making our way back: reclaiming queer space in the SPRING of 2021//LGBTQIA+ Vaccine ed.

Congrats on the vaccine, also I’m glad you are navigating your breakup in the best possible way

Hi! Work has been so busy. Stevie if I didn’t already say so congratulations!!! So exciting. Did you get your haircut

News on my front is that this guy who I had one wild night with years ago found me on grindr and asked me out. This is coming at an epic dry spell so feeling slightly excited

Surm!!! I was thinking of you the other day, specifically about how rigatoni was once your fav pasta shape and how I think I started buying rigatoni bcz of you, and whether or not it was still your favorite pasta shape.

I tried to book a haircut with the barber I saw last time but he's unavailable for A MONTH, and I can't decide if I should book a spot with the local "alternative salon" in my neighborhood that I've had great success with, or just buzz it and figure out how to make sideburns work with a buzz cut.

actually the salon is v good at dyeing and I could get a haircut + dye my hair in some fashion, which I've never done at an establishment before????

Oh you definitely have to do that. It’s a life changer. Talk about self-care! If only for the experience.

Also regarding rigatoni, I’ve had to confront this recently. It’s a tossup between spaghetti and rigatoni with spaghetti having with the slight edge. Also trying to get into penne for the first time…
🖤

I've been into bolognese a lot lately, so rigatoni is right up there on my grocery list.

You know, I've never been fond of standard spaghetti. We were an angel hair household growing up but apparently angel hair is unanimously hated??? I still love it though. I've also become quite fond of bucatini, which I imagine, surm, you would love

Angel hair has to be cooked for no more than about 7 seconds for it to be good.

and is imho best served with a v light accompanying sauce, like diced tomatoes and garlic and fresh herbs

i finally acquired the family “gravy” recipe recently and i just about die of pleasure every time i make it

literally hundreds of pasta shapes out there, it’s mind boggling. i had this kind recently from a takeout place near me that were shaped like little envelopes! stuffed with creamy ricotta. bonkers good

I mean, since we're on the topic: POLL: Which is the best basic Italian pasta sauce?

Omg

I mean rigatoni Bolognese is one of my favorite meals literally of all time
Also as you can imagine I have all the thoughs on angel hair and bucca. Love both! But both very fickle. You’re in for a challenge if you fuck with spaghetti.

Angel hair: good in soups

I love pasta talk

Today I got a surprise FaceTime from a man I adore who lives far away with whom I hooked up years ago and he told me he just got vaccinated and wanted to know where I was and he said conspicuously proposition-y things and etc.

We had a moment of fantasizing about driving mopeds around Italy and that was the FaceTime

I will be up to full power in three weeks.

Nice!!!!! Great news

XP, that sounds lovely. I also had a moment of fantasy with a new beau last night and the fantasy took place in Italy ...

There's been a lot of wistful reconnections over the past year! Next week I'm going to Montreal to visit my ex for his birthday, gonna be staying in the house we used to share (and where he still lives)

It is kinda crazy, he and I would've celebrated our 18th anniversary this month had we stayed together. Maybe we'll get back together before our "20th"

trying to figure out why i ever thought lockwood51 was cool. "stay queer as fuck" okkkkk it's not like i have to try???

lol i get sponcon from them on FB a lot and most of it looks pretty bad to me

'sponcon' - a perfect word haha

I only just realized that the inversion of "holy shit" is "shitty hole"

Or maybe devilish douche.

i'm feeling gay today.

i was in the leg equipment section of the gym today and goddamn i have never seen so many rudely staring motherfuckers in my life. like cats eyeing each other.

can i be a little bit insufferably edgy and say that this is like really hot?

Taken in 1967 by Rocco Morabito, this photo called “The Kiss of Life” shows a utility worker named J.D. Thompson giving mouth-to-mouth to co-worker Randall G. Champion after he went unconscious following contact with a low voltage line https://t.co/vW6QidVvA4 pic.twitter.com/6kpu1N6j52

— Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) March 26, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOqxI97CoDM

watched this the other night, a documentary about Glitterbox, which is a clubnight based in Ibiza but travels all over the world. First five mins and last five mins are standard "woo our club is the best" hagiography, and some of the material about the birth of disco and Larry Levan feels too familiar for anyone with a passing interest - but I otherwise really enjoyed this. It's about the dancers and their personal journeys as LGBT+ individuals, and it's got Billy Porter talking about how clubbing saved his life.

Oh cool, thanks for sharing. Saving for later.

