Research is always important for a writer, always.
I will generally spend years doing research for books before I start writing them; my scattershot approach to research usually goes something like hey this sounds interesting I should look it up which then takes me down wormholes and I’ll become obsessed with something, I’ll come up with a story idea that I can use the research for, and then it may sit in the files for years, occasionally striking my fancy sometime when I come across something else that might fit in with that, and so on. A lot of my research never makes it onto the pages of my books, either–I could have written chapters on glass-making and the Murano style of Venetian glass in The Orion Mask, but finally decided that, while I thought it was all interesting–Phyllis A. Whitney used to use her books to educate her readers about the area she was writing about, which I loved–but it definitely bogged down the story because there was no way I could figure out to tie the glassmaking to the modern day story.
That was very disappointing, I don’t mind saying.
Likewise, I didn’t have as much time to research drag the way I should have before I started writing Death Drop. Ordinarily, I would have wanted to actually talk to the local who runs the drag school; I would have talked to any number of queens about performing, how they got into it in the first place; and there are so many aspects of drag culture and so many levels and layers to it that it was impossible for me to get the research done and write the book at the same time. Ideally, I would have liked to have actually paid someone–preferably my former supervisor, who went to the drag school and now works full-time in drag as Debbie with a D (check out her Instagram, seriously)–to do the full drag on me–wig, make-up, pads, dress and shoes. (I kind of still need to do this, so I know how it feels; I relied on memories of high school plays for the make-up and wearing a Minuteman costume with real buckled and heeled shoes for walking in heels; I didn’t care for that one bit and have nothing but the deepest sympathies for women or anyone who has to wear any kind of heel on a daily basis. I can still feel how sore my calves were the next day.)
Me with my supervisor’s pageant crown
That was part of the reason I made the book an origin story for Jem and “Joan Crawfish,” the drag name he is christened with at the last minute as he sent down the runway at the Designs by Marigny fashion show. I don’t know drag lingo or slang–outside of whatever I’ve picked up from watching RuPaul‘s Drag Race and having co-workers who do drag and the occasional drag show I’ve caught over the years–and so neither does Jem/Joan. And the second book–set in Florida at the Miss Queer America pageant–will include some of that, as it will have to as he’s already finished the drag school he was considering entering at the end of Death Drop.
It doesn’t hurt that my current supervisor does pageants and was even Miss Gay Mississippi USofA; so I have a good source of information that I see at the office every day, which is….kind of cool, actually.
I do feel pressure to drag it up a bit more in this second book (You Gone, Girl) than I did in the first, but the pageant itself makes for a lot of drama and comedy, and that’s not even taking into consideration all the protests and bomb threats and things and other shenanigans that the evil witches from Moms4Freedom are throwing at the pageant.
And I am going to have some serious fucking fun with those Moms4Freedom bitches, believe you me.
The time change is always so weird to me, really. I always understood it had something to do with kids and not catching the bus in the dark in the mornings or something like that, but if they’re all walking home after school in the dark, how does that make sense? I always appreciate the extra hour, but always resent giving it back (or having it taken away?) in the spring. I kept finding clocks I hadn’t reset in the apartment (after thinking, wow, time has flown–wait a minute), and I did do some things. I did manage to make it to the West Bank, but it was really a wasted trip; Sundays are clearly not the day to do shopping over there as almost every place was out of almost everything. I got my wagon but couldn’t get the wheels to lock in place (I am so not handy) and I also got the wrong size blinds–so I get to go back. Hurray. But I did get some things for lunch this week, and I made ravioli last night for dinner for something different (I even managed to eat some bread softened with red gravy), which was nice. I watched the end of the Saints game–which they tried very hard to lose–and then another episode of Moonlighting. I found a much later and much more revised version of one of the novellas, “Fireflies”–which needs a lot of work, but is a very good idea and the kernel of a terrific novellas is there, if I can stick the landing–and also was put in mind of Chlorine yet again by coming across Matt Baume’s Tab Hunter1 documentary on Youtube (another great job, Matt!)–and I had a germ of an idea for how a part of the plot would work–another piece fell into place, as it were, and so I scribbled it down in my journal (huzzah for journals!) to wait for the day and time I can get back to work on it and give it my full attention.
I realized yesterday–once again astonishing myself with my own obtuseness–that part of what’s going on with me lately–the moodiness, the surliness, the self-destructive inability to get anything done, and the anxiety that comes with all of the above–has everything to do with my coming surgery. The compartmentalization doesn’t always work, you see, when something is creating a lot of anxiety for me. I have very little idea of what to expect and what it’s going to be like–or how restricted I am going to be as far as movement and so forth or for how long. I know I shouldn’t consult Dr. Google, but in lieu of any other information that I can recall, what else is there to do? And Dr. Google was right when I looked up the information on the injury when it was finally correctly diagnosed, after all. So I can look at about three weeks out of the office on medical leave, and then possibly some limited mobility after that. It sounds like if I am going to be able to type at all it will be one-handed, which is limiting, so I am hoping that if I am not drugged out to the gills I can spend time getting caught up on my reading as well as doing a lot of editing work on my own stuff. I am not going to be able to lift or carry things, which is going to make the whole grocery situation interesting for a couple of weeks, but I guess I can have things delivered. Probably the best way to compartmentalize all of the concern and anxiety about the surgery would be to start planning and preparing so I can be as ready as I can, right? It’s been a year, really. I suppose my end of the year round-up blog post on New Year’s Day will be a bit morose and melancholy.
I think one tends to be a bit more morose and melancholy as one gets older.
I also started watching A Haunting in Venice and while it was shot beautifully and had a great cast–it didn’t really hold my interest. The Agatha Christie novel it’s loosely based on–and I do mean loosely–is not one of the more better known ones; Halloween Party was a perfectly adequate Christie novel but it wasn’t anything spectacular. I do remember it, and I do have a hardcover book club edition of it, too. It probably belonged to my grandmother, or else I picked it up at a second hand store or a flea market or somewhere like that. I took a break about halfway through and then went back…and kind of dozed a bit through the second half. It’s a shame; I watched because I had Venice on the brain after rereading “Festival of the Redeemer” Saturday afternoon, and rethinking how to rewrite and revise and improve it. But it was beautifully shot, and made me wish I could live, even if for a brief month or so, in Venice for a while. I did go back and finish it–but I found it disappointing. Beautifully shot, yes, and Venice is always beautiful on film, but such a waste of so much remarkable talent.
I went to bed early–it was a struggle staying up until ten, which felt like eleven, and slept really well. I feel rested enough to actually face the day and potentially be productive–crazy, I know–but I generally feel well rested on Monday; it’s the rest of the week when my ass starts dragging. I also have to keep pushing forward on some things, too–progress must always be made, even when I don’t feel like making progress on anything. (Watching Tug get used to having his nails trimmed and not being able to use thing to climb–me, in particular–has been rather cute, but then again he is world’s most adorable kitten.) I didn’t read very much this weekend, either, more’s the pity; but I am thinking I’ll be doing a lot of reading once the surgery has taken place and I am no longer living on pain medications–maybe I can even read while on painkillers; I know they are going to give me oxycontin or some version or derivative of it, which makes watching all those movies and documentaries and mini-series based on the crimes of the Sackler family against the American public perhaps not as smart as it seemed at the time; I am terrified of becoming addicted to a pain medication–but that’s also an excellent time to wean myself off the Xanax, too.2
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines for the morning. Have a great Monday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back to check in on you again later with undoubtedly more blatant self-promotion.
