March 3, 2025 • 48 mins
Margaret talks with Andrew Ti about the mutual aid and solidarity offered by lesbians in the 1980s.
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/ward-5b-documentary/
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/14/us/ward-5b-a-model-of-care-for-aids.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/26/736060834/1st-aids-ward-5b-fought-to-give-patients-compassionate-care-dignified-deaths
https://www.reddit.com/r/Actuallylesbian/comments/16uyn8i/are_there_more_nuanced_accounts_of_lesbians/
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/gay-bisexual-men-can-donate-blood-new-fda-rules-rcna83937
https://gcn.ie/lesbian-blood-sisters-crucial-1980s-aids/
https://womensmuseum.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/the-blood-sisters-of-san-diego/#:~:text=Wendy%20Sue%20Biegeleisen%2C%20Nicolette%20Ibarra,in%20at%20least%20130%20donations.
https://www.thebody.com/article/candy-marcum-therapist-since-aids-early-days
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Wellness/nurse-cared-aids-patients-1980s-epidemic-explains-fight/story?id=63970606
https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/we-are-everywhere/page/why-are-women-invisible-in-the-aids-pandemic
https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/we-are-everywhere/page/lesbian-aids-activism
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/07/us/aids-definition-excludes-women-congress-is-told.html
https://www.acon.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Ann-Maree-Sweeney-today.pdf
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/comment/the-lesbian-blood-sisters-who-helped-save-gay-mens-lives-235100?srsltid=AfmBOorQfWpzL-6iOSpigFOpkO8TeyPRA03Z7I1qPQELuO1cW9hVbTPy
http://www.thedallasway.org/stories/written/2017/11/24/howie-daire
https://www.texasobituaryproject.org/081983daire.html
https://time.com/archive/6703557/guerrilla-drug-trials-the-underground-test-of-compound-q/
https://www.quietheroes.net/about
https://www.cscsisters.org/holy-cross-quiet-heroes/
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/aids-epidemic-lasting-impact-gay-men/
https://www.workingnurse.com/articles/the-nurses-of-ward-5b/
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/01/783932572/how-the-catholic-church-aided-both-the-sick-and-the-sickness-as-hiv-spread
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast that when there's bad things, there's good
things too. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest
today is one of my favorite returning guests, Andrew Tea.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Oh thanks, Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I always get excited when you're the guest, because well,
I like all my guests equally. Yeah, I can't. I
can't show any preference.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Yeah, don't do that. There's no call for this line
of flattery. But thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Enter t is the host of the podcast EO is
this racist? And also, okay, this specific flattery I think
I could do. You're my favorite guests to talk about
mutual aid with.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Oh, thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Well, I feel like I probably comment at it from
a good place of I'm pretty new.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
To it all things considered, and.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
You know, I've kind of like been around, but there
have been times in my life when I was more
involved in less and yeah, i've been, you know lately
because of how things have been going in LA and
I guess the world trying to really really double down
and just make sure whatever community we have is as
strong as it can be.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I mean that makes sense. I think that a lot
of it isn't an EBB and a flow, Like I'm
not directly doing mutual aid right now, besides like some
specific friends or whatever here and there, you know. But yeah, okay,
So my question before I even get into the topic.
You live in a city that very famously didn't quite
burn down recently? Yeah, how's that going? How are mutual
(01:36):
aid efforts going out there?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Like?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
How things been?
Speaker 4 (01:40):
I mean, I feel like from my perspective, it was
very impressive. I well, I guess I don't know, because
I feel like I'm more plugged in than I ever
have been. So I was able to be on through
Solidarity and snacks folks. I was able to which is
a group that I mostly do work with, and so
(02:01):
I was able to like kind of get in and
least see like a lot of the chat and the
chatter and the planning from the early side of things.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
So that to me it was very impressive. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Maybe I'm sure people with more experience this is maybe
pretty normal, but or maybe not.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
I don't have any basis for evaluating how actually impressive
it is, but it seemed.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Very impressive to me.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
The thing I was mostly focused on was trying to
get masks out to.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
The sort of larger population, especially on house.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Folks down on skid Row because the air quality was
so unbelievably bad.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
I guess it still is, but.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
Yeah, so but it was nice watching like warehouses essentially
pop up at various like a lot of bike shops,
a lot of gallery spaces, a lot of little warehouse
like work type spaces, and seeing things get distributed as
efficiently I think as they could be. And also just
(03:06):
kind of being cognizant of what needs are much harder
to meet with just community, you know, obviously none of
us had access. Maybe not obviously, and maybe I don't know,
maybe things have changed sort of muted the signal group
because it was pretty high traffic, what relatable you know,
we don't have things like bulldozers or like super high
(03:27):
end ppe. Yeah, and so there were limits to what
could be done.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Well, let me give you a piece of advice about bulldozers. Yeah,
they're all keyed the same based on the manufacturer.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Just throwing that out there. Yeah, good to know, Good
to know.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
Anyway, there also largely wasn't that type of need, so
who knows what would have happened if things needed to
truly happen. But it felt like watching the pieces come
into place. I was like, Okay, this is how this goes.
And so I I guess I from from where I sit,
(04:05):
I don't have an amazing objective basis for evaluating how
it all went.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
But to my eyes, it seemed like it went well.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
But I mean that's kind of the thing about something
like mutual aid. It's like not to say it always
goes well, but on some level it always goes well.
It always does. Whatever we can do is a positive thing.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Yeah, it's something that wasn't being done.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Yeah, I think there there's an element of sort of
like I guess it is, you know, in the business
type world of managing expectations and.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Like, yeah, but it is. It is true.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
It is like like pushing a boulder or any any
amount you push the boulder is a place where it
wasn't before. Yeah, you know, is it better than if
we had a functional government that it took our took
our tax dollars and appropriately them.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Yeah I'm not sure. Yeah. Is it the most efficient?
I mean, you know it because of the.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Decentralized nature I it was obviously not the most directly
efficient way to do everything. Yeah, but things absolutely did
get done. I will say, during during sort of the
absolute thick of it, I was like, man, when when
the Mega people really got their heads up about Antifa
super soldiers. I think the biggest, the biggest problem with
(05:27):
you know, us as a fighting group is going to
be just making sure everyone shows up to the war
in time, which is gonna be a real fucking problem
when push comes a shop.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, I agree, And I mean it's funny because I
was late to this recording, but usually I try very
hard to put the punk in punctual.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
I was just like, damn, there's a lot of a
lot of sitting around in parking lots for me this week.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah, everyone's everyone's about fifteen minutes late.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
That's okay, Well that is actually oddly a good hm.
I'll just tell you what this episode is about. But
before I tell you what this episode is about, first,
I want to say we do have a producer, she's
not on the call right now. It is Sophie Lickterman.
We also have an audio engineer named Rory, and everyone
has to say hi to Rory.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Hi, Rory Hi, Rory.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
And our theme music was written for us by unwoman.
And I was pondering this week. I was like, well,
what mutual aid story am I going to do? Because
I have Andrew as my guest nice and a friend
of mine brought up this story. It is a story
about mutual aid during just about as dark of a
time as you can imagine, the brightest lights in the
darkest darkes. It's my favorite kind of story. Yeah, this
(06:40):
is a story about all the people who stepped up
to care for people dying of AIDS in the nineteen eighties.
In particular, it's about the unbelievable number of lesbians who
came in to care for their queer brethren who were
abandoned by their families and society and the government and
the medical institutions. So this is my lesbians did amazing
(07:04):
shit during the AIDS crisis. Episode. I don't know if
it's gonna be called that. I probably can't cuss on
the title.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Amazing stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, have you have you heard about this at all?
This this thing?
Speaker 4 (07:16):
I feel like yes, but I mean not anything specific,
just that like sort of like the in you know,
mentioning unsung heroes type situations.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I think totally just swhear it would have come up.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, I think there's literally I didn't end up watching this.
I don't watch a lot of documentaries when I'm doing
my research, to try to stick to written sources overall,
but there's like different documentaries about many of these different groups.
I think one of them is literally called Unsung Heroes.
I think that's the name of Well, we'll talk about
that one later. Sure, we've talked a bit about the
(07:49):
history of queer rights and queer people on this show.
I think this is an understatement. If you want the
best rundown of how social movements look before Stonewall Riots
of nineteen sixty nine, or the best rundown that I
have done, check out our episode on the Stonewall Riots
of nineteen sixty nine. But in general, I would say
that lesbian and gay activism started off as a bit
(08:10):
separate from each other, but they would often intersect. Maybe
the best way I can think to put it is
that as cultural spaces, the two would stay fairly distinct
lesbian and gay, but in terms of activism and advocacy,
queer folks of all types found common cause with each
other often enough, and that was kind of where I
was coming at from it, But then I was also
reading more and more about like even in terms of
(08:32):
cultural spaces, there was a lot of overlap too. I
have read plenty of examples of stories about lesbian's bartending
at gay mail bars, for example, or queer discothechs for
all comers. You know. So the best way I say
this is really messy the interaction between gay and lesbian
activism and culture. While researching this episode, I ran across
(08:54):
a lot of people, especially people who weren't there, including me.
I wasn't there. I mean, I was technically alive during
that but I was not particularly active as a four
year old, and I ran across a lot of people
who weren't there talking about how incredibly divided gay and
lesbian scenes and people were from one another. But the
(09:14):
more I did the research, the more I found this
wasn't the case. There is a pattern that I've seen
a lot on the show, and I'm curious your opinion
about this pattern. But it seems like we have this
habit of looking back at history and emphasizing all the
divisions between various marginalized people instead of all the places
where we've worked in solidarity with each other and like
(09:36):
both things are true. Right. For example, I have read
so many things before I especially before I started doing
the show. I would read all the time about how
the early feminist movement was like wildly racist in the
United States. So those all white feminists who were just
pieces of shit in terms of race. Sure, and I
internalized that and I believed it, and absolutely there were
(09:57):
huge numbers of actively racist white feminists, especially in the
voting rights era of the early twentieth century. But then
as I would read nineteenth century history about the United
States and the abolitionist movements, a fock ton of the
early white abolitionists were women who were quite actively also
fighting for the rights of women, and they're like the
(10:18):
same social circle more or less.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
Yeah, I wonder, I mean, obviously, I think it's the
headline is more surprising. The divisions are emphasized just because
you know, in a vacuum without any external information, I
guess I would just, you know, war one would just
assume that like all queer people stick together and then
(10:42):
so so it's like more notable the whatever divisions are there.
