Published in the Bay Area Reporter on August 23, 2024.

By Joseph A. Hayden, J.D.

I am a (gay) father. My daughter never had the chance to meet her grandfather who died two years before she was born. I barely got to meet my grandmother once, it appears, judging from a single photo of us together that I only found in recent years. Of course, I never got to know her, because she died at the same age that my father died — FIFTY!

The median age for those who start smoking or vaping is 13. That’s how old my father was when he was handed loose cigarettes on the beaches of Waikiki where he grew up. He suffered a quintuple bypass after years of heart attacks by the time he was 48 and by 50 he died of a hemorrhage from an aortic aneurysm in a very painful death after sitting in traffic on the San Mateo Bridge trying to get to the hospital while his body was bleeding uncontrollably from the same blood vessels that had been made brittle and broken in his body, choking him alive. This is only one of many ways that tobacco can kill, and it’s not pretty. I was warned not to even look at his body after he died because of the damage it had been put through.

Do I sound pissed?

Damn right I am! I’m far from the only one who has lost loved ones to nicotine addiction. It is an invisible epidemic that kills 8 million people worldwide, including 480,000 in the U.S. and 40,000 in California every year, and we just accept it as normal because it has gone on for so long. We need to stop accepting it and start doing more to fight back against the tobacco/vape industry that is responsible, not just for our families, but for the LGBTQ+ community. We smoke and vape a lot more than straight folks, largely because of the stress caused by the discrimination we face.

I’m pissed about that discrimination just as we all are, but I’m also pissed at the tobacco/vape industry that takes advantage of it to get us to smoke more. They’ve been advertising cigarettes, and now so-called vapes (that are technically known as Electronic Smoking Devices, but I’ll call them what everyone else does for clarity) as fun, cool, and even healthy for over 100 years. These ads have even appeared in the queer press saying things like “Take Pride in Your Flavor.” One ad that appeared in the queer press during Pride month in 2005 listed a bunch of “freedoms” including the freedom to marry and the freedom to “inhale.” The tag line read, “It’s all good.”

This is what we’re up against, an industry that claims to be on our side, despite being one of the top corporate donors to the Republican Party for decades. Sure, they gave some money to AIDS groups during the darkest time of that epidemic, but they gave tons more to our enemies at the time, like Jesse Helms, and spent way more on advertising congratulating themselves on the crumbs they tossed our way and other ads promoting their deadly product.

Vaping is smoking!

Vaping is a delivery system that is not benign. One vape device can have the nicotine equivalent of FOUR HUNDRED cigarettes. It only takes one long drag, especially from a youth who has never experienced the masked flavor-laden versions of tobacco, which by itself, tastes repugnant, to get the sensation that one’s capillaries are expanding. Later, when that nicotine has dissipated, guess what? They constrict! This is how the very heavy-handed addiction of tobacco works on bodies and makes them (shortened) lifelong smokers, just as the tobacco industry has planned. Vaping is NOT A CESSATION TOOL. It is a way to make one more addicted to nicotine and mask the true ugliness of the poison and its intended ravaging of one’s body.

So, what can we do?

We can get involved with groups like the one I volunteer for, LGBTQ Minus Tobacco. They’re working in my city, Vallejo, on, among other things, stopping the sale of all vape products and reducing illegal tobacco sales to youth. They’re also working in San Francisco and Oakland on smoke-free bar patios to protect workers and patrons in our community spaces from secondhand smoke.

Also, the queer press could stop taking advertisements from the tobacco/vape industry. I know this is a hard thing to do when media companies are struggling to survive in the digital age of news, but I ask them to think about all the people in this world who are struggling to survive right now, some taking their last breaths far too soon partly due to tobacco advertising.

As I write this, I am 56 with my daughter fully grown. I await a grandchild of my own hopefully in the next few years, and I expect to live long enough to watch any future grandchild of mine prosper and learn who I am, despite the family “tradition.” How I wish that this child will be born into a world where he or she is not targeted for yet a new generation of smokers as I was and as my daughter was, particularly as the gay man that I am and the woman of color she is.

The job of our governments, including our local governments, is to protect citizens. The slave trade that will forever mark the origin story of the USA is bad enough, but our country continues to allow those who profit from the commercial European-style tobacco products — that were created by those who kidnapped Africans and brought them here to HARVEST this poison — to target the descendants of that very same population with specificity to consume those products. Where is the outrage!?