Part One: Lesbian Mutual AID During the AIDS Crisis
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Amika, empathy is our best policy. CoolZone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that when there's bad things, there's good things too. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is one of my favorite returning guests, Andrew T. Oh, thanks. Hi. Hi.

I always get excited when you're the guest because, well, I like all my guests equally. I can't show any preference. Yeah, don't do that. There's no call for this line of flattery, but thank you. Andrew T. is the host of the podcast, Yo, Is This Racist? And also, okay, this specific flattery I think I could do. You are my favorite guest to talk about mutual aid with. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Well, I feel like I probably come at it from a good place of...

I'm pretty new to it, all things considered. And, you know, I've kind of like been around, but there have been times in my life when I was more involved and less. And yeah, I've been, you know, lately because of how things have been going in LA and I guess the world, trying to really, really double down and just make sure whatever community we have is as strong as it can be.

I mean, that makes sense. I think that a lot of it is an ebb and a flow. Like, I'm not directly doing mutual aid right now besides, like,

some specific friends or whatever here and there, you know? But yeah. Okay. So my question before I even get into the topic, you live in a city that very famously didn't quite burn down recently. Yeah. How's that going? How are mutual aid efforts going out there? Like how things been? I, I mean, I feel like from my perspective, it was very impressive because

Well, I guess I don't know because I feel like I'm more plugged in than I ever have been. So I was able to be on through Solidarity and Snacks folks, which is a group that I mostly do work with. And so I was able to kind of get in and at least see a lot of the chat and the chatter and the planning from the early side of things.

So that to me was very impressive. I don't know. Maybe I'm sure people with more experience, this is maybe pretty normal, but or maybe not. I don't know. I don't have any basis for evaluating how actually impressive it is, but it seemed very impressive to me.

The thing I was mostly focused on was trying to get masks out to the sort of larger population, especially unhoused folks down on Skid Row, because the air quality was so unbelievably bad. I guess it still is, but...

Yeah. But it was nice watching warehouses essentially pop up at various, like a lot of bike shops, a lot of gallery spaces, a lot of little warehouse work type spaces, and seeing things get distributed as efficiently, I think, as they could be. And also just kind of being cognizant of what needs are much harder to meet with just community. Yeah.

Obviously, none of us had access, maybe not obviously, maybe, I don't know, maybe things have changed. I sort of muted the signal group because it was pretty high traffic. Relatable. We don't have things like bulldozers or super high-end PPE. And so there were limits to what could be done. Well, let me give you a piece of advice about bulldozers. Yeah. Yeah.

They're all keyed the same based on the manufacturer. Just throwing that out there. Yeah. Good to know. Good to know. Anyway. And there also largely wasn't that type of need. So who knows what would have happened if things needed to truly happen. But it felt like watching the pieces come into place. I was like, okay, this is how this goes. And yeah,

So I guess I from from where I sit, I don't have an amazing objective basis for evaluating how it all went. But to my eyes, it seemed like it went well. But I mean, that's kind of the thing about something like mutual aid. It's like not to say it always goes well, but on some level, it always goes well. It always does. Whatever we can do is a positive thing. Yeah, it's something that wasn't being done. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's an element of sort of like, I guess it is, you know, in the business type world of managing expectations. And like, yeah, but it is it is true. It is like like pushing a boulder or

Any amount you push the boulder is a place where it wasn't before. Is it better than if we had a functional government that took our tax dollars and appropriately used them? I'm not sure. Is it the most efficient? Because of the decentralized nature, I don't know.

It was obviously not the most directly efficient way to do everything. But things absolutely did get done. I will say during sort of the absolute thick of it, I was like, man, when the mega people really got their heads up about Antifa super soldiers...

I think the biggest problem with us as a fighting group is going to be just making sure everyone shows up to the war in time, which is going to be a real fucking problem when push comes to shove. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's funny because I was late to this recording, but usually I try very hard to put the punk in punctual. Yeah.

I was just like, damn, there's a lot of sitting around in parking lots for me this week. Yeah. Everyone's about 15 minutes late. It's okay. Well, that is actually oddly a good comparison.

Hmm. I'll just tell you what this episode is about. But before I tell you what this episode is about, first I want to say we do have a producer. She's not on the call right now. It is Sophie Lichterman. We also have an audio engineer named Rory and everyone has to say hi to Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. And our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And I was pondering this week. I was like, well, what mutual aid story am I going to do? Because I have Andrew as my guest. Nice. And a friend of mine brought up this story.

