#ruth coker burk

[sixbucks]

Found this via the amazing Ruth Coker Burks.

I would do this for you.

My askhole is open if you want to say hi.

Ruth’s Facebook.

#Ruth Coker Burks #we can do this #women helping women #domestic abuse

[arse-blathanna]

When all the library books come off hold on libby at the same time but you use the kindle airplane mode exploit to keep them for as long as you want 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌

#picked up five books really looking forward to reading chuck tingle camp damascus and then ugly crying over ruth coker burks

[26lettersandmanyjourneys]

23.05.2022

I'm pretty sure this memoir is going to break my heart, but it will be worth it

#26lettersandmanyjourneys #books #reading update #pic #all the young men #ruth coker burks #kevin carr o'leary

[queerliblib]

Doing what we do best on this World AIDS Day: sharing stories that need to be heard.

“All the Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South” by Ruth Coker Burks and Kevin Carr O’Leary.

“How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS” by David France.

“Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP" New York, 1987-1993” by Sarah Schulman.

♥️

#world AIDS day #you can find all of these in our collection

[morhath]

Oh I’m very very interested in your nonfiction book recs 👀

EDIT: ykw I'm gonna make this a little more organized

I listed a bunch in this post (the last question) but lemme see if I have any additions because I know I was kinda trying to keep it short when I wrote that. (But that being said, that post is the Top Faves Of All Time, so go for those first.)

Freaky medical shit I also liked:

The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years by Sonia Shah

The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase (I just read this a few weeks ago and OOUUUGGHHHHHH IT'S LITERALLY JUST. LIKE THE RESPONSE TO COVID.)

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

Political shit I also liked:

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher

Immigrants, Evangelicals, and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change by Janelle S. Wong

History I also liked:

Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle

The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives by Bryant Simon (between those two you can tell I was on a bit of a "workplace tragedies caused by lax regulations and bad management" kick)

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore (I think everyone knows about this book, including it for completeness)

Promised the Moon: The Untold Story Of The First Women In The Space Race by Stephanie Nolen

The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke (this is nowhere near as fun and cute as you'd assume from the title)

Memoirs I also liked:

The Less People Know About Us: A Mystery of Betrayal, Family Secrets, and Stolen Identity by Axton Betz-Hamilton (I read this before I really got into nonfiction and it was WILD, I tell people about it all the time)

The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (this one is a graphic not-novel-I-guess-memoir)

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

Other:

Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud by Elizabeth Greenwood

A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America by Ken Armstrong, T. Christian Miller

Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food by Lenore Newman

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror by Joe Vallese

AND here are a few on my TBR that I'm really excited for! I decided not to categorize them because they're almost all history:

Silk and Potatoes: Contemporary Arthurian Fantasy by Adam Roberts

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. Brown

All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara by David I. Kertzer (I am actually partway through this right now but in a bit of a dry/confusing section)

The Broadcast 41: Women and the Anti-Communist Blacklist by Carol A. Stabile

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell (have just barely started this)

Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518 by John Waller

The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyŏng: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea by Lady Hyegyeong

Miss Major Speaks: The Life and Times of a Black Trans Revolutionary by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste by William M. Alley, Rosemarie Alley (I'm in the middle of this but it's surprisingly, um. not exciting.)

Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames

Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It by Joslyn Brenton, Sinikka Elliott, Sarah Bowen

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel

Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Medieval Gentlewoman: Life in a Gentry Household in the Later Middle Ages by Ffiona Swabey

Hitler's First Victims: The Beginning of the Holocaust and One Man's Fight to End It by Timothy W. Ryback

I am soso normal and have very normal interests that are not at all grim :)

#long post #life #reading #books #tempestclerics #my book recs

[tilting-at-windmills]

The incredibly talented Bonj made a stop motion video to a poem I did in honor of Ruth Coker Burks

#poetry #writing #mine #stop motion animation #collaborative art

[fandomfluffandfuck]

https://www.tumblr.com/fandomfluffandfuck/732381591802888192/speak-chapter-3-has-my-entire-god-damn-fucking?source=share

back after reading chapter 4, and oh my god. i actually read it yesterday itself but I was so emotionally fragile after reading it I couldn't bring myself to put anything into words. Still can't tbh. just know that my pillow has a giant tear stain.

