399 posts tagged with aids.
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the difference between a story and a painting or photograph
From 1986, Susan Sontag's short story "The Way We Live Now." (SL New Yorker) (I only just came across this story yesterday and loved it and thought I would share it with you.)
Art, AIDS, and New York in the 80's
As part of their monthly documentary series, Vice YouTube brings us the 2020 film Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker [1h43m, with introduction and director interview 2h20m]. Told through Wojnarowicz's own works and recordings and other material from the time, this is a look at a fierce, angry, brilliant artist burning with rage against the heteronormative world and the unfolding AIDS crisis. [more inside]
In a New York Patient
People Seem to be Frightened of Sexual Imagery
Even as Opel’s fifteen minutes ticked down, his quest for exposure was just getting started. The Oscars were not his first or his last brush with history, and five years later he’d be dead. from What Became of the Oscar Streaker? [The New Yorker; ungated] [CW: references to antiquated 1970s language about homosexuality]
Into the Heart of Me
Artifact, Relic, and Monument The story of Coil's 'Tainted Love,' the first musical AIDS benefit and the first music video to be added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. [more inside]
Cannabis in Japan gets a rematch
It all began when police found a small quantity of "a cannabis-like plant material" in the car of Jōmon-revivalist sculptor ŌYABU Ryūjirō (大藪龍二郎, nickname "Yaburyū". He believes that the Jōmon "cords" are actually cannabis fibers.). But it goes back farther than that, to when MIKI Naoko (scroll to the bottom) (三木直子) was translating Marijuana is Safer into Japanese, and was moved by the story of Peter McWilliams, a Prop-215-protected AIDS patient who was persecuted by the US Federal government and denied access to cannabis, and aspirated on his own vomit on his bathroom floor and died while awaiting trial. MIKI appears on the Great Moments in Weed History podcast to promote a Change.org petition (English follows Japanese) to pressure the judge in Yaburyū's trial to accept evidence and witnesses from the defense into consideration. The next court date happens today (in Japan time), March 25th 2022, about one hour from the time of this post. [more inside]
ACT UP: A History Of AIDS/HIV Activism
It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders breaks out of its usual form and talks to Sarah Schulman ACT UP: A History Of AIDS/HIV Activism [50m]. Transcript sadly not available, but some quotes from the interview on the page. [more inside]
Ruth Coker Burks
For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s... Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.David Koon writing in Arkansas Times in 2015. [more inside]
AIDS denialism in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
The Foo Fighters once embraced the cult of HIV/AIDS denial, enthusiastically spreading a potentially lethal message to their young fans. And they seem to have never apologized or admitted their mistake. In an open letter to bassist Nate Mendel, Bruce Mirken says "You can’t undo the damage you did, but you can at least say you’re sorry you did it."
Tainted Love?
As we’ve seen, though, debates about PWAs being represented with dignity and agency date back to the start of the epidemic, as does the fight to preserve sex-positivity in the face of plague. For Davies not to represent those forces is a narrative choice, an interpretation of history that emphasises powerlessness, pain, isolation, shame and self-hatred over the countervailing forces of solidarity and communal struggle. Moving beyond the shame of the those years will only come after de-programming ourselves from a moralism of pleasure; it was then and is now possible to be a person with HIV and continue to have hot, safe sex.Brian Mullin discusses his objections to Russell T. Davies' story about AIDS in the UK, It's a Sin.
Long-acting injectable PrEP on the horizon
The first injectable treatment for HIV-infected adults has been approved in Europe, Canada, and (as of today) the US. Monthly injections of cabotegravir/rilpivirine (brand name Cabenuva) were found to be as effective as daily oral antiretrovirals at maintaining viral suppression, and injections every other month were effective too. Also, the same drug given every other month is highly effective in preventing HIV but not yet approved. [more inside]
How AIDS was spread through the blood supply
A number of companies were selling HIV-contaminated blood factor for treatment of hemophilia, first from ignorance and then from irresponsibility. I first ran across this about Bayer's complicity, and was pointed at The Origins of AIDS. The first review (by John P. Jones) pointed me at Haemo-Caribbean, a Haitian company which was part of the problem. [more inside]
Miss Major is not your token.
