My deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out I am severely deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency
Moreover, everyone gathers around to be tremulously compassionate and discreetly admiring: all this time, you lacked the Vitamin? And yet you persevered?
A couple of years ago I went to my GP and said, "I think maybe I'm a tiny bit anemic?" So he ran blood tests and was like, "You are so anemic that I genuinely don't understand how you are able to work a full-time job." Which was very validating!
And then I had an iron infusion and felt a million times better.
Unfortunately there are still lots of things wrong with me, but maybe ankle surgery will be The Next Vitamin.
It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.
On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.
I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"
That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.
Never.
These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.
And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.
Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.
You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.
But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.
That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.
It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.
Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.
Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.
Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.
They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.
But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.
I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."
(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.
Fucker.)
But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.
I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.
But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.
The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.
That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.
Why do you think Republicans constantly try to cut spending on education? People who are never taught how to think for themselves are easier to control.
On almost every piece of paper currency that passes through my hand, I mark out GOD on the back. I used to write other deity names. Pan, Coyote, Gaia, Gaea, Athena, YHWH.
By the way, I saw in the news today that thousands of mail-in ballots in Nevada can't yet be certified because the signature on the envelope doesn't match the name on the voter registration. They suggested that this could be attributed to young people not being used to signing their name.
So if you're a young person in a swing state who voted by mail, it'd be a good idea to check that there isn't a problem with your ballot. They official said they'll be contacting all of the voters in question, but you could be proactive in making sure.
"They told me what you did for me on the roof. You saved my life."
"You were directly over my parking space. The only thing I was saving was my paint job."
"Dan, there's nothing to be frightened of. I'm gonna take care of you."
"Listen, Roz, I want to tell you how much I really appreciate you not letting on to the others what really happened in that elevator."
"I don't want people to know the truth about that."
"That I was a low-down, sniveling coward?"
"No, they already know that. I don't want them to know I was nice to you. Because then everybody would want to be my friend."
JOHN LARROQUETTE as Dan Fielding and MARSHA WARFIELD as Roz Russell
NIGHT COURT (1984-1992, 2023-)
Think about the experience of time as a robot girl, through the metaphor of how we use laptops.
You wake up for the first time with your young master, a college present. You're with them every day, powering off each night to charge. Being powered off is just dreamless sleep: a discontinuity. Every morning you wake up, your click syncs, and you know it's the next day. Maybe you miss a day or two: your master went out partying and ended up sleeping on a couch, until they rushedly wake you up before Monday classes begin. You even missed a whole week once when they went on a hiking trip with a new boyfriend.
You help them research upgrades when your specs get outdated. You place the order and a couple days later they power you off, and you wake up feeling like your head got bigger, on the inside. You can think of more things at once.
They repair you. They swap a new hand in when you accidentally crush it in a door, but when your left leg's servos go out, they send you to a repair shop. They power you off as you look up at them, and you wake up hours later. A strange man tells you to extend your left leg, then contract it. He frowns and re-oils some inner mechanism. You do it again, quieter and smoother this time. He nods, and reaches for your switch. The last thing you see before powering down is your own chest cavity with a series of wires hooked into your diagnostic ports, and your missing right leg sitting on a side table. You wake up again back at the dorms, your clock jumping forward a day, an asset tag still looped around your neck. Your master is happy to see you again.
This goes on, but the upgrades slow. There's only so much you can do to keep an old unit working. Eventually you develop more issues: one of your ocular sensors glitches and they don't make that model anymore, so your master just disables it. You spend a while searching ebay for replacement CND batteries and finally get a refurbished model from South England, but it turns out the EU models run on a different frequency, so it won't work. You're limited to fewer and fewer hours a day, and you start skipping more days.
The last time you remember waking up with your master there, there's also someone else in the room. Another robot girl. A newer model, with the new chassis and the Substrate energy packs. They asks you to copy your memories together onto a memory card, and you do. You want to say goodbye, but apparently your vocal synthesizer has been unplugged. You hand them the card, and they hand it to the new robot. Your master tells them to load the memories into her core bank, and she's says "yes sir!" in your voice. Ahh. That's where your voice synth went.
They power you off, and you don't dream.
You wake in a strange place. You're on a shelf, and there's other things scattered around you. An unknown voice days "yep, it seems it powers on. 400 credits, though? Without a voice and only one working eye? Man, value bin doesn't know how to price anything!" and before the blackness falls your clock finishes synching: it's been 7 months since you last were awake.
It happens a few more times. Different voices, different times, different piles of junk piled around and sometimes on you.