It would be my only guess, like.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
That's so fair.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
That makes sense I like I'm so cynical that I'm
like uncynical again where I'm like it helps the powers
that be to focus on our divisions, you know, yes,
but it also like like we shouldn't erase our differences.
We shouldn't pretend like yeah, fucking white feminists haven't been
really shitty or like that, like gay men can't be
(11:14):
misogynists or like, you know, yeah, but I.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Think it you're you're absolutely right, though I do think
it goes sort of both ways in that like whatever
interest is like peaked by the divisions absolutely also like
serves the setus quo. So like there's no like nothing
to like hit the brakes on that or tap the
brakes on on that, like instinct, like whether it's like
(11:39):
writerly or like from the publishing perspective, like they just
want to put that out there and it helps, you know,
the people in power for it to be put out
there as well.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Totally like kind of like how like Twitter is a
nightmareland that creates divisions between people because likes and reacts
and blah blah blah are like more useful to the
algorith them and so therefore people who are angry are
more likely to comment than people who are like oh yeah, no,
totally yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
I mean it's the same way that like, like you know,
just on any the internet is clearly but like even
before the Internet, like one complaint, you get one complaint,
but you won't get you know, a hundred satisfied customers
that are like.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, that's that's it. And then also even like I
would never read the reviews of my own work, I
actually specifically try not to read the reviews of my
own work because I am very aware that I will
read ten reviews that will be like Margaret Kiljoy saved
my children from a burning building or whatever, I don't know,
(12:42):
and then I'll read like one that was like Margaret's
voice is bad or you know, I don't know, right.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
And then I'm like it's like devastating.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, and so maybe that's it. Maybe we like we
hear about we hear about the racist and we're like,
well fuck this whole thing.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
You know, it becomes extra silient. Yeah, I will say
as far as like Twitter goes. On the first big
show I worked on, it was a show called Mixed Dish,
and when it came out, I created not a Twitter bot,
but if I was better at coding, it would have
been a bot that was called not with the word
not crossed out the Mixtish writer's room, and every time
(13:20):
there was a negative comment, I would just write via
the bot or not the not bot, but by the account. Okay,
but we worked really hard on this one. Under every
negative comment on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
That is so relatable when people come like because people
have like things that they could be critical about about
the things I do. But sometimes on some level, I
just always want to be like, do you know I
didn't sleep for like a week because I was trying
to get this right. And I know that I didn't
get it totally right, but like I have to put
out roughly two hours of history content every week, I
(13:56):
just don't sleep. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Yeah, I think we're past the part of the Internet
where that could even work.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
But it was very fun to me in the moment.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
No, totally. Yeah, Okay. So gay rights in America before
the Stone, before Stonewall, most visible groups were very assimilationists
and pushing very hard for mainstream acceptance by like not
rocking the boat. But all along there were all these
kind of like unruly queers being unruly Stonewall was not
the first and not the last major riot by queers
(14:28):
who are sick of being mistreated by society. But after
some cops raided the Stonewall in in New York in
nineteen sixty nine, the gay liberation movement exploded onto the scene.
People were tired of asking nicely, and once people got
tired of asking nicely, shit started getting done. That's a
pattern you can see over and over again. As Frederick
(14:48):
Douglas the Black Abolitionists put it, power concedes nothing without
a demand. The seventies were a vital time in gay history,
as people started really coming out on moss and said
up all kinds of infrastructure that we rely upon today.
I remember I was talking to one of my friends
about this beforehand. I have relied on the infrastructure set
(15:09):
up by like gays fifty years ago, for like my
basic health care, completely unrelated to sexuality, just because I
was like broken, lived out of a backpack, you know,
and like I remember, I injured myself at one point
by having too heavy of a backpack I was living
out of and not being in my twenties anymore, It
turns out that you can carry a certain sized backpack
(15:29):
in your twenties that you can't carry onward, and I
like injured myself and so the only place that I
could go was this gay clinic and it was nice.
But then it's just like bonus points because they respect
my pronouns and it's nice and people are nice to you.
You know. I love gay infrastructure is the point, and
I think that gay infrastructure is one of the most
beautiful prefigurations of the world. I want everyone to get
(15:51):
to live in. A lot of that started getting set
up in the seventies. Unfortunately, a lot of it was
set up in the eighties because the eighties, yeah, were
the spoiler alert for history.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Real bad yeah, yeah, and bad at the time. But
also all the all the shit that's happening now got
started then or not, I got started before, but like
some of the major stuff really got rolling then, and
we're just kind of living with the results of how
how those people did the shit in the eighties.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I know, it's like we're listen, we're in like hyper
Reagan times. Like Reagan was like yeah you at the time,
I think people are like, I can't imagine something worse
than this, and you're like, then, fucking yeah. Pull my beer.
Trump comes in.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
I know, I mean, we'll see, hopefully at the very minimum,
like Trump isn't sort of lionized in history. The way
that that is sort of the most infuriating thing is, Yeah,
people's at least at least in the nineties and two thousands.
I think people are coming around a little bit now.
But like their description of Ronald Reagan's like the fuck
(16:57):
out of here? The fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (17:00):
I was talking with one of my friends who works
in the piercing industry, and they were wearing, I can't
remember exactly, they were wearing a shirt that was like
Ronald Reagan's grave is a gender neutral bathroom. Yeah, And
someone that they work with was a piercer, a gay
man who survived the eighties in San Francisco, which is
a hard thing to have done. And was just like,
(17:21):
I'm so glad that people today still understand that Ronald
Reagan is a terrible person.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Yeah, I mean, well and sort of even.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
As he got like you know, no longer really there
and while he was still president.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
That's the thing.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
It's like, like, yeah, the Republican and right wing in
general like apparatus is this like he is a terrible person,
but it sort of doesn't matter, no, totally, like specifically him, Yeah,
like is this is what those folks want and we
are living with the consequences of not yeah, fucking taking
them seriously honestly.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, and then obviously like some people did, some people tried,
and just like not enough, but like yes, yes, yes,
and so in the eighties it was the dying time.
Gay men started showing up in hospitals as early as
about nineteen eighty one, well exactly nineteen eighty one, with
all kinds of rare cancers and diagnoses with what we
(18:21):
now understand as AIDS. Acquired immuno deficiency syndrome is caused
by an underlying virus HIV human immuno deficiency virus. They
didn't know that yet. The actual causes and means of
transmission were going to be a hot topic for years.
At first, doctors looked at what was happening and called
it GRID gay related immune deficiency. This crisis was completely
(18:46):
and shamefully ignored by the government. It was like till
nineteen eighty seven before Reagan i think, said the word
AIDS right. The treatment that people were receiving was shameful too.
When patients first started showing up destroyed immune systems. At first,
this makes some sense, doctors were rightfully afraid of getting
their patients any sicker, and so they wore head to
(19:08):
toe ppe in what was called colloquial as spacesuits. But
soon enough all kinds of healthcare professionals started wearing them
around AIDS patients out of fear for themselves instead of
the other way around. And the thing is, I've read
a couple of people like talking about, like how reasonable
was it of people to be afraid of AIDS patients
(19:29):
and stuff, And on some level, right, like, people didn't
know what this disease was. They didn't know how it spread,
and they knew that it had all one hundred percent
death rate, which is a really high death rate. You know,
it's about as high as it can get. Yeah, yeah,
But pretty early on, well, no one was quite sure
how the disease was spread. Doctors and epidemiologists were pretty
(19:51):
certain that it was not airborne and that it wasn't
spread by casual contact, just based on looking at the
I can't believe I wrote a script where I have
to say epidemiology a lot, but just based on the
like the spread of the disease, right.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Yeah, I mean it was.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
It's a little bit in retrospect some of the COVID
stuff too, where it was likely, especially like the wiping
down your groceries business, and it's like, okay, but if
it was transmitted like that, we'd all, like, you know,
the city of Wuhan would have been completely obliterated. Like
it just doesn't work like that. Yeah, but totally, I
(20:29):
will say, you know, obviously have a sense of where
this is going, and you know.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
I sort of understand the doctor's perspective, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
No, totally, Like at the very beginning, you're like, whoa,
I don't know what that is, and I don't want
to then spread it to everyone, and like, you know,
there's a there's a certain sense. But yeah, that was
only for a brief moment. The medical establishment knew better
really soon. They knew pretty much right away that it
wasn't casual contact or airborne, and then by nineteen eighty
(21:01):
three they realized it was blood born because of the
number of blood transfusion patients who were getting sick. And
this is the same year that researchers in France discovered
the virus underlying the disease HIV, but homophobia and fear
of disease worked really tightly together. Healthcare professionals were terrified
(21:21):
of catching gay cancer. No one would touch or breed
the same air as AIDS patients, so patients were completely isolated.
One aid's nurse, a guy named Guy Vanderberg, who is
himself hospitalized for a while, told ABC the food tray
was shoved into the room and everything was covered in plastic,
then everything was put into biohazard bags when it was
(21:43):
taken out. People were fully gowned when they came in,
even just to talk with me, And like, even if
this was reasonable, and there's very brief window where it was,
it's also just incredibly alienated and hard.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Yeah, I mean it's like, solitary confinement is torture, literal torture.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
That's even when you're not sick.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. My personal anecdote around this is that
a close family friend of my family's has HIV and
he was diagnosed I think in the eighties, maybe the
early nineties, and he's this conservative man who goes to
a conservative church, and so when he went and told
the congregation that, you know, he had HIV. Everyone in
(22:25):
the congregation lined up to shake his hand like without gloves.