I'm not American, so I didn't get to know about the AIDS crisis for a long time, because people talk about it even less over here than America. And firstly even i was like Bucky, knew the facts, was pretty oblivious to the people.

I read this book though, maybe you might like it as well - All The Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks. It's about the author being a single mom in the midst of the AIDS crisis in her southern town. She starts out by helping one dying man in a hospital where no one would care for him, and then as she helps more and more men she forges more relationships with the men and writes about what happened to them.

I cried when I first read it because it brought all of that right in front of my eyes. And yesterday was something like that again.

https://www.tumblr.com/fandomfluffandfuck/732383639349919744/lmao-perhaps-personally-for-unrelated-oral?source=share

Thank you for all the advice!!! And yep i think even if I read a lot of smutty stuff I have those internal biases at the back of my mind.

like how when I first read fics I used to find replace all mentions of dick with some euphemism because I was so scared to read it lmao. even now, when I read daddy I have an instinct to just laugh, then I reign myself in and bonk it into my head that it's not funny.

I do think it's part inexperience as well (never had sex, and don't want to in the future as well) so all my sex emotions knowledge is from fanfics. which might make my writing very saturated fanfic-ish but I'll roll with it to atleast get the ball rolling on writing.

if I manage to write anything (probably just couple of paragraphs) soon I'll send!

Hope you have an awesome day! 🤍

— 🔪 anon

related to this

Aw, well, thank you so much for saying some words. Just reading is incredible, but hearing from people what they think will always be so incredibly special <3, especially with more emotional chapters like the latest update!

Oh, yeah, I can't imagine how little people learn about it from outside the US, which sort of makes sense. It was a US based event at first, but AIDs affects everywhere, so... yeah.

Oooh, I haven't read that book, but it sounds really interesting in a oh-that-will-certaintly-break-my-heart way. Thank you for the recommendation!

My apologies for making you cry <3

related to this

Of course! I'm glad you got something out of my waffling, lmao.

Lmao, I love that. I feel like so many people begin there. And, hey, some people still are there with Daddy kink. Which, yeah, fair. It can be funny.

Ah, yeah, I could see that affecting your writing as well. I will say, though, many of the ace people I've meant are actually the filthiest fucking people, lmao. Perfect. I love it. Hey, if your fanfiction is fanfic-ish, then it just blends in well, lol 😘

That sounds great! I'd be happy to read anything you write! Happy writing!

#asks #🔪 anon #I'm imagining you writing a lot of consumption-esque smut 😏 #fanfiction #writing #aids crisis

[soberscientistlife]

In 1984, when Burks was 25 and a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend who had cancer. During one visit, she noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), later known as AIDS. On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Burks decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room. In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told her he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, "Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming”. Burks called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a "sinner" and already dead to her, and that she wouldn't even claim his body when he died. “I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, "Oh, momma. I knew you’d come", and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, "I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Burks later recounted. She pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him, and held his hand until he died 13 hours later. After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Burks buried his ashes on her family's large plot in Files Cemetery.

After this first encounter, Burks cared for other patients who needed her help. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them. Burks work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, "They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here'd come the money... That's how we'd buy medicine, that's how we'd pay rent. If it hadn't been for the drag queens, I don't know what we would have done", she said.

Over the next 30 years (with assistance from her daughter) Burks cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family's plot (most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes). For this, she has been nicknamed the 'Cemetery Angel'.

