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[trailofdan]

On World AIDS Day last week, the city of Amsterdam revealed its new AIDS monument (literally called AIDSmonument), a tall abacus with red beads that “counts down the moment that AIDS has left our world for good.”

As a ‘beacon of hope and support to anyone living with HIV’, the monument is also supposed to be ‘a tribute to all buddies, supporters, medical employees, activists and scientists’ and everyone who has died of AIDS.

It also steadily looks towards the future: every year, in a ceremony, the beads will be adjusted to reflect the changes in numbers – whether new infections have gone down, or, if a cure becomes available, the number of people who have been cured.

Love. (via Gay Star News) 

[trailofdan]

I did it my way @artbasel (at Art Basel Miami Beach)

[trailofdan]

“MY NAME IS DUANE KEARNS PURYEAR. I WAS BORN ON DECEMBER 20, 1964. I WAS DIAGNOSED WITH AIDS ON SEPTEMBER 7, 1987 AT 4:45 PM. I WAS 22 YEARS OLD. SOMETIMES, IT MAKES ME VERY SAD. I MADE THIS PANEL MYSELF. IF YOU ARE READING IT, I AM DEAD…,” The Names Project–AIDS Memorial Quilt, Washington, D.C., October 10, 1992. Photo © Fred W. McDarrah. On September 7, 1987, twenty-nine years ago today, at 4:45 P.M., Duane Kearns Puryear was diagnosed with AIDS. According to Stephanie Poole’s 1998 article, “The Making of an AIDS Quilt,” the process of making his own quilt panel was Duane Puryear’s first act as an AIDS activist: “In creating this [panel], with needle and thread, Puryear completed the most significant reidentification possible. He identified himself as dead. Duane Puryear was sixteen when he contracted HIV. He was twenty-two when he was diagnosed with AIDS.” He once said that his goal was to be “the longest living person with AIDS.” In 1991, “at the age of twenty-six, he died. He had lived with HIV for ten years. During [that] time, he became an activist…he worked on an AIDS hotline…he became a lecturer. In Dallas, he founded the speakers bureau, which [became] an important part of the Dallas AIDS Resource Center.” By the end of 1991, over 156,000 people in America had died of HIV/AIDS-related diseases. #lgbthistory #lgbtherstory #lgbttheirstory #lgbtpride #QueerHistoryMatters #HavePrideInHistory #FredWMcDarrah #DuaneKearnsPuryear #NeverAgain #NeverForget #WeRemember (at Washington, District of Columbia)

[trailofdan]

One of my favourite albums

Mrs Ellis said, “There’s someone you should meet here in the church”. I left my bike again, up against the church and went back inside. There was a woman and a child whom I’d not seen and Mrs Ellis said: “The woman is a friend, new to this town—a mother and a child”.

Let your light in babe, and don’t you be afraid.

I live by myself, a mile from the church and do my work at home. The house was a gift, given from a friend on whom I used to care. Named Silius Farm, though it’s not a farm, but a house amidst trees. And Mrs Ellis said, but I stopped her and said. “They can stay with me”.

Let your light in babe, and don’t you be afraid.

(later), Mrs Ellis said. ‘Now are mother and child well?” I said. “They are well. The mother is in bed. The child is at school and I must be rushing home!”

Let your light in babe and don’t you be afraid.

[trailofdan]

August 30th is the Feast Day of Miley What’s Good, which was first celebrated in 2015.

[trailofdan]

“The first Gay Pride flag was made in 1978 by a man named Gilbert Baker. He gave a meaning to each color.”

Beginners (2010) - Directed by Mike Mills

[trailofdan]

dali is the absolute worst

[trailofdan]

I'm a feminist and I'd also like to be a good trans ally. Why are there so many trans people who characterize playing with dolls/wearing dresses/liking pink as a sign they were a girl, and why do some say that their interest in sports was a sign they were a boy? It may not be a community-wide issue, so forgive me that. It strikes me as essentialist and somewhat tactless. Is it okay for me to question people who say things like that? Thank you for your insight!

This is actually a form of institutional violence that trans people, largely trans women, face.

To copy-paste from a previous post I made on this matter:

Growing up, I had a few trans lady friends who were hyped about being openly/visibly butch and/or gnc trans women when they began transitioning.

Three of the bunch committed suicide after basically being blacklisted out of access to medical transition. Others were wealthy enough to be able to move to where they could have a second or third shot. A femme trans lady friend forgot to apply nail polish and makeup to one of her sessions with her doctor, and that led to him keeping her from medical resources for the next two years of care, and she, as well, ended up killing herself. I could keep listing story after story with similar narratives and endings, it’s really pretty common.

