Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that when there's bad things, there's good things too. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is one of my favorite returning guests, Andrew Tea.
Oh thanks, Hi.
I always get excited when you're the guest, because well, I like all my guests equally. Yeah, I can't. I can't show any preference.
Yeah, don't do that. There's no call for this line of flattery. But thank you.
Enter t is the host of the podcast EO is this racist? And also, okay, this specific flattery I think I could do. You're my favorite guests to talk about mutual aid with.
Oh, thank you. Yeah.
Well, I feel like I probably comment at it from a good place of I'm pretty new.
To it all things considered, and.
You know, I've kind of like been around, but there have been times in my life when I was more involved in less and yeah, i've been, you know lately because of how things have been going in LA and I guess the world trying to really really double down and just make sure whatever community we have is as strong as it can be.
I mean that makes sense. I think that a lot of it isn't an EBB and a flow, Like I'm not directly doing mutual aid right now, besides like some specific friends or whatever here and there, you know. But yeah, okay, So my question before I even get into the topic. You live in a city that very famously didn't quite burn down recently? Yeah, how's that going? How are mutual aid efforts going out there?
Like?
How things been?
I mean, I feel like from my perspective, it was very impressive. I well, I guess I don't know, because I feel like I'm more plugged in than I ever have been. So I was able to be on through Solidarity and snacks folks. I was able to which is a group that I mostly do work with, and so I was able to like kind of get in and least see like a lot of the chat and the chatter and the planning from the early side of things.
So that to me it was very impressive. I don't know.
Maybe I'm sure people with more experience this is maybe pretty normal, but or maybe not.
I don't know.
I don't have any basis for evaluating how actually impressive it is, but it seemed.
Very impressive to me.
The thing I was mostly focused on was trying to get masks out to.
The sort of larger population, especially on house.
Folks down on skid Row because the air quality was so unbelievably bad.
I guess it still is, but.
Yeah, so but it was nice watching like warehouses essentially pop up at various like a lot of bike shops, a lot of gallery spaces, a lot of little warehouse like work type spaces, and seeing things get distributed as efficiently I think as they could be. And also just kind of being cognizant of what needs are much harder to meet with just community, you know, obviously none of
us had access. Maybe not obviously, and maybe I don't know, maybe things have changed sort of muted the signal group because it was pretty high traffic, what relatable you know, we don't have things like bulldozers or like super high end ppe. Yeah, and so there were limits to what could be done.
Well, let me give you a piece of advice about bulldozers. Yeah, they're all keyed the same based on the manufacturer.
Just throwing that out there. Yeah, good to know, Good to know.
Anyway, there also largely wasn't that type of need, so who knows what would have happened if things needed to truly happen. But it felt like watching the pieces come into place. I was like, Okay, this is how this goes. And so I I guess I from from where I sit, I don't have an amazing objective basis for evaluating how it all went.
But to my eyes, it seemed like it went well.
But I mean that's kind of the thing about something like mutual aid. It's like not to say it always goes well, but on some level it always goes well. It always does. Whatever we can do is a positive thing.
Yeah, it's something that wasn't being done.
Yeah, exactly, exactly, Yeah.
Yeah, I think there there's an element of sort of like I guess it is, you know, in the business type world of managing expectations and.
Like, yeah, but it is. It is true.
It is like like pushing a boulder or any any amount you push the boulder is a place where it wasn't before. Yeah, you know, is it better than if we had a functional government that it took our took our tax dollars and appropriately them.
Yeah I'm not sure. Yeah. Is it the most efficient? I mean, you know it because of the.
Decentralized nature I it was obviously not the most directly efficient way to do everything. Yeah, but things absolutely did get done. I will say, during during sort of the absolute thick of it, I was like, man, when when the Mega people really got their heads up about Antifa
super soldiers. I think the biggest, the biggest problem with you know, us as a fighting group is going to be just making sure everyone shows up to the war in time, which is gonna be a real fucking problem when push comes a shop.
Yeah, I agree, And I mean it's funny because I was late to this recording, but usually I try very hard to put the punk in punctual.
I was just like, damn, there's a lot of a lot of sitting around in parking lots for me this week.
Yeah, everyone's everyone's about fifteen minutes late.
That's okay, Well that is actually oddly a good hm. I'll just tell you what this episode is about. But before I tell you what this episode is about, first, I want to say we do have a producer, she's not on the call right now. It is Sophie Lickterman. We also have an audio engineer named Rory, and everyone has to say hi to Rory.
Hi, Rory Hi, Rory.
