No, WE Pardon YOU

THE ELDERS OF SODOM, by the Grace of Cock of the Celtic Union of National Territories of New Sodom and Elsewhen and of our other Realms and Territories, QUEERS, Heads of the Cocksuckery, Defenders of the Flounce, to all to whom it these Presents shall come,

Greeting!

WHEREAS Alan Mathison Turing at Knutsford Quarter Sessions on the 31st day of March 1952 pleaded guilty to and was convicted of divers counts of Oh My Lord Fucking Cock Almighty having the audacity to fuck and be fucked by persons of his own choice whose gender was none of your fucking business, and on that date sentence was postponed for a period of twelve months but the said Alan Matheson Turing was placed on Probation for a period of twelve months to submit for the fucking unspeakable abuse of chemical castration by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal Infirmary;


AND WHEREAS the said Alan Mathison Turing killed himself on the 7th day of June 1954 rather than suffer any longer the sheer fucking ignominy of this maltreatment;


NOW KNOW YE that We, in consideration of circumstances humbly represented unto Us, are Graciously pleased to extend Our Grace and Mercy unto you nation of heteronormative cuntfuckery, your sovereign and her government, and to grant you Our Free Pardon in respect of your responsibility for the said death;


AND to pardon and remit unto you the enmity imposed upon you for the aforesaid;


AND for so doing this shall be a sufficient warrant.

GIVEN at our Court of New Sodom

the 24th day of December 2013;

In the Year of Our Reign.

By Our Magnanimity's Whim

THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!! (sic)

POSTSCRIPT:

NOTE that We yet hereby reserve Our Free Pardon for all other such acts of gross injustice over the years, decades and centuries past and, We are in no doubt, those yet to come;

BECAUSE We rather think that saving your hetero arses from the Nazis is not a prerequisite for you keeping your fucking nose out of what We do with our Cocks and Arses.

CAPICHE?

You Got Your Privilege in My Face

The Privilege of Authors

My first thought on reading this article in Strange Horizons is, I have to say, a fairly simple thought: I can't say I'm impressed with claiming the right to ship/slash my characters in ways I find fetishising/problematic and vetoing my engagement. Clearly from the "Go, you!" comments, a number of readers don't have anything approaching that thought, oblivious to the ramifications for a sodomite in a principle which theoretically extends to outright straightironing, and all the more oblivious to the authorial privilege it's actually asserting rather than rejecting, for the authors of appropriative work and amateur critique who are apparently to be treated as special snowflakes, protected from the responses of their sources and subjects. All those poor little straight white authors who need protected from the Authoritay of us faggot authors who might, heaven forfend, gently point out that having X fuck Y in that way (or insisting that the work is Wrong because that's not how it happens) is Epic GayFail, an Othering fantasy promulgating the stereotypes at the heart of the gaybashing that leads to... you know... gay kids blowing their own heads off.

But it's about book blogging, you say. It's about authors not commenting on reviews. Well, yes and no. It's certainly applying its principle--that the author should butt out of social media discourse unless specifically invited in--to book blogs, but it's setting its foundations for that principle in fandom, on an assumption of a power relationship in which artists entering an audience discourse are punching down, imposing the authority of their privileged position on the text, creating discomfort, stifling fanwork. And that notion of fanwork is framed not just such that it extends to appropriative fiction but such that it's grounded in it.

Privilege? The article is asserting it: "Because once I read a work, that work is mine. I'm going to interpret it my way, disregard authorial intention, embrace alternate readings of the canonical facts, and probably consider writing explicit fanfic about characters an author likely never intended to be together." (My italics.) The article lacks the bold-faced audacity to forego the weasel words of "probably" and "consider," and just say, "I'll damn well slash your characters if I wanna and chuck it on the interwebs for all to see," but that's just the angst of repercussions that it's hard not to see as the "discomfort" in question. Maybe that's not the "discomfort" intended, but authorial intent can hardly be a defence here. And my reading is not born of a defence of authorial intent; it's born of the fact that "severe discomfort that takes form as anger and hostility" is typical of entitlement's response to challenge. The privilege of authors is in play here. It's just that the authors in question are the article's author, the author of the Aaronovitch review she references, and those who write their work from that same stance of entitlement, whether it's fiction or non-fiction.

