~Memento Mori~

Instead of a cutesie reference to film censorship it was an explicit statement of defiance of Maryland's criminalization gay sex, which was not repealed until 2002. This wasn't a guy saying "Oh they can't put what I do in the movies according to a completely voluntary industry code" he was saying "The State of Maryland wants to put me in jail for being gay and having gay sex."

Gay people are INCREDIBLY ANNOYING for production when they are on reality shows cause they always do shit like this. Reality shows pick their cast specifically for people who will create drama, so it tracks that bringing in some gay people (in the era that I worked, 2013-2018, this was considered to be new and interesting) would diversify people enough to create some conflict. To a degree, this was true.

But what actually happened was that the gay person, or worse, people, would end up estranged from the other people because Straight People Who Are Fucking Nuts in a way that would be ideal for a reality show are very different from Gay People Who Are Fucking Nuts.

There's one particular instance I remember in which our Gay Person tm wasn't getting into drama and no one could figure out why. Any time anything happened it would just defuse almost instantly. Eventually we prodded during a solo interview and one of the guys said something along the lines of "Mayn gay marriage just got legalized n shit if I yell at this guy I'm being a homophobe". This meant that our gay was COASTING along in this reality show cause no one would vote him out!!

But you know what the PINNACLE of this was?

DATING SHOWS.

One... Very popular dating show I worked on (you know the one) has an unofficial, unwritten rule: you can only have 1 queer woman in the cast of ladies. This is because for a solid few years, if ever there were two bisexual women in the show, they would ALWAYS abandon the man and run off together instead. You can't have contestants saying shit like "this guy has no personality and sucks ass. I prefer this girl I met who actually listens to me". Like this was an actual epidemic in the casting. It happened over and over for YEARS and they couldn't find a way to stop it without literally separating the women from each other, which obviously wouldn't be good for the show. They also couldn't show this was happening because that. Uh. Would be pretty bad to reveal to audiences.

Eventually they just decided to subtly prod and see if women who were going on the show were gay and then avoid having two on the same season at the same time. To my knowledge they still do it this way.

shen doesnt say it harms him in anyway, but people are still using this as proof its wrong. "afaik" means he is not even discounting the possibility of his understanding of himself changing.

“It’s not about the Cheerios.”

This was in reference to a story about a kid flipping the HELL out into a full-blown panic about running out of their favorite cereal. Not a tantrum, not a whine-fest, but an all-hands-on-deck, code-red, world-is-ending blowup.

The kid had originally come from a very unstable situation and experienced food deprivation. The new adoptive parents were stumped, because look at all the other food! You’re safe! We can get the Cheerios tomorrow!

But it wasn’t really about the Cheerios, it was about that first flicker of unease triggering all the old trauma. From the outside, it looked ridiculous. To the trauma-trained reaction of the kid’s brain, it made perfect sense.

Human brains are weird, and we’re all out here trying to survive. Sometimes our brains do this in socially acceptable, convenient ways. But not often.