Quotes about aids
Timothy Conigrave - Holding the Man
You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned. I miss you terribly. Ci vedremo lassu, angelo.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Some people have contracted HIV during their separate endeavours to give someone or some people a curable STD.
Enock Maregesi -
Kuamini (mbali na imani, ambayo ni nia ya kujua kisichoweza kujulikana) ni kwa ajili ya vitu usivyoweza kuvielezea. Unaamini kwamba siku moja dawa ya UKIMWI au saratani itapatikana mahali fulani, ilhali huwezi kufanya majaribio ya kisayansi kulithibitisha hilo. Unaweza kusubiri hata miaka mia, lakini kama bado dawa haijapatikana, unaweza kusubiri hata miaka mingine mia. Kuamini ni kujifanya kujua (na mara nyingi kujifanya kujua ni uongo) na kuamini hakuhitaji maarifa. Kujua kunahitaji maarifa na
Mark Doty - Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space, and walked without hesitating to the altar I hadn’t consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why
Mark Doty - Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’r
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Some women would not have contracted an STD or STDs had they not been on the pill.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
AIDS would have claimed fewer lives if we had publicly recommended what I wish to call ‘The Presumption of Sickness,’ i.e., the principle that whomever we are about to sleep with is HIV-positive until proven HIV-negative.
Stephen Lewis -
One is that if women’s sexuality in Africa wasn’t under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren’t subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have a disease in Africa called AIDS. But you wouldn’t have a pandemic.
Oche Otorkpa -
Globally, millions of married men and women engage the servicesof sex workers each year. Despite growing health concerns aboutthe increased risk of STDs and HIV AIDS this trade continues toblossom, leading to the premature termination of several lives andthe dissolution of several marriages.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
With regards to getting laid and getting AIDS: Being interesting can be an interesting guy’s downfall.
Bret Easton Ellis -
What you need is a chick from Camden,' Van Patten says, after recovering from McDermott's statement.Oh great,' I say. 'Some chick who thinks it's okay to fuck her brother.'Yeah, but they think AIDS is a new band from England,' Price points out.Where's dinner?' Van Patten asks, absently studying the question scrawled on his napkin. 'Where the fuck are we going?'It's really funny that girls think guys are concerned with that, with diseases and stuff,' Van Patten says, shaking his head.I'm not gonn
David Foster Wallace - Both Flesh and Not: Essays
Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, to erect bridges across the chasms that separate selves. Sexuality is, finally, about imagination. Thanks to brave people's recognition of AIDS as a fact of life, we are beginning to realize that highly charged sex can take place in all sorts of ways we'd forgotten or neglected—in a conversational nuance; in a body's posture, a certain pressure in a held hand. Sex can be everywhere we are, all the
Mark Doty - Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin…The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don’t know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers.
Agnostic Zetetic -
I could go into their reality any time I chose to, but they could never come into mine. This is what I called 'helping' them.
Agnostic Zetetic -
We’re all just people making decisions and accepting consequences as we march toward an impending and inevitable death.
David Levithan - Two Boys Kissing
What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease [AIDS] had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.
Nicholas D. Kristof -
Conservatives, who have presumed that the key to preventing AIDS is abstinence-only education, and liberals, who have focused on distribution of condoms, should both note that the intervention that has tested most cost-effective in Africa is neither... Secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Some men would not still be HIV negative or alive, if they had managed to sleep with some of the women with whom they want or wanted to have sex.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Not everyone who has killed themselves because they were HIV positive would have been killed by AIDS.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana -
Being HIV positive doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to die before each and every person who is HIV negative.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay
It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay
Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay
A man cannot really be called (sexually) confident if he has never bought his woman a vibrator.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay
Some men do not know the father of 'their' children.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay
The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay
Some people are so sexually unattractive that the thought of masturbating turns them off.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay
Coco Chanel is said to have said that a girl should be two things: who and what she is. I say a girl should do two things: what and who she wants.
Tracy Hickman - The Immortals
[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer - if the information they base that decision on is wrong. People don't want the truth [when] it is complicated. They don't want to spend years debating an issue. They want it homogenized, sanitized, and above all, simplified into terms they can understand...Governments are often criticized for moving slowly, but that deliberateness, it
Keith Haring - Keith Haring Journals
There is one question George is asked about life and art and which is more important, and George said art is more important because it is immortal. This struck a very deep note inside me. For I am quite aware of the chance that I have or will have AIDS. The odds are very great and, in fact, the symptoms already exist. My friends are dropping like flies and I know in my heart that it is only divine intervention that has kept me alive this long. I don’t know if I have five months or five years, bu
Agnostic Zetetic -
May we each find in ourselves the courage we forgot we have, to see the beauty we forgot is inside us, while battling the demons we forgot we can slay, on a battlefield we forgot we can win.
