Go Ahead And Shoot, You'll Be Doing Me A Favour. @breaded-tablelamp - Tumblr Blog

“Terf is a slur used to silence us” dang bitch I wish it worked shut the fuck up

hey remember how awhile back i mentioned that tiktok has a whole trend where people mix cleaning supplies well i redownloaded tiktok so im finally able to show you what i mean

diet-soap

I put my bare hands in this sink and get a chemical burn so bad it oozes and bubbles nonstop for days

bathroomcube

i have GREAT news for you

riseofthedruids

potion of cough up blood

hottiewitabloggie

people are so fucking stupid oh my god

tami-taylors-hair

Cleaning TikTok: We’ve mixed the perfect cleaning solution!

Everyone Else: You’ve created mustard gas is what you’ve done. Your lungs look like you’ve just returned from the Western Front.

ferrousferrule

Jesus fucking christ. One time I accidentally mixed an ammonia scrub and a bleach spray and gave myself a migraine in 15 minutes how the fuck are they even still standing.

thickness-protection-program

sunrisedespair

Time for a health and safety lesson.

See below for a chart on what household cleaners to NEVER EVER MIX EVER OR YOU CAN (AND WILL PROBABLY) DIE OR OTHERWISE BECOME EXTREMELY FUCKED UP AND NOT IN A FUN WAY BUT IN THE HOSPITAL AND/OR GRAVEYARD WAY:

The above is not a complete list, but these are extremely common in most households and therefore are the most likely chemical fuck-ups to occur.

DO NOT MIX HOUSEHOLD CHEMICALS.

DO NOT MIX CLEANING AGENTS.

DO NOT MIX CERTAIN ASTRINGENTS. (HYDROGEN PEROXIDE IS OFTEN IN FIRST AID KITS OR WOUND SPRAYS AND CAN CAUSE A REACTION IN SMALL AMOUNTS IF MIXED WITH THINGS IT SHOULD NOT BE MIXED WITH EVEN ACCIDENTALLY ON A SURFACE ETC.)

DO NOT MIX ANY CHEMICALS THAT YOU ARE NOT 100% SURE ARE SAFE TO MIX. (SPOILER: MOST THINGS ARE NOT REALLY SAFE TO MIX AND SOMETIMES COMBINING SAFE ONES ACTUALLY MAKES THEM LESS EFFECTIVE ANYWAY, SO JUST DON’T COMBINE THIS KIND OF SHIT!)

YOU ARE PROBABLY NOT A CHEMIST. PLEASE DO NOT TURN YOUR KITCHEN/BATHROOM/HOME INTO A LAB ACCIDENT.

IF YOU ARE A CHEMIST, YOU SHOULD STILL NOT FUCK AROUND. MANY OF YOU DO NOT RELIABLY USE YOUR SAFETY GOGGLES OR THE CORRECT TYPE OF SAFETY GOGGLES. (IF YOU’RE THE TYPE OF CHEMIST WHO DOESN’T ENSURE ADEQUATE VENTILATION IN YOUR WORK AREA, I WILL NOT TRUST YOU WITH BLEACH. COMPLACENCY KILLS.)

CONCLUSION: STOP MIXING CHEMICALS!

YOU ARE NOT PROFESSOR X, AND YOU WILL NOT END UP CREATING THE POWERPUFF GIRLS.

YOU WILL ONLY CREATE A NEW INVOICE FOR YOUR LOCAL FUNERAL HOME.

I AM YELLING AT YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND WANT YOU TO BE SAFE.

TO ANY DUMBASS TEENAGERS OUT THERE, I WANT YOU TO SURVIVE LONG ENOUGH TO BECOME DUMBASS ADULTS.

PLEASE DO NOT DIE.

wickedwonderlandd

The fumes from this vid burned all the hair off my body,melted my skin, and then killed me t.f

lonelyassassin96

Hey, this actually very useful information to have if you are a kid or otherwise don’t know.

bettsplendens

I feel like the “may cause death” part on that chart needs to be majorly bigger. The descriptions of the first two sound like they’d be unpleasant, but “unpleasant” doesn’t cut it. Needs to have a way bigger “THIS IS HOW THEY KILLED PEOPLE IN WARS BEFORE IT WAS OUTLAWED” warning.

