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
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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.
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Yeah, you're absolutely right. Fuck, I didn't think my hatred could get purer but it has.
Have you seen how the white house press secretary responded to questions about aids?
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.
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