And this was like a huge fucking deal, you know, right,
because everyone consciously knew it was safe, but people were
still being real fucking shitty about it.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, Fortunately, queer people themselves, gay people and lesbians are
as I understand it overrepresented in the medical profession, much
like you might think that ads are overrepresented in this podcast,
But I would argue that they are that they are. Yeah,
that's what I would are you too, But if you
(23:01):
get cooler zone media, then you don't have to listen
to them. You can only listen to my ad transitions instead.
But here's the ads, and we're back. The lesbian community
rallied really hard, and they rode to Gondor's aid when
(23:22):
the beacons were lit. They did not ask where was
Gondor when the westfold fell? I have to somehow put
in a Lord of the room's reference in every episode. Yeah, no,
it's just it's important. And one gay man it's actually okay.
The comparisons are going to get really strong though, right
because there's well okay, yeah, one gay man in San
Francisco spoke anonymously to the I news and said, quote,
(23:44):
suddenly the hospitals were full of lesbians who were volunteering,
volunteering to go into those rooms and help my friends
who were dying. I remember being so moved by them
because gay men hadn't been too kind to lesbians. We'd
call them fish and make fun of the butcher dikes
in the bar, and yet there they were.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
Yeah, I mean that is a you know, that that
is sort of like the differences and similarities that we
were talking about earlier right there, which is like there's
a difference between like poking fun at someone and like
a community.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Is dying totally totally. Yeah, like, yeah, we're going to
make fun of oh you got bad haircut. I'm going
to make fun of you until someone else messes with you.
Then it's a war, you know.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
And without also like two needlessly tapping the present, we're
about to also enter into a time when the establishment
medical advice is about to be factually incorrect. Yeah, not
that it always hasn't been, sort of, but even more so,
I don't know, this is sort of an open question
(24:47):
to me, but it's like, whenever the next terrible thing
that is a probably virus hits, like probably, yeah, we
won't be able to necessarily, I mean, we probably pretty
actively won't be able to trust our CDC or NIH.
And again, with grains of salt, we never probably should
have wholly trusted them. However, they've mostly been correct, you know.
(25:12):
So whether it's you know, getting your measles vaccine or
you know, not trying to use nutrition to fight cancer
and mental mental health issues.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
I don't know if there's like an EU like health
authority to follow or Chinese health authority to follow, but
don't follow the like.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
And don't follow the American one, and don't let.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
Their policies dictate your behavior, because we are going to
have to do stuff like this which is maybe not
technically advised or allowed by the establishment, but it is
the right thing to do, and you know, within reason.
I guess who knows what the next actual thing will be.
But just because they say you're safe doesn't mean you are.
(25:57):
Just because they say you're in peril doesn't mean you are.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
I know.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
And it's like hard because it's like, well, this is
going to make it even harder to get people to trust, like,
you know, I'm clearly not like a big like the
state is a really good way of forming society, person,
but yeah, institutions that get together to solve things, Yeah,
I absolutely believe in and many of those are governmental
and yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
Well it's like the difference between like the broadly speaking,
the state, but also like the state is unfortunately the
best way to do some of these.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Things, Like yeah, definitely that we have available to us. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Yeah, so yeah, it would be nice if it worked.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like they're getting rid of all that part.
They're like, it's like, stop making the state look good,
you weird right wing libertarians. Yeah, like you're gutting all
the good parts of the state and you're keeping the
fucking cops in the military.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Yeah all right.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Well, so lesbians step up in so many ways during
this that it's overwhelming and I won't get into all
of it, but we'll start with blood, because starting in
nineteen eighty three, men who have sex with men were
banned from donating blood in order to stop transmission through
blood transfusions. There's there's some logic here, right, HIV tests
(27:12):
weren't available yet, but this ban went on way too long.
Do you want to guess what year men who had
sex with men were able to donate blood again without
discrimination in the United States.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
I only know this because I was asked in my
adulthood so deep into the twenty to two thousand somethings,
Is that right.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Two years ago? Twenty twenty three? Okay, yeah, yeah, no,
that's actually a good point. Yeah, all of us have gone. Yeah.
In twenty twenty fucking three, they finally changed the rules.
In twenty twenty, men who have sex with men were
allowed to donate blood if they hadn't had sex in
the last three months. Nowadays, the rule is anyone regardless
(27:59):
of extra gender, can donate blood, so long as they
haven't had anal sex with a new partner or slept
with multiple new partners in the past three months, and
that I'm not an expert here. That sounds reasonable. Yeah,
make it across the board and not about sexuality. That
seems good. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Yeah. But also it feels like we could also just
screen for I.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
Mean, if you're just worried about HIV, it's like, just
check if there's HIV there.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
I think, but I could be wrong. I think it's
because there's a roughly a three month period for the
efficacy of the testing.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Oh sure, sure, okay.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
But I don't know how it relates to like bottled
blood or whatever.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
It is.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Sure, but in nineteen eighty three men were suddenly told
that they couldn't donate blood. But AIDS patients need a
lot of blood transfusions, especially back then, so their own
immediate community couldn't support them. Fortunately, LGBT is a thing
for a reason. All of us letters are in it together.
The l stepped up the most famous group is probably
(29:00):
the most famous because branding is so important to being
remembered in history, is what I'm learning on this show too.
They were called the blood Sisters. Yeah, like you don't
forget the blood sisters.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
Oh man, And just speaking of this is it's just
nice to get a Warhammer forty K reference in there.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Oh are there blood sisters and Warmmer? I'm a D
and D girl.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
I don't think. I think so.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
Hell yeah, it might be a Sisters of Blood or
something like that, just the bloody angels anyway.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Hell yeah, So the Warhammer forty K girls stepped.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
To the fuck uh.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
The Women's caucus of the San Diego Democratic Club set
up a deal with a private blood bank to allow
donors to designate the recipients, so basically people could go
in and say, this is blood for people with HIV
and AIDS. Then they called for a blood drive on
July sixteenth, nineteen eighty three, and called on all the
(29:57):
lesbians in San Diego, being that like fifty people would come,
but the very first blood drive, two hundred people came
with a line around the block. Peggy Heathers, a blood sister, said, quote,
women came out of the woodwork, women that didn't want
to have anything to do with men, even gay men.
And I fucking love that. Even the hardcore lesbian separatists
(30:21):
were like, look, I don't want to live with men,
I don't want to date men. I don't want to
organize with men. I'm not going to see them fucking
die abandoned because of their sexuality.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
Yeah, like, well, I mean it also is just sort
of like the right triangulation. It's like, listen, even if
I don't want anything to do with men, the worst
men are the ones that are perpetrating this upon gay men.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Like totally, totally, there's still the real enemy.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
Let's not let's not and never be confused about who
the real enemy.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Is yeah, totally, and I just like, I love that.
I love that they were like, yeah, like you know,
you're still as being separatists and we're still coming to
help you. The Blood Sisters continued for years. I have
read that they continued before this is my favorite part
about multiple sources, and I've read that they continue for
four years. I've read that they continued until nineteen ninety six.
(31:14):
Either way they stayed, I'm guessing that they stayed particularly
active until the very first treatments of the late eighties
kicked in, and then active to some degree for a
decade after that until about nineteen ninety six. Is when
you get the well I keep saying about in nineteen
ninety six, you get the sort of cocktail three drug
regimen that started dramatically improving peoples odds, you know.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
And the other side of it is like whether they
were like continuing as a Blood Sister's like you know,
under the Blood Sister's banner. There is the thing, you know,
sort of mirroring my story, which is like once you
get started, you do more like totally and I do
think like a you know, the tiny silver lining for
(31:58):
these crises is it does get regular people or maybe
even slightly apathetic people and to like be like, Okay,
I gotta do fucking something then like something that gets
you know something else. No, yeah, enough of the time
that you know, things become real.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
No, that's a good point. Yeah, you just got to
like get people into the inertia of trying to help.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
And I don't know if the blood Sisters were the
first or if they were the one that gets written
about the most because they have a sick name. The
idea spread. Lesbians ran blood drives in at least San Francisco, Denver, Boston,
Los Angeles, Baltimore, Memphis, and DC. I suspect it's more
than that, because I've read about lesbian support and a
bunch of other cities beyond that. The San Francisco blood
(32:42):
drive was led by the National Organization of Women, and
they would put up flyers that say, our boys need
our blood fucking good.
Speaker 4 (32:53):
And it's also like, because I do think just to
like reach kind of the normal people, you do got
to do essentially war propaganda for stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, totally. And also, I mean this whole thing we're
gonna talk about a little later, This whole thing is
strangely like war, you know. Yeah, well yeah, and queer
newspapers continued to say basically like, hey, lesbians, please donate
blood or to quote the newspaper coming out, which I
believe is San Francisco paper, they should do it, to
quote stand by our brothers and fighting the AIDS epidemic.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
An author named Jennifer Wilde, who was writing for the
queer Irish magazine GCN, put it like this, the drives
also gave more than just blood. They were also away
for the men suffering to know that they were loved
and part of a supportive community that will always do
what must be done to overcome adversity.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
It's the kind of thing where like real almost cheesy
like phrasing, it's just appropriate. You're like, yeah, no, that's
what happened. They absolutely We were like, you're part of
a supportive community. We don't want you to die alone.
Like yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:59):
Well, and also it is like like this is such
a wonderful example of like laws and power are just
people doing shit to other people. And like as bad
as the stuff gets and as has been, like you know,
when gay men weren't allowed to donate blood, really what
this means is they just they need blood, like blood
(34:20):
is needed, and if we can get blood in this
instance to people, then it sort of is a counteraction
to the bigotry and the fucking hate that is out there.
Like you can just reverse it, yeah, or you can
try or you do something.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, but you know what, we can't reverse the continued
march of all of the brilliant products and services who
I love.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
We can try. Are you going to listen to the
ad first to figure out how?
