Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 1,283
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Quote:
Originally posted by PCiAM
Sis, there are a lot of great sources where you can educate yourself.
1) The Normal Heart just premiered on HBO and does a fairly good job at explaining some of this. The author not only criticizes government neglect and the moral majority, but also points the finger at gay men themselves for their rather cavalier attitude towards promiscuous sex, even after people started dying.
2) There are some great documentaries on Netflix you can watch: We Were Here.. about the epidemic told by people who lived through in San Francisco (one of the epicenters). Also there is How to Survive a Plague, which is more about ACT UP, in NYC in the 80s, and the political actions they took to force our government to take things a bit more seriously.
3) As for a general history lesson, of course HIV/AIDS does not cherry-pick a certain demographic but, when this disease spread so quickly, it initially hit the gay population very hard in NYC and San Francisco. This is because the gay population had a huge propensity towards promiscuous, unprotected sex. Now, that's not a reason to judge the community.. back during this time, many gay men fled to these cities because they felt repressed by society and their families for being gay so sexual promiscuity was a type of liberation. Unfortunately, this disease was spreading like crazy... and was already around in large concentrations years before enough people started dying before society took notice.
And unfortunately (but true), without HIV/AIDS forcing the gay population into mainstream and forcing them to publicly fight for their lives, jobs, benefits, etc, we very likely wouldn't be as far along as we are today with LGBT rights.
Sorry, I'm a little tipsy so I've kind of rambled a bit too long.
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Great post! You should all watch TNH to be educated!
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