aids

The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.

There is one question George is asked about life and art and which is more important, and George said art is more important because it is immortal. This struck a very deep note inside me. For I am quite aware of the chance that I have or will have AIDS. The odds are very great and, in fact, the symptoms already exist. My friends are dropping like flies and I know in my heart that it is only divine intervention that has kept me alive this long. I don__ know if I have five months or five years, but I know my days are numbered. This is why my activities and projects are so important now. To do as much as possible as quickly as possible. I__ sure that what will live on after I die is important enough to make sacrifices of my personal luxury and leisure time. Work is all I have and art is more important than life.

Darla shook her head, a small smirk on her lips. __ou__e such a mom,_ she told Katherine.Katherine stared at her, puzzled. __ou__e a mom, too,_ she said softly.__o, I gave birth. That doesn__ make me a mom. Not like you.__ look passed between the two women like none they had ever shared before. For a split second, Katherine felt a slight connection. __ell, you rest. I__l check on you later._ She turned and left the room, a funny, unexplainable feeling inside her.

[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer - if the information they base that decision on is wrong. People don't want the truth [when] it is complicated. They don't want to spend years debating an issue. They want it homogenized, sanitized, and above all, simplified into terms they can understand...Governments are often criticized for moving slowly, but that deliberateness, it turns out, is their strength. They take time to think through complex problems before they act. People, however, are different. People react first from the gut and then from the head...give that knee-jerk reflex real power to make its overwhelming will known as a national mandate instantly and you can cause a political riot. Combine these sins - simplification of information and instant, visceral democratic mandates - and you lose the ability to cool down. There is no longer deliberation time between events that may or may not be true and our reaction to them. Policy becomes instinct rather than thought.

It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.

Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.

The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.

Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.

Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.

A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.

Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating.

Not everyone who has killed themselves because they were HIV positive would have been killed by AIDS.

Being HIV positive doesn__ necessarily mean that you are going to die before each and every person who is HIV negative.

Some men would not still be HIV negative or alive, if they had managed to sleep with some of the women with whom they want or wanted to have sex.

Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither... Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause.

AIDS had won gays sympathy they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.

When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.

To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us vulnerable because it is so obviously about wanting something beyond what is, and to have a political desire often is construed as wanting too much.