Aids Stigma Quotes

I could go into their reality any time I chose to, but they could never come into mine. This is what I called 'helping' them.

Try yoga! Think about the good stuff! Keep yourself engaged! It’s all in your mind! Duh! It is! But is more of a chemical imbalance! I don’t know why people don’t take mental ailments as normal. People are accepting of AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis, etc. But mental ailments? They are just all in the mind!

His friends will decline in their numbers as his needs increase. The inverse, or perverse, mathematics ay life.

We’re all just people making decisions and accepting consequences as we march toward an impending and inevitable death.

The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.

The stigmatization and the excruciating pains of social alienation have compelled most victims to conceal their status while the malevolent ones continue to distribute the virus free of charge to unsuspecting men and women

Lupin’s condition of lycanthropy (being a werewolf) was a metaphor for those illnesses that carry a stigma, like HIV and AIDS. All kinds of superstitions seem to surround blood-borne conditions, probably due to taboos surrounding blood itself. The wizarding community is as prone to hysteria and prejudice as the Muggle one, and the character of Lupin gave me a chance to examine those attitudes. Remus’s

Humans who have been subjected to a lifetime of irrational bigotry on the part of a mainstream society can be excused for harboring unreasonable fears.

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.

Viral vs. Bacterial Death {Couplet} AIDs is a stigma, Ebola a fear, death's the only pandemic, by which means, I don't care.

Much of what keeps the ego’s lies in place now is the fear of being different from the crowd, of stepping beyond convention and going against how most people think. Once there is less of a stigma around questioning your programming, because more people are not drinking the ego’s Kool-Aid, people will awaken to the truth—to reality—much more easily.

Heather Mills As a tireless campaigner for many charitable causes, Heather Mills joined Diana in support of the banishment of land mines all over the world. For her efforts against land mines, Ms. Mills was awarded the inaugural UNESCO Children in Need Award. She is also Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Association, and she has been active in helping amputees by promoting the use of prostheses. Diana, Princess of Wales, was a truly remarkable human being. All too often today we refer to people as icons; in Diana’s case, the word is wholly appropriate. She was a wife, a mother, a humanitarian, and a true ambassador. Despite what the press wanted us to believe, Diana didn’t court publicity. On the contrary, she did far more behind the scenes to help people than in front. Her willingness to reveal her own frailties has, I am sure, encouraged many people to seek help and come to terms with their own personal problems. She was able to reach out to people in a way that few can. In the early days of HIV and AIDS, when everyone was so afraid of this so-called new disease, Diana’s simple gesture of shaking hands with an AIDS patient at a hospital in London broke down the taboo and removed the stigma around the disease. Her palace advisers had initially tried to dissuade her from making this gesture, but Diana--who always led with her heart--went against them and did what she believed to be right.

Diane Louise Jordan Diane Louise Jordan is a British television presenter best known for her role in the long-running children’s program Blue Peter, which she hosted from 1990 until 1996. She is currently hosting BBC1’s religious show, Songs of Praise. Also noted for her charity work, Diane Louise Jordan is vice president of the National Children’s Home in England. We all need to be loved--whether we admit it or not. All of us. A friend of mine recalled how, when in Rwanda a few years ago, he was taken to visit a lady in the slums. She was in agony because of an AIDS-related illness and had just hours to live. He described the inadequate dirt-floor shack that was her home among unbearable squalor. And yet he said it wasn’t the intense poverty or painful illness that struck him most, but rather the compassion of her friend who kept vigil. A friend who used no words, just silent tears, to express the deep feelings she had for her dying companion. In a similar way, it wasn’t words that stirred international attention, but the silent image of two people holding hands. One an HIV/AIDS sufferer and the other a “fairy-tale” princess. When Diana, Princess of Wales, held the hand of that seriously ill man back in the 1980s, many boundaries were crossed, many stigmas defeated. At that time, fear of death by AIDS had gripped the world so savagely that we were in danger of losing our humanity. Yet all it took to crush the storm of fear was a simple loving gesture. Princess Diana was good at that. She had the courage to follow her instincts, even if it meant being countercultural. She made it her job to be kind and loving.

