Gryph's playground

Love Is Lifting These Queer Couples Higher In Incredible Trick Photo Series

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad).  Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. 

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.  

Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.

Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.

Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.

Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.

Picture from 1993:

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

https://youtu.be/tp5676N7de8

so you just bought rope and you wanna know where to start?  here’s a suggested curriculum of free tutorial videos.      

these are all self-tie friendly.

1.  karada (aka diamond harness, aka body harness)

2.  pentagram harness

3.  how to coil rope

4.  how to join ropes

5.  basic crotch rope

6.  rope corset

7.  basic chest harness

8.   futomono 

9.  single column tie

10.  double column tie

11.  diamond crotch rope

First day of life up until 6th grade 

Jumped all the way to Freshman year of High School

Then I cut my hair Junior year, why did I do that

Slowly it started growing back and then….

I finally felt comfortable to express myself (the picture on the left was my debut)

At this point in my transition I am 6 months into HRT

A year on HRT

2 years since my coming out 

2 years on hrt

2.3 years on hrt

At this point I am 3 years into my Hormone Replacement Therapy. I’m thriving. 

These pictures were taken days apart and I am 3 and a half years into my medical transition (The picture on the right was also posted by Instagram on all their major social media handles attached with an interview I did with them for International Women’s Month)

During this time I was 4 years into HRT. Clearly living for it.

Dress you boy in the prettiest lingerie.

Have him stand in front of a full length mirror.

Let him tell you what he sees. What he likes and dislikes about his reflection.

Unsurprisingly, the parts they like less will tend to have the upper hand.

Tell your boy, what it is you see.

Touch him - everywhere - as you tell your boy what you see.

Tell your boy how confident his hands feel on your body.

Tell your boy how that particular side of his chest always seem to flush when you touch him a certain way.

Caress those ugly scars or those moles he dislikes so much. They’re a part of his body after all.

Tell your boy how incredible he looks when he’s lost in you.

Sooth your boy’s mind. Help hem love every part of himself and you’ll end up with a boy that will blossom into the prettiest flower on earth.

(And before you say anything; you damn right boys can be compared to a beautiful flower)

Love Is Lifting These Queer Couples Higher In Incredible Trick Photo Series