Some people have contracted HIV during their separate endeavours to give someone or some people a curable STD.
Some men would not still be HIV negative or alive, if they had managed to sleep with some of the women with whom they want or wanted to have sex.
Not everyone who has killed themselves because they were HIV positive would have been killed by AIDS.
Being HIV positive doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to die before each and every person who is HIV negative.
It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.
Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating.
A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.
Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.
The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.
Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.
Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.
The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indifference of President Ronald Reagan, who wouldn’t publicly address the epidemic until the end of his second term, after twenty thousand Americans had died, and the hostile rhetoric of conservatives close to Reagan like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s future speechwriter. In 1983, Buchanan wrote of AIDS, “The poor homosexuals–they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.
Of course, it’s now obvious why he was so angry that day. People don’t move into hospice to live but to die. And that half an egg sandwich I ended up making him–that sandwich was the last meal he ate in our Haight-Ashbury apartment, our one true home.
Globally, millions of married men and women engage the servicesof sex workers each year. Despite growing health concerns aboutthe increased risk of STDs and HIV AIDS this trade continues toblossom, leading to the premature termination of several lives andthe dissolution of several marriages.
I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space, and walked without hesitating to the altar I hadn’t consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there. Because the black current the masseuse had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I’d needed to know I could go on, but I’d also been needing to collapse. Which is what I did, some timeless tear span of minutes sitting on the naked gray stone. A woman gave me the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to breathe, helpless, except for each other.
But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane?All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.
Perhaps this is why not one of 800 sexologists attending a conference raised a hand when asked if they would trust a thin rubber sheath to protect them during intercourse with a known HIV-infected person. I don't blame them. They're not crazy, after all. Yet they're perfectly willing to tell your generation that "safe sex" is within reach and you can sleep around with impunity. It is a terrible lie.
Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving.... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive.
That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death.
And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful double jeopardy.The point must also be made that there’s no such thing as the enjoyment of good health for women who live in constant fear of rape. Countless strong women survive the sexual assaults that occur in the millions every year, but every rape leaves a scar; no one ever fully heals.This business of discrimination against and oppression of women is the world’s most poisonous curse. Nowhere is it felt with greater catastrophic force than in the AIDS pandemic. This audience knows the statistics full well: you’ve chronicled them, you’ve measured them, the epidemiologists amongst you have disaggregated them. What has to happen, with one unified voice, is that the scientific community tells the political community that it must understand one incontrovertible fact of health: bringing an end to sexual violence is a vital component in bringing an end to AIDS.The brave groups of women who dare to speak up on the ground, in country after country, should not have to wage this fight in despairing and lonely isolation. They should hear the voices of scientific thunder. You understand the connections between violence against women and vulnerability to the virus. No one can challenge your understanding. Use it, I beg you, use it.
In late 1985, the Reagan White House blocked the use of CDC money for education, leaving the US behind other Western nations in telling its citizens how to avoid contracting the virus. Many Americans still thought you could get AIDS from a toilet seat or a glass of water. According to one poll, the majority of Americans supported quarantining AIDS patients.This heightened awareness set off waves of anxiety across the country, which was often express through jokes (Q: What do you call Rock Hudson in a wheelchair? A: Roll-AIDS!) and violence. Between the years 1985 and 1986, anti-gay violence increased by 42 percent in the US. Even in San Francisco, where Greyhound buses still dropped off gay men and women taking refuge from the prejudice of their hometowns, carloads of teenagers would drive through the Castro looking for targets.In December 1985, a group of teenagers, shouting “diseased faggot” and “you’re killing us all,” dragged a man named David Johnson from his car in a San Francisco parking lot. While his lover looked on in horror, the teenagers kicked and beat Johnson with their skateboards, breaking three of his ribs, bruising his kidneys, an gashing his face and neck with deep fingernail scratches.
Listen, I wanted to say, I don't need your judgment, okay? I have enough to deal with without you contributing, so can we just get on with this so I can get out of here?But I couldn't form the words. Dr. Johnson viewed me as a child, and somehow, under his contemptuous gaze, I had regressed to one. I was frightened and shy, and it was all I could do to answer his questions and count the seconds until the end of the visit.
Look, look, we tell each other. It's Tom!He's Mr. Bellamy to his history students. But he's Tom to us. Tom! It's so good to see him. So wonderful to see him. Tom is one of us. Tom went through it all with us. Tom made it through. He was there in the hospital with so many of us, the archangel of St. Vincent's, our healthier version, prodding the doctors and calling over the nurses and holding our hands and holding the hands of our partners, our parents, our little sisters - anyone who had a hand to be held. He had to watch so many of us die, had to say goodbye so many times. Outside of our rooms he would get angry, upset, despairing. But when he was with us, it was like he was powered solely by an engine of grace. Even the people who loved us would hesitate at first to touch us - more from the shock of our diminishment, from the strangeness of how we were both gone and present, not who we were but still who we were. Tom became used to this. First because of Dennis, the way he stayed with Dennis until the very end. He could have left after that, after Dennis was gone. We wouldn't have blamed him. But he stayed. When his friends got sick, he was there. And for those of us he'd never know before - he was always a smile in the room, always a touch on the shoulder, a light flirtation that we needed. The y should have made him a nurse. They should have made him mayor. He lost years of his life to us, although that's not the story he'd tell. He would say he gained. And he'd say he was lucky, because when he came down with it, when his blood turned against him, it was a little later on and the cocktail was starting to work. So he lived. He made it to a different kind of after from the rest of us. It is still an after. Every day if feel to him like an after. But he is here. He is living.A history teacher. An out, outspoken history teacher. The kind of history teacher we never would have had. But this is what losing most of your friends does: It makes you unafraid. Whatever anyone threatens, whatever anyone is offended by, it doesn't matter, because you have already survived much, much worse. In fact, you are still surviving. You survive every single, blessed day.It makes sense for Tom to be here. It wouldn't be the same without him.And it makes sense for him to have taken the hardest shift. The night watch.Mr. Nichol passes him the stopwatch. Tom walks over and says hello to Harry and Craig. He's been watching the feed, but it's even more powerful to see these boys in person. He gestures to them, like a rabbi or a priest offering a benediction."Keep going," he says. "You're doing great."Mrs. Archer, Harry's next-door neighbor, has brought over coffee, and offers Tom a cup. He takes it gratefully.He wants to be wide awake for all of this.Every now and then he looks to the sky.
Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made and drugs are approved. What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of lives would have been saved