“Sylvia Rivera kicking ass on stage after some radfems & transphobes tried to refuse her the right to speak at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally. Said radfems then had their own march in part protesting trans participation in Pride. A precursor to today’s Dyke March.”
It is women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson who started the Stonewall riots and queer liberation. 43 years later, trans women of color, the people who started the movement, are the people maligned and left behind by it.
In Sylvia’s words, “What the FUCK is wrong with you all?”
[[Trigger warning: suicide]]
Sylvia went home that night and attempted suicide.
Marsha Johnson came home and found her in time to save her life.
Sylvia left the movement after that day and didn’t come back for twenty years.
this is incredible, she is incredible, I highly recommend watching it
but I think the addendum re: the effect of this day on sylvia is really important
so often we valorise decontextualised moments of tough, articulate resistance and rage
and the suffering of the people who embodied them is not acknowledged, it’s uncomfortable, it’s not inspiring, we want them to stay tough and cool and stylish forever
which is particularly terrible when I think about how sylvia felt like that because of women like me — women who are now watching this video and feeling inspired and impressed and maybe a bit pleased with ourselves for finally having watched a speech by the famous and really cool to name-drop sylvia rivera
rebloggin for the true as fuck commentary (bolding mine)
n like, on one hand this moment is decontextualized as fuck, but on the other hand a lot of ppl try to hyper-contextualize it to make it “history” and a very specific historical moment, so we (cis women) can be like “oh so sad that’s how it was in the 1970s, radfems were so awful, but it was only the whole second-wave scene that was the problem, glad that’s over.”
Like have we forgotten the fact that Sylvia only died in 2002? And she died young, if she were still alive she wouldn’t even be 65 yet. I know hella older ppl in NYC who knew her personally, and hella “leaders” of the NYC queer scene pulled horrific shit on her constantly in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, like literally until the day she died (ppl from Empire State Pride agenda literally went to St. Vincents to beef with her on her death bed) Where are the video tapes/memorializing of that shit?
N now the Manhattan LGBT center on 13th st has a room dedicated to her memory, despite the fact that very center permanently banned her in 1995 for daring to suggest they should let homeless QTPOC sleep there in sub-zero weather.
N now there’s a whole homeless trans youth shelter on 36th st named after her, Sylvia’s Place, that kicked my TWOC friend out on the streets for testing positive for marijuana; failing to recognize how fucked up that is in a shelter named after a woman who struggled with addiction all her life, and was very vocal about the relationship between drug use and the stress of living under constant threats of violence.
N from the late 90s onward rich gays and lesbians openly fought against Sylvia to try to shut down 24/7 access to the piers that she n hella other QTPOC cruised and lived on bc they were bringing down the property values of their multi-million west village apartments.
N like 90% of the individual people who perpetuated fucked up violence against Sylvia are still alive and high-profile leaders in the NYC LGBT “community” today.
So like yes, good, remember the oppressive weight of our history of transmisogyny…but also remember that this shit specifically ain’t even history, it’s the current reality of the NYC queer/trans hierarchy today—like not even figuratively, literally the same people who pulled shit like this on Sylvia are still alive n well n all over NYC cutting the ribbons to the newest Sylvia Rivera memorial n eulogizing her like they never tried to fucking kill her themselves.
Queer! Ah, do we really have to use that word? It’s trouble. Every gay person has his or her own take on it. For some it means strange and eccentric and kind of mysterious. That’s okay, we like that. But some gay girls and boys don’t. They think they’re more normal than strange.
And for others “queer” conjures up those awful memories of adolescent suffering. Queer. It’s forcibly bittersweet and quaint at best — weakening and painful at worst. Couldn’t we just use “gay” instead? It’s a much brighter word and isn’t it synonymous with “happy?” When will you militants grow up and get over the novelty of being different?
WHY QUEER
Well, yes, “gay” is great. It has its place. But when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we’ve chosen to call ourselves queer.
Using “queer” is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. It’s a way of telling ourselves we don’t have to be witty and charming people who keep our lives discreet and marginalized in the straight world.
