Ramblings and observations on where we’ve been, where we’re at, and where we could end up. Please note: if you are reading and/or trying to view this shortly after seeing it posted, it may take hours for our blessed archive dot org to format it nicely so you don’t have to deal with buffering issues! I hope to follow this up with more discussion on what effects the Delta operation could have on factionalizing resistance in the US.

When I was first out on my own as a teenager and young adult, I paid the bills and made a living by waiting tables and cooking. That was over 20 years ago now and now seems an impossibility for people that young trying to do anything on their own now due to the controlled demolition under the guise of covid and soon, the climate. It’s also interesting to think back on the wide network of friends I developed. We were all young with working class backgrounds, ambitious, and simply happy to be out on our own and making our own lives on our own terms, at least socially.

I don’t like quantifying anything demographically when it comes to personal relationships, but it is unfortunately relevant now because of how compartmentalized life has become with the rapid digitization of society. Every other friend I had was gay or bisexual, and it feels kind of funny to think about this on terms that are acceptable now in our supposedly enlightened progressive age– “as a young hetero, I was a solid ally to the gay community”. Does anyone my age or from my generation express themselves this way? The relationships I made through work, and not only via whatever my current place of employment was (if you’ve been in the service industry, you know this), were built on trust and mutual respect for “the hustle” and the ability to get shit done.

Some friends did drag, and the scene that comes across your television screen now seems totally sterile and soulless compared to the actual community effort that went into supporting your friends who did the damn thing seriously at established joints that not everyone — say, hetero white collar suburbanites flying pride flags? — was privy to. I use “community” in the sense that you could rely on the self-appointed block grandma to fix the hem on the scarf you had to wear on the catwalk; that the handsome GM from your roomie’s “casual fine dining” gig was going to make a cameo and bring brownies to the after party. It was just a mundane yet harmonious reality, but somehow in this age of wokeness, these actual community members who socially, materially, and spiritually supported their neighbors and even employees no matter their orientation aren’t quite edgy enough to make up “the gay community”. And, through the various slow-burn depopulation programs that led up to the makings of the covid world order, they and these bonds largely don’t exist any more.

Continue reading →