2006. Twenty-five years of AIDS.
It is tempting to forget the morning rituals, when you inspected your body for lesions that might have appeared during the night and signal that it had started.
It is tempting to forget that when you asked, “Does this spot look purple to you?” you didn’t need to say anything else for everyone around you to know just what was on your mind, if not on your skin, and how fast your heart was racing as you uttered the words as casually as you could because sounding casual seemed to increase the chances of a reassuring response.
It is tempting to forget that there was a time when gay men were hoping not to lose weight, that plump meant healthy and healthy reassuring. And reassuring, in a turnabout so shocking for us then, meant sexy.
It is tempting to forget that people were dropping like flies, that many gay men in cities like New York or San Francisco were crossing out name after name from their address books, and it is tempting to forget that many gay men who had long left their families behind in favor of friendships were now left only with mere acquaintances, no one close still living.
It is tempting to forget how parents who had once expelled their faggot son now rushed to his bedside to keep te lovers and friends away, to contest the will, and to snatch the spoils of a life lived far from the tender bosom of the family.
It is tempting to forget that women never “got” AIDS but somehow died of it by the thousands.
It is tempting to forget that the truth could only be whispered or screamed but seldom simply told.
It is tempting to forget that kids were chased out of schools by their friends’ parents and by their friends and that their houses were burned to the ground.
It is tempting to forget that Ryan White was once described as a “homophiliac” in a newspaper.
It is tempting to forget the frightened medics and undertakers and the cop’s face masks and latex gloves, as they arrested dying young men and women fighting for their lives.
It is tempting to forget ACT UP’s unforgettable chant, “They’ll see you on the news; your gloves don’t match your shoes!”
It is tempting to forget angry queers screaming bloody murder and spitting out hosts in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
It is tempting to forget the pictures of Dorian Gray on TV and on the pages of magazines, the emaciated faces covered with lesions, the hollow stares, and the feeling that one might as well have been looking at a charred and contorted body hanging from a tree, like Billie Holiday’s strange fruit, as the crowd cheered.
It is tempting to forget gay-related immune deficiency and the gay cancer and the 4-H club — homosexual, heroin addict, hemophiliac, Haitian — and all the conspiracy theories and miracle cures that we knew were bullshit yet couldn’t help but consider just in case, because madness could make sense.
It is tempting to forget the promise of a vaccine in about five years and that it felt like such an eternity that researchers sounded almost apologetic when explaining that retroviruses are particularly treacherous foes.
It is tempting to forget the calls for quarantine camps and tattoos and mass expulsions, “solutions” whose pros and cons were discussed with the sort of equanimity now applied to the debate on torture.
It is tempting to forget that nobody gave a shit.
It is tempting to forget that all this is still happening far, far away from here.
It is tempting to forget and it is easy.
pp. 9-10, The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV, David Caron.
Tag: AIDS
Jesus.
Look at this, and remember it next time someone says that the gay community survived the AIDS epidemic.
We didn’t survive, we started over. We lost all but an entire generation.
This is what “we survived Reagan, you’ll survive Trump” looks like. No, we didn’t.
This is what “we survived Reagan, you’ll survive Trump” looks like. No, we didn’t.
Drug-resistant HIV strain discovered in Philippines could trigger new epidemic, scientists warn
A drug-resistant strain of the HIV virus discovered in the Philippines has the potential to spark a new epidemic, scientists have warned.
HIV prevalence among Filipinos has risen sharply in the past decade, at a time when infection rates across the world are beginning to decline.
The United Nations estimates the number of new cases identified in the Philippines each year has risen by 140 per cent since 2010.
Researchers are concerned a new drug-resistant version of the virus, HIV subtype AE, could be fuelling the epidemic.
The strain is more aggressive, more resistant to antiretroviral drugs and progresses to Aids faster than the HIV subtype B generally found in western countries.
“The HIV virus has the potential to transform itself into a new and different virus each time it affects a cell,” Dr Edsel Salvana, director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of the Philippines told DW.
“There are nearly 100 different subtypes of HIV, with new subtypes being discovered every day.
“Most HIV infections in the Western world are of subtype B. Most of the research that we have on HIV is also on subtype B, though it accounts for only about 12 per cent of all global HIV infections.
“We have discovered that the explosion of HIV in the Philippines is due to a shift from the Western subtype B to a more aggressive HIV subtype AE.”
