An excerpt from my story about faggots and guns – read the rest of it here
“When we initially met, years earlier, Bob told me about his collection of firearms. We were in bed together, our bodies stretched out post-sex. He told me how he bought his first one in response to the threat of ’80s AIDS paranoia. He and his boyfriend started amassing weaponry together when a proposition calling for an AIDS quarantine was put on the ballot. His boyfriend was HIV-positive. They lived together in this house for a decade. Bob didn’t seroconvert until the early 2000s, though, long after that boyfriend died of an opportunistic infection.
In ’86, even though Bob was mostly closeted, he planned a revenge-killing spree. He wanted to walk up to Jesse Helms in a dark alley and leave his body full of smoking holes. He dreamed of drugging Lyndon LaRouche and leaving him facedown in a blood-splattered hotel room. Of waiting on a rooftop for days to pick out Ronald Reagan’s tiny head from a mass of bodyguards, pull the trigger, and watch the body gently fall to the ground.
Bob came of age with the backdrop of Stonewall and Harvey Milk. He deserves these revenges. His stories fill up the room between us, settling the distance between our bodies. I never ask him what happened or why, instead of going vigilante, he stayed in his job as a scrap-metal executive, flying from country to country to negotiate against unions. It is best practice to not ask clients embarrassing questions. That is part of the role of a sex worker: to let clients remember only the good stories about themselves.
That day was the first time we met, but I decided immediately to do what it took to make Bob my regular, even though doing so would break down the boundary between sex-work life and real life. Bob would be my primary romantic relationship for a couple years, the real reason I couldn’t really commit to dating anyone else.
Bob fucks me like I’m the drink of water he’s needed for a long, long time. In bed, when I lower myself onto his cock, he growls into my ear, “Your body is made just perfect for my dick.” I kneel next to him in the kitchen and drink his piss while he deep fries me breaded eggplant. It isn’t all about the sex though. He is caring and kind of lonely. I am caring and kind of lonely as well.”
“There had been something very pleasing to Allen about his visit to the clinic. Being treated as the common man. In exchange for his number a flat-faced nurse led him to a room and barked questions at him tonelessly. How many sex partners had he had? How many had he barebacked with? Had he ever exchanged sex for money? When asked that, a warm feeling of flattery settled into him. He knew that these were just routine questions from a form, but Allen was enticed by the mere insinuation that even a chubby, middle-aged trans man such as himself could be a hustler—like a vision into an alternate life he could have had. For that reason when he counted out how many sex partners he had, he left out Sarah.
The experience was so thrilling that after he swallowed his handful of antibiotics he went straight back to the bathroom where he had pissed into a cup just moments earlier, and he sucked someone’s dick next to the toilet bowl.
He had promised himself to put an end to his sexual exploits. He was a heterosexual man married to a woman, made famous by a public transition that would make exclusive rights to any baby photos that his union might produce worth six figures at least. He had worked damn hard to keep his transition classy, but this ridiculous hunger for cock was threatening to get in the way of everything. He was investigating selling movie rights. He was solidly booked for speaking engagements and book signing events. His busy life of appointments and appearances had not served to curb his sexual habits, however. On the road and away from L.A., he was free. Once his publicist had gone to sleep explicit goal of trolling for sex
He got varying responses. Many men on the internet looking for FTM’s were hoping for someone prepubescent-looking. young, hairless, and slender, whereas Allen was fat and in the throes of his forties. But then Allen found the bear community. All of the homosexuals he’d grown up around had been loud, well-coifed men who fawned over him, called him honey, but with a cold, disinterested look in their eye all the while. Bears were different. Sweaty and pungent, they served as father figures so unlike his own weak, hippy, republican dad.”
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The Dyke Night Riots was originally published in ‘Waking the Witch zine – Envisioning an Unrepentant Queerness‘ which was a collaboration of San Francisco ACT UP, Homonomixxx, and Gay Shame for the Streetopia panel with Sarah Schulman
Many people would say that it was the Dyke Night riots that started the change. That was the first night that the streets became alive — not just with drunken dykes — but with drunken dykes and faggots and trans people on a rampage.
The match was struck when the Upright Parental Brigade (UPB) demanded a revocation of the permits for Trans and Dyke convergences in Dolores Park. This happened after the playground had been remodeled — transforming it from a splintering ship that faggots commandeered at night and a sandpit that hid condom wrappers, into an ergonomic, brightly colored plastic paradise. Designed for optimal early childhood development, excursions to this playground would give little Azaelia or Brody a head start for the prestigious private kindergarten, one for which they’d been on the waiting list since the first attempts at insemination.
