Updates + Tonight! Live on Georgetown's Zoom
Hey all - some short but juicy updates, starting with an invitation for TONIGHT!
I’ve got a backload of things to share with you, and you’ll see them coming through your email in the weeks ahead. So please keep in touch (by commenting on this post, for example).… and share if/what you’d like.
P.S. It took me too long (a.k.a. too many spoons) to format this post, and there’s still some bullet points I can’t figure out how to obliterate... Reminding me that I am looking for a cranky queer, skilled and fun communications person who adores newsletters and social media, for contracted collaboration. Inquire within.
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→ Tonight! ←
At 7 pm Eastern, this very evening, please join me and my comrade Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad on the Georgetown Disabilities Studies zoom account for Generations of HIV, Disability, and Health Justice Activism.
It’s labeled a lecture, but trust us, it’s more of a variety show… No registration or password required, just use this Zoom link.
Image description: Event invite. At top, 3 panels, with title in center: GENERATIONS OF HIV, DISABILITY, AND HEALTH JUSTICE. To left & right, images of participating activists. Left: black & white portrait of JD Davids, a white transmasc person with wispy bangs & a v-neck tee shirt, looks downwards at the viewer & smiles slightly. Right: black & white portrait of Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad, a Black nonbinary person with short curls & a beard, wearing a plain tee shirt, stands with shoulders angled to the right and looks at straight at the viewer with a serious expression. Below, looping red ribbons & text: Join Georgetown’s Program in Disability Studies with JD Davids & Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad. Tuesday, Oct 19, 7PM EST.
→ Make It Accessible ←
My splendid and powerfully furious queer partner Sully Carmona — who contributed this guest post to this newsletter last year — has started their own Substack called Make It Accessible.
It’s dedicated to “disability, neurodivergence, queerness, education, public health, yelling into the void” — and they launched it as they prepared to return to in-person pandemic public high school after a year and a half of remote teaching. Learn what they learned — and now stand to lose — from the unanticipated opportunity to have to work from home in this post:
Then read what was on their mind and heart as they spoke up about what they faced by returning (and weigh in about what you’re up against/working out if you’re also a chronically-ill / disabled educator) in Returning to School... A Question for Chronically Ill and Disabled Teachers.
look at this… I can’t make these bullet points go away. I keep trying. Send help.
And speaking of Abdul-Aliy, check out their discussion with Emily Bass, author of To End a Plague: America’s Fight to End AIDS in Africa, earlier this week at a book talk sponsored by n+1 and moderated by n+1’s Laura Cremer. You can watch it now (or whenever!) on YouTube:
another cranky bullet point, ugh.
Bass’s book To End a Plague: America's Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa is an appropriately complex deep dive into the real story of the fight to win PEPFAR - the U.S. program to provide HIV treatment in sub-Sahara — and as such it sketches out a major thread of the HIV activism that came out of ACT UP Philly ( and, specifically, my former neighborhood of West Philly and my activist cohort) that helped push the issues and win the program.
It was a lil awkward to have a lot of loving name-dropping of me, as I sat next to my partner at the kitchen counter watching and butting into the discussion… but indeed, I was pretty damn involved in this campaign.
I encourage you to read the book, which could not have been written by anyone else, given Bass’s sustained participation with the movement in the US and the rollout of the program itself (particularly in Uganda) along with their penchant for hard questions and analysis that spares neither government not activist dogma. Perhaps you’d like to purchase it from this independent bookstore in Brooklyn, the borough I now have the good fortune of sharing with the author!