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.
And realize that even worse, we have come to a time where people have slowly forgotten everything in regards to HIV/AIDS. An entire generation of young men and women was wiped out of existence; we do not know what world they would have created, but we can feel their loss even now. Teenagers and young adults are not being taught how to properly care for themselves to lower the chance of transmission, which is slowly increasing.
I want to make sure that everyone knows: People who have HIV/AIDS are not a danger to you. They are people. They are not contagious–you can not get HIV from kissing, daily contact, eating after someone, using the same toilet, etc. You can spend your entire life with someone who is HIV+ and unless you share blood of sexual fluid, there is 0% chance of infection.
If you are undetectable, meaning you are HIV+ and on medication that has lowered your viral load to undetectable levels, it is statistically negligible for you to be able to transmit HIV to a partner.
If you do not know your status or your partner’s status, be careful and use a condom.
2.1 million people were infected in 2015.
1.1 million people died of AIDS related complications in 2015.
24% of all infections are between the ages of 13-24.
44% of HIV young people in the US do not know they are infected.
The highest number of increasing HIV infections is young Gay/Bisexual men of color.
Only 16% of young people with HIV are on medication and undetectable.
Only 22% of young adults have ever taken an HIV test.
Get tested. It is free and anonymous. Go once a year, be responsible. And don’t only care about HIV/AIDS when it is World AIDS Day. There is too much riding on staying knowledgable.
Silence=Death
UNAIDS: Source
CDC* Source
