I Will No Longer Be Sitting in Parks With You
Good books, good thongs, and what to watch now Wandavision is over.
Babes,
Only one lingering thought today. Coming up on one year since America’s lockdown, I’ve been thinking about how the fatigue we are experiencing now is a different kind of beast. Do you feel that?
The pandemmy has run us through stages of grief as forcefully as a car wash. I can definitely point to its different phases and I wonder if you can too. After gasping through the Fearing-For-My-Life stage, the first wall I hit manifested itself in a depression, crushed under the weight of the unknown. In May came anger, action, and a second wind that led us to believe we could make some kind of change. After the 5-month mark, I reached a dissociative kind of burnout, finding joy in everyday things but unable to accomplish any work or personal goal. When 2021 started, there was this numbing “I have to laugh” energy around what we are still, somehow, dealing with.
Now it’s different again. What episode of this purportedly limited series are we in now? The optimist in me says the dénouement — maybe the penultimate episode where some of the B-plots are wrapping up and the final boss has yet to reveal herself. But this metaphor becomes an oversimplification knowing how the virus will remain a presence in our everyday lives for years to come. My bff Rose, I think, captured the moment succinctly and crystal clear:
When she said this to me the other week during our weekly Wanda viewing, I couldn’t have felt it more. It’s not fatigue, it’s exasperation. An awakening to the abhorrent things we’ve gotten used to, starting with but not limited to the cultural acceptance of “going on a walk” as a normal recreational activity. It is not. It is boring, socially cumbersome, and often taxing to get through. This was especially true for me trying to go on dates. The offensiveness of broad daylight, the jarring sobriety, the plainness in how we both lose interest so quickly.
I miss making dinner for twenty people. I miss getting wasted. I miss turning looks and staying out till 3am and self-destructing in nightlife environments. I miss making mistakes like drinking too much or kissing people that are kind of bad for me.
Part of the pain comes from this dissonance we’ve been forced to feel. Corona-culture made us side-step our grief and work with the “new normal,” quickly. We had to trick our minds into thinking a Zoom gathering contains the same intimacy as a crowded room... it just doesn’t. The lie we have to tell ourselves in order to sit on a blanket six feet away from someone we’d rather make out with in a dark bar after four palomas... I’m done with it. No thanks. I’ll wait for my vaccine and have plenty of things to pass the time at home until then.
Anyway, forgive me for rambling about things everyone on here already feels. Let’s get to this week’s letter.
Xx Fran
I need a little research help!
First up! I’m *maybe* working on something and I’d love your help. What are your favorite queer bars across the U.S. still working to survive? Specifically ones that cater to Black/Latinx, trans/GNC, women communities, etc. Please reply/upvote on this thread with a quick explanation. Or if you want, you can also reply directly to this email.
some things that brought me joy this week
1. The Moonstruck House is for sale. The reason this brings me joy is because I believe in a just God — a God that will find me a wealthy benefactor to hear my plea and buy me this house so I can turn it into a queer/trans community co-op hosting dinners, parties, artist events, etc. Can we get some communal dreaming goin? All I need is, um, twelve million dollars.
I mean come on....
2. My friend Jake has a long-anticipated cookbook coming out celebrating the Jewish food tradition. I recommend the book, but also his press tour on IG Live has been nonstop joy. He preps meals with folks like Katie Couric and Jill Zarin, and also does a matchmaking game where he interviews eligible Jewish singles. Anyway, does someone want to come over and pound some schnitzel with me?
3. Late to the party, but the Harley Quinn TV show on HBOMax is one of my favorite things I’ve watched in a while. tbh, it took me a while to come around to this because I have a very high standard for adult cartoons and didn’t feel this would meet it as someone who isn’t much of a superhero geek. I was completely wrong. The show is rowdy, hilarious, disgusting, violent, boundary-pushing, and its cultural commentary is always spot on. The feel is very Adult Swim, like a deeper, feminist Archer. The show openly mocks DC comics with satire and reckless abandon, while still keeping to a through line about trauma and the ways we suppress our own histories. I was also surprised by the very queer storyline throughout as Poison Ivy (perhaps my favorite character from the DC universe) is the supporting lead alongside Harley.
