sundries

Op-Art from the New York Times on DADT. Make yourself read the tiny type if you can (or check out this transcript in comments), as it is largely an interview with two gay WWII vets. Among other things they have to say? "If you become totally accepted there is a loss." Go now, people. via brewsternorth on Twitter.

US Special Operations dug bullets out of the bodies of three women they killed during a bungled raid in Afghanistan to hide the nature of their deaths.

First ever ads targeting queer households about sending in the census form.

So last night, Patty and I are in bed, and she tries to shift and she can't 'cause we're sorta tangled up and I make an interrogative noise at her and she says, "I can't move because of that thing."

"What thing?" I ask.

"The thing that the astronauts don't have."

Now, eventually I figured out what word she meant, but my first response was "gravity?"

Would you not have been equally puzzled?

Lately, I've repeatedly been in the situation of people asking me what the Bristol paper is about, and I tell them, and then, the people I am talking to get very angry. Not because they are fans with opinions about character deaths in general or specific but because "HOW DARE PEOPLE FEEL THIS WAY OVER STORIES" and it becomes this deeply uncomfortable moment for me, that then tends to spiral, wherein the people say to me, "so you're psychoanalyzing what's wrong with them?"

"No, no," I reply, "I'm looking at the narrative structures and character traits that make these losses so tangible and more tangible compared to the deaths of other fictional characters."

"But what about real dead people?"

"It's not about them."

It's SO AWKWARD. I'm writing about a thing, that happens. It's not a good thing or a bad thing. It just a thing. And it's not a freakish thing or a terrible thing. It's a very human thing. We tell stories. We feel them. And we commemorate what is absent (and in the case of fiction what has always been absent from us) as best we can. Why can't people be okay with that?

Also, without fail, those people ascribe this to being a uniquely modern "problem." You know, one of those things Internet or television made. And it's not.

By a week from now I'll probably have seen the Mermaid Quay display for myself, and I would be lying to you if I didn't say I'm a little afraid of it -- whether that means being moved by it, or, somehow, feeling nothing despite all the ways I've been walking around with this thing for, what, nine months now?

Angel and Buffy watch: 1.17 "Eternity" and 4.15 "This Year's Girl" ( Read more... )