Coming to you from the dining room table at East Barbary Lane. Welcome to a special episode of Full Circle the podcast.
I am your host Charles Tyson Jr.
And I'm your host Martha Madrigal. Our special guest today is the author of seven books, including Glass and The Pleasures of Memory in Shakespeare's Sonnets. In twenty twenty one, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Today we're discussing the book Red Hot and Blue from the thirty three and a third series. John S. Garrison, Welcome to the Full Circle Table.
Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.
We're so glad to have you. So you have written this awesome book about Red Hot and Blue. And you know, the Red Hot and Blue project was in nineteen ninety, so I was in the tenth grade, shut up, but as a high schooler, you know, in the nineties, who was not yet out to himself, not to mention anyone else, and then a project like this coming out, it gave
me a lot of a lot of feelings. But why don't you talk about your what the project is, and your introduction to it and what it meant in your life at that time.
Yeah, yeah, It's interesting. I was sort of in the same place I was, let's say, nineteen ninety, just graduating high school, entering college, and I was.
I am so old in this feeling it too.
But I was also like not out to anybody, kind of out to myself, but not I mean, no one talked about queerness or being gay or whatever and something on the way they do now. So yeah, for that album to come out and all of a sudden, have I don't know, YouTube, Thompson Twins, David Byrne, like all these people think singing about in some cases queer love,
Katie Lang, in some cases singing about the epidemic. Just all of a sudden, I thought, like, WHOA, Like, if they all talk about gay things and about HIV, then maybe it shouldn't be so scary for me to do it. But the album itself came out as the first major response from the music industry to the AIDS epidemic. There hadn't really been anything as big beforehand. There have been a couple small things, and it came out at the time of the sort of height of the pandemic. This
is before the Triple Cocktail, before effective treatments. It was around the time that AIDS was the number one killer of Americans twenty five to forty four. So it was really kind of the hindigal of the epidemic, the kind of a crux time for me in Charms of my own coming out, and it was just it was time for action, and the music industry stepped.
Up for real, definitely, and it was you know, a lot of the heavy hitters in the industry, and it was pretty brave of them, what was considered let me say that was considered pretty brave of them all to attach themselves to this project, because lord knows, the stigma towards the disease was still very heavy at the time.
Well, and the stigma toward queerness was very heavy at the time, right right. Yeah. I came of age a little bit younger and you know, in the early eighties, so you know, I was there when we were just starting to talk about it and figure out what it mean and how did we contract it, and you know, just in this moment in time in America. You know, I had a discussion with a whole bunch of trans people last night, and you know, we were talking about
the pandemic that you know, ours lasted fifteen years. Yes, and this really was the center of it. So, yeah, the stigma was around us existing. The stigma was around us, you know, daring to defy anyone and realizing that we had to be loud. We didn't really have a choice. So the project itself talk a little bit about that surrounds Cole Porter's music, and ironically there's not really a mention of his queerness.
In the project. In the project, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's super interesting. So this was the Red Hot organization and would go on to make a whole series of albums supporting funding to combat the AIDS epidemic and then later funding efforts towards same sex marriage in Southeast Asia. Now they have a new album where they's supporting trans rites
with trans performers doing duets with cystandard performers. But this was their first album and it brought It really came about because there was a someone in the arts community in John Carlin who was friends with Keith Haring, David Wan Aerobics, similar high profile queer artists who were dying or died of HIV, and he partnered with David Byrne of the Talking Heads, whose sister in law was ah TOV positive and she would actually die shortly after the
album came out, and they got together with a filmmaker named Lee Blake, and the three of them just went out to musical artists and said, we need to do something, and we need to raise awareness, we need to get some funding out there to fight the AIDS epidemic. And they brought a bunch of bus together to do covers
of Cold Porter songs. And you're exactly right. It's a kind of a it's a kind of a curious choice because Colporter, you know, lived and died before the AIDS epidemic, lived and died before a stone Wall, was a semi closet dude, gay man. And nonetheless, they chose to resurrect his music for the album. And you're exactly right, they didn't. What they didn't overtly talk about Coldporter being queer. One
of the requirements from the cold Porter Family Foundation. I guess the folks who owned the rights was to was that they wouldn't mention his queerness. But I think it's still it comes out nonetheless, when you listen to the songs in this context and you realize the he's talking about loss, forbidden love, secret love the kinds of thing that were offered people.
