I’m not really scared of AIDS. Not for myself. I’m scared of having to watch more people die in front of me… I’m sure when I die, I won’t really die, because I live in many people.
Keith Haring, Journals, pp.162-3
Some realized the cruel irony of the obviating ubiquity of “I Will Survive”, the disco anthem, at a time when the dancers were already succumbing to amoebiasis and taking every drug there was in the world to go on dancing.
James McCourt, Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture p.327
Surely this “gay cancer” could only affect older West Village mustached disco queens who went to the baths every day, not youthful smooth-faced East Village anarchist performance artists in skinny neckties. I was wrong about that.
Tim Murphy, New Yorkers Recall the Days of the AIDS Epidemic, NYT
A couple of years later, the Times obits section was commonly referred to as the Gay Sports Page, because we would count the number of apparent AIDS-related deaths before checking the other news.
Murphy, New Yorkers Recall the Days of the AIDS Epidemic, NYT
THE THING THAT’S IMPORTANT ABOUT MEMORIALS IS THEY BRING A PRIVATE GRIEF OUT OF THE SELF AND MAKE IT A LITTLE MORE PUBLIC WHICH ALLOWS FOR COMMUNICATIVE TRANSITION, PEELS AWAY ISOLATION, BUT THE MEMORIAL IS IN ITSELF AN ACCEPTANCE OF IMMOBILITY, INACTIVITY… DON’T GIVE ME A MEMORIAL IF I DIE. GIVE ME A DEMONSTRATION.
David Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of the American Dream, p.206
WHEN I JOINED ACT UP, I WAS A NICE JEWISH BOY FROM THE SUBURBS, AND I WAS FORCED TO UNLEARN THE PRETTY LIES THAT SOCIETY DRILLS INTO US TO KEEP US IN CHECK: THAT THE POLICEMAN IS OUR FRIEND, THAT THE GOVERNMENT WILL TAKE CARE OF US, AND THAT “GOOD” PEOPLE DON’T LIE DOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET AND GET ARRESTED.
Jay Blotcher, Written statement
[Larry Kramer] would say that he had lost five hundred friends and acquaintances who had died. If you think about it, that’s the size of a small town in Germany.
Gordon Ingram, Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance
But in ACT UP, you had to kiss everybody, because you couldn’t be afraid of people with AIDS. So you had to demonstrate that you were not afraid of people with AIDS. So you had to kiss everyone you met.
Schulman and Hubbard, Interview with Gregg Bordowitz, ACT UP Oral History Project
[T]here was a time when they didn’t want to bury people with AIDS in the ground. They thought once they buried a body with AIDS in the ground, you would grow flowers with AIDS.
Lawrence, p.64
At times I feel like there’s nothing to be afraid about dying. I mean, look at how many people have done so before me.
David Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of the American Dream, p.211
Quotations are selected from Kenneth Goldsmith’s Capital
Millionth thought about “Burn” I’ve had this month: Eliza goes for Hamilton’s jugular – but not by repeating the insults we’ve heard before, (arrogant, loud mouthed, obnoxious, son of a whore, bastard, etc…) She rips Hamilton up on the thing he’s most known for, what he’s most proud of – his WRITING. His SENSELESS sentences, his SELF OBSESSED and PARANOID tone. She’s tearing him up about not just the CONTENT of the Reynolds Pamphlet, but the way in which he wrote it. She takes the time in the middle of her rage to mock his style, which is such a rap battle move.
And what is she going to do with all of the beautiful writing he gave her over the years, his letters?
Burn them.
I think about this LITERALLY of the time. About how she pushes the button she knows will kill him.
“not only did you totally drag our names through the mud, and ruin our reputation, it wasn’t. even. your. best. work.”
^^^^^^^^^ killed ‘em ^^^^^^^^^
Okay but that isn’t even the most hardcore part:
The entire play is a fourth wall-breaking battle for narrative control of personal and professional legacy. That’s what it’s about. Conventional wisdom — and basic logic — states that history is written by the winners. Hamilton: An American Musical shows us the battle for that proverbial quill.
