Sunbeam

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

1. it's a rock it does not care

The medieval peasant I went back in time to give a bag of Doritos to, concerned: what terrible and powerful sorcerers they must have in your age, to be able to veil the vault of heaven itself from view, as you say

Me, sniffling: I didn’t realize, I can’t, it’s so much, I, I… are the chips good, at least?

a) Being wrong. b) Fucking up. GENUINELY fucking up. And suffering consequences of fucking up. c) REALIZING he's been wrong. d) Trying as best he can to adjust to that.

I've noted before that you could subtitle every single Vimes book as "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About [Blank]". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About The World Not Being Worth It". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Affirmative Action." "Vimes Finds Out He's REALLY REALLY Wrong About Golems." "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Klatch And International Everything". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Dwarfs." "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About The Past Being Better/Not Wanting To Be A Commander." "Vimes Finds Out He's STILL Wrong About Dwarfs, and Also Vampires, and Also Trolls". "Vimes Finds Out He's Wrong About Goblins and Is Really Upset About It."

And so on. And that is actually a very important part of Vimes because if he was not both able and willing to realize that he's wrong about shit he would just be a very bad person. A very self-righteous bad person. Captain Swing, in Night Watch, is utterly correct: he and Vimes are very, very similar people. It's just Findthee Swing knows he's right.

And Vimes is actually always open to the possibility he's totally wrong, even if he's not happy about that.

Vimes isn't perfect. Vimes isn't even always in the moral right - Vimes starts out Feet of Clay just as bad as anyone else in the story, Dragon King of Arms included, about golems. He starts his place in the story as casually racist, sexist and everything else ist as is standard for the society around him, and his voyage to becoming something else is through his own failures and it too is imperfect.

My absolute favourite Samuel Vimes moment is actually from Thud! but it's not the one you think it is, probably. It's this one:

The dwarfs were clustered nervously by the duty officer's desk. They had that opulence of metalwork, sleekness of beard and thickness of girth that marked them out as dwarfs who were doing very well for themselves, or who had been right up until now.

Vimes appeared in front of them like a whirlwind of wrath.

You scum, you rat-sucking little worm eaters! You heads-down little scurriers in the dark! What did you bring to my city? What were you thinking? Did you want the deep-downers here? Did you dare deplore what Hamcrusher said, all that bile and ancient lies? Or did you say "Well, I don't agree with him, of course, but he's got a point"? Did you say, "Oh he goes too far but it's about time somebody said it"? And now, have you come here to wring your hands and say how dreadful, it was nothing to do with you? Who were the dwarfs in the mobs, then? Aren't you community leaders? Were you leading them? And why are you here now, you ugly snivelling grubbers? Is it possible, is it possible, that now, after that bastard's bodyguards tried to kill my family, you're here to complain? Have I broken some code, trodden on some ancient toe? To hell with it. To hell with you.

He could feel the words straining, fighting to get out, and the effort of restraining them filled his stomach with acid and made his temples throb. Just one whine, he thought. Just one pompous moan. Go on.

[...]

"Gentlemen," he said, keeping his eye on the grag but talking to the room at large, "I know all of you, you all know me. You're all respected dwarfs with a stake in this city. I want you to vouch for Mr Bashfullsson, because I've never met him before in my life. Come on, Setha, I've known you for years, what do you say?"

"They killed my son," said Ironcrust.

A knife dropped into Vimes's head. It slipped down his windpipe, sliced his heart, cut through his stomach and disappeared. Where the rage had been, there was a chill.

"I'm sorry, commander," said Bashfullsson quietly. "It's true. I don't think Gunder Ironcrust was interested in the politics, you understand. He just took a job at the mine because he wanted to feel like a real dwarf and work with a shovel for a few days."

"They left him to the mud," said Ironcrust, in a voice that was eerily without emotion. "Any help you need, we will give. Any help. But when you find them, kill them all."

Bolding mine. There's some bits in the middle there where the moment moves from the duty room to his office, etc, but the important through line is that one and it's a double-whammy: not only that in the moment of discovering the loss that faces another father, Vimes is absolutely thrown completely out of his righteous rage and resentment of days despite it being fed by a quasi-demonic force of vengeance?

But also that the narrative does that to him. That it takes us with him in a build up of days and days and days of genuinely infuriating things and GENUINELY the unfortunate enabling of Hamcrusher's bullshit by people who didn't speak out about it (he's not wrong about that!) right up to the attempted murder of his baby and his wife to this moment and then absolutely yanks the rug out from under him and tells him - and us, the readers - that actually no.

No you don't get it that simple.

They killed my son.

Where the rage had been, there was chill.

If you're going to try to have a Vimes, as a creator, and you want them to be anything other than a self-righteous twerp in their own right, you have to be willing to do that part. To have him stumble, trip up, fall over his own feet, and be confronted by his own misunderstandings, mistakes, just . . . his misses.

So Sam Vimes can be used as (say) a 20-something-insular-white-boy’s First Examination of Their Own Prejudice. They identify with him at first on the axes that they find relatable (he’s a cool older man, very like them in superficial details; he’s positioned in a classic antihero role in the narrative; he’s jaded and cynical and his thoughts are amusing) and therefore they willingly come with him on his journey.

Also, Granny Weatherwax is similar. This is what made me think of it:

Captain Swing, in Night Watch, is utterly correct: he and Vimes are very, very similar people. It's just Findthee Swing knows he's right.

In Carpe Jugulum, there’s a scene where Granny Weatherwax talks with the Omnian priest and says that religion, true religion, is believing something so much that you burn everything else because of it:

“You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just . . . is just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors.” 

(I don’t have the book to hand, so that’s from Goodreads and may be a little off, but that’s the one I have in mind.)

And the priest’s reaction (which I can’t find a quote for) is more or less: if she were to believe, what kind of force would come sweeping down out of these mountains and across the world?

(And the awe of that kind of shakes up his own crisis of faith, which is fascinating but beside the point I’m trying to make here.)

Another quote from Carpe Jugulum:      “The Weatherwax women have always had one foot in shadow. It's in the blood. And most of their power comes from denying it.”   

We don’t get to see inside Granny’s head the way we do Vimes’s, but it’s a similar process, I think. Witches have to have confidence in what they know, but in Granny’s case it’s very deliberately not that much confidence, not that way.

It starts a BIT with realizing in Lords and Ladies that she read the signs completely wrong; but it really starts with Agnes|Perdita in Maskerade (I don’t have my copy with me so I won’t try Word for Word quote but there are multiple points where Agnes’ repeated rejection hits RIGHT at home, demonstrated by Granny’s very awkward attempt to connect at the end while digging her new outhouse and her outright invitation of Agnes into the coven) and then gets hit hard both by her own near catastrophic mistake of Stumping Off instead of unbending enough to ASK ANYONE including people who REPEATEDLY RISKED THEIR LIVES ON HER BEHALF, if maybe, just maybe, something unexpected happened to her invitation, and then REALLY hard by Oats. Repeatedly.

Which I’ve found people often miss about Carpe Jugulum: yes, absolutely, Oats learns lots from Granny. But he also builds the ABSOLUTE clearest picture of her as a PERSON, and scores several HARSH hits and just lets her stew with them.

And without him she would NOT have succeeded, and she knows it, and he also absolutely lets her go on presenting herself as invincible and that’s LETTING her, very much, and she knows that too.

That’s why she sends everyone to his service at the end.

And then you see it Most with Tiffany and most importantly with the way that Esmerelda Weatherwax goes out of her way to make sure that Tiffany DOESN’T end up like her.

The way she basically THROWS Tiff at other witches her own age to bond with and at multiple teachers and the way that she notes that Granny Aching was wise enough to not be a witch— Which is to say, not to be LIKE GRANNY.