I actually met Tab Hunter, which is something that amazes me to this very day; I actually met him and his husband several times. How cool is my life, really? ↩︎
While I’ve been taking it to control mood swings all these years, it’s really not something you’re supposed to take on a daily basis but rather as needed; now that I know it’s anxiety I can treat it appropriately. Most of my medications are now wrong, and need to be changed. ↩︎
Drag is a part of queer culture I’ve always known about but has also been something primarily on the periphery of my gay life and world; I’ve only occasionally ever thought about perhaps doing it–as a gag or as a costume at some point; a very dear friend has always wanted to dress me up as Joan Crawford (narrow waist, big shoulders, enormous eyebrows), which is something I would consider doing if it wasn’t so much work–I am way too lazy to ever do drag properly and respectfully. I did a very poor attempt at drag many years ago, for a Showgirls themed birthday party for a friend; the result was far from pretty. I did sometimes used to use mascara and eye liner when I would go out; it emphasized my enormous and expressive eyes which most people have always considered my best feature (although aging has deprived me of my eyelashes). Drag was just another part of the community and culture, like leathermen, bears, and gym queens–another patch on the quilt that makes up our queer world.
My primary interest in drag has always been historical and cultural; drag culture has always been a part of the gay bar scene, since time immemorial, it seems. I have always been interested in every aspect of gay culture since coming to terms with my own sexuality and recognizing that not coming to terms with it meant a lifetime of guaranteed misery, and shouldn’t I really take a chance on being happy? There was always a lot, for me, of misunderstanding about drag culture and its place in the gay community; but that also primarily came from people outside of the community and therefore didn’t have the slightest grasp of it–i.e. ignorant slurs that all gay men dressed like women whenever they had the chance, you know–not “real men.”
But seriously, who wants to buy into the cult of toxic masculinity? No fucking thanks.
I don’t know the history of drag, but I did know–from the very beginning–that there was a significant difference between drag and the trans experience; there’s definitely crossover, but the Venn diagram of drag and trans is not a complete circle. I understood this always, even when I knew very little of either. This was always the issue I had with To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar–the queens in the movie didn’t just do drag for performance or pageants, but dressed as women in their everyday life…which made them transwomen who also did drag. The failure of that film to define the difference between the two, I think and believe, has a lot to do with the current-day conflation by the Right of drag queens with transwomen. Likewise, was the Nathan Lane character from The Birdcage (and the French original) a transwoman or a drag queen?
And the fact that I, knowing as little about gay life and culture as I did in 1994, knew that the Wong Foo movie was conflating two completely different things as the same certainly means that other, better-educated people should have, as well.
But it’s also important to remember that the movie wasn’t made for the queer community–no Hollywood studio film with queer characters is intended for a queer audience, and thus there’s a falseness to them that rings hollow to me (don’t even get me started on Philadelphia); what Sarah Schulman once (paraphrasing) described as “the creation of a fake public homosexuality that will play in Peoria.”
There’s an essay in that, methinks.
The first time I went to a gay bar in Houston is my first true memory of seeing someone in drag performing on the bar in person. She was doing Liza as Sally Bowles from Cabaret, and as I walked in the door with some co-workers from That Airline, the first thing I saw was her up on the bar, with a musclebound dancer on either side of her in bikinis or thongs, and I can remember thinking wow this is decadent like Isherwood’s Berlin–but I liked it. I felt at home there, in a way I never did in gay bars in Fresno (or anywhere else I was able to sneak away and visit one), and felt like that night was when my gay life actually began: I was with co-workers, I was going to a gay bar openly, and the co-workers knew I was gay but had never really experienced being gay as anything but misery and depression and a curse. I don’t remember the name of the queen, but ever since then, “Mein Herr” always brings a nostalgic smile to my face.
But again, I didn’t go out much or do much during those two years in Houston as I still wasn’t completely comfortable being totally out. I moved to Tampa in 1991 and started living as an out gay man…and started spending more time in gay bars. A popular night for airline employees as Tuesday Nights at Tracks, where cocktails were only fifty cents and no cover before ten. There was also a drag show at midnight, with an actual stage in a show room, and that was my first real experience watching drag queens perform. There was a gay paper there–I cannot remember what it was called to save my life; I know the one in Texas was This Week in Texas, called TWIT by everyone–but it often had information about performances and other night life ads and so forth. I began to get a better understanding of drag, its place in the community, and its importance to gay culture, period.
And of course, once I moved to New Orleans, there was Bianca del Rio.
The mainstreaming of drag actually began in the early 1990’s, with RuPaul having a surprise hit record out of nowhere, “Supermodel (You Better Work)”, which started exposing more people to drag who ordinarily would have never seen one. RuPaul was everywhere in the early 1990’s, and even had her own talk show on MTV for a while. The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert and its homogenized American version To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar were both incredibly popular. (I enjoyed Priscilla, and I’ve already touched on my issues with Julie Newmar–which will probably become an essay at another time.)
There were, of course, other successful queens out there before RuPaul’s big breakthrough and later, comeback with Drag Race, but few had as large a profile in the culture as RuPaul. Lady Bunny, Miss Coco Peru, Miss Richfield 1998, and Varla Jean Merman were all making a pretty decent living as performers before the drag explosion that followed the launch of Drag Race.
I’ve met numerous drag queens on the local scene both in and out of drag–I’ve always been fond of Princess Stephaney and Blanche Debris (who is retired now), and the drag community of New Orleans was always incredibly supportive of the NO/AIDS Task Force. I met Bianca out of drag a couple of times, but I doubt he remembers me…but Drag Bingo at Oz on Sundays with Bianca and Blanche (I just realized their first names both translate into English as white) was always a blast–and I made a point of never trying to get Bianca’s attention because she was always quick and that tongue was sharp as a scalpel always.
I also work with several co-workers who either did drag or have started doing it while I’ve known them, which indirectly helped me with the writing of Death Drop and my original story for a drag queen. Jem is sort of patterned in some ways on one of my former co-workers who actually went to a drag school here in New Orleans–and eventually quit his full-time job to do drag full-time. He’s been in Queer as Folk and numerous other shows filmed here, and has been booking gigs all over the country–check out his Instagram, isn’t he fucking gorgeous? So that gave me the idea to make the first book with Jem his drag origin story.
Learning about drag to write this book–and its sequel–has been an enjoyable learning experience for me. At some point I know I am going to have to do a transformation; I need to know how it feels to have the make-up and the padding and the wig and the dress and shoes on. I can imagine it all from doing theater in high school, but it’s not the same.
And yes, I will share the pictures when and if it does happen.
