Be The Gay You Want to See in the World

My contribution to 100 Fanworks challenge: 2026 by @dustpileofherown 🩵!

The winter she went to dancing-school. Uncle James had decreed she should go and had paid for her lessons. How she had looked forward to it! [...] Valancy was a good dancer, as light on her feet as thistledown.

he tries telling her the same things ilya did in his calm voice (myshane doesn't use baby voice. he speaks to her normally) and she remains quiet as he talks, but even after he's done she won't look at ilya. eventually experienced mother yuna tells them Baby just needs a little time and takes her away to have a nice hot drink and maybe to do some drawing.

ilya looks CRUSHED. he feels absolutely terrible. shane ends up having to console him too:

"I didn't mean to, shane, the box slipped—"

"I know, baby, of course you didn't mean to."

"I'm a terrible fucking father."

"ilya, no you're not. you're an amazing father and she loves you."

"she has never looked at me like that. ever. like I betrayed her."

anyway, later in the day they're all in the living room together, david in the armchair doing a crossword, shane and ilya on the couch facing the tv, yuna and Baby on the floor playing with building blocks. ilya is only half-paying attention to whatever show is on; he keeps looking over at Baby, pained, and shane keeps stroking his hair comfortingly.

at some point Baby yawns.

"oh? feeling a little sleepy?" yuna asks.

Baby shakes her head. she moves some more blocks. then she yawns again and abruptly decides yes, actually, she's had enough of playtime, and stands up. rubbing her eyes, she turns towards the couch.

shane says, "hey, baby, you wanna go to bed?" and she nods as she walks. but she's walking towards ilya. and ilya is shifting up in his seat faster than lightning, hopeful—and when she stops in front of his knees and reaches up to him his face crumples. he sweeps her up into his arms and holds her close, one hand under her bottom and the other cupping the back of her head. he's murmuring to her in english, "my baby, my baby" and then in russian, "papa loves you so, so much. papa didn't mean to hurt you, baby. I love you so, so much, darling." and she murmurs vague baby things back, face hidden in his neck now and arms circling it.

the scene is so sweet there isn't a dry eye in the room. definitely not ilya's, and not shane's or david's or yuna's either.

…Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didn’t clack on the floor,  and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.

While blind auditions dramatically increased the number of women, it specifically increased the number of white women. The number of musicians of colour has not been significantly impacted by the implementation of blind auditions.

There are lots of interesting conversations going on about orchestra hiring and the audition process in general. Several things to know about orchestral auditions:

Auditions are conducted by an Audition Committee, usually the maestro and several others. The selection process for this committee is frequently vague, poorly thought out, and sometimes little more than a section popularity contest.

Audition candidates generally must pay for their own flight tickets and accommodations to audition. And since well-paying symphony jobs are few and far between, you will be traveling significant distances for many of your auditions.

Audition committees often make their decisions on candidates in under twenty seconds of playing. (This happened to a friend of mine - he was eliminated in fifteen seconds by the New York Philharmonic. He kept doggedly playing through his whole excerpt as a stubborn ‘fuck you’ because he wanted to get his money’s worth on the flight.)

The final rounds of auditions are not blind. Usually only the first and second round are.

As you can see, that process is selecting for a very specific type of person who has access to very specific resources: beta blockers (yes these are wildly common in orchestral auditions), flights, accommodations, and often specialized audition training. There are programs that literally use sports psychology principles to help you audition better, and they do not come cheap.

So obviously there’s that problem, and then there’s the problem of a Good Auditioner versus a Good Ensemble Player. A Good Auditioner often has excellent solo musicianship and is good at playing under pressure. A Good Ensemble Player is a musician who understands how to blend with their section, support the musicianship of their colleagues, and generally be a good coworker. A Good Auditioner does not a Good Ensemble Player make. Ideally you’d have both, but…that’s a big ask, and also very difficult to select for with the current audition system. Add in audition committees that are often composed of older white people, and you can see how it’s a less-than-ideal hiring practice.

Young musicians of colour frequently realize shortly after they graduate from music school that orchestras are hostile places for them. Higher levels of musicianship and professionalism are expected from you than from a white colleague of the same gender, age and socioeconomic background. You are frequently tokenized by orchestra marketing departments and are asked to do more than your fair share of (usually unpaid) promo/PR so that the orchestra can show off how ‘diverse’ they are. Microaggressions from your mostly white colleagues abound. You are often passed over for committees, extra paid playing opportunities like chamber recitals, and promotions within your section.

So the question going around in the orchestral community is this: Is auditioning as it stands still serving us well? Or should we be looking at an entirely different way to build orchestras?