It is a story about mutual aid during just about as dark of a time as you can imagine. The brightest lights in the darkest dark. That's my favorite kind of story. Yeah. This is a story about all the people who stepped up to care for people dying of AIDS in the 1980s. In particular, it's about the unbelievable number of lesbians who came into care for their queer brethren who were abandoned by their families and society and the government and the medical institutions.

So this is my lesbians did amazing shit during the AIDS crisis episode. I don't know if it's going to be called that. I probably can't cuss in the title. Amazing stuff. Yeah. Have you heard about this at all, this thing? I feel like...

Yes, but I mean, not anything specific. Just that like sort of like the in, you know, mentioning unsung heroes type situations, I think. Totally. Is where it would have come up. Yeah. I think there's literally, I didn't end up watching this. I don't watch a lot of documentaries when I'm doing my research to try to stick to written sources overall. But there's like different documentaries about many of these different groups. I think one of them is literally called Unsung Heroes. I think that's the name of, well, we'll talk about that one later. Sure. Yeah.

We've talked a bit about the history of queer rights and queer people on this show. I think this is an understatement. If you want the best rundown of how social movements look before Stonewall Riots of 1969 or the best rundown that I have done, check out our episode on the Stonewall Riots of 1969. But in general, I would say that lesbian and gay activism started off as a bit separate from each other, but they would often intersect. Maybe the best way I can think to put it is that

As cultural spaces, the two would stay fairly distinct, lesbian and gay. But in terms of activism and advocacy, queer folks of all types found common cause with each other often enough. And that was kind of where I was coming at from it. But then I was also reading more and more about like, even in terms of cultural spaces, there was a lot of overlap too. I have read plenty of examples of stories about lesbians bartending at gay male bars, for example, or queer discotheques for all comers, you know. Mm-hmm.

So the best way to say it is it's really messy, the interaction between gay and lesbian activism and culture. While researching this episode, I ran across a lot of people, especially people who weren't there, including me. I wasn't there. I mean, I was technically alive during that period, but I was not particularly active as a four-year-old. And I ran across a lot of people who weren't there talking about how incredibly divided gay and lesbian scenes and people were from one another.

But the more I did the research, the more I found this wasn't the case. There is a pattern that I've seen a lot on the show. And I'll be curious your opinion about this pattern. But it seems like we have this habit of looking back at history and emphasizing all the divisions between various marginalized people.

Instead of all the places where we've worked in solidarity with each other. And like both things are true, right? For example, I have read so many things before I, especially before I started doing this show, I would read all the time about how the early feminist movement was like wildly racist in the United States. That it was all white feminists who were just pieces of shit in terms of race.

And I internalized that and I believed it. And absolutely, there were huge numbers of actively racist white feminists, especially in the voting rights era of the early 20th century. But then as I would read 19th century history about the United States and the abolitionist movements, a fuck ton of the early white abolitionists were women who were quite actively also fighting for the rights of women. And they're like the same social circle, more or less. Yeah.

I wonder, I mean, obviously I think it's the, the headline is more surprising. The divisions are emphasized just because, you know, in a vacuum without any external information, I guess I would just, you know, or one would just assume that like all queer people stick together. And then, so it's like more notable, the, the, whatever divisions are there. I would be my only guess. Like,

Is that fair? That makes sense. I like, I'm so cynical that I'm like uncynical again, where I'm like, it helps the powers that be to focus on our divisions, you know? Yes. But it also like, like we shouldn't erase our differences. We shouldn't pretend like fucking white feminists haven't been really shitty or like that like gay men can't be misogynist or like, you know?

Yeah. But I think you're absolutely right, though. I do think it goes sort of both ways in that, like, whatever interest is, like, piqued by the divisions absolutely also, like, serves the status quo. So, like, there's no, like, nothing to, like, hit the brakes on that or tap the brakes on that, like, instinct. Like, whether it's, like, writerly or, like, from the publishing perspective, like...

They just want to put that out there, and it helps the people in power for it to be put out there as well. Totally. Kind of like how Twitter is a nightmare land that creates divisions between people. Because...

likes and reacts and blah, blah, blah are like more useful to the algorithm. And so therefore people who are angry are more likely to comment than people who are like, Oh yeah, no, totally. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's the same way that like, um, like, uh, you know, just on any, the internet is clearly, but like even before the internet, like one complaint, you get one complaint, but you won't get, you know, a hundred satisfied customers that are like, yeah,

That's it. And then also even, like, I would never read the reviews of my own work. I actually specifically try not to read the reviews of my own work because I am very aware that I will read 10 reviews that will be like, Margaret Killjoy saved my children from a burning building or whatever. I don't know. And then I'll read, like, one that was like, Margaret's voice is bad. You know, I don't know, right? Yeah, yeah. It's, like, devastating. Yeah. Yeah.

