*...I was messaging to a friend about the AIDS Pandemic as it related to COVID.
"Most of the friends I had in my young life died in that era,...all died."
They never grew up or grew old. I recall there was a mass culture of denial just like with this pandemic. Them stupid oblivious horny fags went out every night in that culture we had of compulsive anonymous sex. The went infected themselves, and then infected everyone they knew.
It was a kind of mass suicide.I survived because I was horrified at the mass anonymous fornication. I left the gay movement because of it. It was to me heartless anti-romantic ugly, and cold. That was the start of my solitary life.
Imagine a room with near 40+ or so empty seats.
Those were my gay friends. That was my young life. They're all gone everyone of them. 40/50 years before their time. They refused to believe the virus was real. Then when they saw everyone dying around us...they still couldn't stop. They had become addicted to a lifestyle of loveless ejaculations.
Human beings some of us, and sometimes are really not worth the trouble."
“In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away ...
ReplyDeleteAlbert Camus as quoted by Randy Shilts.
What I said elsewhere about handlebar mustaches still applies: BORING.
ReplyDeleteHere's what it said one Saturday night on the marquee of a liquor store on Polk Street, the gay meat rack of San Francisco back in the early Eighties:
EITHER YOU SCORE OR YOU LAY AN EGG
So no pressure, right? I think you can sense the cruelty in that formulation. The agenda is to lay as many strangers as you can as fast as possible. What could possibly go wrong? Heartless, anti-romantic, ugly and cold is about right. And it contributed a lot to the ruin of the movement.
Oh yeah, and about denialism - I attended an AIDS demo a couple of years later at which one man bore a sign declaring that the disease was imaginary, and urging everyone to go have a good time at the bath houses and "laugh your fears away." Those were the exact words on the sign. I wonder where he is now.
Z