Gay and Geeky

April 7, 2026 - "All you had to do was pay us enough to live, all you had to do was pay us enough to fucking live"

A worker in Ontario, California, USA, set his company’s warehouse on fire and has a message for the CEO:

https://thehumanityarchive.substack.com/p/he-made-18-an-hour-they-called-it

All 👏 they 👏 have 👏 to 👏 do 👏 is 👏 pay 👏 a 👏 living 👏 wage 👏

HT @lesbianuhaulindustrialcomplex (reformatted from tags on https://www.tumblr.com/lesbianuhaulindustrialcomplex/813453405755408385/his-name-is-chamel-abdulkarim-free-him):

“I’d also like to point out he first set a small fire which he intentionally allowed the fire dept to put out so the building would be evacuated AND so that the fire dept would shut off the water for the emergency sprinklers which is standard practice, so there were no injuries reported AND the entire warehouse burned down except the concrete facade, king of safety and efficiency”

Yes, I have a couple of stories for this.

Claude Cahun

A queer surrealist photographer from 1920's paris, Claude was Jewish and recognized the rise of antisemitism in their home country and watched it become fascism. Here is a quote from their article:

"In 1937 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore cut off many connections because of the war and ran to Jersey to avoid anti-Semitic violence. Upon arrival, they went back to using their birth names and laid low until the Germans took Jersey. Moore and Cahun set to work. They used their experience with art and disguising their genders to create works that spread misinformation, seeds of rebellion and implied that there was a large-scale resistance happening when in reality, it was just the two of them. Though some of their work was based on confusing the soldiers, they also translated and transcribed BBC transmissions into German, detailing the war crimes that were being committed. They would have these translations on pieces of paper that they would slip into soldier's pockets, matchboxes, and anywhere a soldier may stumble across it and possibly read it. An investigation was started, and Nazi authorities believed there to be a group of people doing this. When the two were discovered to be behind the actions, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore were sentenced to death. Fortunately, the sentence was never carried out because the island of Jersey was liberated from German rule only a year later. Claude took a picture upon their release in front of the camps with a Nazi eagle pin between their teeth."

And Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz

who wrote:

"Poetry readings and concert attendance—and often a chat over vodka—were not only forms

of escapism, but also a search for better, more substantive aspects of human beings, a search

which would end, more often than not, in complete disillusionment. If it could be possible, to

discern, in these notes even if only for a moment a measure of humanity in that time of

inhumanity, the goal of this publication would be fulfilled.”

I think his whole article is worth reading.

Also here are some books to read:

Your Art Will Save Your Life

Beth Pickens

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

Ben MacIntyre

Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color

Christopher Soto

The New Queer Conscience

Adam Eli

i'm an extremely light sleeper, so i barely slept, and sometime around 6 am, i woke up to a girl totally panicking, very quietly, because she peed the bed in her sleep. and listen. this wasn't a group of mean kids by any measure. but there's no level of kindness or understanding in the world that will make peeing the bed when you're 17, surrounded by people you only sort of know, a gentle blow.

so i sat up and she was like "oh my god" and I signaled at her to be absolutely silent and I said I'd be right back. And I crawled over everyone and out of the bed like a stupid cat.

and the thing is, by senior year i wasn't getting bullied much anymore. i was generally pretty well liked by my peers, but, if this makes sense, people still didn't always expect very much from me. i was still figuring out how to mask (autistic) and i still often said or did something that made everyone remember i'm weird and they'd just be like "well. that's story for you. i guess." and for the most part i'd become pretty secure in that.

so what i'm saying is i had nothing to lose and this girl had everything to lose.

so i went downstairs and i made tomato soup. and by "made" i mean i put a whole can of tomato soup in a too-small mug and microwaved it until it was lukewarm so as to be convincingly "made" but not so hot to burn someone.

and then i walked back upstairs, and no longer like a cat, i clumsily "attempted" to crawl back into bed, loudly lost my balance, and spilled tomato soup all over the girl and her lap and several other people's laps and heads and the mattress.

everyone woke up confused and anguished and i was like, "oh my god, I'm so sorry. I just got really hungry and it's all i could find."

and everyone immediately accepted with absolutely no further questions that I would go downstairs, make tomato soup at 6 am,and bring it back to bed. everyone just begrudgingly climbed onto the floor and went back to sleep while I put the bedding right into the laundry.

i don't even know this girl's name. i only remembered this story recently because i'm in my hometown for a few months and recently a high school acquaintance said, "hey. do you remember spilling soup on everyone after prom? why did you do that?" and for a moment i genuinely did not and i stared at them completely dumbfounded while the memory loaded and then i started laughing too hard to answer for 2 minutes.