Gatekeeping, whether it’s within a medical context, or a social one, relies on heavily policing trans women to prescribe to normative gender expressions dialed up to 11. We don’t, and we tend to suffer. And I don’t think it’s at all fair to cast blame on trans women who follow those norms, not when our survival is paramount and we’re coerced into those conditions via potentially fatal consequences.

Like, I’m a sloppy/lazy femme in terms of my expression, often shifting towards the hoodie and jeans aesthetic because it’s just comfy, but every doctor’s appointment, every tribunal over my transition, best believe I was probably among the most stereotypically feminine presenting ladies those docs saw that day. Not a chance I’d risk it. Every job interview, every meeting when I was looking for housing, same deal. Survival wins over the microscopic impact I might have on the reproduction of gender norms in those instances, especially when my continued survival means I can live to fight those (and other) battles in other ways less tied to my survival.

So, to be blunt and concise, it’s not trans folks upholding harmful notions of gender. It’s cis folks…cis men and cis women, weaponizing society against us to uphold gender norms through us because we’re deemed as threats and as less legitimate, so our standards are often exponentially higher than our cis counterparts.

Like, I live in liberal Canada, and this gatekeeping shit still happens. I have sat down and taught so many trans people how to strategize and what language to use, what narratives will provide the path of least resistance, so that we can get what we need in the aggressively oppressive system we live in.

Like, as a young child, I played hockey, I liked micro-machines, I liked video games, I liked climbing trees, riding bikes, building forts, and track & field.

I told my therapist that in my third session when she asked about my childhood, just minutes after telling me she felt I was ready for hormones. I had to endure 23 more sessions with her, spread across the next year and a half, to get back to where I was mid-way through that third session, a long enough time for her to forget enough about those remarks on my childhood, before I could get access to hormones. When she asked about my childhood again in the 22nd or 23rd session, I told her I played with dolls, and that secretly, my favourite colour was pink as a child, and that I yearned to play house but no one would play with me, that I’d try on my mom’s shoes and some of her clothes, etc. etc. And after I tossed out enough cliche elements of the standard narrative (basically painting myself as a very heterosexual hyper-feminine 50′s housewife), I got access. I can’t say that if I ever got interviewed on public media that I’d stray from that safe narrative, because chances are, my doctors would/could see, and I could lose access to healthcare, employment, housing, etc.

Like I said, I’ve had friends who forgot to wear nail polish and were punished for it. I had a friend…in the dead of winter…who wore pants to an appointment and was suddenly told by the doctor that he had no confidence that she was a ‘real’ trans woman. A trans dude friend of mine got in a car wreck and had busted up ribs, and couldn’t wear his binder comfortably for a while, and his doctor refused to renew his prescription to T. He eventually had to find a new doctor, endure the waiting list, and get back on, which took like, 9 months.

So if we’re saying things like that, it’s almost always a self-defense mechanism. It’s very hard to tell who we can trust, and who has the power to derail our transitions, or kill our support networks, etc. And while I’m sure if all trans people revolted and told the truth, it might help disrupt that system of norms and standards and gatekeeping, but I could never ask others like me to take a stand on principle that would likely kill a great many of them. I know that without HRT, I wouldn’t survive more than maybe three months, it’s really that simple, and I know so many others in the same boat. It’d be like walking into a building burning from a three-alarm fire to try and activate the inactive sprinkler system, instead of calling the fire department to put it out. This isn’t our responsibility. 

I think it’s important to remember that trans people who are coerced into expressing these narratives are a tiny demographic, so our ability to significantly ‘reproduce’ or ‘essentialize’ any gender norms is negligible at best. And that in the overwhelming majority of the world, trans folks have to comply with exaggerated gender norms for our gender simply for survival. And that survival must take precedence over worries of us reproducing harm that we’d only be reproducing because cis people can’t get their heads out of their asses over their need to police everything about our bodies and our lives.

Like, in case you’re not aware, the “born in the wrong body” language stemmed from trans patients decades and decades ago, who were being experimented on, sterilized, mutilated, and tortured. Eventually doctors listened to us and our pleas to just treat our dysphoria, but our language didn’t fit necessarily with their worldview. They couldn’t accept that pre-transition trans men and trans women were actually men/women. That we had men’s/women’s bodies. That we were male/female. So we were coerced into using their language for us, in order to get the treatment we needed, to get any shred of support we could get. The cis-dominated structures of science and medicine are to blame for that sexism, cissexism, essentialism, etc. as well.

We’re just trying to get the help we need in a world that does not want us to get that help, and will generally only provide it if we tell them everything they want to hear. Some of the greener, fresh out of the closet trans folks push that sort of language/narrative hard, because it’s what they’re exposed to, it’s what they’re taught keeps them safe, and it’s pretty wrong to be critical of someone for surviving and actively reducing harm against themselves from society at large.