That looks amazing

Just put a hefty down payment on my trip to fire Island this summer, I think it’s so weird that I am becoming a fire Island person,
But I am feeling good about it

Appointment with J&J on Thursday

i have some questions about basic suburb gay fashion

does volcom code as gay?
does hurley code as gay?

do they mean gay-but-not-out? gay-but-trying-to-pass?

so y'all gonna require tricks to flash their jab cards before inviting them over

jab card 4 jab ONLY

mask4mask

i'm not on them anymore but i heard it's a thing on the apps now, stating whether or not you've been vaxed. not happy about that development tbh.

Philosophically yes, sexually no.

No Johnson & Johnson, no johnson and johnson

You got to have a J-A-B / If you wanna be with me

Get into that Pfizer, before you get into my thighs-zer.

If you like Piña Moderna / and jabs in the vein

No head, no backstage vaxxes.

ooh stick you
your mama, too
and your DADDY

Test

I had a date thing the other night that didn’t go so well. We had hooked up years ago and then found each other again online, so I was excited to see him. Well I invited him over, and it turns out there was a bit of a drunk goggles situation. It got kind of awkward and he stayed a reallllllly long time. He’s super nice it just wasn’t the right chemistry. I have to get better at my prescreen

Fully vaccinated (i.e. second jab + two weeks) tomorrow.

💜

i got the J&J shot yesterday and i'm still reeling from it. awful throbbing headache going on about 18 hours now, and last night i had full-body chills and aches all over

I am not particularly looking forward to my second shot but the first one was largely uneventful. Just a low-level all-day headache and fatigue.

sorry donna hope you feel better soon. i felt a little "off" after the first shot but nothing major.. just kind of weak and emotional tbh. also not looking forward to the second one.

To be clear, y'all may feel nothing after the second. I didn't other than cottonmouth.

I think that anyone who has lived the experience of being gay knows it's not an accurate narrative of in/out binary division, and I think straight people find it easy to understand once they think about it. It's just, they don't really have to think about it because they don't have to live it. Narratives about "coming out" (especially in mainstream media) still often frame it as a decision and a process, rather than an ongoing navigation through social situations.

I've known a lot of gay men who've been out in certain areas of life and closeted in others and exist in a weird liminal zone. Being out to family and friends is different to being out to colleagues and different to being out in the sense that you can casually refer to "my boyfriend" in everyday small-talk. I know that I push and pull myself in and out of my perceived sexual identity constantly. Just last week I caught myself referring to a "flatmate" instead of my boyfriend because it felt uncomfortable to do so in that specific situation but I wouldn't say I'm "not out."

I didn't feel fully unclenched until I told my parents nine years after my bros knew, and even so, as my link explains, it took another four years for them to wake the fuck up, which took an ultimatum.

it's true, there are definitely people i don't want to come out to. i feel like if i don't have to see them again and they're obviously conservative or even predatory (like cops) then it's best to pass or leave it unspecified if possible.

i still get a little uncomfortable when we drive through small-town utah. i was pleasantly surprised when we stopped in a coffee shop in green river and the owners made a point of making us feel relaxed and welcome. (then a little less pleasantly surprised when they complained about the push to raise the minimum wage.)

my way of 'coming out' to conservative people i don't have to see again is being a grumpy bitch to them, lol

i still do the thing where if we're driving through small towns and we stop at a gas station, i keep a studied distance from my boyfriend.

so i never actually came out to my parents, in the sense of sitting them down and telling them "so, um, i'm gay." i love my parents and get along with them* but we've never really had a "sit down and have a heart-to-heart" kind of relationship. they ended up figuring it out for themselves when i brought a "friend from college" (ie my first bf) home with me for thanksgiving and my mom walked in on us cuddling. i later learned from my mom's now-ex-best friend that she spoke to her about it shortly after it happened, and i guess my mom expressed some worry, to which her friend countered "but even if he was gay, he's your son, and you still love him no matter what, right?" and she said "well, of course." my dad was more emotionally reticent and we never really explicitly talked about it but he was never anything other than welcoming and loving to my now-husband. to this day i feel i was a little bit cheated out of the experience, even if i know that i was relatively fortunate and that that process doesn't go great for a lot of gays (will always remember my college roommate's very turbulent coming out to his conservative texan parents).

before my parents found out though, i came out to my friends on livejournal when i was 17 lol

*dad's now deceased going on two years but couldn't think of a non-awkward way to refer to both my alive parent and my dead parent here

Thanks surm and everyone for the reassurance xx

Coming out for me was significant mostly in that marked the end of a long period of a sort of denial. There was a point where it became undeniable, and the reaction from friends at the time was "yeah, we've known that for years already, what took you so long?"

It's been about 6 years since I even halfheartedly looked for a date. There's no formal diagnosis, but it seems likely that I have ScPD. My insatiable need for alone time has strained relationships of all kinds. Most friends have given up calling me, at this point. I almost never wanna hang. There is still a yearning for some kind of companionship- I've developed a very animistic world view.

