Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

The one thing about discord that I wish I could get on Signal is different names for different group chats. I'm the only Firstname Lastname LinkedIn-sona in this new trans group I've joined; everyone else has a single lowercase noun for a name, like a normal person.

I hosted a hybrid meeting today, and when D asked who was coming, the names I gave him were one animal, two vegetable, and one mineral.

Lovely to have a friend who can suddenly visit this weekend, lovely that part of the visit planning, right up there with the postcode and parking arrangements, are covid safety negotiations and pronoun checks.

Such things feel so cozy and make me feel really cared-for.

We made mini-zines at queer club tonight.

Someone else made a zine by asking everyone what they wanted to ask Father Christmas to bring them, "selfish wishes only."

D said he wanted structured cabling. I said I wanted a trip on one of the sleeper trains across North America.

Everyone's wish got put in with their first name and their age.

The person working on it said it's good to lean in to childish joy, and I think that is wisdom indeed.

D said he didn't have anything to make a zine about and then made a great zine about how his brain works, and I love his brain (except when it's being a jerk to him) so I was totally charmed by it.

Mine is actually about death (the thing I most associate November with, so it's called Fuck November), and transphobia because I'm a big grump lately. But it's also about love and community because these are part of death too. On the back cover, I wrote "We are only so sad that you are gone because we were so happy that you were here.", something that still makes me think of my brother first but also now so many other people, most recently a teenage trans activist that was known to people I know. On the inside of the zine I wrote something that I think they said (and if not them another member of their movement):

trans community is real, and it is strong, and it’s powerful, and we aren’t going away no matter how much it may feel - at least it feels to me - like the government wants to pretend we aren’t real, to pretend we don’t really exist, we’re just a tiny tiny group they can just tuck in the back of their minds. We’re here. We’re showing up. We’re strong. There are so many of us. It is incredible just in this week how many other trans people of all ages I’ve met. I never been around a trans community like this before.”

“It’s horrible that we have to do this but at the same time it’s been filled with rage and love. Rage at the people who try to do this to us but love for the people around us who are part of our community and are going to make sure that we keep going.”

D was teasing me on our way to see the Lil Nas X documentary this evening that the attempts to include other people in the outing had failed (P's coming down with something, V had a bad night and it'd mean leaving Gary alone until his bedtime which is unfair on the little doofus) so it was just us two.

"Oh no, the worst," I said, because this is what we always say to each other at the prospect of the other's company.

But it gave him a chance to tell me he'd booked a two-seater sofa as our cinema tickets, "so we can snuggle." And we did!

Afterwards we went to eat and had some Wagamama-fancy cocktails (I really liked my "pad thai sour," rum, passionfruit, lemongrass, lime, and tamarind), nice salads, chili mushrooms, and "Korean vegan corn dogs," which were veggie dogs with crispy noodle crumb where the, uh, corn would be. Drizzled with red sriracha and some kind of yellow turmeric-y sauce, they looked exactly like they would with ketchup and mustard which was amusing.

We had a very nice server but when we asked to pay the bill another member of staff came out and she chatted to us while I was failing to work the card machine (sorry nice dude, you deserved a tip, I just fucked it up!) about Pride and similar. She went back inside and we got ourselves and our stuff ready to go. And then she came back outside with a tote bag for each of us, Pride-related things that Wagamama give out in some kind of event -- she said she has the tote bag for International Women's Day and all sorts. She also said they're normally just for staff! I don't know what compelled her to share them with us like that on such short and mundane acquaintance, but we were both delighted and touched at the gesture.

As we were leaving, I said that between this and Lil Nas X I felt like I'd done enough (Manchester) Pride-related stuff already. And since it was sorta accidentally a date-like activity, that fit too.

"What a nice day it's been," I mused as we held hands and strolled through the sunset towards a pub we'd decided to go to.

"What a nice gay," D said.

We walked through Lincoln Square and he said "Gaybraham Lincoln."

We had our pints under cover, and after we'd been summoned home by reports of a dog who'd been very good but now that it was getting to bedtime he was wound up, we suddenly could hear rain pelting down just as we were having to contemplate going to the bus stop.

As we stood up and prepared ourselves for the deluge, the rain stopped!

We figured this was just another part of our charmed gay evening. "After we've had our pint of gayle [gay ale]," D said, "and...la-gay..."

It was a nice gay.

In the spirit of trying to write something that doesn't need to be locked or cut-tagged... (things that are fine to do but for me a sign that I'm Not Doing Well and I don't know if the entire 22-year history of my journal has had such a string of locked and cut-tagged entries as I've needed this week!)