And our theme music was written for us by unwoman. And I was pondering this week. I was like, well, what mutual aid story am I going to do? Because I have Andrew as my guest nice and a friend of mine brought up this story. It is a story about mutual aid during just about as dark of a time as you can imagine, the brightest lights in the
darkest darkes. It's my favorite kind of story. Yeah, this is a story about all the people who stepped up to care for people dying of AIDS in the nineteen eighties. In particular, it's about the unbelievable number of lesbians who came in to care for their queer brethren who were abandoned by their families and society and the government and the medical institutions. So this is my lesbians did amazing shit during the AIDS crisis. Episode. I don't know if
it's gonna be called that. I probably can't cuss on the title.
Amazing stuff.
Yeah, have you have you heard about this at all? This this thing?
I feel like yes, but I mean not anything specific, just that like sort of like the in you know, mentioning unsung heroes type situations.
I think totally just swhear it would have come up.
Yeah, I think there's literally I didn't end up watching this. I don't watch a lot of documentaries when I'm doing my research, to try to stick to written sources overall, but there's like different documentaries about many of these different groups. I think one of them is literally called Unsung Heroes. I think that's the name of Well, we'll talk about that one later. Sure, we've talked a bit about the history of queer rights and queer people on this show.
I think this is an understatement. If you want the best rundown of how social movements look before Stonewall Riots of nineteen sixty nine, or the best rundown that I have done, check out our episode on the Stonewall Riots of nineteen sixty nine. But in general, I would say that lesbian and gay activism started off as a bit
separate from each other, but they would often intersect. Maybe the best way I can think to put it is that as cultural spaces, the two would stay fairly distinct lesbian and gay, but in terms of activism and advocacy, queer folks of all types found common cause with each other often enough, and that was kind of where I was coming at from it, But then I was also reading more and more about like even in terms of
cultural spaces, there was a lot of overlap too. I have read plenty of examples of stories about lesbian's bartending at gay mail bars, for example, or queer discothechs for all comers. You know. So the best way I say this is really messy the interaction between gay and lesbian activism and culture. While researching this episode, I ran across a lot of people, especially people who weren't there, including me.
I wasn't there. I mean, I was technically alive during that but I was not particularly active as a four year old, and I ran across a lot of people who weren't there talking about how incredibly divided gay and lesbian scenes and people were from one another. But the more I did the research, the more I found this wasn't the case. There is a pattern that I've seen a lot on the show, and I'm curious your opinion
about this pattern. But it seems like we have this habit of looking back at history and emphasizing all the divisions between various marginalized people instead of all the places where we've worked in solidarity with each other and like both things are true. Right. For example, I have read so many things before I especially before I started doing the show. I would read all the time about how the early feminist movement was like wildly racist in the
United States. So those all white feminists who were just pieces of shit in terms of race. Sure, and I internalized that and I believed it, and absolutely there were huge numbers of actively racist white feminists, especially in the
voting rights era of the early twentieth century. But then as I would read nineteenth century history about the United States and the abolitionist movements, a fock ton of the early white abolitionists were women who were quite actively also fighting for the rights of women, and they're like the same social circle more or less.
Yeah, I wonder, I mean, obviously, I think it's the headline is more surprising. The divisions are emphasized just because you know, in a vacuum without any external information, I guess I would just, you know, war one would just assume that like all queer people stick together and then so so it's like more notable the whatever divisions are there. It would be my only guess, like.
That's so fair.
That makes sense I like I'm so cynical that I'm like uncynical again where I'm like it helps the powers that be to focus on our divisions, you know, yes, but it also like like we shouldn't erase our differences. We shouldn't pretend like yeah, fucking white feminists haven't been really shitty or like that, like gay men can't be misogynists or like, you know, yeah, but I.
Think it you're you're absolutely right, though I do think it goes sort of both ways in that like whatever interest is like peaked by the divisions absolutely also like serves the setus quo. So like there's no like nothing to like hit the brakes on that or tap the brakes on on that, like instinct, like whether it's like writerly or like from the publishing perspective, like they just want to put that out there and it helps, you know, the people in power for it to be put out there as well.
Totally like kind of like how like Twitter is a nightmareland that creates divisions between people because likes and reacts and blah blah blah are like more useful to the algorith them and so therefore people who are angry are more likely to comment than people who are like oh yeah, no, totally yeah, yeah, you know.
I mean it's the same way that like, like you know, just on any the internet is clearly but like even before the Internet, like one complaint, you get one complaint, but you won't get you know, a hundred satisfied customers that are like.
