seekingwillow:

88linesabout44fangirls-blog:

prismatic-bell:

and-bisexual:

anamatics:

This is a request.

Learn your queer history. Learn about AIDS. Learn about how the leadership of this country looked away and did nothing to help our community for years. Learn about how they joked AIDS was god’s punishment for being gay. Learn about how, in the community, everyone was touched. Everyone lost someone. Learn how the AIDS crisis gave birth to the modern gay rights movement. Learn about how that crisis brought the community together after two decades of infighting. Lesbians took care of gay men who were dying. Found families were everywhere. Our history is too important to allow our politicians to sweep the horrible awful legacy of inaction under the rug. 

Learn your history kids. Think about the people who died to make your life now, as a young queer person in the world, a whole lot better than it was back then.

YES

Learn about how bi men were blamed for the epidemic by both straight and gay people, and especially for its “leap” to those innocent straight people.

Learn about how Newsweek publicly blamed bi men for the epidemic in 1987, calling them “the ultimate pariahs” and “amoral and duplicitous and compulsive.” How Cosmo did the same two years later, promoting the popular stereotype of bi men as dishonest spreaders of AIDS.

Learn about how bisexual activists like David Lourea and Cynthia Slater were at the cutting edge of safer sex education, bringing it into bathhouses and BDSM clubs in San Francisco in 1981, when doctors were still calling it “a rare gay cancer”. Or like Alexei Guren, in Florida, organizing healthcare outreach to Latino married men who have sex with men.

Learn about how it took two years of campaigning to get even the San Francisco Department of Public Health to recognize bisexual men in their official AIDS statistics (the weekly “New AIDS cases and mortality statistics” report),

Learn about the women who got HIV, both cis and trans, who often had no resources or support. And the incredibly high risk trans women faced for HIV even in the late 1990s, and how difficult it still was for them to access healthcare.

Learn about how bisexual activists like Venetia Porter, of the Prostitute’s Union of Massachusetts and COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), were the ones who first advocated for both cis and trans women, and injection drug users, with AIDS.

Learn about how Cynthia Slater, who by then was HIV-positive, organized the first Women’s HIV/AIDS Information Switchboard in 1985.

Learn about how bisexuals are still erased from HIV/AIDS history. How frequently we are told that we were not affected by the epidemic, that we are less oppressed as a result, that we did not participate in this movement or in the larger movement for gay rights. That we were not demonized, that only gay men were disowned or refused cemetery plots for having AIDS. How our erasure is used against us.

Look up the die-ins. Groups of dozens, HUNDREDS, literally laying on the steps of hospitals and breathing their last because hospitals wouldn’t take them and their families wouldn’t either.

Look up Ryan White, an 11-year-old boy who got HIV through a faulty blood transfusion in the days before reliable testing and was denied an education out of fear he’d infect other kids.

Do you know what AIDS was, in those dim days? My mom worked in a hospital. An AIDS patient was brought in and immediately put in the same isolation room they’d use for stuff like SARS, smallpox, and anthrax. Entering his room required that you enter another room first and take off all your clothes. A fresh set of scrubs would be given to you. Then you had to triple-glove, double-boot, double-mask, double-gown–yes, a surgical gown just to enter the room–and when you left you did all this in reverse and then got a decontaminant shower. Nobody knew how this disease was spread.

And the people. In charge. Did NOTHING.

When older queer activists speak, loves, LISTEN. Our history is short and foggy and all too often appropriated by straight people for brownie points. It’s not all the repeal of DADT and getting married.

Psychology today also did an article blaming bisexual men in the most scare-mongering way possible. This was a supposedly ‘objective’, semi-scientific magazine. I still remember reading this over 20 years later.

In response to the bit about the HAZMAT level procedures done with AIDS patients; I just want to add - Learn why it was SUCH A BIG DEAL that Princess Diana touched the hands of AIDS patients, sat with them, sometimes even fed them.

Like off the cuff it’d seem like a random thing to bring up. Except she was a Head of State showing compassion and demanding it, when elected officials were pointing fingers going ‘Plague’.

And yes, also, that marriage rights for queer folk came about because of estranged parents and blood relatives swooping in to take all a couple had built together, because a partner, sometimes even a sick partner who needed funds for their OWN health, wasn’t ‘legally connected’.

It was supposed to be about protection, and then became about exclusion of certain parts of the community and respectability politics of others. Even when those same ‘fringes’ initially had been caretakers and support.

