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Then, after five years of living in the world of construction, which is either steak or ramen, I was like, there has got to be a different way of living.


N-L: How did you get involved with your field work with infectious diseases in Baltimore?

AG: It was a very accidental and unanticipated set of circumstances that brought me to that work. I was awarded a post-doc in the division of Infectious Disease at the Hopkins medical school. I was asked to take part in an ongoing study that was doing a large scale survey of the ecological risks that place adolescents at a heightened danger for sexually transmitted diseases, and I was teamed with a person who had never done any ethnographic field work. So I was there to assist, and I got hooked.


N-L: What hooked you?

AG: It was remarkable. What really hooked me was the stark contrast of moving from an institution like the Hopkins medical school or the Homewood Campus to different sites of healing and different sites of care that were literally in the shadows, one mile away at drug and alcohol treatment centers in west Baltimore, but appearing to be a completely different world.


N-L: Compared to the other places you've conducted your research, how have you found Baltimore to be different?

AG: I think what's different about Baltimore is the shift in atmosphere where you can literally go block to block and the social climate changes radically. There are a lot of other cities that have this quality, but there is something very striking about the way that you just walk three blocks in Baltimore and you walk through three completely different environments, three separate social worlds. And it's very easy to operate as though the worlds don't touch one another, but they absolutely do.


N-L: You're about to complete your dissertation on gay men and families. What was your research about?

AG: I was looking at the meaning of being a father and forming a family for same-sex couples and what is the desire to do so. We have such a strictly defined notion of the family as being a heterosexual institution.

Continued...

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