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah? No, your enemy listen to these ads. Actually some
of them are probably for good things. That's the hard
part is that sometimes we get ads for nice things,
like other podcasts. I like podcasts. I don't mind learning
about podcasts through podcasts.
Speaker 4 (35:08):
That seems fine, yes, yes, but that does start to
feel like a Ponzi scheme a little bit.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
That's true.
Speaker 4 (35:15):
Podcast advertising on other podcasts feels like hold on, well
right now.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
And then people are like, how come all your guests
are podcasters? And I'm like, I see your point, But
all my guests are podcasters because they know how to podcast,
because it's actually a trained skill that takes effort and
also takes equipment, and not all of our guests are
podcasters anyway, but all of our guests listen to ads.
Actually that's not true. We don't listen them while we're recording,
but here they are, you can listen to them. Let's go.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
So lesbian stepped up to donate blood, and lesbian doctors
and nurses stepped up to directly care for AIDS patients.
But it went even deeper than that. In nineteen eighty one,
a game and named Howie Dare He was a fourth
grade teacher with a master's degree in counseling, and a
lesbian therapist named Candy Markham started a gay counseling center
(36:09):
in Dallas after seeing clinics in New York and Houston
that were counseling centers for gay folks. This is before
it was going to be an HIV thing. Everyone needs
counseling and therapy sometimes, right, But if you're part of
a criminalized community, that puts extra stress on your life,
and most therapists that were available weren't exactly queer competent,
let alone queer friendly. So they start up this hotline.
(36:33):
They opened up the Oaklawn Counseling Center in the gahborhood
and then they went around to bars and wherever people
hung out to tell people about it. Then the two
of them went to a gay mental health conference in Houston,
because hell yeah, queer infrastructure. There was a gay mental
health conference in Houston in nineteen eighty one, and they
learned about this shitty new thing called Grid that was
killing gay men and trans women on the coasts. So
(36:57):
they decided to turn one of their phone lines into
a GRID hotline. Even before Grid hit the city. Candy
was like, we don't know anything about this disease yet.
I'm paraphrasing her, but how he said, and I quote, yes,
I know, but we will and we need to be prepared.
So I really like this man because he is a handsome, prepper,
(37:19):
leather daddy school teacher with a master's degree and like
was a mental health king.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
He's fucking cool, amazing.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, you can read all kinds of like I didn't
put all of it in here, but like he wrote
a lot. Well, I'll get to it, okay. Within a
few months, AIDS came to Dallas. And the thing is
is that AIDS untreated kills more or less everyone who
gets it, and there were no treatments for years. I
don't know if I've read anything quite so much like
(37:49):
war as the AIDS crisis. Every account I've read about
this time in any city or town talks about people
going to multiple funerals a week, and that the gay
accepting churches were running two to three services a day. Actually,
the specific I think it was called the MCC the church,
the Queer accepting church in Dallas at this time lost
(38:11):
i think a third of its own clergy days. The
hotline that they had set up, this grid hotline was
staffed at first mostly by gay men. The quote worried
well because it's like if you're a gay man and
this time you're either sick or you're the worried well right,
because you're like, well, I don't know what it's going
to be me.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Anytime anyone got sick, they were like, oh fuck, Like
I got a cold, I might be dead now, you know, right.
The community centered around this health clinic set up a
buddy system where sick men would be placed with healthy
folks who could care for them. They had more than
one hundred registered buddies. These were sort of in addition
to if you have like a full time caretaker, like
(38:51):
if you live with your partner, or you live with
your parents, or someone else's like caretaking for you. You
also have a buddy system on top of that to
help relieve that careme taking right, and this model of
direct care and mutual laid spread to other cities. They
also set up an adult day care center so that
people with AIDS could come and be taken care of
(39:12):
in the center during the day so that their caretakers
could catch a break. All the while how He is
running all this shit alongside Candy. He's also teaching math
to incarcerated people at the county jail. In addition to
be like he's like a college teacher, a fourth grade teacher,
institutionalized people teacher, and a bartender and running a counseling service.
(39:41):
He fucking burned the candle of both ends.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
Jesus, that's so exhausting. But I know good. I know.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
In nineteen eighty five, when how He was thirty seven
years old, he was diagnosed with HIV. It was his
friend and co worker, Candy, the other therapist who was
his buddy in the buddy system, who was assigned to him.
His mom was a nurse and took care of him too,
and He died in nineteen eighty six at thirty eight
(40:10):
years old, with his mother by his bedside, as were
his wishes. His ashes were spread and his mother's rose garden.
And I was like, as I was writing this, I
was like, I don't know, I'm gonna be able to
read this without crying. Like Candy kept going. All of
her male friends were dying, and she spent all of
(40:32):
her time doing pro bono therapy in hospitals and in
home care, and then would go and speak at their funerals.
And this wasn't easy for her. The group that she
was working with would set up housing for everyone who's
being kicked out by their families for being gay and sick.
And she talks about how often she would have therapy
clients who would bring their families and the poor client
(40:55):
right who would have to come out both as gay
and dying in the same conversation. And Candy's job in
that situation, as best as I can tell, was to
try and convince the family to have a basic fucking
human decency right and like love and care for their child.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
So fucking you know, I guess like it's grim to
think about that, and like grim to see like how.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Little humanity some folks have. But I guess you also
just never know.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, yeah, I like I come from a family where
I like, can't imagine that having happened to me. Yeah,
I can imagine family or relatives or whatever who would
be like shitty to me or make fun of me,
or not know how to talk about it and be
awkward or like it's gender me and god, I'm not
(41:50):
trying to talk shit to my family. I could imagine
all of these things. Yeah, yeah, but the like you
are not our child to get out of here, which
happens still happens to so many fucking queer kids. I
just like I can't. I'm like, yeah, Like it's it's
like could you could you have we put the bar
(42:12):
on the floor, like could you step over it? Hell,
it might even be buried under the ground. You just
have to walk normal. Yeah, And instead they're like, no,
I'm gonna dig up that bar and trip on it.
Speaker 4 (42:22):
You have to dig. You have to dig to be
to be that bad. But yeah, or maybe you don't
because it is reflexive for so many people clearly like that,
Like yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, And.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
Basically, as best as I can tell, what happened in
the eighties is you have all of these queer health
services and counseling services and general infrastructure projects, right that
people have been building for a while or maybe built
specifically around AIDS, but like often have been building for
a long time, and then one by one all of
the men in them would die, and so it would
(42:58):
be lesbians who would step up. Sometimes also straight women.
I'm not to to totally cut them out of this picture.
Especially in San Francis, go end up reading about a
bunch of straight women who also a lot, but this
particular episode's focused on lesbians, and so you just have
this thing where like, like I've read all these people
who weren't there arguing about like, oh, why did women
have to do all the unpaid labor or whatever? The
fuck fuck you all of that shit, but like, yeah,
(43:19):
why couldn't the men take care of themselves because they
were dead?
Speaker 4 (43:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (43:23):
Yeah, Like I don't know what.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
To tell you.
Speaker 4 (43:27):
I mean, it's like, you know, of course that the
grain of truth is in there, that is, that is
the work that falls to women so much, but absolutely
there is also an explanation.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, and also like gay men are also over represented
in carrying fields. Yes, yes, Like when I'm reading about
a lot of the like early health clinics and stuff,
it's like, oh, it's gay men and lesbians who staffed them, right,
and then it was just lesbians left for some weird reason,
you know, right. But yeah, no, totally. There is still
a little bit of a like, yeah, you know, it's
like carrying work et cetera as gender. But like you
(44:00):
know what, like some work that is gendered is good
when people do it, like yeah, and so many nonprofit
leaders were dying in this period that Candy and other
folks set up a six month seminar series to onboard
lesbians to lead nonprofits. Right When she was interviewed later,
(44:22):
when she was asked what she would do have done
differently about her life, she says, you know what comes
to mind is I'd make a lot more money and
give it away. But you know, I worked as hard
as I could. I don't think I could have done
anything different. Like I said, I'm filled up from what happens.
I think it is the story of my life. I'm
pretty happy. Yeah, And so how do you have a
(44:46):
good life? You fucking find a way to help and
then you just fucking do it. Like, She's not the
only person I've read this week who's talking is looking
back on a life of helping people in this horrible crisis,
and a lot of the people I'm reading are like, yeah,
we all have PTSD now, or like, you know, it
majorly impacted them, but overall, the people who survived, who
(45:09):
were doing things are like, I'm I'm pretty proud of
myself in my community, and I've lived the best life
I could and I'm doing okay.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Yeah, or look, everything comes with a cost, but you know,
there's also be like, however, like PTSD you might have,
I do think doing nothing would probably have made it worse,
totally right, And you know what, and that's not a guarantee,
of course, like different circumstances. But one of the bigger
benefits of you know, mutual aid is this is for you.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Too, absolutely, like and that's literally in the name mutual aid.
Yeah right, it's like, no, we're just people taking care
of each other. And right now it's me taking care
of you, you know. And it won't necessarily be exact reciprocal,
like oh well tomorrow you take care of me, yeah,
but someone will take care of me, yeah, you know.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Yeah, it works. It worked. If everyone didn't, it just
would work. Society would work.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
I know. It's one of the most frustrated things in
the world, is like, once you start seeing it happen,
you can unsee it, you know.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Yeah, people want to take care of each other.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
Yeah, well some of us don't, but that's true. Yeah,
it's yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, well that's what we got for part one. But
when we come back on part two, we're going to
talk about a whole bunch of other people helped, including
more lesbians and some nuns.
Speaker 3 (46:37):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Yeah. Do you got anything you want to plug here
at the end of your podcast, your mutual group, anything
that TV shows we should watch that you wrote.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Nothing. I don't know, Yo's is racist, our premium shows
called YO. Can we Live? Or we don't talk about
stuff that is horrible.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
That I haven't listened to that yet.