Yeah, that's that's it. And then also even like I would never read the reviews of my own work, I actually specifically try not to read the reviews of my own work because I am very aware that I will read ten reviews that will be like Margaret Kiljoy saved my children from a burning building or whatever, I don't know, and then I'll read like one that was like Margaret's voice is bad or you know, I don't know, right.
And then I'm like it's like devastating.
Yeah, and so maybe that's it. Maybe we like we hear about we hear about the racist and we're like, well fuck this whole thing.
You know, it becomes extra silient. Yeah, I will say as far as like Twitter goes. On the first big show I worked on, it was a show called Mixed Dish, and when it came out, I created not a Twitter bot, but if I was better at coding, it would have been a bot that was called not with the word not crossed out the Mixtish writer's room, and every time there was a negative comment, I would just write via the bot or not the not bot, but by the account. Okay,
but we worked really hard on this one. Under every negative comment on Twitter.
That is so relatable when people come like because people have like things that they could be critical about about the things I do. But sometimes on some level, I just always want to be like, do you know I didn't sleep for like a week because I was trying to get this right. And I know that I didn't get it totally right, but like I have to put out roughly two hours of history content every week, I just don't sleep. Yeah.
Yeah, I think we're past the part of the Internet where that could even work.
But it was very fun to me in the moment.
No, totally. Yeah, Okay. So gay rights in America before the Stone, before Stonewall, most visible groups were very assimilationists and pushing very hard for mainstream acceptance by like not rocking the boat. But all along there were all these kind of like unruly queers being unruly Stonewall was not the first and not the last major riot by queers
who are sick of being mistreated by society. But after some cops raided the Stonewall in in New York in nineteen sixty nine, the gay liberation movement exploded onto the scene. People were tired of asking nicely, and once people got tired of asking nicely, shit started getting done. That's a pattern you can see over and over again. As Frederick Douglas the Black Abolitionists put it, power concedes nothing without
a demand. The seventies were a vital time in gay history, as people started really coming out on moss and said up all kinds of infrastructure that we rely upon today. I remember I was talking to one of my friends
about this beforehand. I have relied on the infrastructure set up by like gays fifty years ago, for like my basic health care, completely unrelated to sexuality, just because I was like broken, lived out of a backpack, you know, and like I remember, I injured myself at one point by having too heavy of a backpack I was living out of and not being in my twenties anymore, It turns out that you can carry a certain sized backpack in your twenties that you can't carry onward, and I
like injured myself and so the only place that I could go was this gay clinic and it was nice. But then it's just like bonus points because they respect my pronouns and it's nice and people are nice to you. You know. I love gay infrastructure is the point, and I think that gay infrastructure is one of the most beautiful prefigurations of the world. I want everyone to get to live in. A lot of that started getting set
up in the seventies. Unfortunately, a lot of it was set up in the eighties because the eighties, yeah, were the spoiler alert for history.
Real bad yeah, yeah, and bad at the time. But also all the all the shit that's happening now got started then or not, I got started before, but like some of the major stuff really got rolling then, and we're just kind of living with the results of how how those people did the shit in the eighties.
I know, it's like we're listen, we're in like hyper Reagan times. Like Reagan was like yeah you at the time, I think people are like, I can't imagine something worse than this, and you're like, then, fucking yeah. Pull my beer. Trump comes in.
I know, I mean, we'll see, hopefully at the very minimum, like Trump isn't sort of lionized in history. The way that that is sort of the most infuriating thing is, Yeah, people's at least at least in the nineties and two thousands. I think people are coming around a little bit now. But like their description of Ronald Reagan's like the fuck out of here? The fuck are you talking about?
I was talking with one of my friends who works in the piercing industry, and they were wearing, I can't remember exactly, they were wearing a shirt that was like Ronald Reagan's grave is a gender neutral bathroom. Yeah, And someone that they work with was a piercer, a gay man who survived the eighties in San Francisco, which is a hard thing to have done. And was just like, I'm so glad that people today still understand that Ronald Reagan is a terrible person.
Yeah, I mean, well and sort of even.
As he got like you know, no longer really there and while he was still president.
That's the thing.
It's like, like, yeah, the Republican and right wing in general like apparatus is this like he is a terrible person, but it sort of doesn't matter, no, totally, like specifically him, Yeah, like is this is what those folks want and we are living with the consequences of not yeah, fucking taking them seriously honestly.