We use queer as gay men loving lesbians and lesbians loving being queer. Queer, unlike GAY, doesn’t mean MALE. And when spoken to other gays and lesbians it’s a way of suggesting we close ranks, and forget (temporarily) our individual differences because we face a more insidious common enemy.
Yeah, QUEER can be a rough word but it is also a sly and ironic weapon we can steal from the homophobe’s hands and use against him
ACT UP (1990) “Queer Nation Manifesto" originally distributed anonymously at New York pride. (via secretgaystuff)
Remember that queer history is global. There is not one country in the world that has no queer community and no queer history. No matter what the laws may be queer people have always existed and we have always made history and never let anyone tell you differently.
This goes double for trans identities. As long as the human race has existed, we have existed.
We were always there. Despite the majority consensus.
It’s also important to remember that a lot of what you consider part of queer identity is NOT universal. Seeing this specific gender identity as inherent, unchanging and something that sets you apart from the mainstream is not universal. Queer people not being the mainstream is not universal. The needs and desires we ascribe to queer people are not universal.
Queer is universal, our narrative of what it means is not.
So I’m going to be bitter and old here for a minute.
The absolute refusal to allow anyone to use queer as an umbrella is both novel and regressive (I know, I know). For decades, queer was an accepted and neutral way to concisely refer to a coalition of loosely connected communities and identities. Queer theory, queer film, queer spaces, queer history.
This use came after another few decades of committed work in reclaiming the word from oppressors who flat out stole it from us.
It took a lot of effort to wrestle it back out of their hands, and now I’m expected to just give it over to them because decades of unity and collective action and shared experience don’t matter because a handful of (usually white, almost exclusively american) kids on this godawful website have deicded it’s illegal for me to “force it on others” and that I should instead just let them for LGBT or gay or whatever else on me.
Like, fuck off?
Fuck off.
I am going to refer to my community in the way that I have been doing for an entire lifetime. Not just my specific identity, which is queer as fuck, but the whole fucking shebang.
And I will not hand the word back over to straight people with a nice little ribbon and a coat of polish and say “here, some kids decided it was cool if I let you stab them with this word so here you go” like
Fucking, why would I ever.
Frankly, and I know how people are going to react to this but, frankly?
I damned well will use queer to refer to my community as well as myself, and anyone who wants to take it away from me can take it over my COLD DEAD QUEER LITTLE FINGERS.
I will not sit by and let antsy, nervous kids who don’t know a damn thing about our history talk down to me about how “well, actually” when they can’t even recognize the fact that trans people were still being policed out of here literally three fucking years ago.
The presumption and the ignorance are staggering.
So yeah.
Queer as in fuck you people in particular.
And, to my followers who are made uncomfortable by this, well. I will regret losing you on some level, but not enough to stop.
I fully intend to use queer as the umbrella term it has been for my entire life. LGBT never did my intersex, pansexual ass any favours anyway.
My point is, I’m not going to be referring to the “LGBT” community at all, anymore. It’s going to be 100% queer here, in a more conscious and consistent way than it has been before. Because, you see, even people who do use queer as an identity unashamedly have gotten into this pattern of being apologetic or conditional about it, with a constant, overbearing tone that even when we do use queer as a community term with have to hedge it and gentle it because it’s so dangerous.
but it’s fuckign not.
We spent decades pulling the danger out of it.
And ‘m not going to let it sneak back in.
Every time someone says “queer is a slur, you shouldn’t use it” I feel like they’re trying to fucking gaslight me. Like, I was there when it got reclaimed. I read “Queer Science”, I saw the “Queer Studies Departments” in college and the majors in Queer Theory. Kids do not get to invalidate my life out of ignorance. And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with, because how would the kids who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about know to invalidate that word?
You go. Reclaim that reclamation. I’ll probably use LGBT+ and queer interchangeably, like I always have, and if some kid tries to lecture my 47-year-old ass on the matter I’m just going to have to look at them over my imaginary librarian glasses and tell them “no. you’re wrong. Go back to school, kid, you need to remember you’re sharing the world with adults and there is a consensual reality you have entered into. You don’t get to make it up from scratch any more than I did.”
