We have arrived at the third Friday in September. September, that most blesséd of months, when superior people are born.
By the time this scheduled post publishes on FontFolly.Net, there may well be significant rain falling just outside my windows.
This was a more difficult Friday Five to assemble than usual. I could have easily filled two more categories! I could have filled out a separate category for the Nicki Minaj cousin’s friends swollen testicles stories alone!
Anyway, it’s time for this week’s Friday Five in which I bring you: three stories that need special categories, plus the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about deplorable people, five stories about the pandemic, and five stories about vaccine lies (plus something I wrote and some notable obituaries).
This Week in the Children’s Shows from Times Gone By:
My 9/11 story isn’t very interesting. I was awakened, like most mornings at the time, by the clock-radio turning on to the local NPR station.
It turned on one minute after the first tower collapsed, because while that happened at 9:59am in New York, it was only 6:59am on the west coast. I hurried out of bed and headed downstairs to turn on the TV.
After watching that news for a bit and waking up my husband to tell him what was going on, I had to get ready for work, catch my bus, and try to get through a work day. It was obviously not a productive work day for virtually anyone in the country.
In the years since, I have always like to re-read this account:
We have arrived at the second Friday in September. September, that most blesséd of months, when superior people are born.
We had to turn the a/c back on in the house this week. Workwise, the Monday holiday meant that some co-workers and customers decided to squeeze about fifteen days worth of urgency and lamentations into the first couple of work days. I’m glad I have to burn off a couple more vacation days this month, just sayin’.
Anyway, it’s time for this week’s Friday Five in which I bring you: two stories that need a special category, plus the top five stories of the week, and five stories of interest to queers and our allies (plus a notable obituary).
We have arrived at the first Friday in September. September, that most blesséd of months, when superior people are born.
I’ve had a low grade fever and weird mostly-cold symptoms for most of this week. I seem to be getting better, so I’m hoping it’s just a minor virus.
Anyway, it’s time for this week’s Friday Five in which I bring you: one story that made me cry, plus the top five stories of the week, five stories about the weather, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, and five stories about deplorable people, and five stories about the graveyard of empires (plue a notable obituary).
This Week in Stories That Made Me Cry:
I’m a White Cisgendered Straight Woman. ‘Pose’ Gave Me My History "I’m the daughter of a mom who came out and lost custody of me in 1979, the sister of a man who died of AIDS in 1990… How is it possible to live through your own history and only comprehend it 35 years later when you recognize it in a TV show?"
I keep asking, why are we letting these anti-vaxxers fill ICU beds?
We’ve made it to the fourth Friday in August!
Work has been weird and stressful. I realize I say that a lot; yet then Thursday of this week good things happened. One of the good things was it was the the first time in well more than a week that my workday wasn’t interrupted by multiple calls from managers, directors, and veeps (both in and out of my chain of command) with emergencies that needed addressing now. I made more progress on my to-dos by midday than I had it the week proceeding. Make no mistake, I did lots of stuff during the last two weeks, it’s just that the majority were emergencies that hadn’t been on my to-do list at the time. There was also one piece of much appreciated good news, so even though I’d already been planning to make Pork Scallopini for dinner Thursday night — which, since 1/3 of a cup of wine is needed for the sauce that means that once I open the bottle I’m obligated to drink the rest — that first sip of wine felt very celebratory.
Anyway, it’s time for this week’s Friday Five in which I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about hateful deplorabloe people, five stories about the pandemic, and five stories about the graveyard of empires (plus something I wrote and some notable obituaries).
The air cleared up and the temps went down this week. I had to turn the a/c back on for part of Thursday, but the daytime highs are supposed to be even cooler in the coming days.
Anyway, it’s time for this week’s Friday Five in which I bring you: two topics stories in each of two unusual topics, plus the top five stories of the week, five stories about the pandemic, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, and five stories about deplorable people.
As a friend who retweeted this commented: “COVID is not our first rodeo, and the last one didn’t have a vaccine!”
It’s been way too long since I spent part of a Saturday morning composing one of these posts about a news story that I learned about after already assembling this week’s Friday Five. Let’s just hop in:
More than one person I saw online (most of them either queer themselves or presenting themselves as allies) made a joke about the reason that so much of the LGBTQ community in the U.S. have rushed to get our vaccinations is because we’re all just dying to get out there and start hooking up for sex again.