free-egg-voucher

corporations trying to profit off of queer people by showing their support for only one month of the year is bad

and

it’s fun to watch conservatives get pissed that they can’t shop at target anymore because the big bad rainbows will corrupt their children :(

and

the existence of rainbow capitalism in the first place proves that society is now in a place where supporting queer people is the more profitable and thus more popular opinion and that means something

are all viewpoints that can absolutely coexist

evetheealien

white people ruined the non sexual intimacy of nakedness methinks

evetheealien

i think that for a species that come into the world naked and have such an easy time understanding sex, its ironic that the world at large cant accept that intimacy cant occur outside of sexual desire. there is intimacy in a shared bath between a mother and her child. between brothers sharing a bed. between friends changing in the same room.

and i said white people bc i feel like literally everyone else figured that shit out already? like in public bath houses and women walking around with their breasts exposed. europe got a hold of chriatianity and decided to put a worldwide ban nakedness and put these restrictions on the human body, bastardizing the nature with which we come into the world. its dirty, its deviant, its dangerous to be exposed in the appropriate spaces or ones own home.

the way young people have to cover up in their homes before guests come, the way shorts and other summer clothes are only perceived as sexual in nature and not the most effective way of combating a million degree heat, the way people freak out when they see a bra strap like it wasnt them who made bitches wear bras in the first place

i think we should let bodies be bodies be bodies

evetheealien

tl;dr dont be surprised if one day i just-

transgender men in japan in a trans-friendly hot spring in beppu japan

himba girls from a village in kaokoland, namibia

indian boys playing in a varanasi ghat

sawasawako-archived

[text ID: a tweet by Aqqalu @uyarakq that reads, “nudity shouldn’t be sexual. my ancestors walked the tundra with their tits out and nobody cared until those with a bible came.” / end ID]

chainsawmansheart

Native women near me used to just wear basket hats and skirts and maybe necklaces for special occasions. It was common for ppl of both sexes and all ages to bath and sweat in sweat houses together, naked of course, bc nudity wasn’t that sexualized until the colonizers came.

genderoutlaws

Members of Boston’s Lesbian Avengers eating fire at a reproductive rights rally | 1995

genderoutlaws

[The fire-eating] grew out of tragedy. Last year, a lesbian and a gay man, Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock, burned to death in Salem, Ore., after a Molotov cocktail was tossed into the apartment they shared. A month later, on Halloween, at a memorial to the victims in New York City, the Avengers (then newly organized) gave their response to the deaths. They ate fire, chanting, as they still do:

“The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.”

lavendersage

there is a small ceramic frog where my brain should be

makingdonalddrumpfagain

minmaneth

Yep, worth reblogging everytime I see it.

jumpingjacktrash

when i watch old movies i’m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad, it’s just often kind of artificial? it’s acting-y. it’s like stage acting.

it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40′s, or even the 70′s.

the performances we take for granted in adventure movies and comedies now would’ve blown the critics’ socks off in the days of ‘casablanca’.

lostsometime

there’s a weird period in film where you can see the transition happening. right around the fifties, I think. the example my prof used when i learned about it was marlon brando in “a streetcar named desire” - he was using stanislavski acting methods and this new hyper-realistic style and most or all of his costars were still using the old, highly-stylized way of acting. it makes it way more obvious how false it is.

jumpingjacktrash

i even noticed it in ‘the sting’, which was 1973. i actually think they used it on purpose to get the viewer fished in by the second layer of the con; the grifters at the bookie’s were acting like they were acting, and the grifters playing the feds were acting for reals. if you’re used to setting your suspension of disbelief at the first set’s level, then the second set are gonna blow right past you.

or possibly the guys playing the grifters playing the feds just happened to be using the realistic style for their own reason, and it coincidentally made the plot twist work better. but i like to think it was deliberate.

jumpingjacktrash

i was thinking about this again, and when you know what to look for, it’s really obvious: old movies are stage acting, not movie acting. it just didn’t really occur to anyone to make the camera bend to the actors, rather than the other way around. just image search old movie screenshots and clips and gifs, you’ll see it. the way people march up to their mark and stand there, the way they deliver their lines rather than inhabiting the character. the way they’re framed in an unmoving center-stage.

this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it’s a tableau. it lives in a box.

now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn’t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren’t stuck inside the box. but i couldn’t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they’re not traveling, they’re moving around, and they treat things outside the ‘stage’ as real and interact with them, even if it’s only to stare in delighted horror.

as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here’s a comedy punch:

here, also, is a comedy punch:

the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn’t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone’s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.

i’m not saying this to dis old movies, i’m just fascinated and impressed by how much the art has advanced!

honey-wine-and-time

I’m going to bed, but I also want to say that I think, without actually bothering to explore it and make sure, that there’s been a similar shift in comics, probably related to the shift in acting/camera work. And I think you still see remnants of old “stage acting” comics in the three-panel style set ups (you might still see it in long form comics, but you’d probably call it bad composition)

mudkippey

Now can someone explain why people in old films talked Like That

garrettauthor

Y’all, THAT’S HOW PEOPLE TALKED.

Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special - just people talking.

AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.

It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,

“WELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”

“OH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND’S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.”

“WELL IT’S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU’LL GET THROUGH IT.”

“WELL I SUPPOSE I’VE GOT TO, HAVEN’T I JOE?”

All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you’ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.

I don’t know if people talked like that because it was in movies but I suspect it’s the other way around.

arcadiaego

Same goes for the UK - When they made the TV series The Hour, set in the 1950s, they had to tell the very well spoken, privately educated Dominic West to tone down his imitation of a 1950s newsreader because being accurate would have sounded to a 2011 TV audience as if he was doing a parody. When you watch Brief Encounter they’re not speaking like that because they can’t act, they’re speaking like that because it was the norm on screen. It now sounds unnatural because it’s not the norm any more.

Obviously there were people with regional accents and who didn’t speak in a heightened manner, but they didn’t get to be on TV or in movies unless they were villains. (And usually the villains were putting it on, like Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock. Sure, he was Richard Attenborough, but he was brought up in the Midlands, and by the on-screen standards of the time, that was common.)

Even the Queen’s very posh accent has changed over the last 50 years and become “more common" - check out newsreel footage etc for proof - and recordings of her father are almost like someone from a foreign country (well, it is the past).

tzikeh

There is, for many film historians/critics, an actual turning point from mannered, theatrical, or “overplayed” acting on screen to naturalistic/American Method realism on screen. It happens in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, during a traveling shot in which Marlon Brando’s character and Eva Marie Saint’s character are walking together. Eva Marie Saint accidentally drops her glove in the middle of the scene. Marlon Brando instinctively picks it up as his character, and continues the dialog, all the while playing with the glove–turning it about, trying it on, etc. Eva Marie Saint stuck with him, never broke, and the director didn’t call “cut.”

Before that scene in that movie, if an actor dropped a prop by accident, they would have re-shot the scene–because Brando mostly disappeared out of frame as he bent down to pick up the glove, and (as is explained above) movies were framed to keep the people in the scene in the frame. I

t’s a pretty famous scene in movies because Brando’s character doesn’t give the glove back, but instead uses it to amplify what the two characters are experiencing, naturally and without artifice. It is, for all intents and purposes, the exact moment that screen acting changed.

niqaeli

Okay, but here’s the thing about television specifically: given the size of TV screens when they first came out? Stage acting was the only thing that could be READ. Watch Star Trek: TOS on a modern screen and it looks absurdly overacted. Film of the same era is not, and yet the TV is.

And that’s not a fault of the actors; they were all very capable of naturalistic film acting (yes, even Shatner) – as the later movies would bear out. It’s because they were acting for the small screen, not the big one.

Stage acting and stage makeup is what it is because people are far enough away from the stage that you have to cake on the makeup garishly and exaggerate the hell out of your for it to be VISIBLE. And in early television? Yeah, those constraints actually very much applied. You could move the camera, sure, but the quantity of visual information you could send was just damned limited.

jenniferrpovey

Here’s another example of that.

Watch some Classic Dr Who. You may or may not notice it without watching for it, but every shot of the TARDIS is taken from the same angle.

The TARDIS was, at that time, a stage set. The camera was behind the fourth (Sixth?) wall. It was fixed. And most TV sets were built like this. They had a specific fourth wall and everything was filmed from that angle.

Fast forward to the new series, and you’ll see that the TARDIS is being filmed from different angles all the time, including following the actor around.

Three things have changed:

1. Cameras have become much smaller.

2. Set building for TV has developed as an art. Those early sets were built by people who were trained to build stage sets.

3. Overall technological improvement resulting in things being cheaper.

The TARDIS set that was just retired? Each of its walls was designed to slide out. So you could put the camera anywhere you wanted. Presumably this is the case with the new one too. They couldn’t imagine doing that back in the day. Nor could they afford the complexities of a set like that.

