mercuryfountain-deactivated2024:

mercuryfountain-deactivated2024:

Declaring open season on gay men because something something punching up made the entire culture more reactionary and you’re insane if you think otherwise.

First, the following tweet:

free condoms but not pads? reproduction is a choice. menstruation is biological. talk abt priorities.

I am very much in favor of free menstrual products, but is there a reason why so many organizations might distribute condoms? Hm, let’s put our thinking caps on. Yet anyone pointing out the greater context of HIV/AIDS activism was dogpiled on for “caring about men’s issues more than women’s.” These people are so entrenched in their own fag derangement syndrome that they forgot that it’s not just gay men who stand to benefit from free condoms. I have some shocking news to share: Most women are attracted to men. Most men are attracted to women. No, it does not strike me as particularly feminist to dismiss tools to prevent the transmission of STIs and HIV and oh, have we forgotten, pregnancy, as only a men’s issue.

As Sarah Schulman forcefully demonstrates in her book Let The Record Show, AIDS activists had to fight for the CDC to change its diagnostic criteria of AIDS for symptoms common in women and transmasc people to be recognized. To quote a Gran Fury campaign, “women don’t get AIDS. They just die from it.” Schulman is upfront about the fact that a crucial perspective was missing from her interviews: that of women with AIDS who were involved in the early days of ACT UP. This is because, overwhelmingly, they died faster than men with AIDS. But to these online contrarians, even self proclaimed feminists, women do not exist in the history and present-day reality of HIV and AIDS except as nameless caregivers. After 1996, when HIV was declared over by many because some had access to new reliable treatments, it shifted in the culture from being a “gay disease” to a “Black disease.” HIV criminalization today, based on archaic understandings of how the virus and its transmission work, is blithely racialized.

With all this in mind, it is ridiculous that anyone can see HIV as a bludgeon to “punch up” instead of down. The people who do this are so caught up in the idea of homophobia as revenge and themselves as ontologically incapable of harm that they are oblivious to, or perhaps gleefully aware of, their own transphobia, misogyny, and white supremacy. These people aren’t even fucking feminists outside the context of post-rationalizing cruelty. Even if they are firm in their conviction that every gay man should drop dead, their bigotry could never stay localized to just one subject, because all they are is bigoted and worthless to the core of their putrid souls. I’m sick of this shit.