For those who don’t know, I live in Ventura County, AKA where the Thomas Fire is burning in California right now.Â
Fire was on 3 sides of my house Monday night/ Tuesday morning. We were evacuated at 4 am.Â
We are back now, and super lucky to have our house still standing. We have power, and running water and all that now.Â
A lot of people weren’t as lucky as us. A lot of homes are gone. A lot of animals are gone. A lot is gone and more is still unknown as to who and what is burned up.Â
I almost lost my sister to the fire.Â
It’s been crazy, the smoke hurts my eyes and lungs, but I am alive, and safe.Â
So many places that I have called home are gone. So many trees and secret places all burned up. So many plants and creatures didn’t make it out. It’s horrible to think of.Â
But if you were worried, I am safe. And I am thankful for that.Â
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Having a toddler: spend an hour trying to dress a naked, spitting, screaming being.Â
Living with my mother: spend an hour trying to dress a naked, spitting, screaming being.Â
Having a toddler: follows you into the bathroom, won’t let you bathe or brush teeth or poop.Â
Living with my mother: follows me into the bathroom, won’t let me bathe or brush teeth or poop. In fact, forbids it, especially during certain hours.Â
Having a toddler: demands you make it food, then won’t eat what you make it.Â
Living with my mother: demands I make her food, then won’t eat what I make her.Â
Toddler: calls me a stupid poopy mean head.Â
Mother: calls me “fucking retarded”, “broken”, “there’s something wrong with you”, “you aren’t my child” you don’t love me”, “I don’t know what I did wrong with you, but it’s not fair”, “This isn’t who you fucking are”, “You shouldn’t be this fat”, “You shouldn’t have this body”, frequently oinks at me.Â
Toddler: cries if it doesn’t get it’s way.Â
Mother: cries and threatens suicide if she doesn’t get her way.Â
Toddler: I have sympathy because you are new to this world, and need to be taught better.Â
Mother: You are 67 years old. I am 30 years old. I know I was a toddler once, and made your life hell, and I am very sorry, but I didn’t ask to be born, and I think it is time you pulled that stick out of your ass.Â
As Alex reached her climax the lights flickered. The air got heavy and warm. Tad or Todd or whatever his name was hesitated as something dripped from the ceiling onto his shoulder. Was that blood? Another glop, right next to the first. It was so hot in there suddenly and that looked an awful lot like blood. What was happening? Panicked, he stopped and looked at Alex. She looked back at him. Plop. Plop. Plop. There was a hissing, squishing sound and something moved down the walls. It traveled in droplets, running downwards and leaving a red trail behind it. He pulled out.
“What the fuck is going on? Alex, what is this? Did you drug me? Is that blood?” he ran his hand through his sweaty hair in a panic.
Alex sighed and sat up. She looked at the walls and his shoulders. “Yeah, probably blood.”
“What the fuck? Why is there blood?”
“I don't know. Whats the problem? Keep going. I was almost there.”
“Are you fucking kidding? It's like a million degrees in here and there is blood coming from your walls and... is that fucking drumming? Why do I hear drumming? it... it sounds like a heartbeat and oh God, is that MY heartbeat? It's so fast!” Tad/Todd was hyperventilating. He moved away and reached for his pants.
Alex Scoffed. “Don't be a little bitch.”
With a last look of horror and a whimper Tad/Todd fled the room.
“Dammit!”
“Was that too much?” a deep, earthy voice rumbled from inside Alex.
“Well not for me, but clearly it was for him. I was so close, too. Why now? Why coudn't you have waited until after?”
“Well I don't exactly understand the sexual relations of you humans. I don't know when after is, I can't read your body language or whatever.”
“Well fucking learn. That's the third one this week you ruined it with. I mean, I am glad it wasn't rats again, or that time you sent a bunch of dead baby heads rolling out form under the bed, I mean what the actual fuck, but still, can't you just keep the curse shit at bay for a while? You are fine while I am at work and out around town, why do you gotta turn it up when I am in bed with someone?”
“Well I mean, it is my job to keep you from getting pregnant, and frankly, I think I am doing a great job.”
“No, it's the copper's job to keep me from getting pregnant by thickening my cervical mucus or whatever. You just happen to be attached to the copper-”
“I was TRAPPED  in the copper! My immortal soul attached to the vein that happened to be mined and turned into YOUR magical slut device-”
“EXCUSE ME? You take that back right now or I will reach in there, rip you out and flush you, and your immortal soul can spend fuck knows how long in the sewers! I am responsible! I got birth control to stop from populating the earth or whatever it is God wants good Christians to do! You should be on my side! It's not my fault you got cursed to haunt an IUD!”
“Fine. Truce. You keep up your wicked succubus ways, and I will try to turn down my demonic charm, though I don't know how you plan on finding a man who will stay without a few gruesome trials...”
“I don't want a man who will stay with me, I just want a freaking orgasm!”
“Fine, I will back off. You do you. Not like I haven't spent half of eternity in Hell. Not like I don't know a few things about lust. Not like you aren't interested in some Satanic Rituals with your black lipstick and pentagram dresses and claw like nails. Not like I wasn't thinking of you when I made the walls bleed. You just go ahead and be ungrateful-”
“FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!”At the mention of the Lord Alex's vagina hissed, “Look, I know you are a demon, and it's not your fault you got trapped in a vein of copper in the earth by some priest and then mined and turned into a contraceptive device, and honestly, I do appreciate how badass it is to have you, an actual demon, inside me, and maybe, MAYBE I did appreciate the blood and the rats were kind of cute, but for fuck's sake, can you stop being such a drama queen!”