And what's very cool about that is, you know, when I'm fifteen years old, I don't think I really clocked that the project was centering around Coalporter's music. And then later on in life, I saw the movie to Lovely Yeah, and that's when I realized he wasn't being really that subtle, even though he was being very subtle with his with his lyrics. And so once when I'm reading the book and I'm putting all the pieces together, I'm realizing how
perfect of a choice that actually was. You know, euphemism upon euphemism upon euphemism, and it also gave a lot of room for interpretation when it came to the videos. Before we sat down, I sat and I watched them all.
I found.
A good deal of them, not all of them, but many of them on YouTube, and there were such works of art. The one that stuck out to me, well, the two that stuck out to me the most one was Nana Cherry got you under my Skin for one thing. That was the only one from that project that made its way to me on its own, just by virtue of it being something that Nana Cherry did so of course I wanted to know what it was. And the
other one was too darn Hot, which was erasure. Yeah, I believe, Yeah, And that was such an artistic piece.
Yeah, I.
It was so much, so many ways to express us the feelings of Coldporter's music and what was just going on in the time. Talk a little bit about the pushback in terms of what could be said, what couldn't be said, and how.
Yeah it's funny, you know, kind of same as you. When I first heard the songs, I think I didn't even I didn't even reached them as Coldporter songs, Like I thought, oh, this is like a cool new song
by you two. I mean, just sound naive. A lot of us are, or at least I was, as kind of a young queer person about our past, like we don't realize that they're the queer people, trans people, non binary people like have been around forever and it's so powerful, or it was for me at least, just realizing Coldporter and always people in the past who lived queer lives contributed so much to what we think of now as just kind of straight society in a way, like Cold
Porter authored so many of the love songs that haven't canonized or thought of today as like these great kind of I don't know, wedding songs or whatever, but we realize it. Oh, it's like queer people have always been there in this long history. But yeah, you see this in the Lovely film and that there's there was pushback against Cold Porter's open sexuality at the time, you know, when the album came out. Dannina Cherry's song is one
of the standouts, I've Got You under my Skin. She uses that song alters some of the lyrics to have it speak directly to the dangers of injection drug use for HIV transmission and they need to not share needles. It was seen as totally radical to redo the song, even though as you hear the title I've got You under my Skin, you realize, oh my god, it's the perfect metaphor, I guess, for virus transmission, for thinking about just like why not to share needles? Like it's really basic,
don't get someone else under your skin. But the song controversial for a couple of reasons. One because this is the early days of rap, so a lot of the reviewers said, oh, the album's really great when it stays true to Coldporter's music. But when they try to do a rap song with Coldporters music, like, it doesn't work
because rap isn't even music. So it was kind of this early period where there was all this prejudice against rap, which of course is totally wrapped up and prejudice against folks of color.
But yeah, that song was.
So radical that when the television special for Red Hot and Blue Air in the US, which had the videos and the songs, they left out and in a cherry video because it was just like, I say, want people speaking so frankly about how AIDS is transmitted, even though the way to stop AIDS from being transmitted is to speak really frankly about how you get it now you don't know, you don't get it right.
And that would explain why I came across that video separate from the project.
God it okay.
Totally please get My dog may make weird noises at times, so just please ignore.
That ours is going to at any moment too.
It's fun probably, Yeah.
I got a kick out of you. Also, the Jungle Brothers, Oh yeah, they did a lot of work with the lyrics.
Yeah, that was the That was the only other song where they changed the lyrics besides an ind cherry and it's that song's really interesting because they changed it to be overtly about kind of sexuality and how sort of hooking up without using a condoms interest. But it's a it's a really interesting song because that one also had pushback where folks didn't want to play it, didn't want to showcase it because they spoke so overtly about sex.
But Cold Porter's original was about cocaine. So yeah, so the kick in the song was about it was about doing cocaine and that, and that was censored at the time. It wasn't at Coldporter's time. It wasn't playing the radio and went on to become one of his biggest hits, but he had to change the lyrics. So it's funny that like in the modern day or whatever, like people think, oh, that song's too controversial by the Dunker Brothers, we can't
play it. But it's like that song has always been controversial.
