always thinking about the Home short story 🥲

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

slight spoilers under the cut !

Summary: I’d locked eyes with Mensah, looking like that. My energy weapons had deployed, without my awareness or direction. My targeting systems had identified her and Bharadwaj, quite insistently, as direct and immediate threats.

Maybe this is just a temporary, dangerous, system glitch, and a hard restart will fix me. I’ll just restart, comb through my code, do some debugging, find the corrupted files or whatever, and then I won’t indiscriminately murder my most trusted humans.

I should know by now to always assume the worst.

In which SecUnit is having some survival threat…response errors. And some…’targeting its humans’ malfunctions. And some…blackouts when restarting. I’m sure it’s fine.

Chapters 1 & 2 of my "SecUnit discovers it's not alone in its head, extreme amounts of stress and drama ensue" fic are now LIVE.

This is part 1 in a series. All 19 chapters are COMPLETE (aside from final edits) and I will be posting new chapters twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturday/Sundays while continuing to write part 2. This is a gen fic, focused on trauma (recovery), h/c, and heavily on Three & MB, also featuring ART and the PresAux crew in later chapters

It would mean the world to us if you checked it out and gave it some love. This is our first published fanfic in almost a decade and our first in this fandom, and it also ended up becoming profoundly personal and a little autobiographical, whoops!