the bone zone

there are two things that make him genuinely panic (beyond his day-to-day neuroticism): one is being exposed in his lies, and the other is sexual shame based. russell is deeply sexually insecure. it's mostly played for laughs in s2ep3, with the whole dick drawing thing (and his resulting weirdness around christine), but it's a lot darker in the following episode with his sisters. it feels like his sexuality, not necessarily his homosexuality (although that factors into it too), but his very sexuality got turned into smth humiliating and disgusting early on by his sisters. ive had a post in my drafts sitting about this actually bc it intrigues me. i think russell has a rlly bizarre, fucked up relationship with sex - which is some of why there's kind of a sexual excitement to his nonsexual sadism towards others, or at least i always read it like that. he gets off on it. because i wouldn't doubt on a psychological level actual sex is a minefield for him.

So, I agree about him weaponizing his perceived queerness (see: immediately shifting into gay bestie mode when he's sucking up to Belinda, etc), but I also think he's riding this weird razor-thin line where he is comfortable with people sort of passively assuming he's gay when it can be to his advantage, but he gets notably defensive when someone directly accuses him of it. With Belinda's kids he bends over backwards to prove them wrong, and I think even his "plenty of straight guys try dick in college" thing is (partially) him trying to convince himself/defend himself against an accusation that Christine isn't even really making.

But, I also think that with Gamby it's a little different. For one, I think all his humping and jumping into arms and talking about Gamby’s dick is at least partially “allowed” by both of them because of the veneer of heterosexuality. But more importantly, Gamby has already seen sides of Russell that he doesn't show anyone else, so I think that, either consciously or unconsciously, he WANTS to let Gamby see the whole picture. But in that moment with the diary, Gamby is contradicting all that acceptance. He's rejecting Russell completely, and I think the way I sort of reverse engineered the gay read was: what if that last diary entry is something Russell just can't stand to see Gamby outright reject? Which IS a sappy shipper glasses way to look at it, I admit. It was just another angle I was thinking about last time I watched that scene.

The thing is, I think you're right. I think the show intends for it to be a nasty little pervert moment that's also horrifically embarrassing for Russell, but not necessarily directly tied to/a smoking gun for queerness. AND I certainly don't want to reduce Russell to just a sad sack closet case, because god, whatever is wrong with him, being gay and in some nebulous layer of denial about it is only one small piece.

You're so so right that sexuality as whole was an utter nightmare for him growing up, and it's absolutely more complicated and fucked up than him JUST being a weird gay kid in a southern christian family (but I can imagine that situation made his sisters' torment seem all that more inescapable, and harder for him to distinguish what was actually weirdo pervert behavior and what was just him being a homo/normal adolescent kid). I would loooove to read your in-depth thoughts. The nonsexual sadism as an outlet 100% tracks.

I don't know that I completely buy into this, but I've spent some time wondering if the gay thing is especially tricky for him because it's something that his sisters clocked more or less correctly about him pretty early on, and so the idea of actually owning up to it would feel to him like handing them a win. And it's something he doesn't technically have to EVER own up to. If he stays married to Christine, keeps playing the dutiful husband, then they can call him a girl all they want, but he's not giving up any ground. (Again, not wanting to simplify, his hang ups are not ALL about his sisters. That one deleted funeral scene is a good illustration of the whole environment being terrible for someone like him)

His family basically rejected him for *gestures broadly at his whole deal*, and it does seem like a Russell move to zero in on the wrong thing about himself to “fix”. He doesn’t really understand how to stop lying and scheming and being vindictive, but he can pretend to be a heterosexual family man (just like he can pretend to cook dinner for Christine). But of course that doesn’t actually get him any of the respect or genuine acceptance that he craves, it just makes him Worse.

(Side note: oh no, it just occurred to me that getting bullied by Belinda's kids--a pair of siblings--might have been bringing up some terrible sister memories for Russell. No wonder he was so immediately overwhelmed by them. He SHOULD by all rights be better at dealing with kids making fun of him; he works at a high school and looks and acts the way he does!)

Re: your tags, I also listened to that line read too many times to make out the rest of what Gamby was going to say, lol, and I couldn't decipher if it was "putting" or "pulling" but either way, yeah, it was definitely some weird little pervert behavior, bless him. I am cheering on your Lee's Childhood Trauma musings and fic.

at any rate:

i think it was something humiliating and he got laughed at and he fantasized about killing everybody who witnessed it for yrs after <3 and possibly enacted subtle revenge against some of them, maybe ruined a life or three. that's my guess

"This is the favorite year of my whole life" (…) "Never had a friend like you before, Russell."

this quote [x] from danny haunts me. it makes sense, but it's absolutely devastating. these are two guys who fell in love with each other in a way neither of them had ever experienced before, they formed such a unique bond, and you're telling me they give that up because they're bad for each other? bullshit. the show's about teaching these assholes a lesson and it does work, they do change for the better, but not that much. by the finale we don't see either of these guys reach that level of self-awareness or desire for personal growth. maybe gamby, a little, but gamby's also a guy who's loyal to a fault, and maybe deciding russell's too much of a bad influence on him, loyalty be damned, would be the healthy decision, but i refuse to believe it. love triumphs good judgement. they're family by s2. there's too much love there and these guys are too damn selfish and immature for me to buy them willingly letting each other go. this is fucking russell and gamby we're talking about. but at the same time it is what the final scene implies, and what danny seemed to have had in mind when he wrote it. that they'd exchange i love yous and then just. give each other up. resign themselves to loving the other from afar.

so on a meta level i'm almost mad at danny for keeping them apart, like it's not their choice as characters but rather he's the universe or their god doling justice out, and their sentence is being kept apart lol. which calls to mind a bit from an excellent fic [x]: