I got into the sandman comics about a year ago, and then subsequently the show (which is just fantabulous), and after telling my uncle about it he sent me the Death volume (she’s been his favorite character for decades). at the end of the volume there was a comic where Death teaches the reader about AIDs and safe sex.
I was wondering what it was like to originally publish that comic, when (i’m assuming, i wasn’t born yet) they were such touchy subjects?
A friend of mine, Don Melia, had just died of AIDS. Before he died we talked and he urged me to do something to help. Martha Thomases at DC Comics and Alisa Kwitney then assistant editor on Sandman put us in touch with the right people, and got what I wrote fact-checked carefully by an AIDS organisation, and found the helpline and information that we put on the back of the original 8 page supplement (to comics) and handout (sent free to comic shops). A lot of comic shops got them to libraries, high schools, or gave them out to customers. It didn’t seem like governments were telling people how to keep safe. We could and we did. I’m still grateful to DC Comics for making it happen, and to all the comics retailers who gave them out or distributed them to people who needed them.
Just wanted to say thanks again, because reading that comic, and having my dad hand me that issue, in a way that framed sex education as normal and in parts funny, made it much easier to talk about sex and sexual health together.
Having that as a third-party we could talk (what Death says or what Neil Gaiman says) made the conversation less embarrassing, especially since you’re the exact same age as my dad. So yeah, thanks Neil.
I’m so glad. That was what it was for.
I grew up during the worst of the AIDS epidemic and before an elder could explain what I needed to know, they were dying of this disease.
There are plenty of other reasons that this lesson is still important.
My thanks, Neil. I am here in small part because of this sound advice.
Peter Hujar, Fran Lebowitz [at Home in Morristown], 1974, pigmented ink print, 14-¾" × 14-¾" (37.5 cm × 37.5 cm), image 16" × 20" (40.6 cm × 50.8 cm), paper
Cup with bat, Henri Husson (French, 1852-1914), dinandier and Goldsmith, Maison A.A Hébrard
(about 1895-1937), founder and Goldsmith, Paris, about 1909.
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.
The bat motif, an extremely unusual and highly evocative image for the period. The bat has the highest rate of homosexuality among mammals and their sexuality was first studied in 1895 by Raymond Rollinat and Édouard Louis Trouessart (French). The image of a bat became a symbol of homosexuality. (x)
I just rediscovered how glorious this image is so excuse me while I laugh uncontrollably every time I look at it again.
It was taken in Kensal Green Cemetery in February.
Terry borrowed the white jacket from our editor, Malcolm Edwards, and grumbled that it did nothing to keep him warm on a very cold day.
“Sometimes you have to be cold to look cool,” I told him.
“It’s all right for you,” he said. “You’re wearing a leather jacket.”
“You could wear a leather jacket too.”
“I’m wearing white,” said Terry, pointedly. “That way, when they come after us for writing a blasphemous book, they’ll know I’m the nice one.”
(After the photo was taken we noticed the bat-winged hourglass, which we hadn’t seen during the photo session, and requested bat-winged hourglasses as a design motif in the book.)
it means exactly what i think it means its just some stupid word that literally has two definitions that mean the opposite thing
what the hell
This makes me really chuffed
This post is quite egregious
Well I’m nonplussed by this whole post.
goddamnit.
all of you go to hell
And you wonder why i am boggled at times
These are called contronyms! A word that is its own opposite.
Why the fuck do these exist
One theory is that the sarcastic use of the word became exceedingly prevalent and because another dictionary definition.
Are you telling me that we were such sarcastic shits it literally changed our language.
Literally is another example now.
There are 21 languages that have Contronyms/Contranyms.
English has 128 contranyms, almost 5 times that of language with the next highest number of contronyms (Arabic with 26) and more than the total number of crontranyms of every other language combined (89).
oh obsessed with this paragraph from a kogonada interview
[id: I thought what was so fascinating about the ingredients of loss itself, about the necessity to really absorb someone’s presence before you can really feel their absence. In this discovery he may think that he was trying to save Yang or get him fixed, but in reality Yang is fixing and saving him just through that process of reconnecting to a life that was passing by him. For me, I know what it feels like to be detached in the world. It protects you from emotion and feeling. Growing up is really about making yourself vulnerable and exposed to things that maybe later on will break your heart. end id]
![mentaltimetraveller:
“Peter Hujar, Fran Lebowitz [at Home in Morristown], 1974, pigmented ink print, 14-¾" × 14-¾" (37.5 cm × 37.5 cm), image 16" × 20" (40.6 cm × 50.8 cm), paper
at Pace
”](https://64.media.tumblr.com/27a5d84187858374f69150adbb174aa4/470d32d59e7a1cc4-c2/s500x750/55010afc95e1d7d8c3fbb649a958bbe56b4aa11f.jpg)
