“modern media doesnt diversify gays enough. they’re all white m-”
“yeah but what about lesbia-”
“how about interracial couples-”
“what about transgender-”
(you could also argue that she’s nonbinary, as mimi also quotes her saying that she called herself “more than a man than you’ll ever be, and more a woman than you’ll ever get”)
“what about bisexua-”
(anthony rapp, who plays mark, is bisexual too)
4/7 of the main cast are PoC and 4/7 also have AIDS
not to mention this movie is a MUSICAL I MEAN rip jonathan larson
IN CONCLUSION rent is a very important movie/musical
Ok, no, you guys do not understand how important it was for RENT to feature LGBT people, sex workers and addicts living with HIV/AIDS in 1993. In 93, AIDS was only just beginning to be recognized and was still heavily stigmatized. Many people believed that it was a “dirty” disease that only affected degenerate people. Some even believed that it was a sent by God to dole out punishment to sinners. For RENT to not only tell the story of AIDS victims, but “undesireable” AIDS victims was unbelievably brave and important.
And there is so much LGBT/AIDS history that we have lost (because they don’t teach it) that is kept alive in RENT.
Things like the landlords turning off the heat because it would speed up the death of AIDS tenants and they could then bring in higher paying tenants and businesses.
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
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 taxrate 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).
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.
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 outrageous 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.
2011
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemicby Randy Shiltsis a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.
Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaustcollects his writings on AIDS.
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
Read or watchThe Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Streetor watchMilk. Dallas Buyers Clubhas its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played Onbut JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.
That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.
As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959
Looking at the digital quilt is heartbreaking. So many of mi gente, dead.
I’m in tears after reading some of that quilt
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop. The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill. My body understood there was no safe place for me to be.
–The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
i think about this quote a lot in relation to HIV and my history.
Posted on
Lesbian mothers raising children in lesbian-headed households also had to worry about ex-husbands using their lesbianism to take custody of the children. In 1958, Vera Martin met and fell in love with Kay, a Japanese American woman who had come to the United States at the end of the Second World War after marrying an African American serviceman. Kay had two children, and Martin had a son and daughter. The families got along well and would spend time together on the weekends. R., Vera Martin’s teenage daughter, babysat for the other children when Kay and Martin wanted to go out together. Both women feared that the authorities or their ex-husbands would take custody of their children if they found out they were in a lesbian relationship. “We knew that we had to be careful,” Vera Martin remembers, “and keep the knowledge that we had kids very quiet … very quiet.” Kay worked as a prostitute to support her family, and the two women lived in fear that someone would report them to authorities, possibly even one of the other women with whom Kay worked, in order to remove competition. They also feared that their ex-husbands would simply take their children away directly if they found out they were lesbians. Martin was an African American woman and Kay was Japanese American, and as two lesbian mothers of color, they felt particularly threatened by the courts.
Lesbian mothers who had left previous heterosexual marriages during this era lived in constant fear of discovery and exposure. One night in 1959, when Vera Martin and Kay were at the If Club, a lesbian bar in Los Angeles, a heterosexually identified man who knew Martin’s ex-husband walked up, said hello to her, and left. Terrified, Martin turned to Kay and said, “That’s someone that knew me when my husband and I were together, and they are still in touch.” Kay understood the danger immediately and said, “I think we better get out of here.” Vera Martin thought the man would use the pay phone and that her ex- husband would show up at the club or later at one of their houses. She and Kay lived in terror afterwards and did not go out in public “for a long time.” When the two of them eventually went to a dance together, they asked two men to accompany them as cover.
As parents, lesbians and gay men had no legal protections or recognition of their co-parent relationships in the 1950s and 1960s. As it would in later decades, this jeopardized their ability to maintain communication with their partner’s children. After Kay died suddenly in the winter of 1959, Vera Martin wanted very badly to take Kay’s children into her home and raise them with her own, as Kay had told her children’s caretaker she wanted before she died. However, Kay’s ex-husband, who lived across the country and had been brutally abusive to Kay, came into town with his new wife and took the children. “Oh, I wanted those kids so bad. … I was crazy about them and they were crazy about me,” Martin recalled, but she had no chance of competing for custody of the two children against an intact heterosexual nuclear family. In the era before gay and lesbian liberation movements there was no chance of legal recognition for lesbian households with children. Martin despaired when Kay’s ex-husband held an auction to sell all of Kay’s belongings. She came up with one hundred dollars to buy Kay’s address book, a potentially dangerous item in the hands of her ex-husband. In 1963, Vera Martin then married a gay man and “slammed the closet door shut behind her,” because she heard rumors that her own ex-husband suspected that she was a lesbian, and she was afraid he might try to use that to obtain custody of T., her son and youngest child.
Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II (2013), Ch. 1. (via captainnipple)
