This has been circulating and it’s given me one too many thoughts. An #HIV, #Queerantine and #COVID19 thread: 1/ 
Imagining that queers and queer academics are going to jump on some bandwagon to catch up with everybody else shows little knowledge of how the history of a much larger and deadly epidemic has for decades been entangled not only with our work but with the flesh on our bones 2/
That all the generalised panic to me reeks of a total disregard for the histories of pandemics that have affected and killed (that continue to affect and kill) bodies always considered less worthy of life. 3/
That it is actually the queers and the BiPoC who have developed strategies to continue to forge community and intimacy despite being continued disregarded by governments and killed by viral and cultural reproduction epidemics. 4/
That, while so many of us are now actively calling for the need of complete social isolation, that when AIDS was killing us and nobody cared, the question we asked was not how to alienate ourselves from one another but “how to have promiscuity in an epidemic” (Crimp 1987) 5/
That while we were dying and nobody fucking cared to even mourn us let alone put money into research on an epidemic which had a 100% fatality rate, that it was we who had to take care of one another and develop strategies for risk-management 6/
That when governments started demanding complete sexual isolation from us, that it was us who developed strategies of intimacy amidst death. Because death can also be a social, not just a medical phenomenon. 7/
That ur panic is telling when a virus appears to target you rather than just those whom u thought deserved it as punishment for their lives; or when that infection isn’t contained—like Ebola, Malaria, MERS, etc—to parts of the world u only remember with ur white saviour hat on 8/
That we are becoming feral animals, stockpiling shit to somehow save our own asses (or clean our own shit), completely disregarding the lessons about panic and fear of contact the AIDS crisis and the eventual governmental responses to it has taught us. 9/
That we are willing to sacrifice what brings us together—the value of what brings us together—to disregard risk-management strategies and simply welcome with open arms really scary legislation that we aren’t sure will even be actually lifted cuz “shock doctrine” (Klein 2007) 10/
So wash your hands regularly, look after those in need, stay together & stop acting like a selfish dick. More importantly, think about what you ask and their possible future consequences. And stop pretending something like this has ever happened simply cuz u’re white and straight
