Anything by Greg Bordowicz: Just a fantastic nonfiction writer in general. The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings (buy here) is an incredibly well written book.
Academic Reading: Fear of A Queer Planet. Edited by Michael Warner (download here or buy here) Specifically see the essays by Patton and by Freeman and Berlant.
Primary Source: Randy Shilts And the Band Played On. Primary resource with (obviously) outdated information (for example, the Patient Zero myth). But important historical artifact.
Biography and Memoir:
David Wojnarowicz
Fire in the Belly:The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz by Cynthia Carr (buy here)
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz (buy here)
Vito: documentary on Vito Russo on Netflix. (bonus: adaptation of Russo’s book on queer portrayals in classic film, The Celluloid Closet)
Bonus: not AIDS related, but The Life and Times of Harvey Milk is on Hulu. It does a good job explaining the political climate in San Francisco following Milk’s murder and establishing the milieu from which the San Francisco AIDS crisis emerged.
Reluctantly recced: How to Survive a Plague. Well-done documentary that provides a great deal of historical background and information, but over-emphasizes the role of white men in ACT-UP (though interestingly enough, not Kramer). I.e., aggrandizes Peter Staley.
Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Rent HBO adaptation here. If you have a Scribd subscription, read here. Teachers’s Resource Packet with Background Information
Sarah Shulman People in Trouble (buy here) Scribd here note: much of Rent was plagiarized from Shulman which is but one reason it is not on this list. Further reading: Shulman’s Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (buy here)
Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction ed. Richard Canning
Larry Kramer
Faggot note: published in 1978. Pre-AIDS, but classic Kramer.
Michael Cunningham: The Hours (film adaptation: rent)
If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also
Matt 5:39
This specifically refers to a hand striking the side of a person’s face, tells quite a different story when placed in it’s proper historical context. In Jesus’s time, striking someone of a lower class ( a servant) with the back of the hand was used to assert authority and dominance. If the persecuted person “turned the other cheek,” the discipliner was faced with a dilemma. The left hand was used for unclean purposes, so a back-hand strike on the opposite cheek would not be performed. Another alternative would be a slap with the open hand as a challenge or to punch the person, but this was seen as a statement of equality. Thus, by turning the other cheek the persecuted was in effect putting an end to the behavior or if the slapping continued the person would lawfully be deemed equal and have to be released as a servant/slave.
I can attest to the original poster’s comments. A few years back I took an intensive seminar on faith-based progressive activism, and we spent an entire unit discussing how many of Jesus’ instructions and stories were performative protests designed to shed light on and ridicule the oppressions of that time period as a way to emphasize the absurdity of the social hierarchy and give people the will and motivation to make changes for a more free and equal society.
For example, the next verse (Matthew 5:40) states “And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.” In that time period, men traditionally wore a shirt and a coat-like garment as their daily wear. To sue someone for their shirt was to put them in their place – suing was generally only performed to take care of outstanding debts, and to be sued for one’s shirt meant that the person was so destitute the only valuable thing they could repay with was their own clothing. However, many cultures at that time (including Hebrew peoples) had prohibitions bordering on taboo against public nudity, so for a sued man to surrender both his shirt and his coat was to turn the system on its head and symbolically state, in a very public forum, that “I have no money with which to repay this person, but they are so insistent on taking advantage of my poverty that I am leaving this hearing buck-ass naked. His greed is the cause of a shameful public spectacle.”
All of a sudden an action of power (suing someone for their shirt) becomes a powerful symbol of subversion and mockery, as the suing patron either accepts the coat (and therefore full responsibility as the cause of the other man’s shameful display) or desperately chases the protester around trying to return his clothes to him, making a fool of himself in front of his peers and the entire gathered community.
