For people who might not know – Wendy Carlos is a trans woman who was deeply influential in early electronic music and hugely involved with the push to have synthesizers seen as real instruments.
These heartbreaking and incredibly moving images show the affection and love shown during the height of the Aids crisis. Photographer Gideon Mendel’s project The Ward began in 1993 when he spent a number of weeks on the Charles Bell wards in London’s Middlesex Hospital. All the patients on the ward were dying with the knowledge that there was no cure for the disease. During this time antiretroviral medications were not available and patients on the ward faced the prospect of an early death.
Another memorialization of this time is the documentary Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End (1996). I saw this very moving documentary a couple of years ago on youtube, but now it looks like it’s been taken down.
Along with the tears it left me in, it renewed my sense of the magnitude of the losses of the AIDS crisis. It’s also serves as a reminder of the lethal consequences of intolerance. Instead of marshaling public resources to address this public health emergency the Reagan administration treated these people as disposable subjects. Do a little reading and you can even find anecdotes that celebrated the deadly scythe of AIDS as a just punishment for deviance.
“Go without hate, but not without rage; heal the world.”
please take the time to remember every member of our community who was lost from aids. our government did nothing to save them. our schools do nothing to remember them. an entire generation of lgbt culture and history has been lost, the generation just before our own. remember them when people ask why theres suddenly so many lgbt kids in this generation. we’ve always been here. we cant be stomped out. we will remember our roots and by doing so we can keep those we have lost alive.
His “broodingly handsome”[2] good looks and typecasting as a sexually dominant villain made him a heartthrob among American women during a time of racial discrimination, and he became one of the first male sex symbols of Hollywood.[3][4][5]
Hayakawa’s popularity and sex appeal (“his most rabid fan base was white women”)[7] unsettled many segments of American society which were filled with feelings of the Yellow Peril. With multiple World Wars taking place throughout his career, and rising anti-Asian sentiment in the United States, the types of roles that he usually played were gradually “taken over by other actors who were not as threatening as Hayakawa in terms of race and sex”.[8]
The above photograph shows a tube containing a small piece of William Burke’s brain,
a criminal hanged in 1829 for murdering 16 people along with his accomplice, William Hare. The corpses of their victims were sold by Burke and Hare to Dr Robert Knox, a renowned professor in anatomy at the time who was aware of the illegal proceedings, as dissection material for his well-attended lectures. A popular rhyme was derived in remembrance of these crimes: ‘Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief, Knox the boy who buys the beef.’
nothing 