Or, probably, in the future as well. In all of recorded time and space, in fact. And just think, Nick Denton, if your place hadn’t become a cesspool of festering Deadspin lunkheads, you could have had this on your site.
In response to an AIDs denialist in the comments on the video of Spencer Cox from the previous post:
Oh, honey. Spencer’s toenails were better than you. They had a higher IQ, more credibility, and a better likelihood of being remembered with fondness. Spencer is now redecorating the halls of Valhalla while the best thing you can think to do with your completely unjust continued life is to troll YouTube, forsooth, in order to eke out tiny shreds of the attention you crave but can gain no other way. Because you have nothing to offer the world. You are wholly contemptible. Go pour salt on yourself.
I’ve been procrastinating this for thirteen hours now, but I can no longer put it off. I have to write the obituary for a friend of mine, a great man, and a hero to millions.
Spencer Cox, founder of ActUp, and one of the key reasons an HIV diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, has died of pneumonia.
There is literally no way to explain the impact he had on people, including me. He was a righteous warrior who gave no quarter, not an inch, to those he felt were in the wrong. He was (rightfully) called the Dorothy Parker of HIV, and was a sensitive enough man to take that as a cue to be kinder, although he never shied away from dishing out what was due.
He was the kind of hero who, when asked about his participation in the documentary How to Survive a Plague, could say the following:
One of the visceral things the film brought back for me is the rage that is still almost as fresh as the days when I first discovered it. Footage of virulently homophobic North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms reminds me even today of how much I hate (present tense) this man. I found out he’d died a few years ago when a ‘porter called me to ask for a comment, and while usually I’d ask for fifteen or twenty minutes to compose my thoughts, on this particular occasion it came slipping out before even I knew what I was saying. “It’s too little, too late.” I wanted him to suffer, and I deeply regret that the last few years of his vicious life were spent deep in the fog of senile dementia, leaving not enough consciousness for genuine suffering. His colleagues, including New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor, Mayor Ed Koch, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Patrick Buchanan, even the low-level Reagan press staffer who, in a transcript of an early White House daily briefing, is asked about AIDS, and reduces it to a smutty joke worthy of a quick chuckle. Karma be damned – I hate these men, and probably will until the day I die.
I met (“met”) Spencer in the comments section of Gawker, which was, for a time, the Algonquin Round Table of the 21st Century. That was some time, and a whole comment model, ago, but back in the day genius could make itself felt, and Spencer‘s always was. He didn’t throw his weight around: hell, in a pseudonymous world, none of us knew who he really was. We respected him because he was visibly wise, visibly kind, visibly passionate, and visibly a marvellous human being. He was also funny as hell.
He would get a kick out of the fact it took me two double Martinis and thirteen hours to bring myself to write this.
If I have one piece of advice for young, aspiring activists, it is to always hold on to the joy, always make it fun. If you lose that, you have lost the whole battle.
And now, if you’ve never met Spencer Cox, allow me to introduce him.
RIP Davy Jones, the first of the Monkees to make it to that center stage spotlight in the sky.
Just like every cute British kid who could act and sing, he played the title role in Oliver when he was young. When he was just a little bit older, he was chosen to form 25% of Menudo 1.0, the Monkees. A synthetic, cynical response to the popularity of the Beatles, the band turned out to be not 50% bad indeed, and when Rebecca Black referenced “Pleasant Valley Sunday” in her symphony of clusterfuckery, “Friday,” it could well have been the blow that started Davy on the road to his eventual expiration.
When my friend told me Davy was dead, at first I didn’t believe her.
There’s no use wishing Kim Jong-Il will rest in peace, because that would be the farthest thing from justice this or any other world could perpetrate. If it weren’t such a long walk, I’d put my dancing shoes on for this. Instead, in keeping with my new mantle of professionalism, I have decided to make this exclusive photojournalism report on Kim Jong-Il‘s journey to Antenora, the Second Round of the Ninth Circle of Hell. First, let’s remember the Beloved Leader as he was in life:
Yep, that’s pretty much it. Now direct to our exclusive coverage, featuring pix from those intrepid photogs over at the World’s Suddenly Least Purposeful Blog, KimJongIlLookingAtThings.
