i wanna make this really really clear: i do not care at all when someone calls me an acephobe.
comparisons matter. history matters. my grief and rage at the senseless waste of human life that is the United Stateâs response to the AIDS pandemic matters.
i donât know if youâve ever talked to long-term survivors, but i have, and iâve talked to the gay men and women who lived through the beginning of the crisis. they say it was like a horror movie. everyone was dying. handsome strong men, men who were powerfully alive, men who were only 27, 23, 18 years old, friends and lovers and acquaintances and strangersâÂ
just vanished. wasted away before your eyes.
my friend tells me a story about when she was born. her mom was living in the gay ghetto of san diego, and the four men in the apartments above, two couples, were all HIV+. one of the men came to visit, and my friendâs mom asked if he would like to hold the baby. he burst into tears. âi canât believe youâd let me hold her,â he said, âpeople wonât even shake my hand.â
theyâre all dead now. they died one after the other, and my friendâs mom eventually moved to los angeles.
when someone sees that history, stands in the face of it, and can manage to say, âbut straight people who donât fuck have it bad too!â i get a little enraged. when someone can say, âmy mom jokes that iâm a plant,â and i say, âthe United States wants me dead,â and they call me an acephobeâ i get a little enraged.
this is the history of our community. itâs my history. and when you draw a comparison between a lack of visibility and genocide, you are spitting on a grave. thank god that youâve never needed to bury your dead like we have.Â
i recently found out that a trans woman my age, who wrote a scintillating funny blog about sex and HIV and poverty, passed away from AIDS complications. i cried when i heard the news.Â
edit: this is OK to reblog
if you havenât read this reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/askreddit/comments/2ug992/serious_gay_men_who_lived_through_the_hiv/ i highly recommend doing so, though i do warn that itâs absolutely heartbreaking.Â
i feel like most people on tumblr know nothing about the reality of this. especially since the legalization of gay marriage in the u.s., they consider us (lgbt+ people) to have already achieved equality, as if homophobiaâs over or something. and things like the aids crisis is why i find ace discourse in general to be really insidiousâ by separating ace lgbt+ people from non-ace-identifying lgbt+ people, you inadvertently brand the non-ace-identifying people as inherently sexual, almost depraved. i donât think people realize what a truly awful thing that is to do to us.Â
