Category: equality

Ladies Who Lunch

Americans have always been fascinated by rich people.

We all want to be rich, after all; as someone once said, “The United States is a nation of temporarily distressed millionaires.” So, in lieu of actually being rich, we obsess about them. The rich used to be celebrities for no other reason than being rich. It’s always been interesting to me that in our so-called “classless” society (which was part of the point; no class privilege, everyone is the same in the eyes of the law) we obsess about the rich, we want to know everything about them, and we lap up gossip about them like a kitten with a bowl of cream. I am constantly amazed whenever I watch something or read something set in Great Britain, because that whole “royalty and nobility” thing is just so stupid and ludicrous (and indefensible) on its face that I don’t understand why Americans get so into it; the fascination with the not-very-interesting House of Windsor, for one. We fought not just one but two wars to rid ourselves of royalty and nobility…yet we can’t get enough of the British royals, or the so-called American aristocracy. (Generic we there, I could give a rat’s ass about the horse-faced inbred Windsors and their insane wealth, quite frankly.)

I wanted to be rich when I was a kid; I spent a lot of time in my youth fantasizing about being rich and famous and escaping my humdrum, everyday existence and becoming a celebrity of sorts with no idea of how to do so. I was intrigued by the rich and celebrities; I used to read People and Us regularly, always looked at the headlines on the tabloids at the grocery store, and used to always prefer watching movies and television programs about the rich. (Dynasty, anyone?) I loved trashy novels about obscenely wealthy (and inevitably perverted) society types and celebrities–Valley of the Dolls has always been a favorite of mine, along with all the others from that time period–Judith Krantz, Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins, Sidney Sheldon and all the knock-offs. I was a strange child, with all kinds of things going on in my head and so many voices talking to me and my attention definitely had an extraordinary deficit; I always referred to it as the “buzzing.” The only time I could ever truly focus my brain was either reading a book or watching something on television–and even as a child, I often read while I was watching television. (Which is why I read so much, even though that buzzing isn’t there anymore and hasn’t been for decades.)

As I get older and start revisiting my past (its traumas along with its joys) I begin to remember things, little clues and observations that stuck in my head as a lesson and remained there long after the actual inciting incident was long forgotten. I’ve always had a mild loathing for Truman Capote, for example, which really needs to be unpacked. Capote was everywhere when I was a child; there was endless talk shows littering the television schedules those days–Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, John Davidson, and on and on and on–and Capote was always a popular guest on these shows. I wasn’t really sure what he did or who he was, but he was someone famous and he was on television a lot. I saw him in the atrocious film Murder by Death, and I know I knew/had heard that he was a homosexual, a gay; and I also knew I was a gay. It terrified me that I was destined to end up as another Capote–affected high-pitched speech and mannerisms, foppish clothing that just screamed gay at anyone looking; Capote made no bones about who or what he was and refused to hide anything…yet he gained a kind of celebrity and fame and success in that incredibly homophobic time period, and no one had a problem with putting him front and center on television during the day time.

But this isn’t about my own self-loathing as evidenced by my decades of feeling repulsed by Truman Capote; that I will save for when I finish watching Capote v. the Swans.

“Carissimo!” she cried. “You’re just what I’m looking for. A lunch date. The duchess stood me up.”

“Black or white?” I said.

“White,” she said, reversing my direction on the sidewalk.

White is Wallis Windsor, whereas the Black Duchess is what her friends called Perla Apfeldorf, the Brazilian wife of a notoriously racist South African diamond industrialist. As for the lady who knew the distinction, she was indeed a lady–Lady Ina Coolbirth, an American married to a British chemicals tycoon and a lot of woman in every way. Tall, taller than most men, Ina was a big breezy peppy broad, born and raised on a ranch in Montana.

“This is the second time she’s canceled,” Ina Coolbirth continued. “She says she has hives. Or the duke has hives. One or the other. Anyway, I’ve still got a table at Côte Basque. So, shall we? Because I do so need someone to talk to, really. And, thank God, Jonesy, it can be you.”

I do want to be clear that once I started reading Capote, he quickly became a writer whom I admired very much; I don’t think I’ve ever read anything he’s written that didn’t take my breath away with its style and sentence construction and poetry. He truly was a master stylist, and perhaps with a greater output he might have become one of the established masters of American literature, required reading for aspiring writers and students of American literature. In Cold Blood is a masterpiece I go back to again and again; I prefer his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s to the film without question; and I was blown away by his debut novel, Other Voices Other Rooms, which was one of those books that made me think my childhood, and my being from Alabama, might be worth mining for my work.

I read “La Côte Basque 1965” years ago, and didn’t really remember it very much other than remembering I didn’t care for it very much. I was aware of the scandal that followed its publication and that all of Capote’s carefully cultivated rich society women friends felt betrayed by it and turned on him, which sent him into a decline from which he never recovered, before dying himself. I’ve always seen Capote as an example of wasted talents. Anyway, I read the story but not being familiar with his social set, I didn’t recognize any of the people gossiped about in the story or who the woman he was lunching with represented (Slim Keith, for the record), and so it kind of bored me; it was a short story about someone having lunch and gossiping about people the reader had no way of knowing who they were or anything about. I assumed this was because the story was an excerpt from the novel, and the novel itself would establish who all these women were and their relationships with each other. But I did know it was all thinly veiled gossip about his friends, and they never forgave him for it. (I also didn’t recognize “Ann Hopkins” in the story as Ann Woodward; I hadn’t known until the television series that he was involved in her story. I primarily knew about her from reading The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and articles in Vanity Fair, and I actually thought, when reading that book, that it was based on the Reynolds tobacco heir murder that Robert Wilder based his book Written on the Wind on; it wasn’t until later that I learned about the Woodward incident) so I thought, well, it was an entertaining if confusing read.

It was kind of like listening to two strangers talk in a Starbucks and gossip about people you don’t know; entertaining but nothing serious, not really a story of any kind, and I didn’t at the time see how it would all fit into a novel as a chapter in the first place. What purpose to the overall story did this nasty gossip play? Why was it necessary for Ina to share these stories at this particular lunch (and don’t get me started on White Duchess and Black Duchess)? Were these people she was talking about important to the book as a whole? It was hard for me to tell, and I put it away, thinking at the time probably a good thing he never finished the book.

Watching the show about fallout from the story’s publication, I decided to read the story again.

And I still question why Esquire chose to publish it, as well as why Capote thought this chapter was the one to send them. Capote was a genius, of course, and after In Cold Blood was one of the biggest names in American literature (he truly invented the true crime genre); of course they are going to publish whatever he sent them, no matter how bad it was. It wasn’t promoted as a story, after all, it was a novel excerpt.

