1999-12-01 16:51:38+00 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
You should be seeing this message first on December 1st, 1999, commemorated by some as World AIDS Day, a Day Without Art and A Day Without Weblogs .
But as I wrote back in October, I don't get into those sorts of memorials , mainly because they lose track of what we've really lost. In a quick search for artists dead of AIDS I saw a bunch of Day Without Art links celebrating the institutions that participate in it or the well known personalities who'd be reading names of the dead, but little information about the actual artists that it's supposed to celebrate.
So today's entries have two purposes. To celebrate a few artists who died of AIDS, and to educate people on the risks of sex, since that seems to be the transmission method for HIV, the cause of AIDS, about which people are still ignorant.
The Coalition for Positive Sexuality is targeted towards teenagers, but has a lot of helpful advice for anyone interested in safe sex. The Sex Education Web Circle hosted by the Society for Human Sexuality is also a good resource.
But the first steps are actually pretty easy: Get people to use additional lube with condoms. That one simple instruction removes most of the problems and issues people have with latex in general and condoms specifically.
It was amazingly difficult to come up with a list of memorials, but here's a short number of celebrations of artists:
Visual AIDS Web Gallery provides exhibits of artists either living with or dead of AIDS.
Rob Farber , visual artist.
Lawrence Steger , performance artist, dead at 37
Debbi passed along a memorial to Steve Abbot by his daugther.