The Invisible Queer

Content Warnings: Suicide mention, Less than positive trans stuff.

Trans Day of Visibility, right?  A lot of trans people don’t love this occasion for a lot of reasons, and that’s fair.  Anybody should be allowed to be as invisible as they want to be.  Invisibility is by definition part of passing, which is the trans dream.  It is hard to argue with its usefulness to the people that it’s useful for: knuckleheaded cis people who need reminders of trans people’s humanity, and baby trans folks who need to see that life is possible – given their high rates of suicide.

Where do nonbinary, agender, and genderqueer people belong?  In a sense we’re trans, so should we be visibling out right now?  If we want to sure.  As for me, I’ll just reflect publicly on what being genderqueer means to me…

Or not.  It’s kind of personal, isn’t it?  It’s in my head, waiting for a future that is never going to come, like so many other things.  Sayeth my problematical inspiration, “Don’t dream it, be it.”  But I don’t have powerful dysphoria pushing me to make the choice between a life of facing bitter and extreme prejudice or living with crushing pain.  (And be real – passing isn’t possible for everybody, open and sometimes murderous prejudice is what I’d get.)

If it can be a dream for me, that’s enough for now, I think.  I might feel differently next year, if the ‘rona don’t take me out first.  Who can say?  In the meantime, ya might catch me in sequined shoes or wearing costume jewelry.  Just a little something to let you know what’s up.

–

Who Else is Paid to Stay Home?

Where my teleworkers at? My workplace was shut down without full preparation for everyone to go on telework, so until they acquire a lot more gear, I’m getting paid to chill and check my email sometimes.  My last job was Malwart, so while it’s a shame to not have the inside track on getting groceries with less hassle, my situation is a lot less cruel.  #blessed lol.

Anyway, I know I’m lucky as hell here, even though it took 3 hours to get groceries at the Winco this morning.  How are you?

–

I Know What You’re Thinking, Biden Dems

Obams=good. Obams like Joe. Joe=good. Bring back time when president nice.

Alternately – and more venal –

Obams=economy good. Economy=my personal comfort. Joe=successor to Obams. Make economy good.

This is the thinking of people who wish they could vote for Bill Clinton again. At least he made the economy good. Therefore your retirement fund is less scary. It’s the safe choice.

Except it isn’t. Conservative dems are going to be like that Trudeau up in Canada. Make nice words while they line their pockets with money from petroleum, prison labor, and the war machine.  Burn down the world to make a little gold.

Don’t you give even a tenth of a shit about your children? Choke on your binkies you adult babies.

–

Ghost Pangolin Breath

I’m sure there’s a billion people in china that don’t go in for medical woo that involves slurping down nature’s rare wonders. I just wanted to say to the other ones, this is not the recommended use for chopsticks motherfuckers.

To be honest I find the idea covid entered humans via pangolin consumption a little suspect, if only because it seems tailor-made to appeal to aggrieved environmentalists like myself. It is an evocative idea, isn’t it?

–

Under the Sign of the Rabbit

I got this job about a year ago.  Used to see rabbits about every day there.  Less so in the winter, but I still see them sometimes.  On the way to catch the bus in the dark, the streetlights silhouette a tree stump making it look like a rabbit.  Above is the moon.  Across the ocean there’s some people who say there’s a rabbit in that celestial body.  Stopped to get a new litterbox for my cat.  The place in the store that normally has cats to adopt only had rabbits.  My favorite movie of 2019 had prominent rabbits.  This wasn’t that movie, but it’s a pretty good depiction of the mood in life.

I Got Sexually Harassed Thursday

Content Warning: Explicit Talk of Sexual Harassment.

I’m six foot tall, 250 pounds, AMAB, masc-looking with a big white beard at the moment.  But I got full-on sexually harassed yesterday on the bus.  Leering, repeated explicit come-ons, not accepting rejection, a weird racial element, and being unwillingly exposed to a stranger’s penis.  This is a new experience for this 43-year old,  and that novelty probably has some of my AFAB readers feeling jealous.  I didn’t feel like my life was in danger, but on the way home from the bus I did look over my shoulder to see if I was being followed.

