These heartbreaking and incredibly moving images show the affection and love shown during the height of the Aids crisis. Photographer Gideon Mendel’s project The Ward began in 1993 when he spent a number of weeks on the Charles Bell wards in London’s Middlesex Hospital. All the patients on the ward were dying with the knowledge that there was no cure for the disease. During this time antiretroviral medications were not available and patients on the ward faced the prospect of an early death.
Another memorialization of this time is the documentary Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End (1996). I saw this very moving documentary a couple of years ago on youtube, but now it looks like it’s been taken down.
Along with the tears it left me in, it renewed my sense of the magnitude of the losses of the AIDS crisis. It’s also serves as a reminder of the lethal consequences of intolerance. Instead of marshaling public resources to address this public health emergency the Reagan administration treated these people as disposable subjects. Do a little reading and you can even find anecdotes that celebrated the deadly scythe of AIDS as a just punishment for deviance.
“Go without hate, but not without rage; heal the world.”
– there is no single, unified LGBT community that agrees on absolutely everything – and that’s okay. a good thing, even.
– 30 year olds are not “elders”. neither are 40 year olds. old LGBT people exist.
– LGBT people did not go through a hard reset during the AIDS crisis. people from that era are still alive and their voices are still important.
– the consequences of the AIDS crisis are still ongoing and people around the world still need treatment for HIV/AIDS.
– intersex is not “cis nonbinary”, and many cishet intersex people are distinctly uncomfortable being perceived as LGBT – it’s important to acknowledge and respect their experiences, too
that’s all i can think of for now. be critical, be safe, have fun out there.
People are cruel and incorrect about some of the worst things on this website, that’s for sure. The number of blatantly ahistorical and erroneous takes I’ve seen about the American LGBT community’s experience with the historical HIV/AIDS epidemic and with HIV/AIDS currently is really sad considering how relevant HIV/AIDS is to our community.
Rush's tumblr archive 