Speaker 4 (47:01):
Just you know, just a way to decompress a little bit. Yeah,
that's about it. I don't know, I'm around.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Okay, Well, if you want to keep up with me,
I don't know. I say that every single time. I
guess I probably probably when this comes out, I'm probably
in the middle of kickstarting a book, which means I'm
probably if this is March twenty twenty five that you're
listening to it, I'm probably kickstarting the third book in
the Danielle Kine series, The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice,
and it is available either through Kickstarter or if you're
(47:31):
listen to this in the future, you can just buy
it probably, And there's audiobooks of all three books, so
if you haven't heard the other ones, you can start
with the audiobooks, or are the regular books which you
can just get and I'll talk to you all soon.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. A more podcasts on cool zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com. Check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 2 (48:03):
You get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly podcast that when there's bad things, there's good
things too. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest
today is one of my favorite returning guests, Andrew Tea.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
Oh thanks, Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
I always get excited when you're the guest, because well,
I like all my guests equally. Yeah, I can't. I
can't show any preference.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Yeah, don't do that. There's no call for this line
of flattery. But thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Enter t is the host of the podcast EO is
this racist? And also, okay, this specific flattery I think
I could do. You're my favorite guests to talk about
mutual aid with.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Oh, thank you. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:45):
Well, I feel like I probably comment at it from
a good place of I'm pretty new.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
To it all things considered, and.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
You know, I've kind of like been around, but there
have been times in my life when I was more
involved in less and yeah, i've been, you know lately
because of how things have been going in LA and
I guess the world trying to really really double down
and just make sure whatever community we have is as
strong as it can be.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I mean that makes sense. I think that a lot
of it isn't an EBB and a flow, Like I'm
not directly doing mutual aid right now, besides like some
specific friends or whatever here and there, you know. But yeah, okay,
So my question before I even get into the topic.
You live in a city that very famously didn't quite
burn down recently? Yeah, how's that going? How are mutual
(01:36):
aid efforts going out there?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Like?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
How things been?
Speaker 4 (01:40):
I mean, I feel like from my perspective, it was
very impressive. I well, I guess I don't know, because
I feel like I'm more plugged in than I ever
have been. So I was able to be on through
Solidarity and snacks folks. I was able to which is
a group that I mostly do work with, and so
(02:01):
I was able to like kind of get in and
least see like a lot of the chat and the
chatter and the planning from the early side of things.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
So that to me it was very impressive. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Maybe I'm sure people with more experience this is maybe
pretty normal, but or maybe not.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
I don't have any basis for evaluating how actually impressive
it is, but it seemed.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Very impressive to me.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
The thing I was mostly focused on was trying to
get masks out to.
Speaker 3 (02:32):
The sort of larger population, especially on house.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Folks down on skid Row because the air quality was
so unbelievably bad.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
I guess it still is, but.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
Yeah, so but it was nice watching like warehouses essentially
pop up at various like a lot of bike shops,
a lot of gallery spaces, a lot of little warehouse
like work type spaces, and seeing things get distributed as
efficiently I think as they could be. And also just
(03:06):
kind of being cognizant of what needs are much harder
to meet with just community, you know, obviously none of
us had access. Maybe not obviously, and maybe I don't know,
maybe things have changed sort of muted the signal group
because it was pretty high traffic, what relatable you know,
we don't have things like bulldozers or like super high
(03:27):
end ppe. Yeah, and so there were limits to what
could be done.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
Well, let me give you a piece of advice about bulldozers. Yeah,
they're all keyed the same based on the manufacturer.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Just throwing that out there. Yeah, good to know, Good
to know.
Speaker 4 (03:45):
Anyway, there also largely wasn't that type of need, so
who knows what would have happened if things needed to
truly happen. But it felt like watching the pieces come
into place. I was like, Okay, this is how this goes.
And so I I guess I from from where I sit,
(04:05):
I don't have an amazing objective basis for evaluating how
it all went.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
But to my eyes, it seemed like it went well.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
But I mean that's kind of the thing about something
like mutual aid. It's like not to say it always
goes well, but on some level it always goes well.
It always does. Whatever we can do is a positive thing.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Yeah, it's something that wasn't being done.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:31):
Yeah, I think there there's an element of sort of
like I guess it is, you know, in the business
type world of managing expectations and.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Like, yeah, but it is. It is true.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
It is like like pushing a boulder or any any
amount you push the boulder is a place where it
wasn't before. Yeah, you know, is it better than if
we had a functional government that it took our took
our tax dollars and appropriately them.
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Yeah I'm not sure. Yeah. Is it the most efficient?
I mean, you know it because of the.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
Decentralized nature I it was obviously not the most directly
efficient way to do everything. Yeah, but things absolutely did
get done. I will say, during during sort of the
absolute thick of it, I was like, man, when when
the Mega people really got their heads up about Antifa
super soldiers. I think the biggest, the biggest problem with
(05:27):
you know, us as a fighting group is going to
be just making sure everyone shows up to the war
in time, which is gonna be a real fucking problem
when push comes a shop.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
Yeah, I agree, And I mean it's funny because I
was late to this recording, but usually I try very
hard to put the punk in punctual.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
I was just like, damn, there's a lot of a
lot of sitting around in parking lots for me this week.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah, everyone's everyone's about fifteen minutes late.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
That's okay, Well that is actually oddly a good hm.
I'll just tell you what this episode is about. But
before I tell you what this episode is about, first,
I want to say we do have a producer, she's
not on the call right now. It is Sophie Lickterman.
We also have an audio engineer named Rory, and everyone
has to say hi to Rory.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Hi, Rory Hi, Rory.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
And our theme music was written for us by unwoman.
And I was pondering this week. I was like, well,
what mutual aid story am I going to do? Because
I have Andrew as my guest nice and a friend
of mine brought up this story. It is a story
about mutual aid during just about as dark of a
time as you can imagine, the brightest lights in the
darkest darkes. It's my favorite kind of story. Yeah, this
(06:40):
is a story about all the people who stepped up
to care for people dying of AIDS in the nineteen eighties.
In particular, it's about the unbelievable number of lesbians who
came in to care for their queer brethren who were
abandoned by their families and society and the government and
the medical institutions. So this is my lesbians did amazing
(07:04):
shit during the AIDS crisis. Episode. I don't know if
it's gonna be called that. I probably can't cuss on
the title.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
Amazing stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, have you have you heard about this at all?
This this thing?
Speaker 4 (07:16):
I feel like yes, but I mean not anything specific,
just that like sort of like the in you know,
mentioning unsung heroes type situations.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
I think totally just swhear it would have come up.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, I think there's literally I didn't end up watching this.
I don't watch a lot of documentaries when I'm doing
my research, to try to stick to written sources overall,
but there's like different documentaries about many of these different groups.
I think one of them is literally called Unsung Heroes.
I think that's the name of Well, we'll talk about
that one later. Sure, we've talked a bit about the
(07:49):
history of queer rights and queer people on this show.
I think this is an understatement. If you want the
best rundown of how social movements look before Stonewall Riots
of nineteen sixty nine, or the best rundown that I
have done, check out our episode on the Stonewall Riots
of nineteen sixty nine. But in general, I would say
that lesbian and gay activism started off as a bit
(08:10):
separate from each other, but they would often intersect. Maybe
the best way I can think to put it is
that as cultural spaces, the two would stay fairly distinct
lesbian and gay, but in terms of activism and advocacy,
queer folks of all types found common cause with each
other often enough, and that was kind of where I
was coming at from it, But then I was also
reading more and more about like even in terms of
(08:32):
cultural spaces, there was a lot of overlap too. I
have read plenty of examples of stories about lesbian's bartending
at gay mail bars, for example, or queer discothechs for
all comers. You know. So the best way I say
this is really messy the interaction between gay and lesbian
activism and culture. While researching this episode, I ran across
(08:54):
a lot of people, especially people who weren't there, including me.
I wasn't there. I mean, I was technically alive during
that but I was not particularly active as a four
year old, and I ran across a lot of people
who weren't there talking about how incredibly divided gay and
lesbian scenes and people were from one another. But the
(09:14):
more I did the research, the more I found this
wasn't the case. There is a pattern that I've seen
a lot on the show, and I'm curious your opinion
about this pattern. But it seems like we have this
habit of looking back at history and emphasizing all the
divisions between various marginalized people instead of all the places
where we've worked in solidarity with each other and like
(09:36):
both things are true. Right. For example, I have read
so many things before I especially before I started doing
the show. I would read all the time about how
the early feminist movement was like wildly racist in the
United States. So those all white feminists who were just
pieces of shit in terms of race. Sure, and I
internalized that and I believed it, and absolutely there were
(09:57):
huge numbers of actively racist white feminists, especially in the
voting rights era of the early twentieth century. But then
as I would read nineteenth century history about the United
States and the abolitionist movements, a fock ton of the
early white abolitionists were women who were quite actively also
fighting for the rights of women, and they're like the
(10:18):
same social circle more or less.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
Yeah, I wonder, I mean, obviously, I think it's the
headline is more surprising. The divisions are emphasized just because
you know, in a vacuum without any external information, I
guess I would just, you know, war one would just
assume that like all queer people stick together and then
(10:42):
so so it's like more notable the whatever divisions are there.
It would be my only guess, like.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
That's so fair.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
That makes sense I like I'm so cynical that I'm
like uncynical again where I'm like it helps the powers
that be to focus on our divisions, you know, yes,
but it also like like we shouldn't erase our differences.