It's not a new thing, right, And it's interesting seeing that video for the first time today. It totally fits into where hip hop went shortly after, because so many artists made a point if not doing an entire song at least having a message about using a condom and practicing safe sex. So that might have been like, you know, opening the door for that, or it just happened. Yeah.
One the hip hop community wrapped community. You know, we're one of the most affected communities in terms of HIV where access to healthcare and access to different kinds of messaging wasn't getting to folks of color as readily. And you know, thinking back even before Red Hot and Blue, one of their early pioneers in terms of it was TLC. Right, song Let's Talk About Sex was a song overly about just having honest dialogue about sex and sexuality. Oh sorry,
that's a sorry. Yeah, I mean I was petting the dog trying to keep them from barking at the same time losing.
My history multitasking.
But but but sorry TLC. But the TLC also is really invested in early AIDS messaging. They would wear condoms on their clothes and their videos and besides save sex.
Yeah, I remember they got in trouble because they all looked like they were like teenagers and they're wearing condoms on their faces and on their clothes.
Yeah, it.
Really was.
Yeah, this project definitely seeing it now with My Today Eyes really was the opening the door for that style of activism in music, which became much more prevalent in the next two years, I would say, And it's this project started the was this was the Red Foundation first and then it became this or this started the Red Foundation, this started.
So yeah, the Red Foundation Bona's major global organization fighting against HIV that came out of this project. So for Bono, for Annie Lennox of The Rhythmics, it was really this album Red Hot and Blue that was their start of being global leaders in the fighting and st HIV nic So it's pretty I mean, it's a great It's really interesting to know how being invited to be part of a project like this is often the kind of first step.
Once you invite someone in thy can all of a sudden become one of the really major pioneers and major leaders for a issue they just might not have known that much about before.
Right.
So you mentioned Bono the most, you to the most. Is it safe to say that that is your favorite entry in the project?
I definitely, yeah. So their song was Night and Day, which is in some ways one of Colporter's most famous songs, and it's the song that's been the most re recorded, the most adapted of all the songs I think. So I love that song and that song's about. That song's about sort of obsession, desire, thinking about someone night and
day like that. For me, I don't know, maybe sorry, maybe all of our experiences of teenage love, but that really speaks to how I felt when I was a teenager in my early twenties was like love and passion was just such a big part I think of coming out, being young, getting into music. So that song from me really speaks to kind of what it's about to have feelings and on the one hand, I want to resist them and on the other hand, I want to talk to everybody about that part.
And yeah, definitely, because you know, you were a couple of years older than me, so you were in that space which I didn't get to until I didn't come out for until ninety three ninety four, and by that point, you know, we were even further along into the saga that was the epidemic, and I really and I never really went back to Red, Hot and Blue, And it's a shame because looking at it now, I'd have been all over it.
Yeah, totally, you know, just like.
The imagery in like the Erasure video just speaks to me, Like the family, the little white nuclear family sitting in front of the television with the red blindfolds on, just so powerful. So it came the project aired, Was it in the UK first?
Yeah? Yeah, the project. The project was sort of multifold, so there was there was the album that had the twenty covers of Cultporter songs. There were videos made by really leading filmmakers Jonathan Demi Vendors, and those videos were then put together into a television special which was meant to raise awareness by HIV. It aired first in the UK with very little concern about showing all the videos speaking frankly about sex, and then it also aired later in the US. In the US it was sort of
dialed back. In the UK, it was very much an AIDS awareness special that sort of had cul porters of through line. In the US it was a cul porter special that also mentioned the AIDS epidemic, but it still was groundbreaking. Distinctions exactly and such. I mean, it's weird.
It's a distinction that speaks so much to I think all of our experiences as queer people, as trance people, as gay people, where like, we're so familiar with that trend where our lives are mentioned and briefly we're a side character in popular media where a character who dies off, where the uncle, aunt whoever, who like you never hear about, who doesn't come to Thanksgiving.
A cautionary tale.
Yeah exactly, yeah exactly, Yeah, no one talks about Edna anymore or whatever.
Whatever.
Yeah. So the I mean, The Special kind of did that same kind of work where it kind of in the US it mentioned US but also sort of tried to downplay US, but still it was radical. It was the first time that the word condom was ever used on primetime television outside of the news in the US. Richard Gear was the host, so definitely a big name who sort of raised awareness about the frankness talking about sexuality.
