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• 1 2017-10-24T14:15:41-07:00 #69, ghosts can’t tell stories 4 March 29, 2017 plain 2020-11-09T21:23:18-08:00 This #100hardtruths was shared with me by my friend, the media artist and activist who creates magical experiences, Quito Zeigler, from their longer rumination, “Elegy from a Queendom that Never Became,” about a gallery of photographs culled from the Visual AIDS artists’ registry.
  
  “Why can’t ghosts tell stories? All of these images were taken before 2000 and tap into the magic and creativity of queer life at the time.
  Coming of age in the early 90s, it never occurred to me that queerness was a sexy, available community or lifestyle. I was taught that to be gay meant dying of AIDS. Considering the sex-positive radical queertopia I now reside in as an adult, that death threat may actually have held some truth.
  
  Who DO we want to be when we grow up? Who did THEY want to be? If they hadn’t been decimated by the plague, would we, their descendants, be different, more humble? Did we inherit their angry vagabond spirits when they left this earth just as we were arriving? And if so, how can we honor their lives and their deaths, so future generations can just keep exploring?
  The problem with images is that they don’t have a voice. I can see the makeup and shy confidence, feel the awkwardness and exhilaration. But I want more: I want to hear the stories, and to learn from the wisdom they were able to accumulate.
  
  Instead I can only just look, and wonder.”
  
  See More:
  • “Elegy from a Queendom that Never Became,”Quito Zegler
  • Visual AIDS
  • On Photography, Susan Sontag
  • The Calendar of Loss, Dagmawi Woubshet
  • #100hardtruths-#fakenews

  To see a poetic response to this hardtruth:

  Ghosts can’t tell stories

  See Alex Juhasz respond in Podcast form to hardtruth #69:

  Alex Juhasz responds in Podcast form to hard truth #69 history is real
• 1 2019-07-25T15:01:32-07:00 Ghosts can’t tell stories 2 Sussex gallery 2020-11-09T21:38:45-08:00

  I 
  Now search the deceased 
  in your omniscient search box; 
  grieve your lost likes. 
  II 
  Sad face the obituary. 
  Now you can miss the funeral. 
  Check for updates. 
  III 
  Timehop memory, 
  because ghosts can’t tell stories, 
  but do keep thumb prints. 
  IV 
  Do continue stalking
  the bereavement of a group 
  known as a friends list. 
  V 
  You really are helping 
  by poking them into posting 
  painful pictures. 
  VI 
  Post how you knew them, 
  because ghosts can’t tell stories. 
  but you can send hearts. 
  VII 
  Click right and ‘see friendship.’ 
  Share your brief interactions 
  to archive your grief. 
  VIII 
  Keep looking for grief. 
  Retweet deep quotes on death. 
  Follow the close family. 
  IX 
  Thank your tired thumbs,
  because ghosts can’t tell stories. 
  But they are online.
  -Gracie Thorne 

  This poem is a response to hardtruth #69:

  #69, ghosts can’t tell stories
   

  See Alex Juhasz respond in Podcast form to hardtruth #69:

  Alex Juhasz responds in Podcast form to hard truth #69 history is real