Yeah, and then obviously like some people did, some people tried, and just like not enough, but like yes, yes, yes, and so in the eighties it was the dying time. Gay men started showing up in hospitals as early as about nineteen eighty one, well exactly nineteen eighty one, with all kinds of rare cancers and diagnoses with what we now understand as AIDS. Acquired immuno deficiency syndrome is caused by an underlying virus HIV human immuno deficiency virus. They
didn't know that yet. The actual causes and means of transmission were going to be a hot topic for years. At first, doctors looked at what was happening and called it GRID gay related immune deficiency. This crisis was completely and shamefully ignored by the government. It was like till nineteen eighty seven before Reagan i think, said the word AIDS right. The treatment that people were receiving was shameful too.
When patients first started showing up destroyed immune systems. At first, this makes some sense, doctors were rightfully afraid of getting their patients any sicker, and so they wore head to toe ppe in what was called colloquial as spacesuits. But soon enough all kinds of healthcare professionals started wearing them around AIDS patients out of fear for themselves instead of
the other way around. And the thing is, I've read a couple of people like talking about, like how reasonable was it of people to be afraid of AIDS patients and stuff, And on some level, right, like, people didn't know what this disease was. They didn't know how it spread, and they knew that it had all one hundred percent death rate, which is a really high death rate. You know, it's about as high as it can get. Yeah, yeah, But pretty early on, well, no one was quite sure
how the disease was spread. Doctors and epidemiologists were pretty certain that it was not airborne and that it wasn't spread by casual contact, just based on looking at the I can't believe I wrote a script where I have to say epidemiology a lot, but just based on the like the spread of the disease, right.
Yeah, I mean it was.
It's a little bit in retrospect some of the COVID stuff too, where it was likely, especially like the wiping down your groceries business, and it's like, okay, but if it was transmitted like that, we'd all, like, you know, the city of Wuhan would have been completely obliterated. Like it just doesn't work like that. Yeah, but totally, I will say, you know, obviously have a sense of where this is going, and you know.
I sort of understand the doctor's perspective, but yeah.
No, totally, Like at the very beginning, you're like, whoa, I don't know what that is, and I don't want to then spread it to everyone, and like, you know, there's a there's a certain sense. But yeah, that was only for a brief moment. The medical establishment knew better really soon. They knew pretty much right away that it wasn't casual contact or airborne, and then by nineteen eighty three they realized it was blood born because of the
number of blood transfusion patients who were getting sick. And this is the same year that researchers in France discovered the virus underlying the disease HIV, but homophobia and fear of disease worked really tightly together. Healthcare professionals were terrified of catching gay cancer. No one would touch or breed the same air as AIDS patients, so patients were completely isolated.
One aid's nurse, a guy named Guy Vanderberg, who is himself hospitalized for a while, told ABC the food tray was shoved into the room and everything was covered in plastic, then everything was put into biohazard bags when it was taken out. People were fully gowned when they came in, even just to talk with me, And like, even if this was reasonable, and there's very brief window where it was, it's also just incredibly alienated and hard.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean it's like, solitary confinement is torture, literal torture.
Yeah, totally.
That's even when you're not sick.
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. My personal anecdote around this is that a close family friend of my family's has HIV and he was diagnosed I think in the eighties, maybe the early nineties, and he's this conservative man who goes to a conservative church, and so when he went and told the congregation that, you know, he had HIV. Everyone in the congregation lined up to shake his hand like without gloves.
And this was like a huge fucking deal, you know, right, because everyone consciously knew it was safe, but people were still being real fucking shitty about it.
Yeah.
Yeah, Fortunately, queer people themselves, gay people and lesbians are as I understand it overrepresented in the medical profession, much like you might think that ads are overrepresented in this podcast, But I would argue that they are that they are. Yeah, that's what I would are you too, But if you get cooler zone media, then you don't have to listen to them. You can only listen to my ad transitions instead.
But here's the ads, and we're back. The lesbian community rallied really hard, and they rode to Gondor's aid when the beacons were lit. They did not ask where was Gondor when the westfold fell? I have to somehow put in a Lord of the room's reference in every episode. Yeah, no, it's just it's important. And one gay man it's actually okay.
The comparisons are going to get really strong though, right because there's well okay, yeah, one gay man in San Francisco spoke anonymously to the I news and said, quote, suddenly the hospitals were full of lesbians who were volunteering, volunteering to go into those rooms and help my friends who were dying. I remember being so moved by them because gay men hadn't been too kind to lesbians. We'd call them fish and make fun of the butcher dikes in the bar, and yet there they were.
