Books!

[wolffyluna]

I have finally read books! Depressing ones, because of who I am as a person!

How To Survive a Plague by David French

A very detailed look at the New York gay community’s response to the AIDs crisis. Like, it goes into specific people’s romantic drama levels of detail.

By the end of it, I was definitely not crying, I was just chopping onions while listening to an audiobook. Just. Man. You had a disease that was a death sentence and no one knew why and then, with the help of the doctors every gay guy went to get STI treatment from because they were cool, and Wall Streeters with congressional ambitions, to drug addicted sex workers, to grad students adding baking soda to industrial processes-- it became a something you could take a pill for and the pills actually worked. People got out of hospital beds and then lived to the end of their natural lifespans. So many people died but-- people got to live.

Some random takeaways:

• At the beginning, there was debate about whether AIDs was caused by a virus, or by a semen overload/allergy. Weirdly enough, the second theory was considered less homophobic? Also, it took people years to go “wait, it doesn’t matter if it’s caused by a virus or by semen itself, we all agree that exposure is the dangerous thing, so. Uh. Why not use condoms?”
• I did not, going into this, expect to end up deeply dislike Dr Anthony Fauci, or questioning why we gave him another shot at handling a crisis. But I do think Dr Fauci should consider signing up for a randomised controlled trial of whether being punched by time travelling Australians increases Good Sense in infectious disease researchers.
• I am endlessly charmed by the pharmaceutical researchers who, trying to hurry things to a human trial where they might save patient lives, did the initial animal testing for safety and bioavailability on ‘big chimps.’
• Wow, AIDs activists were a strange bunch. Like, they tended to be either doomsayers (who started multiple non profits and got kicked out of them for causing too much social drama) or the sort of person who when told “you’re going to die in two years, it’s going to suck, and every time you get stressed you take another step into the grave” went “quick! I need to do an activism! Take over a pharmaceutical company as a protest!”
• Speaking of which there needs to be an Act Up heist movie. Pride (2014) is not enough, we need more.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christine Lamb

A book about rape as a tool of war and genocide, mostly made up of interviews with survivors.

It’s deeply depressing and requires all the content warnings, especially because it gets quite graphic. Very informative though! To give an example of something that does not require all the content warnings: there’s a conflict between war crimes prosecutors and survivors of sexual violence, because the prosecutors tend to go “the definition of torture includes sexual assault, by charging these people with torture, I have covered both sexual and non-sexual torture.” Meanwhile survivors often want people to be additionally prosecuted for rape, and don’t see prosecuting people for torture as ‘counting.’

I do have some caveats: this was very much written by a journalist, and It Shows. The interviews are very good, the analysis occaisionally goes off the rails, and there’s this thing where-- hmm, how to phrase. There’s calls for the international community to ‘do something.’ Sometimes this ‘something’ has a subject, object and a verb, is something the international community can do, and is something that public pressure might cause a change to. (For example, charging war criminals with torture and rape.) Sometimes the something is left very vague, in ways that implies Lamb wants a US backed coup and doesn’t realising that’s what she’s suggesting?

Also it, was written in 2020, which is just long enough for some of the statements to have aged… interestingly.

Links

• [video] New Caitlin Doughty video! About orca grief!
• [video] Moon Channel answers the important question: is Rouge the Bat Latina? (Or: a silly question to kickstart a conversation about racial coding in fiction.)
• [text] a beautiful tale of fact checking, finance, and realising someone was probably telling the truth the whole time. It may be a negative result, but the story is told beautifully.
• [text] getting a suit will be either the most affirming or most dysphoria inducing experience of your life