Not Now Bicurious Mouse Thrall Hayden

i've been thinking a lot about the whole hudson williams inflammatory photo situation, about whether i want to post anything into the internet abyss, about what i can even contribute to this matter. i've decided i'm going to dump some of my thoughts because this whole thing feels a lot less like run-of-the-mill internet discourse and more like a huge, racially-motivated internet defamation campaign.

it’s disappointing to see people demand accountability from a cyberstalked celebrity for something that may very well have been racial humiliation, coercion, and/or targeting when he was a minor. and just to be clear, the symbols in the photo are absolutely offensive. i’m not disputing that. however, a huge part of the issue for me is how few people seem interested in context & how quickly a decontextualized image has been treated as definitive proof of intent, agency, and endorsement.

i’m going to try to share this without doxxing myself. i’m white. i grew up in a very white suburban neighborhood and attended a predominantly white public high school. the racist bullying in my school was so bad that a major news network made an entire documentary about it. i share the below having spent a lot of time reflecting on my own complacency as a white person & through conversations i’ve had (and still have -- the trauma fucking lingers) with long-term friends who experienced racially-motivated hate daily in our school. i know my school is not unique, which is a large part of the reason why i've decided to share this.

(i’m about to share examples, so if you don’t want to read, i've noted below where the examples end. if you're white, please sit with the discomfort & continue reading.)

in my high school, it was commonplace for students of color -- especially melanated students of color -- to be hazed, degraded, and publicly humiliated. racist harassment and acts of racial terror were normalized, and assimilation to whiteness was expected in order to maintain the school’s (and broader community's) racial hierarchy. for many students of color, belonging was conditional. social acceptance usually required minimizing experiences of racism, laughing along with racist jokes, distancing themselves from other students of color, tolerating humiliation and abuse, proving they were “not like the other [students of color],” etc.

the reward for “playing along” was limited and precarious social inclusion. the punishment was exclusion and ostracization by students and parents alike. for many of my friends and peers, assimilation to whiteness was not a desired choice -- it was survival. people of color are often taught that they must endure racism, degradation, and humiliation to gain access to spaces that white people inhabit by default.

the same weekend my school hosted its annual “diversity night,” a white jewish student drew a sw*stika on a Brown student at a party and posted it on instagram. the Brown student was suspended for three days, and the white student -- whose parents defended him like they were in court -- got away scot-free. my friends of color have repeatedly shared that they felt gaslit by our school, which proudly hosted diversity initiatives, multicultural events, and anti-bullying campaigns, yet did little to hold individual students/friend groups accountable for racist harm. instead, the students who were held accountable were often the very students of color who fell victim to this racist harm.

(examples over)

i feel like a lot of people engaging in the hudson discourse are failing to recognize how often racial humiliation functions as a social ritual that reinforces white supremacy. we now have access to a photo of a teenager who was one of the only people of color in a predominantly white social environment, surrounded by white peers, with hateful symbols drawn on his face. maybe he made terrible decisions. maybe he should have objected. maybe he felt like he couldn’t. the point is, we don't know the context. why are we so quick to dismiss the possibility that an asian teenager in a predominantly white social environment may have been the target of racial humiliation, coercion, or abuse?

i also can't help but think about the model minority myth. asian folks are often expected to navigate racism in ways that are legible to white audiences -- be respectable, agreeable, non-confrontational, respond "correctly," etc. yet racism ofc doesn't always look like open hostility, and survival doesn't always look like resistance. sometimes it looks like silence. or laughing along. or enduring humiliation because the social consequences of refusing are worse. like i said above, for many people of color, assimilation is a strategy for survival. the speed with which folks have dismissed those possibilities says a lot about how narrowly many people understand racism, victimhood, and accountability when asian people are involved.

what's clear is that people have spent months digging through his entire historical internet presence, combing through the private social media accounts of people he knew as a teenager, excavating photos that were never meant for public consumption, and distributing them online to maximize outrage. say what you will about the celebrity as a surveilled public commodity -- that's not the point i'm trying to make here. people are digging through this guy’s life with the explicit goal of finding material that can be used against him, flattening every possible interpretation of the shared image into the one that causes the maximum amount of harm. we act as though the existence of a photograph tells us everything we need to know about the circumstances under which it was taken.

a lot of people seem less interested in understanding context/what happened than they are in destroying him. and (coming from a queer jew) a lot of people are suddenly very eager to weaponize antisemitism and homophobia as "gotchas" when they've never previously demonstrated any meaningful concern for either.

Shane: baby, of course. I would take such good care of you. Get you the nicest dirt I could. & I’d bring you to the rink every day so you could wiggle around on the ice :)

Ilya: okay :D would you still love me if I was bad at hockey?

No one will ever convince me that there's not a connection between Shane coming out to his team, it not going well, and Shane volunteering to start an even more intensely restrictive diet than he was already on, that also punishes his relationship. Just like I will always view Shane's anxiety around Ilya coming out to the Centaurs/his friends as a trauma response based on how badly it went for him.

One of the most heartbreaking parts about Shane's performance diet to me, is how in both My Dinner with Hayden and TLG Shane and Ilya mention how they love to cook together, and it's like a fun couple thing for them. It's a point of connection, something they do together aside from hockey. And, unlike hockey, it's something they don't compete about.

Shane's performance diet robs them of this. There's a scene in TLG where Ilya has done a bunch of research to find a meal they can cook together that fits in Shane's diet. And Shane is delighted by this. But, notably, he puts no effort into finding other recipes they can do this with again. He tells Rose he likes the discipline of his diet, and I don't think he means just in regards to what and where he's eating, I think he also means in his relationship.

There's another major change we see in Shane between books. At the end of Heated Rivalry he's talking fairly optimisticly about both of them coming out to friends.

This is at the cottage. Very soon after they've decided they're in a real relationship. It's hard not to compare this with Shane's sheer panic in TLG when Ilya talks about coming out to Troy - not even about them, just about being bi - and also to the possibility of even meeting the rest of his team.

So, what's happened to Shane in the last three years that makes him go from joking around about coming out to his friends to rabidly controlling his relationship and protecting every small detail of it that he possibly can?