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Aids Quotes

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Aids Quotes

“Darla shook her head, a small smirk on her lips. “You’re such a mom,” she told Katherine. Katherine stared at her, puzzled. “You’re a mom, too,” she said softly. “No, I gave birth. That doesn’t make me a mom. Not like you.” A look passed between the two women like none they had ever shared before. For a split second, Katherine felt a slight connection. “Well, you rest. I’ll check on you later.” She turned and left the room, a funny, unexplainable feeling inside her.”

“If we conform our behavior to God’s ancient moral prescription, we are entitled to the sweet benefits of life. But if we defy its imperatives, then death is the inevitable consequence. AIDS is only one avenue by which sickness and death befall those who play Russian roulette with God’s eternal moral law.”

“A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.”

“Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.”

“Most if not all sexually active people do not really love having sex; they merely love experiencing an orgasm every now and then.”

“The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.”

“Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.”

“Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.”

“I don't trust my own answers anymore. I'm too twisted up with rage, too hooked in the millennium. But I find myself combing the past these days, dreaming dreams without sleep, puzzling over any guys, the gay and the straight and the inbetween. Somewhere in there is a horror of love, and to try to kill the beast in them, they take it out on us. Which is not to say I don't chastise myself for halving the world into us and tbem. I know that the good guys aren't all gay, or the bad all straight. That is what I am sifting for, to know what a man is finally, no matter the tribe or gender.”

“I don't come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like this - year after year after year, collaborating by indifference - except by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.”

“But I also understand why Steve, who'd sewn his share of panels over the years, would fly into a rage as the end approached: 'And don't put me in that fucking quilt!' Being of a mind to have his body dumped instead on the White House lawn. The guilt had begun to seem too passive, even too nice, letting the war criminals off the hook and providing the media with far too easy a wrap up. Much neater than trying to unravel the Gordian knot of AIDS activism, the Byzantine infighting and turf protection, the in-your-face bad manners of those who wouldn't go quietly. The quilted dead made for prettier sound bites, especially effective at zeroing in on the "innocent" victims, the kids and the hemophiliacs. At the same time there began to appear a certain overview phenomenon under the general rubric of AIDS-and-the-Arts. Typically these were hand-wringing accounts of the impact of so much cultured dying, lamenting for instance the White Way silence left by Michael Bennett, the songs unsung. This litany was something of a mixed bag, bringing under the same umbrella the likes of Way Bandy and Halston, Miss Kitty and Keith Haring. Though it was surely true what Fran Lebowitz so scathingly observed If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with 'Let's Make a Deal.' these roundups of the arts tended to foster in the general populace ever new heights of Not me.”

“But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane? All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes. There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.”

“Cancer: the code breaks down, becomes disorganized, lets cells proliferate indiscriminately. A disease of information. AIDS: the immune system (the secret defences of the body) is suppressed. Obsessive fear of contiguity, of flows (sperm, blood, saliva), of contact. A disease of communication. What if all this reflected a brute, instinctive refusal of the flows of communic ation, of sperm, of sex, of words? If there were in all this an 'instinctive', vital resistance to the extension of flows and circuits - at the cost of a new mortal pathology, AIDS and cancer, which would ultimately be protecting us from something even more serious, or would at least be serving as an alarm signal? After all, neurosis is what man invents to protect him from madness.”

“The AIDS pandemic forced humans to cover their genitals with condoms. The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing them to put on masks. It is as if many people weren’t already going through life putting on a million masks and changing them based on convenience and self-interest. It is as if countless humans on this planet weren’t already forced to keep their mouths shut and endure the misfortunes imposed on them by the ‘fortunate’ few. I wonder which body part we will be forced to cover next. I wonder if, in the first place, all of this is happening because our eyes were covered all along. Are we heading to a time when staying safe becomes akin to a death sentence with stay of execution?”

“What you need is a chick from Camden,' Van Patten says, after recovering from McDermott's statement. Oh great,' I say. 'Some chick who thinks it's okay to fuck her brother.' Yeah, but they think AIDS is a new band from England,' Price points out. Where's dinner?' Van Patten asks, absently studying the question scrawled on his napkin. 'Where the fuck are we going?' It's really funny that girls think guys are concerned with that, with diseases and stuff,' Van Patten says, shaking his head. I'm not gonna wear a fucking condom,' McDermott announces. I have read this article I've Xeroxed,' Van Patten says, 'and it says our chances of catching that are like zero zero zero zero point half a decimal percentage or something, and this no matter what kind of scumbag, slutbucket, horndog chick we end up boffing.' Guys just cannot get it.' Well, not white guys.”

