Crack Cocaine Injection Practices and HIV Risk: Findings From New York and Bridgeport.

This article examines the behavioral practices and health risks associated with preparing crack cocaine for injection. Using an ethno-epidemiological approach, injection drug users (n=38) were recruited between 1999 and 2000 from public settings in New York City and Bridgeport, Connecticut and responded to a semistructured interview focusing on crack injection initiation and their most recent crack injection. Study findings indicate that methods of preparing crack for injection were impacted by a transforming agent, heat applied to the "cooker," heroin use, age of the injector, and geographic location of the injector.

Scaffolded interviewing with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth: a developmental approach to HIV education and prevention.

The field of education has long recognized that adolescent development and learning are made possible by the structural supports or "scaffolds" that adults create with young people. Although the work of Lev Vygotsky (1978, 1987) has inspired developmentally-supportive approaches to education in the United States and internationally, his work has been largely overlooked in the field of HIV education and prevention. This article introduces an approach to scaffolded interviewing that builds narrative and relational "platforms" for young people's self-development and facilitates health communication, trust and rapport, and HIV awareness.

The invisible body of queer youth: identity and health in the margins of lesbian and trans communities.

How does complexity in gender and sexual identity construction and partnering practices generate unique vulnerabilities for queer-identified youth? We present two case studies from an ongoing ethnographic study of LGBTQ youth development: "Samantha," a queer-identified woman partnered with a transgender man, and "Reid," a queer-identified transgender man who has declined medical gender transitioning and who partners with lesbians and gay men. We consider the implications of these youths' locations on the margins of both lesbian and transgender communities and the challenges in providing health care and support services for queer-identified youth.

The social course of drug injection and sexual activity among YMSM and other high-risk youth: an agenda for future research.

The cumulative epidemiologic literature indicates that many injecting drug users (IDUs) initiate injection as a mode of drug administration during late adolescence or early adulthood. Recent studies have shown that IDUs are often exposed to viral infections relatively early in the course of injection, highlighting the importance of understanding this initiation process for both epidemiology and prevention. Epidemiologic evidence similarly suggests that at least some youth populations, most notably young men who have sex with men (YMSM), are at substantial risk for exposure to HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) from early sexual activity.