John Malkovich was also host. So on the one hand, at prime time you had actors you recognized talking about things like AIDS such a transmit disease. On the other hand, it was the US one was a much more vanilla version of what was broadcast globally, which makes.
Sense considering a the US and B that time totally And it is really interesting because you think it would be for lack of a better word, more palatable coming from.
Uh these beloved celebrities. Yeah, you know, but apparently not so much.
What were other parts of that project that stuck with you?
There was also well, I should say also like part and parcel of the Red, Hot, and Blue project was a public awareness campaign that had posters and wheat pasting and what not about HIV prevention. And that campaign was radical to one because it showed unclothed and naked straight couples, gay cut queer couples, but also it showed mixed race couples.
It was bilingual. It was this kind of early moment in the pandemic where a lot of the prevention messaging was just about white men because it and that was like because it wasceived as a gay male disease. Like part of this project for me was going back to
all this stuff I had kind of forgotten. I had forgotten that when HIV first emerged, it was referred to, you know, by the White House as a gay plague, right, and even in medical circles it was called gay Gay related immune deficiency syndrome GRID.
GRID came before.
It D I mean, and if you listen to that name, gay related. I mean like it sounds like, oh, because you're gay or related to the gay quote unquote lifestyle, you get this disease, like like gay itself is sort of a disease or attracts disease. Gay is a sickness.
And there was course well, and it was you know, you mentioned that in the book. It took him til nineteen seventy three for it to you know, be removed from the DFM.
Yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah, it took and you know there's this lag time. So you think just because it is taken out of the DSM in the seventies doesn't mean that all the way through my I don't know when I was growing up or even today, people don't think, Oh, isn't it sort of something you catch? Can't people be recruited? Like all those all those ideas are still there. So, you know, writing this book really took me back to
that era. I don't know if I blocked it out or if things are better now so I've forgotten how bad they used to be. But I mean it was it was hard to go back to thinking about what it was like in the late eighties early nineties. But it was also good for me to remember that. I mean, all that stuff was so readily available, all that kind of prejudice, all that homophobia, trans phobia, all that racism, like it is immediately bubble to the surface with the pandemic.
Yes it did, Yes, it did because we had the seventies, right, So we had Stonewall and other uprisings in the nineteen sixties that kind of led us to a brief era like you know, it lasted about as long as Disco when we were we were there, you know, kind of celebrated and part of the culture and and you know,
the village people and all of that. And then here was a nineteen eighty one and a lot of people believed that that was our come up and like see that's what you get from that kind of behavior, celebrating all that faggot for me, right, And that really was the way it looked, you know. And so for all the strides we made, we took a huge, huge step back for you know, most of the eighties and the nineties. It changed the conversation.
Yeah, it's so tragic. Yeah, I think on the one hand, people forget that actually before AIDS, there was so much progress around queer rights, around queer people being accepted the AIDS.
Epidemics come out wherever exactly.
The AIDS epidemic I mean, of course took a huge toll on queer people in terms of their health, but yeah, it allowed all this like Jesse Helms, all these sort of fig versus Westborough Church, all these figures and organizations and lost all of a sudden surf because they could take advantage of all people's fears that, oh, gay people are spreading diseases, gay people are doing all these sort of horrible things. People just seized on that, and then all of a sudden we had this huge backslide.
How important to you How important do you think queer history is right now? Learning it, going back over it, realizing where we came from, you know, to get to this point in time.
For me, it's super important, And you know, it's funny it hasn't always been. Like at one point I thought, I don't know, like our lives were so radically different than queer people that came before us that they couldn't have ever seen what we'd be like. That we need to kind of recreate ourselves in the present. But now as things get sort of more chaotic, more precarious. I really take solace in the idea that queer people have
before us. Queer people have survived, queer people have thrived, Yes, but also but it's also important to let people know that, you know, queer people have been under duress for a very very very long time, not like, yes, things are better, maybe getting worse, but let's not let's not sort of dismiss queer suffering by saying, oh, like everything's good now.