At first the revamped playground was innocuous — a segregated island looked down upon warmly by the regulars of the fruit loop, the tanned and drunken faggot zone that encircled the playground. But then came the increased policing. Instead of pot brownies, the park economy shifted to margarita-flavored cupcakes. Cold Beer Cold Water man got arrested. A fence was built around the playground with a metal sign reading “DOGS KEEP OUT ” — within a week someone had crossed out “DOGS” and written in “GAYS.” The 10 pm curfew became absolute as cops issuing citations to the homeless people sleeping and the teenagers drinking Carlo Rossi, swinging in the night breeze.
The trans and dyke marches had met in Dolores Park as long as anyone could remember. UPB, in their appeals to the Board of Supervisors, were clear that they were not homophobic in their desire to move the marches elsewhere — maybe Daly City? They liked the GLBT flair, and of course many of the UPBs were of the homosexual persuasion themselves.
However, they simply could not let the park be overrun by that type of queer rebellion — drugged and sexually predatorial beasts drunk in the glory of the mob. Near the train tracks — girls peeing standing up, boys squatting; garish makeup and bared breasts. Children simply could not be exposed to such hedonism. Studies showed that children exposed to ritualistic explosions of sexual decadence were 50% more likely to drop out of high school.
Really though, the city catering to the expanding spawn pool of the Silicon Valley boom was what sparked it off…San Francisco had been asking for an uprising. Corporation tax shelters, condos, coffee shops, sky-high rents, prostitution busts, pot club raids, sit and lie laws, Ellis Act evictions, disappearing social services, and BART cop brutality — the simmer had been growing into a boil for quite some time.
Two weeks earlier all of the HIV prevention workers in the city were told that due to the new prevention strategy — “Test, Tag and Release” (TTR) — they were no longer needed in their current counseling duties. However, in recognition of their hard work thus far in the endemic, they would be given free training for new careers testing and tagging HIV+ people — leaving small surveillance chips in the right ear that both tracked movement and also transmitted a “harmless but shocking” reminder beep that would go off four hours past the time people were due to take their meds and would not stop until medication had been detected in the bloodstream. They would also be branded with a special tattoo that broadcast their viral load on their forehead. Some of the more weathered workers signed up for the training, but the rest quit en masse.
Was it the apocalypse coming? We’d all been planning for that for years. Andrew Sullivan and his common-law husbear Newt Gringrich were slated to be the king and queen of PRIDE. Was it a sign from the goddess? Maybe it was Mercury retrograde, but maybe it was the end of the world.
When the trans march gatherers showed up at the park and were met with police barricades, it was a shock. We’d heard the rumors — the Department of Public Works had contracted with the Voter Guide to add on page 67 “The city regrets to inform citizenry that the trans and dyke marches have been rerouted this year from Dolores to the archery fields in Golden Gate Park. Please enjoy your homosexuality and transexualism soberly — no homo”. No one expected the scene we were greeted with however.
The cops were flanked by the UPB holding signs reading “THINK OF THE CHILDREN” and “COMPROMISE IS THE SPIRIT OF THE FUTURE.” Some queens tried to play red rover with the cops, and a group of black blockers ran home for their bandanas and set a neighboring coffee shop on fire. The rest of us didn’t know what else to do, so we went home to plot and snort ketamine. The evening news said that the people who had gotten on the bus for Golden Gate Park had arrived and archery practice had not been canceled. There was one fatality — one dude-bro was shot with his own cross bow. The archery supplies were raided. It was also reported that a local gun show had been besieged by a coven of black trans women who left with a flame thrower.
Nobody really knew what was going to happen the next day. There was concocting and complaining and angst and apathy. We all showed up at the park again though. Some people thought we had won, others just wanted to see what would happen, and lots of people still had no idea what they would be faced with and had just come to party.
The cops, however, thought they had won the battle. There was no riot line, just many terse-faced police. Every time someone lit up a cigarette or opened a bottle or took off their shirt they would get put in the paddy wagon. This went on for an hour, all of us sitting silently on our picnic blankets rigid with fury. Then the dam broke. A bejewled trans woman started chanting “PIGS GET OUT, PIGS GET OUT.” Then we all were shouting and then we were standing and thousands of us were advancing on the cops. Some cops were brought down, most were just herded out of the park.
