Tag: recent history

I’ve been trying to read up on the History lately, especially the AIDS crisis, and it’s depressing as hell but there’s so many stories of lesbians who tried to help gay and bi men however they could. It’s a good reminder that we’re stronger together.

soih:

gaypunching:

honestly we owe so much to lesbians and bi women who stepped up when gay and bi men were barred from being w their partners in hospitals or were ill themselves .

its sadly rarely mentioned even in lgbt spaces how these women gave so much and weren’t even asked they just did it

many old dykes that I have known have told me about their experiences during the AIDS crisis – most specifically, the terror and bystander trauma experienced by the lesbians who worked tirelessly delivering medication and meals to those men confined to their apartments. my retired lesbian professor struggled to teach the crisis, the genocide, because of this – the tens upon tens of times where she would arrive at an apartment only to push open the door and find a close friend dead on the hardwood floor, days left neglected. the times where she arrived at empty apartments because landlords were mass-evicting their gay tenants, never to hear from those men again. the times where she had to manually hold her friends’ jaws open just to get water down, the bodies she bathed, the men she loved who were violently stolen from her life, watching as gay mens’ families left their children to die in complete isolation rather than accept their sexuality. these women are still alive, these women carry the legacy of all the men lost, these women care an invaluable lesson of solidarity, love, and bonds that cannot be broken by any act of oppression, violence, or illness. reach out to them, talk to them, let them know you see their pain and you appreciate them. 

photosbyjaye:

chocolatechiprincess:

wizardshark:

berberebae:

revolutionarykoolaid:

justin-with-a-j:

chordn:

kanakalala458:

averysweetpotatoe:

habla-gated:

bando–grand-scamyon:

kaybeeexperience:

sugar–foot:

hypnotic-flow:

ALL OF THIS

*my parents.

And my GREAT Grandma is still alive soooo……..

My GRANDMA

My FATHER went to a LEGALLY MANDATED segregated school until he was 8 and integration was then enforced. He was not legally allowed into a school or part of town with white people until he was almost ten

Many people forget black people couldn’t even vote until 1965. That’s not that long ago.

for the vast majority schools within the south, substantive de-segregation was completed only in like circa 1975. thats like fucking 20 years after Brown v. Board of education.

My father is 52 and he chopped cotton in Louisiana as a child until he was 11

Less than 65 years. King was murdered in 68, which was effectively the end of the movement and beginning of the Black Power era. My parents were both born in the 50s in the Jim Crow south, and remember it vividly. One of my mom’s friends was even killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church. People are delusional for acting like this was all so long ago.

There were schools in the U.S that still had segregated proms in 2012. Shit is still happening it’s not all in some distant past.

my fuckin dad was alive before black people could vote

My grandpa still tells me how he wouldn’t accept a job as a police officer because he knew he’d only be allowed to give black people tickets.

And I’ve always known my aunt to be quiet but my grandma says she wasn’t like that til she had to integrate a school in the south (and part of the curriculum was washing your hair in class. Auntie said hell nah)

Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was murdered in 1968. My mom was 18 and graduated high school in 1968. My brother was born in 1968. I was born in 1972. I have met many people who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

Here’s a secret about strikethrough and boldthrough.

shippingisntactivism:

olderthannetfic:

bravevesperian:

I lived through it. You know what else I did? I stubbornly ground my heels in and stayed on Livejournal for several years. 

When we’re talking about it, I think everyone thinks the big scary words up there meant that like… swat teams showed up and made us delete our accounts at gunpoint or something and that’s not the case.

First of all: Let me confess: Strikethrough and boldthrough? Didn’t even effect me, or any of my communities. I was mostly into RP back then, where we had these neat little single-universe ‘’’jamjar’’’ groups of crossover hell (it was a blast! Tumblr RP can never compare.) At the time of Strikethrough and boldthrough I was one of the people who didn’t care because it didn’t concern me– though I was at the time a prolific writer of darkfic and those themes through my RP as well 

But I did notice when entire tags and a few communities went under, and or stopped allowing certain kinds of content all together out of fear of being next. Sex positivity was still a burgeoning thing even then, and you were likely to get laughed out of town if you liked or focused on sex and or romantic relationships in your writing or even just– shipping in general. There was a grind to a hault of everything but the most canon, vanilia romance crap in almost all fandom circles from day one (when shipping had already been a ‘persecuted’ part of fandom)…. 

People who had been cool with you and your content before changed over night. Suddenly their squicks and or intellectual superiority complexes were ‘proven correct’ by staff’s actions and reports of people getting harassed, bullied, and told that they should never write another fic if all they could write about was gross gays– SKYrocketed

After a while, content became SO sterilized that interest dropped off. I wondered where everyone had went, and ended up in fandom limbo for a few years before making my first tumblr in like 2009 or 2010 or so. 