Trans elder Miss Major Griffin-Gracy's life and work is celebrated in the 2016 award-winning MAJOR! from Stonewall, to HIV outreach in the 1990s to ongoing support for trans women in prison. The trailer includes this quote from a younger activist on how Miss Major has been genderqueer long before the concept: "Someone will be like 'you're a woman' and she'll be like 'I'm a Wonder Woman. Wonder what kind of woman I am.'" (Film available on demand at Vimeo) [more inside]
Operation Denver/Detrick
Lessons From Operation "Denver," the KGB’s Massive AIDS Disinformation Campaign: Historian Douglas Selvage talks about what the Russian government did in the 1980s to spread a conspiracy theory about the origins of HIV, and how that reverberates to the effects of misinformation campaigns currently promoted about the novel coronavirus
Larry Kramer has died
Larry Kramer, AIDS activist, co-founder of ACTUP and The Gay Men's Health Crisis, playwright of The Normal Heart, has died at 84 (NYT) Obituaries are plentiful on the web, and tributes on Twitter. [more inside]
Get Fat, Don't Die
[many links may be NSFW]
In his inaugural food column, Beowulf Thorne included recipes for gingerbread pudding, Thai chicken curry, and vanilla poached pears, plus a photo of a naked blond man spread-eagled in a pan of paella. Eat your cereal with whipping cream, he advised readers, and ladle extra gravy onto your dinner plate. “Not only does being undernourished reduce your chances of getting lucky at that next orgy, it can make you much more susceptible to illness, and we’ll have none of that,” Wulf wrote. “Get Fat, Don’t Die,” the first cooking column for people with AIDS, ran in every issue of Diseased Pariah News, the AIDS humor zine that Wulf started and edited from 1990 to 1999.Beowulf Thorne’s cooking column for people with AIDS claimed the right to pleasure, but in each recipe was embedded an urgent appeal, Jonathan Kauffman [more inside]
All about Kenneth Sean Carson's junk
Ken was not merely dickless by default; the bulge was the result of careful strategizing to which his inventors, businessmen, a psychologist, and Japanese manufacturers all contributed. Despite all this planning, Ken still came to represent things his parent company never intended, as icons tend to do. The story of Ken’s crotch is not merely one of PR, manufacturing, and/or branding—it’s about which realities our culture deems acceptable, and which that it seeks to keep hidden. This goes not just for the doll, but for the man he was named after, Ken Handler, who died in 1994 with major parts of his life airbrushed out of public view. (Rich Juzwiak, Jezebel)
PrEP+
A New, Ever-Complicated Era of Frank Ocean Is Upon Us [Vulture] “Is Frank Ocean circling album mode again? In the last five days, the Blonded team rolled out a new party, a new radio mix, a new single, a bounce remix of Blonde’s “Nights,” [Soundcloud] and more. Co-produced by German house DJ Boys Noize, Ocean’s new “DHL” [YouTube] is a psychedelic floss track rooted in the cryptic swag rap of 2016’s Endless. The lyrics range from devilishly conceited (“Niggas think it’s new, it ain’t new, boy / Old files just turned two, yeah / Still sound like it’s coming soon, yeah”; “Independent juug, sellin’ records out the trunk / I’m already rich as fuck, so the product’s in the front”) to mysterious (“This ain’t no fuckin’ hopes and dreams prophecy / How’d he sleep? Faith is in the coffee bean”) to just plain horny (“Boy toy suck me like a Hoover / Boy toy ride me like an Uber”).” [more inside]
McCarthy Henchman, Nixon fixer, Trump mentor, Reagan White House guest
Roy Cohn, The Most Hated Gay Man in America (The Nib) "Everybody knows, too, that the grotesque qualities embodied by the president are widespread among the Manhattan elite that tolerated and nurtured him, from the real estate sector to the tabloid press and from NBC to Fox News. Just like everybody knows that Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile, and everybody knew it when he was hosting VIPs at his Upper East Side mansion and on his private jet. Everybody knows that after his apparent suicide, most of his elite associates will escape any justice. That’s how it goes." Covering for Roy Cohn (New Republic) " At a gay bar in Provincetown, as reported by Cohn biographer Nicholas von Hoffman, a friend described Cohn’s behavior at a local lounge: “Roy sang three choruses of ‘God Bless America,’ got a hard-on and went home to bed.” How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn's Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America (Vanity Fair) "But important unindicted people were invited, too. And they went. Large slices of the upper crust of New York and Washington snuggled up to him, laughed and entertained one another with stories about his crimes as though they were choice insiders' jokes, and wrestled for the privilege of partying with Cohn and his crooked and perverse friends." King Cohn (The Nation) How Angels in America put Roy Cohn into the definitive story of AIDS (previously)
“Lust, plain and simple—if lust were ever simple.”