But it didn’t stop there. We moved in units: dykes on bikes, dopey faeries, soccer butches, daggers, piss pigs, and radical queerdos taking out the trash. We pushed all the cops out of the Mission and continued into SOMA. Yuppies fled, hipsters went home to their parents in the Marina.
The media declared it a disaster zone. What it really looked like was this: wild animals released from our cages, at first cautious and lost, but within hours our gaits relaxed and our voices became joyful and excited. Each person as they looked into each other’s eyes saw we were committed to moving forward together, each of us ecstatic and hopeful.
Yes, we broke into the fancy restaurants that had scourged our neighborhoods, and yes, we took back the homes that we’d been evicted from. But there was no frenzy, it was just the right time. We talked to our neighbors who we’d passed wordlessly in the streets every day. We fucked each other against buildings, played basketball in the cop shop, and made giant pots of beans and rice to share. Off the computers and into the streets. We knew it was infectious, we knew it was dangerous, but we knew it was the something we would not go back from. The moment of change had arisen.
United in Anger, a new documentary about ACT UP is hitting the film festival circuit.
This is the story my generation has been waiting to see.
I started getting involved in AIDS activism and work in 2002 at the age of 17 – ten years ago, but still long after ACT UP was the force of intensity I later came to obsessively study. When I first became aware of the group, I felt a sense of loss about not having been there, even as I was grateful to not live in an era when the AIDS crisis was decimating my community with that same degree of brutality.
ACT UP: the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power described itself as a “diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” United in Anger illuminates how ACT UP exemplified an era in which queer politics were community driven, inclusive, sexy, unrepentant, and brilliantly dangerous. The energy of the film replicates that of the movement.
United in Anger, produced by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman, is composed of footage from a wide range of video artists, activists, and collectives, including DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists) and Testing the Limits, combined with contemporary interviews from the ACT UP Oral History Project.
The film provides a timeline of ACT UP, largely focusing on the New York chapter, where it all began in 1987. ACT UP was not the first AIDS activist group, but it was instrumental in capturing mainstream attention through large-scale dramatic actions such as interrupting the CBS Evening News and political funerals that brought the bodies and ashes of people who died of AIDS to the White House lawn.
The immediate catalyst for ACT UP was a speech by Larry Kramer delivered at the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Center, wherein he asked two-thirds of the audience to stand up, then told them they would be dead in five years–so what were they going to do about it?
Where United in Anger most succeeds, however, is in not profiling celebrities. The history of the movement is told through a wide diversity of voices, some more recognizable than others, often transposing their oral history interviews with footage of them speaking out at meetings, shouting at protests, or being arrested.
The film interrupts the common belief that AIDS is a gay white men’s issue, and that ACT UP only focus was on getting drugs into bodies. Robert Vazquez-Pacheco, one of the film’s interviewees says, “What I saw was the opportunity in ACT UP for social change…using AIDS as the nexus of all these problems that happened in society, we could address some of this stuff and work towards changing society that way.”
A long segment of the film focuses on a four-year campaign to force the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to change the definition of AIDS to include conditions specific to women and drug users. It is a moment where you see gay men acting in solidarity with women, as women supported gay men throughout the AIDS crisis, which feels so different from the often misogynistic world of gay men today.
United in Anger drives home that difference. It shows a community that saw what oppression looked like and challenged the forces that were killing them, instead of attempting to assimilate into institutions of privilege.
I watched the film with my best friend, holding his hand as we shrieked with joy and cried and plotted how to get back to something like that. The world shown in this movie is something we desperately need.
So, where did ACT UP go? Although the group’s focus was broader than “drugs into bodies,” once protease inhibitors came on the scene in the mid-1990s the wider energy began to dissipate. Some chapters continued, other cities had theirs explode into drama, such as the split in San Francisco between a group of AIDS dissidents and a treatment-focused group. It was also time for people to heal. In all the excitement and the energy of protests shown, there is always the reminder of the real fear and grief driving it.
Today, 25 years after the birth of ACT UP, grassroots activists are beginning to reconverge. AIDS is still a crisis. In the film a man holds a sign that reads “AZT: The Great Pacifier.” It was a particularly striking message. The crisis does look different now. There are antiretroviral drugs that are well tolerated and prolong the lives of many people living with HIV indefinitely, but this, activists say, cannot be enough.
