dystopiary

The Loose Ends Project matches crafters with a project that is unfinished because of death or disability. They offer help with a spectrum of textile mediums in over 80 countries. One project I find particularly lovely: “My mom was making this octopus for me. She was 67 years old when she passed away from COPD. She was hospitalized for pulmonary rehab several times and would always take it to work on while she was there and loved to talk about it with people."

The Mosaic is a Retreat. So is the compound in The Last of Us. Heated Rivalry has the cottage -- Our Flag Means Death ends in this remote island B&B retirement. Obviously the whole mountain in Brokeback Mountain is a Retreat, the existence of the Retreat and the impossibility of survival outside of it is the entire movie. Lavender Men uses it much less, but there's a motif of the log cabin that serves as an (imaginary) Retreat (I know that's a deep cut reference, but find and watch Lavender Men, it's exquisite).

I don't know, it's just interesting, because of course in reality it has typically been urban environments that provide shelter, and obviously that also has a film history, the city and queer culture is the way home in Queer As Folk, in Tales of the City, in Jeffrey, in I think a lot of older gay stories that were maybe more autobiographical.

You could certainly pick on The Retreat as a fantasy of escapism, a kind of pastoralist romanticizing of *not* be embedded in (or beholden to) a community any longer. Maybe it's just pessimism -- I mean, it certainly can be that (Brokeback etc), but I don't know, there really seems to be a lot of yearning behind it, too. The Retreat presents not just as an escape from homophobia, it's always distinctly *beautiful,* nourishing to the soul and not just a shield of privacy.

He had a career, he got married, he had kids. He was trying to address the things he once used drugs to escape from. But he also had serious mental health struggles. He wasn’t perfect, he was ‘problematic’ at times, but he was also very unwell and spoke openly about how he frequently questioned his own reality. He was paranoid and nervous. Certain fanbases didn’t help with that, leading him to largely leave social media to take care of himself and focus on his family.

I don’t know what he’s gone through very recently, I stopped keeping up some time ago, but I’m saddened to hear that it ended this way after all he’s survived up to this point. I feel sad for his wife and young kids. And I feel sad for him.