And so maybe that's it. Maybe we hear about...

We hear about the racist and we're like, well, fuck this whole thing, you know? It becomes extra salient, yeah. I will say, as far as Twitter goes, on the first big show I worked on, it was a show called Mixed-ish, and when it came out, I created not a Twitter bot, but if I was better at coding, it would have been a bot that was called Not, with the word Not crossed out, the Mixed-ish Writer's Room, and every time there was a negative comment...

I would just write via the bot or not the not bot, but by the account. Okay, but we worked really hard on this one. Under every negative comment on Twitter. That is so relatable. When people come, like, people have like things that they can be critical about, about the things I do. But sometimes on some level, I just always want to be like,

Do you know I didn't sleep for like a week because I was trying to get this right? And I know that I didn't get it totally right, but like I have to put out roughly two hours of history content every week. I just don't sleep. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're past the part of the internet where that could even work, but it was very fun to me in the moment. No, totally. Yeah.

Okay, so gay rights in America. Before Stonewall, most visible groups were very assimilationist and pushing very hard for mainstream acceptance by, like, not rocking the boat. But all along, there were all these kind of, like, unruly queers being unruly. Stonewall was not the first and not the last major riot by queers who were sick of being mistreated by society. But after some cops raided the Stonewall Inn in New York in 1969, the gay liberation movement exploded onto the scene.

People were tired of asking nicely. And once people got tired of asking nicely, shit started getting done. That's a pattern you can see over and over again. As Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, put it, power concedes nothing without a demand. The 70s were a vital time in gay history as people started really coming out en masse and setting up all kinds of infrastructure that we rely upon today. I remember, I was talking with one of my friends about this beforehand, and he said,

I have relied on the infrastructure set up by, like, gays 50 years ago for, like, my basic health care completely unrelated to sexuality just because I was, like, broke and lived out of a backpack, you know? And, like, I remember I injured myself at one point by having too heavy of a backpack I was living out of and not being in my 20s anymore. It turns out that you can carry a certain size backpack in your 20s that you can't carry onward. And I, like, injured myself, and so the only place that I could go was this gay clinic, and it was...

But then it's just like bonus points because they respect my pronouns and it's nice and people are nice to you, you know? I love gay infrastructure is the point. And I think that gay infrastructure is one of the most beautiful prefigurations of the world I want everyone to get to live in.

A lot of that started getting set up in the 70s. Unfortunately, a lot of it was set up in the 80s because the 80s were, spoiler alert for history, real bad. Yeah, yeah. And bad at the time, but also all the shit that's happening now got started then, or not, got started before. But some of the major stuff really got rolling then, and we're just kind of living with the results of...

how those people did the shit in the 80s. I know. It's like we're in hyper Reagan times. Reagan was like... At the time, I think people were like, I can't imagine something worse than this. And you're like... And then fucking hold my beer Trump comes in. I know. I mean, we'll see. Hopefully, at the very minimum, Trump isn't sort of lionized in history. That is sort of the most infuriating thing is people's...

At least in the 90s and 2000s, I think people are coming around a little bit now, but their description of Ronald Reagan is like, get the fuck out of here. What the fuck are you talking about? I was talking with one of my friends who works in the piercing industry, and they were wearing... I can't remember exactly. They were wearing a shirt that was like, Ronald Reagan's grave is a gender-neutral bathroom. Yeah. And someone that they work with was a piercer, a gay man who survived the 80s in San Francisco, which is...

Hard thing to have done and was just like, I'm so glad that people today still understand that Ronald Reagan is a terrible person. Yeah. I mean, well, and sort of even even as he got like, you know, no longer really there while he was still president. It's that's the thing. It's like like, yeah, the Republican and right wing in general, like.

What apparatus is this? Like, he is a terrible person, but it sort of doesn't matter. No, totally. Like, specifically him. Yeah. Like, this is what those folks want, and we are living with the consequences of not fucking taking them seriously, honestly. Yeah, and then obviously, like, some people did, and some people tried, and just, like, not enough. Yes, yes, yes. And so in the 80s...