“Someday, I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved, and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died” - Ruth Coker Burks

My mother visited UAMS AIDS patients against orders to not enter the room. She learned everything she could about AIDS and she became a lay minister for the terminally ill. My mom was such a beautiful soul.

🏳️‍🌈 #30GaysOfPride #Stonewall50 #WherePrideBegan 🏳️‍🌈

[morosexualharrow]

I've been doing a lot of research into the AIDs crisis because I am writing a video essay I plan to release on December First for which I've now conducted multiple hours of interviews with survivors and people directly impacted by the Ruth Coker Burks Lie and this interview with Tammy Faye Messner and Steve Pieters is, I think, genuinely one of the most amazing time capsules we have of this era. Not just because of how cute Tammy Faye is during their proto-zoom call but because Steve Pieters had an absolutely impossible job in this interview: humanizing both gay people and people who were HIV+ to a demographic that was very unlikely to have ever directly heard from one before. He's amazing. The pure Gay Mr. Rogers energy he exudes through this entire clip, his quick, endearing disarming of Tammy's clumsy questioning about things that conservatives still clutch their pearls about today, like gay parents adopting children. He is so patient and charming and endearing throughout. Sincerely a national treasure, we're so lucky that he survived as many more years as he did but what a goddamn loss.

#Steve Pieters #Tammy Faye Messner #aids crisis #Youtube

[bunnyreading]

Day 3 of Pride recommendations:

All The Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks & Kevin Carr O'Leary

Genre: Nonfic & memoir

Ruth Coker Burks is a living legend & amazing ally and I wish everyone knew about her.

She was a single mother in Hot Springs, Arkansas and was visiting her friend in the hospital when she noticed a room not even the nurses were going in. They were leaving food outside the room, so she brought it into the patient. What she found was a young man dying of AIDS, asking for his mother. Ruth sat with him until he died, tried to get into contact with his mother, and when she refused contact, Ruth ended up with the young man's ashes, which she buried in her family's cemetery.

After that, the hospitals in her area started giving her contact information to people they didn't want, and Ruth looked after those people. She brought them food, got them wellfare, housing, took them to their appointments, and, if nobody else would take them, she buried them in her family's plots.

Ruth is an incredible ally to the community and I implore you to read her memoir.

#bookblr #books #reading #bookish #queer books #pride month

[ishipitpod]

Will Byers, the Charlie Brown of Hawkins, IN, deserves better than Mike Wheeler. We said what we said.

Mia (@that-wimpy-cowboy-doll) returns for our first episode on opposite coasts (Omigod, guys. THE SADNESS.) to talk about some new MCU disappointment, history of the AIDS crisis, and Emily's new obsession: Stranger Things.

Specifically how Stranger Things is getting their depiction of teenaged homosexuality in 1986 sadly, truly, right. Join us for some good ol' fashioned salt mining, giggling about the shared brain cell of Steve and Robin's epic friendship, and a long and winding list of all the reasons Will Byers is too good for the world he inhabits.

Book Rec: All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks

Fics:

--How your heart beats when you run for cover by fragilethings:

-- i need you closer, and you're not even an inch away by esperastra:

-- Video Killed the Radio Star by DiscoSuperFly:

#stranger things #will byers #aids crisis #doctor strange #spoilers #podcast

[sheshallfromtimetotime]

Tagged by @polyproticamory. Thanks!

Rules: spell out either your name or username using only books or only movies that have your vibe, and tag some people.

I did books ‘cause I thought that’d be easier than movies, but wow, that was still hard. I was literally digging through my old reading lists and googling books that started with h and e to try to jog my memory of what I’ve read and resonated with. It’s absurdly long, took forever to do, and there are so many repeated letters, but.... ta da!

Tagging @pendragyn, @catalynmj1015, @froglady-15, @meldanya44 and whoever the hell else wants to give it a shot.

