Sunday morning in the Lost Apartment, and a very nice day was had here in the Lost Apartment. I worked and ran my errands and cleaned and had a rather nice, productive day. It was also a pretty day to run errands, despite the hordes of tourists on foot in the Garden District who somehow think it’s a pedestrian mall and will literally step out into the street without looking.1 Heavy heaving sigh. I will also never understand tour buses that want to make the left turn off Prytania onto Washington (by the cemetery); Washington is a very narrow two-lane street with cars parked on both sides. Probably heading to Commander’s Palace, but a bus will block the entire street. Ah, the trials and tribulations of driving in uptown New Orleans!
But I got up at a pretty decent hour (this morning as well) yesterday so I could get things done in the morning before I had to venture out into the errands. I was most pleased with what I was able to get done in the morning–the apartment still needs to have the floors cleaned, but at least it’s not nearly as horrifying around here as it was on Thursday night when I got home from work. This morning I am going to do the floors and the weekend’s dishes, so I can head into the work week with a sparking and shining home. I made major progress on a project, and hope to get it finished today. I also did some mental writing of my own on the Scotty book–I am not sure why I always struggle and then remember oh yeah, the plots are supposed to be over-the-top and ridiculous, the more ridiculous the better. So I would really like to get back to work on it, so I need to get this other project finished. When I get this finished I am going to read for a bit before I get cleaned up and get back to work.
I read manage to read some more of Winter Counts, and it’s really exceptionally well written. I am having a good time reading it, and seeing how the standard hard-boiled noir style can be interpreted and developed in an entirely new way and perspective is pretty awesome, too. (Seriously, people: broaden your minds and read diverse books.) I also spent some time with White Too Long, which thus far isn’t really telling me anything new–it opens with an explanation of how the Southern Baptists came into being in the first place, and how it has evolved from those racist roots (without losing the white supremacy) ever since. That may help me with the essay I am writing about religion and why I am so antipathetic to it; unpacking my miseducation on both it and American exceptionalism has been very revelatory–and it also makes me more than a little angry. This is what happens when you confront the truth about this country’s actual history, rather than the American mythology my childhood education groomed me into believing–which is why I guess people are so afraid of the truth and what their children might think of them? You cannot be both a good person and a racist at the same time; because if you harbor bigotry and racism inside of your personality it will spill over into other aspects of your life, and color your decisions and your votes and how you conduct yourself as you navigate through the world.
Paul was at the office for most of the day, and he got home rather late. I bought one of those Costco ready for the oven fresh pizzas Friday, and made it for dinner last night. It was quite good–what isn’t good from Costco, really–but when he got home, he had a tale to tell. As he was leaving his office from the rear of the building he was stopped by firemen (they were hot and young) and he eventually spoke to both the fire chief and the chief of police. Apparently, his building started to collapse while he was at his office. He didn’t even know anything had happened! Ah, New Orleans is always going to New Orleans. Never a dull moment in this city, is there? We’re almost to the anniversary of the Hard Rock Hotel collapse, too.
And on that note, I am going to get cleaned up and read for a while before I get to work for the day. Have a great Sunday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later on, if Sparky will allow it.
Screenshot
In fact, this made me think about Chanse’s computer guy, Jephtha, and his video game, “Tourist Season.” ↩︎
Thursday and my last day in the office for the week. I was very tired when I got home from work yesterday–mid-week fatigue, most likely–but I slept super well and feel pretty good this morning. The temperature started dropping again last night–I checked and it was only 62 degrees inside last night–so I turned the heat on downstairs before heading to bed, and it’s nice and warm down here this morning. I don’t know how tired I am going to be later on, of course, but we’ve an easy clinical schedule today and I should be able to get caught up on all my Admin stuff today before I leave the office and come home. I am almost finished with a project, hopefully by Saturday it will be done and I can get back to my book work. No football for sure this weekend, so I have no excuse not to clean and write and go to the gym as we move into the New Orleans Holiday Season–which doesn’t end until after Carnival. Woo-hoo!
The last time I was visiting my father (or maybe the time before) he told me about a movie (it probably was the time before last, when I watched westerns with him) starring John Wayne that was set in Alabama and was about Bonapartists exiled from France who wound up settling in the western part of the state, which is how the small city (or town) of DEMOPOLIS was founded. (The movie was The Fighting Kentuckian.) Honestly, Alabama’s history is so rich and varied! I could write a million books set in Alabama–and that’s not even talking about places like Moundville, near Tuscaloosa. But there has to be some way I can tie Scotty and New Orleans into the Bama Bonapartists, you know? One of Napoleon’s nephews, Prince Achille Murat, lived at Magnolia Mound near Baton Rouge (I think the location is either on the LSU campus, or very close to it) for awhile in the early nineteenth century. Lots of Bonaparte connections down here, and after all, the Napoleon House is called that because after Waterloo, it was offered to Napoleon for his next exile–needless to say, the British weren’t having that. (There are Baltimore Bonapartes, too.) I came across a mention of the Murats of Magnolia Mound yesterday, and that made me remember about the movie and the Bama Bonapartists.
I also started reading White Too Long, and I am glad I have it. It’s essentially the story of how white supremacy and Christianity became linked through racism before the Civil War, and how those “southern” versions of particular Christian brands worked hand-in-hand with the Klan and other racists ever since. I think the Southern Baptists are the only ones left that didn’t merge back in with their Northern counterparts after the war, and the Southern Baptists have been responsible for a lot of bigotry and unconstitutional prejudiced laws and so forth ever since. The Southern Baptists were the queer community’s biggest enemy for decades, and have poisoned southern culture for generations. (They were also the very first organization to target Disney for being slightly more gay-friendly than anywhere else and announced the first boycott over it; it failed miserably.) It’s going to be an interesting read; I always find religion fascinating–especially how a benign message of caring for others and helping the poor and sick can get twisted so easily into a method of mind control for nefarious reasons. I still want to explore that more in a book, too, and I am going to finish that goddamned essay about my own personal experiences with religion and the Christian god.
Maybe try finishing the writing you’re already doing, Greg, before starting anything new–and yes, that absolutely includes doing research. Make notes of where to find said research and do not go ahead and start doing it–save it for when you’re ready to write it.
And if you never have the time to write it, then was there any need to waste any time researching it? Alas, I do have a curious mind, which can also be very one track at times.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader, and I may be back later. One never knows.
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 gofor 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.
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? ↩︎
Queer and Loathing in America 