And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with
Because it’s absolutely surreal to see someone who is fifteen years old speak as if queer’s been used to constantly attack and smear and belittle and insult them, when they’re about twenty years too late, at the very least, to have gone through that as a teenager. I’ve seen it happen so many times, with so many teenagers on here, that it reads honestly like a script – like a Discourse Point someone’s taught them that they need to trot out as an argument, always and forever, amen. I made this connection over a year ago, when the screaming against ‘queer’ started in earnest on here and thought about it more in-depth when a number of very young activists both here and on Twitter told me unironically and with a straight face that they took all of their discourse points from the likes of leftbians and other exclusionists, starting with your garden-variety aphobes and biphobes and ending with outright radfems / TWERFs / SWERFs.
That was the lightbulb moment for me. Question:
what group has managed to spread their posts and their ideas far and wide on Tumblr, because people reblog without checking the source or reading between the lines?
and what group has had a vicious ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’ as both a self-descriptor and an umbrella-term for decades now?
The answer to both is radfems. I was there ten years ago when they were absolutely driving themselves into a frothing lather over the fact that a very large number of LGBTQIAP+ youth were describing ourselves and our communities as queer uncontroversially – seriously, this was so common on the English-speaking queer youth forums I used to frequent back then that no one batted an eyelash, specifically because the work of reclamation had already been done for decades and if, asked, the vast majority of people answered that they preferred queer because it was INCLUSIVE (which is and has always been the kryptonite for groups of people whose ideas revolved around gatekeeping the community and their precious selves being the arbiters of who gets in and who stays out), Radfems quickly realized that they weren’t going to be able to demonize the word in the eyes of Gen Xers or people at the older end of the Gen Y generation in the community, because we’d either contributed to the work of reclamation or spent our whole fucking lives in communities where queer was a badge of pride.
So, in what is honestly an absolutely brilliant move and which I’d be almost tempted to admire, if I didn’t want to spit everyone involved right between the eyes, radfems and other exclusionists targeted much younger LGBTQIAP+ people, leapfrogging a generation. Tumblr, in this sense, has been absolutely vital, both in giving them access to very young people who were just discovering themselves and whose knowledge of community history was nonexistent and in being built in such a way that radfems could make their posts go viral and attract tens of thousands of reblogs, if not more, if they knew to word them in just the right way (I’ve lost count of the number of what, at a shallow glance, seem like very decent PSAs on consent, but that at a closer reading were actually anti-BDSM screeds, easy to see for anyone who knows the dogwhistles).
If radfems have managed to mire this place in their ideas intensely enough that they’ve turned their anti-kink crusade into an omnipresent thing in certain progressive communities on Tumblr, it’s not impossible to make the logical leap that they’ve managed to do so with their decades-long anti-queer crusade as well.
I’d laugh and clap at the ingeniousness of it all, if it didn’t involve obliterating decades of community history, solidarity and reclamation efforts.
Please note this. Regardless of how you personally feel about the word, this backlash against it happened much more recently than many people seem to think. And it’s worth pointing out who benefits from the backlash, and it sure as hell isn’t the people who gave decades of their lives to make the word a sign of inclusivity and acceptance.
Digging deep into our prejudices, into what influences our thinking (especially online, where so little is vetted properly, just nodded at and passed on) can be painful for some, but it is absolutely necessary. Heather Hogan took heat for doing just that (read this thread), but she makes sense: if we don’t acknowledge where this comes from and do the work in order to fully understand it and free ourselves from it, we’re just spinning our wheels in a rut that benefits the very people and the ideologies that are corrupting and seeking to destroy us from within.
Queer African American Women and the History of Marriage
This photo and headline accompanied an article from the October 15, 1970 issue of Jet magazine. They reveal that long before the recent struggle for marriage equality began, African American women who love women have engaged with the institution of marriage and have fought to make it their own.
Edna Knowles, on the left, and Peaches Stevens were wed in Liz’s Mark III Lounge, a gay bar on the South Side of Chicago, “before a host of friends and well wishers.” The article ended by noting, “although the duo has a type of ‘marriage license’ in their possession, the state’s official marriage license bureau reported it had no record of their license.” This ending serves to remind Jet readers that Knowles and Stevens’ union was not legitimate in the eyes of the state, as does the use of quotes around the word “married” in the headline.
