the magpie

hfml:

“Just because I’m poz doesn’t mean I’m a fearless mofo. I have to worry about criminalization, disclosure, I have to worry about people finding out that I don’t want to find out,” Chevalier tells me. In spite of these anxieties, the 28 yr-old artist speaks with a self-assurance that suggests he knows his work is onto something. HFML has led him to field questions from hundreds of anonymous viewers and users who ask him inane questions like “How do you deal with your AIDS?” and assume that he “got it because of mistakes” he’s made.

“I take it all very seriously. It’s a curious thing where my art starts to teach sexual health, such as with consent and disclosure,” he explains, adding that his audience doesn’t always know when he’s joking – he facetiously refers to his status and its consequences as “my AIDS” – but he knows from personal experience that the stigma faced by HIV positive people is all too real. His practice delves into the intersection of the luxuriously self-obsessed (“my selfish reason for making work”) and the defiantly personal. His “political reason” for making his excessively personal art practice “is to critique what people expect of poz people, to ask ‘what does it mean for me to give you everything and it still not be enough?””

inourwordsblog:

Between the winter of 1987 and the summer of 1988, Boston-based journalist Neil Miller traveled across the United States “in search of gay America.” Though he spoke to women and men in the “well-trodden … urban gay ghettos” of Washington, D.C., New York City (the “gay metropolis”), and San Francisco, his primary purpose was to document the experience of queer folks living in what coasters refer to as “flyover” states, the “red state” regions of the American South, Great Lakes, Midwest, and Plains states. As Miller writes:

Acceptance and self-acceptance amidst the anonymity of cities like New York and Los Angeles and even Boston meant little, I was convinced. One had to travel beyond the large metropolitan areas on the two coasts to places where diversity was less acceptable, where it was harder to melt into the crowd … that was where the majority of gay people lived anyway, even if you didn’t read about them in the gay press or see them on the evening news (In Search of Gay America, 11).

What Miller found in his travels was that queer people in the heartland were often less visible than their East and West coast counterparts; they kept their heads down and their mouths shut, maybe living in a community where everyone knew they were gay but no one openly acknowledged it. Many of Miller’s interviewees talked about the social isolation, particularly if they were un-partnered; in the pre-internet era single lesbians and gay men often had to travel regularly to urban centers to meet and socialize with others like themselves. (Cont.)

laboratoryequipment:

Refrigerating coal-plant emissions would reduce levels of dangerous chemicals that pour into the air — including carbon dioxide by more than 90 percent — at a cost of 25 percent efficiency, according to a simple math-driven formula designed by a team of Univ. of Oregon physicists. The computations…