It was the dying time. Gay men started showing up in hospitals as early as about 1981. Well, exactly 1981. With all kinds of rare cancers and diagnoses. With what we now understand as AIDS, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, which is caused by an underlying virus, HIV, human immunodeficiency virus. They didn't know that yet. The actual causes and means of transmission were going to be a hot topic for years.

At first, doctors looked at what was happening and called it GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. This crisis was completely and shamefully ignored by the government. It was like until 1987 before Reagan, I think, said the word AIDS. Right. The treatment that people were receiving was shameful too. When patients first started showing up with destroyed immune systems...

At first, this makes some sense. Doctors were rightfully afraid of getting their patients any sicker, and so they wore head-to-toe PPE in what was called colloquially as spacesuits. But soon enough, all kinds of healthcare professionals started wearing them around AIDS patients out of fear for themselves instead of the other way around.

And the thing is, I've read a couple people talking about how reasonable was it of people to be afraid of AIDS patients and stuff. And on some level, people didn't know what this disease was. They didn't know how it spread. And they knew that it had a 100% death rate, which is a really high death rate. It's about as high as it can get. Yeah, yeah. But...

Pretty early on, while no one was quite sure how the disease was spread, doctors and epidemiologists were pretty certain that it was not airborne and that it wasn't spread by casual contact. Just based on looking at the, I can't believe I wrote a script where I have to say epidemiology a lot, but just based on the spread of the disease, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's a little bit in retrospect some of the COVID stuff, too, where it was like... Totally. Especially like the wiping down your groceries business. And it's like, okay, but if it was transmitted like that, we'd all like, you know, the city of Wuhan would have been completely obliterated. Like, it just doesn't work like that. Yeah, totally. I will say...

obviously have a sense of where this is going. I sort of understand the doctor's perspective, but yeah. No, totally. At the very beginning, you're like, well, I don't know what that is, and I don't want to then spread it to everyone. There's a certain sense, but that was only for a brief moment. The medical establishment knew better really soon. They knew pretty much right away that it wasn't casual contact or airborne. Yeah.

And then by 1983, they realized it was bloodborne because of the number of blood transfusion patients who were getting sick. And this is the same year that researchers in France discovered the virus underlying the disease, HIV. But homophobia and fear of disease worked really tightly together. Healthcare professionals were terrified of catching gay cancer. No one would touch or breathe the same air as AIDS patients. So patients were completely isolated.

One AIDS nurse, a guy named Guy Vanderberg, who is himself hospitalized for a while, told ABC, the food tray was shoved into the room and everything was covered in plastic. Then everything was put into biohazard bags when it was taken out. People were fully gowned when they came in, even just to talk with me. And like, even if this was reasonable and there's, you know, very brief window where it was, it's also just incredibly alienating and hard. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's like solitary confinement is torture, literal torture. Yeah, totally. And that's even when you're not sick. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. My personal anecdote around this is that a close family friend of my family's has HIV and he was diagnosed, I think, in the 80s, maybe the early 90s. And he's this conservative man who goes to a conservative church. And so when he went and told the congregation that, you know, he had HIV, he said,

Everyone in the congregation lined up to shake his hand like without gloves. And this was like a huge fucking deal, you know? Right. Because everyone consciously knew it was safe, but people were still being real fucking shitty about it. Yeah, yeah. Fortunately, queer people themselves, gay people and lesbians are, as I understand it, overrepresented in the medical profession.

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Call 1-800-LIFELOCK and use promo code IHEART or go to lifelock.com slash IHEART for 40% off. Terms apply. And we're back. The lesbian community rallied really hard. And they rode to Gondor's aid when the beacons were lit. They did not ask, where was Gondor when the Westfold fell? I have to somehow put in a Lord of the Rings reference in every episode. Yeah, no, it's important. And...

