the great work begins...

i should NOT be an elder queer, i should be middle at most. i am a middle aged queer. most of the elder queers died.

when i was growing up i didn't go to pride parades, i went to pride marches. because that's 100% what they were in the 80s and 90s.

I was always kind of grateful that the marches slowly became parades. That the protests slowly gave way to parties. It was progress, it was healing.

I was grateful for that because I never healed.

I’m still remembering how straight society turned their collective backs on us and let us die. I will never forgive or forget that. Maybe that’s a shortcoming on my part but it’s true. I’ve tried and I can’t. That scar runs too deep.

And now we’re back to the same shit again. Straight society is turning their backs on my trans brothers and sisters. Ignoring their pain. Trying to legislate them out of existence.

Even our so-called allies are saying shit like “well if we want to appeal to a broader base we can’t keep going on about the transgender thing.” Fuck you Gavin Newsom. In particular.

Make no mistake: they want us dead. Not just closeted, not just silent. Gone. Non-existent. And I say us because they’re just starting with the trans people. They’ll come after the rest of us if they succeed.

I am old and so, so tired.

AIDS is often talked about as an event that changed queer history, and sometimes I see people frustrated about how cruel it was to think that aids is "God's punishment" for gays. It could be different if society was not that homophobic.

It's interesting that if you compare it to the situation with aids in USSR, you can see the issue was also in USA medicine + social stratification where middle class+ people saw themselves as kinda *biologically* separated from others.

The USSR had aids pandemic started at the same time, and at first the government was trying to tell that soviet people are safe from the "capitalistic disease of gays, addicts and sex workers" (the language was much more dehumanizing, I just don't want to use it). And you know what? Soviet people did not believe it. They were scared as fuck, especially when the knowledge spread and they saw the first results of misinformation and secrecy around AIDS.

The propaganda did not work because people knew the medicine is the same for everyone in the country but the most powerful politicians. Soviet citizens had no control over if they will receive the donor blood of an ill person or the injection from the same reusable syringe as aids+ gay or whoever. There was not enough medical equipment, it was not sterilized properly, and nobody was protected. You could behave as the most "dignified" person ever, to remain celibate and stay out of drug usage, but if you need a vaccination, got hurt at work or have diabetes, you are damned. Every visit to the hospital was a risk. It's the matter of accident if you catch aids in the hospital or not.

It was evident in practice. Because children were first to suffer of aids. Many of them.

The first victims of the aids pandemic in the USSR were an adult man and a 12 yo girl. Almost 10 years later there was an outbreak in the children's hospital in the Asian republic, Kalmykiya, and a lot of really young children got ill. I mean newborn babies and toddlers. They had no chance to misbehave to deserve a punishment, you know.

AIDS pandemic was one of the minor reasons why the USSR collapsed. It was obvious that this government could not protect its people. It tried to use the queerphobic rhetoric borrowed abroad, and it led to the bad stuff, not only for gay people, but for every part of society. And if for the USA the homophobic negligence was at least based on reality - homosexual men were the first victims indeed, - for the USSR it was total fantasy!

There were a couple of gays and bisexual men who brought aids from abroad and were diagnosed because they confirmed the homosexual contact somewhere. But there were foreign students, who formed partnerships and families with Soviet people; there were tourists, children of aids+ parents who had no idea about aids at all, sailors working in Africa and having contacts with locals and etc. Putting the blame on gays did not work because officially the soviet union had no gays! And even when they caught some, it did not look credible.

The history went wrong and now it's forgotten that soviet gays had nothing to do with aids. The tale of gays bringing aids was told so many times that it started to seem the only one. Ehhhh, it's not that simple.

And usa was the origin of this tale, which is upsetting. May be for you the aids pandemic is mostly in the past, but oh boy it's getting only worse for post-ussr space and homophobia rises

An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)

And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.

Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?

That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.

VHS — permanent marker on paper, 23 × 30 inches, 2010

Blueberries in Sunlight - Vincent Giarrano , 2024.

