Howdy y’all,
What a week, huh? For those of you who don’t know, this was the first week I wrote and edited the newsletter at 100 Days in Appalachia. I’m really enjoying working with this team, and I’m very excited for what the future holds. I linked to my first newsletter in the “what I’ve been reading…” section before, so make sure you take a gander – and don’t forget to subscribe! I also had two pieces at the Independent, both of which I’m very proud of.
And, of course, Adele dropped new music! I’ve been listening to “Easy On Me” basically nonstop. It might be her best song to date. But Christ, is it heartbreaking. That line “I had no time to choose what I chose to do” resonates so deeply with me. I think we all have things we did when we were younger which we look back on and wonder “when did I even make that decision?” Sometimes we just get swept away by the currents of life and the next thing you know, you’re nowhere near where you thought you’d be.
Anyway. Both essays below were emotionally taxing not write, and frankly I’m petered out. However, I did just pay my quarterly taxes. For those of you who aren’t aware, as a freelancer I’m technically considered self-employed. Employers do not take taxes out of my pay, meaning I have to pay those taxes to the IRS myself once a quarter. If you want to help me recoup my losses, you can become a Patron for as little as $3 a month, make a one-time donation using PayPal, or buy me a book to help with my research. Every contribution is appreciated!
With that said, let’s get down to it.
On COVID, AIDS, and Marjorie Taylor Greene…
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading Carter Sickels’ novel The Prettiest Star. About a young gay man in 1986 who, living with HIV, returns to his Appalachian home following the death of his partner, I found it difficult to read. Not because Sickels isn’t a good writer – his prose is tight and beautiful, and his characters compelling – but because the subject is just heartbreaking. Every chapter was a punch in the gut. The bigotry the protagonist, Brian, faces from those around him – homophobia, yes, but also AIDS stigma – was tragic. The grief of his sister and his mother, mourning the man who left them six years prior and the man who came home to die, was every bit as tragic.
This was not a real family. The Jacksons of Chester, Ohio are fictitious creations of Sickels’ mind. But he was inspired to write this novel after hearing the story of a real person on the Oprah show. In that regard, the Jacksons are real – an avatar for the more than 750,000 Americans who have died of AIDS in the past 40 years and the families they left behind.
Perhaps it is because I had just finished The Prettiest Star that a recent tweet by Marjorie Taylor Greene – the 21st century’s answer to Anita Bryant – angered me so much. “The fascist NBA won’t let Kyrie Irving play for refusing a vaccine,” the QAnon Congresswoman from Georgia tweeted, “but yet they still let Magic Johnson play with HIV.”
As others on Twitter quickly pointed out, this is factually incorrect. Magic Johnson retired immediately following his diagnoses. Kyrie Irving is not being prevented from playing by the NBA, which has no vaccine mandate, but by the city of New York.
Furthermore, HIV (which can cause AIDS) and the novel coronavirus (which can cause COVID-19) are not the most comparable of viruses. I don’t pretend to be an expert in virology or medicine, but even with a high school level understanding of biology I know the difference between bloodborne and airborne pathogens. HIV requires the swapping of bodily fluids. The novel coronavirus is contagious through the air. No one gets HIV by simply being near someone with HIV. Not true with the novel coronavirus.
As mentioned above, more than 750,000 Americans have died of AIDS since 1980. Roughly that same number – again, to emphasize, three-quarters of a million Americans – have died of COVID-19 in the past two years. By my math (and I welcome you to check this as I’m horrible at math) that means COVID is killing Americans at twenty times the rate of AIDS.
Of course, most of those AIDS-related deaths happened before antiretroviral drugs came on the market. Deaths from AIDS-related illnesses have slowed drastically since the late 1990s. In Sickels’ book, the characters discuss the fact that such experimental drugs at the time as AZT were only available to the wealthiest men, though protagonist Brian would have loved to have access to the drug himself. While I feel compelled to remind you that The Prettiest Star is a work of fiction, the reality of the situation was not much different. Those living with HIV clamored for medicines which would extend and even save their lives.
In this analogy, masks are like condoms. They protect you some, and they protect the one(s) you’re with a lot. People like Taylor Greene and Irving, in this analogy, would prefer to infect others and even themselves. They’re almost like the infamous “bug chasers” – men and some women who fetishize catching HIV. For them, it is a sick sexual thrill. For Taylor Greene and Irving, it’s a sick political statement. “Fuck your science and fuck your feelings,” they’re essentially saying. They are happy to catch COVID and to spread it to others, and they are unwilling to do even the most basic thing to protect it.