When I was a kid, I lived for the Scholastic Book Fairs. There were always more books I wanted than I can afford (still a problem for me with books to this very day), and it was through them that I discovered my love for mysteries as well as deepened my love of history. I bought anything that was history or mystery; very rarely did a book combine both.
This is part of the reason I was so appalled and disgusted by Scholastic’s cowardly abandonment of its commitment to education and diversity by giving book fairs the options to opt out of carrying books–you know, the ones that teach kids empathy for people who are different from them or show kids that they aren’t alone or books they can see themselves in–because they might upset some bigoted parents in Brotherfuck, Arkansas or Sisterfuck, Tennessee.
When I think about what a difference a book like Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden or Trying Hard to Hear You by Sandra Scoppetone or Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez would have made for young Gregalicious, this Scholastic decision makes me shake with rage. (I have pointed out any number of times that Scholastic also publishes the Bitch-Queen of TERFs, so their cowardice is really no surprise. Can’t piss off their massive cash cow, now can they?)
I was thinking about this as I read Angel Luis Colón’s book, Infested, because it would probably be one of the books shoved into that Diverse Books To Not Be Included box Scholastic uses to warn schools about “subversive” and “dangerous” books. The book, by the way, is not only is superb but something any kid who enjoys horror would love.
However, it centers a main character who is a teenager of Puerto Rican descent, and while it never disparages white people…it doesn’t center them, so I can easily some Daughter of the Confederacy getting her panties into a nasty twist over her precious child reading something that doesn’t uphold White Supremacy. How dare young Hispanic readers have an option to read about a Hispanic teenager’s hero’s journey?
The NERVE of MTV Fear to publish such a book!
I can’t remember a time I hated my mother and my stepfather more than the summer before my senior year.
And it wasn’t the normal kind of Oh man, these people don’t understand me bad Disney movie kind of throwback hate. This was mortal-enemy-level hate. It was deep and pitch-black and enough to make me nearly consider getting into death metal.
While I knew I’d change my mind as the emotions scarred over, the laundry list of offenses was too much to bear.
Let me start by saying how much I really enjoyed this book. The main character, Manny, is very realistic and both relatable and likable. The pacing is excellent, and it builds beautifully to its thrilling climax and resolution. The stakes are high but grounded in reality, and the authorial voice is so strong and memorable that I was sorry to finish and bid Manny and his friends and family farewell.
I was also a little amused because the original opening line of Bury Me in Shadows–back when it was called Ruins still–was My mother ruined my life the summer before my senior year.
Obviously, that changed–a lot changed as Ruins morphed into Bury Me in Shadows–but great minds, right? I’ve admired Angel’s work for a very long time–I really need to go back and finish his backlist–and so was excited to see what he could do with a young adult horror thriller.
Great things, it turns out.
The story focuses on the first person perspective of Manny, a seventeen-year-old with a baby half-sister whose stepfather has taken a job in the Bronx managing an apartment building that’s about to open. Manny doesn’t want to leave San Antonio, but it’s more resentment that he wasn’t consulted (no one wants to change schools before their senior year; I can relate because I changed high schools after my sophomore year) rather than anything else. He doesn’t really have a lot of friends back there, but it was home and familiar to him. He also struggles with identity issues; he’s Puerto Rican, but a blanquito–someone who is Hispanic but white (which could lead into all kinds of sidebar conversation which would be inappropriate for now)–and he doesn’t really speak much Spanish anymore; he did when younger but is losing it as he gets older, which is also concerning to him. He’s angry about the move–they didn’t discuss anything with him, just told him it was happening, and he really didn’t want to leave San Antonio–but once he’s in the Bronx, he begins to see that it’s really not a bad thing to have moved there. There’s a variety of Hispanic/Latinx cultures there he can learn about, and he likes that. There’s also other issues touched on here–gentrification being a major one, and as there are no easy answers to that question in real life, one isn’t provided here but both sides of the issue are addressed and Manny sees the good and bad in both.
But the building has a roach problem–and it’s not just your usual roach problem, either. Something very strange is going on in that building, and Manny isn’t entirely sure if these things are really happening, or if he is losing his mind. If you’re like me and hate insects of all shapes, sizes and varieties, your skin will crawl repeatedly throughout this book. It’s up to Manny and his new friend Sasha to figure out the truth about what is really going on in the building, and as I said, it’s terrific and fast-paced and very hard to stop reading once the story starts going great guns.
Highly recommended–unless you’re truly squeamish and triggered by insects. Colón made my skin crawl–no small feat!
Sunday morning and it’s below sixty today in New Orleans, which is fine. I slept super-well last night, which was great, and feel pretty rested this morning. I have a lot of things to do today before I meet my friend Ellen at San Lorenzo (the restaurant in the Hotel St. Vincent, which used to be an orphanage and then a very inexpensive hostel in the Lower Garden District for a very long time but has been gentrified into a lovely boutique hotel with a café, fancy restaurant, and poolside bar) for dinner. And having left the house yesterday for a wedding last night…that’s two nights on a weekend where I’ve left the house. Peculiar, isn’t it?
Yesterday was a very good day. I woke up feeling rested, did some chores, finished reading Angel Luis Colón’s Infested, which I really enjoyed (more on that later) and then did a reread of Daphne du Maurier’s marvelous long story “Don’t Look Now” (more on that later) before watching some football games before it was time to summon my Lyft and head over the bridge to the wedding. Today I am going to start a reread of The Dead Zone–which might not be as thorough as it could be–and I need to get to work on some things. There are also some chores I never got around to yesterday that need to be addressed this morning and I really should write today since I didn’t anything yet this weekend. I worked on “The Blues Before Dawn” a bit on Friday after finishing my work-at-home chores; I’d like to work some more on that today. I also should work on the mess in the laundry room and should finish the organizing and filing, etc. I haven’t ever finished reorganizing the files at all; and I really need to get back on top of that. I need to finish the dishes and run the dishwasher too; and I am going to make potato leek soup in the slow cooker today–I can’t believe it’s never crossed my mind with this soft food diet to make a batch of that soup. It’s incredibly filling, for one thing; usually one bowl is all it takes, and it will last for a week at least. Same with my white bean chicken chili–all soft, will last a long time, and it’s both filling and delicious. Obviously, I didn’t think this soft food diet through beyond “oh, no burgers or pizza.”
The wedding was lovely. One of my co-workers (whom I absolutely adore) married his partner in their backyard on the West Bank last evening, which was marvelous. It was nice seeing my co-workers outside of work in their fancy clothes (they all looked fantastic) plus it was nice to spend time with them outside of the work environment. I had some nice conversations, and I realized that I’ve kind of isolated myself from them because of my age; I feel the age difference far more than they actually notice it. I do like them all, and find them all very interesting; it’s my loss more so than theirs. Anyway, it’s something to think about going forward anyway. I am glad I went for any number of reasons–I will only attend same-sex weddings pretty much now, as they are an act of defiance now more so than ever–but not the least of which is spending more time with my co-workers, or as I like to always call them, “the kids at work.”
