Survey: Are you active in the fight for gay rights?
It’s turning out to be harder to get back into this than I thought. It’s funny how being away for a short time can completely throw off your flow; now that I’m back at DR, sometimes I find myself looking at this blog and thinking, “Okay, I’ve got it…now what do I do with it?” And yet I can’t abandon it; I know eventually I’ll find my stride again. The key is not quitting, or even taking too long of a break - because when you back away for a while, after a while you start telling yourself that you’ll go back soon…and yet you never return.
The same can be said of many things. I’ve been thinking of various aspects of my life where that happened; my old comic, for one, although part of that is because it’s not viable as-is. I would say my fiction writing, but I never leave that even if sometimes I bounce from story to story and feel as if I’m not getting anywhere. Even if I can only pick out one sentence a day or send out one query letter a week, I still hold tight to what is turning into one of the most important aspects of my life. What I can’t help remembering, though, is that I used to be a hospital volunteer and HIV/AIDS activist…and somehow, after I wandered away, I never wandered back.
For four years in high school I volunteered at one of the two major hospitals in my (at the time) home city; I worked the front desk, watched the gift shop, minded outpatient, even (on short-staffed nights in the emergency room and the maternity ward) helped set a few broken bones and assisted in a few live births that could probably get the hospital administration in a great deal of trouble if I ever revealed the name of the facility.
Outside of my usual four hours a night, though, I also participated in the hospital’s youth coalition, which was actually a branch of NOLAN - a New Orleans-based AIDS outreach program. We held weekly meetings, fundraisers, STD education seminars, condom distribution programs…the works. On the weekends we’d meet at a prearranged location to box up food bought with the fundraising money and, riding along with the organization’s adult mentors, bring the food to AIDS sufferers too bedridden to shop for themselves - people who had no one else. No family, no friends, no one who cared about them. Just us - bringing them food, picking up their prescription medications, taking them out for a day at the movies when they were feeling well enough for it, keeping them company with TV, books, and conversation when they weren’t.
Staying by their bedsides and helplessly watching them die, when the time came. It hurt. It hurt more than I care to remember, but it was better than letting them die alone.
All of that ended when I left for college in a different state. Suddenly I had homework, new friends, campus events, new hobbies, and yet more homework still - and I had no personal transportation or even public transportation (it was Alabama, what do you expect?) to really get anywhere. The local GBLTQ organizations were more social groups than anything else; any outreach programs were in the city, out of reach (no pun intended). My life went elsewhere. Later, after university and my move to Houston, I tried to get involved - but the GBLTQ organization that I found within reach was, again, just a social group. There are plenty of outreach groups here that I could have joined, but suddenly I found that work was in the way - work, life, and everything else. So any volunteer services that I might have gotten involved in just…faded.
And thinking about that makes me feel a little sad, a little guilty, and a little self-absorbed. I still don’t have time even now to get involved in gay rights movements, HIV/AIDS outreach programs, any of it. I’m hoping when I move to Chicago to find a more active local community (not to mention that Chicago public transportation is better, so I can get anywhere I need to go in 10-30 minutes rather than 2-3 hours), but right now I can’t help but look back on the past few years of my life and know that while it wasn’t my fault that everything else fell by the wayside while I struggled for stability, I still could have found ways to do more. What about you?
Are you involved in any aspect of the gay rights movement, or HIV/AIDS outreach and education?
(a) Yes; I do everything I can.
(b) Sometimes, when I have time.
(c) No, but I’d like to be.
(d) No, and I’m not really concerned about it.
(e) Other/will explain in comments.
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March 14th, 2008 at 7:41 am
(e) Other/will explain in comments.
I don’t have a car and public transportation in my county is minimal and extremely unreliable at best; I can’t afford to take taxis all the time.
I’ll also admit that I’m not a very “volunteer”-y sort of person. I was forced into it during middle school when I was receiving my confirmation in the Catholic church, and again forced into it during high school as a graduation requirement. It’s left me with a bad taste in my mouth because even though I tried to make the best of a situation in which I wasn’t comfortable, I don’t like being coerced into something even if it is for a good cause. That, and I’ve found in working with the public, I really don’t like people much in general and on my off days prefer to stay away from them as much as possible.
Maybe it makes me a bad person, I don’t know. -shrug- I don’t like giving up my time to deal with yet more people, and frankly I’m far happier donating my money to organizations that need it to keep the volunteers able to do what they do.
March 14th, 2008 at 10:53 am
E.
I am absolutely terrified. Not of AIDS/HIV or the idea of activism itself. I’m afraid I won’t keep up with it. As it is, I’m terrified of going to college in the autumn to study Accounting. Absolutely, gut-wrenching, hear-tearing, bawling TERRIFIED. I hate not completing things publicly. And if I start volunteering, I’ll make my failure to keep up with it PUBLIC. I can barely even find the courage to scrape up the confidence to reassure myself that I WILL succeed in school. My last experience was what broke me, and it left me even less confident about my test-taking skills than it left me sane.
March 14th, 2008 at 11:14 am
I probably sit somewhere between C and D…closer to D.