Additionally, the next verse (Matthew 5:41; “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles.”) was a big middle finger to the Romans who had taken over Judea and were not seen as legitimate authority by the majority of the population there. Roman law stated that a centurion on the march could require a Jew (and possibly other civilians as well, although I don’t remember explicitly) to carry his pack at any time and for any reason for one mile along the road (and because of the importance of the Roman highway system in maintaining rule over the expansive empire, the roads tended to be very well ordered and marked), however he could not require any service beyond the next mile marker. For a Jewish civilian to carry a centurion’s pack for an entire second mile was a way to subvert the authority of the occupying forces. If the civilian wouldn’t give the pack back at the end of the first mile, the centurion would either have to forcibly take it back or report the civilian to his commanding officer (both of which would result in discipline being taken against the soldier for breaking Roman law) or wait until the civilian volunteered to return the pack, giving the Judean native implicit power over the occupying Roman and completely subverting the power structure of the Empire. Can you imagine how demoralizing that must have been for the highly ordered Roman armies that patrolled the region?
Jesus was a pacifist, but his teachings were in no way passive. There’s a reason he was practically considered a terrorist by the reigning powers, and it wasn’t because he healed the sick and fed the hungry.
Yes, and isn’t it telling that the state ultimately adopted Christianity and started teaching everyone that Jesus said to obey your parents and to just do what you’re told…else he’d send you to hell?
technology related sensory memories from my childhood
sliding the metal cover on floppy disks
the slight resistance of inserting cassette and video tapes
ripping off the strips of holed paper off of dot matrix printer paper
rolling the wheel on a disposable camera to take another photo
The heaviness and rubber texture of the roller ball in a computer mouse, and the little ring of lint
Unkinking the curly cord of a telephone while you talked
The -peww sound and slowly fading image of a crt monitor turning off, and then running your finger through the static on the dusty glass
The crunch of opening or closing a plastic Disney vhs cover
The sound effects in kidpix
Extending and collapsing metal antennas and using them as magic wands
Manually rewinding cassette tapes by spinning them around my fingers
Playing with the rubber casing of the buttons on a Walkman–pulling them away, rotating them, slipping them from side to side on the stiff posts of the buttons
The audio and visual static at the end of a videotape
The satisfying thwap-thwap-thwap as you page through a well-filled CD sleeve book
How weird and small and light the first cordless phone felt
Sticking your fingers into the holes of an older relative’s rotary phone they still have yet to replace, and pushing to get the dial to turn and the oddly-satisfying click-click-click to get to the right number.
The sheer loudness and weight of a typewriter: the loud clack! as keys struck paper, the high-pitched warning ding! at the end of the line, the whirring zip! of shoving the heavy carriage back to the start.
The blockiness of computer monitors and towers: huge boxes with sharp lines, cases a roughly textured matte beige.
Depressing the power buttons into the casing of various electronics – and if you didn’t push hard and deep enough, it wouldn’t turn on at all.
Turning the heavy handle on the inside of the car door, and the window lowering in soft jerks.
The weight of your parents’ camera and the strange milky brown of new film being installed before the back of the camera was shut with a soft click.
The actual smell of the camera film.
The smell of the house after getting the first window-unit air conditioner. (It smelled like other people’s houses, not ours.)
The high-pitched, barely audible whine of the television tube.
The sound and feel of turning the TV dial really fast, past the empty channels (and it was faster for UHF than for VHF, since there were so many more UHF frequencies.)
E v e r y t h i n g about the slide projector–the back light when the man lamp isn’t on, the sound and feel of the fan, the motion and sound of the slides being pushed in and pulled out and the carousel advancing, the clunk when the direction is changed, and the glow of the images…
The heavy feel of turning the film strip in class. That God awful BEEP.
that awful squeak when you used the new piece of chalk on the board.
spinning the dial of the radio to find the right station and the joy of finding some obscure station that you could only get if you fiddled with the knob just right.
A scratched CD skipping in the same place every time.
Placing the arm of the record player down, how sharp that needle could be.
The gargantuan effort of trying to turn the wheel of a car with no power steering.
the cracked, sharp, extremely hot vinyl seats of your parent’s van.
Watching the analog numbers flip on the pump at the self serve gas station.