In fairness to Taylor Greene and Irving both, this analogy only works to an extent. After all, no one was forcing people to wear condoms in the 1980s. In fact, conservatives did their level best to discourage any discussion of condoms at all – they wanted abstinence-only education in our schools. And a lot of gay men rejected condom usage and resented the way our community was targeted. Cudgeling people and moralizing over public health has rarely worked, and we are seeing that now in the backlash over masks and vaccines-as-virtue-signals.
But, despite the ignorance and moral panic at the time – Sickels was inspired to write The Prettiest Star after hearing about outrage over a gay man with AIDS swimming in a public pool – AIDS was not as contagious as COVID. This is why the analogy Taylor Greene was trying to make falls apart at face value. It’s comparing apples and oranges – yes, both are fruit, but very different fruit.
As a gay man, it has been interesting to see conservatives react to COVID-19 completely the opposite to the way they reacted to HIV/AIDS. Last year, at the dawn of the pandemic, I wrote a blog on my personal website about why I think this is.
Back in 1988, the show Designing Women featured an episode in which the eponymous women design the funeral for a young gay male friend who is dying of AIDS. Entitled “Killing All The Right People,” that title was taken from a line a bigoted character spoke – which in turn was taken from something show creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason overheard a bigoted person say about AIDS patients. At the time, I argued that Donald Trump did not care about COVID-19 because it was “killing all the right people:”
Why did it take the President so long to comment? Well, it’s a remarkably cogent tweet, striking the right tone and without any grammatical errors or random capitalization, indicating that Trump probably had some help composing it. Perhaps the staffer charged with making him sound human was out yesterday. More likely, though, it is simply that he did not care.
The President did, however, care enough to endorse the notion that the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat, and this pandemic has killed a lot of Democrats. The New York Times recently ran an article comparing how the coronavirus has disproportionately affected blue states, as well as Black people and Latino people, who are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. The President and Congressional Republicans have refused federal aid to states like New York and Illinois, callously labeling much-needed help for ailing Americans as a “blue state bailout.” These Americans are largely Democrats, though, and the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat. So blue states get nothing, and the death toll rises. After all, like AIDS in the 80s, it’s killing all the right people.
This is no longer the case. Now this pandemic is disproportionately affecting Red States. But it’s too late for Republicans to turn back now. They’ve invested too much political capital in anti-mask and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. Not only would a U-turn cost them their credibility with their base, but it would likely do no good. They’ve convinced their most ardent supporters that this disease is not going to affect them or, if it does, that they are strong enough or smart enough to fight to it off – be it with their immune system or horse dewormer.
In this regard, not much has changed from last year or, for that matter, from 30 years ago. The moralizing conservatives such as the bigoted woman in “Killing All The Right People” thought HIV/AIDS couldn’t happen to them. It only happened to those who didn’t know better. To those who made poor choices. To those who deserved it.
40 years ago, conservatives entertained such notions as sending every AIDS patient to a remote island so they couldn’t infect the rest of the population. Back then they were terrified of the virus. Now they pretend they’re invincible.
COVID kills the old, the weak, the fat, the feeble. It doesn’t kill the strong, the healthy, the fit, the virile. Everyone else is the former. They – the MAGA, the patriots, the real Americans – are the latter.
This is fascist thinking. It’s one step away from “might makes right,” which is basically the dogma of the Republican Party since Donald Trump took over in 2016. It’s why they carry firearms to protests outside state capitols. It’s why they marched through Charlottesville. It’s why they stormed the Capitol.
To folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the people dying of COVID are collateral damage at best and deserving of their demise at worst. A study last year by The Prospect found that the death rate from COVID is two and a half times higher in poor neighborhoods than in wealthy neighborhoods. At the same time, Black Americans still have the highest death rate from COVID. This is not a coincidence. In America, poverty is often (though not always) racialized, and the wealth gap between Black and white Americans is well-documented.
I recently saw someone describe the current Republican/conservative/populist/insane view (they’re one and the same at this point) of public health measures as “you’re not the boss of me!” thinking, which I find to be accurate. Somewhere along the way – around 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected and not coincidentally when the AIDS crisis began – selfishness and heartlessness became the fashion. Reagan used the trope of the “welfare queen” to stoke racial animus as well as contempt for the poor and working class, while neoliberal individualism gave Americans permission to be utterly self-centered. Any sense of common cause or even community disappeared.
Over the years, that degraded public discourse and political thought to the point that, by the Bush years, there was this feeling that – to quote one of my favorite songs from the terrific gay film Latter Days – “you can hate the Jews and the Blacks and the fags/as long as you pray and salute the flag.” While it is impossible to peg the current anti-intellectual, anti-science populism to any one cause, certainly a sense that as long as you are white and Christian and unquestioningly loyal to Donald Trump and his party line (the MAGA definition of “patriotism”) then you can’t go wrong. You can do anything you want. Rules like mask mandates and vaccine requirements and basic biology do not or at least should not apply to you.