Yeah, I mean that is a you know, that that is sort of like the differences and similarities that we were talking about earlier right there, which is like there's a difference between like poking fun at someone and like a community.
Is dying totally totally. Yeah, like, yeah, we're going to make fun of oh you got bad haircut. I'm going to make fun of you until someone else messes with you. Then it's a war, you know.
Yeah, yeah, you know.
And without also like two needlessly tapping the present, we're about to also enter into a time when the establishment medical advice is about to be factually incorrect. Yeah, not that it always hasn't been, sort of, but even more so, I don't know, this is sort of an open question to me, but it's like, whenever the next terrible thing that is a probably virus hits, like probably, yeah, we won't be able to necessarily, I mean, we probably pretty actively won't be able to trust our CDC or NIH.
And again, with grains of salt, we never probably should have wholly trusted them. However, they've mostly been correct, you know. So whether it's you know, getting your measles vaccine or you know, not trying to use nutrition to fight cancer and mental mental health issues.
I don't know.
I don't know if there's like an EU like health authority to follow or Chinese health authority to follow, but don't follow the like.
And don't follow the American one, and don't let.
Their policies dictate your behavior, because we are going to have to do stuff like this which is maybe not technically advised or allowed by the establishment, but it is the right thing to do, and you know, within reason. I guess who knows what the next actual thing will be. But just because they say you're safe doesn't mean you are. Just because they say you're in peril doesn't mean you are.
I know.
And it's like hard because it's like, well, this is going to make it even harder to get people to trust, like, you know, I'm clearly not like a big like the state is a really good way of forming society, person, but yeah, institutions that get together to solve things, Yeah, I absolutely believe in and many of those are governmental and yeah.
Well it's like the difference between like the broadly speaking, the state, but also like the state is unfortunately the best way to do some of these.
Things, Like yeah, definitely that we have available to us. Yeah.
Yeah, so yeah, it would be nice if it worked.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like they're getting rid of all that part. They're like, it's like, stop making the state look good, you weird right wing libertarians. Yeah, like you're gutting all the good parts of the state and you're keeping the fucking cops in the military.
Yeah all right.
Well, so lesbians step up in so many ways during this that it's overwhelming and I won't get into all of it, but we'll start with blood, because starting in nineteen eighty three, men who have sex with men were banned from donating blood in order to stop transmission through blood transfusions. There's there's some logic here, right, HIV tests weren't available yet, but this ban went on way too long.
Do you want to guess what year men who had sex with men were able to donate blood again without discrimination in the United States.
I only know this because I was asked in my adulthood so deep into the twenty to two thousand somethings, Is that right.
Two years ago? Twenty twenty three? Okay, yeah, yeah, no, that's actually a good point. Yeah, all of us have gone. Yeah. In twenty twenty fucking three, they finally changed the rules. In twenty twenty, men who have sex with men were allowed to donate blood if they hadn't had sex in
the last three months. Nowadays, the rule is anyone regardless of extra gender, can donate blood, so long as they haven't had anal sex with a new partner or slept with multiple new partners in the past three months, and that I'm not an expert here. That sounds reasonable. Yeah, make it across the board and not about sexuality. That seems good. I don't know.
Yeah. But also it feels like we could also just screen for I.
Mean, if you're just worried about HIV, it's like, just check if there's HIV there.
I think, but I could be wrong. I think it's because there's a roughly a three month period for the efficacy of the testing.
Oh sure, sure, okay.
But I don't know how it relates to like bottled blood or whatever.
It is.
Sure, but in nineteen eighty three men were suddenly told that they couldn't donate blood. But AIDS patients need a lot of blood transfusions, especially back then, so their own immediate community couldn't support them. Fortunately, LGBT is a thing for a reason. All of us letters are in it together. The l stepped up the most famous group is probably the most famous because branding is so important to being remembered in history, is what I'm learning on this show too.
They were called the blood Sisters. Yeah, like you don't forget the blood sisters.
Oh man, And just speaking of this is it's just nice to get a Warhammer forty K reference in there.
Oh are there blood sisters and Warmmer? I'm a D and D girl.
I don't think. I think so.
Hell yeah, it might be a Sisters of Blood or something like that, just the bloody angels anyway.
Hell yeah, So the Warhammer forty K girls stepped.
To the fuck uh.