The heat expelled from the side of the teacher’s overhead projector and the smell of non-toxic transparency markers.
The gradual slowing of the Walkman as the batteries died.
Pulling a 5.25″ floppy disk out of a cloth-paper sleeve.
The heft of the gray, brick-like Gameboy and perching like a gremlin under a table lamp so you could actually see the screen.
The ksssshhhhh-boing-a-boing-a-beep-kssssssssh of the modem connecting.
Sticking your finger through the swinging silvery door of the coin return on a payphone and scooping forward to look for change.
Sliding the switch on the splitter from TV to AV to watch a movie.
Pressing your nose to the tv screen and seeing the tiny, tiny vertical bars of red, blue, and green
The smell and unnatural chill of freon when the car air conditioning came on.
The sound and bright colourful dancing lines of a loading Spectrum ZX Game, and the excitement – only a few more minutes til you can play!
The rude jolt as an audio cassette flipped sides automatically
Your music jolting along with your movements if you tried to run while using a discman
Static seemingly from nowhere in the middle of a radio or TV programme you were enjoying – moving the ariel or portable radio around until you found that sweet spot where the sound/picture were reasonably clear again.
Programmes you’d videod yourself off the telly, with the end of the credits after the programme before, the channel ident, and at the end, occasional announcements about one of the stars appearing in a now long forgotten west end show.
Listening to a cassette that’s been recorded over and and over, and hearing the faint ghosts of songs and programmes that had been taped over.
how is it possible to love fictional characters this much and also have people always been this way?
like, did queen elizabeth lie in bed late sometimes thinking ‘VERILY I CANNOT EVEN FOR MERCUTIO HATH SLAIN ME WITH FEELS’
was caesar like ‘ET TU ODYSSEUS’
sometimes i wonder
the answer is yes they did. there’s a lot of research about the highly emotional reactions to the first novels widely available in print.
here’s a thing; the printing press was invented in 1450 and whilst it was revolutionary it wasn’t very good. but then it got better over time and by the 16th century there were publications, novels, scientific journals, folios, pamphlets and newspapers all over Europe. at first most were educational or theological, or reprints of classical works.
however, novels gained in popularity, as basically what most people wanted was to read for pleasure. they became salacious, extremely dramatic, with tragic heroines and doomed love and flawed heroes (see classical literature, only more extreme.) books in the form of letters were common. sensationalism was par the course and apparently used to teach moral lessons. there was also a lot of erotica floating around.
but here’s the thing: due to the greater availability of literature and the rise of comfy furniture (i shit you not this is an actual historical fact, the 16th and 17th century was when beds and chairs got comfy) people started reading novels for pleasure, women especially. as these novels were highly emotional, they too became…highly emotional. there are loads of contemporary reports of young women especially fainting, having hysterics, or crying fits lasting for days due to the death of a character or their otp’s doomed love. they became insensible over books and characters, and were very vocal about it. men weren’t immune-there’s a long letter a middle-aged man wrote to the author of his favourite work basically saying that the novel is too sad, he can’t handle all his feels, if they don’t get together he won’t be able to go on, and his heart is already broken at the heroine’s tragic state (IIRC ehh).
conservatives at the time were seriously worried about the effects of literature on people’s mental health, and thought it damaging to both morals and society. so basically yes it is exactly like what happens on tumblr when we cry over attractive British men, only my historical theory (get me) is that their emotions were even more intense, as they hadn’t had a life of sensationalist media to numb the pain for them beforehand in the same way we do, nor did they have the giant group therapy session that is tumblr.
(don’t even get me started on the classical/early medieval dudes and their boners for the Iliad i will be here all week. suffice to say, the members of the Byzantine court used Homeric puns instead of talking normally to each other if someone who hand’t studied the classics was in the room. they had dickish fandom in-jokes. boom.)
I needed to know this.
See, we’re all just the current steps in a time-honored tradition! (And this post is good to read along with Affectingly’s post this week about old-school-fandom-and-history-and-stuff.
Ancient Iliad fandom is intense
Alexander the Great and and his boyfriend totally RPed Achilles and Patroclus. Alexander shipped that hard. (It’s possible that this story is apocryphal, but that would just mean that ancient historians were writing RPS about Alexander and Hephaestion RPing Iliad slash and honestly that’s just as good).
And then there’s this gem from Plato:
“Very different was the reward of the true love of Achilles towards his lover Patroclus – his lover and not his love (the notion that Patroclus was the beloved one is a foolish error into which Aeschylus has fallen, for Achilles was surely the fairer of the two, fairer also than all the other heroes; and, as Homer informs us, he was still beardless, and younger far)” – Symposium
That’s right: 4th Century BCE arguments about who topped. Nihil novi sub sole my friends.
More on this glorious subject from people who know way more than I do
Also a thing with fix-it/everyone lives AUs: at various points in time but especially in the mid 1800s-early 1900s (aka roughly Victorian though there were periods of this earlier as well) a huge thing was to “fix” Shakespeare (as well as most theater/novels) to be in line with current morality. Good characters live, bad characters are terribly punished – but not, you know, grusomely, because what would the ladies think? So you have like, productions of King Lear where Cordelia lives and so do Regan and Goneril, but they’re VERY SORRY.
Aka all your problematic faves are redeemed and Everyone Lives! AUs for every protag.
Slightly tangential but I wanted to add my own favorite account of Chinese fandom to this~ I don’t know how many people here have heard of the Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions (红楼梦), but it is, arguably, the most famous Chinese novel ever written (There are four Chinese novel classics and A Dream of Red Mansions is considered the top of that list). It was written during the Qing dynasty by 曹雪芹, but became a banned book due to its critique of societal institutions and pro-democracy themes. As a result, the original ending of the book was lost and only the first 80 chapters remained. There are quite a few versions of how the current ending of the book came to be, but one of them is basically about how He Shen, one of Emperor Qian Long’s most powerful advisers, was such a super-fan of the book, he hired two writers to archive and reform the novel from the few remaining manuscripts there were. In order to convince the Emperor to remove the ban on the book, he had the writers essentially write a fanfiction ending to the book that would mitigate the anti-establishment themes. However, He Shen thought that the first version of the ending was too tragic (even though the whole book is basically a tragedy) so he had the writers go back and write a happier ending for him (the current final 40 chapters). He then presented the book to the Emperor and successfully convinced him to remove the ban on the book.
According to incomplete estimates, A Dream of Red Mansions spawned over 20 spin offs, retellings, and alternate versions (in the form of operas, plays, etc.) during the Qing Dynasty alone.
In 1979, fans (albeit academic ones) started publishing a bi-monthly journal dedicated to analysis (read: meta) on A Dream of Red Mansions. In fact, the novel’s fandom is so vast and qualified and rooted in academics of Chinese literature that there is an entire field of study (beginning in the Qing dynasty) of just this one novel, called 红学. Think of it as Shakespearean studies, but only on one play. This field of study has schools of thought and specific specializations (as in: Psych analyses, Economics analyses, Historical analyses, etc.) that span pretty much every academic field anyone can think of.
(That being said, I’ve read A Dream of Red Mansions and can honestly say that I’ve never read its peer in either English or Chinese. If for nothing else, read it because you would never otherwise believe that a man from the Qing dynasty could write such a heart-breakingly feminist novel with such a diverse cast of female characters given all the bitching and moaning we hear from male content-creators nowadays)
the beauty of archival research *sigh*
i went to a building that is a “fan recreation” of one of the buildings from Hongloumeng and my like bitter, angry, never smiled once 78yo male teacher was like squeeing and giggling and kept sitting down and fanning himself and posed dramatically for photos
this guy was like the voldemort of staff, a man of legendary terror-inspiring mien. swooning.
