My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.
And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.
I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.
“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”
“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”
thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy
Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?
Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.
And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad). Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill.
Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.
I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.
They died of AIDS because
Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.
Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.
Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.
Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.
Picture from 1993:
We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.
As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.
Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.
I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.
This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.
A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.
If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.
I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.
My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died. He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.
In 2019.
Barely more than a kid.
Of a treatable disease.
Because of homophobia.
Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.
AIDS is not just history. Neither is homophobia.
Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.
If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the ‘60s, except in lockstep with population growth.
I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.
Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.
This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:
By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.
By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.
If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.
By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.
Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.
There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.
Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.
Sing for two.
My fave part of this post is the repeated usage of the word “queer”. In a discussion about the hatred of LGBT people and how they were left to die by the government, it’s always a great idea to call them all a slur. Can you switch it up a bit and use “fag” next time?
There’s a really obvious reason why we’re using “queer”.
When talking about LGBTQ+ history, often we have to be really careful with the language we use, because how we understand things now is not how the people we’re talking about understood themselves at the time. We end up using phrases like, “People who we would now understand as gay or lesbian” or “experiences which modern transgender people often identify with”.
In this case? It’s because that’s the word they used.
(Many of them also used the words “fag” or “dyke”, but “queer” is more inclusive.)
When I talk about “the leading lights of queerness” I mean Queer Nation. I mean the people who contributed to Queer Theory. I mean people who deliberately chose to use that word. I mean me and my ex-girlfriend. We exist.
During the AIDS crisis especially, homophobia was so bad that a lot of people didn’t want to be known by any word associated with the gay community: Not gay, not homosexual, not queer, not anything.Epidemiologists had to create the category of “men who have sex with men” because there was literally no existing term that didn’t carry the weight of a slur. The purpose of using the word “queer” was for people to say, “Let’s stop running from the things society is calling us; let’s pick up the weapons they’ve hurled at us and start hurling them back. There is no level of socially acceptable we can be that will make them suddenly decide our lives matter. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” It meant very specifically embracing and defending their/our marginalized position.
Every word we’ve ever been known by has been a slur. We all have our own histories and flinch reactions. I grew up with “gay” and “lezzo” being used really hatefully around me, as well as “queer” and “dyke” and “fag”, and I have different comfort levels with all those different words.
/shrug emoji You can dislike the word all you like and ask that it not be used for you. But historically and today, a lot of us do use it for ourselves, and we constitute “the queer community” or “queerdom”. Which we don’t think is a bad thing. If you don’t want to join us, fine, but that doesn’t make us stop existing, and any other word you can call us would also be a slur, because our community is predicated on saying, “We are that thing you’re so afraid of. Get used to it.”
Speaking to the MSM point in the final addition.
Functionally a problem in trying to get studies going in the 80s and 90s that tried to figure out what in hell was going on was trying to get people into studies. To answer questions. Because you could lose your job, home, family, life if you incautiously admitted to being gay/queer/homosexual. So among the men who were terrified of being on any kind of record as being gay because they self identified that way there were a whole host of people who didn’t actually see themselves as gay.
Because it was just not something they could accept.
But what always fascinated me was in the studies we did (I’m out of Vancouver, BC and have been part of an HIV/AIDS research organization since 96, for context) at one point we had a staunch group of individuals who were predominantly immigrants from other cultures who culturally had definitions of behaviour that didn’t align with North American behaviour labels.
Insertive partners in some cultures are not gay as they were/are not mechanically different from “the normal male” sexual actor. Receptive partners were. Basically the thinking in some people’s minds is that women=receptive and insertive=male. And if your sex didn’t match the sexual position…
Now. To be clear. I’m not saying these things as a point of “this is what I think”. This is what had been captured in interviews and conversations and studies over the years. Some people aligned themselves these ways.
I’ve always seen it as part and parcel of the gender issues and misogyny that we’re still, 30 years later, arguing about.
As to the rest… I’ve written about this (and lectured and written and lectured and written) before. In this particular thread even. It will never stop amazing me the revisionism that happens around queer. Those of us who were in large protesting crowds, remembering “We’re Here! We’re Queer! Get Over It!” being told “it’s never not been a slur/been used by us” just…wigs me out.
What I remember? What I remember is my now husband and then friends (and myself) knowing that the straight culture we lived in equated holding hands with a sexual act. Holding hands in public as queer people was fucking. It was viewed the same. Today that seems ludicrous but it’s how it was. Our being was an act of aggression, of sexual acts, of a political agenda. A spiritual and moral violence.
And we knew. Like everyone has known: the fear behind that was potentially a tool we could use.
So standing in rooms with scientists and physicians who had decided we were dirty queers with sick fucking lives and minds, prone to acts of perversion and inhumanity? We wore shirts with QUEER in big bold letters so when they talked to us, met our eyes, it was over the words they were whispering in their heads. It was under the leather we wore, the sexualized outfits with no room for misinterpretation about FUCKING. And SEX. And in these meetings discussing policy and funding and science we stood there in our entirety on display, forcing them to look at us in all of this - to see we felt all of it was normal and not something we were ashamed of?
How could the idea that sex was enjoyable be a topic of debate that had implications on our fundamental humanity? Apparently people did, and do, think so.