Yes, having your privilege challenged is uncomfortable. If you think you have the right to publish slash with zero repercussions (note: publish; note: with zero repercussions) of course you're going to be thrown into angst if you bring that "sexy fanfiction" and "explicit fanwork" to the artist's attention. And it's sadly predictable that you would view the backlash as  a problem of "bias." And it's only pragmatic to adopt an axiom of avoidant behaviour: "don't talk about fanwork with creators." It's only natural to justify your privilege as a personal precious thing that others have no business trying to take from you when the product of that privilege "isn't for them, it's for us." And it's not surprising to see challenges cast as victimisation, as "horrible characterizations of fans," even a mea culpa of yes, I'm a bit sensitised enclosing (literally, extra-parenthetically,) a defensive/accusatory but it's your bad, really; stop comparing fanwork to theft, turning blame onto those you're disempowering in order to defend your privilege.

You feel uncomfortable? Tough shit.

*

If My Dog Barks At Gays

Sorry to be blunt. I'm not by any means a hater of shipping and slash. I fricking love the fanart that turns up every so often on DeviantArt. I'd most likely be flattered by fanfic in the unlikely event it occurred. But I do reject the assertion of privilege here, where it's the privilege of exercising the power of my characters irresponsibly, where I remain indirectly but ultimately responsible for the consequences. And I absolutely reject the extension of that privilege, the attempt to refuse me the right to even remind you of such consequences. Because I'm a fricking sodomite, and there are a whole host of ways your appropriation could be harmful not just to me but to every citizen of Sodom. Understand, I'm not playing copyright nazi and threatening lawsuits for any labour of love that dares to play in my sandpit. I am however denying you the privilege of carrying out a recuperation of my work safe in the knowledge that I'll just STFU and accept you getting my dog to bark at gays.

An artist's ownership of their living mythos can be understood, I mean, like the ownership of a dog, less as a matter of property than as a matter of responsibility, duty of care, liability for impact. If my dog barks at gays because you've taken it to the park without my permission and this is your idea of harmless play, you have made me indirectly responsible for homophobic intimidation. You don't get to be exempt from the fallout where I make you uncomfortable as all hell.

A simple way to put it. One of the examples used in that article is Teen Wolf, with its gay showrunner, Jeff Davis. As problematic as that series is in terms of race, it's a series that's doing some interesting things from this gay viewer's perspective. It took them a while to get past a tokenism quality to Danny, but there's an embedded normalisation of gay sexuality in which nominally straight male characters are regularly subtly queered (e.g. Stiles's "You'd do that for me?" when Danny jokes about taking his virginity.) Now imagine fanwork which, however unwittingly, applies the sort of homophobic bullshit that characterises Da Vinci's Demons. The appropriating author could rankle at Davis taking issue with that, entering their "fan space" to challenge it, but that would just make them a tool, in all senses of the term. They'd be making his dog bark at gays in the park--hell, if they were as bad as Da Vinci's Demons, they'd be getting it to bite them--and after co-opting his creation from progressive to reactionary impact, acting as a tool of recuperation, they'd be obnoxiously using their resentment at being called on it as a shield. Because if you're busy being aggrieved at the artist coming into your space, that outrage will divert the attention required to even recognise that you are making their dog bark at the gays. That's one of the ways privilege sustains itself, discomfort lashing out in anger and hostility.

Note that artificial distinction of authors here is operating on a pretence that some are not authors, but rather fans. This is an expedient denial exempting those authors from the responsibilities that go with the power they are wielding. It has nothing to do with professional versus amateur. An amateur author remains an author, the only distinction being in terms of pay. To set oneself as a non-author is an affectation of non-importance, which is to say of lack of import. Which is to say, it's a way to pretend to oneself that because one is taking my dog to a certain type of (wholly public) park, by and for fellow "non-authors," any tricks one makes it does by definition constitute harmless play. This being untrue, an affectation of non-importance on the part of an author is not a lack of import but rather a lack of integrity.

Again, of course, when challenged on such behaviour, it is only natural to feel discomfort.

*

An Axiom of Avoidance, a Moral Dictum of Indulgence

Yes, you can prevent such discomfort entirely with a pragmatic measure of keeping it on the downlow, not tempting fate. Yes, "don't talk about fanwork with creators" is a good rule-of-thumb for preserving your privilege of writing such appropriative work and sharing it in public communities without repercussions, but to lay it on the artist as an ethical imperative is arse-about. If there's an ethical reason not to talk about fanwork, it's so as not to rub your privilege in the artist's face: if you're appropriating from a living mythos, (as opposed to a legacy mythos in the public domain,) you wanna have the good grace not to shove it in the original artist's face that you are, as far as they're concerned, a) taking their dog to the park without permission, b) getting it do an oh-so-entertaining trick whereby it barks at gays, and c) getting it to do this trick embarrassingly badly.