Like you all have Oh no, you know, and this generation is kind of seeing that, you know, things can be precarious totally. You know they were then, they were you know, before then, nobody was out in the fifties and sixties, very few people, you know, unless you couldn't pass as anything but who you were, right, you hid because that was the only way to have a job
and a life and a place to live with. I want to say a little exception, you know, And just as I've contemplated, you know, we're sitting down just a few days after the twenty twenty four election, as I've sat with with you know, young queer and trans people who are hurting right now, that was the message that came to my mind, is I need you to know we are resilient people that you stand on the shoulders of giants. You know, we are We are not new
to controversy. You know, our people were tempered and raw shit. And I feel like reaching back and understanding that this is not even the first time we've been targeted. It's not even the third time, right that part, and we emerge and we continue, you know, and we still bring you all of your color, art and culture and that's not going to change. I feel like that's the message,
you know. And looking back at this, I was like, Yeah, it helped me to remember those times and what that was like and totally different world, totally different world, and we a lot of us felt like we had to apologize, you know, until we kind of saw act up when we saw like we better get loud or die right, And.
Yeah, totally, I mean that all was so inspiring for me. I remember, you know, when I was when I was seventeen or whatever, and I saw on TV my first kiss in like folks would get like big crowds of people will get together and they'd like make out in front of I don't know, city hall or like conservative politicians. I can remember my first instinct being, oh, don't do that, that'll make people feel uncomfortable, Like that's what people don't want to see that, Like that's going to make them
think that gay people. Because I had internalized all those messages of gay people should not stay in the closet, the pine, closed doors. I don't want to hear about what you do in bed. I don't want to see, like we don't need public displays of affection. And now I think things like kissing's or something are so powerful because it is saying, you know, there's nothing wrong with me holding hands with or kissing or whatever a same
sex partner like this is totally natural. But as young people, I think we internalize all that kind of shame, all that desire to keep ourselves invisible, and it just does so much damage to young people.
It absolutely does. It's just, you know, conversely, having not experienced any of that, a lot of them are just really feeling mode over right now. Yeah, like why would they do this stuff? You know, why? Why? And it's like they've always done this stuff in one way or another, you know, we've I find it interesting. Another conversation that has come up is you know that the fight for
marriage equality. In large part, the message was assimilation. We're just like yeah, which doesn't really leave a lot of room does it for actual queer love, for actual queer stories. Right, it's no, no, no, Well we're safe. It's okay. We want to pick a fence too, and some of us don't.
Yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, that it's funny. You don't know. Yeah, that that that we're just like you argument.
I don't know.
It denies the truth of love, like what love is? I think I don't know, or in Colporter's music, what love is is like when the Cult's most famous songs is anything Goes.
I know, I'm right on that page. Okay, I'm right on that page, as you say it. Yeah, And I think I don't know.
I mean, that's the truth of love is that everyone loves differently, everyone wants different things, people change their mind throughout their life, people express themselves differently. So yeah, same sex marriage. Well, it was a whin I think a lot. I think so much to the argument was gay people
are just like straight people, therefore we deserve equal rights. Okay, you know in some ways that's true, but it ended up blocking out but love is, which is wild uncontrollable, passionate, undefinable, changeable, and Colport, like a lot of Colporter's music is about that, that that love is fun, love makes us do crazy things. Love is Charles as you were saying, love is too darn hot, like it takes us into this place of like excess, extremity, passion, wanting more, getting outside of ourselves.
That's what's so exciting about love, and that's that's what's so scary about the AIDS epidemic was, at least for me, like I'm coming out, I want to experience falling in love. I want to I don't know, kiss people whatever, And all of a sudden, there's this virus out there and it makes it extremely dangerous to make love to anybody. It makes extremely dangerous to fall in love, especially as
a queer person. It makes extremely dangerous to be a queer person because with AIDS there was violence against queer people. And it was so hard to make sense of that at seventeen twenty, where I thought, wait, no, love is like cool and positive and fun and amazing, and all of a sudden it's like no, no, no, It comes with all these disclaimers.
Now right right, and it did you know it felt a lot change over a very short period of time from you know that those brief moments in the late seventies to you know, a really stark contrast, Yeah, in the early eighties. I love that. You just weave in pop culture and history throughout the book. You know you mentioned Paris is Burning. Oh yeah, I love it, and then they're on the same page. You know, you talk about Oshe simply Yeah, much more recent.
