{"quotes":[{"text":"[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer - if the information they base that decision on is wrong. People don't want the truth [when] it is complicated. They don't want to spend years debating an issue. They want it homogenized, sanitized, and above all, simplified into terms they can understand...Governments are often criticized for moving slowly, but that deliberateness, it turns out, is their strength. They take time to think through complex problems before they act. People, however, are different. People react first from the gut and then from the head...Give that knee-jerk reflex real power to make its overwhelming will known as a national mandate instantly and you can cause a political riot. Combine these sins - simplification of information and instant, visceral democratic mandates - and you lose the ability to cool down. There is no longer deliberation time between events that may or may not be true and our reaction to them. Policy becomes instinct rather than thought.","author":"Tracy Hickman","tags":["aids","gay-rights","politics","science-fiction"],"id":1408,"author_id":"Tracy+Hickman"},{"text":"AIDS had won gays sympathy they no longer seemed the privileged brats that the general populace had resented in the 1970s. ","author":"Edmund White","tags":["aids","general","privileged "],"id":44056,"author_id":"Edmund+White"},{"text":"Being HIV positive doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to die before each and every person who is HIV negative.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["aids","antiretroviral","antiretroviral-therapies","antiretroviral-therapy","aphorism","aphorisms","aphorist","aphorists","arv","arvs","cd4-cells","cd4-count","cd4-t-lymphocytes","cellular-immunity","dead","death","die","disease","diseases","funny","hiv","hiv-aids","hiv-negative","hiv-positive","human-immunodeficiency-virus","humor","humour","ill","illness","illnesses","immune","immune-system","immunity","joke","jokes","satire","sick","sickness","standard-antiretroviral-therapy","virus","viruses"],"id":55546,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"Disciples of Jesus Christ have had a profound life-altering experience. They have encountered a supernatural personality, revealed in history as Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, the Messiah. And they have discovered the meaning and purpose of their lives in the subsequent revelation of his continuing presence to them. The experience demands a faithful, reliable witness.What would public opinion say of a person who discovered the absolute cure for AIDS, but was unwilling to share that cure with a world that so desperately needs it? What if the antidote were kept hidden and made use of by only the discoverer and his family? We would consider it an moral outrage and he or she would be infamous. Why? We expect the cure to be shared, not only shared, but made available to all as soon as possible!","author":"David C. Alves","tags":["aids","evangelism-apologetics","faith","revelation","supernatural","supernatural-experiences","witnesses"],"id":55811,"author_id":"David+C.+Alves"},{"text":"Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?","author":"Paul Russell","tags":["aids","gay"],"id":75437,"author_id":"Paul+Russell"},{"text":"After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin…The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don’t know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers.","author":"Mark Doty","tags":["aids","comfort","death","grief","love","physicality"],"id":98050,"author_id":"Mark+Doty"},{"text":"For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her.","author":"Harold Brodkey","tags":["aids","cowardice","death-and-dying","hospital","life","time"],"id":103428,"author_id":"Harold+Brodkey"},{"text":"The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.","author":"Alysia Abbott","tags":["ableism","aids","american-culture","american-history","death","dying","gay-history","gay-rights","history","hiv","lgbtq","stigma"],"id":104510,"author_id":"Alysia+Abbott"},{"text":"(Note: I realize this is horrifying. Just keep reading.) 'Turn to Leviticus 20:13, because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS. If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them. And that, my friend, is the cure for AIDS. It was right there in the Bible all along — and they’re out spending billions of dollars in research and testing. It’s curable — right there. Because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.'This is an American pastor openly calling for the death of all homosexuals. The anti-gay movement is now so extreme, some, (not all) call for genocide. So how about instead of Alex from Target or pumpkin spice lattes, we get this out on the media. Because this is disgusting. No one should have to be called worthless, better in death, for a problem they did not cause. AIDS did not start with homosexuals, and it's not going to end with them. The only thing that has to end is hate like this.","author":"Anomymous pastor and myself","tags":["aids","god","inspiration","lgbt","love","pro-gay"],"id":116620,"author_id":"Anomymous+pastor+and+myself"},{"text":"...I wondered at times whether I would wake up and this would be just a bad dream, a nightmare that I could wish away, I had the same fantasy when you were sick, Doc, that I would one day wake up and you all would be healthy and alive.","author":"Rabih Alameddine","tags":["aids","death-and-dying","illness","mourning"],"id":143952,"author_id":"Rabih+Alameddine"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":50,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}