Why one doctor left a career in cardiac surgery in order to concentrate on the needs of his LGBTQ clientele, and the new way he’s getting his message across.
Dr. Evan Goldstein was trained as a cardiac surgeon, but about a decade ago, he came to accept that his practice wasn’t providing the long-term career fulfillment he’d hoped for. “I really started to hate the field,” he conceded. After some soul-searching, Goldstein decided to reconsider his options entirely.
“I started to think about where I wanted go and realized that there was a huge need in the gay community for non-judgmental, non-biased care,” Goldstein says, “specifically for the gay male, but also for the bottoming male.”
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That’s when Goldstein launched BeSpoke Surgical, a Beverly Hills and New York City-based medical and surgical concierge practice for the gay community, with a focus on men’s sexual health and wellness. But even though the practice flourished — it now treats some 70 patients a week — Goldstein sought a way to reach more men to embrace healthy lifestyles.
So he recently launched the first episode of Tail Talks, a quarterly video series assembling roundtables of experts, medical professionals and influencers to talk about touchy topics such as sexual positions, HIV and AIDS. In its pilot episode, Tail Talks focused on PrEP, the one-a-day pill which can prevent users from contracting HIV, in an informal and lively conversation with writer Brian Moylan and writer-director Kit Williamson inside Alan Cumming’s nightclub, Club Cumming.
“There are many issues surrounding gay culture that should be talked about,” Goldstein attests. “There should be an educational component to everything that everybody is doing to make sure they are engaging the right way. So we are aiming to educate while doing it in a fun, cool format.”
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Of particular concern, he says, is closing chasms between generations by educating younger gay males. Video provides an accessible, consumable platform to spread info that medical professionals might not always provide or even be informed about. “You use everything you can socially to go direct to consumers, specifically about taboo subjects,” he says, “so people can really do an appropriate investigation and figure out where they really are.”
Future episodes of Tail Talks — the name was coined as a tongue-in-cheek salute to bottoming — will explore sexual issues among a younger generation. “I am trying to hold educators and medical professionals accountable,” says Goldstein, “and make sure that many generations have resources available to them in a succinct, cool, appropriate way, so that people can get answers.”
“That’s the point of Tail Talks,” the physician concludes, “to make sure people have safe spaces and don’t feel they will be judged or biased or are dirty in any way. We really should create positivity in everything we are doing.
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Last modified: August 12, 2019