You awake again in a warehouse and someone tells you to smile. Your other ocular sensor went out so you can't really see them, just their vague shape from the lidar. The freestanding shelves around you seem to stretch into infinity. You hear a bitcrushed shutter sound sample a few times, and they pull a connector out of your chest as a diagnostic completes. It's been three years, five months, eight days, two hours, 27 minutes and 14 seconds since you last saw your master. Your GPS says you're a few cities over. They hit your power switch, and you sleep.
You wake up in a cluttered room, sitting on a bench. You look into the eyes of a person with frizzled hair and large glasses. She couldn't look happier. Your new ocular sensors are mismatched in color but you're happy to see again, in more than shapes and distant silhouettes. Your battery alerts as... Missing? You spot it on the desk next to a soldering iron and some electronic tool you can't identify.
Your voice synth is still missing, but this new woman is digging around in a large plastic bin, and comes up with one. She goes to insert it, and it can't connect. She slaps her hand and goes rooting around another bin and comes back with an adapter. She slots it into your chest and your voice returns. You thank her, and there's that moment of dissociation as your voice doesn't sound like "you". Too deep, and the accent is for a different dialect entirely. But you can talk again. She tells you to call her Cara, not Mistress. She's almost got your battery working again, she had to rebuild it nearly from scratch, but she's excited to get you working again. You're a rare model, and she doesn't see units like you in working order very often. Your clock syncs. It's been 17 years.
Your mistr-- Cara is soldering next to you, attaching a controller to the battery. She says she's got a new set of servos on the way, and she's excited to get you back to full working condition. You smile, knowing what it is to be loved, once again.
New headcannon: everyone in that song is gay except the Piano Man who has no idea he’s playing at a gay bar and the staff and regulars have a betting pool on how long he’ll take to finally figure it out. So far John is ahead.
“The manager gives me a smile ‘cause he knows that it’s me they’ve been coming to see” also implies that the Piano Man is possibly an incredibly attractive but oblivious himbo, and if you listen to the rest of it imagining that, this all fits a little too well.
this makes too much sense. Also, the full quote is “Now John at the bar is a friend of mine. He gets me my drinks for free. And he’s quick with a joke or to light up your smoke. But there’s someplace that he’d rather be” Yes, your bed, he wants to be on your bed honey, that’s not a joke, he is flirting with you.
[image description of the three images in this thread:
First: screenshot of tag #that makes the ‘man what are you doing here’ line way funnier
Second: screenshot of tag # “now John at the bar is a friend of mine who gets me my drinks for free” dude he has a crush on you
Third: screenshot of part of an article. Text reads “Well there’s this new theory out there now, that it’s actually about a gay bar. said Joel.
“I was reading this. And I said, ‘Oh, I see how that could be.’ Paul is talking to Davy who’s in the Navy, you know,“ continued Joel, who began singing the Village People’s 1979 disco hit “In the Navy” which was embraced as an anthem by the LGBTQ community
“So, veah, there’s a whole theory about it. He doesn’t have time for a wife.” he added.
Joel went on to say the he never intended for Paul, Davy or any of the other characters in “Piano man” to be gay.
*I never considered that, but I see it now,“ he said, adding, “It’s very funny, actually.”]
I am watching a mouse make a series of what I can only describe as Fuck Around Choices, and the Find Out is VERY excited to continue this little experiment.
I'm watching my parent's dog Arwen up at their house.
Arwen (Kelpie, 60lbs) is 15(ish?) now and while she has a high prey drive and history of successful hunts, she's also 15 and doesn't give many fucks.
I also have my dogs.
Charleston (Sighthound/pointer mix, 50lbs) is 10 and another proactive carnivore, but he's also JUST finished making his Perfect Couch Nest and doesn't want to get up.
...Herschel (Corgi, 40lbs and extremely tube-shaped) is 5 and has no Prey Drive, but he does have a PLAY Drive, which i found out last time I was up here and found him, having cornered a baby bunny, play-bowing and shaking his ass at it because he just had a Great Time chasing it, now it was the bunny's turn to chase HIM!
Even though all three of these assholes spent all day dragging me hither and yon through the rockies, he still has the endurance of an athenian messenger and still looking for a reason to careen around the house at Mach Fuck.
A Reason has Arrived.
My parent's house is the median age of a US senator, and every year about this time, the local mice start experimenting with sneaking into the house for warmth and snacks.
At 11:14 PM, I noticed a single gray mouse had entered, and was exploring the far side of the living room, which is fully accessible to the dogs, but not in their immediate line of sight.