Football was interesting yesterday; I’ve not really looked at the results from yesterday much. LSU was ahead of Army 14-0 when I got into my Lyft and checked my phone; by the time I got home it was 28-0 and still the first half. It wasn’t much fun–I only enjoy LSU games where they score 62 points if they are playing an SEC opponent–and so I didn’t feel guilty for switching over to Auburn-Mississippi (Auburn ended up losing), or for watching Skate America once Paul came back downstairs (he got bored with the game as well). Checking the scores and results, it looks like this could be another chaotic year like 2007–which will make the play-off decisions interesting once the season concludes. LSU can still win the West with a win over Alabama if Mississippi stumbles again–they have to play at Georgia, so chances are good that will happen–and winning out. I also realized this is the fourth year of LSU’s championship cycles: they won in 2003, 2007, and 2019; played for it and lost in 2011, with 2015 being the only four year cycle that didn’t end in them playing for the national title. Perhaps this will be the second time that cycle is broken.
Twitter continues its slow death spiral, and I am checking it less and less these days, and staying there very briefly. I do have some friends still there that I like to interact with, but of course the others are slowly becoming what Twitter became as well. Yesterday a straight white man came barging onto a thread of George Takei on Threads, in which George was talking about how difficult it is for queer people–for any minority–to deal with elections, when our rights hang in the balance every fucking time, and how sometimes as a queer person or a person of color, you have to grit your teeth and vote for the Democrat because no matter what or who, the Republican option isn’t an option for queer people or people of color—unless we really hate ourselves to the point that we hate other people like us, or only care about our money rather than our rights. The example George was using was campaigning and voting for Bill Clinton after he signed both DADT and DOMA into law during his first time despite his avowed belief in the rights and dignity of queer people in 1992 on the campaign trail. Fox News and the right used his support of queer rights–along with a ridiculous scandal with no evidence of wrong-doing by either Clinton (remember Whitewater? I sure the fuck do)–to take back the House in 1994 and handicap any attempts at being progressive. I also remember Bill Clinton trying to get a form of the Affordable Care Act passed–the right also used that battlecry of “socialism” to scare people into giving them that House majority with Newt Gingrich as speaker (I remember it all too well). The reason I remember this all too well is because HIV/AIDS was still killing people and there was no cure as of yet; a positive test meant a very good chance of death relatively soon. I fucking lived through the 80s and the 90s, thank you very much.
I also remember that Bill Clinton was the first presidential candidate to mention HIV/AIDS, and to notice that queer people actually exist–so you can fucking miss me with the Hillary hate, thank you.
Anyway “straight white man” (hereafter referred to a Mr. Mediocre) barged into George’s thread to lecture him about compromise voting and how if we would all just really get behind true progressives, change would be that much easier and how he could just never ever bring himself to the point where he could vote for someone who ever voted for a war.1 That told me everything I needed to know about Mr. Mediocre–the “ally” who couldn’t bring himself to vote for Hillary in 2016 because she voted for the war, believing the lies the Bush Administration and his fully supportive Congress were pushing on us all, calling those of us who didn’t want the war cowards and/or traitors, questioning our very patriotism. Blaming Hillary for believing the lie so you threw your vote away in 2016 so you could remain “pure” fucked over your so-called “allies,” you miserable piece of shit. And instead of ignoring and blocking, which is what I usually did, the audacity of Mr. Mediocre lecturing George fucking Takei, a gay Japanese-American who grew up in an American concentration camp for American citizens of Japanese descent on purity politics just didn’t go down with me, so I replied, Oh, look, another straight white man who will be okay no matter who is in power lecturing those whose rights are on the line with every election about his purity. Don’t hurt yourself patting yourself on the back while you screw over minorities over some purity test that we don’t have the privilege of applying to our votes.“Allies” like you gave us Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. Thanks for that, by the way.
If you think Mr. Mediocre would let that go, let me introduce you to The Progressive Straight White Man. They can never let that shit go. You know he read my response and climbed back up on his High Horse–how dare a gay man call him out and speak to him that way! He told me “You should want better, but I’ll still keep working for women and minorities.2“
I replied, I do want better but am realistic as a minority in this country to know that no matter what I have to vote for the least damaging candidate because my rights are actually on the line with every election, so don’t condescend to me about your purity tests and progressive bonafides when a real ally will show up, hold his nose and vote for the Democrat. We warned you the Supreme Court was at risk, but her emails! That pesky vote for the war! So forgive us for not applauding you for your purity. Now the Supreme Court is poised to take us back to 1860 but hey, at least you can sleep at night for not voting for the warmonger.
Asshole. After all, Dobbs didn’t affect him–and when his daughter is forced to carry her rapist’s baby, I hope he remembers that purity vote in 2016 with pride.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. I need to eat something and make another cup of coffee and get the potato leek soup started, no easy chore. Plus I want to write up what I read yesterday and the impressions they left with me. Have a great Sunday, COn
which means he wouldn’t have voted for the two most progressive presidents we’ve ever had, I might add; FDR declared war, and LBJ voted for it, as well as intervention in Korea. Some progressive this dude is, right? ↩︎
Love that pathetic attempt at progressive shaming, which again tells me everything I need to know about his politics–if he doesn’t get the perfect candidate that aligns with everything he believes (a pipe dream that will never happen), he won’t vote for them no matter what that means for women and minorities. Some ally. ↩︎
Wednesday morning pay-the-bills day blog, and how are y’all this morning?
Yesterday was ever so much better than Monday (low bar) but I slept really well Monday night and felt very rested and centered yesterday as I went to work. Hilariously, as I walked out to the car in my Prevention T-shirt, I felt a bit chilly. When I got into the car it felt downright cold, and once I started the car the a/c started blowing and YIKES! So I quickly switched it over to heat…and as the lovely warm air began blowing through the vents, I saw the thermostat on my dashboard reading 70–it was seventy degrees and I felt cold. But…for well over a month–an endless summer–of temperatures that felt like 110-120; 70 degrees is a forty to fifty degree drop. That is actually a significant drop in temperature, and one that would certainly be felt as cold anywhere.
I have to go uptown to get a sonogram this morning (and no, I am not pregnant). This has to do with the genetic heart defect Mom had; they want to see if I have the same problem (technical term: Arterial tortuosity syndrome) so if things start going haywire with my blood pressure and so forth, they’ll know where to start (it took weeks for them to figure out what was wrong with Mom after her initial stroke). I think part of the reasons I feel so off this week, while exacerbated by the lack of sleep and driving this weekend, has been subconsciously felt anxiety about all these medical tests and things I am having done; plus Dad’s birthday was yesterday and Mom’s is tomorrow; these are their first birthdays with her gone, so it’s going to kick a little harder, which is only natural, I think. I was also productive in that I ordered our new refrigerator this morning to be deliverer on Saturday (yay!) and I registered for jury duty. Of course this is the perfect time to be called for jury duty–when I have a million doctors’ appointments and a surgery scheduled–and of course, you have to show up in person to try to get out of it, which means getting a doctor’s note and showing up at the courthouse on Friday. I can do that, of course–but it’s just more pain in the ass shit to do on a day when I already have a doctor’s appointment. I suppose I could just go there after the appointment. I don’t know. It’s just more irritation on a week where I’d rather not have more irritations. (The MRI is scheduled for Friday morning, that’s what it is.)