It’s actually my opinion that TV has very much matured as an art form…this century. This decade. We are doing and seeing things that couldn’t be done ten years ago, twenty. Heck, even five.

finnglas

Going back to speech patterns for a moment – I was a young child in the 80s, so my memories of the norms of the time period are limited (especially because I was incredibly sheltered), but the books I read at the time and the popular movies of the time all have this kind of – whimsical, sardonic speech pattern going on. Think John Waters dialogue.

I always thought it was kind of stylized. But then I ended up in a weird part of YouTube one night and found someone’s home video of just walking aroud a 7-11 convenience store at midnight talking to people in Orlando, Florida. Just trying out their new camcorder for shits and giggles, talking to other customers, talking to the cashier, etc. And you know what? They all talked like a goddamn John Waters movie. It was the weirdest thing, like I was watching outtakes from The Breakfast Club or Say Anything. I expected one of the Cusacks to walk into frame any second.

Anyway, so I think it’s super cool how human speech and interaction shifts over time, and if you’re living through the shift, you don’t really notice it as it happens.

ms-demeanor

A) I think you mean John Hughes but I’m very amused by the idea of everyone talking like it’s a John Waters movie

B) This is still happening only now you can pick up people’s net accents. My friends with tumblrs have tumblr diction. My friends who only spend time on facebook for social media sound VERY different. People who use twitter heavily put emphasis on different things and have a different meme literacy (you all know the difference between the way greentext sounds and the way “RIP but I’m different” sounds).

Anyway have fun listening for tumblr accents now

terulakimban

What gets me is that I had a medium-strong tumblr accent before I joined tumblr. ( @magikarpjumpest and I have talked about this a few times) The way I break clauses, my stress patterns, hell, I do the Midsentence Emphatic Capitalization in speech. And I think that ties in to why I do the Giant Tumblr Rambles in a way that I just… don’t, on FB. I’m too rambly for twitter, and while I can use ‘tag group dialogue’ as a facebooker, and occasionally will in speech (yes, I code-switch my social media dialect in person; I’m conscious of the fact that I mirror, but it’s not generally a thing I decide to do), that’s not my default setting for phrasing. Established tone/accent conventions of tumblr already correspond somewhat to my natural way of speaking, and it’s much easier to get two forms of dialogue that are already close to merge. It also means that engaging with longposts here is much easier because people are more likely to be using humor and syntax that feels natural to me. Twitter threads have a concision to them. Greentext boards -I can read them, but it’s like reading something with a very heavy transcribed accent that I almost never hear in person -it’s a headache-inducing amount of effort that’s usually not worth it to me for a downtime activity. FB doesn’t do paragraph breaks the same way, and the emoticon usage is different enough that I don’t like dealing with it.

yournewapartment

This is a wild read from start to finish!!

prismatic-bell

Having lived through early Web 2.0, I can tell you that “accents through time” also applies to internet “accents.”

You know how people now will end sentences with “Lol” to indicate they’re not mad (e.g. “I have to go now lol, Mom’s home”)? Yeah, we didn’t used to do that. We also used to have a sarcasm tag! I’m going to apologize to the people with screen readers and tell you I promise this is reasonably short. It looked like this:

“Yeah, well, Obama is a ~*~*~Muslim.~*~*~

The asterisk action tags used to be a non-ironic, non-cringey thing, too. Like this:

“NINA GUESS WHAT”

“What??? :D”

“(Typing notification)”

“*waits*”

The term “teal deer” to replace “TL;dr” was a thing. And, of course, in the early 2000s you had 13375p34k, which for younger folks was “leetspeak.” One is the Homestuck characters uses it, but it’s not just a quirk—people really talked like that.

We are far enough into the internet era that even internet accents have changed.

friendlyfrankenstein

This is a *fantastic* post and something I find very fascinating, because I tend to focus really strongly on character dialogue and speech. Also I’ve definitely noticed that my internet ‘accent’ is definitely slightly antiquated. I’m still much more likely to use a :3 or a -3- text emoticon over a smiley, and I’m not in the habit of using reaction gifs, and I definitely still do actions inside asterix’.

then again I’m also the kind of person who uses words like antiquated, so I wonder if soon enough it’ll all sound the same amount of old fashioned?

ms-demeanor

It drives me up the wall that asterisks on discord mean bolding or italicising or whatever.

NO! No, I’m not changing the emphasis of the word, that is not what I want.

What want is to indicate an action dammit!