Today I. ade plans to go with a workmate to Sparkle Weekend, a trans event, tomorrow.

"Are you gonna get dressed up or anything?" they asked.

Thinking I still don't have any snarky trans t-shirts like my bi one (it says "if I wanted to pass for monosexual, I would've worn a different shirt" over a bi flag), and also thinking we'll be coming from the dog photography place beforehand which is a weirdly cishet hegemonic context: "Nah. But don't let that stop you from dressing up like a vampirate."

They told me their style is vampire pirate! So of course I'm calling them a vampirate now! Surely this isn't an original coinage but it's new to them and it always seems to throw them and make them laugh.

They're like half my age so I'm glad I can bring this goofy-uncle energy to our friendship.

A friend -- who, perfectly, is in Minnesota and named Pine -- shared an article yesterday about the 20-year history of Pride in Pine City, population 3,000, and the surrounding rural area.

Having just made a snide comment earlier that day to a trans friend traveling through what she called "the corn-producing parts of this country," I was properly chagrined because, though she does get looks there and shit can still be real bad, it isn't always and everywhere.

Pine City's 20th pride is in fact celebrating the fifth anniversary of its earlier gay men's group. The Strib article describes this via one of its founding members, Don Quaintance, an 83-year-old navy veteran who

grew up in rural Iowa and lived in Minneapolis in the 1960s before moving to Isanti [this is in east central Minnesota]. After his partner died in 1997, Quaintance began volunteering with the Rural AIDS Action Network. That led him and four friends to found a support and community group for gay men in the area, called East Central Minnesota Men's Circle. They began meeting in 2000, often gathering at Tobies restaurant in Hinckley.

I would love to talk to Don. There's a photo of five older white men, who I don't know but who I feel like I do. I know the coffee cups and napkin dispensers in this Hinckley restaurant, I know the kinds of department stores their clothes will have come from. And yet they're gay! And they're all older than me! Intellectually I know that We're Everywhere but seeing this photo still has a big emotional impact on me.

I have heard a lot about AIDS advocacy but in New York and similar cities. I'm just now hearing about the Rural AIDS Action Network, which still exists and still is explicitly helping Minnesotans outside the Twin Cities metro area.

Anyway, after five years, the group wanted to celebrate having lasted that long, so they planned a picnic in a park -- a suitably subdued celebration for a group that has to call itself a Men's Circle.

The men's circle founders worked to put it all together, creating a flyer to distribute in the five-county area that read: "This invitation goes out to all GLBT people in the community. PFLAG, Rainbow families as well as friends and family. Be proud of who you are!"

"Randy [Olson] supplied most of the food: Hamburgers, hot dogs, potato salad and some bars."

The language is a time capsule -- yes, it was "GLBT" when I went to college and even when I first moved to the UK, when that was a shibboleth for telling USian queer stuff from UK queer stuff which was already "LGBT"; and you don't hear about "PFLAG" as a kind of person any more now that, hopefully, it's more expected that people have family who are queer (and maybe something other than Lesbians And Gays" which is of course the second half of that acronym) -- and also so Minnesotan: of course the food was organized by someone called Randy Olson, of course it was hamburgers, hot dogs, potato salad and bars. Sentences like this are so evocative of my upbringing, and the accident of me having moved away from Minnesota just as I started to be able to Be Queer mean I sometimes forget they can co-exist: of course you can be queer and bring bars to pride in the park. But it's good for me to be reminded of this.

Other Minnesotan things here:

As the third annual East Central Minnesota Pride approached in 2007, organizers created a flyer reading "It's Okay to be Gay in Pine City" that showed the town's landmark 35-foot wooden voyageur statue "Francois" wearing a hot pink feather boa.

As the state debated same-sex marriage [in 2012], the event flyer featured a voyageur canoe with the words "Just Married" on the side.

In recent years, the local brewery, Three Twenty Brewing Co., created rainbow T-shirts and Froggy's Bar & Grill started hosting post-picnic drag shows.

I normally dislike drag but I want to go see the drag show at Froggy's Bar & Grill so bad now.

And then at the end, a thing that made me cry:

When East Central Minnesota Pride's giant banner first hung above Main Street in 2015, the planning committee got an e-mail from a closeted teenager who was visiting grandparents in the area.

"I just wanted to say thank you," the kid wrote. "On behalf of so many closeted teens, the downtown banner is so epic and eye catching, we drive underneath it all the time, and I can't help but grin."