One gay man. It's actually, okay, the comparisons are going to get really strong though, right? Because there's, well, okay. Yeah. One gay man in San Francisco spoke anonymously to the iNews and said, quote, suddenly the hospitals were full of lesbians who were volunteering, volunteering to go into those rooms and help my friends who were dying. I remember being so moved by them because gay men hadn't been too kind to lesbians. We'd call them fish and make fun of the butch dykes in the bars. And yet there they were. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that is sort of like the differences and similarities that we were talking about earlier right there, which is like, there's a difference between poking fun at someone and a community is dying. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Like, yeah, we're going to make fun of... Oh, you got a bad haircut. I'm going to make fun of you. Until someone else messes with you, then it's a war, you know? Yeah, yeah. You know, and without also like...

too needlessly tapping the present. We are about to also enter into a time when the establishment medical advice is about to be factually incorrect. Not that it always hasn't been sort of, but even more so. I don't know. This is sort of an open question to me, but it's like,

Whenever the next terrible thing that is probably a virus hits... Probably bird flu, but yeah. We won't be able to necessarily... I mean, we probably pretty actively won't be able to trust our CDC or NIH. And again, with grains of salt, we never probably should have wholly trusted them. However, they've mostly been correct. So whether it's...

you know, getting your measles vaccine or, you know, not trying to use nutrition to fight cancer and mental, mental health issues. Um,

I don't know. I don't know if there's an EU health authority to follow or a Chinese health authority to follow, but don't follow the American one and don't let their policies dictate your behavior because we are going to have to do stuff like this, which is maybe not technically advised or allowed by the establishment, but it is the right thing to do. Yeah.

you know, within reason, I guess, who knows what the next actual thing will be. But just because they say you're safe doesn't mean you are. Just because they say you're in peril doesn't mean you are. I know. And it's like hard because it's like, well, this is going to make it even harder to get people to trust. Like, you know, I'm clearly not like a big, like,

The state is a really good way of forming society, person. But institutions that get together to solve things, I absolutely believe in. And many of those are governmental. Yeah. Well, it's like the difference between like the broadly speaking, the state and but also like.

The state is, unfortunately, the best way to do some of these things. Yeah, definitely that we have available to us. Yeah. Yeah. So it would be nice if it worked. Yeah. Yeah, it's like they're getting rid of all that part. It's like, stop making the state look good, you weird right-wing libertarians. Yeah. Like, you're gutting all the good parts of the state, and you're keeping the fucking cops in the military. Yeah. All right, well, so...

Lesbians step up in so many ways during this that it's overwhelming. And I won't get into all of it, but we'll start with blood. Because starting in 1983, men who have sex with men were banned from donating blood in order to stop transmission through blood transfusions. There's some logic here, right?

HIV tests weren't available yet. But this ban went on way too long. Do you want to guess what year men who had sex with men were able to donate blood without discrimination in the United States? I only know this because I was asked in my adulthood this, so deep into the 2000-somethings.

Is that right? Two years ago, 2023. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's actually a good point. Yeah, as all of us have gone. Yeah. In 2020 fucking three, they finally changed the rules. In 2020, men who have sex with men were allowed to donate blood if they hadn't had sex in the last three months. Nowadays,

The rule is anyone, regardless of sex or gender, can donate blood so long as they haven't had anal sex with a new partner or slept with multiple new partners in the past three months. And that... I'm not an expert here. That sounds reasonable. Yeah. Make it across the board and not about sexuality. That seems good. I don't know. Yeah. But also...

Feels like we could also just screen for, I mean, if you're just worried about HIV, it's like, just check if there's HIV there. I think, but I could be wrong. I think it's because there's a roughly a three month period for the efficacy of the testing. Oh, sure, sure. Okay. But I don't know how it relates to like bottled blood or whatever it is. Sure. But in 1983, men were suddenly told that they couldn't donate blood because

But AIDS patients need a lot of blood transfusions, especially back then. So their own immediate community couldn't support them. Fortunately, LGBT is a thing for a reason. All of us letters are in it together. The L stepped up. The most famous group is probably the most famous because branding is so important to being remembered in history is what I'm learning on this show too. They were called the Blood Sisters. Yeah. You don't forget the Blood Sisters. Yeah.

Oh, man. And speaking of this is, it's just nice to get a Warhammer 40K reference in there. Oh, are there blood sisters in Warhammer? I'm a D&D girl. I think so. Oh, hell yeah. It might be the sisters of blood or something like that. Yeah. I don't know if there's the blood angels anyway. Hell yeah. So the Warhammer 40K girls stepped the fuck up.

The Women's Caucus of the San Diego Democratic Club set up a deal with a private blood bank to allow donors to designate the recipients. So basically people could go in and say, this is blood for people with HIV and AIDS. Then they called for a blood drive on July 16th, 1983, and called on all the lesbians in San Diego. They were hoping that like 50 people would come, but the very first blood drive, 200 people came with a line around the block.