A more recent example of fandom in history is the original Sherlock Holmes fan base! It’s one of the earliest coherent models we have that closely represents the fandoms of modern media.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s first two Sherlock Holmes novels weren’t hugely popular, but when he began to write stories for The Strand magazine involving Sherlock Holmes, the public basically went absolutely mental. He used to get fan mail – predominantly from women, apparently – addressed directly to Sherlock Holmes, some women even offering to be his housekeeper.
He eventually got so fed up of writing stories about a character he didn’t really like (he considered Sherlock Holmes to be an irritating distraction from his ambition to write historical fiction, once saying “he takes my mind from better things”) that he took measures to end the series once and for all. First, he raised his fee for writing the stories to an extortionate amount, hoping that the magazine would refuse to pay it and fire him. However, there was such a demand for new Sherlock Holmes stories that the magazine just agreed to pay his ridiculous fee. So, he killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 in the Reichenbach Falls, and when he did that, shit hit the fan. People reportedly placed Sherlock Holmes obituaries in newspapers. Many of them cancelled their subscription to The Strand, and wrote angry letters to Arthur Conan Doyle explaining how he’d broken their heart. To fill the gap left by the death of their bb, some people wrote fan fiction and shared it in literary groups and book clubs.
Conan Doyle caved to pressure in 1901 and wrote Hound of the Baskervilles, partly because the fan fervour never really died down, and partly because cash dollah. You know how fans lobbied for the return of Firefly, and ended up getting Serenity made? The original Sherlock Holmes fans totally got there first.
You forgot the bit where Holmes fans wore honest-to-god *mourning* attire after the death of their fave. Men wore crepe armbands in the streets for Holmes. It was redonk.
“Nothing belongs to us anymore. They have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair. If we speak, they will not listen to us. And if they listen, they will not understand. They have even taken away our names.
My number is 174517. I will carry the tattoo on my left arm until I die.”
Primo Levi, Italian writer, poet and partisan, survived Auschwitz lager.
New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston. Scan from b/w film, taken with YashicaFX-3
Some of the most remarkable items from the Bodleian Libraries’ collections have been selected for long-term display in our Treasures Exhibition. This is where visitors can find a whole slate of the ‘greatest hits’ in one single gallery, from Shakespeare’s First Folio to Magna Carta, or Handel’s hand-annotated Messiah to Shelley’s long-lost Poetical Essay.
One extra gem – almost an honorary member of the Treasures selection – can be found just outside the exhibition. Hanging proudly on the wall in the Weston Library’s Blackwell Hall is the Sheldon Tapestry Map of Worcestershire.
This is one of four lavish, groundbreaking tapestry maps, alongside others of Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, that were intricately woven from silk and wool for landowner Ralph Sheldon in the 1590s. Sections of the Oxfordshire and Worcestershire maps have been owned by the Bodleian since they were donated in 1809; we have also purchased several pieces of the Gloucestershire map at auction in the years since.
Because it’s simply so detail-packed and comes with so many stories, the Sheldon Tapestry Map gets its own special event for visitors on every weekday.
From 11.30am until noon one of our guides (who is, whenever possible, an expert from our Map Room) goes on duty in Blackwell Hall, ready to tell stories about the map or answer any visitors’ questions.
There’s a lot to say about the Sheldon maps, and the questions asked by guests will ensure that every morning’s talk is different, but here are just a few of the things we learned from the expert guide in just a few minutes – and all while we were taking onboard the tapestry’s immense, delicate beauty in person.
Each of the four tapestries shows one of the labours of Hercules. On the Worcestershire map is a depiction of Hercules killing the Hydra.
The map is largely consistent with many other maps at the time, but also features the brilliantly-named WorldesEnd which, soon after the tapestries were completed, vanished from maps entirely.
Weston House, Ralph Sheldon’s own home, is featured on all four maps, making the links between their geography more obvious.
The map’s scale is approximately 1:25,000, which is the same as today’s Ordnance Survey Explorer Maps.
The Worcestershire map is detailed in purple, with Oxford set in orange, Gloucestershire in green and Warwickshire in yellow.
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