Heavy heaving sigh.
I wasn’t terribly tired when I got home yesterday from work, but I didn’t seem to get very much done. I did spend some time reading more of the Sager novel; I’d like to get that finished this weekend at the latest so I can move on to the Elizabeth Hand, the reread of Shirley Jackson, and Infested by Angel Luis Colon. I should, I think, be able to get them all read by the end of the month; I may even have the time to revisit The Dead Zone by Stephen King, which I’ve been meaning to do since the 2016 election. I’m still trying to get a grip and handle on everything, but it’s hard to do with all of these tests and appointments and everything to stress about, even if I try to let it all go it’s still there working away at my subconscious. I also don’t understand why I am so reluctant to face the fact that I am still grieving my mom, seven months later, and her birthday is tomorrow; something else I need to unpack, I suppose. But progress is being made on everything, and of course I am delighted to be getting a functional refrigerator at long last.
Which means I get to spend Friday partly getting the apartment ready for a refrigerator delivery and installation and removal of the old one; which means moving all the food over to the carriage house Friday evening.
I was also thinking back to precisely when I lost the reins of my life and when I started being discombobulated and losing control of my own narrative. I think the stress truly began taking off after buying the car in 2016; the car payments wreaked havoc on my finances and put me even further into debt, which was something I was very concerned about for several years, obviously (still am, but am paying it all down and feel a lot better on that score). Then came the Great Data Disaster of 2018, when I lost all the back-ups and my desk top computer stopped functioning properly; I wasn’t able to afford a new one (thanks to the car payment wreaking havoc on my finances) which also didn’t help–a computer that was super slow, crashed and/or froze up all the time, and was barely functional for what I needed didn’t help–and of course by the time I paid off the car and was able to buy a new computer we were deep into a pandemic and I was doing all that volunteer work while barely holding onto my own sanity by my fingernails. That was also the period of time (2016 on) when the filing got out of control as did my computer files; so now trying to climb out of the wreckage is a Sisyphean task, apparently; I never feel like I am caught up on anything because there’s so much fucking mess to straighten up and organize, and I can never just take a few days to even try to dig out from under the mess because there’s always something else going on that needs attention right now.
These are the things I was pondering as I sat in my easy chair last night watching videos on Youtube–documentaries about the Hapsburgs again–and waiting for Paul to come home. I find that I’ve become a lot more introspective about my past lately (since turning sixty, really) as well as working on unpacking things and understanding why I am the way I am a lot better. I’ve spent most of my life trying to work on myself and become a better person–reading, thinking, watching, etc.–and admittedly, not always succeeding; but a lot of that is because I’ve not looked back and unpacked things I’ve experienced or went through. I’ll give you a case in point: one night during Boucheron I was sitting with my friend Teresa at the pool bar during happy hour enjoying their amazing nachos when Lou Berney joined us. As we talked, he asked us both if we’ve ever come close to death before–close calls. I’d never been asked that before and I really had to think. And while Teresa was answering about a car accident situation where she was almost killed, I remembered an experience I had when I was twenty. I related the story and they both looked at me, eyes open wide, and were like “Jesus fucking Christ, Greg!” I hadn’t really thought about that incident in a really long time; I had started writing a blog entry sometime in the last ten years (it’s still in drafts) where I talked about that experience–it is one of the reasons I am so anti-gun–but other than that…no. But having that brought up into the forefront of my mind, I realized something.
I had never expected to live this long, and I’ve always had the feeling that I would die young. I don’t know if this is a common thing for people or not, but I have just always had that thought in the back of my mind for most of my life–when I’d think about the future, I would always stop because why think about it when you’re going to die young? I gradually began to believe that was because I lived through the 1980’s; the HIV/AIDS thing. But after remembering and talking about that incident back in 1982, I realized that after going through that was when I began thinking I wouldn’t live very long; the arrival of the “gay plague” right around the same time didn’t help much in that regard either. I’m not being coy in calling it the incident–tl;dr: the husband of one of the managers at the Burger King I worked at went over the edge and came into the place and shot her multiple times (today he would have had an automatic weapon and I would have died that day, or been wounded–because that’s not what this post is about and I do want to finish my draft post where I go into more detail.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again tomorrow, if not later.
Yesterday was a little frustrating, I am not going to lie. The day went off the rails early and just never seemed to get back on track. Frustrating news, irritation, depression, and high anxiety all combined to make yesterday a challenge for me to stay on track and balanced, so much so that I just felt overwhelmed and didn’t even try to cope or stay centered because I felt tired all day on top of everything else that was going so irritatingly wrong yesterday.
I did sleep well Sunday night, but I was still worn out from the driving and so forth from the weekend.
So yeah, I was channeling some Major Bitch Energy yesterday, but managed to keep it all inside and not inflict it on anyone else. This was the big win of the day–because I used to just give rein to it and everyone else would just need to get out of my way or else. But I didn’t snap at anyone, I didn’t swear at anyone when I was driving home after work–but I did drive straight home after work, despite needing to run errands. I was smart enough to realize how close I was to snapping at someone or just being a dick in general, so I went home to spare the world and some unsuspecting person my foul mood.
Sigh.
And then I got home to find out that they’d started working on the house today–not really sure what they are doing but it’s an old house in New Orleans so it literally could be anything–and didn’t give any warning–as evidenced by the kitchen wall clock lying in pieces on the kitchen floor (it’s easy to put back together), and then I noticed a lot of the framed pictures in the laundry room were on the floor. The workers didn’t give any warning nor did our landlady; but Sam the handyman knew there were things on the walls so he called Paul. He got five minutes notice, but didn’t think about the clock in the kitchen–and why would he? It’s a whole different room, even if it is connected to the laundry room and one wall is also the back wall of the house.
I also slept wrong or something either Saturday or Sunday night so my neck was sore yesterday (still is this morning, in fact)–turning my head to the left hurt, which of course made driving an absolute joy. I do remember taking good health and not always hurting for granted for way too long. Sigh, I guess there is some truth to that saying you really don’t know how much you’ll miss something until it’s gone; it never even crossed my mind to be grateful I was in good physical condition. I didn’t even know how lucky I was; but I certainly am very well aware that I am a physical wreck at sixty two. Heavy heaving sigh. My neck is still sore this morning, but Ben-Gay has been doing the trick and it’s not quite as bad this morning as it was yesterday.
So, by the time I finally got the laundry started last night, I was already in a mood and said fuck it and repaired to the living room with Tug for some lap time. A purring sleeping kitten in your lap is the best thing for anxiety and stress after a bad day.
