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@bzbwoyprince
#Breakfast #GivingThanks #Gratefulness When my needs have been met & i can say God has done more than enough. #ThankfulThursday https://www.instagram.com/p/BtBnnbVFviBrA4fTnHPzPTct-Hk_MU23dSdDqk0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1mxbi51i40lr8
#Dru been getting #FrostBitten this past month & he's been doing a good job not getting damaged by the #Frost, covering his eyes helps 😁😁😁 https://www.instagram.com/p/BslUxrnlXwKLkPabNLj_B_9c4pR5xxgd0Oa6GU0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=12w2ndjsq5low
#TBT #Family #Friendship #FaithFellowship #PJParty. Spent #Christmas with my #ChicagoFamily who have given me #NothingButLove from #DayOne to now, #GodWill place people in our path to remind us the #BloodOfChrist #MakesUsOne; #LoveUnconditionally & allow #AllThingsThroughChrist to #ConfirmAndConformCharacter. https://www.instagram.com/p/BseTWUOl-_JfuvDU08oQEiz7C4Q3YA8di8C5ps0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=133fjnzuxxf5m
#WorkingWarrior, always take time to #PausePonderPraise; it doesn't matter if your blessings may not seem or feel bountiful - they're enough. #LifeLibertyLove #AuthenticMan https://www.instagram.com/p/Bsc0kiOlVJ3MKZ-7JHS9eXZ34D_7i1Gynss8040/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=4kt45u7cksva
Remember the Muslim group who started raising funds to help pay for funerals and medical expenses for the victims in Pittsburgh?? Well. They’re not done yet. Look at this
They have increased their goal several times and exceeded it within hours. HOURS!!
Here is their latest update
They’re asking you to please donate to their other fund, to help the victims of the shooting in Kentucky. These people are beyond amazing. They give me hope for the future and restore my faith in humanity.
Here is the fund for the synagogue
Here is the fund for the victims in Kentucky
They haven’t reached their goal with this one yet. If you’re feeling compelled to donate, please donate to the Kentucky fund. Because of everything else going on, it hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention. But these two peoples lives were just as important. They were just as loved and they will be just as missed.
And because they haven’t gotten as much attention and their stories aren’t in the news as much, here’s their story. From the fund raiser.
Please pass this around. If you can’t donate, someone who sees your reblog might.
Respond to evil with good.
It has been two and half hours since I posted this and the funds raised has increased by almost $2800 !!! This is amazing !! You are wonderful people for helping in any way you can.
Keep up the great work!!
PS: the fund for the Tree Of Life victims has raised an additional $11k in the past two and half hours as well. How amazing is that ?!
Respond to evil with good
#EmbracingSelf💯 #MohawkModel #BelizeanCoolie🇧🇿 #YoungAtHeart💖 #LGBTQS🏳️🌈
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.
The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.
Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.
They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.
HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.
The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.
There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.
Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
2011
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts is a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.
AIDS at 30: A History by Victoria Harden
The Origin of AIDS by Jaques Pepin for the science of it all.
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS.
The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America.
Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaust collects his writings on AIDS.
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience
The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project
Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub
Borrowed Time: And AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette
Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Some documentaries:
Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) [hard to find]
How to Survive a Plague (2012)
We Were Here (2011)
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.
That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.
Here’s the link to the digitization: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/
As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959
I’ve had several conversations recently with younger guys for whom this part of our history isn’t well known. Here are some resources for y'all. Please, take care of one another.
http://www.aidsquilt.org/view-the-quilt/search-the-quilt
Updated link to the quilt
this is so hard to read or even think about but… it’s so important. it’s so important to understand just the …overwhelming SCALE of this. how many people died while the government did NOTHING.