The Women's caucus of the San Diego Democratic Club set up a deal with a private blood bank to allow donors to designate the recipients, so basically people could go in and say, this is blood for people with HIV and AIDS. Then they called for a blood drive on July sixteenth, nineteen eighty three, and called on all the lesbians in San Diego, being that like fifty people would come, but the very first blood drive, two hundred people came
with a line around the block. Peggy Heathers, a blood sister, said, quote, women came out of the woodwork, women that didn't want to have anything to do with men, even gay men. And I fucking love that. Even the hardcore lesbian separatists were like, look, I don't want to live with men, I don't want to date men. I don't want to organize with men. I'm not going to see them fucking die abandoned because of their sexuality.
Yeah, like, well, I mean it also is just sort of like the right triangulation. It's like, listen, even if I don't want anything to do with men, the worst men are the ones that are perpetrating this upon gay men.
Like totally, totally, there's still the real enemy.
Let's not let's not and never be confused about who the real enemy.
Is yeah, totally, and I just like, I love that. I love that they were like, yeah, like you know, you're still as being separatists and we're still coming to help you. The Blood Sisters continued for years. I have read that they continued before this is my favorite part about multiple sources, and I've read that they continue for four years. I've read that they continued until nineteen ninety six.
Either way they stayed, I'm guessing that they stayed particularly active until the very first treatments of the late eighties kicked in, and then active to some degree for a decade after that until about nineteen ninety six. Is when you get the well I keep saying about in nineteen ninety six, you get the sort of cocktail three drug regimen that started dramatically improving peoples odds, you know.
And the other side of it is like whether they were like continuing as a Blood Sister's like you know, under the Blood Sister's banner. There is the thing, you know, sort of mirroring my story, which is like once you get started, you do more like totally and I do think like a you know, the tiny silver lining for these crises is it does get regular people or maybe even slightly apathetic people and to like be like, Okay, I gotta do fucking something then like something that gets
you know something else. No, yeah, enough of the time that you know, things become real.
No, that's a good point. Yeah, you just got to like get people into the inertia of trying to help.
Mm hmm. Yeah.
And I don't know if the blood Sisters were the first or if they were the one that gets written about the most because they have a sick name. The idea spread. Lesbians ran blood drives in at least San Francisco, Denver, Boston, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Memphis, and DC. I suspect it's more than that, because I've read about lesbian support and a
bunch of other cities beyond that. The San Francisco blood drive was led by the National Organization of Women, and they would put up flyers that say, our boys need our blood fucking good.
And it's also like, because I do think just to like reach kind of the normal people, you do got to do essentially war propaganda for stuff like this.
Yeah, totally. And also, I mean this whole thing we're gonna talk about a little later, This whole thing is strangely like war, you know. Yeah, well yeah, and queer newspapers continued to say basically like, hey, lesbians, please donate blood or to quote the newspaper coming out, which I believe is San Francisco paper, they should do it, to quote stand by our brothers and fighting the AIDS epidemic.
Yeah.
An author named Jennifer Wilde, who was writing for the queer Irish magazine GCN, put it like this, the drives also gave more than just blood. They were also away for the men suffering to know that they were loved and part of a supportive community that will always do what must be done to overcome adversity.
Yeah.
It's the kind of thing where like real almost cheesy like phrasing, it's just appropriate. You're like, yeah, no, that's what happened. They absolutely We were like, you're part of a supportive community. We don't want you to die alone. Like yeah.
Well, and also it is like like this is such a wonderful example of like laws and power are just people doing shit to other people. And like as bad as the stuff gets and as has been, like you know, when gay men weren't allowed to donate blood, really what this means is they just they need blood, like blood is needed, and if we can get blood in this instance to people, then it sort of is a counteraction to the bigotry and the fucking hate that is out there.
Like you can just reverse it, yeah, or you can try or you do something.
Yeah, but you know what, we can't reverse the continued march of all of the brilliant products and services who I love.
We can try. Are you going to listen to the ad first to figure out how?
Yeah? No, your enemy listen to these ads. Actually some of them are probably for good things. That's the hard part is that sometimes we get ads for nice things, like other podcasts. I like podcasts. I don't mind learning about podcasts through podcasts.
That seems fine, yes, yes, but that does start to feel like a Ponzi scheme a little bit.
That's true.
Podcast advertising on other podcasts feels like hold on, well right now.
And then people are like, how come all your guests are podcasters? And I'm like, I see your point, But all my guests are podcasters because they know how to podcast, because it's actually a trained skill that takes effort and also takes equipment, and not all of our guests are podcasters anyway, but all of our guests listen to ads. Actually that's not true. We don't listen them while we're recording, but here they are, you can listen to them. Let's go.
And we're back.