4. Another delayed recommendation, but I finally binged Watchmen. It took me this long because I am bad at complex, interweaving plotline prestige TV and even worse at gorey violence. (To this day I still don’t know the names or motives of pretty much anyone in Game of Thrones.) After watching Wandavision (every episode explained to me by Rose), I decided I had the chops to conquer Watchmen. Though I did have to read the Vulture recaps, it was without a doubt one of the most ingenious adaptations I’ve ever seen. The show doesn’t follow any sort of rules, and I appreciated its willingness to *go there* with its imagination of what race in America could look like in an alternate dimension. It revels in breaking form and is frequently building worlds while tearing them down. Though I’m sad it won’t get to continue, I do feel the show is perfect as one season and will remain a resonant cultural object. If you just finished Wanda and are looking for what’s next, this is your girl!
5. I loved Dr. Darien Sutton’s interview for this podcast about grief. I’ve mentioned America’s Doctor before in this letter, but hearing Darien distill corona information has always been a source of comfort, especially with the encouraging look on declining cases and increased vaccinations. It was nice to catch another side of Darien talking about himself and his personal journey understanding death.
6. My darling hermana Oscar Nñ of Papi Juice made a delicious playlist dedicated to group chats. I’ve been boppin’ to it all day.
7. NASA named its latest Mars landing after Octavia Butler, the legendary world-builder in sci-fi writing whose work massively influenced the genre (and beyond).
8. Get Mariame Kaba’s latest book before it sells out. You’ve been warned! It goes without saying that Mariame’s thinking on abolition and a prison-free world are a foundational text for its movements. I am so grateful organizers like her are disseminating ideas that will literally set us free. She is a true intellectual.
9. The SZA music video, though very otherworldly, hit close to home. I loved reading into it as a meditation on the creative process and its blocks, a study on extreme isolation and how it spins worlds, how we take drugs to both fall into it and escape it, and the distractions we welcome. Also loved this behind-the-scenes look at the instructor who coached her for the stripper pole in record time.
10. Back to Papi Juice, they just released a new thong design made from stretchier material to accommodate all genders. Walk, don’t run, my fellow amab gncs.
11. I loved Torrey Peter’s appearance on last week’s It’s Been a Minute. Sam is such a thoughtful interviewer and Torrey is a mind for our generation. I loved her distillation of how marginalized storytelling is something the “majority” is starting to learn from.
“In other places is an evolution of the literature of marginalized people where there's different stages... A first stage would be like, ‘We're just like you. We want your approval,’ to the dominant culture. The second stage would be like, ‘Actually, we're nothing like you. Go away.’ And then a third stage would be like, ‘We define ourselves separate from you. We don't have anything to do with you. We don't reject you or accept you. We're separate from you.’ And then I think there's a fourth stage, which is what I think trans literature and many types of things are on right now, where the dominant culture begins to understand itself through the terms set by the marginalized culture... Straight people now understand the terms of their own sexuality through ideas and concepts that were created by queer people or queer scholars.”
If you haven’t read her book yet, this interview doesn’t spoil anything.
12. Thanks to Amina’s letter, I’ve discovered tree.fm which has captured a gorgeous collection of forest-y soundscapes. I only recently got into sound baths and sound therapy as something I turn on to wind down in the evenings. Such a welcome addition to the rotation!
13. This clip of Alan Kim winning his Critic’s Choice Award… it has broken me. Upon my 45th viewing, I’m still noticing its nuances. The genuine shock and surprise on his face! The way he says “oh my goodness I’m crying” with the charm and candor of someone three times his age! The way he pinches himself asking “is this a dream,” with the most beautiful/funny/heartbreaking callback to a motif his character has in Minari! Protect this baby at all costs so he can win Oscars.
this week’s action
This week, a very harrowing piece of legislation is attempting to make it a felony for trans kids to get healthcare. You can take quick action (like twenty seconds) by sending an email through this link. This goes double for people who know people in Alabama!