Many are saying now that we should be building orchestras with inclusivity, community and equity in mind, sacrificing that minuscule edge in playing quality afforded by the audition process. Orchestras that pave the way to welcome new generations of young musicians into a space that’s not openly hostile. (For the record, the differences in musicianship between final-round audition candidates really is minuscule. Often candidates are so closely tied that there will be multiple tiebreaker audition rounds, sometimes over a period of days as the committee deliberates.)

I personally fall more in line with this thinking. I also believe that by changing the composition of orchestras, we’ll be changing the landscape of classical music - programming featuring more diverse composers from music history, as well as the living composers today whose work is extremely underrepresented.

Some further reads on this subject:  

To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions http://archive.today/iH2uh (NYT article, sans paywall)

like without government intervention, strawberry jam would have wood in it. like it's a thing. food companies realized that they could use less of the expensive strawberries as ingredients and just use wood. there are laws you cannot legally call it strawberry jam if you do this. you have to call it a strawberry product or spread. food companies are always trying to get that shit through. they have lobby groups pushing that all the time

it is more expensive to put metal detectors in a food processing plant. companies want to cut costs. it is a legal requirement in a lot of countries to have them. so it forces companies to install them.

also to do routine inspections. that is a government requirement. so are building codes. a lot of codes are the bare minimum. like some companies will exceed the code and have more protections but a lot don't. like if it is not in the code, they don't do it. so that's why having governing bodies that regulate building safety, worker safety, food safety and product safety are crucial. because without them, your employer will not see the need to have exit doors with quick release handles, or do routine fire sprinkler inspections or have road salt for the sidewalks. some of it is basic fucking stuff.

companies when left alone do not regulate themselves. it's been historically untrue. companies want to give you a product that is cheap for them to make and that they can sell at the highest price so they can get the most profit. for everyone who loves capitalism, that's what it is. the free market will not self-regulate. if you don't have anti-monopoly laws and anti-wage theft laws and workers' protections, the open market will not fix that organically.

*or cats we know and love but don’t own

*or cats we know and love but don’t own

*or cats we know and love but don’t own

YES. the way this hasn’t left my mind….Like okay they’re still Victorians. They’re still sexist and homophobic. My thought for this alternate history is third gender people are expected to only marry into already married couples. And they’d probably throw in a lot of Christian Holy Trinity and Mary Joseph God imagery to religiously validate triads.

Or three people (of all different genders of course bc again. They’re Victorian) could marry all at once but the courting situation would be a nightmare.

This is why it was so important for women to marry well: even if you worked as a married woman (and many women did), your money wasn't actually yours. It's one thing to have to live with a drunk asshole; it's worse to have that drunk asshole be the sole person who decides if that paycheck goes towards rent or more booze.

So, having a trinity/three parts of one whole entity would totally fit Victorian ideas of coverture. I think you'd still have it be men > everyone else, because they'd expect some kind of hierarchy, and even within the Trinity, God is still the leader.

Second thought: separate spheres. The Victorian era was very heavily focused on men being involved in the "dirty" business of work/politics/etc., and women being more morally pure and better suited to the domestic sphere (the whole "angel of the house" thing). Obviously this wasn't actually or practically true a lot of the time, but it was the aspired-to standard, the thing you'd measure people against to say if they were acting appropriately as members of their gender or not.

So you'd need a third sphere for Honorables to inhabit that is completely separate from the work/domestic dichotomy, or create an entirely different three-way dichotomy. Basically, you'd need a thing to point to, like "X is very ladylike" or "Y is not manly," but for Honorables.

So, extrapolating:

You'd still have "Mr. and Mrs. Robert Smith," it'd just be, "Mr., Mrs., and Mx. Robert Smith" (differentiating by title, not by first name). I could actually see there being a different title for unmarried vs. married Honorables, like Master vs. Mister or Miss vs. Madam/Missus. Mix vs. Max, maybe?

I think Honorables would definitely need to have some kind of dowry. It actually might be even more necessary, because unless the guy is insanely wealthy on his own, you're going to need enough money to support three people, not just two.

The idea of who should be in charge of household accounting has always waffled between a man’s job and a woman’s job. Is teaching the realm of governesses and school mistresses or lecturers and professors. Academics are too weak and frail to be masculine but too logical and rigorous to be feminine.

Thus, men, even if they're unqualified on whatever area of knowledge they're dealing with, and even if they have no understanding of their or other people's feelings whatsoever, still possess an inherent and intangible quality that makes them the only part truly suited for decision making.

Woman: Caretaker

Honorable: Assistant/Advisor

*or cats we know and love but don’t own