The only place Ingrid Berkhout felt comfortable getting a cervical
exam in the mid-1990s was in a stranger’s South Seattle basement, where
she went for a mobile screening organized by the Lesbian Cancer Project. “I had questions I couldn’t
pose to a regular medical provider,” says Berkhout, who now heads the
breast and cervical health program for the local YWCA. “I wanted to
talk to someone who knows about being a lesbian,” she says.
Since the 1970s, a burgeoning women’s service and advocacy movement
had established a growing number of lesbian health organizations,
including the Lesbian Resource Center, Aradia Women’s Health Center,
and the Lesbian Cancer Project. That last organization went on to found
Verbena Health, a full-
service health-care provider and outreach
group on Capitol Hill for lesbians and transgender people. Verbena’s
free wellness center included a clinic, programs to help clients quit
smoking, cancer detection screenings, and support groups for cancer
patients and survivors.
In their collective zenith around 2003, all the organizations seemed
to thrive at once. But then, in a hairpin turn, the momentum
reversed.
“The Lesbian Resource Center is gone, Black Pride is gone, the LGBT
Center—where are they?” asks Berkhout in her slight Dutch accent.
“We don’t know. I [drove] by and they were gone, and I was like, what
the heck happened?” Indeed, just last month, Verbena Health announced
that its executive director, Michelle “Mo” Malkin, was resigning under
charges that she had embezzled from the organization’s coffers, and the
organization had ceased all services.
While Verbena’s demise was the direct result of the embezzlement
charges, other lesbian-focused groups cited a lack of funding for their
decline.
What’s revealing about the collapse of most of these organizations
is that it happened at the same time as a high-profile movement for
same-sex marriage was emerging across the country. As illustration,
marriage-driven Equal Rights Washington (ERW) started out as a one-desk
project in the LGBT Center in 2004. Last month, ERW had to move into a
downtown office large enough for its growing 14-member staff, where it
now provides a rent-free desk for the one remaining staff member of the
LGBT Center.
Seattle City Council member Sally Clark, who is gay, says Verbena’s
passing “definitely left a hole. The fact that their doors are closed
means there are people seeking services or delaying care for something
because they don’t know where to go next.”
Verbena’s board members are still reeling, trying to match clients
with services, such as cancer recovery groups and smoking recovery
meetings, at other organizations. But “that’s really just a stopgap,”
says board chair Christoph Hanssmann. “If the programs aren’t situated
together, it loses power.” In the meantime, Hanssmann hopes community
leaders will step in to help rebuild Verbena (or a similar
organization) to fill the void.
The need for culturally sensitive health care for the lesbian and
trans communities can be striking. “I hear astonishing stories all the
time,” says Leslie Calman, executive director of the Mautner Project, a
national lesbian health-care advocacy group. “Women who are lesbian or
bisexual are told [by doctors] that they don’t need internal exams
because there’s no penis involved.”
Fear of intolerant doctors keeps lesbians and transgender people
from getting regular check-ups, says Calman. Moreover,
butch-identifying lesbians are less likely to seek breast exams, and
lesbians tend to initiate health-care contact later than straight
women, who start seeing doctors in their teens and 20s, when they begin
taking birth control.
Fortunately, in Seattle, some mainstream health organizations are
stepping in to fill that void.
Berkhout, of the YWCA, is about to hire an outreach worker dedicated
to the LBT population, in part to fill the need left by
Verbena.
And as this article was being written, she called to announce a new
website (LesBe
Healthy.org) to
help link up clients with
existing services until Verbena, or
something like it, can return. But, she says, “You can’t put it all in
virtual space. We all need to work
together, maybe all in one
organization.” 