Horatio For King

The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.”  Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index.  Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5]  In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s.  Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco.  Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20th century.

from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html

Interview with the Vampire ★ The Vampire Lestat 2x04 "I Want You More Than Anything in the World" 3x02 "Toledo"

Nick Barlow, Clusterfuck/Keep It Together, 2022

This isn't inherently because it's disrespectul to my job, though it is and us caregivers do SO much more than that; we're taking care of people. That's 10% or less of the job.

It's the genuine DISRESPECT of my clients that bother me.

Do NOT speak about my client like they're a dog. "Do you wipe ass for a living?" You could not have phrased that in a more insensitive, ableist, and dehumanizing way.

Incontenience care is NORMAL.

It is NOT gross, weird, immature, or anything else besides normal.

My clients have felt ashamed for normal things like needing their briefs changed or having to do toiletry and everytime I reassure them they're completely fine and not doing anything wrong. It breaks my heart to see them so embarassed over a normal bodily function, esepcially when they still feel so even though I signed up to do this.

Maybe the elderly or disabled wouldn't be so ashamed of basic things that ARE normal if people didn't make it sound like it was the most absurd, repulsive, and gross thing ever.

Please be mature. If you are an adult and cannot comprehend someone needing toilet assistance without making it weird or sound gross, then you really really need to grow up.

I don't really like making aggressive sounding posts or scolding posts, because every single person is learning and we all make mistakes, but gosh guys, this really bothers me.

You could do a root-cause analysis of the whole thing (and we have) to really break down what happened, but ultimately the effect was the same as if the neglect had been malicious. I'm sympathetic to the husband, as were a lot of people in this situation, because, yes, hospital staff dropped the ball in a way that meant the patient was in unnecessary pain and discomfort with delay of care for over a day, despite multiple requests from patient and family to address the situation. The husband reacted emotionally to a situation where he'd felt helpless and ignored. Institutional neglect ground away at him until he verbally snapped.

And the way he snapped was to tell staff, "I'm going to come back with a gun and shoot you all for what you've done." Which is about as explicit a threat as you can get. Does he get to keep visiting the hospital after that? How do we be fair to him, to the patient, and to the staff? He probably didn't mean it. Right? But how do you ignore a statement like that? If he does come back and commit a shooting, how will you justify ignoring his threat? But does one sentence said at an emotional breaking point define him? How much more traumatic are we going to make this hospital stay?

A couple years back, I worked on a floor a few hours after a patient had been escorted away for inappropriate behavior--by the way, you can't imagine how inappropriate the behavior has to be for us to do that. I have never seen another case like this. That patient said he was going to come back with a gun and shoot nurses that he identified by name. This didn't come to pass. Whether that was because the patient didn't mean it or changed his mind or was prevented or simply was not mentally coordinated enough to follow through on the plan, I don't know. I do know that shift fucking sucked. I remember the charge nurse telling me that it wasn't our jobs to die for our patients. If there was shooting, she told me to run.

There was another situation recently involving a patient in restraints. I despise restraints. I think the closest legitimate use for them is in ICUs for stopping delirious patients from ripping out their ventilators, and that should still be a last resort. I discontinue restraints whenever I inherit them, and I am very good at fixing problems before restraint seem like the only solution. Having said that, I work in a hospital that uses restraints, and so I am complicit in their use. Recently I walked into a situation involving restraints with zero context for what was happening, just that there was a security situation involving a patient who had been deemed for some reason to lack capacity to make medical decisions. They were on a court hold and a surrogate med override, which means they cannot refuse certain medications. The whole situation was horrible, and I've spent the days since it happened thinking about every way I personally failed that patient and what to do different next time.

At one point, the patient called one of the nurses a bitch, and the nurse said, "hey cmon, that's not nice," and the patient replied, "if you were in hell, would you call the devil a nice name?" And yeah! Fair! It is insane to expect people who are actively being denied their autonomy to be polite to us as we do it.