Tl;dr: the death of live journal that all us old codgers are talking about did not happen overnight. It was a slow, painful, awful death of malady where your loved one forgot who you were and called you slurs before they finally died and the pain was over. Btw, you can still go make an LJ account today. Goahead if you want! 

When we talk about tumblr dying it’s not about the site blipping out of existence, it’s about the fact that it’s going the exact same route as LJ. If you don’t believe me, you should look into the tags that have been completely purged (the yaoi tag for one, which I know or a FACT was mostly used by gay nsfw content artists). 

This is so accurate!

It’s not that tumblr is going to completely die now. It’s that this is an early warning sign, and we still have time to duplicate content and follow people on other sites while they’re still contactable. This doesn’t need to be an insurmountable problem, but waiting it out, hoping that tumblr will get its act together will probably not work.

Do not make an account on LJ. IT’s servers moved to Russia, and that means monitorable content and a bunch of other bad stuff.

llesbianfarmer:

angellfallendown:

anyways fuck america for not educating students about the aids crisis whatsoever

my drama teacher mentioned to us “most of my friends from college are dead” and I knew right away what he meant. he explained “I was a drama major in the 1980s” and still no one else in the class understood. he explained a little bit about the aids crisis, but these kids had no idea before. it is truly heartbreaking to hear about it, and especially to see it being erased.

actupny:

On October 11, 1988, ACT UP members from all over the country descended on the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in Rockville, MD, in an action they called “SEIZE CONTROL OF THE FDA.”

ACT UP activists demanded that the FDA make its drug approval process faster and more ethical in order to get more experimental drugs into the bodies of people who needed them. They demanded that drug trials include women, people of color, IV drug users, and all other people with AIDS who had traditionally been excluded from trials and therefore denied access to new drugs.

As a result of the action and ACT UP’s continued lobbying, the FDA adopted ACT UP’s proposed structure for drug trials, Parallel Track, which greatly expanded access to experimental medicines.

Read more about the action here.

Join the fight! ACT UP still meets every Monday at 7pm at the LGBT Center in NYC.

argumate:

collapsedsquid:

Most conservatives
believe that the best way to downsize government is to take away its allowance,
as Ronald Reagan once put it. In other words, tax cuts will lead to spending
cuts. This is a theory I once subscribed to. Back in the days when people cared
about federal budget deficits, there was a case to be made that intentionally
increasing the deficit by reducing revenues would put downward pressure on
spending. Today, unfortunately, the evidence seems to point in exactly the
opposite direction.

At the time that I drafted the Kemp-Roth tax bill, in 1977, the Republican
Party still believed that budget deficits were evil. Republicans would often
even support tax increases, such as in 1969, to balance the budget. But they
came to believe that higher taxes only encouraged higher spending—until a
politically intolerable deficit emerged, at which point they would again be
pressured to support tax increases. Eventually, Republicans like Newt Gingrich
would charge that their party had become the tax collector for the welfare
state. …

At this point, in the late 1970’s, a few conservatives like Jack Kemp …
said to heck with the balanced budget. Let’s just cut taxes and see what
happens. Mr. Kemp predicted that economic growth would rise so much that
revenues might not even fall.

Most mainstream conservatives didn’t buy Mr. Kemp’s strategy right away. But
after Californians passed Proposition 13 in 1978, they could see that tax
cutting was politically popular. They had also learned the hard way that trying
to cut spending at a time when revenue was rapidly rising was politically
impossible.

So Republican Congressional leaders and conservative economists like Alan
Greenspan … came to support tax cuts as a strategy to force spending cuts.
David Stockman, who was … director of the Office of Management and Budget
under President Reagan, was among the most enthusiastic converts to what came to
be called the “starve the beast” theory of taxation.

The subtext to this 2006 piece that he doesn’t quite say is that “Starve the Beast“ is an attempt by republican administrations to force future democratic administrations to cut programs by forcing a crisis.

bold of them to assume a crisis won’t lead to unexpected and unwanted outcomes

brooklynmuseum:

Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection is organized by themes that relate to urgent conversations happening today. One theme, No Surprise, is inspired in part by the #MeToo movement. It includes Sue Coe’s depiction of Anita Hill being burned at the stake (a reference to witch hunts) while the all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee and press corps look on. 

During Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Broadcast live to the nation, the hearings became a national scandal, with Thomas denying all allegations and eventually being confirmed, a position he’s held since 1991. The accusatory and disbelieving tone of both the committee and the media effectively put Hill, not Thomas, on trial. 

Nearly 30 years later, have things changed?

