![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jun. 5th, 2006 03:33 pmToday is the 25th anniversary of the day the North American medical community noticed that gay men were suddenly contracting strange and rare diseases. AIDS didn't have a name then, and wouldn't be isolated for another 2 years.
I count myself lucky that I've only lost one friend to the virus. I have several more who are living with it. Gay men born a generation or two before me sometimes watched every friend they had in the world disappear.
The damage done to the community is something we haven't even begun to try and understand. Two generations of elders wiped out of existence. With that broken link, we lost two generations of wisdom and knowledge, history and culture.
A loss like that leaves deep scars. It's probably why the community is fragmented, apolitical, and purposeless now.
Nothing leads to self-destruction faster than losing one's history.
And in Africa, it's beginnning to look like entire nations will be wiped off the map -- cities reduced to ghost towns, vast emptinesses where once human beings lived and loved and laughed, created and imagined, touched and spoke kind words to one another.
I can't even imagine a loss so great. I can't imagine surviving a loss like that.
I count myself lucky that I've only lost one friend to the virus. I have several more who are living with it. Gay men born a generation or two before me sometimes watched every friend they had in the world disappear.
The damage done to the community is something we haven't even begun to try and understand. Two generations of elders wiped out of existence. With that broken link, we lost two generations of wisdom and knowledge, history and culture.
A loss like that leaves deep scars. It's probably why the community is fragmented, apolitical, and purposeless now.
Nothing leads to self-destruction faster than losing one's history.
And in Africa, it's beginnning to look like entire nations will be wiped off the map -- cities reduced to ghost towns, vast emptinesses where once human beings lived and loved and laughed, created and imagined, touched and spoke kind words to one another.
I can't even imagine a loss so great. I can't imagine surviving a loss like that.