What I’ve not been able to figure out from any of this is why he thought he could publish this without any fallout from his “swans.” I guess it went to the grave with Capote, who clearly didn’t–and I don’t think ever did–understand why they were so upset with him, which just astonishes me. (Someone once thought I based a character on her–I didn’t–and was very angry with me. I didn’t care, because I neither cared about the person nor her concerns, but I know how careful you have to be as a writer with these sorts of things.)

I wish I could say I liked it better on the reread. I did not. It’s still the same mess it was when I originally read over twenty years ago. It’s just a rich woman being bitchy to her gay friend she feels free to be bitchy about her friends with, and when you have no context (even knowing this time who the actual people were, and yes, he barely disguised them) about the women being discussed or anything about them…it’s just boring, gossip about people you don’t know and you don’t know enough to care about, so it’s just a bitchy little boring lunch. I don’t know what could come before that or after, as an author myself; had I been the fiction editor at Esquire I would have been pissed that was what he sent in, and I would have definitely taken a red pencil to it before I would have published it–and Esquire? Why did Esquire, a men’s lifestyle magazine, publish this when the right place would have been Vogue or Vanity Fair or even The New Yorker. None of it made sense then, none of it makes sense to me now; and if this is the best example we have of Answered Prayers, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that the manuscript–if it ever existed–disappeared.

Sorry, Truman, you were a great writer but this one was a swing-and-a-miss.

Love’s Been a Little Bit Hard on Me

Wednesday pay-the-bills day, and I am a bit groggy this morning, but that’s okay, really. I slept well and didn’t want to get up, and there’s nothing wrong with that (why I’ve always felt like not wanting to get out of bed in the morning makes me a lazy slug is something else I clearly need to work on). But the weekend draws nigh, which is always a lovely thing, and of course…parades. Yes, the parades start this weekend, with three on Friday night, six (!!!) on Saturday, and another three on Sunday. It’s also supposed to rain all weekend, so I don’t know how much time I will actually spend out at the corner this weekend risking getting sick and/or tired. I was also very tired last night, to the point that I really didn’t do much of anything once I got home from work yesterday afternoon. I didn’t do any chores, I didn’t run any errands, and I didn’t get the mail.

I did work on the story more and it’s starting to take a better shape than the mess that it originally was. I’m not certain why it’s taking me so long to get this draft finished, but I am instead going to think of it in terms of your writing muscles are as rusty as your actual muscles and so yes, they need to be used a bit more so I can get back into the swing of using those muscles every day. I really should think about writing now as writing therapy; the same mindset as my physical therapy. I am slowly but surely getting back into the spirit of writing after a deeply traumatic year, and the more I do it, the stronger and more lithe those muscles will get–and the less warm-up they will need. Having so many of the conflicting voices in my head stilled at long last also helps me with the focus and stuff; the problem is the lack of use and working out the kinks and the doubts. I think the story is going to make better sense and be much stronger than it was going to originally be in this draft version, and I did think about it a lot last night, too. I have always had a powerful imagination, and so last night I was using it to imagine what it would feel like out in the Manchac Swamp on a night in early October–and the kinds of risks college students will take that older people probably wouldn’t. If it weren’t for the parades–and maybe after the season is over I can do this–I should drive out to the swamp and check it out; there are a lot of places around New Orleans and in Louisiana in general that I really should go visit and experience.

Time, and exhaustion, is always such an issue. I do remember driving somewhere–I’m not sure where or why–that required me to cross the lake to Slidell on my way; I was writing something that required me to take a look at that far reach of New Orleans east that heads out to the bridge over the Rigolets, and so I detoured on my way to get a good look. (I also used that visit to base a scene in Royal Street Reveillon on as well; two for the price of one!) I’ve also noticed that, now that I have take up my proverbial quill again, my process of writing is a little different than it used to be; again, rusty out of use muscles might have something to do with it, but it could also be a change, who knows? My process has evolved and changed so much since Ye Olden Days when I first starting treating writing as a job and a vocation as opposed to a dream. (It’s also why I hate process questions, mine is rarely ever the same, especially when it comes to writing short stories.) I do like this story and like where it’s going; I really like the idea of my four unsuspecting, slightly drunk and high college students out visiting a supposedly haunted location in the Manchac Swamp (putting some of those New Orleans-area history wormholes I’ve gone down since the pandemic started) and I think it could be a terrific (if macabre) little story. And it’s something I am actually writing, not something I’m just thinking about. The story will probably always be special to me for being the first thing I wrote and finished after the surgery.

I’ve also been watching, with no small amount of amusement, as the right wing anger cancellation machine (you know, the thing they bitch about from the left while doing themselves because they are nothing if not the biggest hypocritical pieces of shit in recent American and world history) has decided to come for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. I have enjoyed so many cruel laughs at their expense over the last few months! Why stop there? Why not come for Beyonce, too? They never learn, do they? Their refusal to look at factual history–even factual recent history–showed itself when Ron DeSantis chose to follow the Southern Baptist playbook and come for Disney to bolster his dead-before-it-started presidential campaign? The Mouse is undefeated, and remains undefeated. Taylor Swift is the biggest pop culture star in the world right now whose fans absolutely worship her–and her fans are of all ages, and they protect her from scavenging low-life scum whenever and wherever someone tries to come for her. The irony that this romance is actually the culmination of every Taylor Swift longing teenaged love songs–she’s dating the star football player AT LAST–does not Fox or Newsmax in their quest to humble Taylor Swift, who is laughing at them as she sits on her piles of gold and the love and admiration of millions around the globe. I wouldn’t call myself a Swiftie1–I do like her music, and listen to it occasionally, but it’s not my go-to–but I do admire her as an artist, a businesswoman, and a person. She stands up for the underprivileged, she supports queer people and queer rights, and above all else she fights misogyny (which a lot of the right-wing hate is predicated upon) whenever she encounters it, calls it out, and is not afraid to go to court to fight it, either. The way she outsmarted the douche who bought her original masters deserves a five minute standing ovation.

I may not know a lot about Ms. Swift, but I do know better than to fuck with her or activate her fans. And frankly, the profas (if the the left is antifa, then it stands to reason that their position makes the right profa, right?) are soooo stupid and blindly wrapped up in their cult of Golden Calf worship that their rage makes me like her all the more. I listened to her Red album in the car on my way home from the office yesterday and it’s still a banger (“Red” is my favorite Swift song, don’t @ me), and I’ll probably be listening to more of her music in the coming days as well. I also love that the derangement extends to rooting against the Kansas City Chiefs in the upcoming Super Bowl–which means they have to root for San Francisco.