Peggy Heathers, a blood sister, said, quote, I fucking love that even the hardcore lesbian separatists were like, look, I don't want to live with men. I don't want to date men. I don't want to organize with men. I'm not going to see them fucking die abandoned because of their sexuality.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it also is just sort of like the right triangulation. It's like, listen, even if I don't want anything to do with men...

The worst men are the ones that are perpetrating this upon gay men. Totally. Totally. There's still the real enemy. Let's not and never be confused about who the real enemy is. Yeah, totally. And I just like, I love that. I love that they were like, yeah, like, you know, we're still lesbian separatists and we're still coming to help you. Yeah.

The Blood Sisters continued for years. I have read that they continued for four... This is my favorite part about multiple sources. I've read that they continued for four years. I've read that they continued until 1996. Either way, they stayed... I'm guessing that they stayed particularly active until the very first treatments of the late 80s kicked in. And then...

active to some degree for a decade after that until about 1996 is when you get the... Well, I keep saying about. In 1996, you get the sort of cocktail three-drug regimen that started dramatically improving people's odds. Well, you know, and the other side of it is, like, whether they were, like, continuing as a blood sister's, like...

you know, under the Blood Sisters banner, there is the thing, you know, sort of mirroring my story, which is like, once you get started, you do more. Totally. And I do think like, you know, the tiny silver lining for these crises is it does get regular people or maybe even slightly apathetic people to like be like, okay, I got to do fucking something. And like something begets something.

you know, something else. No, yeah. Enough of the time that, you know, things become real. No, that's a good point. Yeah. You just got to like get people into the inertia of trying to help. Yeah. And I don't know if the blood sisters were the first or if they were the one that gets written about the most because they have a sick name. The idea spread. Lesbians ran blood drives in at least San Francisco, Denver, Boston, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Memphis, and D.C.,

I suspect it's more than that because I've read about lesbian support in a bunch of other cities beyond that. The San Francisco blood drive was led by the National Organization of Women, and they would put up flyers that say, our boys need our blood. It's fucking good. And it's also like, because...

I do think just to like reach kind of the normal people, you do got to do essentially war propaganda for stuff like this. Yeah, totally. And also, I mean, this whole thing, we're going to talk about a little bit later. This whole thing is strangely like war, you know? Yeah. Well, yeah. And queer newspapers continue to say basically like, hey, lesbians, please donate blood or to quote the newspaper coming out, which I believe is San Francisco paper. They should do it to quote, stand by our brothers in fighting the AIDS epidemic. Yeah. Yeah.

An author named Jennifer Wild, who is writing for the queer Irish magazine GCN, put it like this. The drives also gave more than just blood. They were also a way for the men suffering to know that they were loved and part of a supportive community that will always do what must be done to overcome adversity. Yeah. It's the kind of thing where like,

real, almost cheesy, like phrasing is just appropriate. You're like, yeah, no, that's what happened. They absolutely, we were like, you're part of a supportive community. We don't want you to die alone. Like, yeah. Well, and also it is like, like, this is such a wonderful example of like,

and power are just people doing shit to other people. And like, as bad as stuff gets and as has been, like, you know, when gay men weren't allowed to donate blood, really what this means is they just, they need blood. Like, blood is needed. And if we can get blood in

in this instance to people, then it sort of is a counteraction to the bigotry and the fucking hate that is out there. Like you can just reverse it. Yeah. Or you can try. Or you can do something. Yeah. But you know what? We can't reverse the continued march of all of the brilliant products and services who I love. We can try. But you got to listen to the ad first to figure out how. Yeah.

Know your enemy. Listen to these ads. Actually, some of them are probably for good things. That's the hard part is that sometimes we get ads for nice things. Like other podcasts. I like podcasts. I don't mind learning about podcasts through podcasts. That seems fine. Yes, but that does start to feel like a Ponzi scheme a little bit. That's true. Podcast advertising on other podcasts feels like, hold on. Well, every now and then people are like, how come all your guests are podcasters? And I'm like, I see your point.

But all my guests are podcasters because they know how to podcast because it's actually a trained skill that takes effort and also takes equipment. And not all of our guests are podcasters. Anyway, but all of our guests listen to ads. Actually, that's not true. We don't listen to them while we're recording. But here they are. You can listen to them. Let's go.