Currently, there is no cure for HIV, and as long as pharmaceutical companies charge thousands of dollars a months for their life saving medications we are unlikely to see one. Women and trans people are still largely underserved, even in San Francisco. HIV is spreading rapidly through communities of color, pushed by the war on drugs and the prison industrial complex. ADAP and HIV prevention programs are under attack. The criminalization of HIV positive folks and sex workers reinforces HIV stigma and that fear fuels the epidemic.
The tide is changing. Resurrected ACT UP chapters have emerged in San Francisco, New York, and Boston, while Philadelphia continues to hold strong. This year the International AIDS Conference will be held in Washington DC, on US territory for the first time since the recently lifted HIV travel ban was imposed in the late 1980s. Now is the time to strategize, organize, and make demands. Communities affected by HIV seek AIDS action that is not only about putting money into the drug company pockets, but is about a complete overhaul of the laws, policies, and social structures that persecute us all. Now is the hour, ACT UP, FIGHT BACK, FIGHT AIDS.
This post originally appeared on the Visual AIDS blog as part of a series on the FDA approval of PrEP – the use of HIV medication as a tactic of prevention for HIV negative people
I had lunch with Tony to talk about the possibility of him going on PrEP. For twenty-five years he’s been having mostly protected sex, but with a few fuck ups, which sent him into an anxiety spiral. Now he feels in control: making mathematical calculations, picking partners with undetectable viral loads and having conversations about their mutual medication barriers. Now he is experiencing intentional barebacking, instead of it being a slip-up. This is a slip-up both he and I have had: guiding someone’s raw dick into our holes. It’s that moment where you just want it real bad, or need something to give the sex change meaning. Or you just want them to cum more quickly. But then, afterward comes the month of PEPing and calculating window periods. I understand why PrEP would work for him, feels like a right he should have. After all, other than the prohibitive cost, is it so much different from birth control pills? Is the only reason it feels more complicated because we live in a culture that devalues the worth of queer sex?
There are a couple of ways you can think about PrEP: on an individual level, on a public health level, and in questioning its place in the growing divide of what HIV prevention looks like for those who have insurance, versus those without.
Thirty years into the AIDS epidemic, there needs to be prevention strategies other than condoms. I appreciate PrEP being an option. Simultaneously, the increasing biotechnological approach to HIV prevention feels dangerous to me. After AIDS drug availability was something that was fought for so tirelessly, there seems to be little language to criticize the new single-minded, ART-based approach to HIV prevention. With community viral load suppression, “Test and Treat”, and PrEP as the “Brave New World” we are entering I wonder how this will play out on the ground for the people unable or unwilling to access drugs.
PrEP doesn’t make sense as a widespread prevention tool. For many people who are HIV-positive, getting access to and staying “med compliant”, is a struggle, to jump through the hoops of Medicare, ADAP, or even private health insurance. Not to mention how hard it is to take meds when you are struggling with issues of homelessness, trying to hide your status, drug addiction and/or mental health issues. For low-income HIV-negative people PrEP would be further complicated by the cultural shaming and the “we won’t pay for promiscuity” taxpayer mindset.
There are so many questions about PrEP: Exactly what is its efficacy? What are the long- term side effects of taking Truvada? What are the risks of drug resistance for those who do seroconvert? But the biggest question I have is what effect will PrEP have on the rapidly diminishing programming aimed at marginalized communities. My fear is that programs that provide community building, education, and realistic risk reduction will be replaced with pills for those who can negotiate the system, while those who can’t will be, once again, left with nothing.
AIDS activists have historically been a cohesive bunch: able to work together on similar goals, through a variety of tactics, despite varying socio-economic, race, and gender backgrounds. Granted, there have been some explosive differences; particularly in San Francisco. One of the more volatile situations to come to mind involves ACT UP/SF throwing the contents of a cat litter box at former San Francisco AIDS Foundation head Pat Christen. However; when it comes down to it, we have been supportive of each other because we need to be. Being HIV-positive is still criminalized and vilified, and poz people are still outlaws in our society.
We are in a unique time now, where it’s finally become concrete: AIDS is officially big business. It became this way through a long process, spanning the past 30 years. During this time the pharmaceutical companies have always been doing what they do best; squeezing out every last dollar possible, always two steps away from being liable to an extortion charge. The high cost of medications drives everything around big pharma, reinforcing a structure that focuses on the ability to accumulate large sums of money. We see this in AIDS culture and discourse: H and M fashion for AIDS clothing line, giant billboards with fear-based messaging, and multi-million dollar organizations whose direct services are derailed through the bureaucracy of chasing funding dollars.
