... having been breathed out

Though the United States was now [in the early 2000s] providing nearly twice as much to the global effort against AIDS as the rest of the world's richest governments combined, those billions of dollars brought with them a legion of problems. The Bush administration concertedly began to use the funds to impose destructive policies on the governments of poorer countries, the United Nations, and grassroots and civil society groups. At precisely the point when Bush was insisting that the world accept his trumped-up claims about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, those diktats were yet more proof of his schoolyard-bully approach to foreign relations.

( Read more )

Sex workers continued to bear the brunt of the persecution [from government, medical, press, and societal stigma around HIV/AIDS. In addition to hospitals refusing to treat HIV-positive patients, courts refusing to let HIV-positive people marry, and employers firing HIV-positive employees, which were issues faced by all HIV-positive Indians, o]n the orders of the courts or government, sex workers were routinely rounded up in raids and forcibly tested for HIV, with those testing positive incarcerated indefinitely. In 1994, the Maharashtra government attempted to pass legislation that would have allowed it to brand HIV-positive sex workers with indelible ink. In 1996, the Mumbai High Court ordered the arrest and mandatory HIV testing of more than four hundred sex workers; many of the women were incarcerated for over a year, and seven died in that time. The Supreme Court made several rulings that further legitimized the persecution and abuse of sex workers.

My notebooks were soon overflowing. Every one of the interviews was heartbreaking because of the desperation they exuded, so different from the philosophical resignation with which I had seen Indians accept more conventional catastrophes, however awful or unremitting. Their terror leached through as relentless anxiety. Every conversation returned to the looming prospect of death. For those with children, there was the added feverish dread about which relative or friend could be trusted to house them, how to set aside some money to provide for them, how to ensure their well-being.

The one constant I found in my research was that AIDS had devastated the lives of India's sex workers like no force ever before. In the dozen years since Selvi and the five other sex workers in the Madras reformatory had been found to have HIV, countless more sex workers had contracted HIV, had fallen mortally sick, or had died. [But due to the rudimentary state of India's vital registration systems at the time, and the lack of sites providing trend data on HIV infection rates], no one knew exactly how many—or even exactly where.

[...]

But it soon became evident, to my great surprise, that alongside the havoc AIDS was wreaking in the lives of sex workers, the epidemic had also catalyzed positive changes for them, perhaps even transformative changes for those who might survive the epidemic. ( Read more )

[My partner] Tandavan and I often went to my brother Pratap's home, where he and his family treated us warmly. I found even a greater warmth and naturalness at the home of my only other relative in Delhi, my aunt Nandini, the very youngest of my mother's five siblings and hence of my generation rather than my mother's. We had been close since our childhood. I had not discussed with her my being gay, so I was surprised and deeply touched to see that from the moment that Tandavan and I started living together she made it a point to specify that he was always invited with me to her in-laws' home, where she lived in a traditional joint family. From every one of her family, Tandavan and I only felt love and warmth. They may have privately discussed my being gay among them, but not once in their company did I ever feel that my choice of romantic partner was remarkable or made me different.

I was struck that my other favorite aunt, Usha, who lived in the small town of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, also treated my relationship with Tandavan with complete ease, insisting that we visit her often, giving us a bedroom with a double bed, and taking care to give us privacy. I thought of telling her and Nandini categorically about Tandavan and my being a couple, but decided against it on realizing that they were certainly already aware of it yet had not asked for any explanation on my part. All the evidence began to convince me that traditional Indians were immeasurably more accepting of same-sex desire than Anglicized Indians like my father. Siddhartha, with whom I had been debating the matter, insisted that was true, judging from his personal experience of being raised in a more Indian setting than I, a sprawling extended family that shared a large Calcutta house.

In contrast, my father—though unfailingly courteous to Tandavan—did not display the same kind of warmth. I didn't raise the matter with him, as all I wanted him to do was what he was doing already, treating Tandavan politely. But the unfortunate downside was that I stopped joining my parents and brothers on family holidays, to which my brothers' girlfriends were invited. It created something of a hiatus in my relationship with my father after a decade in which we had drawn closer and closer.