So lesbian stepped up to donate blood, and lesbian doctors and nurses stepped up to directly care for AIDS patients. But it went even deeper than that. In nineteen eighty one, a game and named Howie Dare He was a fourth grade teacher with a master's degree in counseling, and a lesbian therapist named Candy Markham started a gay counseling center in Dallas after seeing clinics in New York and Houston that were counseling centers for gay folks. This is before
it was going to be an HIV thing. Everyone needs counseling and therapy sometimes, right, But if you're part of a criminalized community, that puts extra stress on your life, and most therapists that were available weren't exactly queer competent, let alone queer friendly. So they start up this hotline. They opened up the Oaklawn Counseling Center in the gahborhood and then they went around to bars and wherever people
hung out to tell people about it. Then the two of them went to a gay mental health conference in Houston, because hell yeah, queer infrastructure. There was a gay mental health conference in Houston in nineteen eighty one, and they learned about this shitty new thing called Grid that was killing gay men and trans women on the coasts. So they decided to turn one of their phone lines into a GRID hotline. Even before Grid hit the city. Candy was like, we don't know anything about this disease yet.
I'm paraphrasing her, but how he said, and I quote, yes, I know, but we will and we need to be prepared. So I really like this man because he is a handsome, prepper, leather daddy school teacher with a master's degree and like was a mental health king.
He's fucking cool, amazing.
Yeah, you can read all kinds of like I didn't put all of it in here, but like he wrote a lot. Well, I'll get to it, okay. Within a few months, AIDS came to Dallas. And the thing is is that AIDS untreated kills more or less everyone who gets it, and there were no treatments for years. I don't know if I've read anything quite so much like war as the AIDS crisis. Every account I've read about this time in any city or town talks about people going to multiple funerals a week, and that the gay
accepting churches were running two to three services a day. Actually, the specific I think it was called the MCC the church, the Queer accepting church in Dallas at this time lost i think a third of its own clergy days. The hotline that they had set up, this grid hotline was
staffed at first mostly by gay men. The quote worried well because it's like if you're a gay man and this time you're either sick or you're the worried well right, because you're like, well, I don't know what it's going to be me.
Yeah.
Anytime anyone got sick, they were like, oh fuck, Like I got a cold, I might be dead now, you know, right. The community centered around this health clinic set up a buddy system where sick men would be placed with healthy folks who could care for them. They had more than one hundred registered buddies. These were sort of in addition to if you have like a full time caretaker, like if you live with your partner, or you live with
your parents, or someone else's like caretaking for you. You also have a buddy system on top of that to help relieve that careme taking right, and this model of direct care and mutual laid spread to other cities. They also set up an adult day care center so that people with AIDS could come and be taken care of in the center during the day so that their caretakers could catch a break. All the while how He is running all this shit alongside Candy. He's also teaching math
to incarcerated people at the county jail. In addition to be like he's like a college teacher, a fourth grade teacher, institutionalized people teacher, and a bartender and running a counseling service. He fucking burned the candle of both ends.
Jesus, that's so exhausting. But I know good. I know.
In nineteen eighty five, when how He was thirty seven years old, he was diagnosed with HIV. It was his friend and co worker, Candy, the other therapist who was his buddy in the buddy system, who was assigned to him. His mom was a nurse and took care of him too, and He died in nineteen eighty six at thirty eight years old, with his mother by his bedside, as were his wishes. His ashes were spread and his mother's rose garden.
And I was like, as I was writing this, I was like, I don't know, I'm gonna be able to read this without crying. Like Candy kept going. All of her male friends were dying, and she spent all of her time doing pro bono therapy in hospitals and in home care, and then would go and speak at their funerals. And this wasn't easy for her. The group that she was working with would set up housing for everyone who's being kicked out by their families for being gay and sick.
And she talks about how often she would have therapy clients who would bring their families and the poor client right who would have to come out both as gay and dying in the same conversation. And Candy's job in that situation, as best as I can tell, was to try and convince the family to have a basic fucking human decency right and like love and care for their child.
So fucking you know, I guess like it's grim to think about that, and like grim to see like how.
Little humanity some folks have. But I guess you also just never know.
Yeah, yeah, I like I come from a family where I like, can't imagine that having happened to me. Yeah, I can imagine family or relatives or whatever who would be like shitty to me or make fun of me, or not know how to talk about it and be awkward or like it's gender me and god, I'm not trying to talk shit to my family. I could imagine all of these things. Yeah, yeah, but the like you are not our child to get out of here, which happens still happens to so many fucking queer kids. I
just like I can't. I'm like, yeah, Like it's it's like could you could you have we put the bar on the floor, like could you step over it? Hell, it might even be buried under the ground. You just have to walk normal. Yeah, And instead they're like, no, I'm gonna dig up that bar and trip on it.
