I’m wording this for myself to come to terms with how ridiculous it sounds but having a very fem body and aesthetic does not keep me from being non-binary
My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.
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.
“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”
“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.”
thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy
Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?
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”.
I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.
They died of AIDS because
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:
We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.
As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.
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.
I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.
This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.
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.
If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.
I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.
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.
AIDS is not just history. Neither is homophobia.
Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.
If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the ‘60s, except in lockstep with population growth.
I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.
Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.
This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:
By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.
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.
Sing for two.
One of the most sobering parts of moving to the US west coast has been discovering the collective trauma from this all-too- recent era. The trauma was different where I grew up. I lived in a politically mixed area & was still nervous about who I came out to, where I displayed signs of queerness. I heard classmates- teenagers- talking proudly about how they would beat any child of theirs who was gay. The west coast has long been one of the main places queers go to get away from that.
In the context of the AIDS epidemic, that means there are folk I personally know who had entire social circles die around them, made new friends, and lost those all of those friends too.
I’ve heard veteran nurses from the AIDS wards of urban hospitals trade stories about what felt like serving in a war zone. Colleagues died and no one knew why they were getting sick. Young people died, horribly, while their families either ignored their existence or sat, not touching them, awaiting their last breaths and speaking of God’s judgement.
Some medical staff refused to serve those patients, out of fear or condemnation or both. Others sought them out because somebody had to take care of these kids, because they were good people who believed that every patient deserved basic human dignity.
This is why I cried when gay marriage was legalized. And cried again when I realized how many kids’ shows now feature queer characters & relationships, not as teaching moments, but as integrated parts of the ensemble & story. And cried again, in a different way, when the giant United Methodist Church voted not to permit queer clergy or perform queer marriages- and also when so many within the church are fighting hard for more inclusion and may schism over it. Why I was terrified when Trump removed protections for trans people and so relieved that Biden has already reinstated them.
Always remember. Always be vigilant. May the wisdom and strength of those who have gone before guide those who carry the flame now.
I don’t mean to be rude; but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, does anyone have any examples?
Supernatural
Doctor Who (Steven Moffat specifically)
Sherlock (Steven Moffat specifically)
Actually Steven Moffat is basically just this sentiment given human form.
A version of this happened with The Magicians, tbh. Though instead of expectation: men, reality: women it was expectation: smug nihilists, reality: mentally ill queer folks.
Arguably Game of Thrones.
If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.
In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.
They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.
And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.
It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.
Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.
And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.
You’re all sitting on the hot take of the decade tbh
And yet when they fond out that boys were watching MLP:FIM in droves, they had NO PROBLEM with it.
I’m tiny to the point of insignificance, compared to the creators mentioned in these posts.
I don’t know if it matters, but I am pretty sure my audience is primarily women, and I love that. Men tend to be boring, violent, aggressive, and entitled. I’ve never encountered a single female gatekeeper in my life.
I love the codification of women as the “creative side of fandom” because that reflects my experience.
Women are just more interesting than men, in general, and I can’t imagine being upset about or trying to hurt them.
Not to be fat on main or whatever but like. Sometimes I think about how every “pretty boy” is a skinny fucker and how being skinny is So In Right Now and how thinness is beauty and lose my mind lol like fat people aren’t allowed to have flaws like acne or bad hair hair days because you’re only allowed one flaw at a time, and ours is always fatness, and I think about how the only “acceptable” fat people are people who hyper preform gender or make themselves a laughing stock and even then they’re only “cute” or “pretty in a renaissance way” because you can’t see us being pretty Now, the only times we’re hot is when we’re a fetish or when “I never liked conventionally attractive people” and (reactor meltdown in my brain noise)
my favorite thing to do in this christian society is to pretend that i don’t know a SINGLE thing abt christianity. like sometimes people will mention things like going to church with their families or upcoming holidays & i’ll act utterly clueless abt all of it even though i know absolutely everything ever just bc it’s funny to see people fumble to justify + tell me abt things. if i constantly have to explain my religion and practices to ignorant people, y’all are gonna have to do the exact same thing
like one time i asked this girl what christmas was with my blankest possible expression & she looked at me incredulously & slowly said “it’s jesus’s birthday…” and i was like oh that’s cool! who’s jesus? :-) & she froze for a good fifteen seconds. i think i gave her brain damage it was great
Thank you Ethan, Mark, Amy, Evan and all the Editors for this wonderful and once in a lifetime experience!
This truly unique channel with all its weird yet beautiful videos will always have a special place in our hearts. I will never forget the joy I had in watching your videos.
Crawling out of my online hiding place to pop this one on here too, I’m gonna miss everything so much but either way I’m glad I got it done, momento mori all, it’s been fun 🤍🖤
Hi all welcome to my nerd get away! You can call me Widget and this is my personal blog.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you need anything I'm here for you so please come chat to me about anything! I am a huge nerd who loves Disney, Dreamworks, and just storytelling in general. I also am deeply in love with nature and the world as a whole so you will see a bit of everything on here. Most importantly if you ever need a pick-me-up please check out the tags "how to be happy" and "how to love yourself" they're just for you!
