i think this whole thing with richard siken right now is proof that queer youth are so far removed from the aids epidemic and the consequences it had on queer elders. for them aids isn’t a lived experience, it’s not something they went through, the perception of it now comes from media and it’s seen as this navigable, preventable, even curable thing instead of a systemic attack on queer men that wiped out hundreds of thousands.
our queer elders are so low in number because in the mid-90s 1 in 15 queer men had died in the epidemic. doctors refused to touch them. men were dying in secret and begging their friends to break into their houses and erase the evidence that they were gay so their families didn’t know. they were dying alone.
richard siken lived and lost through this and poured everything he went through, his pain, his loss, his ability to love, into his poetry and to see people making a mockery of it now, to see people— queer people, at that— trying to ridicule him for being bothered that his work is being decontextualised to apply to a ship is so, so disheartening.