American , b. 1960 -

(left: November 2008; right: March 2019)

when i try to explain why Katie's Glinda is so special my default words tend to be "weird," or "alien," or "fucking look at her. just fucking--why is she LIKE this." of course i stand by all that, but if i were to doff my facile and irreverent hat at last i'd probably say something like: Katie's Glinda, to me, represents a kind of artistic transgression which can never be fully captured by the institution of Wicked. she might as well be Frank fucking Abagnale given how hard the show has tried, alternately banning or legitimizing what she's done; this kind of granular approach, though, is never going to work. like--yes, it was the individual gestures and line reads which got her in trouble (according to her. it's possible Joe Mantello did a frown in her direction once), but in isolation those things mean very little. the whole of Katie's performance, which drives and always exceeds the sum of its parts, comes down to how Glinda is simultaneously the woman behind the curtain, and the curtain itself. Glinda is shallow artifice at the same time Glinda is complex depth. it's all truth; it's all real.

(it's all lies; it's all pretend. how could it not be? she's the one telling the story. she's the only one here.)

over and over Katie's Glinda feels sharply and just as sharply rejects the feeling; papers over it, squares it away. the Wizard's chamber scene in 2008 is one of her starkest approaches to this. Glinda knows exactly what is happening. what's more--Glinda knows better. (Katie has never allowed Glinda the grace of not knowing, or not knowing better.) she has a strong enough moral compass to react to the Wizard's offer with revulsion and horror, almost as if she were...oh, eighteen years old and intimately discovering she lives in a fascist regime built on a mountain of subaltern corpses. but she only shows it once the Wizard has finally turned away from her and even then, only for an instant. once she catches sight of Elphaba she wrenches herself into damage control mode, and the most important thing, the ONLY important thing, becomes getting them both out of here no matter the collateral.

Glinda in the same scene in 2019 is...pretty different! any disgust or moral conflict is completely wiped, and if Glinda has any feelings pertaining to what just happened it's relief and delight that they can get back on track after all that unpleasantness. even the reach for Elphaba at the end has changed in tone: now she's more authoritative--maybe even a little impatient--for Elphie to get with the program.

on the one hand it's like: okay, well, Katie's Glinda is normal now. she's the MOST normal Broadway Glinda during this period, and this is the typical way for Glindas to behave during this scene. even weirder, more conscientious Glindas aren't as bold about showing their moral quandaries as Katie's Glinda was in 2008, so we can read this as part of 2019 Glinda's overall deal, which is that she is very normal and her actress is very thankful she was invited back to make Wicked levels of money.

on the other: said actress is 👏🏼KATIE👏🏼ROSE👏🏼CLARKE, who has taken to straight up telling her directors she's never going to do the same thing night-to-night. so obviously she couldn't even swan through her (hopefully lucrative) Wicked victory lap without turning yet again into some bizarre outlier. part of this was done by digging Normal Galinda up from her shallow grave, but the other, larger part comes from what has stayed the same. because Katie's Glinda in 2019 remains, at her core, Katie's Glinda. she's the same person from 2008. still sensitive, still trusting, still smart in a way which only brings her grief, because once again Katie is not interested in letting Glinda off that particular hook. still autistic and gay as hell. 2019 Glinda is better at masking; maybe because she learned earlier that her preternatural charisma can only get her so far, and sometimes you HAVE to conform. 2019 Glinda comes from a more cynical world, even before she came to Shiz, which makes her more suited to accept the cynicism to come.

but not more suited to actually live in it, because the significant adjustments to 2019 Galinda's behavior become kinda irrelevant right around the time she changes her name. technically this is something we already know: from the moment she descends in the bubble in NOMTW, 2019 Glinda is just as miserable as she had been in 2008. (Act Two demonstrates that if anything 2019 Glinda might be even MORE miserable, but we'll get there when we get there.) and she's not even really better at hiding it! if Normal Glinda is emotionally devastated in the exact same way as Space Alien Glinda at the end of it all, then why change so much of the lead up? what does it even matter?

well. it's Glinda, so (appropriately) it matters because it's the way you're viewed. while we're inside the Wizard's chamber it matters, which is why even 2008 Glinda tries very hard to at least pretend she's onboard with all the scandalacious villainy. and outside of the Wizard's chamber--in Glinda's present, as she tells the story to her real and fictional audience--it matters, because it tells us how to feel about Glinda, and how Glinda feels about Glinda.