You have to dig. You have to dig to be to be that bad. But yeah, or maybe you don't because it is reflexive for so many people clearly like that, Like yeah.
Yeah, And.
Basically, as best as I can tell, what happened in the eighties is you have all of these queer health services and counseling services and general infrastructure projects, right that people have been building for a while or maybe built specifically around AIDS, but like often have been building for a long time, and then one by one all of the men in them would die, and so it would be lesbians who would step up. Sometimes also straight women. I'm not to to totally cut them out of this picture.
Especially in San Francis, go end up reading about a bunch of straight women who also a lot, but this particular episode's focused on lesbians, and so you just have this thing where like, like I've read all these people who weren't there arguing about like, oh, why did women have to do all the unpaid labor or whatever? The fuck fuck you all of that shit, but like, yeah, why couldn't the men take care of themselves because they were dead?
Yeah?
Yeah, Like I don't know what.
To tell you.
I mean, it's like, you know, of course that the grain of truth is in there, that is, that is the work that falls to women so much, but absolutely there is also an explanation.
Yeah, and also like gay men are also over represented in carrying fields. Yes, yes, Like when I'm reading about a lot of the like early health clinics and stuff, it's like, oh, it's gay men and lesbians who staffed them, right, and then it was just lesbians left for some weird reason, you know, right. But yeah, no, totally. There is still a little bit of a like, yeah, you know, it's
like carrying work et cetera as gender. But like you know what, like some work that is gendered is good when people do it, like yeah, and so many nonprofit leaders were dying in this period that Candy and other folks set up a six month seminar series to onboard lesbians to lead nonprofits. Right When she was interviewed later, when she was asked what she would do have done differently about her life, she says, you know what comes to mind is I'd make a lot more money and
give it away. But you know, I worked as hard as I could. I don't think I could have done anything different. Like I said, I'm filled up from what happens. I think it is the story of my life. I'm pretty happy. Yeah, And so how do you have a good life? You fucking find a way to help and
then you just fucking do it. Like, She's not the only person I've read this week who's talking is looking back on a life of helping people in this horrible crisis, and a lot of the people I'm reading are like, yeah, we all have PTSD now, or like, you know, it majorly impacted them, but overall, the people who survived, who were doing things are like, I'm I'm pretty proud of myself in my community, and I've lived the best life I could and I'm doing okay.
Yeah, or look, everything comes with a cost, but you know, there's also be like, however, like PTSD you might have, I do think doing nothing would probably have made it worse, totally right, And you know what, and that's not a guarantee, of course, like different circumstances. But one of the bigger benefits of you know, mutual aid is this is for you.
Too, absolutely, like and that's literally in the name mutual aid. Yeah right, it's like, no, we're just people taking care of each other. And right now it's me taking care of you, you know. And it won't necessarily be exact reciprocal, like oh well tomorrow you take care of me, yeah, but someone will take care of me, yeah, you know.
Yeah, it works. It worked. If everyone didn't, it just would work. Society would work.
I know. It's one of the most frustrated things in the world, is like, once you start seeing it happen, you can unsee it, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah, people want to take care of each other.
Yeah, well some of us don't, but that's true. Yeah, it's yeah.
Yeah, well that's what we got for part one. But when we come back on part two, we're going to talk about a whole bunch of other people helped, including more lesbians and some nuns.
Amazing.
Yeah. Do you got anything you want to plug here at the end of your podcast, your mutual group, anything that TV shows we should watch that you wrote.
Nothing. I don't know, Yo's is racist, our premium shows called YO. Can we Live? Or we don't talk about stuff that is horrible.
That I haven't listened to that yet.
Just you know, just a way to decompress a little bit. Yeah, that's about it. I don't know, I'm around.
Okay, Well, if you want to keep up with me, I don't know. I say that every single time. I guess I probably probably when this comes out, I'm probably in the middle of kickstarting a book, which means I'm probably if this is March twenty twenty five that you're listening to it, I'm probably kickstarting the third book in the Danielle Kine series, The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, and it is available either through Kickstarter or if you're listen to this in the future, you can just buy
it probably, And there's audiobooks of all three books, so if you haven't heard the other ones, you can start with the audiobooks, or are the regular books which you can just get and I'll talk to you all soon.
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