We shouldn't pretend like yeah, fucking white feminists haven't been
really shitty or like that, like gay men can't be
(11:14):
misogynists or like, you know, yeah, but I.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Think it you're you're absolutely right, though I do think
it goes sort of both ways in that like whatever
interest is like peaked by the divisions absolutely also like
serves the setus quo. So like there's no like nothing
to like hit the brakes on that or tap the
brakes on on that, like instinct, like whether it's like
(11:39):
writerly or like from the publishing perspective, like they just
want to put that out there and it helps, you know,
the people in power for it to be put out
there as well.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Totally like kind of like how like Twitter is a
nightmareland that creates divisions between people because likes and reacts
and blah blah blah are like more useful to the
algorith them and so therefore people who are angry are
more likely to comment than people who are like oh yeah, no,
totally yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
I mean it's the same way that like, like you know,
just on any the internet is clearly but like even
before the Internet, like one complaint, you get one complaint,
but you won't get you know, a hundred satisfied customers
that are like.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, that's that's it. And then also even like I
would never read the reviews of my own work, I
actually specifically try not to read the reviews of my
own work because I am very aware that I will
read ten reviews that will be like Margaret Kiljoy saved
my children from a burning building or whatever, I don't know,
(12:42):
and then I'll read like one that was like Margaret's
voice is bad or you know, I don't know, right.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
And then I'm like it's like devastating.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah, and so maybe that's it. Maybe we like we
hear about we hear about the racist and we're like,
well fuck this whole thing.
Speaker 4 (12:58):
You know, it becomes extra silient. Yeah, I will say
as far as like Twitter goes. On the first big
show I worked on, it was a show called Mixed Dish,
and when it came out, I created not a Twitter bot,
but if I was better at coding, it would have
been a bot that was called not with the word
not crossed out the Mixtish writer's room, and every time
(13:20):
there was a negative comment, I would just write via
the bot or not the not bot, but by the account. Okay,
but we worked really hard on this one. Under every
negative comment on Twitter.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
That is so relatable when people come like because people
have like things that they could be critical about about
the things I do. But sometimes on some level, I
just always want to be like, do you know I
didn't sleep for like a week because I was trying
to get this right. And I know that I didn't
get it totally right, but like I have to put
out roughly two hours of history content every week, I
(13:56):
just don't sleep. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Yeah, I think we're past the part of the Internet
where that could even work.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
But it was very fun to me in the moment.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
No, totally. Yeah, Okay. So gay rights in America before
the Stone, before Stonewall, most visible groups were very assimilationists
and pushing very hard for mainstream acceptance by like not
rocking the boat. But all along there were all these
kind of like unruly queers being unruly Stonewall was not
the first and not the last major riot by queers
(14:28):
who are sick of being mistreated by society. But after
some cops raided the Stonewall in in New York in
nineteen sixty nine, the gay liberation movement exploded onto the scene.
People were tired of asking nicely, and once people got
tired of asking nicely, shit started getting done. That's a
pattern you can see over and over again. As Frederick
(14:48):
Douglas the Black Abolitionists put it, power concedes nothing without
a demand. The seventies were a vital time in gay history,
as people started really coming out on moss and said
up all kinds of infrastructure that we rely upon today.
I remember I was talking to one of my friends
about this beforehand. I have relied on the infrastructure set
(15:09):
up by like gays fifty years ago, for like my
basic health care, completely unrelated to sexuality, just because I
was like broken, lived out of a backpack, you know,
and like I remember, I injured myself at one point
by having too heavy of a backpack I was living
out of and not being in my twenties anymore, It
turns out that you can carry a certain sized backpack
(15:29):
in your twenties that you can't carry onward, and I
like injured myself and so the only place that I
could go was this gay clinic and it was nice.
But then it's just like bonus points because they respect
my pronouns and it's nice and people are nice to you.
You know. I love gay infrastructure is the point, and
I think that gay infrastructure is one of the most
beautiful prefigurations of the world. I want everyone to get
(15:51):
to live in. A lot of that started getting set
up in the seventies. Unfortunately, a lot of it was
set up in the eighties because the eighties, yeah, were
the spoiler alert for history.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Real bad yeah, yeah, and bad at the time. But
also all the all the shit that's happening now got
started then or not, I got started before, but like
some of the major stuff really got rolling then, and
we're just kind of living with the results of how
how those people did the shit in the eighties.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I know, it's like we're listen, we're in like hyper
Reagan times. Like Reagan was like yeah you at the time,
I think people are like, I can't imagine something worse
than this, and you're like, then, fucking yeah. Pull my beer.
Trump comes in.
Speaker 4 (16:36):
I know, I mean, we'll see, hopefully at the very minimum,
like Trump isn't sort of lionized in history. The way
that that is sort of the most infuriating thing is, Yeah,
people's at least at least in the nineties and two thousands.
I think people are coming around a little bit now.
But like their description of Ronald Reagan's like the fuck
(16:57):
out of here? The fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (17:00):
I was talking with one of my friends who works
in the piercing industry, and they were wearing, I can't
remember exactly, they were wearing a shirt that was like
Ronald Reagan's grave is a gender neutral bathroom. Yeah, And
someone that they work with was a piercer, a gay
man who survived the eighties in San Francisco, which is
a hard thing to have done. And was just like,
(17:21):
I'm so glad that people today still understand that Ronald
Reagan is a terrible person.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Yeah, I mean, well and sort of even.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
As he got like you know, no longer really there
and while he was still president.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
That's the thing.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
It's like, like, yeah, the Republican and right wing in
general like apparatus is this like he is a terrible person,
but it sort of doesn't matter, no, totally, like specifically him, Yeah,
like is this is what those folks want and we
are living with the consequences of not yeah, fucking taking
them seriously honestly.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Yeah, and then obviously like some people did, some people tried,
and just like not enough, but like yes, yes, yes,
and so in the eighties it was the dying time.
Gay men started showing up in hospitals as early as
about nineteen eighty one, well exactly nineteen eighty one, with
all kinds of rare cancers and diagnoses with what we
(18:21):
now understand as AIDS. Acquired immuno deficiency syndrome is caused
by an underlying virus HIV human immuno deficiency virus. They
didn't know that yet. The actual causes and means of
transmission were going to be a hot topic for years.
At first, doctors looked at what was happening and called
it GRID gay related immune deficiency. This crisis was completely
(18:46):
and shamefully ignored by the government. It was like till
nineteen eighty seven before Reagan i think, said the word
AIDS right. The treatment that people were receiving was shameful too.
When patients first started showing up destroyed immune systems. At first,
this makes some sense, doctors were rightfully afraid of getting
their patients any sicker, and so they wore head to
(19:08):
toe ppe in what was called colloquial as spacesuits. But
soon enough all kinds of healthcare professionals started wearing them
around AIDS patients out of fear for themselves instead of
the other way around. And the thing is, I've read
a couple of people like talking about, like how reasonable
was it of people to be afraid of AIDS patients
(19:29):
and stuff, And on some level, right, like, people didn't
know what this disease was. They didn't know how it spread,
and they knew that it had all one hundred percent
death rate, which is a really high death rate. You know,
it's about as high as it can get. Yeah, yeah,
But pretty early on, well, no one was quite sure
how the disease was spread. Doctors and epidemiologists were pretty
(19:51):
certain that it was not airborne and that it wasn't
spread by casual contact, just based on looking at the
I can't believe I wrote a script where I have
to say epidemiology a lot, but just based on the
like the spread of the disease, right.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Yeah, I mean it was.
Speaker 4 (20:07):
It's a little bit in retrospect some of the COVID
stuff too, where it was likely, especially like the wiping
down your groceries business, and it's like, okay, but if
it was transmitted like that, we'd all, like, you know,
the city of Wuhan would have been completely obliterated. Like
it just doesn't work like that. Yeah, but totally, I
(20:29):
will say, you know, obviously have a sense of where
this is going, and you know.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
I sort of understand the doctor's perspective, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
No, totally, Like at the very beginning, you're like, whoa,
I don't know what that is, and I don't want
to then spread it to everyone, and like, you know,
there's a there's a certain sense. But yeah, that was
only for a brief moment. The medical establishment knew better
really soon. They knew pretty much right away that it
wasn't casual contact or airborne, and then by nineteen eighty
(21:01):
three they realized it was blood born because of the
number of blood transfusion patients who were getting sick. And
this is the same year that researchers in France discovered
the virus underlying the disease HIV, but homophobia and fear
of disease worked really tightly together. Healthcare professionals were terrified
(21:21):
of catching gay cancer. No one would touch or breed
the same air as AIDS patients, so patients were completely isolated.
One aid's nurse, a guy named Guy Vanderberg, who is
himself hospitalized for a while, told ABC the food tray
was shoved into the room and everything was covered in plastic,
then everything was put into biohazard bags when it was
(21:43):
taken out. People were fully gowned when they came in,
even just to talk with me, And like, even if
this was reasonable, and there's very brief window where it was,
it's also just incredibly alienated and hard.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Yeah, I mean it's like, solitary confinement is torture, literal torture.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
That's even when you're not sick.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. My personal anecdote around this is that
a close family friend of my family's has HIV and
he was diagnosed I think in the eighties, maybe the
early nineties, and he's this conservative man who goes to
a conservative church, and so when he went and told
the congregation that, you know, he had HIV. Everyone in
(22:25):
the congregation lined up to shake his hand like without gloves.
And this was like a huge fucking deal, you know, right,
because everyone consciously knew it was safe, but people were
still being real fucking shitty about it.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, Fortunately, queer people themselves, gay people and lesbians are
as I understand it overrepresented in the medical profession, much
like you might think that ads are overrepresented in this podcast,
But I would argue that they are that they are. Yeah,
that's what I would are you too, But if you
(23:01):
get cooler zone media, then you don't have to listen
to them. You can only listen to my ad transitions instead.
But here's the ads, and we're back. The lesbian community
rallied really hard, and they rode to Gondor's aid when
(23:22):
the beacons were lit. They did not ask where was
Gondor when the westfold fell? I have to somehow put
in a Lord of the room's reference in every episode. Yeah, no,
it's just it's important. And one gay man it's actually okay.
