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Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.

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IF I DIE OF AIDS FORGET BURIAL JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA

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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.

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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”.

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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.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article:
“The men in white are the surviving members of the original San Francisco Gay Men’s choir (sic). The others represent those lost to AIDS,” reads the caption.

Luse released the same photo three years later, but this time with an amendment to the caption. “The Gay Men’s Chorus posed to illustrate the impact of AIDS. Those dressed in black, with their backs turned, represent those who had died. Today, all their backs would be turned because the obituary list is now 47 names longer than the chorus roster. For each man singing these days, more than one chorus member has died of AIDS.” This information started the choral members saying before each performance, “I sing for two.” The SFGMC also maintains their “Fifth Section,” a list of members who have been lost to AIDS over the years, “Their names are memorialized in our concert programs and in the list below. Their spirit lives on with us and we honor their memory” they site on the webpage.
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. The men in white are the surviving members of the original San Fransisco Gay Men’s choir. The rest represent those lost to AIDS.

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.

  • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1·
    7 hours ago

    Thanks, that was an informative article. From what I read, I gather that the main factors which caused the epidemic to be so much worse in the US than in any other developed country, aside from socioeconomic factors that made it more ripe for the spread in the first place, are: 1) ineffective prevention and drug policies from the reagan administration that didn’t heed research or best practices being implemented in other countries; 2) shitty healthcare system that can’t or won’t get people tested and treated in a timely manner; and 3) expensive/unaffordable healthcare that’s prohibitive for many people who require treatment.

    Am I missing anything?

    • Enkrod@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      7 minutes ago

      The complete disregard of the crisis at the beginning. Inside the white house they called it “the gay plague” and many conservatives in the Reagan administration moralized that it was god’s punishment for homosexuals. The response to the crisis was willfully delayed, because from their point of view the infected deserved their fate.

      Needle exchange programs were framed as endorsing drug use. Safe-sex education was vilified as sexualizing children.

      [These attitutes] deeply complicated epidemiologists’ efforts. While public health leaders and epidemiologists from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and National Institute of Health (NIH) attempted to gain control of the epidemic, they also had to contend with Reagan’s conservative advisors and aides, who wanted AIDS education to “fit the model of social and religious conservatism that posited gay men as sick and dangerous”.

      Brier further writes that, "Staff members were flooded with material with vitriolic attacks on homosexuality.

      Reagan himself thought AIDS was like measles and it would go away on it’s own, no matter what people told him. Only after a personal acquaintance of him died from it, did it dawn on Reagan that this disease that had killed tens of thousands of gay men and intravenuous drug users and infected a lot more, might actually be a problem for non-drug-using heterosexuals too.

      Ron Reagan, President Reagan’s son, agreed that President Reagan needed the death of someone he personally knew to make him understand the gravity of the AIDS epidemic, as he commented, “My father has the sort of psychology where he grasps onto the single anecdote better than the broad wash of the problem.”

      The Koop report held great informatiin about what could be done to prevent spread, written in large parts by one Anthony Fauci. But:

      Reactions to the report among conservatives were sharply negative. Phyllis Schlafly, the chairperson of the conservative Eagle Forum think tank, was said to have been incensed by the report, saying it “looks and reads like it was edited by the Gay Task Force”. She further accused Koop of advocating for teaching third graders “safe sodomy”.