Lastly, up into the damn 00′s they were still ‘blaming bisexual men’. There were a lot of articles about ‘black men on the down low’ or ‘prison sexualities’ and claiming that was responsible for things in the US blowing up among the AA community. And not enough stress on safe sex education in general and how the virus spread.

gehayi:

heylookitsarevolution:

wikdsushi:

iammyfather:

ayellowbirds:

northcoastbear:

straightallies:

haydrion:

straightallies:

I hope one day that history looks back on ronald reagan as one of the 20th century’s most vile and disgusting serial killers

may i ask why

Remember when like 6 Americans had ebola and it was an international emergency, and Obama flew out to meet survivors?
Here is a list of things the United States government did in response:
-Increasing the number of Ebola testing labs throughout the U.S. that can quickly and safely screen a potential Ebola specimen -Educating more than 150,000 health care workers on how to identify, isolate, diagnose, and care for patients under investigation for Ebola -Developing countermeasures — including the first Ebola vaccine to progress to Phase 2 testing — to prevent and treat Ebola -Converting at least 10 of the Ebola Treatment Centers into long-term Regional Ebola and Pandemic Treatment Centers for long-term readiness for years to come -Helping state and local public health systems accelerate and improve their operational readiness and preparedness for Ebola or other infectious diseases
Source: https://whitehouse.gov/ebola-response

When the Reagan administration was faced with tens of thousands of gay men dying, they did nothing. They made jokes. They laughed. They caused an epidemic that killed 40 million people, because they hated gay men and thought we deserved to die.

There is so much more to it.  There is a myth perpetuated by Reaganites that he was an historically significant  President, in some positive sense.  If you are old enough to have voted in 1980, you probably know differently.  If you were born after 1980 you have been raised on this myth.  He sold Americans a fable about a Hollywood movie-like exceptional past and destiny, and led ordinary people around with portrayals of that mirage while his reactionary robber-baron friends set about dismantling 50 years of progressive advancements for working men and women, on their way to returning themselves to the position of unfettered economic domination they held between the Civil War and the Great Depression.  He was a union buster.   He gave us Scalia – need I say more?  He tried to give us Robert Bork (does anyone under 30 even know who he is?).  He lied about Iran/Contra.  He avoided dealing with AIDS.  He sealed the political sham-show between right wing capitalist kings and the evangelical thought-control snake-oil salesmen.  Americans don’t want to hear that they are ordinary citizens of the world, and they don’t want to hear that the aren’t anointed by some deity to lead the world to salvation.  They lapped it up, and they continue to do so.  

I have to wonder how the response of a more competent presidency to the AIDS crisis might have changed even the global impact of the disease. Where might we be today? How many millions of people would be alive and not suffering? Yes, Reagan was historically significant—for fucking things up in a globally devastating way.

When you hear how he slashed Income taxes, he did on the Wealthy, but he increased the lowest tax rate from 10% to 15%.

His campaign was funded by Christian radicals, whose entire goal was to dismantle Roe vs. Wade and see American women relegated once more to back alleys and dirty knives.  He opened the door to religion in politics in a way the postwar McCarthyists never dreamed possible.  Now, 36 years after his election, maybe a third of American medical schools offer proper access to even first-trimester abortion training (in an era where that should mean a pill or vaginal suppository), and there are currently fewer doctors trained to perform late stage abortions for the entire US than there were pre-RvW (when such operations were only performed as a heroic measure).

And no one has even touched on his legacy of racial
hatred, deliberate destruction of black communities and establishing of COONTELPRO to destroy the lives of black panthers and black activists, his actual murder of black activists and more. He was actually a demon.

If you want to know how many lives could have been saved if the Reagan government had just fucking BUDGETED for AIDS research instead of telling AIDS researchers that they had to beg, borrow or steal any money for AIDS from other programs–then read And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition by Randy Shilts. And be prepared to have your heart broken at the unadulterated and wildly irresponsible waste.of time and human lives. 

Other shitty things Reagan did:

1) He almost tripled the National Debt. And you need to see the difference with zeroes:

When Reagan took office in 1980: $909,100,000  owed.(909.1 billion)

When Reagan left office in 1988:  $2,601,300,000,000 owed. (2.6 trillion)

2) He raised taxes on the middle class and the poor ELEVEN TIMES while in office. 

3) Unemployment soared after Reagan passed his tax cuts for the rich, and it took decades to get back down again.

4) He turned the U.S. into an illegal weapons dealer.

5) He funded terrorists, helping create the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. From NewsOne:

After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981, U.S. funding of the mujahideen increased significantly and CIA Paramilitary Officers played a big role in training, arming and sometimes even leading mujahideen forces.

The CIA trained the mujahideen in many of the tactics Al Qaeda is known for today, such as car bombs, assassinations and other acts that would be considered terrorism today.

6) When his economic policies began wreaking havoc on the government, Reagan stole from Social Security–to the tune of 2.5 TRILLION–treating it for eight years as the private slush fund of himself and his rich friends. 

7) [T]he Reagan administration demonized opponents of apartheid, most notably the African National Congress, as dangerous and pro-communist. Reagan even vetoed a bill to impose sanctions on South Africa, only to be overruled by Congress.

They called him the Teflon president for a reason. All this shit–and none of it stuck to him. He got away clean every single time.

munnarita:

madgastronomer:

marxvx:

my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the crazy thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.

Younger than 40.

I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.

The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.

Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.

They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.

HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.

The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.

There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.

Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.

OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.

I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.

I recommend the book Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman.