Planet Homo

Dr. Bachmann speaks about homosexuality

With a lisp.

The Gay Bar: Is it dying? - By June Thomas - Slate Magazine

When the New York State Senate voted 33-29 to approve same-sex marriage on Friday, June 24, gay and lesbian New Yorkers—and some straight supporters—knew the perfect place to celebrate: They headed to the Stonewall Inn, the gay bar where, 42 years earlier, the modern gay rights movement had been born. Amid the glorious chaos of fire-eaters, drag queens, and spontaneous proposals, older gay couples walked hand-in-hand admiring the scene. The jubilation at Stonewall and on the surrounding streets was a stirring celebration of progress. But I can't help wondering whether, as gay rights move forward, the gay bar—the place where it all began—may get left behind.

I rarely go to gay bars anymore. I've been in a happy relationship for 14 years with someone who rarely drinks. Bars are loud, they get going too late, and they're packed with kids half my age. They make me feel old. But I feel bad about abandoning them. I still remember the terrifying, giddy excitement of my first forays into gay pubs and clubs, the thrill of discovering other lesbians and gay men in all their beautiful, dreary, fabulous, sleazy variety. I learned how to dance to 15-minute techno remixes under spinning disco balls, how to appreciate tacky drag shows and to show proper respect for the heroines of the pool table. Gay bars are my cultural patrimony and my political heritage.

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AIDS at 30: this gets personal

Living in New York City in the 1980s, at once exhilarating, slowly became exhausting as friend after friend slowly succumbed to a series of horrible diseases and died.

Arriving to the eastern shores of New York City in 1980, I was given a sentimental journey by  a friend showed who showed me around the Brambles in Central Park, the piers down in the West Village, the Gaiety in midtown, The Anvil in the meat packing district—this was New York City at its wildest, with the shadowy figure of men in bushes, on delicate planks of wood, this was New York City before the storm. Fresh from the last vestiges of disco, the gay community was alive and well in 1980. By the next year, mostly through the reporting in the New York Native newspaper, weekly reports of young men succumbing to strange diseases became rampant.

It’s hard to imagine but this was a time when there was so much uncertainty that every itch, blemish, bump or sore throat was certain to lead to the grave. “You lost weight” was no longer a desired observation but a hint at your medical condition.

Certain habits were created that have remained: a daily inspection of the obituaries. In that first decade, there would usually be three or four death notices, and as it was Manhattan, a small island, so it was probable to know some of the dead and dying. As a gay man it was certain. So, when it came to close friends becoming ill, there was a stage of bewilderment and disbelief. In the 80s, there was so little information that had any certainty: kissing, that simplest and sexiest of acts was on the list of possible ways of contagion. Friends would rally. We formulated a schedule so that our friend was never alone. He was diagnosed with dementia. One evening when I arrived he shit all over himself and did not know to clean it up. I recall that I looked at my friend who was attending him and we both were embarrassed not just for our friend, but for ourselves, we hardly knew how to handle a situation like this.

Death was the easy part, dying required some greater human skill: belief. Talking to a friend who had recently been diagnosed, at age 24, he was telling me he was OK with it, he had lived a good life, he was ready. People would disappear, phones lines disconnected, only be to be found in the obituaries, often on different coasts. And it did feel like it was New York City plague, though we all understood that San Francisco was being equally demolished. Los Angeles, often visited during this time always seemed liked a city on holiday: they didn’t know what I was talking about.  It was further evidence that Los Angeles was not a city, but a landscape.

At some point, things manifested. Small white lesions in my mouth sent me to the bookstore looking up something called Thrush. A visit to the dentist only sent me packing to an oral surgeon, who cut away a slice of mouth and sent it to the laboratory. In the week that I waited I lost weight. I knew it had finally come to me; it was my turn to die. It was 1988 and I was picking out coffins.

In March of that year, Nancy Reagan, then the first lady had undergone a similar procedure and the diagnosis was something call actinic keratosis. The white spots were not Thrush, but the experience was enough to send me away from Manhattan.  Leaving the small studio apartment in the West Village, I said good by to one of the most romantic places on earth, but it had turned ripe with disease, hospital visits and most of all, fear.

 

 

AIDS: 30 Years

Thirty years ago Sunday, a brief report in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described cases of a rare form of pneumonia called Pneumocystis carinii in five young Los Angeles men, "all active homosexuals." The cases were noteworthy because the men had previously been healthy, though their particular pneumonia had only been seen in people with severely depressed immune systems.

Within a month, a second report had identified 54 young gay men with a rare cancer known as Kaposi's sarcoma, another disease that had been almost unknown in young men. And by the following summer, the mysterious disease underlying these reports had a name: acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

AIDS was a murderous, mysterious delinquent that emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Transmitted primarily through sexual activity and blood, it mowed down whole communities of young gay men, tore through a generation of intravenous drug users and made orphans of millions of the world's children.

In the 30 years since its first recognition, AIDS has killed nearly 30 million people worldwide, including more than 615,000 in the United States. Today, an additional 34 million people — including nearly 1.2 million in the U.S. — are living with the virus that causes the disease, human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. This year, 1.8 million of them will die, including about 17,000 in this country.

The identification of HIV in 1983 brought the promise of a quick fix for the problem, a vaccine that would block transmission. Sadly, that promise has not materialized. The shifty virus mutates so rapidly and has so many ways of entering the white blood cells that are its primary target that vaccine researchers have had only limited success.

The best results so far were from a 2009 trial in Thailand that reduced new HIV infections by a modest 26%. The results hinted that a vaccine might eventually be possible, but suggested that researchers still had a long way to go to produce one that is useful.

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