buried alive inside my dreams

Gay and lesbian liberation take a break in the sun, New York City, June 24, 1979. 

passively suicidal

premature ejaculation

erectile dysfunction

vaginismus

cries during sex

cries after sex

hates sex

actively suicidal

In the scene where Smoke teaches the young girl how to negotiate, they're standing in front of of a cafe. The shot of them negotiating is framed so that you see a sign in the cafe window advertising a Ham and Eggs breakfast - in other words, a full meal - for 25 cents. The editing makes sure to put that sign back into frame whenever the question of the value of money arises in their discussion.

Smoke offers her 10 cents a minute and asks if that works for her. She says yes. He says no, it does not and tells her to negotiate higher. The 25 cent sign is framed in the shot when he tells her no, reminding us *why* it's not a good value.

She comes back with 50 cents - which the sign has informed us is the cost of *two* meals. Smoke tells her that's too much and counters with 20, which is just under a full meal but we now know that's a fairly respectable price because we just got the high/low contrast of 10 being too little and 50 being too much.

The negotiation ends with her getting 20 cents per minute and we now know 1) 25 cents is the cost of a filling meal in this environment 2) This girl only needs to do five minutes of work to be able to feed herself for a over day (20 cents per minute times five is a dollar, which is four meals) 3) Smoke has the kind of money to throw around that over a day's worth of food for someone can be to him - as it is to our modern eyes - mere pocket change and 4) Smoke's the kind of person who can both be a violent gangster but also care about teaching this girl how to look out for herself so that one day maybe she too can throw over a day's worth of food around like pocket change.

Combined with 5) you can now use that 25 cents = a meal to do the math every other time money gets mentioned in the movie to understand just how much cash the Smoke Stack boys are dealing with.

Try your best and if someone points out something bigoted you did by accident, take the time to process that and if you determine that you did in fact fuck up then apologize if necessary and don’t do it again.

If everyone lived in fear of offending people we wouldn’t have art and a world without art would be a pretty boring place. At a certain point you just need to get over yourself. You’re not uniquely terrible in comparison to every writer that has ever lived.

In order to put yourself out there you’ve gotta grow a bit of an ego. That doesn’t mean you have to like yourself. It means you’ve gotta have the audacity to think that you’ve got something to say that’s worth listening to. To share your art you’ve gotta be a little full of yourself and also be able to listen to criticism and sort through it and determine which criticism is actually useful.