However, decades prior to this bold public display of queer affection, African American female couples in New York strategized alternative ways to obtain marriage licenses in the 1920s and 30s:
“Marriage ceremonies were held with large wedding parties which included several bridesmaids, attendants, and other wedding party members. Actual marriage licenses were obtained by either masculinizing the first name, or having a gay male surrogate obtain the license for the marrying couple. These marriage licenses were placed on file with the New York City Marriage Bureau.” – Luvenia Pinson, “The Black Lesbian: Times Past-Time Present,” Womanews, May 1980 p. 8.
Also during the 1930s, popular performer Gladys Bentley was making a living singing bawdy tunes and playing piano late into the night at various clubs all over New York, including one named after her.
Bentley married her white girlfriend in Atlantic City in a ceremony to which she invited friends in the entertainment industry:
“Columnist Louis Sobol remembered Bentley coming over to his table one night and whispering, ‘I’m getting married tomorrow and you’re invited.’ When Sobol asked who the lucky man was to be, she giggled and replied, ‘Man? Why boy you’re crazy. I’m marryin’ —-’ and she named another woman singer.” – Eric Garber, “Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger Who Sang the Blues,” Out/Look, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1988, pp. 52-61.
These examples show some of the various ways queer African American women have created public rituals to express their relationships and have therefore insisted on their rights to full citizenship, many decades prior to the current struggle for marriage equality.
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.
Wall sticker in Marlborough lesbian pub, Brighton.
i’m actually realizing this now
but the original poster said “queer power” and someone erased that and replaced it with “gay power”
real classy
#is this real
Well. I’m not exactly an expert at image analysis, but the bottom text in the first one looks much cleaner than the top text while the second one matches better. Also, the creases in the second one on the Q and U seem like the sort of detail that wouldn’t be faked. Finally, this actually matches up significantly better to “queer” politics than “gay” politics; it was always queers who advocated and took the front lines in direct action.
If you put the image in an editor or just view the full size of the first image, it becomes very obvious that the text on the bottom was added later: all of the vertical lines in every letter are pixel perfect straight lines. That is basically impossible with a photo of a poster that is both visibly at an angle, and has paper weathering and other distortion. Look at the verticals of the white text to compare. The only distortion of the text is the jpg artifacts we would expect in that level of contrast. There is no lighting on the pink text either, another highly suspicious trait.
Additionally, if you crop out the pink text in op and run an image search you get the second photo, as well as four or five other photos of the poster, all reading “queer power.”
With the pink text left in, however, the only version of the poster is this exact image, sourcing to op.
I want every single person who ever argued with me on That Queer Post to take a long, hard look at this. I have been told at least dozens of times that “nobody is saying you can’t identify as queer,” that I’m “ignoring history,” that they’re not trying to shift back to gay, etc.
Now, here’s this post, in which queer people are having their art defaced in order to rewrite their identity. Where they’re being forcibly rewritten as gay. Where history is being literally goddamn erased. It’s got three times the notes of That Queer Post, and as far as I can tell, @bifoxstiles is the first one to challenge this narrative. And I’m not gonna hold my breath on y’all to call out OP.
They’re literally stealing our history, rewriting it into a new version that excludes more than half of the community. And nobody’s challenging this. You’re too busy trying to shut down inclusive, egalitarian language.
Shame on every last one of you.
Uhhhh. That’s like a really famous poster, at least if you are over a certain age. I recognized it immediately.
Yeah. It… it never said ‘Gay Power’ originally. It said ‘Queer Power.’
What the actual fuck.
OKAY KIDS. HISTORY LESSON TIME.
Ironically, just before this crossed my dash, Oxford University Press shared a link to a new archive of queer oral history. If not for Tumblr’s recent push to wipe “queer” from our collective memory, I wouldn’t have thought twice about OUP using the term. After all, it was chanted in pride and defiance when over a million of us participated in the 1993 March on Washington to demand an end to discrimination…
Video clip from that day: “We’ve come to Washington to show everyone that we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going anywhere!”