The comparisons are going to get really strong though, right
because there's well okay, yeah, one gay man in San
Francisco spoke anonymously to the I news and said, quote,
(23:44):
suddenly the hospitals were full of lesbians who were volunteering,
volunteering to go into those rooms and help my friends
who were dying. I remember being so moved by them
because gay men hadn't been too kind to lesbians. We'd
call them fish and make fun of the butcher dikes
in the bar, and yet there they were.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
Yeah, I mean that is a you know, that that
is sort of like the differences and similarities that we
were talking about earlier right there, which is like there's
a difference between like poking fun at someone and like
a community.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Is dying totally totally. Yeah, like, yeah, we're going to
make fun of oh you got bad haircut. I'm going
to make fun of you until someone else messes with you.
Then it's a war, you know.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
And without also like two needlessly tapping the present, we're
about to also enter into a time when the establishment
medical advice is about to be factually incorrect. Yeah, not
that it always hasn't been, sort of, but even more so,
I don't know, this is sort of an open question
(24:47):
to me, but it's like, whenever the next terrible thing
that is a probably virus hits, like probably, yeah, we
won't be able to necessarily, I mean, we probably pretty
actively won't be able to trust our CDC or NIH.
And again, with grains of salt, we never probably should
have wholly trusted them. However, they've mostly been correct, you know.
(25:12):
So whether it's you know, getting your measles vaccine or
you know, not trying to use nutrition to fight cancer
and mental mental health issues.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
I don't know if there's like an EU like health
authority to follow or Chinese health authority to follow, but
don't follow the like.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
And don't follow the American one, and don't let.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
Their policies dictate your behavior, because we are going to
have to do stuff like this which is maybe not
technically advised or allowed by the establishment, but it is
the right thing to do, and you know, within reason.
I guess who knows what the next actual thing will be.
But just because they say you're safe doesn't mean you are.
(25:57):
Just because they say you're in peril doesn't mean you are.
Speaker 3 (25:59):
I know.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
And it's like hard because it's like, well, this is
going to make it even harder to get people to trust, like,
you know, I'm clearly not like a big like the
state is a really good way of forming society, person,
but yeah, institutions that get together to solve things, Yeah,
I absolutely believe in and many of those are governmental
and yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
Well it's like the difference between like the broadly speaking,
the state, but also like the state is unfortunately the
best way to do some of these.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Things, Like yeah, definitely that we have available to us. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
Yeah, so yeah, it would be nice if it worked.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like they're getting rid of all that part.
They're like, it's like, stop making the state look good,
you weird right wing libertarians. Yeah, like you're gutting all
the good parts of the state and you're keeping the
fucking cops in the military.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Yeah all right.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Well, so lesbians step up in so many ways during
this that it's overwhelming and I won't get into all
of it, but we'll start with blood, because starting in
nineteen eighty three, men who have sex with men were
banned from donating blood in order to stop transmission through
blood transfusions. There's there's some logic here, right, HIV tests
(27:12):
weren't available yet, but this ban went on way too long.
Do you want to guess what year men who had
sex with men were able to donate blood again without
discrimination in the United States.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
I only know this because I was asked in my
adulthood so deep into the twenty to two thousand somethings,
Is that right.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Two years ago? Twenty twenty three? Okay, yeah, yeah, no,
that's actually a good point. Yeah, all of us have gone. Yeah.
In twenty twenty fucking three, they finally changed the rules.
In twenty twenty, men who have sex with men were
allowed to donate blood if they hadn't had sex in
the last three months. Nowadays, the rule is anyone regardless
(27:59):
of extra gender, can donate blood, so long as they
haven't had anal sex with a new partner or slept
with multiple new partners in the past three months, and
that I'm not an expert here. That sounds reasonable. Yeah,
make it across the board and not about sexuality. That
seems good. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Yeah. But also it feels like we could also just
screen for I.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
Mean, if you're just worried about HIV, it's like, just
check if there's HIV there.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
I think, but I could be wrong. I think it's
because there's a roughly a three month period for the
efficacy of the testing.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Oh sure, sure, okay.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
But I don't know how it relates to like bottled
blood or whatever.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
It is.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Sure, but in nineteen eighty three men were suddenly told
that they couldn't donate blood. But AIDS patients need a
lot of blood transfusions, especially back then, so their own
immediate community couldn't support them. Fortunately, LGBT is a thing
for a reason. All of us letters are in it together.
The l stepped up the most famous group is probably
(29:00):
the most famous because branding is so important to being
remembered in history, is what I'm learning on this show too.
They were called the blood Sisters. Yeah, like you don't
forget the blood sisters.
Speaker 4 (29:13):
Oh man, And just speaking of this is it's just
nice to get a Warhammer forty K reference in there.
Speaker 2 (29:21):
Oh are there blood sisters and Warmmer? I'm a D
and D girl.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
I don't think. I think so.
Speaker 4 (29:26):
Hell yeah, it might be a Sisters of Blood or
something like that, just the bloody angels anyway.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Hell yeah, So the Warhammer forty K girls stepped.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
To the fuck uh.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
The Women's caucus of the San Diego Democratic Club set
up a deal with a private blood bank to allow
donors to designate the recipients, so basically people could go
in and say, this is blood for people with HIV
and AIDS. Then they called for a blood drive on
July sixteenth, nineteen eighty three, and called on all the
(29:57):
lesbians in San Diego, being that like fifty people would come,
but the very first blood drive, two hundred people came
with a line around the block. Peggy Heathers, a blood sister, said, quote,
women came out of the woodwork, women that didn't want
to have anything to do with men, even gay men.
And I fucking love that. Even the hardcore lesbian separatists
(30:21):
were like, look, I don't want to live with men,
I don't want to date men. I don't want to
organize with men. I'm not going to see them fucking
die abandoned because of their sexuality.
Speaker 4 (30:32):
Yeah, like, well, I mean it also is just sort
of like the right triangulation. It's like, listen, even if
I don't want anything to do with men, the worst
men are the ones that are perpetrating this upon gay men.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Like totally, totally, there's still the real enemy.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
Let's not let's not and never be confused about who
the real enemy.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Is yeah, totally, and I just like, I love that.
I love that they were like, yeah, like you know,
you're still as being separatists and we're still coming to
help you. The Blood Sisters continued for years. I have
read that they continued before this is my favorite part
about multiple sources, and I've read that they continue for
four years. I've read that they continued until nineteen ninety six.
(31:14):
Either way they stayed, I'm guessing that they stayed particularly
active until the very first treatments of the late eighties
kicked in, and then active to some degree for a
decade after that until about nineteen ninety six. Is when
you get the well I keep saying about in nineteen
ninety six, you get the sort of cocktail three drug
regimen that started dramatically improving peoples odds, you know.
Speaker 4 (31:37):
And the other side of it is like whether they
were like continuing as a Blood Sister's like you know,
under the Blood Sister's banner. There is the thing, you know,
sort of mirroring my story, which is like once you
get started, you do more like totally and I do
think like a you know, the tiny silver lining for
(31:58):
these crises is it does get regular people or maybe
even slightly apathetic people and to like be like, Okay,
I gotta do fucking something then like something that gets
you know something else. No, yeah, enough of the time
that you know, things become real.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
No, that's a good point. Yeah, you just got to
like get people into the inertia of trying to help.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
And I don't know if the blood Sisters were the
first or if they were the one that gets written
about the most because they have a sick name. The
idea spread. Lesbians ran blood drives in at least San Francisco, Denver, Boston,
Los Angeles, Baltimore, Memphis, and DC. I suspect it's more
than that, because I've read about lesbian support and a
bunch of other cities beyond that. The San Francisco blood
(32:42):
drive was led by the National Organization of Women, and
they would put up flyers that say, our boys need
our blood fucking good.
Speaker 4 (32:53):
And it's also like, because I do think just to
like reach kind of the normal people, you do got
to do essentially war propaganda for stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, totally. And also, I mean this whole thing we're
gonna talk about a little later, This whole thing is
strangely like war, you know. Yeah, well yeah, and queer
newspapers continued to say basically like, hey, lesbians, please donate
blood or to quote the newspaper coming out, which I
believe is San Francisco paper, they should do it, to
quote stand by our brothers and fighting the AIDS epidemic.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
An author named Jennifer Wilde, who was writing for the
queer Irish magazine GCN, put it like this, the drives
also gave more than just blood. They were also away
for the men suffering to know that they were loved
and part of a supportive community that will always do
what must be done to overcome adversity.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
It's the kind of thing where like real almost cheesy
like phrasing, it's just appropriate. You're like, yeah, no, that's
what happened. They absolutely We were like, you're part of
a supportive community. We don't want you to die alone.
Like yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:59):
Well, and also it is like like this is such
a wonderful example of like laws and power are just
people doing shit to other people. And like as bad
as the stuff gets and as has been, like you know,
when gay men weren't allowed to donate blood, really what
this means is they just they need blood, like blood
(34:20):
is needed, and if we can get blood in this
instance to people, then it sort of is a counteraction
to the bigotry and the fucking hate that is out there.
Like you can just reverse it, yeah, or you can
try or you do something.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Yeah, but you know what, we can't reverse the continued
march of all of the brilliant products and services who
I love.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
We can try. Are you going to listen to the
ad first to figure out how?
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah? No, your enemy listen to these ads. Actually some
of them are probably for good things. That's the hard
part is that sometimes we get ads for nice things,
like other podcasts. I like podcasts. I don't mind learning
about podcasts through podcasts.
Speaker 4 (35:08):
That seems fine, yes, yes, but that does start to
feel like a Ponzi scheme a little bit.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
That's true.
Speaker 4 (35:15):
Podcast advertising on other podcasts feels like hold on, well
right now.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
And then people are like, how come all your guests
are podcasters? And I'm like, I see your point, But
all my guests are podcasters because they know how to podcast,
because it's actually a trained skill that takes effort and
also takes equipment, and not all of our guests are
podcasters anyway, but all of our guests listen to ads.
Actually that's not true. We don't listen them while we're recording,
but here they are, you can listen to them. Let's go.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
And we're back.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
So lesbian stepped up to donate blood, and lesbian doctors
and nurses stepped up to directly care for AIDS patients.
