The long run.
September 18, 2018 9:44 PM   Subscribe

 
Heartbreaking.
posted by greermahoney at 10:22 PM on September 18, 2018


Threadreader version for the Twitter-averse.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:34 PM on September 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


i got to the "i turned 24" one and i had to go lay down for a while
posted by poffin boffin at 10:48 PM on September 18, 2018 [18 favorites]


I lost family and friends during that time. But I’m an outsider; I did not lose lovers, hopes, dreams, my entire world...

Such a powerful piece and so important. We should never forget. Those of us who are friends and allies have a duty to remember, to support, to be quiet when we should and be loud as hell when we need to be.

To absent friends
posted by fallingbadgers at 11:05 PM on September 18, 2018 [17 favorites]


So sad and well written. Giving up that last physical token of someone you loved is so dark, terrible, and sometimes necessary
posted by benzenedream at 11:11 PM on September 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


the umbrella is where it got to me
posted by halation at 11:13 PM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Thank you for posting this. It was very powerful and well written.

There is a section of Chloe Benjamin's book The Immortalists that is set in San Francisco of the 1970s/early 1980s, and it is absolutely heart wrenching. This piece reminded me of that. I read the book a while ago but that section in particular is pretty much seared into my memory.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:09 AM on September 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


Another outside here, who lost a close friend and some work colleagues but not partners. But I remember visiting my friend in the Aids ward in the early days (maybe early 80's?) when the disease was misunderstood and these patients were housed in a totally different part of the hospital, away from everyone. It was a scary time. Everyone talked in hushed tones. And no one ever said the word "Aids".
posted by greenhornet at 3:01 AM on September 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


I was just a child in the 80s. I didn't lose anyone to AIDS. But sometime around 1991 I was 13 years old and volunteering at the local hospital. Just changing garbage and refilling water jugs. I went into one room with a man who looked emaciated. So, so thin. I changed his garbage and refilled his jug. He said something to me but I couldn't understand it. It may have just been thank you, but the words were so mangled, I just didn't know. I didn't reply because I didn't know what to say.

I walked out of the room and a nurse took me aside.

"Don't go back in that room"
"Why not?"
"That man has AIDS."

Even then I think I remember knowing that I couldn't catch it just by changing his garbage. But I didn't go back in that room.

I'm 40 now and I still think of that man and my heart hurts for him.
posted by aclevername at 3:40 AM on September 19, 2018 [32 favorites]


Made me cry. A wonderful thread. Truly the best of the web.
posted by Ziggy500 at 4:14 AM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Heartbreaking. Not all that long ago, really...
posted by bookmammal at 4:27 AM on September 19, 2018


The changes which came as a response to the crisis are something that gets airtime in both my university units and queer readings and circles.

The general understanding I've gotten is that a lot of the state and NGO responses wouldn't have happened if the crisis hadn't.

Some, like the prevalence of very Western conceptions of sexuality in interventions and funding elsewhere haven't always been so good.

Mostly though we talk about the radicalisation of so many, the way it gave rise to a new wave of activists rightfully angry about what they and their peers were going through. As far as I've heard things, it had a big impact, and a lot of improvements wouldn't have happened otherwise.

I get that it's got to be hard to see the suffering sidelined though, and the discussion focus only on what was provoked. That's far from ideal.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 5:03 AM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Thank you for this.
posted by Empty Planet at 5:36 AM on September 19, 2018


.
posted by sockermom at 6:03 AM on September 19, 2018


If I may:
To be on course to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030, UNAIDS estimates that US$26.2 billion will be required for the global HIV response in 2020 alone. This means the world must increase the amount of resources available for HIV by US$1.5 billion each year between 2016 and 2020, a situation that is looking increasingly unlikely.

In recent years, high-income countries have reduced funding for the HIV response in low- and middle-income countries, with a 7% decrease reported between 2015 and 2016. Philanthropic donations, on the other hand, have risen for the past three consecutive years.
...

Despite the fact that between 40% and 50% of all new HIV infections among adults occur among key populations* and their partners, just 2% of all HIV funding, and around 9% of resources allocated specifically for prevention, are spent on these groups. (source)
*gay, trans, sex workers, injection drug users, etc.
posted by mosst at 6:12 AM on September 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


There is a section of Chloe Benjamin's book The Immortalists that is set in San Francisco of the 1970s/early 1980s, and it is absolutely heart wrenching.

The Bay Area Reporter's obituaries database remains a helpful tool for those who didn't live through the 80s and early 90s to get a sense of the enormity of what was lost. It has a "view random obituary" feature that allows you to search without knowing a specific name.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:31 AM on September 19, 2018 [22 favorites]


That goddamn notebook.

A friend of mine responded to this story by talking about living in Zambia and there just . . . not being a generation of people. There were kids, there were elderly people, but there just weren't that many adults. And how hard it is to create stability if there's nobody to learn from, no real model, because anyone who did have that knowledge had died of AIDS.