This all put us in positions of power in those negotiations. Negotiations, do not ever forget often that were about whether or not their largess would allow us to live. So while people were embarrassed to be confronted with their prejudices that they were comfortable expressing out of sight and hearing of us, we stood and HELD their eyes and their attention.
Queer fuckers. Fags and perverts. And we refused to fucking die quietly.
(shrug) So to those that dislike the word, outside of the fire of my own history I will calmly discuss it and follow their instructions not to call them queer. But if you step into my history, into the graveyard of the men and women I know who are now gone due to apathy and disinterest and hatred and homophobia… you’re going to hear queer. In great swelling chants from the throats of thousands of people in the streets. You can like it or hate it but you cannot argue it’s existence and the lever it was that shifted the world we’re arguing in the middle of, today.
my mom says she’s not a hugger. but when i put my arms around her on a gloomy day or after bad news she’s the last to let go. my dad says he doesn’t want gifts on his birthday, but i see the way his face light up when i get him a card with a nice message and a box full of chocolate anyway. he’s just a kid inside, still. it makes him giddy. my brother never says i love you. but when i tell him “i just need to finish the dishes before i vacuum!” he wordlessly goes to vacuum the entire house before i can, and if he sees me struggle with a wrapper or a jar or a bottle he mutters ‘c’mere’ and opens it for me without even sparing me a glance. the thing is, people love you quietly, and you love them quietly, and the air is buzzing with tiny but grand gestures & once you look for them, you find them everywhere. i think that’s really beautiful.
i could never delete my tumblr. it would be like someone burning their diary. it is the only thing keep those years from blurring together completely. i don’t know how u girlies do it.
Are you insinuating that regular pine needles aren’t spicy???
Regular pine needles are regular
Not by rosemary standards
…Have you eaten pine needles?
We’ve been friends for like four years, do you seriously have to ask if I’ve eaten pine needles or not
I mean I’m pretty sure you have but I don’t want to assume
Of course I’ve eaten pine needles. Various kinds. Singleleaf pinyon is weirdly the best
Are they…
spicy?
You know, I’d love to tell you but I’m pretty unclear about what marks the difference between “spice” and “strong-tasting plant that isn’t considered a spice”
I’ll have to eat some pine needles myself then to find out
Ok but it only counts if they’re PINE needles and not just any old needle-like leaf off a tree
I’m going to eat every needle-like leaf I see
Please Don’t Do That
Needle-Like Leaf Roulette
…I’ll accept this plan as long as you promise not to eat any yew leaves.
I can try very hard not to
Pine needles are distinguished by the presence of a sheath-like structure at the base of the leaf, almost always holding bundles of two or more leaves. Yews don’t have the sheath thing
It’s time for me to go out into the woods and stare at needle leaves
Finally you can gain real insight into my average daily life
this conversation reads like two shakespeare characters who come out in the middle of the play to talk about something completely unrelated for comic relief and then are never heard from again
god fucking dammit gimme a minute
Enter AERUH and MALUS SYL-VESTRIS, a pair of JESTERS.
AERUH I tell thee, rosemary is like a pine but with a spicy taste.
MALUS Art thou to claim that needles base of pine have not a spice?
AERUH A needle base of pine is merely base.
MALUS ‘Tis not when held, comparing, to anthos.
AERUH My dearest Malus, needles thou'st eaten?
MALUS How many moons have we as friends seen rise? How many suns have we as friends seen set? Thou sixteen seasons in my heart I’ve held, and hope that I in thine hast been the same. With brotherhood as rich and old as this, thou needst not ask me such frivolities.
AERUH I know thou likely has, to tell the truth, but I would not assume.
MALUS Well, yes, I have. A multitude of types I’ve eaten too. I’ll tell thee now: the best (though it is strange) is single-leaf pinyon.
AERUH And it has spice?
MALUS I truly wish that I could tell thee this, but now, i'faith, I cannot fully tell, the difference in classifying thus: to say “has spice” or merely “herbal strength”.
AERUH To tell this tale most clearly it would seem that eating needles from a pine’s required.
MALUS Aye, it would seem that that’s the task at hand, but caution tells that this is what’s to do: eat only needles of the honest pine, and none of lying leaf with pinelike shape.
AERUH I’ll eat them all.
MALUS I prithee, stay thyself.
AERUH Roulette with leaves.
MALUS At least restrain from yew.
AERUH I’ll do my best.
MALUS That is all can we do. The scholars tell that needles true of pine can be distinguished from the lying yew by sheathlike clothing all along the base; the yew has no such guard.
AERUH With this new truth I now will venture out into the wood and seek the pines and pinelike fakes alike to stare them down and learn their secret truths.
MALUS With this thou canst at long and weary last Discover for thyself my life’s own path.
Exeunt.
Enter MACDUFF.
MACDUFF. Yo dudes that king there’s dead. Like dead as FUCK.
so heres the situation i’ve been gnawing my way thru a pack of blue raspberry jolly ranchers like a deranged rodent and now i’ve stuck molars together and im sipping coffee through my teeth until theyre unstuck and i dont know if im having a bad time or an average time but it tastes really flavour.
the second i unweld my jaw im eating another jolly rancher