But it went even deeper than that. In nineteen eighty one,
a game and named Howie Dare He was a fourth
grade teacher with a master's degree in counseling, and a
lesbian therapist named Candy Markham started a gay counseling center
(36:09):
in Dallas after seeing clinics in New York and Houston
that were counseling centers for gay folks. This is before
it was going to be an HIV thing. Everyone needs
counseling and therapy sometimes, right, But if you're part of
a criminalized community, that puts extra stress on your life,
and most therapists that were available weren't exactly queer competent,
let alone queer friendly. So they start up this hotline.
(36:33):
They opened up the Oaklawn Counseling Center in the gahborhood
and then they went around to bars and wherever people
hung out to tell people about it. Then the two
of them went to a gay mental health conference in Houston,
because hell yeah, queer infrastructure. There was a gay mental
health conference in Houston in nineteen eighty one, and they
learned about this shitty new thing called Grid that was
killing gay men and trans women on the coasts. So
(36:57):
they decided to turn one of their phone lines into
a GRID hotline. Even before Grid hit the city. Candy
was like, we don't know anything about this disease yet.
I'm paraphrasing her, but how he said, and I quote, yes,
I know, but we will and we need to be prepared.
So I really like this man because he is a handsome, prepper,
(37:19):
leather daddy school teacher with a master's degree and like
was a mental health king.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
He's fucking cool, amazing.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, you can read all kinds of like I didn't
put all of it in here, but like he wrote
a lot. Well, I'll get to it, okay. Within a
few months, AIDS came to Dallas. And the thing is
is that AIDS untreated kills more or less everyone who
gets it, and there were no treatments for years. I
don't know if I've read anything quite so much like
(37:49):
war as the AIDS crisis. Every account I've read about
this time in any city or town talks about people
going to multiple funerals a week, and that the gay
accepting churches were running two to three services a day. Actually,
the specific I think it was called the MCC the church,
the Queer accepting church in Dallas at this time lost
(38:11):
i think a third of its own clergy days. The
hotline that they had set up, this grid hotline was
staffed at first mostly by gay men. The quote worried
well because it's like if you're a gay man and
this time you're either sick or you're the worried well right,
because you're like, well, I don't know what it's going
to be me.
Speaker 3 (38:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Anytime anyone got sick, they were like, oh fuck, Like
I got a cold, I might be dead now, you know, right.
The community centered around this health clinic set up a
buddy system where sick men would be placed with healthy
folks who could care for them. They had more than
one hundred registered buddies. These were sort of in addition
to if you have like a full time caretaker, like
(38:51):
if you live with your partner, or you live with
your parents, or someone else's like caretaking for you. You
also have a buddy system on top of that to
help relieve that careme taking right, and this model of
direct care and mutual laid spread to other cities. They
also set up an adult day care center so that
people with AIDS could come and be taken care of
(39:12):
in the center during the day so that their caretakers
could catch a break. All the while how He is
running all this shit alongside Candy. He's also teaching math
to incarcerated people at the county jail. In addition to
be like he's like a college teacher, a fourth grade teacher,
institutionalized people teacher, and a bartender and running a counseling service.
(39:41):
He fucking burned the candle of both ends.
Speaker 3 (39:44):
Jesus, that's so exhausting. But I know good. I know.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
In nineteen eighty five, when how He was thirty seven
years old, he was diagnosed with HIV. It was his
friend and co worker, Candy, the other therapist who was
his buddy in the buddy system, who was assigned to him.
His mom was a nurse and took care of him too,
and He died in nineteen eighty six at thirty eight
(40:10):
years old, with his mother by his bedside, as were
his wishes. His ashes were spread and his mother's rose garden.
And I was like, as I was writing this, I
was like, I don't know, I'm gonna be able to
read this without crying. Like Candy kept going. All of
her male friends were dying, and she spent all of
(40:32):
her time doing pro bono therapy in hospitals and in
home care, and then would go and speak at their funerals.
And this wasn't easy for her. The group that she
was working with would set up housing for everyone who's
being kicked out by their families for being gay and sick.
And she talks about how often she would have therapy
clients who would bring their families and the poor client
(40:55):
right who would have to come out both as gay
and dying in the same conversation. And Candy's job in
that situation, as best as I can tell, was to
try and convince the family to have a basic fucking
human decency right and like love and care for their child.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
So fucking you know, I guess like it's grim to
think about that, and like grim to see like how.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
Little humanity some folks have. But I guess you also
just never know.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
Yeah, yeah, I like I come from a family where
I like, can't imagine that having happened to me. Yeah,
I can imagine family or relatives or whatever who would
be like shitty to me or make fun of me,
or not know how to talk about it and be
awkward or like it's gender me and god, I'm not
(41:50):
trying to talk shit to my family. I could imagine
all of these things. Yeah, yeah, but the like you
are not our child to get out of here, which
happens still happens to so many fucking queer kids. I
just like I can't. I'm like, yeah, Like it's it's
like could you could you have we put the bar
(42:12):
on the floor, like could you step over it? Hell,
it might even be buried under the ground. You just
have to walk normal. Yeah, And instead they're like, no,
I'm gonna dig up that bar and trip on it.
Speaker 4 (42:22):
You have to dig. You have to dig to be
to be that bad. But yeah, or maybe you don't
because it is reflexive for so many people clearly like that,
Like yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, And.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
Basically, as best as I can tell, what happened in
the eighties is you have all of these queer health
services and counseling services and general infrastructure projects, right that
people have been building for a while or maybe built
specifically around AIDS, but like often have been building for
a long time, and then one by one all of
the men in them would die, and so it would
(42:58):
be lesbians who would step up. Sometimes also straight women.
I'm not to to totally cut them out of this picture.
Especially in San Francis, go end up reading about a
bunch of straight women who also a lot, but this
particular episode's focused on lesbians, and so you just have
this thing where like, like I've read all these people
who weren't there arguing about like, oh, why did women
have to do all the unpaid labor or whatever? The
fuck fuck you all of that shit, but like, yeah,
(43:19):
why couldn't the men take care of themselves because they
were dead?
Speaker 4 (43:23):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (43:23):
Yeah, Like I don't know what.
Speaker 2 (43:26):
To tell you.
Speaker 4 (43:27):
I mean, it's like, you know, of course that the
grain of truth is in there, that is, that is
the work that falls to women so much, but absolutely
there is also an explanation.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, and also like gay men are also over represented
in carrying fields. Yes, yes, Like when I'm reading about
a lot of the like early health clinics and stuff,
it's like, oh, it's gay men and lesbians who staffed them, right,
and then it was just lesbians left for some weird reason,
you know, right. But yeah, no, totally. There is still
a little bit of a like, yeah, you know, it's
like carrying work et cetera as gender. But like you
(44:00):
know what, like some work that is gendered is good
when people do it, like yeah, and so many nonprofit
leaders were dying in this period that Candy and other
folks set up a six month seminar series to onboard
lesbians to lead nonprofits. Right When she was interviewed later,
(44:22):
when she was asked what she would do have done
differently about her life, she says, you know what comes
to mind is I'd make a lot more money and
give it away. But you know, I worked as hard
as I could. I don't think I could have done
anything different. Like I said, I'm filled up from what happens.
I think it is the story of my life. I'm
pretty happy. Yeah, And so how do you have a
(44:46):
good life? You fucking find a way to help and
then you just fucking do it. Like, She's not the
only person I've read this week who's talking is looking
back on a life of helping people in this horrible crisis,
and a lot of the people I'm reading are like, yeah,
we all have PTSD now, or like, you know, it
majorly impacted them, but overall, the people who survived, who
(45:09):
were doing things are like, I'm I'm pretty proud of
myself in my community, and I've lived the best life
I could and I'm doing okay.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Yeah, or look, everything comes with a cost, but you know,
there's also be like, however, like PTSD you might have,
I do think doing nothing would probably have made it worse,
totally right, And you know what, and that's not a guarantee,
of course, like different circumstances. But one of the bigger
benefits of you know, mutual aid is this is for you.
Speaker 2 (45:41):
Too, absolutely, like and that's literally in the name mutual aid.
Yeah right, it's like, no, we're just people taking care
of each other. And right now it's me taking care
of you, you know. And it won't necessarily be exact reciprocal,
like oh well tomorrow you take care of me, yeah,
but someone will take care of me, yeah, you know.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Yeah, it works. It worked. If everyone didn't, it just
would work. Society would work.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
I know. It's one of the most frustrated things in
the world, is like, once you start seeing it happen,
you can unsee it, you know.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Yeah, people want to take care of each other.
Speaker 3 (46:18):
Yeah, well some of us don't, but that's true. Yeah,
it's yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, well that's what we got for part one. But
when we come back on part two, we're going to
talk about a whole bunch of other people helped, including
more lesbians and some nuns.
Speaker 3 (46:37):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Yeah. Do you got anything you want to plug here
at the end of your podcast, your mutual group, anything
that TV shows we should watch that you wrote.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Nothing. I don't know, Yo's is racist, our premium shows
called YO. Can we Live? Or we don't talk about
stuff that is horrible.
Speaker 2 (46:59):
That I haven't listened to that yet.
Speaker 4 (47:01):
Just you know, just a way to decompress a little bit. Yeah,
that's about it. I don't know, I'm around.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Okay, Well, if you want to keep up with me,
I don't know. I say that every single time. I
guess I probably probably when this comes out, I'm probably
in the middle of kickstarting a book, which means I'm
probably if this is March twenty twenty five that you're
listening to it, I'm probably kickstarting the third book in
the Danielle Kine series, The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice,
and it is available either through Kickstarter or if you're
(47:31):
listen to this in the future, you can just buy
it probably, And there's audiobooks of all three books, so
if you haven't heard the other ones, you can start
with the audiobooks, or are the regular books which you
can just get and I'll talk to you all soon.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. A more podcasts on cool zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com. Check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 2 (48:03):
You get your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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