Yeah, yeah, I tried to. I mean, part of what the book was for me was really just sort of thinking about like both what music does for us or for me in terms of thinking about what love can be and what should be, but also like just thinking about how I learned about love and how I learned about of who I am and how to be proud
of who I am. So because of that, one of the reviews and early reviews of the book described it as a mixtape, and I think that is very much what I tried to get at, was that what kind of makes us us is a whole kind of collection of songs. We've loved, movies, we've seen comments people have said to us, people we've dated. It's the whole assemblage of who we are is all the kind of stuff we've collected, the people, the memories, the song lyrics, the
things we've decided are our favorite things. You know, going back to Julie Andrews out of music, the things we listened is our favorite things. Like actually tell other people who we are and tell us who we are because we look and we say, I love this song, I love this movie. I love Shakespeare, I used to love to you know what it go hiking and whatever, whatever it is, it's the list of who we are? Is it kind of a love letter to ourselves in terms of who we want to be?
Yeah, I love that, you know, just in the in the last words in the book you talk about, you know, music is the ideal vehicle not just to move people, but to energize a movement, red hot and blue, standing as it's inspiring foundation. You know. I think music continually, especially times like now when words are just failing and meaning less and less and there's such a cacophony of misinformation in the air, music still does speak to everyone.
Yeah, yeah, amazingly so. I think when you say that, I think of not even necessarily queer rights movement or the AIDS fight against AIDS. But even back to songs against the Vietnam War and songs for peace. They came out in the sixties. These sort of songs allowed people to kind of express what they were feeling, what they
wanted to have happened. I don't know, Marvin Gaye, what's going on, John Lennon, Imagine these songs that kind of move us because we think that's what peace feels like, that's the world I want to live in, and it moves us to imagine a more peaceful world, and it can make us want to say in the book, join a movement towards peace and too. Also, yeah, when you said that, I lovely you put it out.
I was.
I was thinking about how certain songs will come on in a queer context, like we are Family, even though that song isn't necessarily about queer people, are necessarily about the queer lives we live now. The minute a room full of queer people here, we are family or I'm coming.
Out like I'm coming out yeah or mean.
Or ymca like it is. Its kind of a queer joy because we feel like well, like yeah, we may not be loved or maybe we are by our family of origin. But we all found family with each other. And it was for all the hardship and all those sadness, it was just an exhilarating feeling for so many of us to find queer community, queer family, to find people like us who might actually not look or act like us at all, but like they have a certain feeling we have and all that's so powerful.
Yeah. I one of the most important things and themes I think of the next four years is going to be community. Yeah, you know that schosen family. I had a a friend say, I spent my birthday with everyone that I love. I had my biological family on Saturday and my logical family on Sunday. I had never heard that before.
I've never heard that before. It's terrific.
My logical family. Consider it stolen exactly.
I would be using that today.
You know, I.
Talk often about the need for shorthand right queer people, trans people. You know, we need queer and trans fends. We need people for whom we don't have to explain ourselves. I don't have to educate you in order to have a conversation with you, right, because we can meet and understand who we are and where we are, and you know, it's so important. Books like this are so important. It's a lovely, fast read that's packed with so much and you're telling a story, but again weaving so much history
into the way you tell it. I love it.
And what I also appreciate is in reading it and then going into the footnotes and then going and doing a deep dive there. I had this total, like deep dive in queer history that was in that time period that was such a sweet spot for me. And so it was like things that I was aware of as
a young queer person but didn't necessarily follow. Like you mentioned the documentary Tongues Untied, which talks about the epidemic from the black gay mail perspective, which was, you know, largely overlooked, even though, like we said before, that was one of the hardest hit demographics of the community. The press conference, the White House press conference where we're trying to get a statement from the White House using the
word aids and being met with laughter. You know, those those moments that's.
Six years yeah, yeah, six yeah. We waited for him to say ye, yeah, it was.
It was on the day Rock Hudson died that Reagan finally talked about AIDS. I don't know, but yeah, I'm glad to hear you say that, because yeah, I really wanted. I wanted to write a short book a because all of our attention spans are shorter, but also because I wanted to sort of capture a feeling. But I also, exactly as you say, I wanted to point people in different directions. So if you want to learn about the sort of long history of Reagan's White House press conferences
around AIDS, you can. The book takes you to a place where you can listen to the actually listen of the actual briefing is gonna be the transcript. You can go and watch Marlin Riggs's film to hear an articulation of black frustration around the AIDS epidemic. You can go and watch the videos as you did, and that might spark another exploration. Okay, you know, when did Katie Lane
come out? And how did her video read to queer people even though she wasn't publicly out, but her video was showing herself as a woman whose female lover it died. So the book, I hope, kind of opens up all these avenues. And in fact, I've spoken to lots of young people who have read the book and said, I was so grateful to read it because you know, I knew the AIDS epidemic existed, obviously, but I just had
no sense. I couldn't make sense of it. And I think it's one thing to read a long history book, which you can about the AIDS epidemic, and that's great, but I wanted to capture what it felt like to be living through it. And I think for a lot of readers I've been happy to hear like that, listening to really transmitted they feel like I now understand what old for people and other folks who lived through it, what it felt like for them to live through that.
