Where’s the brotherly love for gays and lesbians?

[Ian David]

Where’s the brotherly love for gays and lesbians?
Equal rites
By: MARY ANN SORRENTINO
11/29/2006 7:08:28 PM

I enjoyed Brokeback Mountain and thought it did a good job of trying to give the rest of the world a window into the joys and sorrows of men loving men (which mirror the joys and sorrows of men loving women, and vice versa).

Yet recently, a truly pioneering film about homosexuals and the world around them once again reduced me to sobbing. Philadelphia (1993) captures and preserves for posterity a time in America when, although men and women were dying by the thousands, a whole country seemed unable to weep for them, so great was its fear of contagion. When Tom Hanks, playing the young lawyer ravaged by AIDS, lowers the oxygen mask covering his mouth and says to Antonio Banderas, his character’s lover, “Miguel, I’m ready ,” we understand why.

Many of us who were involved with AIDS-related care in the 1980s remember our own fatalism and our uncertainty about all the possible ways the virus might or might not be transmitted. In a sense, we felt like participants in a daily crapshoot, seeking reassurance that emptying bedpans of waste and basins full of vomit would not put us at risk.

Those of us who trained as AIDS buddies (such a summer-camp name for such a serious task) virtually lived with our charges. We washed their faces, helped them brush their teeth, and when the fevers, the chills, and other dark horrors came, we held them, rocked them, and even slept wearily at their sides.

Still, they died, by the hundreds, every year. We sang, we prayed, we lit candles, and we made quilts in their memory. We warred against a government bureaucracy moving so sluggishly that, too often, the client’s first disability check arrived on the day of his funeral.

More:
http://www.thephoenix.com/article_ektid28658.aspx

[xchrom]

1. ah yes. n/t

[William769]

2. Tomorrow is AIDS world day.

I hope to see all participate. I know I'm dreaming, but hey I'm an optimist.

So many people. :cry:

[bliss_eternal]

6. World Aids Day 2006...

http://www.worldaidsday.org/

[acmejack]

3. Please, the lip service to it you mean?

It is a national shame what has been allowed to happen to the people with AIDS, all because of the Reagan administration's heartless decision (see a pattern here?)that it was a "homosexual problem".

Even in the so called gay friendly communities, such as Austin, we have incidents as we had here recently, with an off duty police officer's gay bashing! (He was the bashee) Right...

We Americans are a hateful, bigoted bunch, despite our frequent protestations to the contrary.

[sui generis]

4. And when these pompous bastards say "pride" is "flaunting it"

I just want to say we're proud that we came through those times and still have the capacity to hope and give a damn about the rest of the world; that we have any capacity for humanity left that wasn't subsumed in bitterness and rejection and rage.

Yes, until you have talked the long, frank hours with your dying friends, and hoped in the face of all reality that some last second miracle would happen, and hoped even again as they breathed their last, until you've looked at their bloodless still faces, transformed from something vital and beautiful and full of humanity to a wasteland of cancers, blindness, and madness, it's impossible to understand.

We held their hands and put cool cloths on fevered foreheads when hospitals segregated them on "AIDS Wards", when nurses wore masks and full body armor in ignorance, when their loving "natural" families circled like vultures with writs and power of attorneys. We had to believe that we wouldn't get it from bedpans and bloody bandages and sweat, and most often from hopeless defeated tears.

The world doesn't really know about those moments, when we ourselves were children taking care of our own in face of betrayal, blame, abandonment, gibbering fear, and even worse, just ordinary apathy.

And for every "oh no not another AIDS story" lament, there are literally another million AIDS stories to lament, that people don't want to hear, can't bear to hear. We, so many of us, hold our pain where the rest of the world can't see it, should never have done to them what was done to us.

And had we known the cost to ourselves from the outset, the sheer impossibility of it, the unreality of it, the brute unending unyielding pain in the soul, that we would do it all over again without hesitation, for duty, for love.

I have stories. We all have stories. Those quilts, some funny, some sad, some grand and simple, tributes etched not in stone but in frail cloth by the fleeting heart of memory, those panels were a way to remember past the pain, to what was lost, to the people who fell then, and still fall.

[Jella]

11. Thank you

As someone living with HIV, and remembering those times I appreciate your post.

[bliss_eternal]

5. Kicking and nominating.

Great post--thanks for sharing! :hi:

[Sapphire Blue]

7. K&R

[goclark]

14. K and R too~

[bliss_eternal]

8. If you are reading this thread--please nominate it...

In honor of World AIDS Day! Would like to see as many HIV/AIDS threads as possible make it to the main page. :hi: Thanks so much!

[goclark]

12. Kicking for the Cause!

[bliss_eternal]

13. Thank you so much, goclark!

:hi:

[Why Syzygy]

9. Kick n/t

[ThomCat]

10. Kick.

:(