S - Squire by Tamora Pierce

H - Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

E - Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

S - Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

H - The Hours by Michael Cunningham

A - All The Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks with Kevin Carr O’Leary

L - Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

L - Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce

F - Fleabag: The Scriptures by Phoebe Waller-Bridge

R - Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

O - One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

M - My Own Devices by Dessa

T - Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert

I - I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay? by Naomi Shihab Nye

M - Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl From Somewhere Else by Maeve Higgins

E - Endgame by Samuel Beckett

T - To Be Taught, If Fortunate - Becky Chambers

O - Object Lessons by Eavan Boland

T - The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

I - [Insert] Boy by Danez Smith

M - A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

E - Emperor Mage - Tamora Pierce

#thanks! #polyproticamory #tag meme #books

[bensbooks]

TBR Highlight: All The Young Men

In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth Coker Burks visits a friend in hospital when she notices that the door to one of the patient's rooms is painted red. The nurses are reluctant to enter, drawing straws to decide who will tend to the sick person inside. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. And in doing so, Ruth's own life changes forever.

As word spreads in the community that she is the only person willing to help the young men afflicted by the growing AIDS crisis, Ruth goes from being an ordinary young mother to an accidental activist. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis, and in doing so becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of society.

#books #booklr #bookblr #tbr highlight

[prettylittlelyres]

2023 - My Year in Writing

Hello, friends! Happy New Year to all of you!

I hope 2024 is fabulous and fun... but also very calm and soothing, even if it needs to be a little bit boring. I think most of us need a slightly boring year after whatever mess 2023 was. All I see - all over the internet - today are posts about how 2023 was a giant mess for nearly everyone, and while that makes me feel less alone, it also makes me a little sad for everyone else who had trouble with it.

I am sure 2024 will be better, because, for goodness sake, it can't get worse. And, on the bright side, the Gävlebocken (Gävle Goat) has been gobbled up by jackdaws, and I firmly believe that to be a good omen. May 2024 bring us abundance as the goat brought abundance to the birds of Gävle. (We derve some tasty abundance.)

But, with the start of a new year comes the end of an old one, and that means it's time for me to write about all the writing I did in 2023.

This was the year I tried to be kind to myself, and I certainly succeeded in that. I'm proud of the leeway I have given myself this year, and - perhaps ironically - I have achieved more because of it. Letting myself work without pressure has always been difficult for me, but I think I finally learnt to do it in 2023.

So, here's what I did.

The best thing I did was start joining in with the writers' Discord server I joined last year. I lurked for a long time, never really piping up in the group chats, because I never really felt like I had anything to say. I didn't write anything like as much in 2022 as I wanted to (would you believe I started the year with a bullet journal page covered in New Year's Resolutions for Writing that included "finish redrafting 2 novels", "write 2 novels from scratch" and "plot another 2 novels"?) and I was upset with myself about it. At the end of 2022, I found out that I'd been quite ill for a while, and started getting better, and I decided I'd be kinder to myself from the start of 2023.

So, whenever I wrote anything, I mentioned it in the group chat where we share our daily wordcounts and achievements (no matter how "small", they are all worth celebrating), and started chatting to the other writers here and there. We had meetups on Zoom, and communal sprints on Twitch that really helped me get back into the swing of writing happily in January and February. I started to feel like a proper writer again, like part of a real community, and I can't quite express how thankful I am to the server for helping me get that feeling back.

I got 78,000 words written in the first 2 months of the year, mostly working on a character study for a story that I've put on hold until I can work out exactly what I want to happen to its characters. I've explored how they'd behave in certain situations, and thrown problems at them to see how they cope (badly!). But a story needs a storyline, and that storyline needs to be coherent, so I've mothballed the project until a good one comes along.

I also started journalling about my reading in the first few months of the year. I did an extensive study of "The Restless Dark" by Erica Waters, and absolutely loved it, filling an entire notebook with my thoughts on what was happening and what might happen next. I haven't kept up such a meticulous habit for the rest of the year, but it helped me focus on reading in a way I haven't done in previous years.

