Beka > Recent Status Updates

Ope. There it is. A man was treated with Radathor, a Radium derived potion, and he eventually died. Suddenly companies stop recommending it as a treatment or safe thing. Who cares about the 20+ girls who worked with and ingested radium-containing products and died after awful, sometimes lengthy diseases of bones appearing 'moth-eaten' and falling apart.

Thanks to Hoopla for allowing me to find this one at the drop of a hat.

This story is wild. The power of an industry to not just suspect that their product was harming their workers, but then decided to make up their own facts + shut down any concerns of the employees (14-19 year old girls), is chilling.
I appreciate hearing how, eventually, a couple of lawyers decided that the fatal + grotesque illnesses the girls were developing needed some representation to fight the industry lords.

"A battery of laws criminalized not only gay men's narrowly 'sexual' behavior, but also their association with one another, their cultural styles, + their efforts to organize + speak on their own behalf. Anyone discovered to be homosexual was threatened with loss of livelihood + loss of social respect. Hundreds of men each year in NYC were arrested for violating such laws."

Shudder.

This has been one of the most clarifying, informing books on the topic of race/economy/culture that I've read in a while.

Intro "If American life is a river, relief from poverty and strife sits atop one of its slippery banks, and the American Dream sits safely back from its edge. Few of us manage to plant our feet firmly enough in that soil to have *no* fear of it falling away; fewer are born there in the first place."

"The gay world that flourished before WW2 has been almost entirely forgotten in popular memory + overlooked by professional historians; it is not supposed to have existed. This book seeks to restore that world to history , to chart its geography, + to recapture its culture + politics."

I frickin LOVE Gale Galligan's standalone books, so I'm excited about this one...

"On the one hand, queer people have tried to define for themselves who they are, what they do, + what their identities mean to them + the larger world.

On the other hand, others have tried to define queers using medicine, religion, + the law. Sometimes that dialogue has been marked by constraint + repression..."

"In the past, queerness had more to do with gender roles than with who was sleeping with whom. People were identified as 'that way' if they transgressed the boundaries of what it meant to be make or female, masculine or feminine."

"...we mention Brandon Teena, who was murdered because he did not conform to people's expectations of what he should be, as a way of showing that queerness is sometimes about violating boundaries, or, put another way, overturning and challenging expected roles."