Ash Vale Updates: May 2025

With Pride month nearly upon us, I’ve been thinking a lot about collective, direct action and the role of art in defiance. This has coincided with me finishing “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993”, a book written through a series of interviews with surviving members of the early ACT UP coalition which fought for AIDS recognition and treatment.

I tried something new with the newsletter this month, where I wrote up some of my longer thoughts about the book at the end! I think it’s poignant to consider successful campaigns from the past when we’re looking at the current state of queer politics globally and at home, and in particular, the significant push at all political levels against trans people. This has made the newsletter quite long, sorry, but if you don’t want to read my rambling at the end that’s totally okay.

This month for me had some huge highs (a major poetry acceptance) and big lows (getting absolutely bodied by a nasty cold my child gave me that turned into bronchitis, thanks child). I’ve tried really hard this month to get over my terminal Fear Of Being Bad At Things in Front of Other People disease, which means I actually played my bass guitar in front of my friends in our little band! And they didn’t boo me or anything! I was very brave.

I also saw Corb Lund in concert, went to the lovely botanic gardens near me, and planted SO MANY PLANTS! I have: carrots, zucchini, cucumber, bell peppers, squash, tomatoes (x4), a bunch of herbs, and then as my why-the-fuck-not plant of the season, a watermelon! I didn’t even know you could grow those here but I’m gonna damn sure try.

Writing

Sales/Updates

• Okay so, last month I announced that I got my first poetry acceptance—which I’m still very excited about, and will be out sometime this summer! But a few weeks after that happened I got my second ever poetry acceptance, to fucking NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE, one of the largest pro-rate horror magazines that exists. I’m still in shock, honestly! They bought a weird poem I wrote about that’s basically asking - hey, what if your girlfriend literally ate you? I’m sure we’re all excited to find out. It won’t be out until the fall or winter, but don’t worry, I’ll be insufferable when it does happen!

In Progress

• The novel is clip-clopping along! I set myself up with a spreadsheet tracking my weekly goal of 1750 words, and it’s currently predicting a draft completion date of early December if I stayed at this pace, which isn’t bad! Hopefully I can sneak in some cheeky weeks where I’m above the weekly goal, though, which will put me closer to my initial goal of being done in September. Then just…more drafting, forever until I die, I guess?

My Recs

Books

I read a lot of non-fiction and a few things I didn’t like enough to really write them up this month, but one thing I did read and really enjoyed was Bunny by Mona Awad. This had surprisingly mixed reviews, but I’d heard about it from book Tiktok (where people didn’t like it lol) and thought it sounded up my alley. And I was right! Sort of Mean Girls or Heathers meets an acid trip, this book is about the cohort of women in an MFA program, and how one of them doesn’t quite fit in with the “bunnies” (the Plastics, if you will). Then weird shit starts happening! And it keeps happening! This book was delightfully bizarre, and I couldn’t guess what would happen next which I personally really enjoyed.

By the way, if you’re on Storygraph, feel free to add me over there!

Short Stories/Poems

My first short story rec this month is an odd flash piece about rooms. My Sister’s Life as a Series of Rooms (Craft Literary) by Nora Nadjarian is a story of sisterhood, motherhood, and the little intimate glimpses of life that make us family. It’s really beautiful and sweet.

Next is Whalesong (The Deadlands) by Guan Un. Ugh this story was gorgeous and so heartbreaking. It’s all about how grief affects us, and how grief can also be uniting if we let ourselves be open to it, even when it comes from unusual or even scary sources.

Finally, I have a monster story of a sort! There Be Monsters (Sunday Morning Transport) by Suzan Palumbo is stunning—absolutely lovely prose underpinning a dark and relatable story. Women in a small fishing village hear a song from the water, but have to decide whether it’s worth risking a comfortable life to pursue it. This deals with a lot of the expectations women face, and the clashing of tradition and intuition.

Music

I discovered Rose Betts through some musical friends, and this song is just lovely! A very relatable little folk song about wishing we could undo mistakes we’ve made.

Something Extra

I haven’t done this before, but as I mentioned at the top, this month I read “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993” by Sarah Schulman and was really intrigued and moved by it. The book details AIDS activism performed by ACT UP New York, a group of a broad cross-section of people who were dedicated primarily to finding treatment for AIDS, and also raising awareness of the governmental barriers people were facing around it.

The book is absolutely worth picking up, especially if you’re queer and interested in activism, but I really think it could be a beneficial read for almost anyone. I will warn you that it’s a huge book—the hard copy clocked in around 650 pages, but I really do think it’s worth checking out. I can’t reliably sum up the entire book here, but wanted to just touch on some thoughts I had while reading it.

