horrifying fun fact of the day: so greenwich village, which is the neighborhood in nyc where the stonewall riots took place and which was a v important gay center from like the 50s-80s, is now super swanky and full of touristy boutiques and expensive apartments and stuff. st vincent’s, the local hospital which had the first aids ward on the east coast, closed a couple years ago and is being replaced with luxury condos. all of this is sad enough, BUT i just found out that one of the reasons it’s so gentrified now is that the aids crisis was really awesome for real estate. ppl were dying in thousands and leaving empty apartments behind, which their landlords would then rent at higher prices until only rich ppl could afford to live there :)
elaphaia said: also during the aids crisis landlords would shut their heat off in the winter knowing it would kill ppl so they could then rent 4 higher :-)
Reminder that the cishet dominated government didn’t just ignore the effects of HIV/AIDS because of how concentrated the deaths were in other communities because they hate us, but also because they materially benefited from it - because they owned most of the buildings, because our partners and other kin had no legal right to our possessions, and because they commodified and monopolized antiretrovirals to bilk us.
not to forget that a market started up to buy people’s life insurance policies… pay a little monthly fee to the sick, dying queer and get your name on their documents so you get the life insurance payout when they kick the bucket. sure you’re paying out a monthly fee, but as long as your dying queer checked out early enough, you got way more than you had paid out. there are people alive today who are wealthy because of the money they got from gambling that we’d die quickly. living cishet people people sent their kids to college with blood money from investing long- and medium-term capital in queer death.
this basically only died down like when i was born… my parents were young cool politically-aware people in this era. so were yours, most likely. this is NOT ancient history. these people walk among us. they take the bus with you. they’re your aunts and uncles. they’re out there.
