(no subject)

[kradeelav]

None of our movements had done the kind of work you ended up having to do in order to guarantee the most fundamental rights for someone who was getting sick. So it was really an extraordinary thing for me. It changed the way I understood activism. There’s no way that you have the privilege of just being an outsider when you’re fighting an epidemic. You can always be right when you’re in an outsider position. Your placard can always sound clever. Your chants can always sound correct. But when you’ve got to make sure that somebody gets bathed in a hospital, you’ve got to try to figure out how to maintain that radical position and how to get inside that hospital at the same time, so that when you’re not there, that person is still getting cleaned in a way that respects their dignity.

— Amber Hollibaugh on AIDS activism, quoted in An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003) by Ann Cvetkovich, Ch. 5.