Noisy silence.

Draco: You named our little dog, what!?

Harry: He's very brave like they were

Look at the cure rates compared to mortality rates in universal health care countries and compare them to ours, then talk shit.

But then I got sicker.  And it turned out I had cancer.

Burkitt’s lymphoma, stage 4a. It had spread into my brain and spinal column. 90% cure rate, but I needed nine months of chemo - and not the outpatient chemo, nope, talking multiple week stays per round of the magrath protocol.  Drugs were about 10k an IV bag.  I was unemployed.  And there were complications.

Thankfully I live in a country with universal healthcare.   And it didn’t cost me a goddamn cent to save my life.  I’m now officially past the five year mark to move me from “remission” to “Cured”.

I’ve lived in a universal healthcare country my entire life. And I’ve seen the US system in action.  Your system is fucked. Straight up fucked. You’ve got fucking Dickensian shit going on there, people dying on streets from preventable causes or ending up broke for breaking a hip.   Your health insurance companies have you by the balls and people like you are begging them to squeeze harder.  What the actual fuck is wrong with you? 

“But but but TAXESSSSSSSSS”

She’s oxygen dependant. She’s on more meds than I can count. She’s completely bed bound. She gets weekly chest x-rays because of her copd and degenerative heart disease. They can’t operate because of this so each week they replace her casts, take more x-rays. She ended up in medical high dependency for a week, with 4 personal nurses. She’s in a side room because she has antibiotic resistant mrsa. She requires round the clock care.

And it’s all free.

Don’t come to me with your “wait a few years for your health care”.

Something I’ve never noticed before:

Could you imagine going to your AP Chem teacher when you were in 10th grade and going “nah man, your way is ok I guess but there’s like 5 other ways to perform this titration faster and more accurately.” Because that’s pretty much what he did with the notes in HBP.

So it should be no surprise that someone of that level of intellect, who was bullied and harassed from the time their ability presented, would be a goddamn MASTER in duel-combat. You can bet your ass he’d studied that almost more than anything else. He was a master Occlumens (mental self defense and evasion), a master of Potions, a master of any and all forms of strategy, defense, combat, etc, BECAUSE HE FELT LIKE HE HAD TO BE JUST TO STAY SAFE. Why else would a flaming 16 year old come up with something like Sectumsempra? It’s def not a Potion! It’s a self defense spell of last resort. It’s fucking LETHAL. So we can assume he was heavy into combat spells and practice by that point, and given his intellect, would have had virtually unrestricted access to any books on any subject he wanted.

Hi anon. I was out doing some shopping when you sent in this ask, and I wanted to stew over it before I responded. Because in all honesty, this is an amazing ask. I’ve had a few people (between yesterday and today) discover a something new about themselves, or become curious about things I’ve talked about, or @shadowprince27 has talked about. The beautiful thing about all of this is most of us are pretty open and happy to share our experiences, or at least - what we know.

So, the anything part is really open and I’m not sure what you’d like more information on, without doing a whole thing and spending three years writing a dissertation on kink. (Which now I totally want to do..!) But I’ll go over some of the basics and maybe leave you a few references to look at. I’d also say, if you feel comfortable enough - I’d be happy to answer any questions you have via private dm as well. Especially if you have any further/specific questions.

I’m putting the rest under the cut as it’s quite long.

Stories need conflict.

Write them to show what’s healthy. Write them to show what’s unhealthy.

Write them because problematic behaviors exists, and writing is a medium to explore and show– to teach and make the reader think. Shying away from these topics only creates ignorance. 

I see so many people telling writers to avoid anything that could be problematic, like writing about it is supporting it. They fail to see the importance of writing with depth and meaning. 

This corner of fandom may be large in numbers, but it’s fairly homogeneous when it comes to political stance and views on social justice issues. We more-or-less have a consensus of what it means by problematic. The argument is: whether it should exist in literature.

It doesn’t have to be that way – no, I think it’d be fair to say, it won’t be that way – if this “purity culture” permeates into real life. Pull the lens a little further, there will be people who find the whole fandom problematic: first, because the source material is problematic, then, because why are you people wasting your life away fantasizing over fictional characters? problematic. Pull that lens a further still, there will be people who want to cancel problematic LGBT+ population, cancel the even more problematic “kill the industry” millennials, cancel the most problematic non-God loving folks…

When purity culture becomes real, chances are, the fandom people who currently wish for it most will not get to decide what is purity. When purity culture becomes real, it will become yet another tool for those the rich and powerful to manipulate culture in their favour. One may say, morals are non-negotiable, but so say the people who want to cancel us all. And because purity has no written laws and requires no consensus to define, it’s a convenient tool for stifling the voices of opposition because its very definition can be shifted from one day to the next, depending on whose voice the powers that be want to silence. 

composed characters losing their composure

kind characters snapping

characters hugging each other after one or both of them have been through hell

character cradling their significant other’s face while they kiss

character says something hurtful. later on in the movie they are in a similar situation and say something kind instead.

self sacrifice

griefstricken women (who under normal circumstances wouldn’t hurt a fly) lashing out and striking the person responsible for the loss of their loved one

ugly crying

characters struggling to talk because they’re about to cry

characters reuniting with someone whom they thought were dead

FOREHEAD KISSES

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.

The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.

Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.

They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.

HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.

The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.

There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.

Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.

OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.

A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall

I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:

And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts is a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.

AIDS at 30: A History by Victoria Harden

The Origin of AIDS by Jaques Pepin for the science of it all.

Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS.

The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America.

Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaust collects his writings on AIDS.

I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list: 

The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience

The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project

Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub

Borrowed Time: And AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette

Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.

Some documentaries:

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) [hard to find]

How to Survive a Plague (2012)

We Were Here (2011)

Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.

Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.

That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.

Here’s the link to the digitization: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/