May 31st, 2011
TODAY’S AGENDA:
EQCA Town Hall: Palm Springs, CA. Equality California will host a “Back to the Ballot?” Town hall meeting in Palm Springs to discuss whether we should wait for the courts to restore the freedom to marry — a decision which could have a nationwide impact — or whether Californians should try to overturn Prop. 8 through a ballot measure in 2012. The town hall will take place this evening at the Golden Rainbow Center, 611 S. Palm Canyon Drive, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
TODAY IN HISTORY:
Scientists Trace AIDS To 1951: 1986. The summer of 1986 looked to be another terrible year in the nearly five-year-old AIDS epidemic. To be precise, that should be the five-year-old known AIDS epidemic. The CDC first noted the new disease in 1981 with the death of five young men, “all active homosexuals” whose immune system had been mysteriously and severely compromised. Out of the 23,000 known cases of people with AIDS between 1981 and the end of 1986, 56% were already dead (PDF: 32KB/5 pages).
While anti-gay activists rushed to declare that the so-called “gay plague” was a divinely inspired “terrible retribution,” scientists rushed to determine the source of the deadly virus. It wasn’t long before doctors in Europe and Africa noticed that the new disease first reported in America was remarkably similar to a mysterious illness striking the Congo River basin of Zaire and was already spreading eastward to Uganda. Swedish doctors remembered an infant born in Zaire who had contracted a similar disease in 1975 and finally died in 1982. Others recalled a Danish surgeon who died in 1977 after working in the Congo River region. Preserved blood and tissue samples tested positive for HIV, and this sent scientists scurrying to identify earlier possible samples which may offer clues to the disease’s origin.
On May 31, 1986, a team of American scientists published a letter in the British journal The Lancet announcing that they were able to test a blood sample that had been taken from an unknown patient at a Kinshasa hospital in 1959. Nothing was known of the patient — neither a name nor medical records survive — but we can certainly guess at the suffering he or she must have endured. Nevertheless, this finding was an early clue that the epidemic itself was much older than previously thought. It was only the stigma surrounding the disease that was then approaching its fifth birthday.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Walt Whitman: 1819. Usually I commemorate famous birthdays by providing a brief biographical sketch. But when describing the life of the great American poet, it strikes me as unseemly to describe a man’s life when he has already written all that needs to be said:
When I Heard At The Close Of The Day.
WHEN I heard at the close of the day how my name had been
receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy
night for me that follow’d,
And else when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d,
still I was not happy,
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health,
refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in
the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing bathed,
laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend my lover was on his way
coming, O then I was happy,
O then each breath tasted sweeter, and all that day my food
nourish’d me more, and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy, and with the next at evening
came my friend,
And that night while all was still I heard the waters roll slowly
continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands as directed to
me whispering to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover
in the cool night,
In the stillness in the autumn moonbeams his face was inclined
toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast and that night I was
happy.
These two facts, when considered together, are fascinating to me:
If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. PLEASE, don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).
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Ben In Oakland
May 31st, 2011
The whitman poem is beautiful.
At my first wedding, way back in 1992, my oldest friend read that poem.
Graham
May 31st, 2011
You know, that poem was in an unpublished manuscript by Whitman which seems to detail a love affair of his:
http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00154.html
all the poems in the sequence ended up in the “calumus” cluster, but out of order which destroyed the narrative. It’s very sad when you read it as a story…really hits home too.
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