*throws hands up in the air*

digitaldiscipline

As one who “grew up” using IRC or similar stuff in their early online experience (or folks who joined because of MMORPGs) - the alternative to *doing this* is /doing this

That fucking *fuck with what’s between the asterisks* shit was obviously coded by folks who didn’t grow up in that era, and has resulted in a whole lot of *types only one goddamn asterisk like a peasant

firecoloredwater

Not to derail even further but in case anyone who cares sees: you CAN use asterisks on discord. You just have to mess with it a little so that it doesn’t interpret them as code.

The simplest way is to leave a space between one or both of the asterisks and the words *like this * or * like this* or * like this *. The spaces look messy to me, but the asterisks stay asterisks and don’t italicize anything. I haven’t tried this with double asterisks but I assume it would be the same.

The first version I worked out was to type two asterisks, a period, one asterisk, the text, and then a closing asterisk, **.*like this*. This results in the asterisks on either side of the period italicizing the period, and the other two showing up as normal asterisks. Of course the period is still visible and it’s more complicated, so the spaces method is probably better, but the point is that it’s not too complicated to mess up discord’s asterisk to italics conversion and keep the asterisks visible for actions.

paragrin

Or a single backslash before a format tag will disable it on Discord. So [ \*this* ] will come out as *this* and not this.

bisexualgarrus

fuck the seven deadly sins. reblog and tag your most toxic trait: aggression, suspicion, manipulativeness, dominance, risk-taking, callousness or grandiosity

#grandiosity #or #pessimism

picsthatmakeyougohmm

fanonical

i love how everyone has a pokemon that they’re ride or die for like everyone just picks one lil guy to stan forever

mine is absol

#snorlax #!!#i would throw hands for snorlax #even though snorlax is canonically almost 7ft tall

seymour-butz-stuff

Testify!

thedreadpiratejames

Wait staff makes $2.13/hr and then have to humble themselves for your gratuity to get anything else.

You wanted free market, now you’re getting free market.

pancakeke

good morning my fellow bastards of monday

pancakeke

that’s the spirit!

pisshandkerchief-deactivated202

really feeling this today

desinteresse

Heist movies aka found family trope for bastards

mens-rights-activia

in-sumerian-haze

whatever you think misanthropy is, none of it comes even close to the sheer hatred that the average gentrifier has for all signs of humanity, of life

oddlittlefandomist

wow i’m 100% down to slap whoever absolutely fucking ruined that lovely house

#but it was so pretty

star-anise

My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”

freedom-of-fanfic

“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”

aphilologicalbatman-deactivated

thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy

brs-love

Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?

star-anise

Oh heck yeah.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad). Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill.

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.

I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.

elfwreck

They died of AIDS because

Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.

Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.

Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.

Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.

Picture from 1993:

We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.

psychoactive-teratogen

As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.

smallswingshoes

This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.

mycroftrh

I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died. He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

AIDS is not just history. Neither is homophobia.

madgastronomer

Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.

specificfuckery

carnivalseb

If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the ‘60s, except in lockstep with population growth. I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.

Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.

purplepints

This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

Sing for two.

mg-dl

My fave part of this post is the repeated usage of the word “queer”. In a discussion about the hatred of LGBT people and how they were left to die by the government, it’s always a great idea to call them all a slur. Can you switch it up a bit and use “fag” next time?

star-anise

There’s a really obvious reason why we’re using “queer”.

When talking about LGBTQ+ history, often we have to be really careful with the language we use, because how we understand things now is not how the people we’re talking about understood themselves at the time. We end up using phrases like, “People who we would now understand as gay or lesbian” or “experiences which modern transgender people often identify with”.

In this case? It’s because that’s the word they used.

(Many of them also used the words “fag” or “dyke”, but “queer” is more inclusive.)

When I talk about “the leading lights of queerness” I mean Queer Nation. I mean the people who contributed to Queer Theory. I mean people who deliberately chose to use that word. I mean me and my ex-girlfriend. We exist.

During the AIDS crisis especially, homophobia was so bad that a lot of people didn’t want to be known by any word associated with the gay community: Not gay, not homosexual, not queer, not anything. Epidemiologists had to create the category of “men who have sex with men” because there was literally no existing term that didn’t carry the weight of a slur. The purpose of using the word “queer” was for people to say, “Let’s stop running from the things society is calling us; let’s pick up the weapons they’ve hurled at us and start hurling them back. There is no level of socially acceptable we can be that will make them suddenly decide our lives matter. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” It meant very specifically embracing and defending their/our marginalized position.

