#adreadfulidea

Thank you! Sorry I took a few days to reply - school and the kitten keeping me awake and also an unhealthy addiction to the Witcher 3 have been keeping me offline. I’ve been falling down on the job of writing it, partially because I just have all of these random bits and I’m struggling to get a coherent timeline knocked out. But I’m really hoping to have an actual chapter done and postable by the end of the long weekend.

i don’t mind admitting that your reply made me laugh WAY too hard

it’s definitely a possibility! d’amato was the acting head of the decavalcantes, which is based in north jersey, so it’s not completely out of nyc’s sphere of influence, but it’s certainly not an epicenter of queer activity the way nyc historically has been. my gut impulse is that location was slightly less deterministic of response than time period—partially because the given reason for d’amato’s murder was “we can’t have a queer guy representing us in front of the new york family heads, we won’t be taken seriously,” plus there was no punishment from the new york families meted out to the decavalcantes for unilaterally murdering an acting boss without bringing it up for a vote, which is supposedly what anyone wanting a boss killed were SUPPOSED to do, which makes me think there was at least implied rejection of queerness even from the new york bosses in the d’amato case—but obviously queer acceptance in new york in the 20s was higher than queer acceptance in almost anywhere else in the country at the same time, and considering that the village is right next to the lower east side/little italy and was already established as a queer enclave by the 20s, it’s pretty likely the proximity influenced gangsters who considered that their home base, especially the ones that emigrated before their teens and grew up in manhattan

How do I *heart eyes emoji* in real life?

Anachronistic Starbucks-orders-wise... this is so hard for me because I don’t drink coffee, so I only know Starbucks’ teas.  Hickey shows up with a trenta cup of cold brew with cream but no sugar, then runs around on the glaciers and the shale fields and things shouting about his own divinity. 

This fic was pretty much entirely dictated by A. Lynn Martin’s book Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the Sixteenth Century, both in its epistolary format as a riff on the journalistic framing of the original short story and in some of the specifics like the quarantine measures and the narrator’s reflexive religious hedgings. Martin’s book is a better Early Modern science fiction horror story than anything I could write, though. 

Basically it's really fun if you like your weird angry midcentury gay shit with a lot of stuff about class and power in it, or if you like your gloomy meditation on class and power to be full of fraught weird sexuality going every which way. It reminds me a lot of plays adapted to the screen like Ira Levin’s Deathtrap (1982) but as far as I know it was adapted right from novella to film, and it has a really cockeyed sense of humor that gives it a low-key Hitchcock vibe almost. I’m so mad the fantasized Criterion Collection edition the folks at Make Mine Criterion! came up with doesn’t actually exist. It’s not on streaming anywhere from what I can tell, but I hope some place will pick it up.