Hiv Quotes

“That’s the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I’m in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can’t enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we’re going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death.”
― Jessica Verdi, My Life After Now

“Some women do not masturbate for pleasure; they masturbate to make a political statement: to remind us that women do not really need men (or at least not as much and as frequently as every single male chauvinist and every single misogynist believes).”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay

“It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay

“Some women have been faking orgasms for so long that they sometimes fake one when they are masturbating.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, On Masturbation: A Satirical Essay

“Forever feels a long time when you're eighteen. When you're away from home for the first time in your life, when you forge instant friendships that are so strong they are destined, surely, to be with you until the bitter end.”
― Jane Green, Bookends

“That's the problem with lying. You can never remember what you've said.”
― Jane Green, Bookends

“How many thousands
of stories like yours
have been told
and forgotten how many
stories of lovingly durable nurses
of hospital sheets of IV tubes
dripping saline and morphine
How many stories of drugs
that would haul you
along in their wake for a while
but finally
let you sink”
― Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon

“Because of things such as drugs and alcohol, countless people, most of whom are female, do not know that they were once raped, many of them more than once.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Unprotected sex is often a subconscious attempt to commit delayed assisted suicide.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“To his fans at Our House, he was a symbol that having HIV or AIDS did not mean that you had to go hide in exile. You could stay in the game, be social, snatch trophies and *live.* The literature about HIV that I read and shared, by gay men for gay men, emphasized a focus on living with HIV, rather than on dying. But that was all theoretical, just words, until they could see it in practice.”
― Ruth Coker Burks, All The Young Men

“Condomizing makes it way less difficult for you not to worry about the sex life or lives of the person or people who are also sleeping with your partner.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Life minimizes the number of materialistic women mainly through well-off men and boys whose main goal is to infect as many females as they can with HIV.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Some women are so cruel that they do not choose to at least not play hard to get, when they are being pursued by men who they know they will intentionally infect with HIV.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“You are my blood.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Weetzie Bat

“At times I feel my body has been transformed into a factory of infection, a vessel of virus. The wheels and cogs are constantly turning, manufacturing more toxins and poisons. My body is merely the host”
― David B. Feinberg, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone

“Today, HIV has spread around the world, infecting around 65 million people, with 25 million dying from the disease. In some countries, most people who are infected are women, as transmission of the virus occurs most commonly during heterosexual sex.”
― Megan Coffee, Vaccines For Dummies

“To this day, I still do not believe, not for one minute, in the type of god who passes out diseases. What an awful, erratic god it would be! Nowhere in Scripture did Jesus once say, "If you don't straighten up and fly right, God's going to give you a disease." Read the Bible for yourself! Disease is exactly and only that - disease.”
― Troy D. Perry, Don't Be Afraid Anymore: The Story of Reverend Troy D. Perry and the Metropolitan Community Churches

“She gazed over her oxygen mask at the small, smiling Christmas tree that sat on the table behind her.  Tonight, the whirling sound of the disk in the drive was a song that was sweeter than any lullaby.”
― Circa24, Thomas Hardy was an Optimist: A Collection of Short Stories From the Plague Years.

“HIV prevalence is an abstraction. the time-lag between infection with HIV and illness with AIDS is so long - eight to ten years - that a new epidemic consists mostly of symptom-less HIV infection rather than visible sickness and death from AIDS”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“there is a missing link. people overwhelmingly acknowledge that there is an AIDS epidemic, but do not take the next step of accepting the consequences. this is familiar territory for those concerned with trying to change risky sexual behaviour: knowledge about how HIV is transmitted and the dangers of certain kinds of practices does not seem to translate into behavioural change.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“in the higher stages of denial, ever-more-complex mechanisms are developed for explaining the unacceptable while maintaining a façade of social and moral normality.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the AIDS pandemic is a disaster with few parallels, because it is so easy to make it invisible or to pretend it is something else. an earthquake, flood or famine is dramatically visible and politically salient, because it affects entire communities in a spectacular fashion, including their leaders and spokespeople. AIDS is more like climate change, an incremental process manifest in a quickening drumbeat of ‘normal’ events.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the most sophisticated form of denial is ‘normalization’. the intolerable becomes ‘no longer news’ and people invest in ‘not having an inquiring mind about these matters’.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the study of socio-political denial is the study of how appearances are kept up, the moral order is sustained, and necessary changes are pressed up into the service of existing interests. this can be seen at the family and community level, and in the way that national and international politics is managed.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“for the women [sex-workers], all poor and competing in an oversupplied market for sexual services, the ‘choice’ of unprotected sex is simply a financial trade-off between less money today (and the threat of physical violence from a dissatisfied client) and the far-off danger of developing AIDS. this has echoes, too, of the risk of a ‘bad reputation’ weighed by women [in the area] who too rarely insist on condom use to protect themselves.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“if spiritual forces operate in a different sphere to the rule of law and human rights, then democratic politics is failing to deal with a fundamental problem in people’s lives and after-lives. the repercussions of AIDS for the moral cosmology are profound indeed. the secular frameworks of epidemiology and public policy will not by themselves be enough to make sense of the virus and epidemic. we need to develop and deploy metaphors that speak to the social world, constructed around moral imaginings which are impacted by AIDS and which in turn constrain social capabilities to respond to AIDS. we should also be alert to the fact that scholars and policy makers themselves are unable to think about the crisis that is AIDS without using language and imagery borrowed from another realm of human experience. how we think about the AIDS epidemic becomes its own reality. yet we must not lose sight of the virus and the disease. (…) AIDS represents the ordinary workings of biology, not an irrational or diabolical plague with moral meaning. HIV transmission is preventable and medication is available that can extend a healthy life for those living with HIV. science can triumph, given resources, policies and the right social and political context.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why there is no Political Crisis - Yet by Waal, Alex de [Zed Books, 2006] ( Paperback ) [Paperback]

“in the run-up to South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994, Nelson Mandela was reportedly advised not to make AIDS into a campaign issue for fear of offending culturally conservative constituencies. ‘I wanted to win,’ said Mandela, ‘and I did not talk about AIDS.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“it is from such diverse sources with varied networks and linkages that the response to HIV / AIDS has been patched together. it is an NGO model of response, uneven in coverage and quality, responsive to the particularities of local circumstance, the character of local leaders, and the availability and types of funds available.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the philanthropic NGO has long been decried by the left as a means of addressing only the symptoms of poverty and thus obscuring the political strategies needed to overcome it. NGOs are criticised for creating Potemkin villages not replicable at scale. their limits are often painfully apparent. some are ‘briefcase’ NGOs, to give their founders income or profit.”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet

“the Cold War thaw brought a rising tide: a series of waves that swept in and receded, slowly and unevenly bringing new political waterlines”
― Alex de Waal, AIDS and Power: Why There Is No Political Crisis – Yet