This is what toasts my corn and jerks my chains.
In the 1980s we Gays did not die of AIDS because of the unavailability of preventatives and/or curatives.
We died from the lack of will to find them because it was better to let us as a people die for political purposes than find a cure.
History is replete with genocides for political purposes.
The Christian soldiers of the 1980s did, indeed, march on to war and we were their main target and our loved ones their collateral damage. They claimed God wanted us dead and they made sure that happened by guaranteeing there was nothing to help us to show they were correct and so deserving of votes but ourselves.
The Republican party got in bed with religion and we are now living in the years of the child that marriage produced as the old desire to eliminate comes back with a vengeance to finish their parents’ work, and some people who are from the stripes in the Pride Flag support these killers.
On a recent World AIDS Day I sat next to a man bemoaning all those lost over the years. He had lost many friends. Then he, in a very casual, conversational way, revealed that his first presidential vote was for Ronald Reagan and he has voted straight Republican ticket since because they have the better economic ideas. He was lamenting the loss of his friends that might have been prevented had those whom he supported acted earlier, if at all, and did not try to interfere with any progress in the fight against AIDS.
No. I am sorry. No.
That is aiding and abetting.
They wanted us dead during AIDS.
They fought any progress in gaining Gay Rights.
They tag us with subliminally loaded labels so anything negative we get, we deserve,
They stacked the Supreme Court that is undoing any progress we made and exposing some of us to a new form of guaranteed death, the denial of gender affirming medical care for Trans people.
They are banning books implying literature by and about us is intrinsically lewd and dangerous for children.
They lie about what Drag Queen Story Hour is and who Drag Queens are in order to use children as their pawns in the war they have been waging since they realized that after Stonewall we would no longer stay in the closet for their convenience but would be our true selves instead.
And, as the rest of society began to see who we really were and not as those who claim they have no association with us claimed we were, the need to use us where the devil of religion had lost his power over thinking people arose, and, in their panic, they began to divide the Community in order to conquer by going after each stripe on the Flag, one at a time to see which is abandon by the others as the sacrificial lamb
They were allowed to settle on the Trans stripe by the others.
They fought to be as able to discriminate against us in the name ol the same religion that fought hard to let us die off in the 1980s.
During the last presidential administration, beginning as early as Day One of it, the president took actions to immediately remove won right, the ones with which we had already been endowed by the Creator and to get anit-Gay Justices on to the Supreme Court to undo any rights one up to and i9ncluding marriage and all the civil benefits that come with it many supported by the tax dollars paid by Gays but of which we were unable to avail ourselves of and may not again in the future.
Time is not confined in separate boxes but overlaps like a snowball rolling down hill as it gathers more to itself while losing nothing. A century may be divided into decades, but unlike sit-coms and mystery show episodes, things do not wind up at the end of each and new history begins with the next. They cross flow.
What got us to this point from the pre-Stonewall days and the ever evaporating false information took time and brought us from the before to the now through at least 40 years of intense struggle.
Like those who want to revise history in schools, there seems to be those who, while disliking what they heard of the past, would prefer to block that out so they can celebrate what we have without dealing with what it took between to get us here because it is unpleasant.
The thought seems to be that we can keep the good even if we ignore what it took and all will remain as is.
Under the present political climate, if we ignore those working years we will lose what we won, and fighting to get something lost back is usually next to impossible. The things done in the pst are not just in the past, but in the very real present.
The modern problems that never happened before did, like book banning, and we need to be ready to defend what is written about and by us.
Our past is not what we chose but what we were allowed.
Sadly as we are returning to that position, there are those who ignore this and support people who say the right things and then either do not follow through or, having our vote and not needing anymore from us do nothing but remind people of the promise.
I cannot abide the border collies and camp Kapos in the Gay Community.
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