(laughs evilly in gay.)

And on that note, I need to head into the spice mines and start paying the bills. Have a lovely Wednesday and you never know–I may pop in again later.

  1. Although I did start writing an essay during the pandemic that I called “A Sixty-Year Old Swiftie.” ↩︎

Hurts So Good

Ah, Monday morning back to work blog today. I have to leave early as I have a PT appointment at four today, but that’s okay. I also have to run errands, and I will already be uptown, which is terrific. (Mail and make a little groceries, for those who are unsure what I mean by errands.) I’m usually in a good mood when I finish PT (it’s the endorphins), so hopefully that will make running the errands in the cold a little easier. It should get up to the sixties by the time I leave the office today. Parades begin next weekend (not this coming one, but the next) and I am not even remotely in the slightest prepared to deal with all the aggravation, exhaustion and fun that comes from living inside the box1, as we call it here. While it does mean having easy access to parades and catching throws, it also makes navigating every day life incredibly difficult.

Sigh.

I feel very rested this morning, after a weekend spent feeling tired most of the time. I managed to do very little this weekend other than rest and cleaning and chores. Maybe the strength PT on Friday wore me out far more than I had originally suspected; after all, it’s the first taxing kind of exercise I’ve done in over a year. (I also have to leave work a little early today as well for a session later this afternoon.) I didn’t get much done this weekend, sadly, but I consider progress on the house to be progress of a kind at any rate. I also started reading Lina Chern’s Play the Fool, which I am enjoying; the voice is quite original and delightful. We also watched another episode of Lupin last night, which is also quite good.

I was struggling there for a moment to remember what precisely I did yesterday while Paul took calls and worked upstairs; I just remembered that I spent most of the day finishing the original BBC series of Brideshead Revisited. I can see why the show was so popular back when it originally aired and why it own so many Emmys–Americans have always thought British productions of anything to be vastly superior to anything produced here–and it did remind me a lot of Downtown Abbey, which also led me to wonder why Americans are so fascinated by the British upper class. I know I certainly used to be, but my lack of knowledge regarding Brideshead seemed like a missing cultural touchstone for me, and now that I’ve seen it–yes, I can see how influential it was. There would be no Downton without Brideshead, but the original is far less soapy than the later show….and of course, Upstairs Downstairs was truly the original Downton, a soapy show about a wealthy family’s ups and downs as well as their servants. I don’t imagine the occasional thoughts I would have while watching–deep criticisms of the class system and the disproportionate division of wealth in British society of the time; how it would have sucked to have been one of their servants–would have occurred to me had I watched when I was younger. I also felt that there was more to the relationship between Charles and Sebastian than mere friendship; which is another thing it has in common with Saltburn; an ambiguous love relationship between two men. I was also rather disappointed that Sebastian disappeared from the show about halfway through so it could focus on Charles and Julia, which I felt was giving Sebastian, whom the show really centered at first, very short shrift indeed. I will go ahead and read the book–my education in Evelyn Waugh was sorely neglected–but I feel that watching the series has given me enough grounding to explore Saltburn again through that experience.

It’s chilly again this morning but nothing terribly unbearable, thank the Lord. I do feel rather good this morning, and hope I can ride that feeling through the work day, into PT and making groceries again after work tonight. This is an actual full work week, of which there have been few for quite some time for me, so we’ll see how I feel when Friday rolls around again, shall we?

It’s been an interesting and slightly uneven January so far, bit of an up and down month, in all honesty. Life is always a rollercoaster, isn’t it? Ups and downs and never certain when the next curve or sudden drop is coming, all at great speeds that sometimes never give you a chance to catch your breath. There’s nothing life can give us that we can’t handle, as Scotty always says, it’s how you handle it that matters. I’ve always found that emotional responses or reactions are often counterproductive and exhausting, and if you can somehow switch the emotional component down or off or mute it so you can engage your logical brain and figure out how to handle it and what you need to do next to start the getting through it process might not be the absolute healthiest way to handle anything, but it has always worked for me and is why people always think I am so good in a crisis–I am very good at ignoring the macro while focusing on the micro. The problem with that, of course, is that you never go back and process the feelings and emotions; they’ve been securely buried for the moment and inevitably, that results in me thinking oh I don’t need to process that after all!

When in fact I really do need to.

That’s been happening a lot for me since the concurrent COVID pandemic/shutdown coupled with me turning sixty and eventually losing my mom. I’ve been thinking about things from my past a lot more than I ever allowed myself to, identifying the lessons I’ve taken from bad experiences and how I turned that into I don’t ever want to feel like this again s so I will never do that again which may not have been exactly healthy. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over that sense of not belonging anywhere when I was a kid, which was partly being a gay kid (I didn’t know that specifically, but I also knew I was different from the other kids) as well as having some chemical issues in my brain (ADHD, anxiety, etc.), added to the sense of not belonging because I was from Alabama and living in Chicago. New Orleans was, in fact, the first place I’ve ever felt like I belonged, and that’s part of the reason I love it here so much. There wasn’t any single one thing to blame; I always thought it was this or that or the other, but rather the combination of everything that made my childhood so incredibly difficult for me (and pretty much my life until about thirty-three or so).

I think the real reason–I was asked this on the young adult panel this weekend–I write about teenagers is I am still trying to make sense of my own experiences. I also think that my past is also filled with very rich material for my writing. I learned that with both Bury Me in Shadows and #shedeservedit–writing about things that I have had trouble understanding in my own life fictionally has not only made my work better but also has helped me process things in a healthier way than I ever have before.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Monday, Constant Reader.

  1. “The box” means inside the parade route for Carnival; the box being formed by Canal, Napoleon, St. Charles and Tchoupitoulas. Once parades have started you cannot cross any of those streets, and yes, I live just inside the box on the St. Charles side of the rectangle. ↩︎

Carol of the Bells

And now it’s Christmas Eve. I slept super-late today, not rising from my bed until almost ten(!!!!) which is unheard of since the weekend after Thanksgiving, when I was still recovering from surgery, but it doesn’t happen often. I started feeling bad yesterday–scratchy throat, stomach upset–and I feel both of those more intently today. I did spend the morning finishing reading Tamara Berry’s Buried in a Good Book, which I really enjoyed; definitely will be more on that later.