Deanna Lynn Sletten - Whore
Darla shook her head, a small smirk on her lips. “You’re such a mom,” she told Katherine.Katherine stared at her, puzzled. “You’re a mom, too,” she said softly.“No, I gave birth. That doesn’t make me a mom. Not like you.”A look passed between the two women like none they had ever shared before. For a split second, Katherine felt a slight connection. “Well, you rest. I’ll check on you later.” She turned and left the room, a funny, unexplainable feeling inside her.
Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone
Kind of gay? I wanted to say. Do you have any notion how many homosexuals sweated their ass off on the dance floor to make this soaring bit of derivative trash possible? How many died of AIDS, OD'd, or went broke on the way to that girl from Texas cutting a deal...
Alysia Abbott - Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.
Alysia Abbott - Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservative against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indifference of President Ronald Reagan, who wouldn’t publicly address the epidemic until the end of his second term, after twenty thousand Americans had died, and the hostile rhetoric of conservatives close to Reagan like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s future spee
Alysia Abbott - Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
Of course, it’s now obvious why he was so angry that day. People don’t move into hospice to live but to die. And that half an egg sandwich I ended up making him–that sandwich was the last meal he ate in our Haight-Ashbury apartment, our one true home.
David C. Alves - We're the sons of God. . .So What?: Believe God About Who You Really Are!
Disciples of Jesus Christ have had a profound life-altering experience. They have encountered a supernatural personality, revealed in history as Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, the Messiah. And they have discovered the meaning and purpose of their lives in the subsequent revelation of his continuing presence to them. The experience demands a faithful, reliable witness.What would public opinion say of a person who discovered the absolute cure for AIDS, but was unwilling to share that cur
Christina Engela - Inanna Rising: Women Forged in Fire
Is the drive to refuse gay blood a fear of contracting HIV/AIDS, or is it an embodiment of the irrational fear that receiving blood from gay people will somehow make them gay?
Paul Russell - The Coming Storm
Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?
Carol Rifka Brunt - Tell the Wolves I'm Home
They segued into a more general piece about AIDS. As usual, they started out with footage of some kind of sweaty nightclub in the city with a bunch of gay men dancing around in stupid leather outfits. I couldn't even begin to imagine Finn dancing the night away like some kind of half-dressed cowboy. It would have been nice if for once they show some guys sitting in their living rooms drinking tea and talking about art or movies or something. If they showed that, then maybe people would say, "Oh,
David Levithan - Two Boys Kissing
Stupid arbitrary shit means it will take a movie star to die and a hemophiliac teenager to die before ordinary people start to mobilize, start to feel that the disease needs to be stopped. Tens of thousands of people will die before drugs are made and drugs are approved. What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of
Oche Otorkpa - The Unseen Terrorist
The stigmatization and the excruciating pains of social alienationhave compelled most victims to conceal their status while themalevolent ones continue to distribute the virus free of charge tounsuspecting men and women
Oche Otorkpa - The Unseen Terrorist
HIV is free, why pay for it
Anomymous pastor and myself -
(Note: I realize this is horrifying. Just keep reading.) "Turn to Leviticus 20:13, because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS. If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them. And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS. It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you
Rabih Alameddine - The Angel of History
...I wondered at times whether I would wake up and this would be just a bad dream, a nightmare that I could wish away, I had the same fantasy when you were sick, Doc, that I would one day wake up and you all would be healthy and alive.
Harold Brodkey - This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death
For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time
David Levithan - Two Boys Kissing
Look, look, we tell each other. It's Tom!He's Mr. Bellamy to his history students. But he's Tom to us. Tom! It's so good to see him. So wonderful to see him. Tom is one of us. Tom went through it all with us. Tom made it through. He was there in the hospital with so many of us, the archangel of St. Vincent's, our healthier version, prodding the doctors and calling over the nurses and holding our hands and holding the hands of our partners, our parents, our little sisters - anyone who had a hand
Deanna Lynn Sletten - Whore
Are you afraid of dying?" "I was at first, maybe I still am a little bit. But it's not death that scares me so much as not being alive anymore. It's missing all the things that I would have seen if I hadn't gotten AIDS. Things like my daughter's graduation, her wedding, my grandchildren. I'll never see those things, and that makes me sad.
