The Cranky Queer Guide to Chronic Illness
stories and strategies for health and wellness in sick times
To live their best lives, people facing chronic diseases need clear information and compassionate connection. But essential, honest and practical advice and support can be hard to find, despite a deluge of condition-specific and medical websites, direct-to-patient pharmaceutical advertising, diagnosis-based support groups, and social media chatter. The confluence of narrowly-defined medical specialties; the market interests of drug companies, medical insurance and health care providers; and economic and social divisions and inequities ensures that many of us remain isolated and ill-informed — and just plain ill.
Through memoir and personal stories (both those of the author and a range of noted LGBTQ cultural and political leaders), worksheets, practical tips, creative approaches to self-knowledge and spirituality, and a look inside the profit-driven systems of digital health media and health care delivery, the Guide gives a unique, personalizable roadmap for living well.
Each section includes engaging, relatable and deeply honest tales of dealing with common challenges, along with practical tips and a worksheet or key questions to consider. But unlike most books on managing conditions, the Guide also turns daily actions of care and relating to others into rituals of curiosity, deep self-acceptance, and healing. In addition, my experience as an organizer, advocate, journalist and digital editor anchors the advice in often previously untold moments in pivotal HIV, LGBTQ and left activist history, while animating deep dives into the real reasons that health care systems and online resources consistently fail to meet the needs of people with chronic illnesses -- and what we need to do to change these problems.
The Guide has three primary sections:
1.
Queering Chronic Illness provides a foundation on the structures and systems affecting the lives of people with chronic illnesses. I show that the most common factors that affect the lives of people with chronic conditions cut across diagnoses or medical specialties, explore specific facets of queer and trans health, and issue a call to action for those facing different illnesses to come together to share information and strategies.
2.
In Living the Illder Life, I unfurl strategies learned from decades as an HIV activist, in which I start to fill the many gaps of health and wellness information by providing real-world (and at times blunt and explicit) guidance on living well with chronic illnesses.
3.
Knowing Yourself is a substantive section that sets The Guide apart from most consumer health content, walking readers through a process of discerning and personalizing a mind-body-spirit connection that can ease suffering, promote healing, and bring more meaningful awareness in our lives.