FuckReagan

They did the same shit with covid. Trump admin was preventing blue states from prepairing and securing PPE. They wanted it to ravage large cities

Just shows how fucking dumb he is. At least old Ronnie had the excuse when aids wasn't understood very well that it looked like it would mostly stay in the gay communities. An evil calculation on his part (or at least on Nancy's, depending on what stage of dementia he had at the time), but not dumb given the facts.
Fucking shitbrain mchamberders saw a highly infectious disease and figured "yeah, that'll probably never affect my cult. Now I'm gonna spread and amplify anti mask propaganda."
- *Nancy's psychic

This is all worded in the past-tense, which is a mistake. They did celebrate it in the past, but they also still celebrate it today, as long as it only affects "teh gayz".

I grew up in a very right-wing environment, and the amount of people who got mad only because it was spreading to straight people was insane.

There's an alternate history in which conservatives realized how disproportionately PoC and low-income folks were dying of COVID and decided to get on the "Stop these people from getting the vaccine at all costs!" bandwagon way earlier.

A lot of RFK Jr's current leadership of HHS is looking exactly like this kind of eugenics program. Find everyone who is autistic. Find everyone with a physical or learning disability. Find anyone who is LGBTQ or otherwise neuro-divergent. Find everyone with congenital health issues. Find the wrong kind of pregnant women. Find everyone who "looks unhealthy" (aka "unfuckable"). Tag them. Deny them any kind of care. Sick the police on them if they try to access it. Blacklist them from any kind of gainful employment. Other them. Get rid of them.

i'm in statesia and spent the last 7 years trying to get on a specific noncontrolled prescription medication. because of a complicated medical history, it's taken that long to find someone who will change my prescriptions.

It actually affected LGBTQ more? I thought that was a myth...

It doesn't, in general, affect gay people more; everyone is susceptible to HIV. The idea that it specifically targets gay people is, indeed, a myth.
But it first cropped up in the gay community and, since gay people – generally – aren't having sex with non-gay people, it spread in the gay community first and affected that community first.
It's more about the material, historical events playing out in that particular order than anything specific to gay people.
- Gay people also weren't using condoms at the time, unlike straight people trying to avoid pregnancy
- I think it's that HIV is most transmittable to the receptive partner in anal sex. Since (some) gay men switch they can contract it bottoming and transmit it to a subsequent partner when topping.
- Gay men had lots of unprotected anal sex with frequently changing partners, both of which raise the risk of getting HIV substantially.
The disease impacting LGBTQ more? I can't say that for sure one way or another. It's unlikely. But the utter lack of work around AIDS was due to a general belief that it was specific to the LGBTQ community, more specifically gay men.
When AIDS was first being discovered it had a completely different name. GRID. Now, AIDS stands for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome so what does GRID stand for? Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. From the very fucking birth of AIDS, it was seen in an homophobic lens. Due to that believe, both research/work done into it was considered a low priority as well as warning other groups.
But another impact of it being believed to be a gay disease was that gay men were overwhelmingly the early pushers of looking into it. Gay Mens Health Crisis was established in 1982, if I remember correctly, because no one else was doing fuckin anything. Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (another gay activist group) also started publishing the first ever pamphlets about AIDS too, pushing safe sex, and even started hooking up the first AIDS fundraisers also in 1982.
Like... there was no information out there about the disease in the early days that weren't made by someone in or connected to the LGBTQ community. Literally fucking none. Not to downplay the work that PoC communities had to do as well. AIDS wasn't just the "gay" disease, for a long time it was the "white gay" disease. Yet the fuck again, PoC communities were left to dry and had to start their own activist groups to distribute information internally about the fact that, no, the virus doesn't care about your skin color.
I highly recommend looking into both the lives and works of Michael Callen, Larry Kramer and Edmund White (who very recently passed away) who more or less defined the early push for awareness of AIDS and the dangers therin. Not alone, not by any means, but it's a good place to start and even just being aware of one of them will really shock you.
They say like we stand on the shoulders of giants. It's true. Those men (and so many more) are giants and we owe them everything. But they stand on a mountain of corpses made from indifference and hatred.
- Sure fuck Reagan but I'm honestly bewildered at the...creative...rewriting of history in your comment.
  The CDC received just 5 reports between October of 1980 and May of 1981 (7 months) and then published it's first article about it in June of 1981. On September 15th of '81 the CDC held its first conference on the issue, barely 90 days after it published its first paper.
  In April of 1982 US Representative Henry Waxman sponsors a public conference on the issue. The NYT is the one that popularizes the term "GRID" in it's article from May 5th of 1982. but the CDC re-names it on September 24th of 1982.
  On September 28th of 1982 Rep. Phillip Burton and Rep. Ted Weiss introduced the first Federal Legislation to directly fund AIDS research.
  Like… there was no information out there about the disease in the early days that weren’t made by someone in or connected to the LGBTQ community. Literally fucking none.
  This is literally not true. By the end of 1982, which was very early days for AIDS in the United States, the CDC had already punched out numerous papers, sponsored conferences, and correctly named the disease. The CDC and the NIH kept doing those things too.
  There's so much history and work missing from your comment that I don't have the time to go through it alll -BUT- you can find out for yourself by going to timeline section of the HIV.GOV website. There you can go through the years and find the links to newspaper articles, the CDC & NIH Studies, the conferences, and all the rest.
  Was Reagan a massive shitball on this issue? Yes, absolutely no question. Did America do enough to help people? No it did not.
  Were people outside the LGBTQ community working on the problem from the early days? Unquestionably they were and the history is there to prove it.
I believe it does spread more easily through unprotected anal sex than through vaginal sex, as with most things.
And it certainly hit the gay community first.
- Yup. Something to do with the lining of the rectum absorbing things easier than the vagina.
stds on the whole are most easily spread through unprotected anal sex. especially those spread through blood and other fluids. there was also the difficulty of safely having a long term gay relationship at the time among other factors that led to gay men trending to have more hookups than most demographics.
it's not that aids targeted gay people, it's just that gay men In that era were more susceptible to stds in general. this was just the first time it started killing people en masse. and, as obvious as it may seem now to wear a condom, at the time we didn't have the research to tell us how it actually spread or that a contraceptive could stop it. when you think of the condom as a tool to stop pregnancy it's hard to reframe that as a tool for gay men to be safe. especially since it makes sex feel less intense. the government certainly wasn't interested in studying it to figure that out.
as far as I understand that's all that really changed too. we learned how it spreads and some basic tools and techniques we can use to mitigate that spread. it's still a terrible disease, but that alone brought it from genocidal to what it is today. still dangerous, of course, but not killing people by the millions.
It primarily spread among people who had unprotected sex, anal sex, and promiscuous sex as well as people who shared needles. That last bit is irrelevant here but the first three sums up a good portion of fhe gay male community in the late 70s. If there's no pregnancy and no sex Ed talking about disease why bother with protection. Promiscuity was common by cultural norm. And anal is self explanatory, gay men notoriously have idiosyncratically particular sex.
It wasn't just gay men, trans women (of the culturally gay male variety, the stealth hets and culturally lesbian ones fared like our communities) and bi men were dropping like flies for similar reasons. It spread to lesbians who believed ourselves immune and promptly blamed the bisexuals, the sluts, and the leatherwomen. IV drug users were dying too and straight promiscuous people were dealing with it as well.
Today it doesn't affect us more. When nobody cared we learned. These days last I checked we had lower rates of hiv than the general population
First times I heard about prominent people dying from it were Rock Hudson and Freddy Mercury. 2x gay men. N=2 says yes.
- Weird. Since it's a STD, you'd think straight people fuck too.