Hopefully today will be a good day. I am going to attempt to start eating more “not soft” foods this week at some point. I do still have a lot of that soft food stuff to get rid of anyway, so its just as well I was wrong about how long it would take to get my dentures (I don’t think I ever really told a timeline, which was why I got confused) because all this remaining soft food I’ve not gotten to yet will get used and it won’t just sit in the cabinet for months (years) waiting for me to get fed up at last and start pitching things, right? And I don’t need to have the expensive ice cream–it just has a high calorie count and is very filling and I like it, so I can probably start doing without that; maybe switch to something less expensive and with chunks of stuff in it. I don’t know that I can’t chew so much as I can’t bite into things, which is why I am going to start practicing with other foods. Most of this soft stuff is just carbohydrates, which my body is turning into sugar which is making me pre-diabetic which is also building up my uric acid which is manifesting as gout (everything is connected in your body–everything). I did make it into work, only had to use two hours of my sick time (I get to use two more on Wednesday when I get my sonogram), and managed to get some things done both there and on the home front.
As I was driving both to and back from Panama City Beach over the weekend, I also went down memory lane back to my childhood again. I hadn’t been back to Panama City Beach since the summer I graduated from high school, back in 1978; we went on a trip to visit the relatives and the beach and all for about three weeks that summer, right after I graduated. We never used I-10 back then–was there an I-10 then? Probably–but once I took the exit for 331 south, I knew exactly where I was; Defuniak Springs, and 331 was the road to my grandmother’s old place on Choctawhatchee Bay. And sure enough, 331 took me to the bridge over the bay–no longer a draw bridge or a two lane bridge; now it’s two separate bridges with two lanes crossing in either direction–and the gas station at the corner where you’d turn to go to my grandmother’s is now a park, which I didn’t catch until I was past it. I was going to turn and drive down there on the way home, just to take a look, but by the time I got across the bridge I was deep into The Only Good Indians and I was tired and just wanted to go home. But these old sites–and the incredible beauty of the beach at Panama City Beach–brought back a lot of memories and thoughts about me, my life, and my writing; as did spending time with my aunts and uncle on my father’s side of the family–none of whom I’d seen outside of weddings or funerals since that last trip down there before we moved to California in the the first months of 1981, and that made me go down that road. We spent most of Saturday after I arrived watching football games–Alabama-Texas A&M, and then Notre Dame-Louisville–which reminded me again of how deeply rooted football is as a family thing; we bond over watching football games, pretty much rooting for the same teams while hating the same ones. (They all overlook my LSU fandom, but they’re all Auburn fans who hate Alabama with a passion–my dad and mom and our little branch were the exceptions; rooting for Alabama unless they were playing Auburn. For me, the SEC is now LSU–with Auburn a distant second and Alabama just behind them in third. We all hate Tennessee and Florida–but they hate Georgia; I don’t. Even Dad hates Georgia.) But it made me think more about the panhandle books and the Alabama books I still want to write–and I was also laughing at myself for trying to make the books set there (like the ones in Kansas) so based in fictionalized reality that I feel tied to making the towns almost exactly the same; it’s fiction, lunkhead, so you can change things; it’s okay. (This also kind of dovetails with my “NOLier than Thou” post; because I realized I’ve always created fictional places in New Orleans while still trying to get the city right…it’s really about the mentality than the actual geography.)
But I would like to go back and explore; perhaps Paul and I can find a place over there to rent for a few days–a condo or something so we can eat at home and so forth; Paul would be more than happy to just be given beach access 24/7–and then I could think about the two or three books I want to set there. (I also want to set some books and more stories in the fictional town of Tuscadega, which I invented and based on Freeport, where my grandmother lived. “Cold Beer No Flies” was set there, for example. And driving through Mobile made me think of Dark Tide, too.) It was also interested because the Google Earth views I’d looked at made Panama City Beach look a lot different. It is a lot different than it used to be–more built up, no vacant lots, and yes, there are condos and massive resort hotels built on the beach side of Lower Beach Road (there was only a Beach Road back in the day–now there’s Lower, Middle, and Upper Beach Roads), but there are still public beaches where you can drive up and park right by the dunes and walk a very short distance to the beach, and those tourist-serving little shops that sell gimcracks and souvenirs and beach towels and inflatable rafts and suntan lotion are still there–not as many, but there are some, bearing names like Surfin’ Safari and so forth. I also took some pictures to help me remember things if and when I write about the area again. (It’s where I want to set my Where the Boys Are/slasher novel mash-up that I am calling Where the Boys Die. )
And another story–another one of the ones from back in the day when I was still in college and trying to figure out how to become a writer (which is what I thought those classes were for; they were not) I had written another one that I had turned in with “Whim of the Wind” (the first semester with a good teacher, I had started to feel like I could be a writer again, and by the second semester when I took the class a second time–you were allowed to take it twice–I decided to write a lot of stories to turn in….which was when I first started writing fast, I suppose. Anyway, when I turned in “Whim of the Wind” I turned in another story called “Thunder Island,” which was also set in the panhandle. It was also well received by the class, but not as well as the other, and so I’ve never really thought much about the second. I tried rewriting it once, but to no avail, and since then it’s just kind of been languishing in the files. Ironically, the story was about someone who was returning, after a long time, to the area after a funeral and was remembering a summer when he was a kid, staying on the bay with his grandmother…but while the story was good and worked, now it’s problematic. I’d have to update the story and change some things, and it’s not a crime story at all–although technically in its original problematic form it was an inadvertent crime story. Funny that I completely had forgotten writing a story set in the panhandle almost forty years ago that actually predicted the drive I just took. Maybe I should look it over again? May not be a bad idea.
But the most important thing for me to do today is assess my situations and figure out where I am at with everything, and what I need to get done. I am still in the midst of medical processes–part of yesterday’s problems stemmed from me either never being told or misunderstanding the denture process, which is much longer than I thought and I won’t be getting the final ones for another four to five weeks–and tomorrow morning I am having a sonogram on my heart and Friday an MRI on my shoulder. I need to get a handle on things because all the medical stuff keeps pushing everything else out of my brain; how do people prepare for surgery when they have a gazillion other things to do on top of that? I guess you just endure. I have no control over the situation–which is probably part of my problem with the whole thing–and just have to put my fate in the hands of others, which is something I never like doing and always chafe at; it’s part of the reason why flying is such an issue for me (one of the many reasons, all of which have to do with my faulty brain wiring)–I have no control over anything. You have to surrender control of your fate to the airline once you walk into the airport until you walk out of the airport at your destination and that really chafes at me. Anxiety, of course–on the one hand I know what the general disorder is and that everything else I thought was wrong with my brain’s wiring is just a symptom of the macro disorder, and I am better about controlling it now that I know what it is…but yesterday was one of those days where I felt no control at all over my life and situation and so that started the spiraling and it just got out of control.
But I am happy that I’m better and more balanced (and better rested ) this morning–the neck is still stiff and sore–and on that note, will head into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I will be back later, probably.
As Banned Books Week comes to a close, it was exponentially more important and timely this year than before–given the Right Wing’s vicious, well-organized and ultimately doomed to failure attempts to control what people are allowed to fucking read in this country (for the record, you shrewish harpy lying “Moms4Liberty”–the First Amendment exists because the Founding Fathers foresaw the rise of people like you, and amended the Constitution to stop your skank, anti-American asses).
