Supportive Scorpio

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot to death in Houston, Texas, USA, by ICE agents earlier this week, on July 7th. Araujo was 52, and was in the process of completing his citizenship authorization in the United States. He was family man who was deeply dedicated to his wife and three children, and supported his coworkers at their construction company without fail. He was assaulted by ICE during a traffic stop and, according to ICE, fled while using his car as a deadly weapon, justifying his murder. As there is currently little to no civilian footage of the murder and ICE has complete control of the narrative, holding ICE to the fire will be exponentially harder than the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

i'm getting laid off at work by the end of the month because i can't relocate, without any prospect yet. i don't think i'll be able to get the same salary.

quite honestly we have a lot of expenses for the month, but every dollar counts, since the conversion rate is high to philippine peso. any amount helps. my mother has a tumor close to her ear and needs to eat healthily.

priority expenses:

grocery - $275

2 bottles of concerta - $300

less priority expenses:

bills and rent - $200

1 psychiatric session - $50

2 therapy sessions - $60

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Someone asked F1nn why it was that on her larger branded social media accounts she still listed herself as a femboy in some places while in more intracommunity spaces she more readily and comfortably identified as transfem.

Now, depending on who you ask that kind of question to you'll probably get a meandering answer on the complexities of how one defines their own identity. But instead F1nn gave a very quick and simple answer.

Instead of a cutesie reference to film censorship it was an explicit statement of defiance of Maryland's criminalization gay sex, which was not repealed until 2002. This wasn't a guy saying "Oh they can't put what I do in the movies according to a completely voluntary industry code" he was saying "The State of Maryland wants to put me in jail for being gay and having gay sex."

Gay people are INCREDIBLY ANNOYING for production when they are on reality shows cause they always do shit like this. Reality shows pick their cast specifically for people who will create drama, so it tracks that bringing in some gay people (in the era that I worked, 2013-2018, this was considered to be new and interesting) would diversify people enough to create some conflict. To a degree, this was true.

But what actually happened was that the gay person, or worse, people, would end up estranged from the other people because Straight People Who Are Fucking Nuts in a way that would be ideal for a reality show are very different from Gay People Who Are Fucking Nuts.

There's one particular instance I remember in which our Gay Person tm wasn't getting into drama and no one could figure out why. Any time anything happened it would just defuse almost instantly. Eventually we prodded during a solo interview and one of the guys said something along the lines of "Mayn gay marriage just got legalized n shit if I yell at this guy I'm being a homophobe". This meant that our gay was COASTING along in this reality show cause no one would vote him out!!

But you know what the PINNACLE of this was?

DATING SHOWS.

One... Very popular dating show I worked on (you know the one) has an unofficial, unwritten rule: you can only have 1 queer woman in the cast of ladies. This is because for a solid few years, if ever there were two bisexual women in the show, they would ALWAYS abandon the man and run off together instead. You can't have contestants saying shit like "this guy has no personality and sucks ass. I prefer this girl I met who actually listens to me". Like this was an actual epidemic in the casting. It happened over and over for YEARS and they couldn't find a way to stop it without literally separating the women from each other, which obviously wouldn't be good for the show. They also couldn't show this was happening because that. Uh. Would be pretty bad to reveal to audiences.

Eventually they just decided to subtly prod and see if women who were going on the show were gay and then avoid having two on the same season at the same time. To my knowledge they still do it this way.