Kelowna's Dirty Secret

Part two of a special Castanet feature report – Kelowna's Dirty Secret. The article has been printed in its entirety. For those who have already read Part I, you can skip to the second half of the feature by scrolling below

Warning, the following article is not suitable for children and some adults may find the contents offensive.


Harry loves his wife, but something is lacking.

The passion in the bedroom began to fade years ago and now Harry is looking for something new. He wants sex. He wants it now and he doesn't want to pay for it. He also doesn't care who he has it with -- including other men.

Harry, a traveling salesman, begins surfing the Internet to help satisfy his sexual urges. He's looking for anonymous sex while he's out of town and finds a willing partner by "cruising" gay Internet sites. They arrange to meet in a public washroom and have unprotected sex. The two men barely say a word to each other and go their separate ways.

Harry returns home to his wife. She doesn't suspect a thing.

Harry might be fictitious, but his actions are very real and the consequences can be far reaching.

Harry is into what is known as MSM - men having sex with men. But Harry is not gay. There's no emotional attachment to his partners. In fact, to his friends and family, Harry is a normal guy, but he's living a double life and he's not alone.

The subject of MSM has been around for decades, if not centuries, and recently came to light in the Okanagan when a handful of men were arrested in Penticton after being caught having sex with each other in a park washroom. It's also happening here in Kelowna.

Castanet has obtained a list of public and private areas published on an MSM Internet site where men arrange to meet for anonymous sex. Those areas include a number of parks, gyms, and mall washrooms.

Kelowna RCMP recently became aware of the list, but say there's no reason for concern to the general public.

"Some of those locations do not surprise us, but some of them do," says Kelowna RCMP spokesperson Annie Linteau. She says, upon learning of the list, officers inspected some of the public washrooms and found nothing out of the ordinary.

Linteau adds that complaints about MSM are few and far between.

"There hasn't been an increase in lewd conduct in public places. I've been in Kelowna for nearly nine years and I've never witnessed that sort of activity."

But the gay community is well aware of the MSM activity in Kelowna and is quick to distinguish that there is a difference between homosexuals and MSM.

"There's a distinction in the Okanagan as to what gay men are doing versus what men having sex with men are doing." says Bill Litwin, Chair of the Okanagan Rainbow Coalition in Kelowna. "Gay men are about intimacy and relationships. MSM don't want to be intimate. They would rather not know the other man's name and certainly don't want to be acknowledged by that person outside of the 'park in the dark'."

Litwin says the biggest fear these men are having to deal with, is being discovered.

"What we know is that there's a percentage of the Okanagan population which is defined as MSM who do not identify themselves as being homosexual because of the fear of being 'outed'. There are many men in the Okanagan who are into having sex with other men who could be married with families, so-called respectable men in our community. They want to be pleased and their wives can't satisfy them, so who knows how to please a man, but another man."

Part II – The unknowing victims of MSM

Experts say the consequences of MSM, men having sex with men, can be devastating including the spread of disease such as AIDS.

Brian Mairs can be considered an expert on the subject.

He's the Program Coordinator at the Okanagan Aboriginal AIDS Society in Kelowna. Mairs conducted a study last year on MSM activity in rural areas including Kelowna.

"The husband tells the wife that he has to work overtime or there's an emergency at work and that he's going to be late. But what he's really doing, is going to a secret meeting place to have anonymous sex with another man and usually it happens without a condom. There are also men out there who get their thrill by being subservient to other men because that's where they get their sexual thrill from. They don't care who that other man is and they don't charge anything. They're just doing it for the thrill."

Mairs says about half of the respondents to his MSM survey indicated they don't use a condom. "That alone is reason enough to have some concerns about the transmission of HIV," he says.

Mairs says it's the unsuspecting wife or girlfriend who ends up being the innocent victim and he has statistics to back that up.

"There has been a huge increase over the past couple of years in the Okanagan of women who have contracted HIV from their husbands or spouses."

Mairs says a survey shows the proportion of heterosexual women in rural BC who contracted HIV increased from 46 per cent in 1999 to nearly 65 per cent in 2003.

He adds that there's also another silent innocent victim -- the unborn child.

"The main concern is that if a woman gets HIV, and she doesn't know it, will she pass it on to her child?"

Mairs says he doesn't want to press the panic button, but says the potential for the spread of disease to unsuspecting victims needs to be acknowledged in the community.

"I don't want to get women into a panic every time their husband goes out for a quart of milk, but this needs to be discussed."