Dr Salvana added: “Those infected by the HIV subtype AE are younger, sicker patients who are more resistant to antiretroviral drugs. We are also seeing a faster progression to Aids under subtype AE.”
Around 5,000 people in the Philippines were living with HIV in 2006, compared to around 56,000 in 2016, according to UNfigures.
The number of new cases being diagnosed has also spiked in recent years, with some 10,000 new cases identified in 2016 alone, giving the country the fastest-growing HIV rate in the Asia-Pacific region.
Dr Salvana warned work done in recent decades to combat the HIV virus risked being undone if research was not conducted into the new strain.
“HIV is not done yet. We cannot think of HIV as a single virus but as a collection of viruses that are evolving, with a new mutation that can possibly set off a new epidemic.
“The gains that we have made in decreasing HIV infection rates will be short-lived without research and treatment for HIV subtype AE,” he added.
“This is urgently needed. Specifically for the Philippines, we need more scientists willing to do research work on HIV.”
Drug-resistant HIV strain discovered in Philippines could trigger new epidemic, scientists warn
He Took a Drug to Prevent AIDS. Then He Couldn’t Get Disability Insurance.
Three years ago, Dr. Philip J. Cheng, a urology resident at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, nicked himself while preparing an H.I.V.-positive patient for surgery.
Following hospital protocol, he took a one-month course of Truvada, a cocktail of two anti-H.I.V. drugs, to prevent infection. Later, because he was an unattached gay man, he decided to keep taking Truvada to protect himself from getting H.I.V. through sex.
The practice — called PrEP, short for pre-exposure prophylaxis — is safe and highly effective. Several studies have shown that users who take the drug daily are at nearly zero risk of H.I.V. infection.
But when Dr. Cheng applied for disability insurance — which many young doctors do to protect a lifetime’s worth of income should they be hurt — he was told that, because he was taking Truvada, he could have only a five-year policy.
[…]
There are nearly 800 life insurers in this country, according to the American Council of Life Insurers. There are no national figures on how many of them have denied coverage to men because they take PrEP.
But insurance brokers, gay-rights advocates and staff at medical clinics said in interviews they had heard of numerous such cases. H.I.V. specialists say the denials endanger men’s lives by encouraging them to drop PrEP if they need life, disability or long-term-care insurance.
HIV stigma is based on bigotry and fear, not facts.
He Took a Drug to Prevent AIDS. Then He Couldn’t Get Disability Insurance.
On World AIDS Day, I want to remember those not on the quilt, those forgotten.
I remember the street kids who purposely overdosed instead dying of AIDS. I remember the sex workers living and dying in dignity. I remember the homeless people who died unnoticed and untreated. I remember those who died deep in addiction.
I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. You mattered. You still matter. I love you.
its a national holiday
Celebrating someone’s death seems like a really macabre thing to do. Like I get that people don’t like him because of how his administration dealt with the AIDS epidemic, but promoting someone’s death as a good thing doesn’t sit well with me.
during his administration, we had a problem with abuse of patients in mental healthcare facilities (asylums, but don’t call them that), and his response to it was just to shut down the entire system. he closed all public mental healthcare facilities because a few of them were mistreating patients, and all those mentally ill people suddenly found themselves homeless without the skills necessary to survive in the general populous. he’s the reason why our healthcare system is so terrible, and he’s to blame for the homelessness epidemic (i’ll get into the next reason why he’s responsible for our high homeless population in a sec). millions of people lost everything because of reagan. thousands died.
he also completely restructured our economy. from 1776 until he became president, we had an economic system like no other (look up the American School), but he removed most of the rules and regulations we had to keep the system in place because our system at the time limited accumulation of wealth. we had a built-in buffer that kept most people middle class. when he restructured our economy so he and his friends could get richer, reagan removed the safeguards that kept us out of poverty (most of the time), so now the lower echelons of society were in freefall towards homelessness. people lost their homes and businesses because the rich could do basically whatever they wanted now. superstores like wal-mart rose to prominence and pushed out small businesses because of this. our government also greatly reduced its expenditure on infrastructure. ronald reagan’s greed is why we don’t have enough trains and all our roads are falling apart.
he also expanded our already bloated military while in power. one of his slogans was “peace in strength.” his goal for our country was to get an iron grip around the rest of the world and impose our own agendas on other countries at gunpoint.