Yeah, you definitely did capture it. It took me back to that time. And you know what we're trying to be, what we're afraid to say we are. It's it's really powerful. This is a really good book and it's going to have a special place on our bookshelves.
Okay, Yeah, well, thank you for having me on to talk about it.
Absolutely absolutely. You know one of the things that I am always reminded of. We talk about the timeline, and you know, ninety six is such a pivotal year, right when the cocktail came out. What we don't talk so much about is how long it took that to filter down to the street level and impact the lives of folks who didn't have insurance, the lives of folks who I didn't have the money to pay for it, And that took several more years.
Yeah, that took a while. And the other thing I remembered, which I'd kind of forgotten about reading this book. There were people for whom the cocktail came soon enough, Magic Johnson being a famous example, and they got the cocktail. You know, they're living with the chronic disease, but they ended up living a full life. And there were people who had just who were alive when the cocktail arrived, but they were so advanced with HIV disease it couldn't
help them. So, yeah, there was the insperance piece. There was the access to information. There was knowing if you were infected. There's the whole other part of this, which is that folks in the developing world couldn't get access to it. So on the one hand, it was about privilege. On the other hand, I feel like there was like a tragic roll of the dice because I can remember
friends who were achio positive. The cocktail came out. This is so great, but it just wasn't i mean even within months kind of, it just wasn't in time to save them, and it was so heartbreaking.
Yeah. Well, and you know, one of the things we don't realize in twenty twenty four is there are still people who diabate. Yeah, because by the time they're diagnosed correctly, Yeah, it happens. It still happens that it's too late. That's why, you know, knowing your status. I mean, you know, we volunteer with the AIDS Fund every we have for years. We stage managed the Philadelphia AIDS Walk cool and you know, watch the quote displayed and we talk about the stigma
that still exists. You know, there's there are so many stories still happening. You know, there was so much resistance to prep initially from the large AIDS organization, and it was like, what come on, come on, and yeah, it's still happening, happening, and we still need awareness, we still need to care for one another, We still need to keep removing stigma, you know, and saying it's so important to know.
Yes, Yeah, I'm so glad. I had forgotten that there's so much stuff I forget, which is why I think it's so great to talk with queer people about queer lives. Yeah, when PREP came out, there was a lot of shame around PREP. Yeah, people felt like, oh, if I say I'm on PREP, then then I'm sort of announcing to the world that I, you know whatever, like like what, like I have sexual desire.
I'm a whore. Yeah, yeah, I'm a whore. Yeah.
I can't control myself sexually or I can't control myself in terms of having safer sex. And you know, looking back, like now, it's just sort of normal to hear that someone's on PREP. But like, for all the work we do to instill pride and queer people and to talk openly about sex, we can still just do it to ourselves and all of a sudden be so ashamed to talk about the fact that I'm a human being who wants to experience love and sex and a fully realized life.
Like for some reason, claiming that can make us feel it still feels so umbarrous, sometimes not all of us, but like it can make people react that way.
That shame campaign was effective.
Yeah, totally, certainly, totally. Yeah, another one to the bookshelf. I love that you have chronicled this story so well and so beautiful. Thank you and uh yeah. The book is part of the thirty three and a third series Red Hot and Blue john S Garrison, It's been amazing talking with you.
I love talking to both of you. Also, I love this kind of connection.
Who warns my heart? Yeah, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you, take care, take you too.
Full Circle is a Never Scured Productions podcast hosted by Charles Tyson Junior and Martha Madrigal, Produced and edited by Never Scured Executive Produced by Charles Tyson Junior and Martha Madrigal. Our theme in music is by the jingle Ares. All names, pictures, music, audio, and video clips are registered trademarks and or copyrights of their respective copyright holders.