards and principles that express diverse professional values; and as a child from the South, I have, I imagine, some ‘gene’ for paying attention to stories—individual and mythic—that surround events and suggest their meaning, to ourselves and others. So, this is a brief story of the Summit from one point of view. This story is about coming to the Summit to see what values it would gather together, by gathering into one place the diversity of LGBTI and