Sue Coe (born Tamworth, Staffordshire, United Kingdom, 1951) Thank You America (Anita Hill Trial), 1992. Photoetching on wove paper, edition 24/150. Gift of Marco Nocella, 2012.90.

flootzavut:

gaygothur:

gaygothur:

We’re getting pretty close to having adults who weren’t alive during 9/11, and we really need to admit at this point that the overemphasis on 9/11 in the US is just a propaganda machine to indoctrinate the younger generations into nationalism and to justify all the horrible war crimes the US committed in the Middle East, and the continued mistreatment and distrust towards refugees.

Also remember when we were told that “They” attacked “Us” because they “hated our freedom”? That was some of the most blatant and transparent propaganda that was churned out of 9/11.

As an addition, in response to some of the replies to this post, I didn’t see the OP saying that it wasn’t terrible that 3K people died, or that we shouldn’t care, or that some people aren’t still traumatised by it. They simply pointed out it’s been used as propaganda, which is true.

Just one thing that I can attest to myself: I was in East Jerusalem on 9/11. We had been working in a hospital on the Mount of Olives (Princess Basma, if anyone cares), and we had no idea what was happening until we got back to our hotel. We did notice that it was quiet as we walked back, but that was it.

I had turned 23 a few days before, also in Jerusalem. A new graduate, doing some voluntary work in the Middle East.

We only found out when our group leader met us at the hotel and told us what had happened – and by the way, I vividly remember thinking it sounded like something out of a movie, and that when he said the Pentagon was on fire, I almost laughed. Not because I thought it was funny, but because it seemed so absurd, and for a second I honestly thought he was joking.

Until I got home almost a week later, the only footage I saw of the attacks was on a tiny TV screen in a darkened room that was where the proprietor of the hotel (a Muslim man named Ibrahim) was watching it. It was very surreal. Ibrahim was scared, because it was initially being blamed on Palestinians, and as he put it, “if we did this, no one will ever care about us ever again.” (Paraphrased, because this was a long time ago, but I remember the sense of what he said very clearly.)

Later that day, we went down to call home from a payphone near (if memory serves) the Damascus gate to let our friends and family know we were okay. (The biggest fear at that point for us was that America would attack the West Bank, in which case, we would’ve been toast.) It was quieter than we’d seen it. The whole city, to my memory, was quiet. The Damascus Gate was almost deserted, where it’s frequently a morass of people.

When I got back to the UK, and saw the footage of the towers collapsing, it was shocking and surreal. But one of the things that shocked me almost as much was that there was some footage being shown of Palestinians celebrating in Jerusalem. And I was very, very shocked, because barring one day when we went up to visit Galilee, I was in Jerusalem every day from 9/11 to the following weekend – I forget when we flew, I think it might have been the Monday. And what I remember about Jerusalem that week was that everyone’s mood was low and shocked and scared.

What I saw with my own eyes on the streets of Jerusalem was not what I saw being reported in some channels at home or what I have seen in YouTube clips since. I’m not saying “no one celebrated, everyone was sad”, because I didn’t spend those five or six days scouring Jerusalem to make sure no one was happy about it. But what I can say for sure is that I have seen videos of these supposed celebrations happening on streets I recognised, on streets I walked down in the aftermath of 9/11, on streets in predominantly Muslim/Palestinian parts of Jerusalem, and when I was there, when I was seeing those streets with my own eyes, those things were not happening. (My memory is shakier on this, but I think I actually saw footage from the Damascus Gate as a throng of happy people, and again, my own firsthand memory was totally the reverse.)

That’s one small aspect of how 9/11 was misreported, twisted, and misused. I can only speak for my experience – I was in Jerusalem, I wasn’t in Gaza, I wasn’t in another country in the Middle East. But I have seen the contradictions with my own eyes, and I know that at least some of how it was reported and the footage that’s been said since to show what happened in Jerusalem is, at best, misleading as to the extent and nature of the reactions, and at worst is deliberate lying and misrepresentation that is completely the reverse of the truth.

It’s not contradictory to say that 9/11 was a terrible tragedy, that none of those people deserved to die, that the first responders were brave and incredible, that what happened was awful, and at the same time admit that the portrayal of the event and the way it’s been used in the 17 years since it happened has often been dishonest, misleading, and a political tool to make sure that the people at home hate and mistrusted the right people so that our governments could get their hands dirty for reasons that often had little or nothing to do with 9/11.

In fact, to mislead, to lie, to pretend it was other than it was is unconscionable. The people who died in horrible, horrible ways in those attacks shouldn’t have their deaths used as propaganda. They deserve better, and frankly, so do we. Both those of us who were alive at the time, who remember watching in disbelief and horror, and those born since. That’s not contradictory at all.