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Gays and lesbians urged to kick the habit 

Smoking rates among the gay and lesbian community in the UK are significantly higher than the general population, and this No Smoking Day we are being urged to give up the fags for good.

Around 40% of gays and lesbians smoke, as opposed to 23% of men and 24% of women in general population. . . .

Dan Tickle, chief executive of the charity No Smoking Day said:

"No Smoking Day is the ideal opportunity to quit smoking and significantly improve the quality of your life.

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Ohio health department to study tobacco habits of gay teens 

Ohio health officials will use a federal grant aimed at preventing tobacco use among minorities to study why gay and lesbian teenagers smoke at a higher rate than their straight peers.

Health officials are allocating $60,000 to identify the smoking habits of those teens and develop a tobacco-prevention campaign for them.

Ohio Department of Health spokesman Kristopher Weiss says gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community has a smoking rate at about 40 to 60%.

As part of the Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Community Youth and Young Adults Anti-Tobacco Social Marketing Project, officials will form focus groups among youths ages 12 through 20

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Tavern Guild abstains from smoking fight 

Dallas Tavern Guild officials plan to stay out of the fray if the City Council pursues a proposal to extend the city's smoking ban to nightclubs, according to a group official.

"The Tavern Guild is not taking a stand as an organization," said Michael Doughman, executive director of the gay and lesbian bar association. "We decided that was not something the Tavern Guild could do as a blanket statement. We're leaving that to the individual bars as to how they stand." . . .

Some local bar owners report that many of their customers complain about being subjected to second-hand smoke by other customers They also acknowledge that if smoking was banned in nightclubs, the costs of air purification and cleaning would decrease.

The ruckus in 2003 led to the gay and lesbian bar association adopting a new policy when it comes to divisive issues like smoking, Doughman said.

"When we supported Mayor Miller originally and took that stand for her, some of our members were not happy," Doughman said. "They did not feel that they were fairly represented, so we just made a policy that on those kind of decisions it would be up to individual clubs how they feel about it."

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No-Smoking Ban Kicks In 

"When did smoking become a part of us?" This catch slogan is traveling cross-country alongside an image of a cigarette as a stripe on the rainbow flag.

On Jan. 1, when Illinois statewide no-smoking ban went into effect, was it a direct hit against the gay community or just against smokers? After all, numbers from the Women's Health Initiative show that gay females smoke at twice the rate of heterosexual female smokers.

Howard Brown Health Center reports that 17 percent of the overall male population smokes while 27 percent of gay men smoke do. The combined death toll of smokers and secondhand inhalers totals 438,000 annually.

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Illinois Smoking Ban Takes Effect on New Years Eve 

Some bar owners are concerned that since the ban is to be implemented from midnight on Monday, New Year revelers may not take the sudden change too kindly and implementing the ban may be practically impossible at that time.

Minibar * Winebar and Big Chicks are among several gay bars in Chicago that have offered a smoke-free environment for over a year.

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Quitter's tips to stop smoking 

Slide 1 of 9

Congratulations! Actually saying you want to quit is the first big step. The next big hurdle is figuring out how you're going to do it.

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Let Yourself Go at New Club in Shaw 

The scene: Town, a new nightspot in Shaw, is "what Washington needed," say owners Ed Bailey and John Guggenmos. And what, exactly, have we been lacking? A surprisingly cozy 20,000-square-foot club . . .

Town has a designated smoking area in the rear of the club, but waits can be really long. Bailey says the number of smoking customers is much higher than they anticipated. Don't try to go out front, either: To avoid disturbing the neighbors, anyone who walks out the front door has to wait in line and pay again to get back in.

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Officer faces charges after he allegedly beat lesbian 

San Antonio police have opened an internal affairs investigation into the behavior of a veteran officer accused of using a racial slur and beating a lesbian woman who asked him to put out his cigar at a community pool.

Tamara Vaughan, 18, said her jaw was pushed in and she still cannot open it far after an attack by Detective Keith Alfaro, 35, who was off-duty.