Literally the first song tells us “His enemies destroyed his rep/America forgot him” because up until the release of this play, Alexander Hamilton’s legacy was mostly overlooked by the average American, largely thanks to folks like Jefferson and Madison underselling his contributions after he died.
(This is also why Jefferson isn’t shy and awkward in the play. While that would have been historically accurate, the point is that the modern perception of Jefferson is that he’s a Big Fucking Deal. Because he made himself look that way.)
So the characters on stage are constantly fighting to make their version of events the version of events.
Burr is the narrator because this is his opportunity to tell his side of things. “History obliterates in every picture it paints, it paints me in all my mistakes.” He’s saying that in the end he LOST the fight for narrative control. And yet — and here’s the fucking amazing part — the mere act of explaining this to the audience CHANGES OUR PERCEPTION OF BURR and alters his place in history. God Lin is too smart for his own goddamn good.
(“History has its eyes on you,” Washington says, putting a very fine point on things. And if you don’t think he also means there’s an audience sitting watching this play, you’re not paying attention.)
So, let’s talk about Alexander, his obsession with legacy, and his tried and true method for controlling the narrative:
Writing.
In “Hurricane” he says “I’ll write my way out! Write everything down far as I can see! … Overwhelm them with honesty! This is the eye of the hurricane, this is the only way I can protect my legacy!”
“It doesn’t work” you might say, going by the contents of “The Reynolds Pamphlet.” Except… it kinda does. “At least he was honest with our money!” the company sings. Which was really Alexander’s main concern, after all. Think of his priorities in “We Know” where his first instinct is to gloat because “You have nothing!” It’s not until a beat later that he even considers Eliza.
He published the Reynolds Pamphlet because he didn’t want people to think he was disloyal to the United States. His concern was with his professional legacy. And in that sense… he succeeded.
(He succeeded in another way, too. Listen to “Say No To This.” (God I could write a 40 page paper on that song alone.) This is where we actually hear the contents of the Reynolds Pamphlets. And how does the song begin? With Burr explicitly handing narrative control to Alexander Hamilton. “And Alexander’s by himself. I’ll let him tell it.”
Every line of dialogue from Maria is prefaced with Hamilton saying “she said.” That’s because HAMILTON IS WRITING HER DIALOGUE. Hamilton is creating this character of a sultry seductress in red, coming to him when he was weak and luring him to adultery. Maria Reynolds in the play not a character, she’s a fantasy, created to excuse Hamilton’s transgressions.
It’s worth noting at this juncture that Maria Reynolds, the real woman, wrote her own pamphlet. No one would publish it. She was silenced. And Hamilton’s depiction of her as a morally corrupt temptress became the dominant narrative.
So suck on that literally any time you want to fucking blame Maria for Hamilton’s affair: good job, you’ve bought into a serial adulterer’s lies about a battered woman. Also don’t do that, I swear to god I will come for you.)
SO. What does any of this have to do with Burn?
In the very end, it’s revealed that it wasn’t Jefferson or Burr or Hamilton in control of the Almighty Narrative.
It was Eliza.
The very last second of the play is Alexander Hamilton turning Eliza to face the audience. She sees the people watching, and she gasps. Because she did this. She’s the reason this play exists. She’s the reason Lin Manuel Miranda is telling us a damn thing about Alexander Hamilton, she’s the reason Hamilton got a massively popular zeitgeist musical.
Now. Throughout the course of the play Eliza sees all these people weaving their important stories and she thinks she’s somehow… outside. She’s not a statesman, she’s not brilliant like Angelica, she’s just a wife and a mother and she has no place among these giants. At one point she LITERALLY ASKS HER HUSBAND TO BE INCLUDED I’M GONNA SCREAM.
And yet she never had to ask. She was in control the whole time.
And how, how did she do it? How did she “keep” Alexander’s “flame?” By collecting and preserving everything he WROTE, of course. Making sense of it all. She spent fifty years on the project. Everything she collected BECAME THE NARRATIVE.
But you know what wasn’t in there?
That’s right: those letters she burned.