...these books are artifacts. There is every sort of forbidden subject in forbidden books, what was then illicit sex, but also, all things taboo—drugs, various subcultures, descriptions of parts of cities there was no reason to go to otherwise. There is an honesty that rises from there being little reason for lying: emotional states, cultural criticism about art and politics at the time of the writing, blind items, gossip, maps—the stuff we call today “creative nonfiction” ... These books served as community. My First Library Was a Library of Porn by Brian Bouldrey [NSFW text] [more inside]
If You Make Movies Just for the Critics, They'll F*ck You Anyway
When you’re a very active person and you make movies, shit will happen to you. What I say to film schools is making movies is not all blow jobs and sunglasses. Every shot is grunt work. And happily, there’s nothing I would have rather done. In Conversation: Joel Schumacher [CW: sex, the 60s, the 70s, AIDS, Woody Allen, Batman & Robin, &c.]
Disabled People Can Lose Their Homes for Not Mowing the Lawn
Richard McGary lost his home because he wasn’t able to clean his yard. hen McGary lived in Portland, Oregon, a city inspector decided he had too much debris in his yard and cited his home as a “nuisance” property under the city’s local nuisance ordinance. McGary, who was living with AIDS, asked volunteers from a local AIDS project to help. But before they could clear the yard to the city’s satisfaction, McGary was hospitalized with AIDS-related complications. His patient advocate informed the city that McGary was an individual with a disability and requested more time, but Portland refused. The city issued a warrant for violating the city’s chronic nuisance ordinance, and charged him $1,818.83 for the cost of clean-up. When McGary couldn’t pay, Portland claimed rights to his home — and forced McGary sell it to satisfy his debt to the city.
Indian tycoon Dr. Yusuf Hamied fights big pharma
AIDS Medication Produced and Sold for $1 Per Day “We cannot afford not to (help.)” became the driving force behind Cipla’s production of AIDS cocktail. Hamied said in response to accusation of an ulterior motive: “Of course I have an ulterior motive: before I die, I want to do some good.”
Mark was tweaking when he forged his own death certificate.
He said he'd been diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s, at age 30, and had never expected to reach his 40s....To finance the life he kept thinking would end at any moment, he had committed increasingly creative and reckless varieties of fraud. He told me in our first conversations that he had faked his own death several times; I couldn’t quite keep track of how many. He had stolen his brother’s identity and faked his death, too, despite the fact that his brother was already dead.
