Can you even appropriate something like “ballet culture?” It’s something a lot of little American and European girls are familiar with and is pretty entrenched in (white, middle class) imaginations. It’s a mainstream thing.

Relevant

And yet Madonna kept thinking that she did have a Broadway-calibre voice (and acting ability). Hence her appearance in Dick Tracy and Evita.

Yes you treat it with long course of antibiotics that hve nasty side effects. My daughter was suspected to have an atypical bacterial infection last year from an agent that isn’t TB but the bacterium itself acts like TB (not in symptoms) so they treat it with TB drugs. It was a relief when they later decided she did…

You gonna have to take that back because otherwise you’re insinuating A League of Their Own was bad and I will have to murder you.

He is a historians (and I imagine epidemiologists) dream. People are rubbish (absolute rubbish) at tracking small details of their lives and having to recall them. Why should they be, really, since most of the stuff is inconsequential?

The stigma of homosexuality and drug use (evil black kids in ghettos) was the major barrier with AIDS not getting the attention it deserved. In a way, it’s almost good that TB went through those growing pains in a different era than the Reagan years.

no, we still are, it’s just not as blatant

Very few people willingly infect anyone with anything, but we treat AIDS so differently than we do TB—as if TB is a blameless disease and AIDS is not.

It’s technically been ‘debunked’ for a while now, but it was unfortunately so ingrained in the public narrative (thanks to reasons mentioned in the article), that this seems to be the first time the news is making any impact. At least the correction is finally getting out there!

That isn’t true in the slightest and you’re confusing his portrayal in an HBO movie with actual facts. The real fact is that he volunteered for non profits helping HIV patients before his death and voluntarily flew to Atlanta to give blood samples to the CDC for research.

RadioLab did a fantastic piece on Patient Zeroes, including tracing the AIDS virus back to its probably initial vector, a monkey or ape.

HIV was in the US as early as 1968, probably much earlier (mid-1960s):

All because he used the letter O ... and people mistook it for a 0.

Democrats do have plenty of their own sex scandals, but the Republicans do seem to have a lock on the closeted gay meth parties and the kiddie diddling.

PREACH. I was definitely guilty of this as well when I was younger.

i think we all bought into that shit when we were younger. god i get that sick feeling of mortification in the pit of my stomach whenever i think about it. i was so proud to be “not like the other girls”. It was gross and the sisterhood is so much more important!

Plus they know that white women will come roaring back as soon as some judge tries to put a few black kids in Tyler and Melanie’s middle school.

It’s like being the “cool girl” who’s “one of the guys.” Conservative women get praise specifically for rallying around causes that are seen as (and actually are) the opposite of what is actually in the self-interest of women at large. Same as the women that slut-shame other women to fit in with the men and be “cool.”

I get it. I grew up in a solidly Republican suburb outside a heavily Democratic city, and as high school (and then college) student who was interested in politics, I had mentors who tried to steer me towards Republican causes/volunteering opportunities. The implication was pretty clear — as a woman and as a minority,…