One of the first things reagan did when he came to power was to ignore the supreme court’s earlier ruling, ignore the constitution, and try to enforce a mandatory daily christian prayer time in all schools. when government workers went on strike against him and his policies, he fired 11,345 people. he put 11,345 people out of a job because they didn’t like him.
he lowered taxes for the rich, but increased taxes on the poor, contributing to the aforementioned lack of infrastructure and homelessness crisis. he also began privatising the government, which put thousands of jobs at risk and made wealthy capitalists the men who run our country. reagan is responsible for trickle down economics.
after the great depression, our government put in social programs to help people stay afloat, like universal healthcare for the elderly and disabled, basic income (the government paid people to dig ditches if they couldn’t find any other jobs. the ditches didn’t serve any purpose, but those people needed money and the government was willing to give money to anyone who worked), and food stamps. ronald reagan slashed all these programs and more, like the EPA, which made sure we were a “green” country.
as a result of these slashes, people who had been secure on government assistance programs were now having to take out loans and get into debt, which jeopardised our economy. we had a stock market crash because people were becoming too poor to buy stocks, and our national debt increased by 3 times. we went from $997 billion in debt to $2.85 trillion in 1987.
he also pushed us further into the cold war. previously, our relations with russia were cooling down a bit, but during reagan’s second term, he began actively threatening russia again. ronald reagan brought us to the brink of a nuclear war that would have killed all humans on earth.
Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, the most hated prime minister in UK history, were close friends. he was also personal friends with Donald Trump.
Under reagan, we resumed a history of violent military imperialism in foreign countries, most notably lebanon, afghanistan, and pakistan. In lebanon, we tried to stop a revolution against an oppressive regime, and in afghanistan and pakistan, reagan ordered the CIA to train civilians and create a military force to fight russia for us. Reagan created the taliban, a militant group that even today publicly dismembers people for playing games in public. they cut off children’s hands. He also began dealing weapons with China, betraying our longstanding ally, Taiwan, destabilising politics in the pacific. Under his orders, we secretly aided african and south american military dictatorships in crushing their opposition. He assisted Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran who started the 1979 revolution, in purging political opposition from the government. in 1988 our military shot down an iranian commercial flight, killing 290 civilians.
Reagan was a Nazi sympathiser and referred to slain SS officers as “victims” of the war. just to make sure you read that right: Ronald Reagan supported the Nazis.
He declared the war on drugs, a movement that has greatly increased the disproportionate incarceration rates of african american and latino men in this country.
During Reagan’s second term, 115,000 people were diagnosed with AIDS and 70,000 died of it. Reagan did nothing to curb the spread, despite knowing that the AIDS epidemic almost exclusively affected black people and the LGBT community. when he learned how many people were dying and who they were, he laughed. he laughed at our suffering while we were dropping dead.
In short, Ronald Reagan was a wealthy, selfish, greedy, capitalistic, imperialist, racist, ableist, homophobic, genocidal, antisemitic, warmongering, backstabbing murderer. Ronald Reagan was a monster.
Different person, but, I’ve seen some people who are older in the community claiming that kink and polyamory have historically been considered part of the community. I don’t know enough about the history there, do you know anything on that? I’ve been on the “no” side with those two, but I mean, I don’t really know anything that would go against those historical claims, so do you know if are they true?
iwantthatbelstaffanditsoccupant:
butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:
I don’t know any history surrounding that but kinks and poly are not LGBT+. They deviate from social norms, certainly, but they’re adjectives, not subjects.
okay idk if that made sense im not an english major guys
Okay so I’ve made about a dozen of these posts in the last month or two, so I’m not going to get as exhaustive as I sometimes do, but here’s the history that my mother and aunties taught me about kink and polyamory as queer.
When I was growing up, I was told that the kink community was the physical space in which the queer community existed and that non-monogamy/polyamory as the concepts that exist today were born directly out of queer culture and the environments that shaped it.
Basically, back in the early years when most of queer culture was an arrestable offense and people mostly only got to meet their partners in the backrooms of old speakeasies and nightclubs, kink spaces were doing the same thing and were one of the only non-mob owned options for gatherings. Kink communities themselves were almost entirely made up of queer folks already anyways because surprise surprise a community made mostly of abuse survivors is gonna have pretty high rates of queer folks in it. And because of the semi-public nature of the spaces and the limited safe dating options polyamory and related non-monogamous practices became common place.