“...”
“Ceruicex?”
“...”
Alex Sighed and got up to go to the bathroom. She peed, and cleaned herself up, and put on some clothes. Ceruicex, the demon that possessed her intrauterine device, remained quiet. Since she got the device inserted six months ago, she and the demon had gotten along relatively well. She loved horror and the dark arts and all things macabre. He had been upset to find out that he had been reduced to a contraceptive device, but considering he couldn't really see anything, and he didn't really understand exactly how humans mated, he had calmed down and struck up a strange friendship with her. Alex could communicate with him, though no one else could, and he could make things happen around her that were pretty strange and brutal. She had gone to a few metal concerts together and the raw excitement, violence, and insanity had sated his demonic nature more than his hundreds of years stuck in the earth.
But as Alex had started to meet men and bring them home, Ceruicex had taken the opportunity to stretch his powers. He made a big show for all the men, and perhaps overdid it, as they all ended up running and screaming before Alex could find release. One or two ended up in the hospital, emotionally distressed and perhaps criminally insane. The one who had the misfortune of experiencing the baby heads had been found in a dark alley, covered in his own blood after trying to chew all his fingers off. Alex felt a little guilty about that one. It wasn't fair Ceruicex did this to her either. She had gotten the IUD after a bad break up, and was ready to rebound, and make some poor choices she would regret later. Now her poor choices couldn't be fixed with penicillin, but instead had to be treated by heavy doses of sedatives. Â
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He got the cream poured right on his head… he isn’t sure if he likes it, since it spoils the warmth of his tea nest. Tasty, though. #tea #dragon #resin #resinart #arttoy #seedarts
It’s weird after living apart from her, because I never realized how much I was healing while being out of her sphere. being back here is like re-breaking an old injury that never healed right in the first place. It’s so much more painful and delicate. I am so much more delicate since my walls have been down so long.Â
it’s good to know that I was actually doing better, but it’s so much more suffocating to know I am back to all this weirdness that toes the line between abuse and love.Â
No wonder I never felt like I could relate to humans. I was like the feral dog that never learned how to be domesticated. I never understood social cues because I was never taught social cues. I was raised by people with out of control mental and emotional illnesses.Â
It’s been 6 hours with my mom today and I am physically shaking, but I am not allowed to leave. I am not allowed to poop with out permission. I am not to wear make up or cook my own food or do my own laundry because I am too stupid and too much of an idiot to know how to do it. Every time I change clothes or go to the bathroom, my mom finds a reason to watch me and try to touch me, and then have an innapropriate emotional ordeal about my body, from how fat I am and how unfair it is to her to how soft my skin is and how unfair it is to her.Â
As a kid it was just my mom trying to raise me right because I was broken. At almost 30 I have lost my patience. I am have lost my ability to just dig deep into myself and cut myself or choke myself with a belt. It doesn’t help anymore, and honestly, I am almost 30. I don’t want to hurt myself anymore.Â
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The house is getting tented to kill bugs until Saturday, and then We have to move out by next wednesday, so if I am absent or unreachable, I am sorry, I am moving.Â
We did find somewhere to rent for a bit, so at least there is that. Â
Today my facebook feed has been full of posts about white women in the women’s march, and how they don’t belong there. I just saw a picture of a white lady marching with the caption “she’s acting like this isn’t all her fault”
and it’s like, yes, I get it, the majority of white women voted for trump. Most white feminists are not inclusive. White people are the problem. I can wrap my head around that, and while it is hard to accept as a white person, I want to keep learning how to be better, and think everyone should. If you are not always questioning things you are being brainwashed.Â
but like, its hard to see the people I know, (and they all seem to be male feminists) say things like “Feminism should be inclusive” and then say things like, “these white women don’t belong here”.Â
The pictures bother me most. That white lady who you have a problem with, who is the problem is still out marching for rights, is still out protesting. You don’t know why. You can think she is just jumping on the bandwagon, but what if she had an abortion and is willing to fight for that right for everyone? what if she was a victim of rape and wants to fight to end that? what if she is a lesbian and her parents kicked her out at 15 to live on the street, and now she wants to fight to help however she can?Â
No one is an angel, and most white people have a history of being racists. I know I do. Hell, I have be pretty transphobic in my life, and still am in a lot of ways despite being non-binary. Someone told me 53% of white women voted for a cheeto. but that means 47% of us didn’t and isn’t telling that 47% to be quiet kinda counterproductive?
Telling a problem to “go away” isn’t gonna solve the problem. Telling white women to get out of the women’s march isn’t being inclusive. There’s gotta be a way white women can have our voices heard, can contribute to the outrage, the protests, the change, without talking over anyone else.Â
I don’t know how, but I want to find out, I want to make it work.Â
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my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
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.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
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.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
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:Â
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.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
My dad became a nurse in the early 90s and worked with AIDS patients. I was just a little kid, but I remember some of his patients who he had become friends with coming over and spending time with me. One in particular took me to go see the Lion King when it first came out. I was just a little kid, but I remember them dying. Now I look back and realize that in the early 90s my parents let these people around their young child. They weren’t afraid.Â
Just last year at work I heard my coworkers talking about someone being HIV positive and how they would never allow their children around them, and how they would be afraid to work with someone HIV positive, because what if they caught it?
This was discussed casually. The AIDS and HIV epidemic is not over. I learned the science and details because I got lucky, but most people still think like they did so long ago, that it is a yucky disease and they are afraid of “those people”.Â
The AIDS epidemic is not over, and I won’t let it get brushed under the rug.Â
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