For real doe.

After ten days, she found a boat moored near a shelter, and found the boat’s fuel tank still partly full. Koepcke poured the gasoline on her wounds, an action which succeeded in removing the maggots from her arm. Out of 93 passengers and crew, Juliane was the only survivor of the LANSA flight 508 crash that took place December 24th, 1971.

This was the first thing that stuck out to me, in her book:

If Juliane was a 17-year-old boy, her judgment calls & survival skills probably wouldn’t be passed off as a mere mistake/fluke. If she was a guy, people would lap that shit up and call her a Fine Boy Scout™.

Next is this passage:

“Now Father has lost his wife…” this thought never crossed Juliane’s mind, because she had no way of knowing if her mother was alive or dead. Juliane couldn’t find her mom after the crash. But notice how the media somehow managed to center the plight of a man in a story about *checks notes* a girl who braved the wilderness alone for 10 days after losing her mother in a plane crash.

Some media outlets floated the idea that, in addition to witnessing her mother’s death, Juliane had seen other struggling survivors as well & neglected to help them. This is false. It just goes to show that girls are villainized for taking care of themselves instead of taking care of everyone else—even when they’re all alone in the middle of the jungle, fighting for their own survival.

Juliane also came under scrutiny for her emotional state, after her rescue. Because she was traumatized and in shock, she didn’t react “appropriately” to her situation or grieve for her mother the way people expected her to.

As seen above, some voices in the media pathologized her understandable trauma response, treating her like a deranged sociopath.

^^^ This shit speaks for itself. Reminder that Juliane was just a child, a teenager.

Lastly, there actually is a 1974 movie about Juliane directed by Giuseppe Maria Scotese, starring Susan Penhaligon. The movie is called Miracles Still Happen. This is how the movie marketed her story:

And here’s how the media covered it:

So yeah. In conclusion, men are trash. And to wrap things up, I’ll leave you with this extremely tasteful comic strip by a (male) artist.

During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.

On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.

In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”

Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a “sinner” and already dead to her, and that she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.

“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come”, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.

Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him

and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.

After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family’s large plot.

After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.

Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done”, Ruth said.

Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family’s plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.

louis: it's about uhhh parties and uhhh missing somebody and uhhhhh like uh yeah yeah that's what it's about