Today is World AIDS Day.
Here’s a cool resource from the AIDS Memorial Quilt organization, showing various places in the US & events for World AIDS Day in your area, courtesy of Google Maps.
& Here’s Safe Sex info from Just Say Yes. (I love the little erection/condom .gif.)
I would love to hear from people as to why, say, the Quilt seems so different than the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Both are largely about the death of those we love. Yet they feel different, & I can’t quite put my finger on how.
It’s an interesting question, Helen. I think that the Quilt seems, to me, to be more of a celebration–or at least it includes as part of its function a celebration of each person’s life. It seems a less somber thing, too, which is not surprising, really. A quilt is a comforting thing. I suppose it could be just as depressing as TDOR if all the patches had to be black and only carry the name of the people who died. There is so much more to the Quilt, though. I think, too, that there is more effort involved in the quilt. It isn’t a single candle night vigil in the rain; somebody had to make the effort to actually construct it.
For whatever reason, the Quilt manages to capture the brightness of the lives that have been lost, while remembering that they have in fact been lost. The TDOR is just so much more somber an occasion, and while there are attempts to have people celebrate the lives of transpeople who have been brutalized, it all seems to come back to somebody reading names off a list, in the dark and in the rain. Who wouldn’t find that depressing as all hell?