Killing Patient Zero
A new documentary, Killing Patient Zero, sheds more light on the erroneous demonization of Gaëtan Dugas: "Based on Richard A. McKay’s landmark book, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (2017), the film features 38 interviews with friends and colleagues of Dugas and [Randy] Shilts, as well as doctors, scientists and gay men and women who lived through the epidemic, notably the sardonic Fran Lebowitz. They include [William] Darrow, who laments how his study was skewed, and Michael Denneny, Shilts’ editor and publisher, who takes the blame for igniting the Patient Zero hysteria with a shameless publicity ploy to sell And the Band Played On." Killing Patient Zero: Official Trailer. [more inside]
The early days of AIDS
“Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.” From OUT
The Recollectors
The Recollectors features the memories and stories of “children and families left behind by parents who died of AIDS”. Max Mueller remembers growing up with his mom Cookie Mueller, who was one of the John Waters’ Dreamlanders and a frequent subject in Nan Goldin’s photos. [more inside]
A room without a painted ceiling is like a world without a sky
Larry Boyce knocked on the door of San Francisco's Old First Presbyterian Church, explaining that he had AIDS and wanted to do some painting in exchange for a place to stay. First Presbyterian put aside its apprehension and opened its doors to Larry Boyce, sending him and the entire congregation on a spiritual and artistic odyssey (S.F. Gate, 1996). Before that, in the spring of 1989, Boyce was in Tucson, AZ, where he offered to decorate the lobby of the Congress Hotel in exchange for a place to park his bike, and he did (Google street view). In 1988, itinerant ceiling painter had arrived in NYC (NYT, 1988). Larry Boyce was an energetic, optimistic cross-country bicyclist and the late 20th-century’s greatest champion of the stenciled frieze (Collector's Weekly, Sept. 7, 2018).
The long run.
One of New York’s Most Unlikely Friendships
Part of the history of the AIDS epidemic is buried on Hart Island
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Potter's field. [more inside]
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Potter's field. [more inside]
“We have obviously failed.”
After watching the Larry Kramer documentary In Love And Anger, writer Eric Thurm found the most memorable moment to be an angry speech by author David Feinberg about the movement as a failure. (The speech starts at 11:09 of this old AIDS Community TV Video.) He has written a meditation on the man and his rage for The Outline. [more inside]
"Eight Loving Arms and All Those Suckers."
How Angels in America put Roy Cohn into the definitive story of AIDS: This oral history is lightly adapted from The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. (SL Vulture).
“We are in a golden age in HIV vaccine science.”
On the eve of World AIDS Day, the NIH announced two new large clinical trials. HPTN 084 will test the efficacy of a long-acting injectable drug in volunteers in southern and eastern Africa. Imbokodo will recruit women in southern Africa to test the efficacy of a mosaic vaccine designed to induce immune responses against a variety of strains of HIV. Also see the South African Medical Research Council announcement. [more inside]
Life sucks. And my life sucks in particular.
Michael Friedman was the composer-lyricist of Broadway's Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, numerous off-Broadway musicals, a founding member of The Civilians, and the newly-named artistic director of New York City Center's Encores! Off-Center series. He died yesterday at age 41 from complications due to HIV/AIDS. [more inside]
A Sign Of Trouble: The HIV Crisis In The Deaf Community
In July 2016, Smith, who identifies as black, gay and deaf, presented to a doctor seeking pre-exposure prophylaxis. Despite his knowledge of PrEP, the HIV infections rates in the black queer community and his willingness to take the drug, one thing stood in his way: a hearing doctor. The doctor told Smith that Deaf people should not be having sex. Journalist Matthew Rodriquez (twitter) writes about the unspoken HIV crisis in the deaf community for Into, the online lifestyle magazine from Grindr (yes, that Grindr - note: not a link to Grindr)
Gay/bi black men in the US have the highest rate of HIV in the world
Why? (SLNYT) Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using the first comprehensive national estimates of lifetime risk of H.I.V. for several key populations, predicted that if current rates continue, one in two African-American gay and bisexual men will be infected with the virus. That compares with a lifetime risk of one in 99 for all Americans and one in 11 for white gay and bisexual men. To offer more perspective: Swaziland, a tiny African nation, has the world’s highest rate of H.I.V., at 28.8 percent of the population. If gay and bisexual African-American men made up a country, its rate would surpass that of this impoverished African nation — and all other nations.
Her Name Was Glynis
Now for the sad story (CTRL+F "Now for a sad story") behind The Smashing Pumpkins' dreamy song Glynis. [more inside]
"Yes, my brother was gay. Yes, he died of AIDS. Yes, I love him."