In the past year, I’ve seen some Tumblr members trying to suppress the word “queer,” just as people back then tried to suppress us. The excuse is that it’s sometimes used as a slur. But so is “gay.” In my 45 years, I have heard/seen “gay” used as an slur far more often.
At first, I tried to respect the fact that “queer” bothered some Tumblr users, even though it was painful for me to see queer-positive posts tagged “q slur.” But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that caving in to those asking us to drop the term “queer” would permit homophobic and/or transphobic sensibilities to define our identities.Do we have to drop “gay” now as well, or tag it “g slur”? Since when did we stop reclaiming these words as a matter of pride?
Isn’t this just the latest ploy of internalized homophobia/transphobia sneaking up on us?
Unfortunately, erasing “queer” from our vocabulary has hurtful real-world consequences.
Silencing “queer” silences many of those who fought, marched, rioted and died for your rights. It erases those of us who are queer but not gay: trans, intersex, nonbinary, lesbian, bisexual, aromantic, asexual people, and more (see why the term is so necessary?) Erasure/minimization of queer people is how we end up with disrespectful historical revisionism like that Stonewall movie. Or the Photoshopped poster above, rewriting our history with a lie.
And that’s the real kicker.
Erase “queer” from our vocabulary, and we erase future generations’ ability to learn about their past. How will they be able to find LBGTA+ history, if you teach them not to use one of the main keywords they need to search for to find it?
How much of our past and present community will be rendered invisible and their needs ignored (this article is really, REALLY worth a read), if those now lobbying against the term “queer” are successful?
Decades ago, when being out was taking a huge risk, we chanted, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” It would be a bitter irony if, even as mainstream society becomes “used to it,” as demonstrated from the Supreme Court to the bridge of the U.S.S.Enterprise, our own community becomes less “used to it.”
Think about the forces of prejudice who were trying to silence us when that “queer power” sign was made. Please don’t let them win.
Silencing “queer” silences many of those who fought, marched, rioted and died for your rights. It erases those of us who are queer but not gay: trans, intersex, nonbinary, lesbian, bisexual, aromantic, asexual people, and more (see why the term is so necessary?) Erasure/minimization of queer people is how we end up with disrespectful historical revisionism like that Stonewall movie. Or the Photoshopped poster above, rewriting our history with a lie.
I’m from that generation that saw young friends die over this issue. A single word is not your enemy. Being ignorant about our past and perpetuating ignorance is.
horrifying fun fact of the day: so greenwich village, which is the neighborhood in nyc where the stonewall riots took place and which was a v important gay center from like the 50s-80s, is now super swanky and full of touristy boutiques and expensive apartments and stuff. st vincent’s, the local hospital which had the first aids ward on the east coast, closed a couple years ago and is being replaced with luxury condos. all of this is sad enough, BUT i just found out that one of the reasons it’s so gentrified now is that the aids crisis was really awesome for real estate. ppl were dying in thousands and leaving empty apartments behind, which their landlords would then rent at higher prices until only rich ppl could afford to live there 🙂
elaphaia said: also during the aids crisis landlords would shut their heat off in the winter knowing it would kill ppl so they could then rent 4 higher 🙂
Reminder that the cishet dominated government didn’t just ignore the effects of HIV/AIDS because of how concentrated the deaths were in other communities because they hate us, but also because they materially benefited from it – because they owned most of the buildings, because our partners and other kin had no legal right to our possessions, and because they commodified and monopolized antiretrovirals to bilk us.
Never forget ACT UP NYC that consisted of marginalized members of the LGBT community, many of whom were dying of AIDS. All of whom fought hard and valiantly against AIDS and HIV/AIDS discrimination. Never never forget about the brave men and women who smuggled drugs for AIDS patients into the US because the FDA was taking too long to approve drugs here and people were dying.
Never forget that people were often kicked out of their housing because they were unable to afford rent and treatment, because their partner died, or because of outright discrimination.
Enjoy your luxury apartments. I hope you remember the men and women who died so you could live there.
Just remembered Mimi’s line in RENT. “It’s nothing/they turned off my heat/and I’m a little weak on my feet.”
Jesus. I know this was before a lot of tumblr’s time, but we can’t forget this shit.
The Doctor Is Out 