Good posts, boxedjoy. Ongoing navigation is OTM. I think it's okay to be bitter and angry. You're not wrong for what you feel.

Obviously have empathy for what y'all are talking about, particularly as I now have to navigate life with a sexual zone off-limits due to cancer, but while I don't mention it at first meeting or whatever, it hasn't been my experience to code-switch or that coming out is a process. Maybe I've just been lucky or maybe I just don't care, or maybe a bit of both. If someone has a problem with me being gay and married to my partner, then that's their issue.

I think the only thing that's changed for me in Philly is I don't dress like as much of a total slut, but that's also because I'm older and the east coast has very different mores about this stuff than the west, from my experience.

My coming out story involves me being shitty and my ex moving my kids halfway across the country after our divorce so I don’t really like to think about it

Although my parents are already much nicer and warmer to my new male partner than they ever were to my ex-wife so that part of things was not a problem, although I guess when your kid is about to hit 50 and has been effectively self-sufficient since graduating college, there’s not all that much you can do about how they’re going to live

xxp i kind of want to hear more about west coast vs east coast social mores tbh.

I always thought it was the other way around honestly, like I can tell you that New Yorkers on the whole are very eager to shed our winter layers, and will do so the moment the thermostat hits 72. It's like a cathartic thing, almost. Maximum skin exposure from the first nice day in April as a rule.

I haven't spent enough time on the west coast, but my sense is that in Southern California it's mostly just the tourists who dress that way in milder weather. Californians might have fewer opportunities to wear that favorite sweater or jacket.

I got ugly stares and called an ugly name when I wore my DICK BINGE shirt with cut-off sleeves on the east coast. I'd wear that shirt into shopping malls in conservative parts of California and no one would look twice. Sometimes I'd even get a compliment!

There are other personal anecdotal tales, I just find that people on the east coast are much more likely to straight up call me a faggot to my face if I dress a certain way, and I literally had that happen once, maybe twice, the entire time I lived in California.

That sucks :(
NYC isn't going to be the most representative sample of the east coast as a whole. New Yorkers are famously desensitized to pretty much whatever and anything more conventional than a bologna sandwich as hair accessory (at least 1 documented occurrence) is unlikely to turn heads.

I def experienced quite a bit of that in Long Island when I visited friends in the 90's, not that I wore anything too out there. But I later lived in a couple of pretty conservative towns in northern Nassau County (and one very small town that's really hippie) and it wasn't an issue. I don't know if times changed, or if it's the age difference.

So I know what you mean, it totally sucks, it's just been a while since I personally encountered that so maybe I've become overly optimistic about the state of things.

Actually living in these quite affluent parts of Long Island, my lifestyle and living conditions were very incongruous, more or less like a squatter. Car-free, at other times heat and plumbing-free also. I probably looked more 'different' than I realized at the time, but it was very conspicuous in other ways too, and I was constantly surprised at how tolerant the neighbors were.

To what extent I encountered resistance... It was mostly young kids who were obnoxious.

grew up just outside nyc and lived there for a time before moving to LA. pretty sure the first time anyone ever called me a faggot was when i was visiting SF for the first time.

i tend against ostentation generally but i've thought a lot about my clothes this year and how boring they all are and how i want to change that. but i also find clothes shopping fundamentally stressful - i know some people love it and are super-good at it but i have never really been one of those people. i just want some fun, stylish, durable clothes that are like...not fast fashion but not bank-breaking either.

What's convenient for you to get to in terms of stores? What general silhouette r u thinking?

It's summer y'all

texting with a beautiful boy I met at a friend's political debut

I see - and what age does boy mean nowadays?

Anyone know what this one's about?

holding poppers while posing for pictures with pop starts isn't a personality but y'all really stay in love with a mediocre white man who said racist shit in the past

— the morally corrupt juan barquin (@woahitsjuanito) July 19, 2021

from a followup tweet: this guy (no, me neither):

lol @ dumb bitch jordan firstman being a super spreader https://t.co/0htv0ZNYFS

— the morally corrupt juan barquin (@woahitsjuanito) July 19, 2021

lol that Tweet's by a friend/former student/local film writer

(no, me neither)

Truly.

Apparently it's this https://www.distractify.com/p/jordan-firstman-tweets

tbh I'm just glad I'm old now

Hello! Do we have a summer thread yet? Cuz it's summer y'all, and "my hair is comin' down" (name the movie and actress without googling and win a fun gif of what I think best represents your posting style! 🌈💰

hi surm! i have no idea but i'd appreciate a gif

New thread?

yes plz

is there a new one

haha you do it i suck at titles

Lucky for you, I got all these daddy issues: Queer Summer, 2021 (LGBTQQIAAP+++)

fill er up!