Reblogging for pride
Never forget your fallen. Your people were nearly annihilated in an epidemic. Never forget how lucky we are, never forget how they tried to let us die.
speaking of jesus being the classical snarkmaster
you know that line about “if a soldier forces you to carry his pack for one mile, carry it for two”?
there was a thing where roman soldiers could demand that civilians carry their gear, but only for a mile. obviously people did not like this. they had shit to be doing. they did not want to be some rando’s pack mule any more than people today would. also, it was kind of scary, because here’s this guy with a weapon saying “you’re my fetchit bitch or else.” and you had to go off with him wherever he wanted, up to one mile.
but jesus was all about the nonviolent resistance. i mean, sure, you could run, but then maybe they see you later and point you out to the cops, it’s a small world. maybe they chase you down and kick you around a bit. hell, maybe they show you their stabs. you gonna bring a sword of your own and make a duel out of it? that’s even worse than just carrying the damn pack.
so what you do is, you just keep carrying it.
at first they don’t notice the mile’s up. but then it starts feeling kind of long. they find themselves waiting for you to call time. but you don’t. you just keep going. they start checking the landmarks. are they lost? are they dreaming? are you stealing their shit? you can’t be, can you, since you’re right there. but you’re still HOLDING it. they’re wondering if they’re ever gonna get their centurion undies back. they could ask, but waitasec, you’re carrying their stuff, which is what they said to do, so that’s good, right?
but why are you still HERE?
are you trying to be friends? are you an assassin? are you a vet just helping a brother out? are you up to something? are you crazy? are you sleepwalking? are THEY sleepwalking? WHAT IS EVEN GOING ONNN NN N
at mile marker 2 you set the pack down and go “have a nice day!” and bail
and next time they think of handing their shit to some stranger, maybe they think again.
Yeh but you see it goes further than that. Roman law stated that any soldier could tell them to carry their pack for a mile, and that poor random person HAD do to it. But here’s the thing
They could only carry it for a mile, and if they carried it further (the assumption being that the soldier kept forcing the person to keep carrying it) the soldier could get in HUUUUUGE trouble.
So this soldier and some civilian (I believe it had to be someone who was not a Roman citizen?? I can’t quite remember) are walking along, and they hit the mile marker. The soldier demands his pack be returned.
“No no, allow me, I’m not tired!” Says the civilian, and keeps on walking.
The soldier keeps asking, maybe rather threatening, but the civilian just keeps kindly insisting to help, it’s not a problem, let me help you, etc. and continues walking.
It then gets to the point that the soldier has to be like “Hey, man c’mon, I could really get in trouble for this…please give it back”
What has just happened was a serious change in power dynamics. It went from the soldier being in control of the situation and treating the civilian as lesser, to the civilian being in control, and the soldier treating the civilian as an equal.
What Jesus was teaching was not to lay down and submit to authority, but how to passively command respect, to be treated as an equal.
I’m
It’s amazing how so many Christians have no clue just how radical Jesus was and how much they wouldn’t actually like him if he was around today.
Jesus is around today! He is the Black Lives Matter movement, he’s the Women’s March, he’s the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, he’s Planned Parenthood, he’s Pride, all of these protests and voices of the marginalized are the same message: treat marginalized people as human beings.
And yes, the people in power still fucking hate him and everything he stood for. It’s just a really sick irony that they claim to be his number one fans while shitting all over everything he fought so hard for.
there’s a reason he said “love your neighbor as yourself” – the point is that other people are the same as you. we’re all in this together.
and to paraphrase pratchett, there’s no sin that doesn’t boil down to treating people as things.
#BlessedBreakfast: #PoachedEggs #CrispyBacon & #StrawberryPreserve on #WheatBread - some mornings you just feel for extra #SelfLove
#Tattoos tell a #Story: My #Mom "M" became an #Angel due to #Cancer, she leaves a #Legacy of #SixChildren; thanks @prikdesigns for the #Gorgeous #ArtWork.
Day 21
Day 22
day 27: For my amazing courageous sister!
For anyone out there feeling in crisis, please seek help. Crisis Text Line serves anyone in any type of crisis providing access to free 24/7 support and information via the medium people already use and trust:text. Here’s how it works:
Text HOME to 741741 form anywhere in the USA, anytime, about any type of crisis.
You’re not alone
Day 28 Thanks for reading! Thanks for Sharing! It was tiring doing this again with a job but you guys motivated me to share with all of you! so much love!
