Tim Barrus Blog
Posts tagged with AIDS
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I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. — Malcom X
I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. — Malcom X. I am a communist. Why are you here. I ask that question a lot because I want to know the answer to it. I write the answers down. I doubt I will use those answers for anything. I…
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Tim Barrus, New York Times
Today, HIV gets a tiny mention in the New York Times. In an article about sexually transmitted diseases. One word at the end of the piece. This, too, marginalizes. We are ashamed. We hang our heads. We did it to ourselves. Normals refuse to see HIV as a sexually transmitted…
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Tim Barrus, New York Times
“I don’t see how I can make it work.” Right. It’s humiliating. Degrading. We are a region, not a state. How do you address poverty in West Virginia, and forget the states it borders. Haves and have nots all over again. Survival is ephemeral. Nothing works. I borrow the school…
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Tim Barrus New York Times
I am one of the people Ross Douthat condemns. I have attended protests. Ross feels those demonstrations should never have happened. “…protests go forward amid a pandemic was justified by redescribing their motor, antiracism, as a push for better public health.” I haven’t heard that one, but it sounds right,…
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Tim Barrus: New York Times
I teach boys at-risk who have HIV. Cancer and HIV are formidable. I have seen teenagers decide they cannot endure what they call poisoning. Adding antiretrovirals into a pharmacological regimen can be hard. Easier said than done. Especially with kids whose compliance is iffy, and who are not undetectable. TV…
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Genetic Mutation in HIV: Tim Barrus in the New York Times
I’m with anything that will take out HIV. That particular species should be burned crisper than toast, slashed, nuked, bombed, extinguished, executed, shot by drones, mutated out of existence, and squashed. I’m with eradication. But what about the rogue nation that keeps the virus around. Like us. But what about…
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Rabbit Hole
Boys with HIV kill themselves at rates eight times the rate of typical adolescents who attempt suicide. Children who kill themselves, kill themselves for a reason. And society recoils. The institutions of society need for the people in that society to want to stay. Or at least pretend to want…
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When They Take The Food Right Out Of Your Mouth…
Contrary to what you might be hearing from the white, privileged, upper-middle-class activists, AIDS is not over. No quite yet. https://timbarrus.tumblr.com
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Tim Barrus in the New York Times
AIDS in Appalachia I live in the Blue Ridge in Appalachia where health care is a nightmare. Public Health has waiting lists which means you cannot get an appointment for seven to eight months. Public Health throws you around like you are just a carcass of meat. They sexually exploit…
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Tim Barrus in the New York Times
I work with adolescent boys at-risk. Many have HIV. They are frequently referred to as – the Hard to Reach. A term that carries stigma like a tsunami. I tweet like crazy. Usually about them and me. Relationships matter. AIDS is not over. I want you to know that HIV…
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Tim Barrus in the New York Times
AT NIGHT, THEY PACE you were sleeping and I would sculpt your naked body with the contours of my tongue/ you were that flawless carnal bleeding from your hole/ the inside of my mouth was eros drowned in blood/ in the cold hours of the night, you were awake and…
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holding me up
in the war against boys, first you cut off their legs/ well, i am ill, but i’m not dead/ and i don’t know which of those i prefer because that limb which i have lost, well it was the only thing holding me up, holding me up/ https://timbarrusart.tumblr.com
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What Cure
The Smash Street Boys and I wrote a book called JUST BEFORE THE CURE. We put the thing on Medium. One person read it. Sex, violence, and post-apocalyptic resistance were the project’s main themes. My original idea was that it could raise the awareness of the adolescent boys themselves as…
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I Hate the Term: Hard to Reach
it brings up all the wrong images/ when i hear the term: hard to reach, it makes me want to puke/ it purports that as a source it means you are speaking truth to power when, in fact, it’s sheer bullshit designed to keep people and racial minorities in their…
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How Do We Reach the Hard-to-Reach
I call them Boys-At-Risk. The label is inaccurate. It puts human beings in a box we don’t want to look at, and it’s language as racism personified. I loathe the terminology. But I am at a loss, not in terms of examining the many challenges, but how do I reach…
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I Opened My Eyes
When Is Cultural Approbation Survival I still get death threats. Death threats are stupid, and stupid people make them. Bring it on, bitch.I opened my eyes. A small group of people in scrubs were looking down at me and they were uniformly grim. Obviously, this was a hospital. Tubes. Beeps.…
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Tim Barrus: New York Times: PrEP Package
It is easier to chose to not have sex than become another rat in the HIV maze. Constant lab tests, the humiliating exams, the struggle to maintain medical relationships around informed consent (I am always being tested secretly when they take my blood, but I do find out about it…
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Junkie’s Winter
that december of thursdays we lived on the subway like dishrags, incredulous that this had happened to us/ slamming in the subway toilets/ like cats/ vicious as a tattletale/ someday someone is going to put a bullet/ through your head/ and the rest of us and our second selves —…
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Aurelien Was a Whore
That word again. Aurelien was a veteran of the whore wars. He wanted to be a sex work activist. He wanted us to decriminalize what he did, what I did, what everyone we knew, everyone we lived with, everyone in our drug-saturated bubble did. Sex work was and is mainly…
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QUID PRO QUO: INTERVIEWS: BOYS WHO DO SEX WORK
I was twelve. He was a teacher. My parents had explained to me that they could no longer afford me. They had no money. I was on my own. I was terrified. All I had to do was be naked, and then it got a little bit more complicated. He…
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Loving Boys At-Risk: Just Before the Cure
I am acutely aware of the fact that no one in a million years would dare to publish this. That does not mean I do not need to write it. I needed to write it. Yet I can see where it fits tightly into JUST BEFORE THE CURE which is…
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We Need Assisted Suicide
We need assisted suicide. So you don’t fuck it up, and awaken to find yourself strapped down to a hospital bed having barely survived a coma you’ve been in the past three years. It happens every day. Don’t be stupid and think it doesn’t because it does. Killing yourself is…
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Death’s Footsteps
UCan breathe safely now i am told that AIDSISOVER jumping down TheRabbitHole of hiv is what we call TheNormal LifeJustThinkUCanLiveLike the normals live and UCanHave the AmericanDream because it WasMade4U if U could stop listening to death come down the hall
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Survival is Vile Shit
I wonder if any of you have ever noticed that it is sometimes those who find most pleasure and amusement in their fellow man, and have most hope in his goodness, who get the reputation of being his most carping critics. Maybe it is that the satirist is so full…
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On Being Here
i have never wanted to be here because i am above it all all all all daddy tried beating it the fuck out of me and i was literally at-risk of being murdered. he bashed my head through walls and came after me with broken liquor bottles but i could…