They became so common place in fact that queerness and queer culture completely and foundationally shaped the discussions around consent, relationship needs, emotional connections, and ethical behavior that became central to kink and polyamory as practices. They became so common place in part because it made sense, in part because the cultures all needed each other, and in part because, as my mother always said, “if society had already damned you just for being queer, what did you have to lose by trying all the other things society was going to damn you for as well?” This, incidentally, is also why there have historically been such high numbers of queer folk in illegal occupations like sex work and why my mom and aunties also used to consider sex work as a culture pretty fucking queer too.
But the years went by and your average, “respectable” white gay and lesbian folks with their picket fence day dreams started making progress. They started kicking people to the curb in an effort to make queerness look less “challenging” and different. Bye bye, bisexuals, bye bye drag and trans culture, bye bye non-monogamy what do you mean you actually think the “slippery slope” to gay marriage also leading to polygamy might be a good thing? Bye bye all you sex freaks, sexuality is something your born with and you can’t help who you love, it’s not like all that disgusting talking-about-sex-and-building-the-entire-network-of-sex-ed-information-we-used-to-desperately-try-and-survive-the-AIDS-crisis-ew-you-perverts-our-sex-is-beautiful-and-pure-like-marriage! And so on and so forth.
See, when it was all about survival, the distinction that Straight people drew between gay, kinky, polyamorous, trans, ace, etc was irrelevant. They’d kill us all the same so we might as well band together and make a world in which the next generation might not just live but thrive. But once it became about gaining access to state acceptance and making room within the legal framework that already existed, those of us who were too scary to Straight society, who still needed the hierarchy destroyed, not just expanded, became dead weight. Our labor, our physical space, our intellectual efforts all became irrelevant and all that mattered was when the Straights looked at White Cis Gays they saw Us instead. So the White Cis Gays fixed that by making it clear they thought we were just as disgusting as the Straights thought we were. They abandoned us and took our history and our language and our fucking lives with them and said we weren’t ~allowed~ to have it. And because those of us who were marginalized in many ways or who were doubly or triply damned were more likely to have suffered massive losses during the AIDS crisis and to still be living in poverty, in crime, and in general destitution of social capital, we’ve been fighting an uphill battle not to be erased ever since.
So now you have a whole generation or two or three who grew up being told a sanitized history where a “drag queen” threw the first brick at Stonewall, Pride wasn’t started by one of the bisexual Queens of Kink, and non-monogamy hasn’t been the natural progression of so many of our communities for generations. And they tell us we never existed, we’re just secret straighties thinking our gross sex lives make us queer, we could just choose to be respectable and “normal” like everyone else and then we wouldn’t be “bullied” (because god forbid our actual oppression be recognized) and they completely miss the irony.
And as much as I hate that I have to list my credentials in order for there to be a chance in burning hell for this response to be considered legitimate, I am the nonbinary, bisexual, polyamorous, kinky, intersex child of a bisexual, kinky, polyamorous woman who spent all of my life and most of hers in the heart of Queer culture and politics to the point that she put me on the stand in front of the entire school board and a third of the state at age 10 to fight for our right to participate in the Day of Silence without fear of suspension, expulsion, abuse, or injury/death. I was on my mother’s hip at the state capitol protests with police in riot gear ready to do whatever it took to prevent us from entering the building. I am Queer in so many ways, including ones no one can dare fucking argue and so was my mother before me and my aunties before her, and this is THEIR history I am telling and will keep telling until I’m dead because I will rot before I let people erase their memories, blood, and joy from our history by claiming that kink and polyamory don’t belong.
I apologize for that all sounding angry and upset. It is not aimed at anyone in particular. I am just very very tired and it’s almost Passover which means that my auntie’s are a lot more on my brain than usual and I am just so exhausted by the way I have been mocked and belittled for months now over things that were simply Truth when I was growing up. Please understand how much history is denied and how many ancestors are dishonored by this rhetoric of “who REALLY belongs in the community?”
We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.
We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate.
We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better
itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of
seeing people pretend otherwise.When I met my “First queer person ™” back in 1990, one of the things she said to me that I spent about 27 years unpacking was this:
“monogamous heterosexual relationships are patriarchal bullshit.”
I took offense at the time. But when you don’t let people use words like “queer” to describe “everyone who isn’t in this Normative Bubble of heterosexual serial monogamy”, you have to get pretty specific about the fact that STRAIGHT refers to this concept of being “normal” which in this culture has meant for many years “Straight, cis, monogamous (or doing your best to fake all of the above)”
Quit fucking gatekeeping.
