If you've ever wondered why there's a dearth of radical older gay men, mostly in the range of 50+, it's at least in part because of that. Puritanical anti-sex assholes like Larry Kramer managed to survive for obvious reasons, and then got to revise history and sound like an unheard Cassandra, when the reality was that a lot of the damage had already been done by the time he started his own activism.
In my view, this led to a rightward shift in the activism of the gay community, which ended up hijacking a lot of the hard work that lesbian and trans activists had built up, and moved towards respectability rather than queer liberation.
All the more reason to say fuck Reagan for ignoring it for nearly a decade. Even Thatcher did something about it and that's saying something.
This isn't even my take, it's something that an AIDS activist in the late '80s said, that AIDS killed off the interesting gays. But thought it would be
This is why I don't go to pride any more. The seething contempt from heteronormative assimilationist gays towards anything weird or different was too much.
I have railed against charging money for pride (since I'm in New York they act like it's normal to pay $100 a ticket to see Madonna say the n-word on a barge or whatever) and for making it more accessible, and all the asshole older gays have had the most blisteringly bad takes on it
You can go to the parade for free, but any of the dances or events or literally anything else, there's a fee.
It's dipping into media-analysis libtube I know, but Lindsay Ellis' video on RENT (and why it sucks) starts and ends with this very theme. The cruelty was the point, and the very administration was so set to allow it to happen. That final quote by Larry Kramer she uses to end the video, the whole end really, just gives me shivers.
I feel stupid that I hadn't realized that. I thought it was just contempt.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Fuck, I didn't think my hatred could get purer but it has.
Seeing him laugh at Bob Hope's homophobic AIDS jokes while celebrating the Statue of Liberty's 100th anniversary seemed to piss me off more.
I can witness to this because some of those people you're talking about are my dead friends. I've got in my closet right now the diaries of one of the most interesting men I have ever met, he escaped HIV but he still caught Hep C and his liver eventually failed at age 65. I cared for him in his final days, so I inherited his diaries and his dog. The dog has since died too but I still have the diaries.
I really want to figure out a way to tell his story. A lot of the witnesses to the events of his life have died as well, so time is running out. He fled his home in Pickens, Mississippi in 1961? I think and on his way to the emerging gay scene in San Francisco at that time he stopped at a monastery in Santa Fe to try to "cure" himself with Catholicism. I have all his old Bibles from that time too. He eventually gave it up as a bad job and went on to become the PR director for the San Francisco Opera. Opera was his passion until his very last day on this planet.
I have so many good stories with that guy. One time he got so angry at a mutual friend that he shit on their doorstep, but I was homeless and crashing there that night, so I was the one who stepped in it. When we met up shortly afterward for our morning Bible study, we solved the mystery of why I stepped in a giant pile of human feces and the motherfucking aliens in space could have heard his laughter. There was no one else like him, and there never will be again.
I mean I don't know but it sounds like it. He was the only contact I had with that scene. We don't have opera around here, which is probably a large part of the reason he left in the 60s.
My humble suggestion: just get him talking and record it. You will have the raw materials from there to then write something or give it to someone to write.
Also lmao that is some beautiful petty shit
I guess I didn't make this clear enough, he died November 1 of the year 2000. He had no idea what was coming next but good grief I wish I could hear his takes. It was All Souls Day, exactly one year prior to the day I just mentioned when he shit in front of our friend's back gate. I remember the date because of the homily we read, and that's why the story stands out to me. We weren't even all that religious, by the time we got to doing that together it was pure ritual, just some comfort for each other in the mornings before breakfast. I can't do any of this story justice in a comment. Like I said, I'm still trying to figure out how to write about him, and it's been two decades now.
Christ sorry, I'm an idiot. Well my advice stays the same, just record yourself telling his stories, and then that's something you can work from.
Oof sorry. That was stupid of me.
reproduction by budding, it's the only way
edit: kinda defeats the purpose though if you can't duplicate the brain contents. but maybe the body grows back cisgender. and then we could become apathetic to social issues too! imagine all that extra leisure time if you don't feel so compelled to give a shit about like other people.
edit: what even is cisgender when you're non-binary? i've long wanted to use the retort "pass for what?", but i don't even know what that would be for myself, what i would want to be ideally, if it's even human. i'm tired, i should go to bed....
edit: i've been meaning to watch the second season of Pose, and anarchopac's recent history of AIDS video, but that stuff hurts to watch. maybe when the future feels brighter i'll care more for looking into the darkness of that past again.
edit: hahaha a chapo.chat! i can post my queer leftist sad thoughts on them and won't even get banned or downvoted or deleted or brigaded this is amazing. getting kicked off reddit was a good thing. cringe culture is dead. :transshork-happy: :zzz:
edit: i like how sneaky editing makes people retroactively uphex this hot garbage i'm adding all at once. john kerry for president.tw:internalized-queerphobia
edit: that anti-natalist thread though: would budding be okay because you consent to yourself being duplicated into existence? also if i bud from myself, and my other body is cislike, and i sex with my otherself, then i could make babies! who are also genetically identical, so is that anti-natalism approved? what if i torture and eat my babyselves for adrenochrome, and live forever, is that permissible because I still consented to doing it? if not, then why does past me get to consent to things, but present me just has to live with that? that's not fair! future me will be positively disturbed that i even posted this, poor them. maybe future mes should unionize for better treatment. maybe my brain cells should unionize for more sleep. might is right motherfuckers. that's my answer to anti-natalism. what the hell are unborn babies going to do about it? complain on chapo? please, they could be dead from climate change before they're old enough to shitpost.