In the end I read 40 books, and the ones I enjoyed most were, "Tell Me I'm Worthless," by Alison Rumfitt, and, "All the Young Men," by Ruth Coker-Burks.

"Tell Me I'm Worthless," is a horror novel about how extremists will manipulate traumatised people to get them on side, but its core message feels like, "It's always possible to recover."

"All the Young Men" is Coker-Burks' memoir about nursing and providing community support to people living with - and dying from - AIDS in Hot Springs, Arkansas, all through the height of the crisis. Heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal parts, it reminds us all that, no matter how bleak things are, someone, somewhere, will want to help.

In April 2020, I started writing "Journal of a Pandemic", which has turned out to be a much longer project than I ever anticipated it to be. It's a chronicle of my life in the COVID19 pandemic, observing the changes I'm seeing in the world at large as well as in my own personal life. I wish I hadn't been able to write it this year, or at least that I'd been able to rename it - "Journal of a..." well, just about anything would be better than a pandemic, I think - but it's still happening. COVID19 still hasn't gone away, and I still can't go out in public without a mask on, because I'm high-risk. The bright side of my generally dodgy health is that I've been more careful with myself, and only had coronavirus once, in Summer 2022. I managed to escape it entirely in 2023, and didn't get any colds either. I'm eligible for continued vaccinations, which I've been having as they've become available, and I'm doing OK! One day I hope to put the pandemic journal aside, and keep a copy safe to show future generations, but unfortunately that day hasn't yet come.

Throughout 2023, I was working on various drafts of "Violins and Violets", a historical fiction (and historical romance) novel that I started writing in 2018. I kept on getting stuck within the first three chapters, getting "sidetracked" (or so I thought) by early plot points. My aim in 2023 was to redraft the novel to develop Katharina's character more before the inciting incident (when her father forbids her to compose, and burns all the work she's done so far), but I just couldn't get to that point. Originally, it was the beginning of Chapter One! In the outline I'd revised to make the new draft, it was Chapter Four, and I couldn't get past Chapter Three. There was just so much that I wanted to write about...

...but then I realised one day that I needed to make the events before the burning into a novel of their own, and "Violins and Violets" needed to become a series of three books! That "three book" idea quickly became a "five book" idea, and I started working on the first book that day.

The first draft of the first "Violins and Violets" book, which I started on 31st July, became my project for NaNoWriMo, and I'm pleased to say that I won with it! I then took the first 13 days of December to finish it off, and ended up with a complete draft of about 96,000 words. I started the sequel on 14th December, and got 18,000 words of that book down by midnight on 31st December. It's been a number of years since I've written so much so quickly, and I don't think I finished a single draft of any book in 2022. (Although maybe I finished off the longer version of "Vogeltje" early on? I'm not sure!)

I'm very excited to see what I can write in 2024, but I'm going to keep being kind to myself, and take it easy. No pressure to get anything done... but I'd really like to finish the sequel, and get the next book or two in the series drafted, too. I'd like to read more historical fiction, to develop my understanding of the genre, and if I can read some more histfic focused on music and art in particular, I'll be really pleased.

Month-by-Month Breakdown

November - 50,000+ words (won NaNoWriMo!)

January - 40,850 words

February - 37,150 words

December - 29,500 words

July - 24,125 words

March - 22,000 words

May - 18,000 words

October - 13,750 words

September - 12,750 words

August - 9,000 words

April - 8,750 words

June - 5,875 words

Total - 271,750 words

average 745 per day, 22,645 per month

(Sharp-eyed magpies amongst you may notice that I'm posting this on 17th January 2024, and you're right in thinking that's rather later in the month than I intended. It's for a very good, happy reason, though: I've been working on my sequel to "Ladies Don't Write Music" and so far in January I've added almost 32k to the manuscript, bringing me up to nearly 50k total!)