I’ve participated in Banned Books Week in the past; I’ve certainly done readings during it (the ones I remember reading from are Annie on My Mind by the late Nancy Garden–which was not only burned but tried for obscenity--and Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis; I should have read from Peyton Place at least once). I’ve not participated in a long time–haven’t been asked, to be honest–and so I don’t know if anything is going on in New Orleans for it, or whether it’s something we no longer do here, or what; but I never get offended when I’m not included. Life’s too short for that–and yes, I am well aware that such a thing used to offend me, which was incredibly stupid. I’m really sorry I spent so much of my life and my time allowing negativity such free rein in my head.
The first time I did Banned Books Night, it was after Hurricane Katrina (at least the first one I remember) and it was at the House of Blues; Poppy Z. Brite also read, and I gave him a ride home afterwards; it was in that car and on that ride that he convinced me I could write another Scotty book despite everything that had happened to New Orleans since I’d written the last one; that’s why Vieux Carré Voodoo was dedicated to him.
He gave me Scotty back after a very difficult time, and I will always be grateful for that,
Above are the covers of my seven of my first books. They all look pretty racy, don’t they? But only two of them are actually erotica–Full Body Contact and FRATSEX. Those were the only two erotica anthologies I edited under my own name before switching to Todd Gregory.
The reason I am sharing the covers is because the covers is what the Concerned Women for America, Virginia Chapter, used to get me banned personally (not just my books!) from a high school in suburban Richmond. They used the covers to try to get the Gay-Straight Alliance at a high school shut down, and they used those covers in the House of Burgesses to try to get GSA’s banned at every state-supported school in the state of Virginia.
They came for me based on the covers, not the content–because they had not read the content.
And please, bear in mind, they did not include the erotica anthology covers in their attempts.
In other words, they called me a gay pornographer but didn’t use the actual pornography I actually had done to try to get me banned.
There’s a book in the entire experience at some point for me; I’ve always intended to write a book about the experience called Gay Porn Writer–because that was how they branded me, and the news media, in their attempts to be fair and unbiased, gladly picked up that branding without question or thought or without even looking into me and my writing career in the slightest bit. It was also my first experience with learning that the media cannot be trusted; they are not driven by a desire to print and report the truth; they’re looking for clickbait headlines that drive clicks or people to pick up the paper (print was still very much a thing back then) and which headline would you click on:
Gay author banned from local high school; First Amendment questions raised
or
Gay porn writer’s high school appearance cancelled.
The second one is a lot more enticing, as well as concerning, don’t you think?
That, to me, was the most interesting thing of the entire experience; the perceptions, smears, slanders, and how no one was even the slightest bit interested in the truth. The question that was at the heart of the entire thing is precisely what is driving the bans and book removals and so forth now: how old is old enough to know that queer people exist, that literature and art about us exists, and that we’ve always been here despite being regularly erased from history. It also begged the question we are fighting yet again today: does merely the mention of an alternate sexuality automatically make the book adult content–which really means pornography. We can’t have kids thinking about sex, can we? And we certainly can’t have kids reading a book, recognizing the struggle a character is going through as similar, and feeling less alone, now can we? We’ve got to keep those queer kid suicide rates high!
You see, even the homophobes know the truth that they cannot eradicate our existence, and they also know the truth that the only difference between queer people and straight people is who we are sexually attracted to; ergo, even if you don’t talk about what it means but you have a character who identifies as queer–the “queer” difference means kids will either know that queer people exist (THE HORROR!!!) or think about sex.
And certainly, we cannot have anyone under the age of eighteen thinking about sex, can we? Just because most people become obsessed with it after going through puberty doesn’t mean we should educate them properly. Proper education for teenagers about sex and sexuality would mean a drop in teen pregnancies, teen STI infections, and the need for teen abortions. The spurious argument against sex education for teens has always been we’re just encouraging them to have sex. But that’s stupid; their fucking hormones are encouraging them to have sex, no matter what we teach them, and the more we teach them that sex is bad and wrong will only encourage them to do it more–and once they realize it’s actually a lot of fun and nothing bad immediately happened–they will have more of it.
It’s just basic human psychology. Deny someone something and they will want it all the more even if they weren’t interested in it to begin with. Nothing is more desirable than the forbidden.
The smart thing to do is educate them properly about safety, the risks and hazards of having sex at a young age–and this kind of education will also help teach them about finding the language to get help for sexual abuse they may be experiencing.
But oh no! We don’t want them to have sex! Because not educating them about sex and sexuality has worked so well so far, right? Better they find out by looking stuff up on-line or going to porn sites, right? As a sexual health counselor, I am constantly amazed at the things my clients do not know, or how wrong what they think they know is. Every day I see how our educational system fails to prepare us for one of the most important aspects of our lives.
And learning that queer people exist, can live and love and have happy and fulfilling lives, well, that isn’t what these people want for kids. No, if you’re queer, they want you to be miserable and unhappy and suicidal. What could be more Judeo-Christian than that? The rise in people identifying outside the gender/sexuality binary doesn’t mean that prior generations didn’t have those same people existing in them; just that the world and society wasn’t as accepting and understanding then so they had more to lose by coming out, by talking realistically about who they are and what they feel–and it’s scary, very scary. People who do fall into those binaries, who don’t have to worry about what other people will think about who they are and how they identify, shouldn’t be the ones deciding what is real and what isn’t.
And the sad truth is these people are simply terrified of having a queer child, period. So, they figure if they take away anything that might tell their child it’s okay to be queer and to be yourself, their child will instead choose to live in a closet for the rest of their lives and be completely miserable.
Which tells me all I need to know about what kind of parents these people are.
Their love has conditions, which means it isn’t love at all.
I was always under the impression that parents, first and foremost, want their children to be healthy and happy….which is apparently another myth I’ve been gaslit into believing since childhood. #notallparents
I always say my first identity is reader; I was a voracious reader long before I realized that loving to read and loving books predestined me to become an author, a teller of tales. Certainly author is my primary, preferred identity; sometimes I worry that my identity is entirely too wrapped up in being an author. But trying not to worry and be anxious about anything and everything in my life is my new mantra.
Anyway, I had the great pleasure of meeting S. A. (Shawn) Cosby at Bouchercon in St. Petersburg. I don’t really remember much of the weekend–I met a lot of people and I drank way too much–but I know I met and liked him enough to get a copy of his debut novel, My Darkest Prayer. I loved the book, and saw in its pages an incredible talent, for character and place and dialogue and language, and when I reviewed it on here I predicted an incredibly bright future for him as a crime writer.
I was right,
Titus woke up five minutes before his alarm went off at 7:00 A. M. and made himself a cup of coffee in the Keurig Darlene had gotten him last Christmas. At the time she’d given it he’d thought it was an expensive gift for a relationship that was barelyfour months old. These days, Titus had to admit it was a damn good gift he was grateful to have.
He’d gotten her a bottle of perfume.
He almost winced thinking back on it If knowing your lover was a competition, Darlene was a gold medalist. Titus didn’t even qualify for the bronze. Over the last ten months he’d forced himself to get exponentially better in the gift-giving department.
Titus sipped his coffee.
His last girlfriend before Darlene has said he was a great boyfriend but was awful at relationships. He didn’t dispute that assessment.