I picked up the mail yesterday and came back home, feeling terrible, and spent the day plotting the book and cleaning/organizing the house, going back and forth between the living room and the kitchen and the laundry room. I watched the 2014 Godzilla yesterday, confirming that Monarch: Legacy of Monsters was indeed a sequel; I’m not sure if I need to watch the 2019 Godzilla King of Monsters or not, but it doesn’t seem necessary. Those movies–gigantic creature monster movies–terrified me as a child and gave me nightmares and anxiety; I don’t remember why I watched them in the first place, but I never rewatched them and never had any desire to do so. We started watching the Apple series because I was curious about it, and I find it interesting enough to keep watching; Paul thinks they need more monsters, but this show is more about the backstory/current story of the company Monarch, but they are also out looking for monsters actively while searching for the missing expert, who just happens to be the father of the half-siblings involved in the search. (And the best part of Godzilla was Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who should be a much bigger star than he is, really.)

We also watched more of Looking last night, which I continue to enjoy with each episode. The thing I really like about it is the characters, for good or bad, feel very real to me; these are gay men I’ve known, as opposed to the two-dimensional archetypes of Queer as Folk that I couldn’t relate to at all.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what I’ll be writing in the new year. I have an old novella, y/a really, that I wrote from the perspective of a teenaged girl that was kind of a sequel to Sorceress; I’ve decided to rewrite it from the point of view of a gay teen and turn into a novel with the title The Grimoire of Broken Dreams, which I think is a better title and makes for a more compelling story. I’m also going to spend some time today rereading some of my books; I really need to reread Death Drop to get more of a sense of Jem’s voice for its sequel. So, yes, even when I am not feeling well I am thinking of new stories, things to work on, and things to prepare me to get back to working hard.

And on that note, I am going to medicate and get cleaned up and try to get something done today. Check in with you again later, Constant Reader, and have a lovely evening.

Who Took The Merry Out of Christmas

It’s the Wednesday before Christmas and all through the apartment…the only creature stirring before I got out of bed was one General Touglas McSparkle. He always stays under the bed all night in his fort (Paul calls it his Batcave), but always starts chasing a bottle cap or something right before my alarm goes off, and then will jump into bed and start rubbing against me and purring; when the alarm goes off the first time he curls up next to my head and stays there. Once the alarm goes off for the third time, he jumps down because he knows that’s when I’ll get up, and bee-lines to his food bowl, waiting for me to refill it. He really is smart.

When I got home last night I made some progress on the book, and I also did a load of laundry, emptied the load out of the dishwasher and did another; there’s still a sinkful of dishes, but if I take care of that tonight, I’ll sail into the weekend with a relatively good jump on cleaning things up. I have a follow-up with my surgeon Friday before PT, and I am really hoping the brace, which is becoming more and more cumbersome and inconvenient by the day–I know I have to keep it on, but it’s frustrating because it doesn’t feel like I need it, and its primary purpose is to limit mobility of the arm. Of course, it’s also a constant reminder to be careful; would I lose that mentality once the brace goes and do something to re-injure it or something without the brace? Only time will tell.

It’s cold again this morning ; forty-eight degrees at the moment. I know this is nothing to people up north; but it’s a damp, humid cold, which cuts right through you. (I’m not sure why people are always mocking me for complaining when it gets cold here; I don’t mock people in the summer by mocking them by mentioning how hot it gets here in the summer, either. You acclimate to your climate. And we had probably the most miserable summer of all time this past summer; based on that, I could also point out that the temperature variance here between this past summer and today is between seventy and eighty degrees, which is about the climate difference elsewhere between summer and winter, isn’t it?)

We finished watching the Escaping Twin Flames documentary on Netflix last night, and sorry, Jeff and Shaleih Divine, you are not prophets and you are not God; you are grifters and cult leaders who brainwash your followers. It’s actually a really sad commentary on how lonely some people are; they so desperately want to find their “true love” (“twin flame” in cult-speak) they are willing to go to such great (and awful) lengths to try to find it, and these grifters are just making bank off them. It’s horrible and predatory and not “god-like” at all. And the damage they are doing to queer people is horrifying and off the charts revolting; their definition of divine masculine and feminine (as well as a decided lack of cis-male members) led them to start telling cisgender women that they were spiritually “divine masculine” and needed to start living as transmen–which is what the hateful Right claims that recognizing the gender identity of anyone outside the binary will lead to, proving their disgusting and invalid point that no one truly exists outside that binary: coercive transitioning.

Jeff and Shaleih can just go fuck themselves right off.

And maybe there’s a book in this.

And on that note, it’s time to head into the spice mines. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I might be back later; one never really knows.

New World Man

I am up earlier than I have been since before the surgery (no, I don’t want a cookie–never been a cookie fan, even as a kid), and feel pretty good this morning. Yesterday was a pretty good day, over all. I didn’t really leave the house at all, but I worked on getting things more under-control around here–the kitchen has been a mess since the ceiling collapse, and the cabinets and drawers need some serious organizing–and also spent most of the day doing other chores around here, while thinking about getting back to work writing. The brace is still awkward to work around, but it feels like I’m getting more used to working with it on–and having a cleared and cleaned off desk surface also helps with that as well. I am going to run some errands this afternoon, but there’s not college football today to distract me or send me to the easy chair for the day, so I have little choice about blowing the day off, methinks, which is not a bad thing. I also did laundry and more dishes yesterday, and I have some other things I need to do here in the kitchen/office today as well. I also spent some time reading the second book in Raquel V. Reyes’ delightful Caribbean kitchen cozy series (Calypso, Cooking and Corpses), which is just as delightful as the first, and then…well, I fell down a Youtube/Twitter wormhole that was eye-opening and shocking before Paul got home from the gym and we watched this week’s Fellow Travelers, which, interestingly enough, kind of tied into the wormhole in some ways; as you may recall, just the other day I was talking about how these stories (Fellow Travelers), while sad and depressing, were necessary to remind people of how awful the past was for queer people not that long ago; we don’t have much of a societal memory for things that happened as recently as twenty years ago. There’s a large gap in our community that was created by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, so the oral traditions within the community of passing along our history was horrifically interrupted and many younger queers–and those that aren’t that young–have no way of connecting to the past, and don’t even know where to start looking.

