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I promise, I will. I actually have quite a lot to say.

Something I’d like to tell you about, before I say the other things I want to say, is Larry Kramer’s speech on the 20th anniversary of the foundation of the AIDS awareness group ACT-UP which he gave in New York City on Monday. I can’t help but cry when reading his words full of sorrow and pain, hope, joy, loss and a great great harrowing sadness.

via Towleroad: We Are Not Crumbs; We Must Not Accept Crumbs

These are just a few of the things ACT UP did to make the world pay attention: We invaded the offices of drug companies and scientific laboratories and chained ourselves to the desks of those in charge. We chained ourselves to the trucks trying to deliver a drug company’s products. We liberally poured buckets of fake blood in public places. We closed the tunnels and bridges of New York and San Francisco. Our Catholic kids stormed St. Patrick’s at Sunday Mass and spit out Cardinal O’Connor’s host. We tossed the ashes from dead bodies from their urns on to the White House lawn. …And of course funeral after funeral after funeral. We made funerals into an art form, too, just as our demonstrations, our street theater, our graphics, many of which are now in museums and art galleries, were all art forms as well. God, we were so creative as we were dying.
ACT UP did all this. My children—you must forgive me for coming to think of them as that—most of whom are dead. You must have some idea what it is like when your children die. Most of them did not live to enjoy the benefits of their courage. They were courageous because they knew they might die. They could and were willing to fight because they felt they soon would die and there was nothing to lose, and maybe everything to gain.

…previously: all that for nothing?