For a long time, my San Francisco gay male friends thought everyone they knew would die of AIDS. Hundreds did. Young medical workers in training at San Francisco General sometimes lamented they would never treat anything except complications of AIDS, fruitlessly. And then, suddenly, the "triple cocktail" started saving lives and gradually additional medicines were invented. And for some, AIDS became a condition to live with, not a death sentence.
Last Men Standing Trailer from San Francisco Chronicle on Vimeo.
This is about the survivors, whether living with the disease or living with the ghosts of those who died, or both. It is beautiful. Many of the scenes were filmed in our church which once performed scores of funerals for those who didn't make it.
***But some people do still contract AIDS ... and not all get the life saving treatments. At the end of last month, the Centers for Disease Control issued a report on the enduring plague.
If you’re a white American woman, your risk of being diagnosed with HIV is pretty small, lower than the odds of dying in a car crash. If you’re a gay black man, the chances of getting an HIV diagnosis are closer to a coin flip.
Bloomberg
The virus forges on ... enabled as it always has been by poverty, racisms, ignorance and human desperation.
1 comment:
Let me be clear here that I am aware what I say may cause a woman I admire, respect, and hold personal affection for to "defriend" me on facebook. This PISSES ME OFF no end and has for more than a decade now. HIV/AIDS is like police violence being visited upon Black bodies all over the USA--IT NEVER WENT ANYWHERE, white people and most others just stopped paying attention/caring. And what makes me want to slap every single middle-to-professional-class gay white man I know upside the head is that when THEIR kind started getting well, the struggle ended for them, they moved on to getting fucking married, and most lgbtqii (last initials i saw, pardon me if they have been superseded in the last 2 months) supporters went right along with them. My father and one of my brothers died of AIDS (1996 and 1992), but my brother's partner of 15 years is still alive, HIV-positive, living happily-ever-after, and never looking back. Like OI said slap every single one of them.
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