Reagan was the worst president the usa ever had. But then came Bush, and W.Bush after him and we were all like, this is the lowest this country could ever go. Then... they fucking elected a pedophile babyllionaire to be the people's person and he tried to break the world and destroy the US democracy but in the end they managed to get rid of him. We were all thinking, maybe this world has a small chance after all. And then the americans said fuck you world, we will never elect a black women we'd rather have a full blown fascist oligarchy haha. Take that libs, it's call american exceptionalism, we'll never live in a country were you have free healthcare and the kids don't risk to get shot at school, you stupid socialist. So yeah, Reagan almost seem like a nice guy in the end.

plenty of straight natives make the wording of his last point incorrect

Asking as a straight man that does not go to very many celebrations. Period.

Has anyone ever been to a pride parade that is like.. an actual parade? Not just a super inconveniencing lgbtq themed county fair set up in the middle of a city?

They're typically both. Also it's not that inconveniencing to drive up a different street for a couple weeks. The majority of the places closed down due to the celebrations are in the village anyway where if you live there that's just a part of life. The parades do happen but it's just over the course of one or two days. Usually one MASSIVE parade with a couple of smaller ancillary ones.
- Uh, it is — but I would say that about any event that causes me to take a different route. I think the only exception for me would be protests, I hope I don't need to detail which protests.
  Like I'm not going to go out of my way to stop pride events/parades. My girlfriend is bi, she's actually the only reason this is something I even think about. I think it would actually be pretty cool to see a big parade with floats and celebrations, on a weekend when I don't have to go to work.
  Edit: also, the events where I live are mostly downtown — it's not contained in midtown or whatever the village equivalent in a city would be.
Yes. Boston, MA Pride is an actual parade, set up many months in advance with all sorts of organizations participating with floats/banners.
- Same with Seattle. It's an actual parade, but also with plenty of local buisnesses participating and various booths/etc.
- That's cool, I wish that they would do that here — it'd be much better to observe a moving parade with big floats and stuff rather than it just being a line of vendors and food trucks. Though I get why it's difficult.
The pride parade in my city in Florida was an actual parade too. They had floats, banners, a bunch of LGBT friendly churches, even a band. There was also a rainbow county fair of course, but yeah the parade was a parade
- That's cool, maybe I've just gone on the wrong days? I'll have to give it some more thought.
https://pride.amsterdam/en/event/canal-parade/
Literal parade... but boats!
- Ok I have to avoid saying 'that's cool', but yeah pride parades seem like a ton of fun.