“Some men would not still be HIV negative or alive, if they had managed to sleep with some of the women with whom they want or wanted to have sex.”

“Being HIV positive doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to die before each and every person who is HIV negative.”

“Not everyone who has killed themselves because they were HIV positive would have been killed by AIDS.”

“That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death.”

“there is a missing link. people overwhelmingly acknowledge that there is an AIDS epidemic, but do not take the next step of accepting the consequences. this is familiar territory for those concerned with trying to change risky sexual behaviour: knowledge about how HIV is transmitted and the dangers of certain kinds of practices does not seem to translate into behavioural change.”

“the AIDS pandemic is a disaster with few parallels, because it is so easy to make it invisible or to pretend it is something else. an earthquake, flood or famine is dramatically visible and politically salient, because it affects entire communities in a spectacular fashion, including their leaders and spokespeople. AIDS is more like climate change, an incremental process manifest in a quickening drumbeat of ‘normal’ events.”

“the study of socio-political denial is the study of how appearances are kept up, the moral order is sustained, and necessary changes are pressed up into the service of existing interests. this can be seen at the family and community level, and in the way that national and international politics is managed.”

“for the women [sex-workers], all poor and competing in an oversupplied market for sexual services, the ‘choice’ of unprotected sex is simply a financial trade-off between less money today (and the threat of physical violence from a dissatisfied client) and the far-off danger of developing AIDS. this has echoes, too, of the risk of a ‘bad reputation’ weighed by women [in the area] who too rarely insist on condom use to protect themselves.”

“if spiritual forces operate in a different sphere to the rule of law and human rights, then democratic politics is failing to deal with a fundamental problem in people’s lives and after-lives. the repercussions of AIDS for the moral cosmology are profound indeed. the secular frameworks of epidemiology and public policy will not by themselves be enough to make sense of the virus and epidemic. we need to develop and deploy metaphors that speak to the social world, constructed around moral imaginings which are impacted by AIDS and which in turn constrain social capabilities to respond to AIDS. we should also be alert to the fact that scholars and policy makers themselves are unable to think about the crisis that is AIDS without using language and imagery borrowed from another realm of human experience. how we think about the AIDS epidemic becomes its own reality. yet we must not lose sight of the virus and the disease. (…) AIDS represents the ordinary workings of biology, not an irrational or diabolical plague with moral meaning. HIV transmission is preventable and medication is available that can extend a healthy life for those living with HIV. science can triumph, given resources, policies and the right social and political context.”

“in the run-up to South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, Nelson Mandela was reportedly advised not to make AIDS into a campaign issue for fear of offending culturally conservative constituencies. ‘I wanted to win,’ said Mandela, ‘and I did not talk about AIDS.”

“it is from such diverse sources with varied networks and linkages that the response to HIV / AIDS has been patched together. it is an NGO model of response, uneven in coverage and quality, responsive to the particularities of local circumstance, the character of local leaders, and the availability and types of funds available.”

“the philanthropic NGO has long been decried by the left as a means of addressing only the symptoms of poverty and thus obscuring the political strategies needed to overcome it. NGOs are criticised for creating Potemkin villages not replicable at scale. their limits are often painfully apparent. some are ‘briefcase’ NGOs, to give their founders income or profit.”

“J'avais reconsulté entre-temps le docteur Chandi, à qui j'avais confié ma volonté expresse de mourir "à l'abri du regard de mes parents", et devant lequel, en évoquant le coma dans lequel était tombé Fichart, l'ami de Bill, je repris les mots de l'unique testament autographe de Muzil : "la mort, pas l'invalidité". Pas de coma prolongé, pas de démence, pas de cécité, la suppression pure et simple au moment adéquat. Mais le docteur Chandi se refusait à prendre en note quoi que ce soit de définitif, se bornant à indiquer que le rapport à la maladie ne cessait de se transformer, pour chaque individu, dans le cours de sa maladie, et qu'on ne pouvait préjuger des mutations vitales de sa volonté.”

“I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space, and walked without hesitating to the altar I hadn’t consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there. Because the black current the masseuse had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I’d needed to know I could go on, but I’d also been needing to collapse. Which is what I did, some timeless tear span of minutes sitting on the naked gray stone. A woman gave me the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to breathe, helpless, except for each other.”