During the shutdown I spent a lot of time in my easy chair making condom packs for the day job to justify getting paid for being at home–there were other job duties I could do at home, but mostly I made a shit ton of condom packs–and so I spent a lot of time looking through streaming apps on my Apple TV for things to watch while my hands worked. This was how I discovered the endless wormholes of Youtube video essays and documentaries; and of course, algorithms started suggesting other videos and channels of “influencers” similar to the videos I had watched and was finding on my own. Discovering Matt Baume’s delightful channel about queer rep in popular culture was a joy for me; he named sources for his information, was very clear about what was fact, what was unknowable, and what was his opinion–and since most of it was stuff that aired or happened while I was alive, it was a lovely trip down memory lane for me, reminding me of the few things that resonated with me growing up as a lonely queer kid and what shaped my views on what it was like to be a gay man in America. (Also, once I discovered there was such a thing as queer books and queer publishing, spent most of the 1990’s reading mostly queer stuff…and I’ve always been a voracious reader.) Anyway, watching Matt’s videos and subscribing to his channel shifted the algorithms, and I started getting other videos and channels suggested to me….and one of those belonged to a queer video essayist named James Somerton, and one of them–called Evil Queens and having to do with Disney–I don’t remember the actual name of the video, and he has since scrubbed his entire Youtube channel (more on that drama later)–and thought, interesting–a long time ago I read and reviewed a book called Tinker Belles and Evil Queens by Sean Griffin, but you can’t copyright a title and can you talk about queer coding and such in Disney and not use the words “evil queens”? Disney has always fascinated me, since I turned into a Disney queen after The Little Mermaid (I was never a big Disney kid; that waited until my adulthood and coming out, oddly enough), and Griffin’s book was so astonishing and good and insightful that I never forgot it. I watched Somerton’s video, and it all seemed incredibly familiar to me–and I did note he said some things that were wrong; mainly Gay Days/Gay Nights at Disneyworld were never official, Disney-sponsored events…which I know because I lived in Florida and used to go for Gay Day. I also thought it was odd that he left out how the Southern Baptists tried to boycott Disney to stop Gay Days…and were ground completely into the dust by the Mouse. But it didn’t fit the narrative of the video essay–how Disney queer baits us for money then betrays us by not giving us rep in their films1. I also thought it was weird that the book–which so much of the video’s content was dependent on for its facts; the stuff that was wrong I assumed was from Somerton himself–wasn’t credited for anything, or even mentioned as a companion reading piece to the video itself. Periodically, after that, Youtube would suggest other videos to me from him, and I’d watch them, mainly out of curiosity…and began noticing things.

Like how his entire video about queer coding in Hollywood film seemed incredibly familiar–like I’d read it all already in the uncredited The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo, which had already been made into a documentary in 1996…so much so that I bought an e-book of it to see and yes, it was used almost word for word with no attribution. And some of his other videos…were not only offensive but just bald-faced lies, things he’d made up, or okay, let’s be fair–conclusions he drew were from cherry-picked facts and broad speculations made from those facts; it seemed, in his video on gay body image issues, that he took the old 1990’s term for gym and body culture (the “you have to be a ripped muscle god to have any sexual currency”), which was “body fascism”, and somehow extrapolated from there the bizarre notion that Nazis created body culture and American GI’s brought it back from Europe after the war…and even weirder, somehow we didn’t get it from the Soviets because they were so “bundled up” we couldn’t see their bodies. (Maybe he should have read Michelangelo Signorile’s Life Outside, which explored how body culture morphed into something even bigger after the advent of AIDS because a strong, muscular, defined body was the antithesis of the wasting most people dying from AIDS experienced at the time; fit body= not infected; seriously, dude.) He was also horribly misogynistic at times–he didn’t like lesbians, and he hated straight women, and was also borderline transphobic at times despite trying to champion transpeople? It was all very weird, but I would periodically put on one of his videos that sounded interesting, even as he made claims that didn’t make sense or was simply restating things I’d already read somewhere. I didn’t think much of it, but I was idly curious–the way I often am; periodically I think about influencers and how to write a crime novel around one, and Youtube influencers seemed like the way to go if I were going to do that, and so I always chalked it up to research…and sometimes, the wrong things he said would send me off in search of the actual facts, so it was kind of educational by reminding me of things I’d forgotten about.

Turns out, he plagiarized almost all of his videos, never credited or named sources unless called out for it (he took down the videos about Disney and queer coding and put them back up as “based upon” the books he literally was quoting verbatim); the scandal dropped this week–I only found out yesterday–with two other Youtube influencers making really long videos about the plagiarism and the harmful lies he was spreading, as well as the self-loathing, misogyny, and transphobia. I went down that wormhole yesterday, watching both videos–which were long as the crimes were plentiful–and now his Youtube channel is gone, completely. As I said, I didn’t put a lot of thought into it–but he had a Patreon, and his Youtube channel was monetized, which meant he was profiting from the work of other queer creators that he was plagiarizing and stealing, then playing victim when caught…until he was literally destroyed by these other two Youtubers this week. He was apparently making a shit ton of money–and you know, there’s the plot for an influencer crime novel.

It was very eye-opening.

But it extrapolates further to what I’ve been thinking about since starting to watch Fellow Travelers–dark and sad and depressing as these stories are, they are important because our history is always erased; how are queer kids supposed to feel pride and understand where we’ve come from and what we’ve fought for, if they never hear about it, can’t find it, and are never told? The kids I work with (with an age range from early thirties to early twenties) don’t remember how horrible HIV/AIDS was because they hadn’t been born yet or weren’t old enough to really pay attention before the cocktail and the new meds changed it from a fatal disease to a chronic one (with treatment). There’s SO MUCH bad information out there about sexually transmitted infections, and so little education, that it frightens me on an almost daily basis as I work with my clients.

Obviously, this is what I’ve been wrestling with lately, with myself and my own artistic work (yes, I am starting to think of myself as an artist, which I should have done all along); what responsibility do we have to the younger people who don’t know our history, the history I lived through? It’s part of the reason I started writing “Never Kiss a Stranger”, and set it in 1994; I wanted to show what gay life in New Orleans was like during the time when HIV/AIDS was still a death sentence, and the city was also crumbling and dying itself before the wave of renewal and gentrification that started before Katrina and kicked into high gear; who is going to write that story if I don’t?

And what responsibility do I have to current and future generations of queer people as an artist? Do I have any? Or is my only responsibility as an artist to myself?

Something to think about, at any rate.

And on that somber note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Sunday, Constant Reader, and I’ll probably be back later; I can never stay away for long.

  1. Uh, I guess he never saw the Disney documentary about Howard Ashman, who was partly responsible for the Disney animation renaissance and who died of AIDS before the release of the last film he completed, Beauty and the Beast; to date the only animated film to be Oscar nominated for Best Picture, and won three other Oscars, including two for Ashman? ↩︎

Looking Good, Feeling Gorgeous

As I was saying in my other blatant self-promotional post of today (for Mississippi River Mischief) I rather jokingly mentioned that perhaps my childhood fandom of celebrities like Cher, Bette Midler, Liza Minnelli, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck was an early sign of my destiny as a gay man; and yes, I know that’s a stereotype but as I always say, “stereotypes have to start somewhere“–there’s occasionally some kernel of truth in a gay stereotype. (Example: Jack on Will & Grace got some grief for being a stereotype–but I’ve known any number of gay men who were very similar to Jack; imagine being told you’re a stereotype.)