And I know that is a sentiment many had expressed. Or that they missed going to bars or concerts and so on.
But I’m sorry, the friend I quoted in the caption of the graphic above has hit the nail on the head identifying not just why many of us got the vaccine as soon as we could, but also why most of the queer communities in various U.S. towns and cities, canceled 2020 Pride events mere weeks after the first lockdowns were announced.
For a lot of us, this isn’t the first time we have lived during a deadly epidemic.
In May of 2020, there was one of the Fox /(Propaganda/) network talking heads who tried to get a viral thing going about how all the queers and their liberal friends would stop supporting the idea of lockdown once late June rolled around at Pride Parades were cancelled.
She instead was dragged on social media and news sites with the fact that we’d already canceled the Pride Parades, on our own at least a month previously. I remember just weeks into the first lockdowns that on several queer forums people had already been posting, "We’re canceling in-person Pride events, right?"
I know I’ve told the following story on this blog and else where before: but there was one month in the early nineties where 12 people that I knew personally died from complications of AIDS. In a couple of cases, my late husband, Ray, and I had to decide which of the memorial services we weren’t going to attend. And that was after years of watching vibrant people we knew deteriorate before our eyes and die. It’s not that that was the only time a bunch happened close together, it just happened to be the worst.
For years we watching our neighbors, friends, acquaintances, community leaders, and more suffer and die with virtually no help from government health agencies. There were exceptions. Dr. Anthony Fauci famously (incognito) went to bathhouses and some other places queer men went looking for sex to get a better idea of the cultural reasons that a disease which could be transmitted sexually had spread so quickly. But most responses were like this:
The headline on that particular article at the site doesn’t mention what I think is a crucial aspect of those chilling recordings: most of the laughter you hear at the very idea that the government would concern itself at all with a deadly disease that was perceived as killing gays were members of the so-called liberal media.
In the early years hospital staff didn’t want to treat AIDS patients. What treatments that were offered were anti-viral medications most of which had been developed a decade or so before under military research grants because we were afraid future soldiers would face biological weapons in the field during conflicts. They actually hoped to develop a drug that would allow every soldier to be issued a few pills along with their other equipment and if they thought they’d been hit with a bio-weapon, they could take the pills and keep fighting. Didn’t quite work out.
But they were the only thing that seemed to slow down the virus, even though there were often some pretty severe side-effects.
In the early 90s someone came up with the idea of putting patients on not just one anti-viral, but three or more that each attacked different parts of typical viral replication process. By 1995, the so-called "antiviral cocktails" were approved for general use.
The result was startling.
The August 13, 1998 edition of the Bay Area Report was the first edition in over a decade that didn’t have obituaries of local residents who had died of complications of AIDS.
It seemed like a miracle. Some people who were already very sick and looked like shadows of their former selves seemed to rejuvenate in a matter of months.
Unfortunately, those anti-viral drugs are very expensive. If you need three or more in combination, that makes things even worse. So the cocktails have only performed their apparently miracles in countries that have reliable health care.
And note that it isn’t a cure. It’s not really a miracle (unless you want to talk about the insane profit margins of the pharmaceutical companies). Because in order to stay alive and healthy, people infected with the HIV virus have to take those very expensive drug combinations (which still often have wicked side effects) every day for the rest of their lives.
We don’t have an HIV vaccine. Forty years into the epidemic that still kills hundreds of thousands of people world wide every year doesn’t have a vaccine.
Queer people younger than me, who don’t have the same personal memories of the worse part of the HIV epidemic, still had their lives overshadowed by the disease. Because despite the fact that most new infections in the U.S. these days are straight people (that’s right!), and most of the people who are dying in the so-called developing world are straight women and children, the perception is still that AIDS is a "gay thing." I linked a year or two ago to a poignant story a young cartoonist posted about how when he was 15 years old and had never had sex with anyone, he went to an anonymous clinic for an AIDS test–because all he knew about the disease was the gay people got it. Nothing he had been taught in school or seen in the news or what very few media portrayals of people dying of the disease there were at the time, had conveyed two very important facts: 1) any human can get infected by the virus that causes AIDS, 2) it is most often transmitted sexually.