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So lesbians stepped up to donate blood and lesbian doctors and nurses stepped up to directly care for AIDS patients. But it went even deeper than that. In 1981, a gay man named Howie Dare, he was a fourth grade teacher with a master's degree in counseling, and a lesbian therapist named Candy Markham started a gay counseling center in Dallas after seeing clinics in New York and Houston that were counseling centers for gay folks. This is before it was going to be an HIV thing.

Everyone needs counseling and therapy sometimes, right? But if you're part of a criminalized community, that puts extra stress on your life. And most therapists that were available weren't exactly queer competent, let alone queer friendly. So they start up this hotline. They opened up the Oak Lawn Counseling Center in the Gaborhood. And then they went around to bars and wherever people hung out to tell people about it. Then the two of them went to a gay mental health conference in Houston, because hell yeah, queer infrastructure. There was a gay mental health conference in Houston in 1981. And they were like,

And they learned about this shitty new thing called GRID that was killing gay men and trans women on the coasts. So they decided to turn one of their phone lines into a GRID hotline, even before GRID hit the city. Candy was like, we don't know anything about this disease yet. I'm paraphrasing her. But Howie said, and I quote, yes, I know, but we will, and we need to be prepared. So...

I really like this man because he is a handsome prepper leather daddy school teacher with a master's degree and like was a mental health king. He's fucking cool. Amazing. Yeah. You can read all kinds of like, I didn't put all of it in here, but like he wrote a lot. Well, I'll get to it. Okay. Yeah. Within a few months, AIDS came to Dallas. And the thing is, is that AIDS untreated kills more or less everyone who gets it. And there were no treatments for years.

I don't know if I've read anything quite so much like war as the AIDS crisis. Every account I've read about this time in any city or town talks about people going to multiple funerals a week and that the gay-accepting churches were running two to three services a day. Actually, the specific, I think it was called the MCC, the church, the queer-accepting church in Dallas at this time, lost, I think, a third of its own clergy to AIDS.

The hotline that they had set up, this grid hotline, was staffed at first mostly by gay men. The quote, worried well. Because it's like, if you're a gay man in this time, you're either sick or you're the worried well, right? Because you're like, well, I don't know when it's going to be me. Anytime anyone got sick, they were like, oh, fuck. Like, I got a cold. I might be dead now, you know? Right. The community centered around this health clinic set up a buddy system where sick men would be placed with healthy folks who could care for them.

They had more than 100 registered buddies. These were sort of in addition to if you have like a full-time caretaker, like if you live with your partner or you live with your parents or someone else is like caretaking for you, you also have a buddy system on top of that to help relieve that caretaking. Right. And this model of direct care and mutual aid spread to other cities.

They also set up an adult daycare center so that people with AIDS could come and be taken care of in the center during the day so that their caretakers could catch a break. All the while, Howie is running all this shit alongside Candy. He's also teaching math to incarcerated people at the county jail. In addition to being a college teacher, a fourth grade teacher, institutionalized people teacher...

And a bartender. And running a counseling service. He fucking burned the candle at both ends. Jesus. That's so exhausting. I know. Good. I know. In 1985, when Howie was 37 years old, he was diagnosed with HIV. It was his friend and co-worker Candy, the other therapist, who was his buddy in the buddy system who was assigned to him.

His mom was a nurse and took care of him too. And he died in 1986 at 38 years old with his mother by his bedside. As were his wishes, his ashes were spread in his mother's rose garden. And I was like, as I was writing this, I was like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to read this without crying. Yes. Like, Candy kept going.

All of her male friends were dying, and she spent all of her time doing pro bono therapy in hospitals and in home care, and then would go and speak at their funerals. And this wasn't easy for her. The group that she was working with would set up housing for everyone who's being kicked out by their families for being gay and sick. And she talks about how often she would have therapy clients who would bring their families home

And the poor client, right, who would have to come out both as gay and dying in the same conversation. And Candy's job in that situation, as best as I can tell, was to try and convince the family to have a basic fucking human decency. Right. And like, love and care for their child.

So I can, you know, I guess like it's grim to think about that and like grim to see like how little humanity some folks have. But I guess you also just never know. Yeah. Yeah. I like that.

I come from a family where I like can't imagine that having happened to me. Yeah. I can imagine family or relatives or whatever who would be like shitty to me or make fun of me or not know how to talk about it and be awkward or like misgender me. God, I'm not trying to talk shit to my family. I could imagine all of these things. Yeah, yeah. But the like...

you are not our child. Get out of here, which happens, still happens to so many fucking queer kids. I just like, I can't,

I'm like, yeah, like it's like, could you could you have we put the bar on the floor? Like, could you step over it? Hell, it might even be buried under the ground. You just have to walk normal. Yeah. And instead they're like, no, I'm a dig up that bar and trip on it. You have to dig. You have to dig to be to be that bad. But yeah, or maybe you don't because it is reflexive for so many people. Clearly that like, yeah, yeah. Basically, as best as I can tell.