edit: do you think queer people during the AIDS epidemic felt this way? that the whole world could be ending and nothing to do about it but watch sadistic republicans rejoice in the carnage. we can only hope that one day in the future they'll make a Pose about us leftie larpers that people can watch for trauma and cringe porn. :eyes: ...oh man yikes. jesus yikes....
that's it, that's my take, that's why I couldn't watch Pose anymore. it still feels like it was made to be cringe and trauma porn for cis people to consume. i can't shake that feeling. i'm sick.
i hate myself for ever seeing and feeling any of it that way in the first place. i don't need budding i need a neurocisectomie.
Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman is sorta about this, how an entire generation of thought and its proponents were destroyed and papered over. Good take.
Tfw you're currently in the country with the largest HIV/AIDS outbreak in the world due to the 2 pervious presidents being some form of AIDS denialists and the apartheid government trying to use HIV/AIDS as a bio weapon to kill of the BIPOC population
Cis white gay men will all be voting republican in ten years time.
One of the queer eye cast members is going to be a speaker at the RNC in 2026.
if I knew more old gays I'd probably agree with you, but they're all so fucking boring that I don't
uh? can't tell if sarcasm
Blaire White and transmeds have been trying their darnedest.
In some places being trans is more socially accepted than being gay.
Apparently is a real thing that some people consider transitioning because they're gay but too homophobic to accept that...
...or so one of the transheathcare gatekeepers told me. They make the rules so they much be right.tbf it's a good thing if that happens. I'd rather sections of people be normalized rather than rejected.
As a means to establish communism? no not a good thing.
but as a means to normalize the existence of trans people? I think yeah.
I'd say that some degree of assimilation is evidence of societal acceptance even if it isn't a good thing in and of itself.
I don't have an easy solution, but if gaining societal acceptance means going the same route as the shitty white cis gay men who've thrown everyone else under the bus, I hope that never happens to them.
What I mean to say is, when some members of a group "sell out" to the right by going Blaire White or whatever, that's not good.
But the fact that they were even able to do so in the first place is a good sign, because it most likely means that all the members of that group are being treated better by society.
Absolutely fucking no it is not. Conservatives don't allow entry to minorities who want rights. They allow entry to minorities who think that minorities have too many rights already. All they're willing to accept is a token who will stand up and argue that yes, in fact, the left want to give me special rights and I don't deserve them. That's the only thing the right will voluntarily normalize.
Huh. I mean my whole point was more that the gay community was moved right because of this. That's what confused me.
It sucks. People fought for his rights, and he doesn't give a fuck about them in return. I hate it.
well that is a hot take, but yeah, youre not wrong. mainstream gay culture is super gentrified right now but i have hope in the zoomers (except they're also somehow more likely to be sex negative??).
Sex negative is less worrying than social conservatism to me. Larry Kramer in particular bothers me because he literally pushed abstention, not safer sex, and he felt vindicated because he didn't fuck and he lived. He got lucky and turned into an evangelical. Pretty much everyone else I know who was alive back then hated his guts.
i agree completely. its not even in the same ballpark really. i wish we had that radical spark in gay culture but its so dimly lit now.
to add on to what you're saying, also a lot of european younger/30 something gays have extremely reactionary politics. i used to frequent pop music forums and all the european members were always saying some heinous shit.
Yeah, one of my older friends was an Opera Singer in the later part of his career during the AIDS crisis. He has stories (I'm a big fan of the one about the gourmet Cocaine tasting party/orgy at a major secretly gay Peer's house. Alternate drugs were available for different dietary needs.)
But all, and I do mean all his male friends are dead. He only survived because he got thrown out of the company in the aftermath of a bad breakup, and found someone to settle down with.
Oh yeah, it was apparently quite a time. Decadent and a bit awful and utterly unsustainable ("High art" actors are basically lumpens although proletisation was in full swing.) But you get this idea of a small, brief area and moment where people weren't alienated from themselves and each other, and that sounded great.
While I agree with the general sentiment, Larry Kramer was HIV+ so that doesn't fully fit this idea that only the bores did not become HIV+. I guess you could make the point that the bores were more careful and hence stayed alive for longer.
He was poz, but his suggestion to prevent spread was to close all bathhouses and to stop fucking. He took an extremist, puritanical position that was not borne out by the data. But a lot of the folks who survived were either lucky, monogamous, conservatives, or closeted.
your stance: covid anti-mask individualism except good actually
god imagine a pandemic and all you gotta do to avoid it for the most part is just jerk off instead
not completely, no
and sure, include condom usage in the list of stuff not to do to get pozzed up
seriously. imagine instead of "wear a mask" it was "don't fuck people raw in the ass" and somehow enough people decided "nah fuck that" that we got an r_n of like 4.0 or some shit