And I think of what was lost here, too. All those people who never got to share what humanity they could and grow old. I have a hard time believing it was better in the long run.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:32 AM on September 19, 2018 [14 favorites]


that one memorial photo of the san francisco gay men's chorus always destroys me.
posted by poffin boffin at 6:34 AM on September 19, 2018 [32 favorites]


That was heartbreaking to read.

that one memorial photo of the san francisco gay men's chorus always destroys me.

And that made me cry. So much loss.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:47 AM on September 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yeah, the more I think of it, the more I hate the idea that all of those deaths improved things in the long run. I tried imagining someone telling me that the response to Hurricane Maria was better in the long run because it improved visibility to Puerto Rico’s status as a colony, and I can’t think of a nicer response than ‘fuck off, you fucking fucks’. And twenty years from now, I think I’d have the same response.

And more than that, I think it’s dangerous. It reeks of accelerationism, which seems to discount the value of all of those who don’t survive whatever harsh conditions that are supposedly required for a brand new day (and it's always those who already have the least that suffer the most). Fuck that. Things are shitty enough.
posted by dinty_moore at 7:08 AM on September 19, 2018 [10 favorites]


What gets me is that I'm part of the last generation that takes AIDS seriously, it seems (I'm 37.) When I was a protogay people were still dying of AIDS all around me, it seemed, and that didn't stop en masse in the developed world until 1995, which was "only" 23 years ago. But, I've been amazed at the number of younger guys I hook up with that don't want to use condoms. It's not even that they don't want to--it just doesn't even occur to them.

I recently started taking prep--I had been on the fence about it for a while--because I finally had the realization--if I could go back in time to 1989 and tell people that if I took one pill a day it would be essentially impossible for me to contract HIV--they would probably tell me I was stupid not to take it.
posted by Automocar at 7:11 AM on September 19, 2018 [29 favorites]


A whole generation lost. And mine, the one after, permanently traumatized.

I'm 46, just young enough to have seen a lot of people die but older people, not my cohort. I grew up with a permanent fear that sex could mean infectious death. I've mostly come to terms with that fear, but it has a huge effect.

Like Automocar I'm a bit baffled at how the younger generation of gay American men no longer practices safe sex. (Although unlike Automocar, I'm not hooking up with younger guys on the regular :-). I think it's healthy, at least as long as PREP really works and is available to them. But my ingrained fear of infectious death makes me want to think judgmental things about the sex. Also I'm kind of jealous.
posted by Nelson at 7:24 AM on September 19, 2018 [12 favorites]


That obituary data base mentioned above...
I just have no words.
posted by bookmammal at 7:45 AM on September 19, 2018


I'll be 44 this year and can't believe that I have to tell young (or some straight) people what it was like to be young and figuring things out to watch the people around you who otherwise would have been introducing you to your amazing queer life wither and die.

Similar to Nelson, it has imprinted if not poisoned so much of my thinking about my own queerness in so many ways.

Not long ago a young friend was joking that "there aren't really guys in their 60s and 70s at the bars!" No, they all died when I was in high school and college in the late 80s and throughout the 90s.

The only positive thing - and it is such a stretch that it is painful for me to make - but the ONLY positive thing I have ever been able to draw from my teenage years in a smallish town is that for a brief time HIV/AIDS brought back to small towns all of the men who left home to live their brilliant queer lives in NYC, Chicago, LA, Miami, and San Fransisco. It brought me into contact with the painters, actors, designers, dancers, writers, and outlandish creatives who had... come home to die. And then they were gone. All of them. Like they vanished over the course of a year.

And the absurdity and contradiction of the promise of there being something else so big and glamorous out there as I heard them tell their stories tempered by their bodies failing in horrible ways right in front of my face... For my 14-18 year old self navigating that was probably the most complicated and horrible thing to process.

And then to see so many men who survived (I can count at least four I've known personally) self-destruct because they survived.
posted by Tchad at 7:58 AM on September 19, 2018 [25 favorites]


The idea that the death of a generation of queer men was a good thing feels so completely wrong to me. Yes, it brought visibility and activism, but didn't it vastly increase stigma? Didn't it fuel mental illness and trauma in the community? And then the government demonstrated how little they cared that the "wrong" type of people were dying. I can't wrap my head around that at all.
posted by scruffy-looking nerfherder at 8:52 AM on September 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


i've seen similarly bizarre sentiments from people saying that the current political instability and white supremacy and enthusiastic oppression of minorities will be the catalyst for a lot of beautiful art and music.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:02 AM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


It's a pretty uncontroversial opinion in queer circles that the AIDS crisis did result in some good things (like marriage equality.) It's not the same as saying that the crisis itself was good (because it very obviously was not.)
posted by Automocar at 9:07 AM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm not going to fault anybody for trying to find a silver lining in the AIDS crisis, or our current political bullshit, or anything else: it's human to want to salvage something from a shitty situation, find reasons to hope, etc.