David J. Cooper - The Party's Over
His life was a party which tragically came to an early end.
Stephen Richards - Scottish Hard Bastards
Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.
Tom Cardamone - Pacific Rimming
Colonel Sanders as played by Hot Daddy Harrison Ford, cracking the whip on some island plantation, topping every native boy, stopping only long enough to enjoy a refreshing Coca Cola. Because every white guy is a blonde, Aryan top. All of us are the Christian Soldiers of Capitalism that flew TWA into your country, depositing AIDs in your brothels and IMF loans in your banks.
Mark Doty - Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
And I was cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option.
Andrea Walker -
Life lessons build strength, and life is truly A Beautiful Struggle
Agnostic Zetetic -
Fighting makes us feel alive, until it kills us. If it doesn’t kill us, the pain of sitting alone with ourselves, quietly, under constant assault by our own thoughts and memories of war can easily be enough to make us wish we’d died in battle instead.
Tracy Hickman - The Immortals
[A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened me. "Do you really want to write a book about homosexuals?" they asked me. "Won't people who read your work be influenced toward sin?"I notice that I don't hear from them much lately.
David Cronenberg - Consumed
Everything changed after AIDS,” Dr. Molnár had just explained to him. “From then on, blood was more dangerous than shit.
Susan Sontag - Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors
The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors
Neil Gaiman - The Kindly Ones
It must be a real betrayal, when your body turns against you. I wonder if she likes flowers. All the bits of you that can go wrong...I don't like flowers, not really. I like growing them, but that's only because I like seeing them blossom, and seeing them
J'son M. Lee - One Family's AIDS
Shame is the demon that keeps many of us trapped in our pain healing comes when we gain the courage to confront our demon(s).
Stephen Greco -
And we went through AIDS... which was as good a course in mortality as anyone is likely to get, short of war.
James C. Dobson - Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
If we conform our behavior to God’s ancient moral prescription, we are entitled to the sweet benefits of life. But if we defy its imperatives, then death is the inevitable consequence. AIDS is only one avenue by which sickness and death befall those who play Russian roulette with God’s eternal moral law.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay
Some women do not masturbate for pleasure they masturbate to make a political statement: to remind us that women do not really need men (or at least not as much and as frequently as every single male chauvinist and every single misogynist believes).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana - On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay
Most if not all sexually active people do not really love having sex they merely love experiencing an orgasm every now and then.
Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosom
Deborah B. Gould - Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP's Fight against AIDS
To engage in activism that envisions alternatives ways of organizing society and alternative ways of being is to risk membership in society, a sense of belonging, however partial it may be. Activism can make us vulnerable because it is so obviously about wanting something beyond what is, and to have a political desire often is construed as wanting too much.
Edmund White -
AIDS had won gays sympathy they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s.
Jessica Verdi - My Life After Now
That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death.
Stephen Lewis -
And there’s one other matter I must raise. The epidemic of domestic sexual violence that lacerates the soul of South Africa is mirrored in the pattern of grotesque raping in areas of outright conflict from Darfur to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in areas of contested electoral turbulence from Kenya to Zimbabwe. Inevitably, a certain percentage of the rapes transmits the AIDS virus. We don’t know how high that percentage is. We know only that women are subjected to the most dreadful d
Chris Crutcher - King of the Mild Frontier: An Ill-Advised Autobiography
Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving.... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay alive.
James C. Dobson - Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
If we conform our behavior to God’s ancient moral prescription, we are entitled to the sweet benefits of life. But if we defy its imperatives, then death is the inevitable consequence. AIDS is only one avenue by which sickness and death befall those who play Russian roulette with God’s eternal moral law.
Jessica Verdi - My Life After Now
Listen, I wanted to say, I don't need your judgment, okay? I have enough to deal with without you contributing, so can we just get on with this so I can get out of here?But I couldn't form the words. Dr. Johnson viewed me as a child, and somehow, under his contemptuous gaze, I had regressed to one. I was frightened and shy, and it was all I could do to answer his questions and count the seconds until the end of the visit.
Josh Sundquist - and Made It Down the Mountain
I kiss [her] even though I know that if you kiss a girl before you are married to her you might get AIDS.
Alysia Abbott - Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
In late 1985, the Reagan White House blocked the use of CDC money for education, leaving the US behind other Western nations in telling its citizens how to avoid contracting the virus. Many Americans still thought you could get AIDS from a toilet seat or a glass of water. According to one poll, the majority of Americans supported quarantining AIDS patients.This heightened awareness set off waves of anxiety across the country, which was often express through jokes (Q: What do you call Rock Hudson