There was a bit of foreshadowing to this experience.  Within the last week on the bus, a drunk lady who may have been trying to hook on me dropped a come-on line that was verbatim the sort of thing men often tell women.  “I just wanted to tell you I think you’re cute… I’m not bothering you, am I?”  To that I said, “Thank you, no bother, I just prefer to listen to my headphones in the morning.”

Why am I so irresistibly hot right now?  I guess with the beard I’m kind of a bear.  And I’m more stylish for the office than I was for the mega-retailer.  But the A.M. drunk lady was the first time I could remember hearing anything overtly positive about my appearance in over ten years.  (I used to catch a few smiles from fellas and ladies back in my 20s, which was nice.)   I had my doubts about her motives, but it was almost pleasant for me.  That did not prepare me for the dude who was sleazing on me last night.  I didn’t do anything about it and probably will not (unless I see that guy again), except tell him to chill out or he’ll get himself arrested, on my way the hell out the door.

I don’t know how I felt about this.  At first there was bewilderment and amusement, but there’s a lingering sensation in my head I’d like to get rid of.  I’m a little disturbed.  At no point did I fear violence, and yet?  My body is kind of reacting like I did.  I’m taking a sick day.  I’d rather not take the same bus home at night within 24 hours of that experience.

But I will almost certainly get over this, and soon.  It is not part of a pattern of abuse that preceded puberty for me, unlike the experience many AFAB people have to contend with.  That may make it a little more of a shock at the moment, but it doesn’t feel like society affirming its fundamental disrespect for my bodily autonomy, like an atom in a sea of degradation that defines my life.

Moral of the story?  Public transit sucks.

–

Instead of Star Wars, Watch This

Spoiler Warning: for a forty year old Z-grade italian movie

Starcrash! You can see it on Youtube probably illegally, or on Amazon. Like Message From Space, it’s a scifi space adventure with fantasy elements that came out the same year as Star Wars. In the case of Starcrash, it was blatantly a dashed off attempt to cash in on the success of the more expensive film. It even includes a knockoff jedi character with absolutely zero explanation for how or why has “powers” such as messing with electricity, resisting lasers, and seeing the future. His lightsaber doesn’t show up until the end of the second act and again has no explanation.

But is it better or worse to not have jedi explained? The deeper we get into Star Wars lore, the more shit like midichlorians we get. The more powers are shown that people find goofy, overpowered, or annoying. You get force ghosts that can do so much they might as well still be alive, which makes death a lot less dramatic.

Starcrash is bad and Italian. I don’t know if the director Luigi Cozzi was fascist, but the way the show was run did inspire communist crew to steal the final print and hold it for ransom. The biggest star in it was Christopher Plummer doing a performance so bad that it’s very well known he was just in it for a free trip to Rome. He seems stoned in a very particular way, which makes me wonder if he was on the same shit as Bill Shatner back in the ’60s.

There’s mention of scanning a planet with “computer waves” within the first few minutes of the film. The hero is Caroline Munro dressed like Vampirella. The robot is a cowboy. There’s a green guy whose face paint keeps rubbing off. There’s a sub-harryhausen giant fembot controlled by the laser brains of a space-amazon. There’s italian space-cannibals flying through the air. There’s a David Hasselhoff space-prince. There’s just a space-lot to space-recommend this.

Oh, and spoiler: There’s a happy ending.

–

Cyberpunk Creativity

We live in a cyberpunk dystopia. Some people might quibble because there aren’t enough lazertacular synth pop jams and airbrush art, but they just haven’t looked at the right spots on Bandcamp and Soundcloud and such. It is the time for cyberpunk. Cyberpunk comes out of rebellion against oppression – corporate fascist oppression trying to turn us all into burnt out zombie consumers, laboring on treadmills until our bones grind to a halt, heads plugged into virtual reality to avoid the sad sight of the lives they have left to us.