So if you get the urge to criticize a trans person for bringing that sort of thing up, maybe instead criticize the structures that prevent us from saying anything else.

[trailofdan]

[trailofdan]

Peter probably was infected within a few years, maybe even a few months, of his arrival in San Francisco. By the time he tested positive in 1985, he said, “the party was over.” In those days, a decade before drugs were developed that could arrest the disease, anyone who tested positive expected to die quickly, gruesomely. Doctors did little to discourage that thinking. Make the most of the little time you have left, patients were told.

“From that day on,” Peter said, “you’re always living with that in your head.”

Just a year earlier, Peter had started a travel agency in the Castro with a friend, Jonathan Klein. For a few years, theirs was a joyful, flourishing business catering to the gay community. As the AIDS epidemic grew, they began charting final trips for young clients who needed oxygen or wheelchairs to travel.

His doctor died of AIDS just months after Peter tested positive. Friends from high school and college died. In the Castro, where he lived and worked, men his age stooped over canes, withering away. Peter offered the spare bedroom in his apartment as a refuge for families and friends keeping vigil over loved ones.

“I saw one of the great world epidemics unfold in front of my eyes,” Peter said. “I have to carry that with me the rest of my life.”

Kevin tested positive for HIV. At 27, he felt he’d been handed a death sentence. Now 56, Kevin doesn’t have a job and rarely writes. He spends hours by himself in his apartment overlooking the Castro. Sometimes he’s there all day.

If he’d thought there was any chance he would outlive AIDS, he might have stayed in school. He might have saved for retirement or bought a home. Instead, he said, “I was preparing all that time to die.”

Last Men Standing: The forgotten survivors of AIDS

[trailofdan]

when we first got married i had to psych myself up every time to say “my wife” to a new person. it was awkward because with “girlfriend” a lot of people would just assume i meant “friend,” and of course “fiancée” is gender-neutral when spoken, so we’d always had plausible deniability. but the meaning of “wife” is pretty unavoidable. still, i made myself do it on principle, and slowly but surely it became natural.

now i love saying “my wife,” to everyone all the time. i love saying it to the old woman distributing the strawberries at the farm share, asking if she knows where i can still get rhubarb because every summer i make my wife a pie. i love saying it to the gay employee helping me at crate and barrel, telling him i’m buying these glasses because my wife and i both had them growing up, and seeing his eyes light up. i love saying it to friends of friends and to new acquaintances and to potential coworkers and to the women at the laundromat. i love being aggressively out, and i love having such an easy way to be aggressively out. i love being the first woman with a wife someone has ever met, making our existence part of their reality. i love being visible for other lgbt people who might feel a little less alone knowing i’m there, which helps me push past the fear when it comes. most of all, i love not hiding. i love saying “my wife” and i love my wife.

[trailofdan]

Love in the time of social collapse. https://www.amazon.com/Pounded-Pound-Socioeconomic-Implications-European-ebook/dp/B01HJXVP8G/

[trailofdan]

Let it be so...

I have no idea if this is straw-clutching or not. But it’s a very interesting argument, even if I can’t imagine that the resulting perpetual limbo would do much for EU or international stability, or for the prospects of British politics not being a shitshow for the foreseeable.

But there is a precedent. In 1997 the British public handed a landslide victory to a Government committed to going into the Euro. In 2001, with the opposition explicitly making the election one about Euro membership, it did so again. And yet we are not in the Euro, thanks to Gordon Brown and his “five tests”, which were never met and never really designed to be met. And eventually, once it became clear that going into the Euro would probably have been a disaster, the issue was dropped.

If Boris (or whoever) starts mentioning tests or conditions, it’s a good sign that history will be repeating.

EDIT: Liam Fox! ““A lot of things were said in advance of this referendum that we might want to think about again and that [invoking article 50] is one of them,” said the Conservative MP.” Meanwhile Germany is scrabbling for ways to legally kick us out. Tragedy is turning into farce with extreme speed.

[trailofdan]

I've spent today alternating between feeling like I'm going to cry, feeling like I'm going to vomit, and looking for jobs in North America. (And thinking that maybe this is going to be the thing that makes me go back to Australia)

Obsolete Units Surrounded By Hail

An A to Z of Brexit. Cathartic fragments, pessimistic conjectures. I had to write something, and so I wrote this.

Keep reading

[trailofdan]

i like that the english think americans are crazy because there’s like a 2% chance that donald trump could get elected president but then look what you just ACTUALLY DID you nihilist accelerationist nutjobs 

[trailofdan]

my kids: can you sing us a song from your time?

me: sure! *clears throat* WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK I AM?

my kids: jesus christ

me: YOU AIN'T MARRIED TO NO AVERAGE BITCH BOI

[trailofdan]

Sean Connery & Charlotte Rampling in Zardoz (1974)