So she didn’t just insult him, oh noooo. Eliza WHOLESALE OBLITERATED A PIECE OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON FROM THE NARRATIVE.
And not just any piece. “You built me palaces out of paragraphs, you built cathedrals,” she sings. In “Hurricane” Hamilton lists his letters to Eliza among his greatest accomplishments, (conflating his writing them with actually BEING HER HUSBAND, god what a self-centered prick). “I wrote Eliza love letters until she fell.”
Eliza says: “I’m burning the memories, burning the letters that might have redeemed you.”
The best pieces of Alexander Hamilton: gone.
God I’m gonna go curl up in a ball and freak out about this some more. FUCK.
I’ve been contemplating for several days something, and I’ve been trying to distill it into meaning, and put nice little bullet points on how this relates to things that have been bugging me about some common Discourses I’ve been seeing, but at the end, I only really have a story. So here, have a story.
About ten years ago, sometime in the eventful 2006-2007 George W. Bush-ruled hellscape of my identity development, I was just starting to figure out how I felt about my conservative upbringing (not great) and whether I was some brand of queer (probably, but too scared to think about what brand for too long). I was working as a server at a popular Italian-inspired sit-down restaurant that was the closest thing my tiny South Carolinian town had to “fancy” at the time but isn’t really fancy at all.
The host brought a party of four men to one of my tables. It was hard to tell their ages, but my guess is they were teenagers or in their early 20s in the 1980s. Mid-40s, at the time. It was standard to ask if anyone at the table was celebrating anything, so I did. They said they were business partners celebrating a great business deal and would like a bottle of wine.
It was a fairly busy night so I didn’t have a LOT of time to spend at their table, but they were nice guys. They were polite and friendly to me, they didn’t hit on me (as most men were prone to do – sometimes even in front of their girlfriends, a story I’ll tell later if anyone wants me to), and they were racking up a hell of a tab that was going to make my managers happy, so I checked on them as often as I could.
Toward the end of their second bottle of wine, as they were finishing their entrees, I stopped at the table and asked if they wanted any more drinks or dessert or coffee. They were well and truly tipsy by now, giggling, leaning back in their chairs – but so, so careful not to touch each other when anyone was near the table.
They’re all on the fence about dessert, so being a good server, I offered to bring out the dessert menu so they could glance it over and make a decision, “Since you’re celebrating.”
“She’s right!” one of the men said, far too emphatically for a conversation on dessert. “It’s your anniversary! You should get dessert!”
It was like a movie. The whole table went absolutely silent. The clank of silverware at the next table sounded supernaturally loud. Dean Martin warbled “That’s Amore” in some distorted alternate universe where the rest of the restaurant went on acting like this one tipsy man hadn’t just shattered their carefully crafted cover story and blurted out in the middle of a tiny, South Carolina town, surrounded by conservatives and rednecks, that they were gay men celebrating a relationship milestone.
And I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew I wasn’t an asshole, and I knew these men were family, and I felt their panic like a monster breathing down all our necks. It’s impossible to emphasize how palpably terrified they were, and how justified their terror was, and how much I wanted them to be happy.
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I said, “Congratulations! How many years?”
The man who’d spoken up burst into tears. His partner stood up and wrapped me in the tightest, warmest hug I’ve ever had – and I’ve never liked being touched by strangers, but this was different, and I hugged him back.
“Thank you,” he whispered, halfway to crying himself. “Thank you so much.”
When he finally let go of me and sat back down, they finally got around to telling me they were, in fact, two couples on a double date, and both celebrating anniversaries. Fifteen years for one of them, I think, and a few years off for the other. It’s hard to remember. It was a jumble of tears and laughter and trembling relief for all of us. They got more relaxed. They started holding hands – under the table, out of sight of anyone but me, but happy.
They did get dessert, and I spent more time at their table, letting them tell me stories about how they met and how they started dating and their lives together, and feeling this odd sense of belonging, like I’d just discovered a missing branch of my family.