It’s hard to complain about the excess when you know about the history. Years went by where the only governmental intervention amounted to the distribution of a poster asserting: “DON’T ASK FOR AIDS; DON’T GET IT.” Resource wise, we have vacillated between a feast or famine state (mostly famine), since people first came together to demand government accountability in the AIDS crisis. In the HIV/AIDS world we are still in a crisis mentality, where any money is “good” money – don’t ask where it came from. PEPFAR (the U.S. governmental organization that provides international funds earmarked for AIDS services) has a policy of denying funding to organizations that support sex worker rights. While many AIDS programs strongly disagree with this policy, and other similar exclusionary clauses, they comply because they are starved for cash.
Public AIDS activism has been replaced by AIDS consumerism. The face of AIDS organizing has shifted from grassroots community outreach, to one of business marketing, clothing lines, and $1,000 memorial bricks; all of which are targeted toward a particular class bracket. This creates an illusion that people in the U.S. living with HIV are spoiled for resources, that AIDS exists only as a memory, and that only Third World communities suffer from lack of services.
The reality is that the AIDS crisis still exists. At one point, medication and treatment options were a scarcity for all poz people, but with protease inhibitors coming onto the market in 1996 – economically advantaged people secured the opportunity to take their meds and be quiet; which is heavily reinforced by the social pressure of continuing AIDSphobia. But for the homeless, people living with mental illness, the incarcerated, trans women who are unable to access competent care, and the over 9,000 people on the national AIDS Drugs Assistance Program waiting list, the experience of living with HIV/AIDS looks the same as it did in the 1980s and 1990s, minus the community support.
On World AIDS Day, in San Francisco, there were three events. A Castro merchant public health campaign, a film screening, and “A Light in the Grove,” (an AIDS gala where tickets started at $175 each, $500 for VIP access.) Could the late performance artist David Wojnarowicz have ever imagined this future? No anger, no protests, no fight left. Public commemoration available only for those with disposable incomes, where only the wealthy are allowed to mourn. [There was also a free event at the National AIDS Memorial Grove.]
Radical AIDS activism in San Francisco has been at a standstill for some time, the territory of a few hardworking people. The stranglehold of the budget keeps most community organizations busy just grappling to keep their doors open, affording no opportunities to challenge the institutions that fund them. This is the situation: HIV organizations are, vastly, no longer run by poz people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines that dropped community building and anti-stigma work, in favor of a “test and treat” model, now guide HIV prevention services. And, the Circle of Friends within the AIDS grove is sponsored by Wells Fargo, which also happens to be a major investor in prisons; a predominant source of HIV transmissions in this country.
World AIDS Day is a time for us to honor our own: the people who locked themselves to the old fed building in the ARC Vigil. The activists who lay down in the streets, took over churches demanding that homophobic archbishops stand down, and who devoted their lives to fighting for the rights and recognition of poz people. We still have so much to fight for: Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) has introduced three bills supporting decriminalization of HIV transmission, access to condoms in prison, and an end to abstinence-only education. We must fight for the passage of those bills, and for the availability of generic HIV meds in the U.S. and abroad. And that’s only a step; there are many more battles to be won before we can rest.
There is a place for exclusive fundraising events, but at a time where there are up to 2,500 HIV-positive homeless people living in San Francisco, it is unconscionable that we have nothing else. With the nationwide Occupy movement, people everywhere are standing up against big corporations, utilizing ACT UP chants, demanding change: for all those who care about HIV, this is our moment!
For next year’s World AIDS Day we recommit to a radical voice. Forget about marketing tactics, AIDS soirees, and public health billboards. Remember that there is still a lot to fight for. We have a rich history to commemorate, but rather than just memorializing it, we need to actively engage with that history; to draw wisdom from mistakes, and inspiration from past victories. We need a radical change in tactics before we can even hope to change a culture; that culture which currently perpetuates the spread of HIV through silence, isolation, issues of access and class, fear campaigns, misinformation, and pharma-corporation driven funding policies. In the battle for access, education, and community, this is a call for reinforcements: let’s take back our hijacked community, and turn the current AIDS paradigm into one that supports poz folks beyond just medicating them.