RuPaul’s genius idea to kind of create a Project Runway and American Idol hybrid reality show started out very slow–it was on Logo, I believe, and the budget was incredibly bare bones that first season or two or three; part of the fun of the show was how much it looked like a cable-access do-it-yourself reality show. And as usual with any art form created by gay men, it was popular with gay men and straight women; the show slowly started building an audience and then WHAM! One day it seemed like drag had taken over the world.

Katya from RuPaul’s Drag Race, whom I find hilarious–and beautiful.

Paul and I lost interest in the show after the Bianca-Courtney-Adore season, because that season was so good we both felt that anything after that would be anti-climactic. I know there have been other good seasons and incredibly fierce queens since then, but we came back for All Stars Season 2 (when I became a fan of Katya, actually) and were bitterly disappointed at how scripted, staged, and unfair the entire season was to everyone who wasn’t Alaska, Detox, or Roxxy. And just like with Project Runway, once we saw a season that was clearly predetermined from the start, we stopped watching.

I have zero interest in watching a “competition” with a predetermined winner, which is kind of why I don’t watch WWE much anymore. (it’s also very cartoonish, but that’s a subject for another time.)

I know there are cisgender women who have issues with drag, and I know there are transwomen who do as well; I think the transwomen’s issues primarily have to do with the conflation between the two–which was clearly prescient, given the rise of the raw sewage known as LibsofTikTok and “Moms4Liberty” (how’d that election go for you on Tuesday, you miserable soulless contemptible bigoted shrews? CRY MORE BITCHES, your tears are like Mimosas to us gays), who see no difference (because the harpies are as ignorant and uneducated as they are bitter, soulless, and unChristian). I’ve never seen a lot of criticism for drag from the straight cisgender women as a general rule, but I know there are concerns and critiques from the feminist community, which I do not dismiss or take lightly.

But since the primary straight cisgender woman who used to scream at me about the “misogyny of drag” also has turned out to be a sociopathic TERF who is dead to me (shocker, I know; a feminist who hates drag is a bigoted disgusting piece of shit TERF? Who could have seen that coming?), I don’t necessarily take those feminist critiques as seriously as I used to. If your feminism is about cisgender white women only, go fuck yourself. (This is the same woman who claimed to be a gay ally because she loved going to gay bars where gay men made much of her…the irony that it was primarily because she acted like an over-the-top drag queen completely escaped her–but then, drag queens competed with her for attention in gay bars, and I’ve also come to recognize that the poor bitch is so fucking thirsty for attention that she probably needs intense therapy for at least a decade.)

I’ve always seen drag as a critique of the societal notions of what a woman is supposed to be; drag is that expectation taken over the top to the nth degree. This is why they have the exaggerated everything–from wigs to shoes to gowns to make-up to hip padding and fake boobs. (I also think that the reason drag kings never attained the same level of popularity and mainstreaming as the queens is because it’s harder to over-exaggerate masculinity; it’s not as easy to create the illusion of a thickly muscled body, a super-deep baritone voice, and thick body hair–and besides, who wants to watch women performing toxic masculinity? And as a general rule, men don’t wear make-up when they are cosplaying masculinity.) They’re also loud, funny, and crude–all the things women aren’t supposed to be in proper society–and when they are hyper-sexualized, it’s to make a point about the hyper-sexualizing of women by the dominant culture. Women aren’t supposed to have control of their bodies and sexuality; they aren’t supposed to be crude and crass and vulgar. They aren’t parodying women; they are parodying the cultural expectations (that still exist) for women by over-exaggerating everything and reflecting back to the overall societal culture about how we limit and control women.

I tried explaining this several times to my former friend, but she was also sociopathic in her narcissistic belief that she was never wrong. She was exhausting, frankly, and when I cut her out of my life like the cancerous tumor she was, it was amazing how much better I felt knowing I would never see any of her ignorant bigotry anywhere on my social media ever again, and sorry–you come for transpeople, you’re coming for all of us.

Keep your conditional allyship, bitch.

It’s called intersectionality, use the Google.

And yes, there are misogynistic gay men and drag queens. Some of the common language of drag is misogynist; “fishy” and so forth are questionable–but again, it plays into that critique of societal feminine archetypes; women would never talk about themselves that way and would be furious if a straight man did; so why is it okay for gay men and drag queens to do so? It’s not really; but if you’re going to come for drag with honest concerns about misogynist anti-woman language, that’s one thing; when you come for the entire community because of it, fuck you with a cheese grater.

So, part of the reason I wrote Death Drop was for the same reasons I write y/a about rape culture and homophobia and racism; to put a human face on an issue that might help the reader develop more empathy about the subject than they may have felt before reading my book. Death Drop is not going to convince drag-haters or TERFs that their beliefs and values are trash and they need to rethink and reevaluate; but maybe, just maybe, someone who doesn’t know much about the subject and the issues around it might learn something.

That may be hubris, but you can’t be a writer without some level of hubris in your personality.

So, feel free to click on this link and order several copies! They make great gifts for homophobes, and Christmas is coming!

Sexy Drag Queen

Today’s blatant self-promotion for Death Drop image is of one of my favorites from the world of Drag Race–Manila Luzon. I fell in love with her during her initial run on the show, and wanted her to win. (She didn’t, alas, but I also like Raja, who did win that season.)

When I was a personal trainer, I always asked new clients what their fitness goals were. Straight women inevitably wanted to lose an average of ten pounds or so; gay men always wanted to look like underwear models or Olympic athletes; and lesbians generally just wanted to be healthier. I tried to educate the women on the fallacy and dangers of “dieting”, and that the best thing to do was restructure and rethink how and what they ate and when. I used to always tell the gays, “can you afford a personal chef and nutritionist, and can you exercise three to four hours a day every day? Because they don’t look like their photos most of the time…they usually maintain their bodies regularly but go on ridiculously limited diets that aren’t healthy and also dehydrate themselves to look more cut for pictures. And it’s also their full time job to look like that. Now, let’s realistically talk about a plan that can make your body fit and toned in a healthy way that will be easier to maintain.”