When they finally left, all four of them took turns standing up and hugging me, and all four of them reached into their wallets to tip me. I tried to wave them off but they insisted, and the first man who’d hugged me handed me forty dollars and said, “Please. You are an angel. Please take this.”
After they left I hid in the bathroom and cried because I couldn’t process all my thoughts and feelings.
Fast forward to three days ago, when my own partner and I showed up to a dinner reservation at a fancy-casual restaurant to celebrate our fifth anniversary. The whole time I was getting ready to leave, there was a worry in the back of my mind. The internet web form had asked if the reservation was celebrating anything in particular, and I’d selected “Anniversary.” I stood in the bathroom blow-drying my hair, wondering what I would do if we showed up, two women, and the host or the server took one look at us and the “Anniversary” designation on our reservation and refused to serve us. It’s not as ubiquitous anymore, but we’re still in the south, and these things still happen. Eight years of progressive leadership is over, and we’ve got another conservative despot in office who’s emboldening assholes everywhere.
It was on my mind the whole fifteen minutes it took to drive there. I didn’t mention it to my partner because I didn’t want to cast a shadow over the occasion. More than that, I didn’t want to jinx us, superstitious bastard that I am.
We walked into the restaurant. I told the hostess we had a reservation, gave her my last name.
She looked at her screen, then looked back at us. She smiled, broadly and genuinely, and said, “Happy anniversary! Your table is right this way.”
Our server greeted us, said, “I heard you were celebrating!”
“It’s our anniversary,” Kellie said, and our server gasped, beaming.
“That’s great! Congratulations! How many years?”
And I finally breathed a sigh of relief, and I thought about those men at that restaurant ten years ago. I hope they’re still safe and happy, and I hope we all get the satisfaction of helping the world keep blooming into something that’s not so unrelentingly terrible all the time.
Most of us find our own voices only after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people.
hey! I know reblogging posts about how much you support trans and nonbinary people is fun, especially in a time when we need solidarity more than ever, but idk maybe you should consider:
We received an ask regarding resources for trans people in light of the anti-trans rulings and bills in America recently, so I thought I should reblog this here. Here are a few more (US-centric) resources as well:
I hope these help someone! There are many more resources out there, too, and many, many people who want to support and help trans people succeed!
If you are an ally in America, please do what you can to fight against the trans military ban as well as H.R.2796 aka The Civil Rights Uniformity Act of 2017.
1944 – Snowball the cat tries to take over a machine gun in Normandy so she can shoot some Nazis herself.
Blessed post. Good kitty
i want someone to read that headline in an old timey reporter voice
Okay fun fact: cats were actively deployed to trenches and ships to help deal with rodent infestations in both world wars, and they had the curb cutter effect of keeping the men’s spirits high.
One cat, Simon, was given the rank “Able Seacat Simon” after dutifully killing rats and mice that were destroying the HMS Amethyst’s food supplies. The ship had come under fire during the Chinese civil war and many of its crewmen had died. The cat had been gravely injured, too, but he picked out the shrapnel himself – seriously – and went straight to killing the rodents that were overrunning the ship. He unfortunately passed from his injuries two weeks before he was scheduled to receive the Dickin Medal. To this day, he is the only cat to receive this award.
Let someone tell me cats can’t be service animals. Cats can be anything a dog can do you see how bad was these cats are.
for all my trans and nb followers, especially the kids and those who may still be in the closet, please don’t let what trump said today make you ashamed or afraid to be who you are. you are NOT a burden, you are IMPORTANT and you MATTER. i’m so sorry that there are people who can’t see that. i’m not going to lie to you and say this isn’t what trans people face on the daily, i’m not gonna tell you that our lives are all rainbows and flowers bc they aren’t AT ALL. but we are capable of having rich and happy lives, despite pieces of shit like that orange circus peanut.
you matter. you always have, please let my voice drown out all the bad ones. please. you matter.
and for all my cis followers, fight for us. we are fighting for ourselves trust me we are, but be an ally to us and fight too. don’t speak over us, don’t overshadow us, but stand with us please. know the struggles we face, and stand with us to help change that. be our ally.
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 