Nell Carter, the Broadway and 80s sitcom superstar who died too young in 2003 after a life of many highs and lows, was born today in 1948 . In 1992, ABC, in partnership with Elizabeth Taylor, presented "New Light: A Call to Action in the War Against AIDS" (1992 New York Times article) and Ms. Carter sang a perhaps odd choice: Steve Winwood's "Back in the High Life Again", which she dedicated, against her family's wishes, to her gay brother Dr. Bernard Taylor, who had died of the illness in 1989. (poster's note: if this interests you in the least, please forgive the poor quality and make it to the end around 3:48 because it is worth it) [more inside]
Why Peter Hujar is Portraiture's Forgotten Hero
"Who? Although many would recognise the work of Peter Hujar – his famous photograph of Susan Sontag reclining, for example, or his affecting shot of transgender actress Candy Darling on her deathbed – the American photographer and his impressive legacy are frequently overlooked." Thirty years after his death, Peter Hujar is finally getting his due: a traveling retrospective, organized by the Morgan Library & Museum. [more inside]
Rescuing an Artwork from Crumbling Technologies (e.g. MS-DOS, Laserdisc)
What does it look like when a museum pulls a time-based media installation artwork from storage? MoMA Conservator Ben Fino-Radin tells the story of rescuing and exhibiting the 1994 interactive multimedia work Lovers, by Teiji Furuhashi. [more inside]
Life in the Plague Years
"On the first of December, three decades after the disease first hit the city, the New York City AIDS Memorial will open at ground zero of the epidemic — St. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village, now closed, where patients once flooded the rooms and spilled out into the surrounding corridors, turning the genteel facility very suddenly into a kind of war zone. All told, more than 100,000 New York men, women, and children have died of AIDS, and the memorial is built in their names. But it reminds us, too, as all memorials do, of how much has already been forgotten."
Not patient zero
More than thirty years after his death, Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas — who has been dubbed “Patient Zero” of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, has been exonerated by medical evidence, a new study published in Nature today.
Even the word had power for me. Quilts.
Twenty-nine years ago, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfolded on the Mall for the first time, with 1,920 panels. Today, it has grown to more than 49,000.
GMHC
Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the founding of what would become known as the the Gay Men's Health Crisis. On August 11, 1981, Nathan Fain, Larry Kramer, Lawrence Mass, Paul Popham, Paul Rapoport, and Edmund White met with Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien and discussed the "gay cancer" that was affecting their friends and lovers. "In 1983 Larry Kramer, one of the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, was kicked out of the organization he helped create, due to his loud and often controversial methods of raising public awareness about the AIDS epidemic." Today, GMHC serves more than 10,000 people per year. [more inside]
Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever – CRISPR
Designer babies, the end of diseases, genetically modified humans that never age. Outrageous things that used to be science fiction are suddenly becoming reality. The only thing we know for sure is that things will change irreversibly. [more inside]
The AIDS Activist and the Banker
Peter Staley was a 24 year-old banker at J.P. Morgan when he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1985. His brother, Jes, worked there as well. In a Q&A with Fortune, they discuss how their paths diverged,
Australia's AIDS Epidemic Declared Over
Good news for Oz: AIDS epidemic no longer a public health issue in Australia, scientists say. The nation's top scientists have declared "the end of AIDS" as a public health issue, as Australia joins the ranks of a select few countries which have successfully beaten the epidemic.
You're the National Gallery/ You're Garbo's salary /You're cellophane
Happy Birthday Cole Porter! In 1990, Red Hot + Blue, an AIDS benefit album was released featuring covers of Cole Porter's music by an electric array of performers accompanied by a TV special with music videos from the likes of Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders. Notable tracks include "Miss Otis Regets" by the Pogues and Kristy MacColl (video Neil Jordon) "Don't Fench Me In" by David Byrne "You Do Something To Me" by Sinéad O'Connor (video John Maybury) "Have You Evah" by Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop (video by Alex Cox) "From This Moment On" by Jimmy Somerville (video Steve mcclean) and "Ev'ry We Say Goodbye" by Annie Lennox (video by Ed Lachman)
Living is complicated
Last Men Standing. The stories of eight men who aren't supposed to be here. Diagnosed with HIV in the 1980's, when that was a death sentence, they are now living lives they never expected to have. [more inside]