Jem, my main character in Death Drop, is a professional hair stylist and make-up artist, and also has a good eye for fashion. His job is to make women, as he says, feel beautiful and confident, and as a gay man, he also can see the endless pressures from every direction that are put on women. Part of his issue with Marigny Mercereau, whose fashion show he is hired to work in the book, is that he hates the clothes she designs because the silhouettes are unattractive and they don’t flatter women’s bodies. Add to that the fact that the last time he worked for her, her check bounced, and yeah, she isn’t one of his favorite people. But so much is going on that night of the fashion show that Marigny’s clothes–and his dislike of her–aren’t in the forefront of his mind.

I mean, he does have to do drag for the first time that night–in front of a bunch of wealthy or upper middle class women he would love to have as glam clients. And Jem has stage fright.

That is one of the keys for me with Jem and the whole drag thing: he has stage fright, like I do. I’ve never really written about that much in my fiction–I know I’ve talked about it on here ad nauseum ad infinitum–but despite mining almost every experience I’ve ever had in my life into my fiction at some point, it’s kind of odd that I’ve never written about stage fright. I have it, bad. I am sure it’s a symptom of my anxiety–as everything is–but I have it, and I’ve always had it bad. When I was in plays in high school, it was torture. I liked being in the plays–I used to dream, as a kid, of being in show business, and yes, practiced award acceptance speeches in the mirror while clutching a shampoo bottle–but the actual performances? Absolutely not. I generally shake so much when on panels that I usually try not to use my hands when I talk–which I always do–because I don’t want anyone to see that I’m literally trembling in terror; I am also usually sweating a lot and my heart is racing and there’s a massive adrenaline rush…panels aren’t as bad as moderating one is; but now that I know it’s anxiety I try to handle it. Before I moderated that panel at Bouchercon this past year, I walked around a lot before the panel to burn off the adrenaline and try to get my heart rate down to something passing as normal. Also knowing it was based in anxiety gave me a handle on it; when I know what is going on I can try to cope with it better than what I did before–which was just grit my teeth and get through it.

Jem didn’t have stage fright while walking in the fashion show–and he also knew it was because of the lighting and it being after dark, he couldn’t really see the people in the audience. He knew they were there, but as long as he couldn’t see them it didn’t phase him. His fears of performing, of getting on stage, is going to be something he is going to have to work on in future books–of which I am hoping there will be at least three, if not more. He probably won’t have to deal with it in the second book either–because while he has graduated from drag school and performed in the graduation show, that was for friends and family and not the general public–because the second book takes place at a national drag pageant…which is being protested by a hideous hate group called Moms4Freedom…which I am having a lot of fun with, rest assured.

And on that note, I will bring this to a close–there will be more blatant self-promotion to come!

Lady Marmalade

He met Marmalade down in old New Or-leenz, strutting her stuff on the street, she said “hello, hey Joe, you want to give it a go?“

That classic song by Labelle came out while I was in high school, during the early to mid-1970’s, and there was a lot of prurient young teenager thrill in knowing that the French lyrics translated to “do you wanna have sex with me tonight?” But the song–essentially about a hooker in New Orleans and a man’s experience with her–was an introduction to another side of New Orleans–one you wouldn’t find in the World Book Encyclopedia.

It was very important to me, for a variety of reasons, to make Scotty someone who embraced his sexual orientation and sexuality. I wanted to write someone who LOVED having sex, loved beautiful men, and felt no Puritan-American based shame about enjoying sex. Those kinds of characters were few and far between in gay fiction, let alone in gay crime fiction. After writing the typical miserable cynical bitter gay man with Chanse, I didn’t want to do that again. I wanted Scotty was to be the obverse of Chanse in everything, except their mutual love of New Orleans.

(This was, in part, in response to being briefly dropped by Alyson when I signed the Scotty series with Kensington, being told “two mystery series set in New Orleans would be too alike.” I took that personally, as an insult to my talent, ambition, creativity, and abilities…and I think I proved my point. Once Murder in the Rue Dauphine and Bourbon Street Blues were released–and Rue Dauphine sold super well for them and was nominated for a Lammy–Alyson changed their minds. I’m still mad at myself for not asking for more money.)

But while Scotty was highly sexually active, he never got paid for it. He also never did porn–although I did consider that at one point as an option; I thought a murder mystery built around a porn shoot would be interesting and kind of fun. And of course, in this book he mentions that he and the guys have recorded themselves having sex, and have sexted each other.

Scotty always preferred to keep his status amateur–but he was a go-go boy (stripper, exotic dancer, dick dancer, whatever you prefer to call the guys who dance for dollars in gay bars wearing various kinds of male undergarments), and he was certainly someone who was not averse to having a sexual encounter with a handsome stranger. (There’s a joke about this in Mississippi River Mischief where Frank comments after they’ve met someone, “I’ve been with you for almost twenty years. If you think I can’t tell by now that you’ve recognized someone but you’re not sure from where, which means you’ve probably slept with them, think again”–a paraphrase, but you get the gist; Scotty is often running into men who look vaguely familiar, and that usually does mean he slept with them a long time ago.)

New Orleans, despite it’s rather prim-and-proper high society set (on the surface, anyway), with the Pickwick Club and the Boston Club and the mysterious Mystick Krewes of Rex and Comus and so on, has always been a city of loose morals and freewheeling attitudes towards sex and sexuality. We had a zone where prostitution was legal for three decades or so (Storyville) and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were several bordellos operating within the city limits as we speak. There was the arrest of the Canal Street madam; and of course local author Chris Wiltz wrote The Last Madam, a biography of notorious Norma Wallace–the last well-known madam in the city. (Which I need to reread…) Bourbon Street was known for its strippers and vice for decades; there are still strip clubs on the infamous strip running from Canal downtown to Esplanade–and there are usually men in bikinis or something equally scanty on the bars of the gay clubs down down around the St. Ann/Bourbon queer nexus of the Quarter. When I was starting my deep dive into New Orleans/Quarter history, I wasn’t surprised to find out there were “stag” bars down along the riverfront along the levee; and if someone at one of the fancy houses in Storyville had a predilection for the Greek vice that needed scratching, the madam would send one of her bouncers down there to find someone willing to turn a trick, with a fair share going to the house, of course.

I think that’s fascinating, really; and something I want to explore in a story. I’ve started the story (it’s “The Blues Before Dawn” which I’ve mentioned from time to time) but can’t quite nail down the crime part of it. The set-up is great, though, he typed modestly.