Action and Dialogue

Something I found really fascinating about ACT UP New York was the broad array of people who joined the movement, and the book gets into interviews with a lot of them. There were obviously quite a few cis gay men, but there were also quite a few lesbians and bisexual women, and a surprising number of straight women who were just generally interested in activism. This led to one of my biggest takeaways from the book: imperfect activism is better than none.

The author repeated several times that ACT UP had a philosophy of “action followed by theory”, or this concept of praxis before perfection. It was demonstrated in many ways throughout the book: we want any kind of treatment because the alternative is death; getting anyone into trials is important, even if the cross-section isn’t ideal; and performing an action is always better than performing nothing.

Some of the most famous actions ACT UP coordinated were “die-ins”, where a large group of people, largely men with AIDS, would lie down on the floor at the institution they were protesting. Their death became visual, became impossible to ignore by the media. Similarly, they had actions where they wore large clocks on their clothing to give a visual aid to their own time running out. It was really powerful stuff, orchestrated by people desperate for change.

Likely one of the most enduring images of the time is the SILENCE = DEATH one I included at the beginning of this newsletter. It was inspired by the Holocaust, and the pink triangle that was used to mark homosexual prisoners in death camps. The originators printed thousands of posters with just the triangle and the words on it, and plastered them all around New York. The meaning is clear: if we don’t speak up, we’re dead.

Treatment and Immediate Aid

ACT UP was involved in incredibly important changes that were made in many areas of life at this time of AIDS. One of them, which informs clinical trials still today, was getting through to researchers in drug trials that a control group is not a real control when we already know the control outcome: death. They advocated strongly for what are now known as parallel trials, something not done at that time. The idea was that if you know the control group, ie. people with AIDS, will die, then you already know what the worst outcome is if you did nothing. Therefore it’s unethical to enforce a control group of people you know will die because you gave them a placebo. Instead, test several different drugs in different groups; this way you can compare the rate of death between people in the different trials. Inaction, or placebos, were certain death for those people.

While treatment was obviously at the forefront of the movement, there are aspects of ACT UP that aren’t remembered today and that were also vitally important in saving lives. In particular, they were heavily involved in clean needle exchange programs. The media campaigns at the time were clear that they had a vision of their ideal AIDS victim, and it was a cis, white, gay man. What doesn’t get talked about is how many HIV/AIDS victims were intravenous drug users, which included many people of colour and women. The administration didn’t want to acknowledge that these people were also dying, partly because of class divisions, but also because there’s a lack of sympathy for substance abuse ingrained in North American society. People simply didn’t care. So ACT UP went out in the streets where they knew people were using, and created their own needle exchange programs. Give a dirty needle, get a clean one. It’s so simple but was one of the things they were most regularly arrested for because it was illegal at the time. This really drew me back to praxis before perfection; instead of arguing in some back room about how to help people get clean, or refer them to treatment programs, people just went out and did the hard work of giving people clean needles. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Finally, I wanted to touch on some of the activism for women that wasn’t as popular from ACT UP but that was clearly vitally important. As mentioned above, the administration had an idea of their ideal AIDS victim, and it wasn’t women. In fact, there were well-known and respected doctors at the time going on record to say that women couldn’t get AIDS. This started what I personally think was one of the most profound campaigns they engaged in, which was “Women don’t get AIDS, they just die from it.” The group put this up on posters all over the city, raised it on banners in public places, and shouted it in meetings where they weren’t being heard. Women with AIDS at the time were engaged in the activism, but not being given the opportunities men were; not for treatment, not for clinical trials, and not for media attention. As is true in so many areas of life, they had to fight twice as hard for half the success. Their group was integral to getting women access to many of the trials that eventually led to antiretroviral drugs, the current treatment for HIV/AIDS.

So…

If you read through all of that, good on you! If you just read this though, what I really think is crucial to take away from this kind of activism is what I said at the start, and what Schulman repeats throughout the book: action is better than no action. In a time when things feel so uncertain for many vulnerable groups, particularly trans people, start with what you can do. Write letters, talk to people, volunteer locally. Wear a rainbow. Be visible. Support queer people vocally and don’t let them be forgotten. The book was frustrating at times, as is our current political situation, but it also left me hopeful. Community can bring us together and force action, even when things feel terrible.

And lastly, I leave you with my favourite poster from the book, which I think speaks for itself.