Then there was another patient on the behavioral health floor who got put in seclusion. It's so frustrating, by the way, that staff put them in seclusion because it would have been extremely easy to avoid escalating the situation to the point that it got to. But the situation did escalate, and by the time the patient was locked in a seclusion room, they were shouting slurs and kicking the walls. Other patients were scared of the patient even when they were calm because the patient talked endlessly about guns, poisons, bombs, etc. When I checked in with the patient in the seclusion room, they called me a cog in a fascist machine just following orders. And I was like, yeah. Fair.

Another patient: one night when I was charge nurse, I replied to a security situation where a patient trapped a staff member in the room and tried to choke her. The staff member escaped unharmed. She told me later that the patient had been verbally aggressive to her all day, but she hadn't told anyone because she knew he was having a bad day, she didn't want to get him in trouble, and she didn't think anything was actually going to happen. She said, "Patients are mean all the time."

And another case: I had a different patient with the ultimate combination of factors for violent agitation--confused, needed a translator, was hard of hearing so the translator was of little use, in pain, feverish, scared, withdrawing from alcohol, hadn't slept in two days, separated from his caregiver who had also just been hospitalized--the whole shebang. He shouted at us that we were human trafficking him and could not be reoriented to where he actually was or that he was sick. I tried all my usual methods of deescalation, which I am typically very good at. I could not get him to calm down. He had a hospital bed where the headboard pulls out so you can use it as a brace during compressions. He ripped that out and threw it at the window, trying to shatter the glass. At that point, with the permission of his medical surrogate and with help from security, I forcibly gave him IV medication for agitation and withdrawal. He slept all night with a sitter at his bedside to monitor him. I pondered when medication passed over the line into chemical restraint, but I stand by the decisions I made that shift.

Last one: I had a different patient who was dying who had a child with a warrant out for arrest. We didn't know for what, and no one investigated further because no one wanted to find out anything that might prevent this person from visiting his dying parent. Obviously, "warrant for arrest" could mean literally anything, although it was significant enough that security was aware of the situation and wanted us aware as well, but I was struck by how proactively the staff protected his visitation rights and extended him grace. Everyone was very aware of how easily the wrong word could start a process that would result in a parent and child losing the chance to say goodbye to each other.

In the case of the husband who threatened a mass shooting, you'd be surprised how many of the staff advocated for him to keep all visitation rights. After all, the patient wanted him there.

One, the onus for breaking the cycles of violence is on the healthcare system. We hold almost all of the cards, we have the institutional power, we are the ones that get to go home at the end of the day, we are the ones interacting with difficult situations but not LIVING with them. Moral injury, moral distress, compassion fatigue, second victim syndrome—these are all very real and very painful experiences. But the answer to them cannot be embracing callousness and passivity.

Do you feel a bit like whatever the show is doing with G is being buried under everyone's expectations for what a female-mother-vampire character should be? (We need Akasha and other women stat... )

Like with the club scene, I'm not 100% sure yet what's the what, but I can't imagine they have G kissing a woman just to pander to the male audience gaze (I feel like G would be styled more form-fitting/revealing if that was the aim of the scene? Egg on my face if I'm wrong in the end).

I mean /I'm/ also biased because I want it to be a nod also to the 70s lesbian vampire films, so I'm not one to talk (I want a queer female vampire 😅), but I feel like many people are eager for a reason to not think deeply about her unless she's doing exactly what they want on screen.

Again, maybe I'll be wrong and it's all shallow and 2-D...but I'm holding on til ep 7. She's somehow too obscene and too tame at the same time...which makes me feel like nobody wants to crack her open and see what ticks.

Do you have any thoughts about Gabi and gender?

God I have so much to say because there are so many different aspects to the reaction to Gabi.

I'm honestly like... so shocked that I'm in the minority of people who really love what the show is doing with Gabi so far. I watched episode 2 and was so excited to see what everyone had to say about Gabi but I guess for a moment I lived in a world where misogyny didn't exist or something. Insert "'we need more complex female characters' you can't even handle Gabrielle" meme here.

And yeah I do think a lot of fandom perception is being heavily scewed by disgust. And I don't mean disgust at incest in general (which is absolutely valid and is the intended response), I mean specific disgust at incest and incestuous abuse from a mother.