I wasn't even a closeted kid because I didn't know enough to be but I still feel for that kid. It was really moving for me to read the article's quick history of Minnesota Prides:

A few other Minnesota cities created events in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Rochester in 1998 and Mankato in 2002...The idea of rural Prides, however, has taken off in recent years. A former Pine City resident started Lake Pepin Pride in tiny Stockholm, Wis., in 2021, and there now are Pride events in Minnesota towns including Fergus Falls, Virginia and Marshall.

Except for Stockholm (I think I've seen other parts of Lake Pepin, though), those are all towns I've been to. Some fleetingly, some frequently, but I can picture them all and I can imagine the effect it might have had on me if there had been these pride festivals when I was there: when I was a bored kid being dragged around the mall, when I was a terrified kid being subjected to the Mayo Clinic, when I was a college kid who went on road trips to Fergus Falls (I think that was when J got a flat tire?? so many adventures), when I visited a college friend near Virginia on the Iron Range...

I really want to go to a rural Minnesotan Pride now.

Today I re-purposed an old thing I wrote about the similarities in being bi and partially sighted, so it can get shared around my workplace by the LGBT+ staff network.

When I first wrote this, eight or nine years ago, to be included in a chapter about disability of a book about bisexuality in Britain, we were increasingly calling it Bi Visibility Day instead of the name I'd first learned: International Celebrate Bisexuality Day. Now we get a whole week!

But otherwise I prefer the old name. The jokes about visibility or awareness are inevitable. I'm starting to want to hearken back to the old ways and ask for celebration rather than either visibility or awareness.

The other day, diffrentcolours spotted something happening as part of the Manchester International Festival that he thought might be relevant to us: a stage show called The Faggots and Their Friends Between the Revolutions.

Described by Artforum as a "fairytale-cum-manifesto", The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions is a series of allegorical vignettes set in the declining empire of Ramrod, ruled by "the men" (patriarchal society) under the rule of Warren-And-His-Fuckpole, while the eponymous "faggots" (gay men) live communally, produce art, have sex, and await the next revolution. Their "friends" include the "strong women" (feminists), the "queens" (drag queens), the "women who love women" (lesbians), and the "faeries" (the Radical Faeries), among others. Distinct from the faggots are the "queer men" – gay men who are closeted, or who have assimilated into patriarchal society. The novel is primarily non-narrative, and is composed largely of a combination of single-page episodes, polemic writing, and aphorisms.

I was surprised because I'd only heard the words of this title in this order a few days earlier: a friend who works in a library in another country said he wasn't content with having read this book from there and now wants his own copy. This was enough to be intriguing, and I was also keen to finally go to an audio-described live performance, so he and I got tickets and went this afternoon (sadly mother_bones wasn't well enough to join us).

It was amazing.

I wasn't expecting it to be so musical! It was through-composed -- everything was sung (in a very 20th-century style, and the queer politics felt very 20th-century to me too), and not fitting the patterns of melody or chord progressions in the sense that such things are typically understood by people who listen to pop or blues or showtunes or whatever.

It leaves you -- well, me anyway -- without specific musical memories: no tunes you're humming or earworms stuck in your head, just more nebulous feelings. D said it felt "joyous, liberating, magickal and interactive, we all got to have a sing song."

I don't know if the interactive part was specific to this performance, because one of the cast members who told us about the rules of this relaxed performance told us she'd check on us halfway through (there was no intermission), when she did so told us we should learn the song. Even as we were learning it, it was difficult to keep track of the melody and timing of the words. Even as she was teaching it, she forgot a line or two in the middle.

One of the most delightful things for me about the whole performance was that I could hear the person doing the audio description say "I think she has missed a line" in confirmation after the performer said "uh, I think I forgot a line when I was teaching you this song..." Also I could occasionally hear bits of the audio description person singing along with the rest of us. I loved that.

The many performers sang and danced and played an impressive array of instruments: not just hints like violin and flute and piano but harpsichord and viola de gamba. This musical diversity was matched by other kinds of visible diversity in race and gender presentations (including fabulous costume changes).

We chose this over yesterday's performance because today had audio description. For which I was incredibly grateful because I would've missed so much without it that I wouldn't have had nearly as good a time. It was my first time experiencing audio description at a live event, and I was really curious to see how it worked. A similar experience to the cinema (a wireless headset that's picky about where you sit/how you move your head sometimes) but of course different in other ways: the description has to be done live too, it's not just another audio track like on a movie. The description still fit around the "dialogue" as much as possible as it would in a movie or TV show.

Not that this was a play with dialogue in the usual sense: there weren't characters coming and going and speaking to each other etc. They were more like epic poets, telling us stories, and they were their own Greek chorus too. As well as their own pit orchestra like I've described, and their own choreographed dance troupe.