Alone and frankly often very scared — not of the monsters, but of herself and of BEING alone, being truly unwanted, of the niggling uncertainty of whether all the work she’s done on their behalf IS enough to make up for the fact that honestly she’s often a hurtful bitch to those around her in ways that are unnecessary and counterproductive —even to her own goals.

And it’s in the way the narrative lets Tiffany SEE her. In how the narrative let’s Tiffany see that she’s afraid and alone and to give her a cat, and a beautiful midnight cloak.

It’s an interesting narrative transition and it’s actually one Pterry didn’t manage to do with Gytha; her massive flaws (she’s actively emotionally abusive of her daughters in law, at the least NEGLECTFUL of her own daughters and I have many other bones to pick with Gytha Ogg*) remain unexamined while being wincingly there on the page. But with Granny there’s a clear realization that the biggest risk, the thing that puts her in most danger of going Badly Wrong, isn’t actually her power, it’s the walls she puts up around her fear and the acid of it that undermines her foundations, that arise from holding herself apart from people, better than, and how that shifts but can only shift so far so that she figures out that now she’s found the next “her” it’s probably best to, you know. Not do that again.

Like Obi-Wan and Jango fett imo.

I don't want them to turn into a happy couple together, I want Obi-Wan bagging himself an unwanted booty call after a one-night stand when he was 19 and Jango was 28 because Quinlan wanted to help Obi pop his cherry. I want Obi-Wan to figure out that he has a thing for older men afterwards and keeps coming back to Jango because shittt the dude might be a bastard but he's got stubble and Obi-Wan loves kissing him because of how it feels. I want Jango to hit him up while he's on a Jedi mission with Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, 22 years old and realizing he might have fucked up in turning the hookup into a regular thing, having to decline but dodge the reason why bcuz it's an important mission and he can't give away any details. It's crucial that Jango doesn't know he's a Jedi at this point. I want the Naboo crisis to happen and Jango sees Obi-wan on Tatooine and they end up doing it on the side of the Mos Espa wall and captain Typho sees it happening. I need Jango to be a constant in Anakin's padawanship because Obi-Wan is grieving and needs an outlet so Jango kinda becomes "That weird guy who's got bad vibes but he makes Obi-Wan happy." Would this turn into a fix-it? I dunno. I need Jango at some point to find out about Obi-Wan being a Jedi and at first being horrified and disgusted but returning to Obi-Wan because it's just become a habit atp. They need each other for pleasure but in all other metrics they hate each other. at one point, be it a Jango survives AU or a plot pre-Clone wars Jango needs to be the linchpin in how Obi-wan gets a mission done but when everybody asks how they're familiar with each other they both look at each other and cringe.

are they gone? okay. you are a knight and i am your childhood friend but the key point is we've been in love for years and years and years and every time you come back from a quest i'm there.

and every time, i wipe the blood from your face and bandage your wounds, and you catch my hand and press it harder over the cloth, and it hurts you but it feels good, too, because it's my hand that's doing it, and because of this quiet unspoken thing between us that will never be because of the oaths you've made to others.

and then one day an enemy of yours tracks me down and i am your one weakness, and you came back to the quiet village and i am not there, and the houses are burning, and you raze every inch of ground between us

but it's a trap (obviously it's a trap) and you are caught and i am there, and your enemy vows to destroy your world as you have destroyed his (and this is how i find out that you are not the good person i thought you were) (and how i find out that i don't care, i'll have you anyway, if we survive this thing)

and then while you are restrained your enemy hurts me just to see you scream, and i won't beg even though nothing has ever hurt this bad, and you are raging against your chains, with this look in your eye that's fear, not rage, because for all your vows i am the only thing you love.

and then you get free and you kill him and you toss his body aside like it doesn't even matter (because it doesn't, only i matter, i am the only thing in the world) and you undo my bindings with shaking hands and you say damn my oaths, i will slay a thousand kings if you ask it of me, and i smile finally with blood on my teeth and you kiss me