i was involved in a car crash while on the way to Rooster Teeth Expo. I am alive and recovering but Hannah( caboose-defense-squad) is in worse condition than me and it would mean the world if you guys could pray for her.
I lost my best friends Kyle, Dale. And Holly. They were the best friends I could ask for and I miss them. I know they are now resting in pease. Thank you all for listening
Every single Australian person who is outraged at the police (and entire societal) brutality against black people in the US that’s currently in the headlines needs to put the same amount of energy into learning about the VERY SAME brutality that’s used here in Australia to oppress Indigenous Australians.
Every single Australian, whether in Australia or overseas, born in Australia or born overseas, needs to put the onus on themselves to EDUCATE, INFORM and TALK ABOUT the institutional violence black Australians face.
White Australia has:
Warning. These links may contain the names and images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people now deceased.
Refused Indigenous people treatment from the Royal Flying Doctor Service in preference of less in need white people (‘Ray Martin: The Great Divide’, SBS)
minimised and attempted to erase the historical importance of Aboriginal Australians, including that Indigenous Australians may be the earliest humans on the planet
Be outraged at Ferguson. Be outraged about Tamir Rice. Be outraged at ALL the black deaths due to police brutality and institutionalised racism in the USA.
But ALSO be OUTRAGED at the same treatment shown to Indigenous Australians here in this country.
Today is August 2nd. Today is Romani Holocaust Remembrance day. Today, in 1944, the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz was liquidated. Today marks 71 years since brave Roma and Sinti lost their fight against the Nazi’s Final Solution. Today marks 71 years without reparations or even acknowledgement of a Romani genocide during the Holocaust. Today marks 71 years of continued state-sanctioned oppression and brutality. Today, there is still Romani genocide. Today, we still lose our brothers, fathers, and children to police and Neo-Nazi violence. Today, we continue to be exploited for our labor and forced into slavery. Today, we still live in ghettos and camps. Today is August 2, 2015. Today, our stones have become words and books and education. And today, we will not stop fighting.
SB:
I’m waitin’ on you. This is your job. I’m waitin’ on you…
Cop:
You seem very irritated.
SB:
I am. I really am because I feel like what I’m getting a ticket for, I was
getting out of your way. You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move over, and
you stop me. So, yeah, I am a little irritated, but that doesn’t stop you from
giving me a ticket.
Cop:
Are you done?
SB:
You asked me what was wrong and I told you. So now I’m done, yeah.
Cop:
Ok. You mind putting out your cigarette, please?
SB:
I’m in my car. Why do I have to put out my cigarette?
Cop:
Well you can step on out now.
SB:
I don’t have to step out of my car.
Cop:
Step out of the car. [Cop opens the car door] Step out.
SB:
No, you don’t have the right-
Cop:
Step out of the car!
SB:
You do not have the right to do that.
Cop:
I do have the right. Now, step out or I will remove you.
SB:
I refuse to talk to you other than to identify myself-
Cop:
Step out or I will remove you.
SB:
I am getting removed for a failure to-
Cop:
Step out or I will remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order. Get out of the
car now or I’m gonna remove you.
SB:
I’m calling my-
Cop:[Cop
reaches into the car] I’m gonna yank you out of here.
SB:
Okay, you gonna yank me out of my car?
Cop:
Get out.
SB:
Ok. Alright. Let’s do this. Don’t touch me.
Cop:
Get out of the car!
SB:
Don’t touch me! I’m not under arrest. You don’t have the right to-
Cop:
You ARE under arrest.
SB:
I’m under arrest for what? For what? For what?
Cop:
Get out of the car. Get out of the car! Now!
SB:
Why am I being apprehended? Because you’re trying to give me a ticket for a
failure-
Cop:
I said get out of the car.
SB:
Why am I being apprehended? You opened
my car door-
Cop:
I am gonna drag you outta here.
SB:
So you’re threatening to drag me out of my own car?
Cop:
Get out of the car!!
SB:
And then you-
Cop:
[Cop points his taser at her.] I will light you up!!
SB:
Wow.
Cop:
NOW!!
SB:
Wow. [Sandra steps out of the car.]
Cop:
Get out of the car!
SB:
For a failure to signal, you’re doing all this. You’re doing all this for a
failure to signal.
Cop:
Get over there. [Cop points her over to the sidewalk, while pointing his taser
at her.]
SB:
Right. Yeah. Let’s take this to court. [Sandra continues to walk toward the
sidewalk.] Let’s do this for a failure to signal. Yep, for a failure to signal.
[Sandra is led out of the view of the dashcam video.]
Cop:
Get off the phone.
SB:
I’m not on the phone. I have a right to record-
Cop:
Put your phone down.
SB:
This is my property.
Cop:
Put your phone down.
SB:
Sir?
Cop:
Put your phone down. Right now! Put your phone down.
SB:
[Sandra puts her phone down on the trunk of her car.] For a fucking failure to
signal, my goodness.
Cop:
Come over here!
SB:
Y’all are interesting. You feelin’ good about this whole thing?
Cop:
Stand right here.
SB:
You feelin’ good about yourself? For my failure to signal, you feel real good
about yourself, don’t you?
Cop:
Turn around.
SB:
You feel good about yourself, don’t you?
Cop:
Turn around. Turn around now. Put your hands-
SB:
Why am I being arrested?
Cop:
I’m giving you a lawful order. I will tell you-
SB:
Why am I being arrested? Why can’t you tell me that part?
Cop:
I’m giving you a lawful order. Turn around.
SB:
Why will you not tell me what’s going on?
Cop:
You are not compliant.
SB:
I’m not compliant ‘cause you just pulled me outta my car.