African Americans and their allies tried to create their own opportunities [in the wake of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery] by establishing dozens of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the late 1860s. Antiracist educators and philanthropists who viewed southern Black students as intellectually equal to White students were almost certainly involved, but they were not nearly as numerous or as powerful as the assimilationist educators and philanthropists. These assimilationists commonly founded HBCUs "to educate... a number of blacks," and then "send them forth to regenerate" their people, who had been degenerated by slavery, as one philanthropist stated. Black and White HBCU founders assumed New England's Latin and Greek curriculum to be the finest, and they only wanted the finest for their students. Many founders assumed "white teachers" to be "the best," as claimed in the New York National Freedman's Relief Association in its 1865-1866 annual report. HBCU teachers and students worked hard to prove to segregationists that Blacks could master the "high culture" of a Greco-Latin education. But the handful of "refined," often biracial HBCU graduates were often dismissed as products of White blood, or as extraordinary in comparison to the ordinarily "unrefined" Black.

Not all the HBCUs founded in the aftermath of the Civil War adopted the liberal arts curriculum. African Americans "had three centuries of experience in general demoralization and behind that, paganism," the 1868 founder of the Hampton Institute in Virginia once said. Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the former Union officer and Freedman's Bureau official, offered teaching and vocational training that tutored acceptance of White political supremacy and Blacks' working-class position in the capitalist economy. Hampton had a trade component that aimed to work its aspiring teachers hard so that they would come to appreciate the dignity of hard labor and go on to impress that dignity—instead of resistance—onto the toiling communities where they established schools.

For all their submission schooling, Hampton-type HBCUs were less likely than the Greco-Roman-oriented HBCUs to bar dark-skinned applicants. By the end of the century, a color partition had emerged: light-skinned Blacks tended to attend the schools with Greco-Roman curricula, training for leadership, and darker-skinned Blacks ended up at industrial schools, training for submission. In 1916, one estimate found that 80 percent of the students at the HBCUs offering a Greco-Roman education were light-skinned or biracial. The racist colorism separating HBCUs was reflected in Black social clubs, in housing, and in the separate churches being built. Across postwar America, there emerged Black churches subjecting dark-skinned visitors to paper-bag tests or painting their doors a light brown. People darker than the bag or door were excluded, just as light-skinned Blacks were excluded from White circles.

femslashficlets

Antigonish, Nova Scotia: December 23, 1878.

"Do you love your neighbour?" Alice asked, her face grave.

femslashficlets

Halifax, Nova Scotia: February 4, 1916

Later, looking out at the drifting white, Maisie laughed, out of nowhere, and said, "Is this why you didn't want to marry Paulie, then? For all those years?"

I was at a loss for words. On the one hand, the idea was definitely attractive. Myron sometimes enjoyed the company of four or five men at the same time but he did not believe in mixing the sexes. I of course do. [...] Although I am not a Lesbian, I do share the normal human response to whatever is attractive physically in either sex.

St Peter met her at the gate,
And took her by the fin
Said He: some sins we all must rue
But you did clubs one winter through,
And that is hell enough for you—
Come in.

greywash

• Did you know that "hinterland" has a technical definition? Apparently, in maritime terms, the area which brings its goods to a port for export and receives the imports processed through that port, is that port's "hinterland." (In more general economic terms the same can be said of an area outside an urban center, even if that center's not a port.) I always just thought it meant "the boonies." *themoreyouknow.gif*



• Three of the four surviving issues of the Atlantic Advocate, which today I learned was Nova Scotia's first Black Canadian newsmagazine (starting publication in 1915) are available online to browse at one's leisure: January 1917; April 1917; and May 1917. I haven't had time yet to read them all in full, but skimming through, they're an interesting read: extremely moral-suason-y—the January issue promises "All the news of interest: Of the Race; Their Doings; Their Progress"—but it gives a sense of how a certain group of Black Canadians were talking about their lives & activism at the time.



• You can also browse the entire run of issues of the Dalhousie Gazette, the Dalhousie University student newspaper, from its inception in 1869 right up until the present day. In case you wanted to know what Professor Martin had to say about dreams in his lecture to the medical school, or what happened on the Senior Night Walk of November 30, 1916.



• Archives of mainstream Nova Scotia newspapers are, on the other hand, bizarrely difficult to find online?? Apparently I need to track down a ProQuest membership in order to look at back issues of the Halifax Chronicle(/Herald)?? My life is hard, etc. etc.



• Speaking of Halifax, did you know that the Great Halifax Explosion, in which a ship laden with high explosives exploded in the harbor, was the largest man-made explosion in history prior to the atomic bomb? Now you do.