1) “How did I end up down this rabbit hole of being obsessed with men on the DL (down-low)? Why did I prefer playing more in the straight arena with the closet cases (as they were called in my day) and the bisexual men over the gay ones?” 2) “We didn’t identify in my day; you were either gay, bisexual, or straight. People will always label others or pigeonhole them without even knowing for sure who they really are. They presumably stereotype and judge just by your outward appearance.” 3) “It wasn't until the seventh grade that Sister Gloria would be my social studies teacher, and I began leaning more towards being an extrovert than the anxious introvert that I was. All the accolades go to her. She lit the flame under my ass that would be the catalyst for my advocacy. Her podium, located front and center of the classroom, became ground zero for me and where I found my voice.” 4) “Their taunting was my kryptonite. My peers hated me for no other reason than the fact that they thought I was gay. I was only thirteen and often wondered how they knew who I was before I did.” 5) “Evangelical Christian Anita Bryant (First Lady of Religious Bigotry), along with her minions, led a crusade against the LGBTQ community back in 1977 and said we were trying to recruit children and that ‘Homosexuals are human garbage.’ My first thoughts were, how unchristian and deplorable of her to even say something like that, not to mention, to make it her life’s mission promoting hate.” 6) “Are there any more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. kind of Christians in this country today? Dr. King knew about his friend’s homosexuality and arrest. Being a religious man and a pastor, Dr. King could have cast judgment and shunned Bayard Rustin like so many other religious leaders did at the time. But he didn’t. That, to me, is the true meaning of being a Christian. He loved Bayard unconditionally and was unbiased towards his sexual orientation. Dr. King was not a counterfeit Christian and practiced what he preached—and that, along with remembering what Jesus had said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ is the bottom line to Christianity and all faiths.” 7) “We are all God’s children! That is what I was taught in Catholic school. God doesn’t make mistakes—it’s as simple as that. Love is love—period! I don’t need anyone’s validation or approval, I define myself.” 8) “You will bake our cakes, you will provide us our due healthcare, you will do our joint tax returns, and yes, you will bless our unions, too. Otherwise, you cannot call yourselves Christians or even Americans, for that matter.” 9) “The torch has been passed. But we must never forget the LGBT pioneers that have come before and how they fought in the streets for our lives. Never forget the Stonewall riots of 1969 nor the social stigma put upon us during the HIV/AIDS epidemic from its onset in the early 1980s. Remember how many died alone because nobody cared. Finally, keep in mind how we were all pathologized and labeled in the medical books until 1973.

The horrible mismanagement of the AIDS crisis makes me want to grab [disease minimizers] by the shoulders and shake them and say, “Why haven’t you read about what worked or did not work every time a plague cropped up before this one? Why aren’t you paying attention? Do not do the same stupid stuff people did before! We know what works and what doesn’t! Be smarter, please, please, be smarter, be kinder, be kinder and smarter, I am begging you.” I find the forgetfulness of people, especially in true matters of life and death, so frustrating. Sometimes I look at these histories and think, People are just going to keep making the same dumb mistakes every single time. And one day those mistakes will doom us all. And I feel sad and furious and frightened for what will happen next. But then I think about how polio is almost eradicated. Or that penicillin exists. And I remember that we are progressing, always, even if that progress is sometimes slower and more uneven than we might wish. I remind myself, too, of all the ways people have persevered and survived in conditions that are surely as bad as anything that is to come. Whenever I am most disillusioned, I look to one of my favorite quotes from The World of Yesterday (1942) by Stefan Zweig. When Zweig was fleeing from the Nazis and living in exile he wrote: “Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to find our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again to the ancient constellations of my childhood, comforting myself that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.” I have to believe that the missteps are only intermittent relapses as we grow stronger and smarter and better. We do get better. At everything. Combatting diseases fits somewhere among “everything.” I believe there will be a day when we will see diseases as what they are—an enemy of all of humanity. Not of perceived sinners, not of people who are poor or have a different sexual orientation, not of those who we somehow decided “have it coming” because they’re “not like us.” Diseases are at war with all of us. Diseases don’t care about any of the labels, so it makes no sense for us to. I believe we will become more compassionate. I believe we will fight smarter. I believe that in the deepest place of our souls, we are not cowardly or hateful or cruel to our neighbors. I believe we are kind and smart and brave. I believe that as long as we follow those instincts and do not give in to terror and blame, we can triumph over diseases and the stigmas attached to them. When we fight plagues, not each other, we will not only defeat diseases but preserve our humanity in the process. Onward and upward.

When a London gay switchboard’s lines broke down because they were so overwhelmed with AIDS calls, telephone company employees refused to fix them because they were afraid of contracting AIDS through the wiring.

No need for psychiatric contortions; no shock waves; no need to conjure up deep-seated anxieties and conflicts. It is combat exhaustion—instead of something ominous and mysterious. It is, quite simply, just having had too much. Of course, in more technical terms, combat exhaustion can be thought of as an abnormal reaction to the stress of combat, its manifestation being unique to the person who develops it, channeled into a specific form by the person’s own individual personality and background experience. But it is only one of many abnormal reactions. A soldier who has had too much might choose to surrender or convulsively go forward. He might panic and get killed; he could get himself wounded or wound himself; he might even go to the chaplain or decide on the relative safety of a stockade. He might—if he’s so disposed—develop psychosomatic complaints, get angry, or, in some cases, become totally unreasonable. He can become neurotic, begin to shake, refuse to move, or go completely hysterical. He might even become grossly psychotic—hold imaginary rifles, hear voices, or see his grandmother in every chopper that flies by. “You will be treating these men, and the treatment is simple. For most it will just be rest. In more severe cases, those soldiers whose functioning is beginning to be impaired, who can’t rest, you will medically put to sleep. They are given enough thorazine to put them out and left alone for a day or two. They too, though, like the troopers who are merely resting, stay near the aid station. The more disturbed patients, those troopers who for the moment may be truly disoriented, who have completely stopped functioning, who for any number of reasons appear to need more than a short rest, are sent to an evacuation hospital. But they are never lost to their units. Their group identity is never tampered with, and they know they will be going back. And they do go back. And they are accepted by their units. Believe me, the casual, yet efficient way it is all handled, the official emphasis on health rather than disease, and the lack of mumbo-jumbo have taken the stigma out of having had too much. To the men, it is just something that happens; and more important, it is something they realize can happen to anyone. It is handled that way and it is presented that way. “Gentlemen, it works.