in 2008 Glinda beseeches empathy. the visceral sharpness of her body language and facial expression feels like an implicit interjection from Glinda the narrator: she was so scared. what else could she have done? what could you have done, had you been this scared? but in 2019 the same moment--with almost entirely the same Glinda, doing almost entirely the same motions--is treated so unsparingly it borders on self-abuse. Glinda in 2019, looking back on what happened, recounting it; alternately framing, hiding, and exposing her past self; within and between texts, says: who cares what she felt? who cares what she believed? this is what she DID. and look how good she is at it! if she had been pretending she's only getting what she wanted. this is what everyone saw. this is the only truth anyone should know. how in Oz can her feelings matter in the face of all she has done? all the harm she's dealt? all the people she's abandoned? all the bodies left in her wake?

MOMENT 2: "Frustrating!" Fiyero declares to Morrible's question, catching Glinda's eye as he keeps talking. Glinda nods in affirmation before an exasperated Morrible derails him by announcing the engagement. Glinda responds with ecstatic shock, while Fiyero does a "haha big joke" laugh before double taking at the congratulotions banner.

this point kind of feeds into the first by highlighting that PR has been Fiyero's job (at least part-time) for the past five years, too. Ryan does a good job of showing that it has been five years; you expect Glinda to be polished no matter what, but FIYERO being this well trained is something else. the sulky little face he makes right after Morrible interrupts him is just like...he's used to this. this is typical Madame. (Nancy's fed up look right after "frustrating!" implies she's used to him too.) it's a pretty rare take on Fiyero in TG, and i don't think it's mandatory--most Fiyeros unknowingly or knowingly contrast with Glinda and Morrible on the podium by being less smooth and practiced, and i've liked many of them.

this version does feel pretty special though, because it subtly underscores what Glinda and Fiyero's relationship has been like during the act break. Fiyero had been instinctively attuned to Galinda's feelings as early as the Ozdust, and now that's matured into them...well. working in tandem. he's clearly been doing enough of this stuff with her to know the workings; he checks in as she moves aside so he can take over, and she trusts him enough to back him even though his comment was clearly not scripted. they're a team.

MOMENT 3: Morrible's first verse. Fiyero reorients himself back to playing supportive spouse. Glinda watches Morrible like a hawk, only relaxing when it seems they'll stick to the script after all. Fiyero catches the heavy editorializing halfway through but, seeing Glinda's non-reaction, settles for a sotto voce protest after Morrible pauses for breath.

i remember being caught off guard when i first watched this. Ryan's Fiyero is such an obstinate fuckboy when things don't go his way; he is among the least impressed and most angry Fiyeros during the "surprised?" "yes!" exchange right before this. but he pulls himself back together remarkably quickly, to the point he's returned to nodding "yes Glinda is the greatest actually" as Morrible launches into her speech.

which is the part that stands out most: every Fiyero has to calm down because the script says so, but most Fiyeros play it either like they've gone back to factory neutral or like they're barely restraining themselves from throwing a confused tantrum. in both cases the implication is they're still too floored by the engagement to support Glinda anymore, and i expected Ryan's Fiyero to similarly hold a grudge. he has perfectly legitimate reasons to do so--what happened was a SERIOUS breech of trust--but he...doesn't. his calming down process doesn't involve getting some space from Glinda but going right back to Glinda-and-Fiyero, the perfect team.

and like. obviously this is because Glinda called him "handsome" and he's so chuffed that being mad at her is impossible, but damn if it doesn't give me feelings anyway. he was so upset when the engagement was sprung on him, but he has enough faith in Glinda that he's willing to wait and hear her out, and in the meantime he's going to keep taking her cue in their united front against Morrible. this degree of instinctual trust speaks volumes about how much comfortable intimacy they have with each other, and how fraught their lives have been in the past five years. Glinda and Fiyero have each other's backs because they know and love each other; Glinda and Fiyero have each other's backs because they know they can't rely on anybody else.