Vaughan was hospitalized. She has bruises on her arm that she says are from Alfaro and estimates he hit her 25 times, including putting his forearm on her throat and choking her.

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Island in the Storm  

Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking is a coming-out novel about a world we don't quite live in yet, a world in which the great dividing line between straight and gay looks as faint as that other once life-and-death demarcation between Protestant and Catholic.

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EDITORIAL: Surgeon General: Ax the nomination 

Tuesday's testimony of former U.S. surgeon generals has added a new dimension of understanding of the administration's concerted efforts to suppress, deny and pervert science to its own ends. President Bush's advisers are as eager to distort reality about human health as they are in other fields.

Dr. Richard Carmona said that as surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, he was censored . . .

We have seen the administration's arrogant disdain for independent science on environmental matters. But it is embarrassing to have a surgeon general so thoroughly squelched in a country where one of them, Luther Terry, had used the truth to help set billions of people worldwide free from tobacco addiction and another, C. Everett Koop, sounded the alarm about AIDS.

Bush has nominated as Carmona's permanent successor Dr. James Holsinger Jr., who wrote in 1991 that homosexual sex is unnatural and unhealthy. The choice is absurd. We'd be better off without a surgeon general than with one willing to rubber stamp ideology as science.

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Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals Smoke More than General Population in California 

New research suggests that smoking is more common in the gay community than in the general population, but scientists are calling for more research to document this difference.

Women and men in California’s general population were less likely to be smokers than a sample of Californians who identified themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB), according to a study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Researchers compared results from a 2003-2004 tobacco use survey of 1,950 self-identified gay, lesbian or bisexual residents with a general population survey from 2002.

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BREAKING: Anti-smoking ad won't appear on MTV 

An award-winning anti-smoking ad that parodied "Brokeback Mountain" to help students avoid cigarettes will not appear on MTV because the state withdrew its funding after deciding its message wasn't clear and its quality was not good enough.

Montgomery County College students who made their commercial "Smokeback," a satire on the Oscar Award-winning movie "Brokeback Mountain," won a smoking-prevention commercial contest sponsored by the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Montgomery County after it received the most online votes.

(See Video)

It was supposed to begin airing on MTV tomorrow as the winner of the college contest, but the state must first approve any anti-tobacco advertisement funded with tobacco settlement dollars. The grant to broadcast the commercial was supposed to be about $1,000.

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Filter Out 

The National LGBT Tobacco Control Network in conjunction with Howard Brown Health Center, is happy to debut a new book, How to Run a Culturally Competent LGBT Smoking Treatment Book. This 20-page book distills lessons learned from over 20 LGBT treatment groups run across the country as part of an American Legacy Foundation research project. Information is given on how to set up staffing, do outreach, tailor a curriculum and find other resources. The last chapter of the book adds a bonus, a low-effort recipe to evaluate any tobacco treatment group complete with model evaluation forms. According to Dr. Scout, "It was really frustrating to us as evaluators to realize there were no turnkey evaluations for treatment groups available. So we decided to create one we hope anyone can use because we all deserve to know when we're succeeding." If you would like to order a copy of the book for yourself or your organization, please follow the link above to fill out an order form. For a PDF version, please visit www.howardbrown.org

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Is smoking tobacco an independent risk factor for HIV infection and progression to AIDS? A systemic review  

Conclusions: Tobacco smoking may be an independent risk factor for HIV infection although residual confounding is another possible explanation. Smoking did not appear to be related to progression to AIDS although this finding may not be true in developing countries or with the longer life expectancies seen with highly active antiretroviral therapy.

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Gay community encouraged to give up the fags 

The 40% of gay and lesbian community who smoke are being encouraged to kick the habit on this year's No Smoking Day next Wednesday.

Two million smokers are expected to try to get off the cigarettes on March 14th.

With a ban on smoking in bars and other public places coming into force at the start of July, anti-smoking organisations are confident that record numbers will try to rid themselves of the habit in 2007.

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