Disney has always been at the vanguard of oppression in the creative sphere, and have finally cemented their monopoly status. Epcot Center is The Death Star for vital and socially relevant art. Pew pew. Kablooey. Nobody will be able to compete at their level. But what about making art below that level? What about tha streetz?

There was a time when Star Wars and comic book movies and such could be at least kinda liberal. The first Star Wars in particular was very much antifascist, even while it cribbed some imagery from Triumph des Willens. Now that the noose has tightened, we’ll see more playing it safe, more bland bullshit riding the creepy side of the political center – and never doing anything to offend the censors in Beijing while they’re at it.

What interests me is the potential for independent art to take the inspiration of those stories and use it to create something else. Nobody’s really tried to capitalize on the success of Star Wars with an equivalent spirit of fun and adventure since the various B movies around the first one. Shit like Ice Pirates and Starcrash. Nowadays all it would take to make a good funtimes antifa scifi adventure is for some theater kids from the fine art school to join forces with computer graphics fuckos from the commercial art school. Get on it, people.

Superhero stuff would be even easier because you could set it on modern-day earth and not have to create all your sets in CG. Chronicle had a budget of $12 million (peanuts to the studios these days), which was probably pretty heavily invested in the actors and Hollyweird apparatus. Not much of that budget made it to the screen – something like it could have been made for a lot less.

That’s just talking about the genres we’ve come to expect from the big boys. Horror and arthouse and all kinds of movies can get made if people get the gumption. Maybe all it will take is for Monopoly Mouse to keep disappointing our asses just a little longer. They’ve already inspired a massive wave of piracy. Classic cyberpunk. Now let’s see if they inspire some real art too.
–

Not Paying Disney for This

From a spoiler here, a spoiler there, an opinion here, an opinion there, I’m getting an impressionistic look at the new Space Shooters film. And it sounds unappealing, uninteresting, not worth the ticket. Hell, not worth the bother to pirate. I didn’t watch Revengers: The Last One either. Disney brought me right up to the grand finales of their big cash cows and lost me there. Why?

Revengers had a big ensemble cast but always felt like at core it’s the Tony! Toni! Toné! show, and it doesn’t feel good. Robard Downy Jerk was fun in his first movie, because of the focus on wacky inventor stuff and because he rejected the military industrial complex. By the second one – by his own admission – he was “bored of the liberal agenda” and was just back to being an asshole. Some people insist they love characters who are assholes, but that ain’t me. The more I heard about The Last One, the more I realized it was a big exercise in fellating Downy with a good dose of fatphobia to wash it down. Nuh.

Space Shooters: The Franchise Awakens had these cute actors playing cute characters with heart, big bombastic visuals that spoke to my dreams, and a villain who was a great reflection of the kind of flailing infantile fuckboyism that’s taken over our world. The sequel kicked up the space wizard stuff all the notches, making Da Force feel like some Dragon Ball Z shit. It made the main characters of the first one feel less important, less like they have agency in any important way. It included people giving waaay too much latitude to a egotistical ass who got a lot of people killed. But it shook out all right, in my opinion.

It also introduced a character who was a sweaty nerd and an excellent audience stand-in – Rose Tico. Think of this: She was cute but not sexy or conventionally attractive. She was deglammed in dumpy overalls, sweating and trying hard. She cared more about furthering the story than our diffident man of action Finn. Come on, sexy main actor people!, she said. You have to be the heroes we’ve held you up to be! You have to engage in this star war!

But it sounds like the new movie was designed by committee (how many writers?) to avoid offending any given partisan audience member – which meant capitulating to the sexist racist misogynists who couldn’t see past their dicks to notice Rose Tico was for them, leaving the second most important character from the first movie in time-killing mode, walking back anything interesting they’d done in the second movie, and generally wasting the potential of a damn fine set-up.

That’s the impression I’m getting. I still haven’t seen Revengers: The Last One and Space Shooters has become even less interesting than that. In honor of Rose Tico, I’m not paying Disney for this bullshit anymore.
–