Understand, this is an actual privilege, not a vague and nebulous abstraction but the practical entitlement to do a specific concrete thing. The artist cannot prevent you. They're morally--which is to say, in the current mores of society--restrained from legal action, because suing some kid who publishing a slash piece that regurgitated fetishizing/demonizing gay tropes which the average viewer is clearly oblivious to in Da Vinci's Demons is going to look ridiculously overkill... even to the artist. You can write all the fanwork you want in which you take that dog created by a gay artist to the park, make it do whatever tricks you fancy, and if the gay artist finds your appropriation of their characters so clueless as to be dangerous, they're restrained from slapping you down for it, for no other reason than that the pervasive perception would be that they're in the wrong. That moral dictum of indulgence is about as pure as privilege can get. Well, until you entrench and extend that restraint to even challenging the privilege.

Which is what that article is proposing, functionally, where it frames the discomfort to be averted as that of the fanwork artist liable to incite an original artist's challenge, and frames that challenge as of "intensely dubious" acceptability. This is no less than an extension of the privilege such that if someone turns my dog against gays and I turn up on their virtual doorstep with even a polite request that they rethink, I'm the one that's out of line, in breach of this moral dictum of indulgence.

*

Punching Up

With all due respect, anyone thinking in these terms needs to get their head out of their ass. This entitled fantasy is not something to be grounding one's protocols of artist-audience engagement on. It's not something to be applying to the SFF book blogosphere or to literary discourse in general. It's projecting a power and privilege on authors, a "canonical weight" that is wholly an illusion of enthusiasts' canon-reverence, even more outmoded in the age of incessant franchise reboots than it was in the age of incessant franchise retcons, and inapplicable to individual authors who are, as Barthes put it, dead, their privilege of imposing an authoritative reading stripped. That illusion is an intellectually dishonest expedience for those authors who need to assert it in order to maintain their own pretence of "non-author" status. Ironically, they must, in complete doublethink, assert the authority of authorial intent here, even as they reject it.

The mass of appropriative fanwork fucking with any canon is a mass of hard evidence of where the real power and privilege resides. There can be few contemporary individual writers with a more impressive canonical profile than Rowling, so the real privilege is demonstrable in any Harry/Draco BDSM vignette, in the free publication of such. The legal veto on (non-profitmaking) appropriative work has long since been overridden by those privileged with the option to ignore it simply doing so, until we're now at the point where not only is that privilege considered a right, the right to challenge abuse of that privilege is now considered a privilege.

Pardon me if I don't tug my forelock and kowtow in meek accommodation of that sense of entitlement. Forgive me if, in interrogating the foundations of an argument on author-audience interaction, I unpack the "discomfort" at the heart of it, and finding it to be the angst of the entitled, expose and excoriate it as such. Like any artist, I have a dog in this fight simply on that basis, but as an artist, I know how easy it is for the abusers of such privilege to thereby dismiss the artist's challenge as the petty stinginess of a control freak unwilling to share their toys with the poor fans who only want to play, how easy it is to throw up a smokescreen in which any artist trying to defend their right is cast as punching down out of petty pique and mercenary self-interest, dismissing their stance as motivated by bullying egotism and greed. As a gay artist, maybe by making it brutally clear what dog I have in this fight... maybe that will cut through the crap and force the privileged to confront the exact nature of that discomfort.

The truth is, as a gay artist living under that moral dictum of indulgence, my right to challenge abuse of that privilege is being cast as a privilege by that article, and the weight of comments in support of this stance makes it very clear how systemic that privilege is among the culture. That means I'm punching up.

*

My Dog in This Fight

What dog do I have in this fight? Well, how about the werewolf from "Sic Him, Hellhound! Kill! Kill!"? He comes with his handler, his boy, a pre-slashed pairing that I could happily write a few more stories with. Hell, I'd love to do the TV series, with plenty of red-hot action to fuel your fantasies. I found that dog, made him my own, and I know he can do more tricks than there was space for in that story. And cause it's the whole point of our relationship, with that link I've let you into a space in my imagination to see him do those tricks. Because it's now a space in your imagination too, you get to come in and pet and play with that dog in my absence, even teach him to bark at gays. But taking him to the park to do that without my permission is not part of the deal. Why not? Because that dog is my responsibility. And what he does in the park is my responsibility. And while you having him bark at gays in your imagination only manifests your damage to yourself, having him do so in the park is damaging to others, and that damage caused by my creation is my responsibility too.

