I’m I’m not saying it’s not true but how is cancer about aids?
omfgjsh. i should have realized i would get a bunch of asks abt this. ok never confirmed. but the lyrics are like. things that are about having aids but not explicitly. like ok they sound like they COULD be about being gay and dying from aids but like youre not sure. but like also i think theyre specific enough that they cannot be about anything else. like they are 60% about aids. not enough that people will a) notice or b) understand if you’re not gay/ thinking about gay ppl. but enough that when you take the lines out and close read them they logically don’t really make sense if you say no this CAN NOT be about aids.
Call my aunt Marie
Help her gather all my things
And bury me
In all my favorite colors
My sisters and my brothers, stillI will not kiss you
'Cause the hardest part of this
Is leaving you
1. aunt marie. having an aunt who is the inheritor of your estate instead of your parents. gay estranged family narrative.
2. bury me in all my favorite colors:
3. my sisters and my brothers - more common in the 90′s gay liberation political slang. i.e. calling each other lesbian sisters trans sisters gay brothers etc when referencing another group to show solidarity within the lgbtq community.
4. i will not kiss you - a popular stigma during the rise of aids was the idea that you can get it from kissing (and hugging, spit, etc) and it was super harmful and created this image of gay people as villainous deliberate spreaders of deadly disease. info about aids was so mystified and unknown in the beginning that many gay people thought this too. there’s a graphic going around rn that’s popular that was part of a campaign to de stigmatize kissing :
All my agony
Know that I will never marry
...
I'd ask you to be true (I'd ask you to be true)
'Cause the hardest part of this
Is leaving you
5. know that i will never marry - less obvious, makes sense within the context of aids / gay liberation, but plausibly deniable as a lyric about dying too young to marry (but like. also something that happened to aids victims. dying too young to see the possibility of marriage). the right to marry which was a bigger deal than some of us give it credit for (not that it should be number 1 top priority BUT within the context of aids.... the idea of like. not being able to see your partner when they die in the hospital. not being the person who gets their ashes or decides if/where theyre buried. basically no spousal rights when your longterm partner dies, it was amplified when so many gay people were dying)
6. cause the hardest part of this is leaving you - very ephemeral evidence here but sort of what i was talking about before. the context of seeing you partner die was especially amplified by aids, moreso than any other terminal illness i would posit. it was just a matrix of things that created this especially tragic outcome where young people were seeing their partners die quickly with nothing being done about it and no solution. so you have this whole community of people who just saw their friends (but especially partners) die within a few months. and the whole politicized magnified idea of who you loved being the crux of their illness - gayness being the elephant in the room, a political sentiment that is based ENTIRELY around who you love.
the final touch is calling it CANCER and not AIDS. a song coming out called AIDS esp in 2006 would be literally a joke, like laughed off of the cultural stage. and so calling it CANCER makes it less of a joke, less about the highly agitated and political gay experience and making it about cancer, the ultimate equalizer, the person killer, not the f-g killer. basically reframing aids in a way that makes it more human (even though it is. human. ). leveling the playing field. etc. (more to say abt this but i’m running out of patience) and like i said having it be coded and signalling - gay experience.
ok! that’s a lot i know but i’m like writing something for my gender and sexuality class about this song el oh el.
this is incredibly well written! didnt know that this was a lesser-known thing in the fandom. for anyone who wants extra evidence, even though this is already really well analyzed and worded, gerard actually did confirm that cancer is about aids outside of the song as well. well, at least really really strongly hint at it without explicitly saying so, like you said doing that would end with people just either making a joke or a controversy of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5tltPI2eGg
the question he talks about it in starts at 00:54
