theunderestimator-2:

Diamanda Galás in stills from “Positive”, a 1990 documentary focusing on  NY gay community’s courageous struggle to organize themselves in the face of ignorance on the part of the state and the city during the ‘80s AIDS crisis.

“I am not a Goth — I’m a Greek.”

The story of legendary dark avant-garde Greek-American composer and four-octave range performer with roots in Mani, Greece, land of medieval castles, blood feuds and haunting dirges,

is a spectacular larger-than-life saga, starring a high priestess of darkness who went from studying classical and jazz music and pursuing a postgraduate degree in neurochemistry to carrying knives as protection in the period she spent working as a prostitute in ‘70s California and to contracting Hepatitis C from sharing needles, before eventually releasing ‘The Litanies of Satan’ and ‘Wild Women With Steak Knives’ in 1982, sensational, virtuosic works that generated much early controversy about her and paved the way to becoming an icon.

She became an AIDS activist after her brother died of AIDS in the mid-’80s.

“In 1992, when I wrote “we are all HIV positive” on my hand with a tattoo artist from Brooklyn, I said several things: One was that you may not separate the uninfected from the infected as so many so-called liberal doctors wanted to do, by putting the infected on Plum island outside of New York City. You cannot separate the uninfected from the infected by denying them access to your country. You cannot separate the uninfected from the infected by putting the infected on a separate floor that has red danger contagion signs and giving them crap to eat and instructing Catholic nurses not to administer painkillers to the guilty and allowing Catholic priests to visit them and inform them of their future in Hell if they do not confess that their entire life has been a crime…

No, you cannot separate the uninfected from the infected by saying “I do not suffer from this virus: I have been spared.” Because one day, in one city, in one moment, you will learn that you suffer from some virus, some pathogen, something poisonous that will not exit from your body; and you will realize that you do not mourn the dead, you mourn the suffering of the living while they are still alive. Noone can escape death, and worse than that, no one can escape the life of anything and everything that smells your blood and lives because of it…”

“Stigma”, Diamanda Galás