It’s the smug entitlement we see in viral videos of people screaming at low-wage workers because they don’t want to wear a mask, or of airline passengers who have to be duct taped to the seat because they won’t comply. Might makes right. You’re not the boss of me.
In The Prettiest Star, not everything works out. [SPOILERS] Brian wastes away, growing sicker and sicker. He is in and out of the hospital (when the hospital will admit him, anyway). He can’t hold food down. He has to have his teeth pulled. You can see his skeleton under his gray, pallid skin.
The town never learns a lesson in acceptance. Bigots mostly remain bigots. The ignorant stay ignorant. Brian dies. Nothing changes.
In real life, though, things did change. We learned more about how HIV spreads. Gay men and the lesbians who tended to us formed groups like ACT UP. We organized. We fought back. We changed hearts and minds. We lobbied for research. It took years – decades, even – but we made progress. Today, HIV is not a death sentence. Gay marriage is legal. The world is better.
But 750,000 Americans are still dead from a disease they need not have died of had there only been better and faster public education and public health initiatives. Had the government only acted quicker. Had conservatives not basked in their hate and their ignorance. Not politicized the virus to advance their own bigoted agenda.
Am I talking about AIDS or COVID? Does it matter? Story’s just the same.
On the John Lewis Home Insurance advert…
In case you missed it, British Twitter erupted in a debate over this advertisement for John Lewis Home Insurance. Watch it before you read on:
This advertisement is an interesting case of two different viewpoints, each I would consider valid but regardless are informed by our lived experiences. Most of the gay men I saw tweeting about this loved the ad, while most of the feminists hated it. All had their reasons.
I smiled the entire time I watched this commercial. What I saw was an adorable young gender non-conforming boy expressing himself in ways that most gender non-conforming boys are never allowed. He was rebelling against the constraints of masculinity, of heteronormativity, and of bourgeois consumerism and middle-class propriety. This boy was free, liberated from the cage of gender norms and expectations, and living his best life as the most authentic version of himself. Plus, he’s adorable as heck. I love him.
Here’s what many feminists saw: an obnoxious little brat of a boy destroying his mother’s bedroom before going on a tear through the rest of the house, bullying his sister by yanking her paints off the table and then wrecking the living room, leaving his poor, beleaguered mother to clean up after him. He was enacting the worst of toxic masculinity and male entitlement, making a right mess of things for and at the expense of women and girls. He wasn’t rebelling against patriarchy – he was embodying and enacting it.
Which reading is correct? I’ll leave that for you to decide. I have to say, after hearing from the feminists who follow me on Twitter, I was persuaded that they are on the whole more right than I was. Though I still think that there is merit in my initial reading. Probably the most correct take came from my friend the writer Emma Burnell, who (and I’m paraphrasing here) said that if anybody is that upset by an advert for home insurance their priorities are woefully out of whack. She’s probably right about that.
Someone on Twitter said in reply to my tweet that they felt it would be more radical if the little boy was doing what he did but it was his father watching rather than his mother and his brother whose paints he took. I concede that. Still others pointed out that your insurance agent is not likely to clean up that mess, and because the little boy intentionally destroyed property the insurance company is not even likely to cover damages. To their credit, John Lewis – which was forced to issue a statement clarifying its intent due to the controversy – did say that they would cover these damages in real life. I remain unconvinced based on my experience with insurance agencies. But that’s what they said.
Either way that’s besides the point. The real reason I’m writing about this advert isn’t the advert itself, and it sure as hell isn’t insurance. It’s because I had a very respectful exchange of perspectives with people on Twitter, which in our modern age is a rarity.
I listened to them. They listened to me. Sometimes we agreed. Other times we didn’t. But I never felt attacked by the women (and some men I presume) in my mentions, and I hope they never felt attacked by me. We looked at the same thing and saw something different, but we didn’t let that cause us to hate one another.
This got me thinking about, well, everything else in our world. Some things are objectively true – there are four seasons, the sun is 93 million miles away from the earth, Adele releasing a new song will break the internet. There is no doubt, no arguing, no nuance. A fact is a fact.
But some things – maybe most things – are open to interpretation. This is certainly true of politics. I write this newsletter on Friday, and this Friday happened to be a bad one. Sir David Amess, the Conservative MP for Southend West, was fatally stabbed at a surgery (that’s sort of like a town hall, for my American readers). It’s the second time in five years a sitting member of parliament has been assassinated, the last being Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016. At the time of this writing, we do not know the motive for Amess’ killing, but my understanding is it is being investigated by counter-terrorism officers.
