redshift-13:notyourdaddy:Gideon Mendel’s The WardMemories from the heart of the Aids crisis shows tr
redshift-13:notyourdaddy:Gideon Mendel’s The WardMemories from the heart of the Aids crisis shows true love in a time of terrible tragedy.These heartbreaking and incredibly moving images show the affection and love shown during the height of the Aids crisis. Photographer Gideon Mendel’s project The Ward began in 1993 when he spent a number of weeks on the Charles Bell wards in London’s Middlesex Hospital. All the patients on the ward were dying with the knowledge that there was no cure for the disease. During this time antiretroviral medications were not available and patients on the ward faced the prospect of an early death.Another memorialization of this time is the documentary Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer’s End (1996). I saw this very moving documentary a couple of years ago on youtube, but now it looks like it’s been taken down.Along with the tears it left me in, it renewed my sense of the magnitude of the losses of the AIDS crisis. It’s also serves as a reminder of the lethal consequences of intolerance. Instead of marshaling public resources to address this public health emergency the Reagan administration treated these people as disposable subjects. Do a little reading and you can even find anecdotes that celebrated the deadly scythe of AIDS as a just punishment for deviance. “Go without hate, but not without rage; heal the world.”-Paul Monette -- source link