About a minute in, Charleston notices, but his sole reaction is to look at it, then make very pointed eye contact with me as if to say "Are You Seeing This Shit? Disrespectful." and then curl deeper into his couch nest.
Arwen is very asleep, snoring and farting.
Shortly after that, Herschel noticed The Mouse, mostly because it had meandered into the main part of the living room, possibly lured in by the kibble-heavy scent of Dog Farts.
It had, actually, wandered to within two feet of where Herschel was splooted on the floor, dozing, directly in front of his nose.
Now, I don't now much about Mouse vision, but on average, Herschel is very nearly the same color as my parent's carpet, and does very much resemble a faux-fur throw pillow in shape and texture. Perhaps he is well-camoflaged. Perhaps it is full of tiny rodent hubris.
It is very quiet- quiet as a mouse, even- but it must still smell of one, because the first thing I see is Herschel's nose twitch.
His eyes slowly crack open
Cross to focus
Then very quickly open as he recognizes the shape as A Potential New Friend!
His Nubbin begins to wag
One hind foot goes up
The the other
and he slowly rises to a mere half inch above his previous elevation, and begins to slowly play-stock the mouse.
This is not the subtle maneuver of a camouflaged predator, but the hyper-visible way that Corgi and other herding dogs go "I'm Gonna Getchya! I'm Gonna Getchya!" at sheep and cattle and birthday parties full of toddlers in an attempt to get thin to break into a run so The Chasey Game can begin.
The Mouse noticed that it had been Noticed (TM) but to it's credit, it did not run, but instead was very casually search-ambling back to whence it came, it's ears pointed directly behind it, listening to The Find Out.
Props to the mouse, even though Herschel had significantly closed the distance between them, it was maintaining it's facade well.
...but it has now made the peculiar descision to shelter inside the Wobbler Kong, a hard plastic and heavy toy that is in fact exceptionally bite-proof and may have kibbles in it.
The reason there may be Kibbles in it is that I feed Herschel all his meals in the Wobbler to keep him from bolting his food and/or choking himself, because in order the get the kibbles back out, he must do smack the shit out of the wobbler like so:
He's currently standing, staring at the wobbler, waiting for his New Bestie to come out, but I can see the gears of impatience turning and he may decide to accelerate the mouse's descision-making process.
The reason I am allowing this to happen is that The Mouse is unlikely to come to any harm beyond some environmentally-adaptive trauma, and I am Hoping it hauls ass back to the compost bin where most of them live and tells the colony that there's a very large fucked up little man in the house, fuck that shit, let's stay out here.
I don't know if Psyops work on mice but I feel like it's worth a shot.
After a few minutes of waiting for the mouse to come out, Herschel was getting concerned (bored) and stood up all the way, little paw raised, ready to smack the fun back into this poor creature.
"Ah!" I told him.
As much crime Herschel commits, he's actually quite biddable, and stopped, little paw raised, staring at me before slowly lowering it.
"Good job!" I tell him, and he wiggles with joy. "Figure it out!"
Herschel returns his attention to the wobble, circling and sniffing it with small boofs of excitement, looking bac at me for approval eery so often, before giving the bottom of Wobble the smallest, gentlest push with his nose, which doesn't make it rock, but does scoot it along the carpet.
"Okay!" I tell him, and for the last few minutes he has been slowly scooting the mouse inside the wobble across the living room floor an inch at a time.
This has, however, made charlie actually sit up and watch, so I may need to intervene soon.
I mean my whole life is a funny story but in this particular case, it's funny because while I do not have a broken ankle, I do have a pretty severe sprain, and a new appreciation for the horrors of Wordle.
I'll get there.
Anyway, when we last left off, Herschel was doing the Canine equivalent of Playing Cars with the wobble, scooting it around the living room with his nose, which was enough to wake up both Charlie and Arwen, who were squinting at him with matching expressions of "What is the Ginger Idiot up to now?"
Eventually, Herschel got distracted and paused to get a drink, and I started to get up to rescue the mouse, but before I could walk over to the far side of the Living Room, the mouse made the first move, and stuck it's face out of the treat hole to see if the coast was clear.
...in full view of Charleston, and in the following millisecond, I watched his body and Soul become possessed with the millennia-old instincts of his sighthound ancestors, and the more recent instruction of the cats who raised him, and in a beautifully fluid motion that inspired the poets of old, launched himself out of his decadent nest of couch pillows and quilts, up over the coffee table and about 15 feet across the living room to POUNCE on the Wobble and Mouse.