Sometimes good people disagree. It’s always acceptable to question someone’s judgment and to say when we think they’re mistaken. But over the past decade it became the norm to question their motives. To assign ill intent to any disagreement. Your opponent ceased to be simply wrong. They were evil.
Each of us has on a pair of blinders informed by our own lived experiences. We’re going to see the world differently. We’ve long understood this; it’s why the idiom “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” exists. Yet increasingly it feels like we are all too consumed with our own self-importance, our own identities, our own narcissism to dare see anything from another perspective. It’s all or nothing. There is no gray anymore, just black and white.
Except that isn’t true. There is still a lot of gray in this world. The only difference is we increasingly ignore it. We pretend that nuance doesn’t exist, that things aren’t complex or complicated or open to interpretation and earnest but honest disagreements. Too many people are unwilling to even entertain the thought that just maybe their opponents are operating in good faith, even if what they are saying makes our heads want to explode.
I’m not here to pretend I am not guilty of this. I famously wrote half my family off after the 2016 election. But then my little brother almost died, and that put a lot of things in perspective. Red or blue, we all bleed the same. And at the end of the day, as Jo Cox said, we have more in common. There is more that unites us than there is that divides us.
It’s hard to step back, to see the world from someone else’s perspective. But it is imperative that we do. I don’t want to live in a world where political disagreements spill over into bloodshed on the streets. I don’t want to hate my political opponent. I want to convince them that they’re wrong and I’m right. But that may never happen. And I don’t want to hate them. I don’t hate them.
Maybe that ad wasn’t a metaphor for patriarchy, or gender norms, or heteronormativity, or any of that. Maybe it was a metaphor for our times. The destroyed house is our nation. The mother and sister, our democracy. And the terror that is the little boy? Well, he is our basest instincts and cruelest impulses made manifest in flesh and bone. He is every Twitter spat and cancellation and no-platforming and act of political violence that we’ve tolerated over the past ten years.
That destructive little boy that ruined his home? He’s us.
What I’ve been up to…
I wrote about Jon Gruden (the disgraced NFL coach who resigned after misogynistic, racist, and homophobic e-mails he sent were made public), the right-wing outrage of a bisexual Superman, and the conservative classroom culture wars coming for Pride flags in my first piece for The Independent this week. I highlighted a case out of my hometown of Hyden, Kentucky as well as other instances of schools banning Pride flags as political symbols, discuss why that’s bollocks, and how this is all just part of a homophobic backlash against the progress of gay rights.
Sticking with the theme of homophobia and right-wing backlash, my next piece for The Independent was on Tucker Carlson’s homophobic and misogynistic remarks about Pete Buttigieg taking paternity leave. I enjoyed writing this piece both because it allowed me to use my women’s studies minor and because I always enjoy ripping Tucker Carlson a new one. I hate that I had to write it, though, because men doing their fair share of the childrearing and housework should be normal by now. As should gay parents. As should paid parental leave in the United States. Sigh.
My first weekly newsletter for 100 Days in Appalachia was sent out this week. I wrote about my own experience as a young gay man in Eastern Kentucky and how I reconciled my sexual orientation with my Appalachian heritage. Most of the newsletters I write from here on out will not be about me, but about Appalachia. This one served as my introduction to this audience, though, and I thoroughly enjoyed writing it. Please support the work of my incredible colleagues at 100 Days in Appalachia. If you haven’t, subscribe to the newsletter so you hear from me every Tuesday and from an awesome artist or activist in Appalachia every Thursday!
From the archives: In 2017, I wrote about the terrorist attack on the Palace of Westminster for Huff Post UK. “We moan about career politicians, but every parliamentarian (whether in the Commons or the Lords) or aspiring MP I've spoken with has entered politics because they want to make a substantive difference to society. Regardless of party, if you get to talking to them, they are some of the most patriotic people you'll meet.”
What I’ve been reading…
I read The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels. Having discussed the book at length in my first essay, I won’t say much more here other than it’s a very good but very sad book.
This essay by Freddie deBoer is an excellent analysis of the politics of power and privilege – who has it and who wields it. It’s also a great takedown of identity politics and the individualism of the neoliberal left, particularly in America. I genuinely do not like that the left have become such scolds. We’re so puritanical anymore that it makes any sort of collectivism and solidarity all the more difficult, especially across the working class which is so diverse both demographically and politically.
John McWhorter wrote about the upside of cultural appropriation for the New York Times. Well worth a read, as it makes the case that often beautiful things are born when cultures collide or people borrow from a culture that isn’t their own.
What I’ve been listening to…
I mean, Adele. It’s got to be Adele. Is anybody listening to anything that isn’t Adele right now? Seriously. Go listen to Adele.
A picture of the puppy…