Archive | Country Matters
The Church of Act Up
I’ve been thinking a lot about the AIDS crisis in terms of the Trump/GOP coup. We are in a moment in which our ostensibly elected leaders are hanging women and queers and people of color and Muslims and Jews and immigrants out to dry. Actually, that’s the best way to phrase it. The worst is that they are hanging us out to die.
I was in elementary school when AIDS first became nationally recognized, and a teenager when ACT UP first came on the scene; I remember joining the Philadelphia chapter and waking the fuck up because you couldn’t not the minute you entered those meetings. I graduated from college and moved to New York City, where so many beautiful young gay men wore stocking caps and four coats in the middle of summer, were covered in black sores, were walking skeleteons held together by scotch tape and four kinds of antibiotics and a strong community of love. Continue Reading →
Rereading the 12th Street Riot
It’s been five decades since the 1967 Detroit Riot, but the issues surrounding it are as urgent as they’ve ever been. Certainly they’re as divisive. Witness how U.S. citizens can’t even agree on whether to refer to it as a riot or a rebellion. What we do agree on is that the six-day uprising was one of the most violent in our country’s history, and that it presaged a new era in race relations in America, not to mention a totally misguded movie that has only succeeded in tanking Kathryn Bigelow’s career.
The 12th Street Riot, as it also was called, began when white police officers raided an after-hours club in a mostly black neighborhood, and long-simmering anger about the police force’s racism boiled over along with frustrations about segregationist employment, housing, and education policies. When all was said and done, entire city blocks were burnt down, 43 people were dead, 1,189 were injured, more than 7,000 had been arrested, and 683 buildings were destroyed. A presidential commission later determined that “police officers shot at least twenty people to death, and Army troops and National Guardsmen killed up to ten more.” All but ten of the forty-three killed were black. Continue Reading →