Cop:
Turn around!!
SB:
Are you fucking kidding me? This is some bullshit.
Cop:
Put your hands behind your back.
SB:
Cause you know this is straight bullshit, and you full a shit. Full a straight
shit. That’s why y’all are some scary fucking cops. South Carolina got all y’all
bitch asses scared. That’s all it is. Fucking scared of a female.
Cop:
If you would have just listened-
SB:
I was tryin’ sign the fucking ticket. Whatever.
Cop:
Stop movin’!
SB:
Are you fucking serious?
Cop:
Stop movin’.
SB:
Oh, I can’t wait till we go to court. OH,
I can’t wait! I cannot WAIT ‘till we go to court! I can’t wait. OH, I can’t
wait. You want me to sit down now?
Cop:
No.
SB:
Oh, you gonna throw me to the floor? That’ll make you feel better about
yourself?
Cop:
Knock it off.
SB:
Ah, that’ll make you feel better about yourself? That make you feel real good,
won’t it? Fucking ass. Fucking pussy. For a failure to signal, you doin’ all of
this. In little ass Prairie View, Texas. My god. They must-
Cop:
You were getting a warning, and now you’re going to jail.
SB:
For what??
Cop:
You can come read right- [Cop leads Sandra back over to the trunk of the car.]
SB:
I’m getting a warning for what?
Cop:
Stay right here.
SB:
You just pointed me over there!
Cop:
I said stay right here.
SB:
Get your fucking mind right. OH, I swear on my life, y’all some pussies. A
pussy ass cop pulls for a fucking signal, you’re takin’ me to jail. What a
pussy. What a pussy. What a- you about to break my fucking wrist.
Cop:
Stop movin’!
SB:
I’m standin’ still! You keep movin’ me, goddamn it!
Cop:
Stay right there.
SB:
Don’t touch me. Fucking pussy, for a traffic ticket.
Cop:
[Goes around the car and closes the front door. Walks back off screen to where
Sandra is on the sidewalk.] Come read right over here. [He stands by the trunk
of the car and shows her the written warning.] This right here says a warning.
YOU started creating a problem. [Cop walks out of shot, toward Sandra.]
SB:
You asked me what was wrong!
Cop:
Do you have anything in your purse that’s illegal?
SB:
Do I look like I have anything on me? This a fuckin’ maxi dress!
Cop:
I’m removing your glasses.
SB:
This a maxi dress.
Cop:
Come on over here.
SB:
Fucking assholes. For a- you about to break my wrist! Can you STOP!? You are
mother fuckin’ about to break my wrist! [Sandra makes sounds of pain.] STOOOPP!
Cop:
[Sounds of struggle.] Stop! Now! Stop it!
Cop
2: Stop resisting, ma’am.
Cop:
If you would stop then I would tell you!
SB:
[In pain.] For a fucking traffic ticket.
Cop:
Now stop!
SB:
[In pain.] You are such a pussy. You are such a pussy.
Cop
2: No, you are.
Cop:
You were yankin’ around.
SB:
[In pain.] For a traffic signal.
Cop:
You were yankin’ around. When you pull away from me, you’re resisting arrest.
SB:
This make you feel real good. This make you feel real good, don’t it? A female
for a traffic signal. For a traffic
signal. I know that makes you feel good, officer.
Cop
2: I got her. I got her.
SB:
I know it make you feel real good. You a real man now. You slam me, knock my
head into the ground, I got epilepsy, you mother fucker.
Cop:
Good. Good.
SB:
I hope I-
Cop
2: You should have thought of that before you start resisting!
SB:
Yeah, this is real good. Real good for a female. Yeah. Y’all strong, ooh. Y’all
real strong.
Cop:
I want you to wait right here. Wait right here.
SB:
I can’t go nowhere with your fucking knee on my back. Duh.
Cop:
[To Cop 2] I’m gonna open your door. [To man recording the brutality.] You need
to leave. You need to leave. You need to leave.
SB:
[inaudible] For a fucking traffic ticket.
Cop:
For a warning. For a warning. You’re going to jail for resisting arrest. Stand
up.
SB:
If I could!
Cop:
Roll over.
SB:
I can’t even fuckin’ feel my arm!
Cop:
Tuck your knee in.
SB:
I can’t-
Cop:
Listen, listen, you’re gonna sit up on your butt.
SB:
You just slammed my head into the ground. Do you not even care about that?
Cop
2: He’s telling you to getup.
SB:
I can’t even hear!
Cop
2: Yes you can.
Cop:
Sit on your butt.
SB:
You slammed my head into the ground.
Cop:
Sit up on your butt.
SB:
He threw my fucking head to the ground. What the hell?
Cop:
Now stand up.
SB:
All this for a traffic signal. I swear to god. All of this for a traffic
signal. [To witness.] Thank you for recording! Thank you! For a traffic signal.
Slammed me into the ground and everything.
Everything. I hope y’all feel good.
Remember when we kept telling y’all, white tumblr, that “know your rights” and all those videos of y’all talking to cops however you please was only for y’all? That it was white privilege? Yeah.
I just read that whole thing without even breathing
This was planned. This was planned from the jump, I have no illusions
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing – every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.
The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.
Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.
They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.
HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.
The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.
There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.
Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemicby Randy Shiltsis a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.
Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaustcollects his writings on AIDS.
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
Read or watchThe Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Streetor watchMilk. Dallas Buyers Clubhas its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played Onbut JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
Please, if you are following me right now, read this. It’s so important to remember this, to understand how much we lost. To understand that, when I was a little kid, the biggest thing about the community was that shared loss.
There is a lot I want to say and I don’t have the spoons but. Yeah. This is all so, so important. Please read this.