#writeblr #blog #writer's life #2023 my year in writing #2023 in writing #2023 #2023 round up #2023 wrapped #writeblr wrapped

[chicleeblair]

Dawn of Redeeming Grace [18/23]

Title: Chapter 18: December 23rd, 1989 || FFN

Rating: NC-17/Explicit

Pairings: Meredith Grey/Derek Shepherd

Six weeks after Derek left to take the NIH job, Meredith is ready to use the holidays to prove she has this working mom thing on lock. Sure, he neglected to tell her he'd be bringing a guest, but whatever, 'Tis the season for truces. Even Ellis Grey took the day off. But with every moment of family togetherness, a return to the trenches seems more impossible. Can a few days of peace put their relationship back on track, or has she fallen for the illusion of a snow-globe, destined to either settle or shatter?

Dawn of Redeeming Grace|| FFN

Meri Beri’s House of Fairies comes from Ellen Pompeo often saying that after her mother died when she was four, she was brought up by drag queens in her neighborhood.

This chapter is loosely based on real events described in All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks. Known as the cemetery angel, Burks not only buried the remains of dozens of young men who passed from AIDS in cemetery plots she’d inherited, she came to know and take care of them, in place of families they’d “come home” to, only to find themselves rejected. The chapter takes place in 1984, and depicts her taking her four-year-old to a house where three men with AIDS were living alone and “bringing them Christmas.” Recycling of medications is mentioned in her book, but also many other sources about an epidemic where hope was thin on the ground. Later, it was discovered that many of these drugs, including the AZT Meredith passes on here, were not significantly affective. In 1996, a drug cocktail was introduced that has led to today people with HIV/AIDS being healthy, and unable to transmit the virus if they can afford to be compliant with medication. The epidemic still exists; in the States it’s primarily seen among Black men in the south, many of whom may not identify as gay.

ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power was a worldwide organization run by a diverse collection of people who believed that direct action was needed to get treatment and other needs provided for. Among many other things, they advocated for expanding the definition of AIDS to include conditions that affected women, who were being under diagnosed. The actions alluded to in this story are Slop the Church, the St. Patrick’s Cathedral die in on December 10th, 1989; protesting Catholic Church officials' advocacy for abstinence-only sex education, and specifically opposing condoms.

In LA, that same day, the protest took on a different, but equally performative tone. As described in this article a "short-lived anonymous collective of spirited artists, designers, actors, costumers, and musicians" responsible for this performance called itself the 'Altered Boys.' The name was “ called The Altered Boys, "a tongue-in-cheek reference to the sexual abuse of altar boys as well as Catholic calls for homosexuals to be celibate,” caroled in front of several area Catholic churches. Their songbook of rewritten Christmas songs can be found here (You’re welcome.)

#grey’s anatomy #Anatomy Belonging to a Grey #dawn of redeeming g race #dorg #Meredith Grey #Derek Shepherd #MerDer #bisexual Meredith Grey #Meredith Grey/Derek Shepherd #fanfiction #fanfic #Zola Shepherd #Carolyn Shepherd #Zola Grey Shepherd #Bailey Shepherd #Ellis Grey #11x12 #fix-it #au #alternate universe #Derek lives #christmas #holidays #fluff #smut #backstory #novel length #long fic #update #Amelia shepherd

[tranquil-traveler]

My husband and I exchange Christmas presents early, mostly bc he often wants clothes and so he gets to wear them immediately, especially when they are warm and cozy ones.

So, I can already share what he got me:

- All the young men by Ruth Coker Burks and Kevin Carr O‘Leary

- Root: A Game of Woodland Might and Right

I‘m excited to read the book as the blurb sounded very interesting, and I‘m looking forward to playing the boardgame! Love me some cute and competitive critters.

Semi-related: I noticed that I had a gift card for a comics shop. It had enough money on it that I was able to get Mattie Lubchansky‘s „Boys Weekend“, so I‘m eager to get to read that one too! :D

#personal #holidays #christmas