Every word we’ve ever been known by has been a slur. We all have our own histories and flinch reactions. I grew up with “gay” and “lezzo” being used really hatefully around me, as well as “queer” and “dyke” and “fag”, and I have different comfort levels with all those different words.

/shrug emoji You can dislike the word all you like and ask that it not be used for you. But historically and today, a lot of us do use it for ourselves, and we constitute “the queer community” or “queerdom”. Which we don’t think is a bad thing. If you don’t want to join us, fine, but that doesn’t make us stop existing, and any other word you can call us would also be a slur, because our community is predicated on saying, “We are that thing you’re so afraid of. Get used to it.”

everything-a-wolf-could-want

The history in this post is so important. And so is the fact that in a post about how the queer community faced homophobia that literally cost generations of our elders their lives, there are TERFs in the damn reblogs bitching about the word queer being used.

So I’m going to add something here, because this is one of the few issues on which I refuse to remain silent.

I was born in 1988. I knew a very small number of queer people growing up, and I only knew those because they were either a) related to me ((my cousin and his life partner)) or b) because my mother happened to be friends with them. I remember in middle school, realizing I was queer and feeling like I was so alone. I had been raised to believe that it was okay to be the away I am, whatever that entailed, but I still felt alone. I didn’t know who to talk to. I had no “elders” to turn to for advice; for history lessons; for support. There was no one to help me navigate the complexities of sorting out my own personal identity or labels. My first brush with the history of the AIDs epidemic was listening to RENT on CD when my older sister borrowed it from a friend.

I had to do my own research. I had to teach myself. I had to explore and stretch and twist and bend and do everything I could not to break under the pressure of it all. But by the time I was in high school, I was realizing that I wasn’t actually alone. That a startlingly significant number of my peers were also queer. Perhaps not the same exact flavor of queer as me, but that was okay because we were all huddling under this one umbrella. And it was a really big umbrella. It had to be, to cover all of us. As we got older and found each other, our voices got louder and we realized that the sheer number of us was so much bigger that we’d been led to believe.

It would be another few years past graduation before I really started to understand that the reason we’d been led to believe there was so few of us in relation to the overall population was because our elders were dead. Killed by hatred and bigotry and violence and cruelty and neglect. We were not some small subsection of humanity, beneath the world’s notice. We were a large enough group to make change happen. We could march, and protest, and lobby. We could exist, and there were enough of us under that big umbrella of queerness to afford us a measure of support and protection.

I resisted labels for a long time. I changed the ones I used as frequently as some people change their shoes, struggling to find one that fit. I hated how nothing seemed to stick; how nothing worked for me. Except QUEER. Because queer just meant not straight. It meant different. It meant questioning and figuring it out and evolving. It meant I belonged under that umbrella with everyone else.

The loss of the generations of queer persons above me - my mother’s generation, and the generation that nestled between hers and mine, and the generation nestled between her’s and her mother’s - was a devastating blow to the queer community. Not merely because of the loss of life, the loss of loved ones, the loss of history…but because of the loss of mentorship. I grew up believing I was a small, statistical anomaly. I had no concept of the fact that I was, in actuality, part of a rather large community. It is a loss that simply cannot be overstated.

Do your research. Learn your history. Listen to the elders who survived. The march for their lives was built on battle cries like “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” and “Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you!” They fought for queer rights. There were queer studies and queer history classes. QUEER was the umbrella they built, from the sticks and stones hurled at them by their oppressors, broad enough it turned into a canopy that covered all of them. It was all the shelter they had.

And you can pry that umbrella from my cold, dead hands. I will not surrender it any other way. And by telling me that’s a slur you are announcing your own willful ignorance of the history of our community; of the sacrifices and losses of our elders. Stop listening to the hissing lies and sneered condescension of TERFs and gatekeepers. They do not have your best interests at heart, and they certainly don’t have my best interests at heart.

For the love of everything, don’t drink the Kool-aid. It’s been poisoned by bigotry and rhetoric. The goal of stripping away the umbrella of queerness from the community is to leave a very specific subset of the community exposed, because we don’t fit under the umbrellas the TERFs are holding up as acceptable. If you learn nothing else from the history of bigotry and homophobia and hatred that resulted in the AIDs epidemic killing off so many of our elders, learn this. Exclusion does not benefit or protect us.

If you are not prepared to shelter the most vulnerable among us - if you are not prepared to support and protect the members of our community who are attacked and belittled as beneath notice or less than human - than you are a part of the problem.

Which side of history do you want to be on? As for me, I’m siding with queer and everyone it shelters.

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