Souless Creation

THIS IS PARSLEY

THIS IS BASIL

AND THIS IS MINT

The puppy cart

I will end this phone call if you continue to shout at me.

I need time to think about it. I’ll come back to you.

I can stay for half an hour.

I don’t respond to work emails at the weekend.

Thank  you for your offer, unfortunately I can’t make it.

I’m not comfortable with that. If you do it agai I will have to leave.

I’m not comfortable discussing that. Please do not discuss it with me.

I respect your opinion but this is my life and my decision.”

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.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died.  He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

Okay. I’m Canadian so I know a shit ton about staying warm if you’re new to the cold there here are some tips!(add more if you know more!)

1. Wear grippy shoes, nothing is worse than snowmelt freezing on your skin.

2.Do not wear jeans as your outter layer. wet denim is the most body heat siphoning mother fucker known to man or god

3. Have a warm drink with you. It will help. Even just some hot soup broth or boiled water will help keep you warm.

4. Wear a moisture wicking layer close to your skin so you don’t get cold from your own sweat. You will sweat. That is fine and expected.

5. If you start feeling too warm even though you were cold and like you have to take your clothes of DO NOT. Call 911. You are suffering from hypothermia.

6. Bring a blanket and a heat source that needs no electricity with you in your vehicle. You do not want to be stranded with no heat in the case that something happens.

7. If you are struggling on ice as you’re walking, stop. Get your balance and penguin shuffle to a less slippery patch of ground. There’s usually less ice on one side of the walk and it’s better to walk in the snow next to the sidewalk than it is to eat dirt when ya slip

8. STAY THE ABSOLUTE FUCK AWAY FROM FROZEN BODIES OF WATER. Ponds are deceptive as shit even with the “solid blue tried and true” thing. Go around.

9. Keep kids warm. They run at a higher body temperature and will feel the effects of the cold worse than you.

10. Huddling is your best friend. Even if you don’t know the person, remember you’re both cold, especially if they don’t have the right clothing for the weather.

11. Pay attention to windchill. That is how cold it feels. Dress appropriately please. I know it’s tempting to dress for style, but there’s nothing stylish about losing your toes to frostbite

12. Don’t touch metal if you can avoid it. It will sap your heat and likely freeze to anything wet. Like tongues. Don’t fucking lick a pole.

13. If someone licks something metal, pour warm water over their tongue to get them free. If they yank, they will bleed. A lot.

14. Keep your ears, noes, fingers, and toes warm. You’re extremities will get cold first and are the most likely parts of your body to get frostbite.

15. If you see someone who may not have a place to be in the cold, offer to help them find a local shelter or library. The elements, especially the cold, are some of the largest threats to those who cannot avoid them.

You can also, if you’re so inclined, make a little winter shelter for cats and small animals fairly easily and cheaply.

There is an old belief in Serbian villages and small towns that certain pumpkins (and watermelons), when left outside during a full moon, will turn in to a vampire.

Happy Halloween, everyone!