And part of his story is talking about when he came out in in twenties and started meeting other gay people, virtually all of them approximately his age had gone through a period in their teens where, after realizing they were attracted to members of their own sex, they also assumed that meant they would die young because of AIDS.
My point is, that once these younger queers do find out that his horrible specter which was part of their trauma growing up queer and closeted is a disease that was ignored for decades? Well, their attitude about health issues is a lot like us older queers.
And so that is the real reason that so many of us rushed out to get vaccinated. We know what happens when a health crisis is ignored. And we damn well refuse to take part in ignoring this one.
Heat. Poor air quality. Stress at work. All things I could talk about, but I don’t want to. Instead, I want to point out that my ongoing battle with one particularly persistent squirrel has entered a new stage. I was contemplating washing the bird feeder that has been hanging outside my window since the summer of 2017, and then coating several bags of bird seed with a more potent mixture of pepper-spray… when I realized that the plastic parts of that bird feeder had some cracks. So I ordered a completely different style of feeder which claims to be squirrel proof and I have since seen said persistent squirrel try few times to get to the seed, then give up, drop down to the deck, and pull food from the squirrel feeder. I am getting a LOT more birds at the feeder than I had during previous months, and also a whole lot more finches. So I think that so far this is a win!
Anyway, it’s time for this week’s Friday Five in which I bring you: two different stories that I think each deserve their own category, plus the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about deplorable people, plus discussion about a story that I think I must comment on, but I don’t really feel comfortable linking to.
One of the news stories in my bookmarks for the week is truly horrific. So horrific that I have decided not to link to it. But it is an important news story, in no small part because I have seen a lot of people on the Progressive End of the political spectrum laughing at the people who believe the QAnon Conspiracy as it it is nothing more than a joke.
It is more than that.
So, I’m going to mention the story of the man who, having completely bought into the conspiracy theory, kidnapped his one very, very young children, ran off to Mexico, and murdered them. Because the theory convinced him that his wife wasn’t entirely human and the children would therefore be monsters. The conspiracy theory and the people who buy into it are NOT jokes. They are very really threats to the lives of innocent people, such as these two very young children. If you haven’t read the story, and think you can stomach it, then use Google to find the tale of the father murdered his down kids because of the QAnon theory.
I don’t want to talk about work. It’s been weird. Our weather had also been weird. Earlier this week I started to freak out because the squirrel who was very obviously pregnant a week and a half ago (and has clearly given birth since) has continued to insist on ignoring the squirrel feeder on our deck and jump up on the bird feeder to the point that I saw birds flying toward the feeder the seeing the squirrel and veer away–but the point is one day she ate birdseed so fast that she was out there hanging on the perch choking for air and for about a minute or maybe two I thought I would have to go out there and try to perform a tiny squirrel heimlich manuever… anyway, after she coughed up and started breeding again and left the feeder, while I was checking it I realized that it was nearly four years old and the main plastic tube had cracks in it. So I ordered a different feeder whose design is supposedly squirrel proof. It arrived late Thursday. I filled it and put it out on the veranda and also cleaned out and refilled the squirrel feeder with fresh food. So over the next few days we will see if the new feeder is, indeed, squirrel proof.
Anyway, it’s time for this week’s Friday Five in which I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, and five stories about deplorables (plus a post I wrote).
I don’t want to talk about work. It’s been weird. Our weather had also been weird. Earlier this week I started to freak out because the squirrel who was very obviously pregnant a week and a half ago (and has clearly given birth since) has continued to insist on ignoring the squirrel feeder on our deck and jump up on the bird feeder to the point that I saw birds flying toward the feeder the seeing the squirrel and veer away–but the point is one day she ate birdseed so fast that she was out there hanging on the perch choking for air and for about a minute or maybe two I thought I would have to go out there and try to perform a tiny squirrel heimlich manuever… anyway, after she coughed up and started breeding again and left the feeder, while I was checking it I realized that it was nearly four years old and the main plastic tube had cracks in it. So I ordered a different feeder whose design is supposedly squirrel proof. It arrived late Thursday. I filled it and put it out on the veranda and also cleaned out and refilled the squirrel feeder with fresh food. So over the next few days we will see if the new feeder is, indeed, squirrel proof.
Anyway, it’s time for this week’s Friday Five in which I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, and five stories about deplorables (plus a post I wrote).
Font Folly 