I’d like to volunteer, but..this sounds terrible, but it’s extremely inconvenient. I don’t even know where to start to look for places to do so. I’ve seen a few ads for such things, on TV and whatnot, and visited some websites, but all those volunteer-matching sites end up feeling like I’m applying for a job, instead of volunteering for something.
And a bit of Anji’s reasoning as well: most of the things that volunteers are needed for is the answering phones, going door to door, giving out pamphlets and talking about the organization type stuff. I’m….not very personable. I can do it, if it’s something I’m good with; I’m apparently good at explaining and teaching math and accounting, for the bits that I know and understand well, but outside of that?
There’s a GSA/GSA-compatible group with the college I’m attending, but all of the information about it on the school’s website? “For more information, call X”. And the webpage associated with the country-wide group? “Default webpage template for GSA, but with the group’s address and phone number instead of the national HQ”.
I’d like to help…but I’d rather not spend a month’s effort just finding a place where I could do something.
Wow, that was a teal deer.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
C
I…am not a good person. Well, I try, but I’m not. When I get in a mood to try and find something to do…I just get lazy and don’t. I know I can do more, but I never do. Maybe we can find someone helping AIDS patients here in Chicago, Adri, and do it together?
March 14th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Mine’s C. I’d really like to, but I don’t have the time. I have too much on plate now, and I don’t have the energy for it. Perhaps in the future it might be possible.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
E.
There’s a very simple reason for it: I cannot handle it.
Anyone who knows me in the slightest can predict what the effect of that kind of work would be on me: depression and break-down. I can’t bear to see someone suffer. I would invest all the energy I have trying to change something that ultimately can’t be changed and it would destroy me. I have too much empathy, I love too easily. I just can’t do it.
The only thing I can do, is be the best friend I know to be for the people I know (semi)personally. I can be there for them and let them vent, support them and help them. But that is the largest scale I can handle. I can only carry so much.
I do make a point of it to explain to people who have wrong ideas about homosexuality or AIDS and the like. And to give people the Death Glare when they use anything associated to it as a swear word. I don’t let anything like that slide. I have even ‘lied’ on occasion and answered affirmatively when someone asked me ‘if I was one of them’. I don’t get mad easily, but damn did I explode then.
I feel guilty for not doing anything. But sometimes I have to try and be selfish. Because I have to save myself before I can save anyone else, even if it goes against every instinct I have.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
(c) No, but I’d like to be.
I’ve got bicycle, and if ever I would go out with a patient or however it works, I always have my mum. But because I’ve never truly looked into this I’m probably too young, that and my family wouldn’t approve so it would make it hard on my mother who is the youngest of her family and when something goes wrong with anyone, especially my mother because she is one of the last of her children WITH teenaged children, my grand mother leads a witch hunt against her and suddenly me and my brother are being pitied by aunts and uncles and my mother is crying in her room about how horrible her grandmother is.
That’s probably no excuse but if you’ve seen the damage my grandmother has done, you’d think differently. I’ve often been a spaz about things that are not school related, but this seems much more important than anything else i’ve ever attempted to do. I want to, and as soon as I’m done with this comment I’m going to become active in volunteering in whatever I’ve got to do for whomever I work for so I can be proud of myself for once.
I’m not very happy, maybe this will do the trick?
Wish me luck..
March 15th, 2008 at 3:10 am
(c) No, but I’d like to be.
I am in the situation of being at college where the only LGBT groups are pretty much a social thing (I still go, but it doesn’t really help with this sort of thing). And SoCal public transportation fails… And on top of that there are massive amounts of homework. I hope that when I am out of undergrad I will have the time and opportunity to volunteer.
Adri S.
March 15th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Uh…d). I’m not a nice person. I don’t care. I don’t particularly care about anything. If it impinged on my life, like one of my friends ended up needing care, I would do it, but I won’t go out looking for things like volunteering projects or similar. I’m lazy and jaded, not particularly proud of it, don’t care enough to change. I realise I should care. I just don’t.
There are transport and time issues as well, of course. I’m quite vocal about GBLTQ issues in arguments and stuff, but that’s easy and happens in the course of other stuff I have to do, like school. I’m going to hell, aren’t I?
March 16th, 2008 at 12:38 am
B. That said, I almost never have time. Between school and work (and currently moving), I have very little free time. And I tend to selfishly hoard what little I have for myself. Of course, the fact that most of my free time is between 8pm and 3am before I finally try to sleep also doesn’t help any volunteer efforts. xD
March 17th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
D. About every time I think about stuff like this, my mind keeps second-guessing itself. “Why this cause; why not another” is usually what I ask myself, so I rarely volunteer for anything unless there’s someone I know doing things already.
Also, a part of me fears activism and distrusts even well-meaning attempts to educate others. I don’t know, it just feels like there are more important things I can do with my time than help people I don’t know the slightest bit about. Probably just rationalizing.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:16 am
(e) Other
I don’t do much big-time activism, because I like to see the results of what I do. Instead, I do the ancient thing called “talking to people.” Not “politicians” people, but “that guy who just said ’slope fields are so gay’” people, or “that Republican in the corner of history class” people. I have no idea if I can change the minds of politicians, but I know these people. I’ve managed to convince a few, and I’m pretty sure that’s a few more than I’ll convince with parades, protests, and signs.