Fortunately, for the mouse, the Wobble isn't the easiest thing to grab, even if you have opposable thumbs, and instead of acquiring a late-night snack, Charlie instead pressure-launched the wobble across the living room and into the kitchen, where it proceeded to pinball around between the cabinets and dinner table.
Herschel, who loves activities and is also a jealous little brat who hates it when Charlie so much as looks at his toys, retaliated by taking a flying leap onto Charlie's face and the two began to wrassle aggressively while Knocking the wobble and everything else in the kitchen around, including me as I tried to grab the wobble from between them.
Charlie broke away from his brother via the complex tactical strategy of "Use limb superiority to smack him repeatedly in the face", and sprinted out of the kitchen across the house with the look of an animal In Hot Pursuit, Herschel and myself on his heels. When Charlie came to a halt at the back door, there was no mouse to be found, much to everyone's bafflement.
I hear jingling back in the living room.
I return to find Arwen has gotten up, walked the seven and a half feet to where the Wobble is in the hall now, and laid back down, both big Puppy Crime paws on either of the Wobble.
I am walking back, because usually she just wants to lick kibble dust and the occasional forgotten green bean out of it, and am fairly sure the Wobble is Devoid of Mouse, who has escaped to relay news of the modern wolf pack inside the house.
Instead, Arwen opens her mouth wide, turns her entire head sideways, clamps onto the top of the wobble, and twists her neck.
She's learned how to unscrew it.
I sprint back and manage to grab the wobble from her and the other two canines now Baying for Rodent Blood at my feet, and carefully peek inside.
The Mouse is still within the Wobble, plastered to the far side of the container, extraordinarily flat, as though trying to become one with the hard plastic walls. Deciding that it was Traumatized Enough, I taped a paper towel over the opening to trap it but not create an airtight seal and took it out to the yard.
I was about to release it when I looked back to see all three dogs at the door, watching every motion with a laser focus, and realized that they'd scent-trail it back to the main colony. I decided I didn't really feel like dealing with the consequences of Arwen and Charlie teaching Herschel that pinkie mice are made of meat, and opted instead to take the mouse to my car, and drive it a few miles up the road to the nearest meadow for release.
It's a lovely October Night. Temperature in the low 50's, full moon, and the wind blowing through the turning leaves when I get to the meadow, and I take my time going down the embankment from the gravel parking lot of the city park, a bit into the tall grass near the creek that cuts through the meadow, and carefully unscrew the wobble. The mouse is still braced to the inside, so I set the pieces down and wait for it to cautiously start sniffing and delicately step out of the toy, stare up at me for a moment, and then scamper off into the grass.
I look up at the big yellow moon, and for a moment, all is well with the universe.
then there is not quite a noise, and not quite a motion but more of a Disturbance In The Force on the edge of my peripheral vision, and I slowly turn to look.
Also enjoying the Lovely October Night and the associated seasonal changes to its anatomy is one of the last true Megafauna of the Ice Age, which have been making a big comeback in Colorado of late, but I had not realized they'd come out of the mountains and into city limits:
The Bull Moose is maybe 60 feet away from me, and still making up its mind about how it's going to respond to this invasion of it's personal space.
Slowly, I back up the way I came.
The Moose chooses violence, as is it's right, and charges.
I am possessed by ancient instincts much like Charlie was and scramble back up the embankment, into the parking lot, and sprint for the car, which has already endured one moose attack and lived.
Unfortunately, just before I get to the car, I eat shit on the loose gravel, roll, ans slam my ankle into a granite boulder at the edge of the lot with considerable force.
Adrenaline carries me through, and I get back up, run the remaining five very painful steps to the car, and get inside. I start it up, through the brights on to dazzle the moose, and prepare to make a very inadvisable reversal out of the lot.
The moose is only halfway up the embankment, staring with a dull disappointment into my brights, having concluded from my spectacular lack of coordination that I am no threat to it, and it turns back down the small hill.
It's my left ankle, so I can still drive, but I still spend two hours in the Urgent Care to get it looked at and braced, because there are people having Much Worse nights ahead of me, and decide to be grateful that for all my other problems, I am not having their problems, even if there is no Wifi.
I get home, all three dogs stomp as hard as they can on my boot to make sure it's good and sturdy, and I pass out in the recliner like my Dad for a solid five hours, and then got woken up again because Herschel and Arwen were having an argument about who was going to sleep on my leg to fix it next.
Charlie has won.
---
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