Titus took another sip.
All the Sinners Bleed is Shawn’s fourth novel (as a solo author–he also co-wrote a book with Questlove). In the wake of My Darkest Prayer, he released two novels to extraordinary success and acclaim, Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears. Both were amazing, and somehow each book is somehow better than the preceding one–which is really saying something; I’d happily retire if I ever reached anything comparable to those two with any two of my own.
But they were just warm-up acts for this incredible new novel.
Something that has always interested me over the years is the integration of American police forces on every level. How do, for example, Black and/or Latinx/Hispanic cops feel when their fellow officers commit racially driven police brutality? How does it feel to be a part of a police force–particularly in the deep South, but also in places like Los Angeles–that has always been historically racist and oppressive to non-whites? For that matter, how does it feel to be a queer police officer?
All the Sinners Bleed takes on that question with our main character, Titus Crown, the recently elected first-ever Black sheriff in a pretty racist little corner of southeastern Virginia. Titus was born and raised there; his father and brother live there, and he returns to his hometown after a stint with the FBI. He ran for sheriff not expecting to win, but to try to break the stranglehold of power always held by money and white supremacy there. (I have another essay or entry to write about small Southern counties/parishes, and how they all too frequently are run like corrupt authoritarian dictatorships with the power being passed down within a few families, sometimes only one. Exhibit A: the Murtaughs in the South Carolina low country.) As the first Black sheriff of Charon County, he has to uphold the law–which he intends to do to the best of his abilities.
The book opens with a shooting at the local high school; this was hard for me to read and part of the reason it took me so long to get into it; I thought this was going to be a school shooting novel and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read that. But I was wrong; yes, there was a shooting at the school and yes, that shooting was pivotal to the plot, but it wasn’t a mass shooting: a young Black man goes to the school and murders one of the teachers, and on his way out he is shot and killed by the cops when he won’t drop his weapon. Why would Latrell Macdonald shoot Mr. Spearman, a very popular teacher? As Titus starts looking into the strange shooting, he discovers another level of horror going on in Charon County, and once the story gets moving, it’s hard to put the book down.
Over the course of this all-too-short novel, Cosby tackles a lot of issues without either being preachy or over-the-top. Confederate monuments, the Daughters of the Confederacy, racism, white supremacy, the cruelty of poverty, police brutality, and the hard, cruel kind of Christianity practiced in poor, remote rural regions of the South. But the most powerful aspect of the book is how it handles grief; the three Crown men dealing with the loss of wife and mother, a wound that never heals–and the guilt that comes with moving on from such a loss. Cosby had a lot to say in just over three hundred pages; the fact that he said it all, and powerfully, by using character, place and story to get his messages across is testament to his great skil.
And this book is bound to piss off white supremacists. It will make a great Christmas gift for any in your family.
Yesterday was a bit of an emotionally challenging one at work yesterday, but handling days like yesterday is the most important part of my job, and part of the primary reason I took the job in the first place. It does get to me sometimes; not as often as one might think, but that’s also having years of experience in doing the work, too. I was emotionally and mentally tired when I got off work, decided not to run any errands and just come home to have some time to myself for a little while instead. There were chores that needed doing, of course, so I put on my big boy pants and went to work. Chores are always lovely when you’re processing things, or when you’re writing something. I like how satisfying it feels to be doing something mindless with your hands while your mind works away at something.
I did manage to do some work on the sequel to Death Drop, and got about 1200 words down, so that’s something. It wasn’t as easy as the work was on Sunday, but I was also better rested then and hadn’t already worked a full day when I sat down to work on the first chapter of the new Valerie, too. Both manuscripts are starting to come together in my mind, which is nice–but I am not sure if this “work on one for a chapter and then switch to the other” is going to be productive or help me at all in getting them both done, either. And the chores helped me assess the chapter and come up with the things that need to be said and written in it, which I will do tonight. So yay for the chores again!
I’ve been toying with the idea for a blog entry for several years now that is actually turning into a longer-form essay. (It’s been sitting in my drafts for a very long time here.) It began as a response to a homophobic op/ed run in a college paper at a major Southern university that was so incredibly offensive on every possible level (there wasn’t a homophobic dog-whistle the little bigot writer didn’t blow) that it was hard to believe a college student in this day and age could write, unashamedly and with such great pleasure and glee, such incredibly bigoted rhetoric disguised as “concern” when what was actually written was nothing more than an uninformed, un-researched, and completely emotional rant, entirely based in nothing factual. All it did was merely give the author a chance to expose their anger and feelings of contempt for queer people. That person should never ever be given any kind of platform again under any fucking circumstance–unless she goes to work for the Murdochs. That post then continued growing, until it became something else entirely, eventually consuming another blog post draft I’d been toying with for a very long time about authenticity and #ownvoices and cultural appropriation. It’s a separate piece from the other essay I’ve been developing (“Are You Man Enough?” about masculinity)–apparently, I’m getting into the writing of essays now, even though no one will want to ever publish them–but it’s something I feel strongly about, especially with that recent nonsensical essay making the rounds about gay romance that erases gay writers almost completely. Yes, yes, we get it, you think straight women invented gay romance.
You can say it a million times, you can even believe it–but that still doesn’t make it true.
Erasure of queer people is an ongoing effort.
The water situation in New Orleans–always dire, no matter how you look at it really–is finally getting national attention (which means I’m hearing about it from friends and family), and this is a question/problem that is going to continue, and not just here, either. Florida seems just as determined to make a quick buck at every moment without any concern for their fresh water supply, which is being steadily poisoned by chemicals and other pollutants; I am sure the rise of the seas is going to also gradually impact the Florida aquifer, too, as well as those of cities along rivers on the coasts. Now imagine a major hurricane coming this way and sending a twenty-foot storm surge of saltwater up the river. It was never a concern before…but it is from now on. Yay! Obviously, Louisiana’s environmental issues are something I’ve always been concerned about, but the concern is definitely ratcheting up a lot lately. This brutally hot summer, the drought, the river level being so low for so long…it’s hard not to think about it. It should be our legislature’s primary concern…but they’re too busy legislating against trans people and banning books because, you know, priorities.
I also started watching, while waiting for Paul to come home from work last night, some old episodes of the original Dark Shadows, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The funny thing about the show and my memories of it are that I don’t really remember a lot of the storylines or characters beyond the original; probably because the “Barnabas is a vampire” storyline was also made into a feature film (House of Dark Shadows) and when the series was rebooted in 1989, they started with that same storyline. Prime used to have the individual episodes; now they have them bunched together with titles–I was watching the episodes when Quentin (David Selby) first came on the show; the grouping is called The Haunting of Collinwood, which made it more fun because I don’t know how the storyline runs–although I know Quentin became one of the stars of the show so this evil persona he’s inhabiting here inevitably must be redeemed. I may have to rent House of Dark Shadows to watch again.
As you can see, I am starting to get into the Halloween Horror Month spirit already!
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Wednesday (oh! It’s Pay-the-Bills day!) and I’ll talk to you again later.
Queer and Loathing in America 