I didn’t intend for Scotty to wind up in what is now known as a throuple–a three way couple, or a relationship of three people–on purpose. I wanted to create the dynamic of two men being interested in him at the same time, and have some fun with that in the first book. I absolutely did, and when I sent Colin away at the end of the first one, that was deliberate. I couldn’t decide who Scotty should wind up with, and I wanted Frank to be really who he logically should end up with–but this bad boy with a mysterious background who was so hot and sexy? I couldn’t NOT bring him back, and so I decided I had three books to wrap up the romantic dilemma. I wasn’t certain what the backstory of the dilemma would be, or how it would turn out, or how it would go–but when I was writing Jackson Square Jazz I found the perfect place and perfect way to bring Colin back. That book ended with them deciding to try a throuple to see how it works out. It was going pretty well until Mardi Gras Mambo–and I tried really hard with that book to not end the romantic story the way it ended in that book…and finally decided, since the series was actually turning out to be popular, that I would finish it by the end of the fourth book.

I’ve also not talked about it in the books or on this blog at all, but….they also have an open relationship. (Someone asked me about this at some point after the last book came out.) Nothing else would work for Scotty–he may not take advantage of the opportunities that pop up now the way he used to, but that’s because he has the freedom to make that choice. If he was forbidden from outside sexual relationships, he would cheat–and he doesn’t want to do that because that’s hurtful and wrong. He never wants to hurt Frank or Colin–but both of them are also away from New Orleans for long periods of time; Colin off doing his international agent stuff, while Frank is on the wrestling tour doing shows and promo events; so they are on their own a lot and temptation is always there–after all, all three of them are gorgeous–so while it is unspoken on the page, it’s an open throuple. And usually, Scotty finds outside sex to be kind of dull, unemotional, and not nearly as much fun as it is with one or both of the guys. That’s a character development arc. I also don’t show Scotty going out to clubs or waking up with hangovers with a stranger in his bed anymore, either. He does still go out–he loves dancing–but the gay bar scene has changed since he was younger and he doesn’t find it to be nearly as much fun as he used to.

Though he won’t say no to a hit of Ecstasy during Carnival or Decadence.

How subtle are the changes in Scotty as he has grown, aged and evolved? I think they are miniscule, but a revisit of the first two books in the series has shown a lot of change and growth over the years for him. He is definitely not that same flighty twenty-nine year old who booked a gig dancing at Southern Decadence all those years ago to make rent and wound up kidnapped by neo-Nazis deep in a swamp–I think he’s a little less flighty and a lot more responsible than he used to be…though he’s not as responsible as most people his age. Turning him into a property owner in the Quarter from a renter–and letting Millie and Velma ride off into the sunset in Florida as retirees–has also made him grow up, as now taking care of the property is his responsibility.

I will always be fond of my Scotty, though, and hope to keep writing him till I can no longer type into a computer or speak into a word-to-text app.

my neighborhood is so beautiful at night, isn’t it?

It’s Raining Again

Wednesday and it’s Pay-the-Bills Day again, hurray.

Last night’s sleep wasn’t as good as previous nights, but I do feel awake and rested this morning so that’s a good thing. I am also incredibly excited about my wagon, which i know is weird. I had a straight male co-worker look at it*, and sure enough, he was able to get the wheels attached properly. I stopped on my way home from the office to get the mail and thought, hey I had packages and my hands will be full, so let me use the wagon and it was marvelous. Clearly, I should have bought a wagon a long time ago–and it’s the right size to fit along the narrow walkway alongside the house. It’s actually going to make life so much easier for me now it’s almost scary, and it makes the most sense to actually keep it in the car–it’s out of the way, will always be there when I need it, and if I need it for anything else, well, the car is parked usually out in front of the house so it would be easy to get to. I am most pleased with the wagon, I have to say.

I’m also trying–not always successfully–to stay in control over my anxiety. I have all my pre-surgery appointments on Monday, so that’s when I am going to find out what the recovery is going to look like. I am taking unpaid leave from work (I don’t have near enough sick or vacation time to cover the time I need to be out, so here we are) which is going to be an issue I will deal with when it rolls around; but I do have the process started and I can get the documentation I need for Admin from those visits and turn everything in the following day when I go back to the office.

I wasn’t tired when I got home yesterday, but Tug was feeling lonely and needy, so I had to go give him a lap to sleep in for a while, and after watching another episode of Moonlighting and a documentary about Greek fire and the Byzantine Imperial Navy, I’d lost all motivation and was feeling tired and sleepy. I did nothing for the rest of the evening–nothing. I did go to bed around nine-thirty, and of course woke up just before five again this morning, but I think the body is beginning to adjust somewhat to the time change.

I got an unexpected royalty check (small, but I’ll take it gladly) in the mail yesterday along with my copy of David Valdes’ new Finding My Elf, which looks absolutely adorable, and I can’t wait to give it a read after the surgery. I am two books behind on my Donna Andrews reading, I need to read the new Lou Berney and Angie Kim novels, and there are any number of others I want to get to. I am assuming after the drugged haze of painkillers and so forth dies down afterwards, I’ll have lots of down time to read. I am going to have a rigid cast to keep the arm immobile for at least three weeks, and I am assuming that means limited options for doing things other than reading. I imagine typing one-handed is going to be incredibly frustrating, but it can be done. And during the drug fogs of those early post-surgery days, I can just reread things–like histories or true crime favorites or some Stephen King favorites (it’s been a hot minute since I reread Firestarter, for one, and ‘salem’s Lot and The Stand are always fun to revisit), or some of the other great favorites lying around the house.

I was also very happy to see that Ohio added abortion rights protections to the state Constitution as well as legalizing recreational marijuana–well done, Ohio!–and that Kentucky reelected their Democratic governor. There were some right-wing wins, but the great Blue Wave momentum from 2020 has continued, as well as the reaction to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe–congratulations, Federalist Society, your hand-picked Supreme Court majority has effectively destroyed the conservative movement’s electability for a generation. The Democrats needs to hit hard on abortion and the illegitimate Supreme Court–Mitch McConnell’s legacy, by the way, have fun being hated for the rest of American history, douchebag–going forward, and frankly, they need to put Howard Dean–who engineered the historic gains of the 2008 election cycle–back in fucking charge of the DNC.

I always said that abortion rights should be put on the ballot. This is the wedge issue that trumps (couldn’t resist) the Right’s religious zealotry and transphobia and racism.

But of course, they won’t learn the lesson that they’re unpopular and so are their policies and values–they’ll just see this in a paternal way: “clearly the voting public can’t be trusted, so we need to install authoritarianism for their own good.“

Yes, this is the same party that thinks they’ve successfully branded themselves as “true American patriots.” Fucking garbage is what they are.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back to check on you with more blatant self-promotion later.

*ah, stereotypes. Alas, we have a lack of butch lesbians in the department now, so had to make do with a straight guy. C’est la vie.