The people who hate us hate all of us. Joining them in their hatred doesn’t solve the problem.
The way they win is if they get us to fight each other.
I don’t reblog sensitive topics on this blog, but this is exactly what I had a long conversation about recently. I’m not young, and I remember shit like this as it was happening. polyamory is queer as fuck and learn to respect that
Ok none of this is pleasant conversation…but they weren’t pleasant times, nor enlightened POV: ( I was in high school and college during the AIDS crisis, and lived in sheltered surburbia, hours away from the Big Bad City, and then in a college town that was still very conservative. Both were in the US)
From my experience, this community patchwork of queer/gay/kinky/poly was a popular view in the 70s and very early 80s, and was a city phenomenon. After the AIDS crisis expanded, there was a sense that the disease was caused by a lack of “virtuous” behavior (not just spread that way..but actually caused by it), and morality would save us (George Michael videos promoting *monogamy*, for instance). I remember feeling safe because I was monogamous at that time. Doing what was “right” kept me safe.
And the shift went kind of like this: Accept gay people because they can be “sexually responsible” (read that as monogamous– because that was the “better” solution, as opposed to multiple partners. Remember, we didn’t know how safe you had to be for safe sex yet. We still thought toilet seats and sneezing were dangerous.) And bisexuals were seen as “contaminating” the straight community by serving as a connection with the gay community– the straight viewpoint was only gay people carried the disease.
Drug users were added later, though they were seen as decadent city-dwellers who were hanging with other “immorals”. (No one in suburbia thought they were in close contact with any IV drug users). Gay people were seen also as city partiers who had multiple partners and did drugs and everything else that came with being outside the boundaries of conventional society…and to an extent that may have been true, as @butts-bouncing-on-the -beltway describes. There is often a bond amongst the excluded. On Long Island we saw NYC as the Land of Decadence. And parts of it as actual Hell ( and my god some of it was so dilapidated, unlike today, that that image made a certain amount of sense)
And monogamous bisexuals simply didn’t exist. They were all liars out to ruin the safety and health of the straight community. So it really was a moral framework we were trying to fight our way into and people were trying to gain equality by being more like straight people.
The early marriage rights movement with Andrew Sullivan capitalised on acceptance by being just like straight people…so there was distance between marginalised groups now, depending on how *relatable* they could become. Lesbians were seen as the easiest to tolerate, because they weren’t child molesters. ( I know, I know.) This is why many who grew up during this time have issues with accepting some of the kinkier aspects of their sexuality. It isnt just being “born with switched wires that reverse attraction, poor you”. There is a point where deliberate choice for behavior is involved. And that is where the disconnect often is. When we bring in actions and choice.
That disconnect is what allowed me to take an oath to become a teacher( back in 1989) because I had to swear to exhibit outstanding, morally upright conduct, even when I knew it really meant “don’t be queer” because I hadn’t done any of those “questionable” actions yet. I chose not to. That made me moral. I could separate myself from “them”. I thought about this, at 17. Whether I was breaking a vow. It mentioned sexuality, but the oath never did specify exactly how I was being moral or immoral.
I try not to look upon those people, that whole generation, actually, which absolutely included myself, too harshly. In a historical context, we have always allowed for assimilation of any minority group ( religious, racial, ethnic..etc) based on the theory that the dominant group will see they are “just like us” (us being, in the USA, anyway,…straight, white , Christian males) underneath the surface. Then once that is established, we can began to see differences again and allow for them. No. We are not all the same and we do not all value the same things. We have our cultural differences. And we can still maintain our rights.
What is interesting now is there are new shifts where many, many Millenials do not consider themselves straight. The idea of “normal” behavior is dissolving.
One brief addition to this incredibly important conversation: the leather pride flag was designed by a gay man in 1989, as a symbol of pride and defiance at the height of the AIDS crisis, and debuted at that year’s International Mr Leather, which is a very very gay event although kinky people of all orientations attend it. It’s the second-oldest of all the pride flags; only the original rainbow one predates it (1978). LGBTQ Leather people have always been on the front lines of the LGBTQ struggle – and yes, have often made common cause with straight kinky people because there is definitely common cause to be made. Prejudice against kink affects all kinky people regardless of orientation. And lines often blur in the community because many people are perfectly willing to do BDSM play with people of a gender they aren’t technically sexually attracted to.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 