What happened in the 80s is you have all of these queer health services and counseling services and general infrastructure projects, right? That people have been building for a while or maybe built specifically around AIDS, but like often have been building for a long time. And then one by one, all of the men in them would die. And so it would be lesbians who would step up. Sometimes also straight women. I'm not trying to totally cut them out of this picture, especially in San Francisco. I end up reading about a bunch of straight women who also did a lot, but this particular episode is focused on lesbians.

And so you just have this thing where like, like I've read all these people who weren't there arguing about like, oh, why did women have to do all the unpaid labor or whatever the fuck, fuck all of that shit. But like, yeah. Why couldn't the men take care of themselves? Because they were dead. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I don't know what to tell you.

I mean, it's like, you know, of course, the grain of truth is in there. That is the work that falls to women so much. Absolutely. There is also an explanation. Yeah. And also, like, gay men are also overrepresented in caring fields. Yes. You know? Yes. Like, when I'm reading about a lot of the, like, early health clinics and stuff, it's like, oh, it was gay men and lesbians who staffed them. Right. And then it was just lesbians left for some weird reason, you know? Right. Right.

But yeah, no, totally. There is still a little bit of a like, yeah, you know, it's like caring work, et cetera, is gendered. But like, you know what? Like some work that is gendered is good when people do it. Yeah. And so many nonprofit leaders were dying in this period that Candy and other folks set up a six month seminar series to onboard lesbians to lead nonprofits. Right. Yeah.

When she was interviewed later, when she was asked what she would have done differently about her life, she says, you know, what comes to mind is I'd make a lot more money and give it away. But, you know, I worked as hard as I could. I don't think I could have done anything different. Like I said, I'm filled up from what happens. I think it is the story of my life. I'm pretty happy. Yeah. And so, how do you have a good life? You fucking find a way to help, and then you just fucking do it. Like...

She's not the only person I've read this week who's talking, who's looking back on a life of helping people during this horrible crisis. And a lot of the people I'm reading are like, yeah, we all have PTSD now. Or like, you know, it majorly impacted them. But overall, the people who survived, who were doing things are like, I'm pretty proud of myself and my community and I've lived the best life I could and I'm doing okay. Yeah. Or look, everything comes with a cost, but you know, there's also the like,

However, like PTSD you might have, I do think doing nothing would probably have made it worse. Totally. And you know what? And that's not a guarantee, of course, like different circumstances. But one of the bigger benefits of, you know, mutual aid is...

This is for you, too. Absolutely. Like, and that's literally in the name Mutual Aid, right? It's like, no, we're just people taking care of each other. And right now it's me taking care of you, you know? Yeah. And it won't necessarily be exact reciprocal, like, oh, well, tomorrow you take care of me. Yeah. But someone will take care of me. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

It works. If everyone did it, it just would work. Society would work. I know. It's one of the most frustrating things in the world. It's like once you start seeing it happen, you can't unsee it, you know? Yeah. Yeah. People want to take care of each other. Yeah. Well, some of us don't, but... That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what we got for part one, but...

When we come back on part two, we're going to talk about a whole bunch of other people who helped, including more lesbians and some nuns. Amazing. Do you got anything you want to plug here at the end? Your podcast, your mutual aid group, anything that TV shows we should watch that you wrote? Nah, nothing. I don't know. Yo, this is racist. Our premium show is called Yo, Can We Live? where we don't talk about

stuff that is horrible that rules I haven't listened to that yet just a you know just a way to decompress a little bit yeah that's about it I don't know I'm around okay

Well, if you want to keep up with me, I don't know. I say that every single time. I guess I probably, probably when this comes out, I'm probably in the middle of kickstarting a book, which means I'm probably, if this is March 2025 that you're listening to it, I'm probably kickstarting the third book in the Danielle Cain series. The Immortal Choir holds every voice and it is available either through Kickstarter. If you listen to this in the future, you can just buy it probably.

And there's audiobooks of all three books. So if you haven't heard the other ones, you can start with the audiobooks or the regular books, which you can just get. And I'll talk to you all soon.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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