I do object when people get so focused on the silver lining that they ignore or minimize the gigantic honking cloud, though. Which is also a human tendency, and one that needs to be actively pushed back on, so I'm glad @tucker_shaw is doing so.
posted by Spathe Cadet at 9:50 AM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


It would be obscene to say that even a single death was "worth it," much less the actual carnage. But as a matter of historical analysis (history is very often obscene), it's probably true that the AIDS crisis changed the perception of LGB people in broader society in ways that ultimately gave rise to positive changes. I grew up amongst reasonably liberal but seriously religious people whose views have changed drastically just over my lifetime (my mom went from "gays are called to celibacy" to "if they won't accept our gay bishop, then let's have the schism!"), and I can't deny that part of what effected that change was having the basic human decency to respond to the suffering they (eventually) saw.
posted by praemunire at 9:52 AM on September 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


About twelve years ago, I was in my mid-thirties and my new admin assistant was a gay man in his mid-twenties. He was telling me how he felt a bit flummoxed and nervous because his grandparent had just died and he'd never been to a funeral before. Wait what, I said? You've never been to a funeral? Well no, he said, I was too young to go to my other grandfather's funeral and I've been lucky that no other family members have died young and blah blah utterly ordinary description of his family and...

I remember just staring at him dumbly for a moment, not being able to compute the idea of an adult gay man who hadn't been to funerals. Because AIDS. But of course, time passes. Of course, he's too young. I'm honestly a bit on the young and sheltered side to have witnessed the worst of the devastation, though certainly I lost people.

I just hadn't perhaps realized so viscerally until that moment how much those of us of a certain age carry those AIDS deaths as part and parcel of our queerness. The hole in collective memory, the talented people who never got to mature and make and do more things. I don't know what's like to be queer without feeling that grief.

I don't want to obligate the younger generation of queer people to feel traumatized, but I don't want the community to drop that baggage, either.
posted by desuetude at 11:12 AM on September 19, 2018 [23 favorites]


.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 11:45 AM on September 19, 2018




I recently read a play called "The Inheritance" by Michael Lopez, about this very topic. (It's a six hour play, so it's really about a lot more than that.) It just transferred to the West End in London; I don't know of any plans to transfer it to NY yet, and given that it's such an epic play I'm not sure commercial producers are going to want to take the risk. But it's extremely well written, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing it when I go to London next month.

I think this is a topic that we need to be talking about, and in fact it is why I'm currently doing the work I do now. So I might be a bit biased.
posted by grae at 1:32 PM on September 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


This also seems like a good place to link this recent essay in the London Review of Books. Here was a plague by Tom Crewe.

Too much good stuff in there to excerpt.
posted by gingerbeer at 1:43 PM on September 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


Not enough young people have been exposed to personal testimony like this. Not enough young people have been told much about the AIDS crisis at all. Just a few weeks ago, I was disturbed by the number of younger viewers who didn't understand the AIDS plot point in GLOW S2, and it's one of the reasons I'm not a fan of the show declining to be explicit. I also keenly remember the time, a couple years back, when an acquaintance of mine was complaining that a gay man in our volunteer group was so melancholy and bitter and tired-looking and how do people even get like that. (For context, we were both in our early twenties, both queer.) And I was just like, "Isn't he sixty-something? Didn't he move here from San Francisco?"

Acquaintance: "...Yeah?"

Me: "So. Probably carrying a lot of trauma."

Acquaintance: ???

Me: "AIDS crisis?"

Acquaintance: "Oh, you think he knew people who died?"

Me: ".....He definitely, definitely did."

Eventually the man in question opened up more, and we learned that he lost all his friends, and his partner. That this never occurred to my friend as K's likely backstory was very alarming to me, and illustrates why it is salutary for young LGBT people to have some older friends/mentors. It also illustrates the importance of teaching LGBT history in schools, as is now state-mandated.

It gets me thinking: hearing direct testimony from Holocaust survivors, both privately and at school, made a huge impact on me as a young person. Are there any schools that bring in survivors of/witnesses to the AIDS crisis? Is there a program that organizes anything like this in California? Firsthand testimony along the lines of the tucker_shaw twitter thread could be invaluable in helping young people understand what happened, and why it's so important to take safe sex and STI screening seriously. Because yes, HIV/AIDS is an ongoing public health issue, especially among certain vulnerable populations. Not enough people appreciate that.

For instance, this piece hit me hard last year. It's a NYT Magazine article about the criminally high* HIV rate among queer black men in the U.S., and the difficulty of getting these patients proper medical care. Also: last year we lost theatrical composer/lyricist Michael Friedman, who wasn't diagnosed until nine weeks before his death. I don't know why Friedman ignored his symptoms for so long, but wariness of healthcare settings is not uncommon among the LGBT population. And for obvious reasons, many of us are also very practiced at the art of denial, as well as prone to debilitating shame. All these factors may have played into Friedman's death.

(*If current infection rates continue, 50% of black who have sex with men will be diagnosed in their lifetimes. Unacceptable.)
posted by desert outpost at 2:48 PM on September 19, 2018 [19 favorites]


Can't believe I'm saying this (about Twitter, of all places) but read the comments, just this once.
posted by queen anne's remorse at 3:09 PM on September 23, 2018


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