D and I talked afterward about how the casting must have been very stringent in some ways -- big demands on everyone for singing, dance/movement, playing instruments, etc. -- but could also be very flexible in others: the performers could be of any age, ethnicity, gender, appearance... Indeed there didn't even seem to need to be this particular number of them: you'd want a biggish group but it could easily vary by 5 or 10 and still convey a similarly meaningful performance.

Yet everyone's individuality did matter: Yandas* was a strong and captivating physical presence so she moved around a lot, Dipa* was an operatic singer so used her voice to stunning effect especially when singing words like "faggot" or "fuck" which made people laugh because we aren't used to words like that sounding like they're in an opera. (I understand that opera, like Shakespeare, was popular entertainment in its day, and just treated like impossibly highbrow and inaccessible now, so I thought it was totally appropriate to hear such words given such treatment.)

It was great and I wish more of you could see it. I think a lot of you would like it, but also I just want more people to talk about it with!

*I'm guessing at how these names are spelled by the way; I only heard them in the audio description. It was never even clear to me if they were character names at all, or perhaps the performers' names, because there weren't really characters here. (The flautist was called Eric, and every time the describer said his name I jumped a little, as if I'd been called on in a meeting and wasn't prepared.)

I cannot believe it's time for Eurovision already. I can't believe it's May!

But here we are.

I like the semi-finals at least as much as the final. You always end up seeing great stuff that doesn't go on to the Saturday night! (I felt a little bad for illustrating this for diffrentcolours last year, which I think was the first he watched it: he got very attached to I think it was Lithuania, and then they didn't make it through).

My quick, non-exhaustive notes from tonight might give you an idea of what I enjoyed.

During the intro:

Liverpool is the best city to host this except maybe for Manchester. Because it's so serious about itself as a Musical City. I just can imagine down the other leg of the trousers of time where we're listening to an emotional version of "Sit Down" by James instead. And then New Order in the background for them to talk over...

Malta set the tone early: it was an extremely 80s night. Not many ballads -- a relief after last year!

I actually hoped for a ballad eventually, for a break from the strobey lights (my nystagmus has been bad since Gary woke me up at 5:30 this morning...tiredness usually makes it worse and I guess I just didn't sleep enough to get any of these spoons back last night!). But when I eventually got a proper ballad, even that was strobey!

I did like how sparkly everyone was this year though! And gay. This was even gayer than usual I think.

I complained about the commentary so much that D changed it to the Radio 2 version. Still a white guy, but at least not Scott Mills! It actually came in handy, because someone narrating Eurovision for a radio audience is basically providing audio description. Still boringly hegemonic, and trying too hard for the sarcasm that Terry Wogan was so good at but drifting too often into just meanness. But it sure came in handy for Finland, which was so flashy I literally couldn't see what was going on. J added to the audio description too: there were apparently other dancers, in pink, something about ribbons on the crate...so not just the regular guy and the big Godzilla projection of him that I knew about.

I just wrote "heck yeah Czechia!" for them. Easily my favorite of the night.

During the touching Ukrainian performance while people were voting, J said "I've been spending too much time on Grindr..." The screen was showing a graphic of text messages as they appear on a phone, on a black background with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, blue and yellow...which is also the color scheme Grindr uses. Hearing that they were sweet messages of someone texting their mother ("I miss you," "I hope you're okay" kind of stuff) made him feel guilty for the comparison, heh.

I knew Paul O'Grady as an older radio personality, not so different from some others not so different to the voices I heard from people I might eavesdrop on or tangentially chat to on a night out in the Village. Here's some of a thread I saw on Mastodon.

So it's nice to hear some more stories and get some context, even if it is on the sad occasion of his death.

In 1987, The Metropolitan Police are waging an intimidation campaign against queer people.

Wearing rubber gloves to "protect from AIDS" they raid the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

"Well well," says Lily Savage (Paul O'Grady) from the stage as the police pile into the venue. "It looks like we’ve got help with the washing up."

Arrested with many others, when she was booked in and ordered to give her name, the answer was "Lily Savage." When a REAL name was demanded, the reply was: "Lily Veronica Mae Savage."

On release, Lily was back on stage the next night.

I don't think it can be overstated just how HUGE an impact Paul O'Grady had on people like my parents. As the press, police and politicians waged a war on the LGBTQ+ community and stoked AIDS fear, Lily Savage was on TV making them laugh, and showing them that these were real people. People they didn't need to fear.

in the 80s and 90s the LGBTQ+ community was fighting a war on multiple fronts - against violence AND public perception. There are few people who can claim they fought on both. Paul O'Grady was one of them.