We don't have to look further than Da Vinci's Demons, its artist(s) and audience, for proof of how oblivious the privileged can be of the damage they do. And if your head is far enough up your ass you don't recognise the artist's right to challenge abuse of that privilege of shipping/slashing their work, you are a proven threat of real damage. Your self-serving cluelessness is established. You are demonstrably operating on a sense of entitlement. That the privilege remains unchallenged shows that you do not recognise these specific ramifications for gay artists, no matter your sexuality and/or politics; and so you are a proven threat of real damage in this specific area.

I can predict where you would most likely go wrong indeed. For all the light tone of that story, there are some serious purposes to the exact way gay relationships are rendered. One of the reasons I might well return to that mythos is to make it clearer that there's a bottom and a top in that pairing, that their relationship is contrary to the pervasive trope(s) spawned by heteronormative culture. If you flip them because you don't get that the one being bossed around isn't necessarily the one taking it up the arse, then you're fucking over the thematics and creating an appropriative work which reasserts the very misconception I'm out to challenge. There are other reactionary tropes being critiqued too, precisely because they're the clichés we're most prone to regurgitate. If you fetishize the characters, if you load them with Gay Angst, if you go wrong in any number of ways that you could go wrong with that material, your fanwork could well be actively harmful, as far as I'm concerned.

*

The Fourth Wall, the Left Arm

Consider how I class Da Vinci's Demons as agitprop and do not, in your arrant sense of entitlement, expect me to accept your "fourth wall" as a defensive perimeter, a bastion of your privilege where even for me to knock on the gate is a transgression. And for all the superficial focus on book blogging, the conflation with the issue of etiquette in author's responding to reviews, do not pretend that this is not what's going on here. From the first two paragraphs it is clear that the "fourth wall" Renay paints between artist and audience is, in its roots, a defensively furtive huddle, the left arm kept on the table as one leans in to do one's fanwork on the paper hidden by it, the arm kept guarding that picture from prying eyes as you show it to trusted friends. It's the extension of that self-protection to LiveJournal communities, DeviantArt, dedicated fanfic sites, the application of that axiom of avoidance in private groups and "friends only" lockdowns, all of them essentially domains of the privileged. If you were an online cultural super-consumer in the '90s, trust me, you're privileged.

What has changed perhaps, for Renay specifically, is an increasing involvement in the literary SF scene where that fourth wall / left arm huddle has never been the way of things, not in the convention culture from the Golden Age to the present day, in the clubhouse of carasses and granfaloons mingling professionals, SMOFs, aspiring writers, casual fans, you name your flavour or combination thereof. And what has changed generally since Renay's involvement in media fandom in the '90s is not that the industry has crept into those private spaces of enthusiasts sharing fanwork; it is that those often only quasi-private communities have themselves relaxed out of the huddle, become open public communities, that privilege extending into the liberty to appropriate without any "fourth wall" at all.

The surrender of artists to that reality has, I'd argue, often been done willingly, often positively, in celebration of the greater joy granted if one allows the budding creative type to take your dog to the park and teach it to do tricks, even embarrassingly bad ones, as long as they're not charging for it. It's sad to see the return from that generosity not a recognition of the privilege as a gift and an unshucking of the angst defending it, a concomitant surrender of the sense of needing a defensive perimeter, but rather an entrenchment of the entitlement focused on incidents of backlash, a spin of "bias" and "canonical weight" casting artists as unwarranted aggressors, and an abstraction of that dropped pragmatic barrier of privacy into a ludicrous moral dictum of indulgence--directing artists to STFU and butt out of the public spaces.

*

DiscourseFail 101

To apply this to book blogs of all things is absurd. Blogs are a distinct step outside of that comfort zone of cloistered quasi-privacy. They're public platforms, as any free magazine distributed round a city, published for anyone to read. They remain an owned space, the blog's owner having the same authority to turf out unwanted boors that they have in their physical home, and many blogs distinctly present themselves as such, as intimate offhand spoutings of--as here--rants, raves and general ramblings. Some with a more literary focus establish themselves in the discourse as a virtual salon, with an open door but with no function other than virtual communion. An owner like myself may double as author, in an essay like this automatically open to debate as an entry into the literary discourse, but I'm quite entitled to kick someone out for co-opting the space as a way to challenge how I live my life via posts that are purely social. One doesn't review a host's anecdote of a trip abroad as if it were an X thousand word mini-memoir, whether it's told in their physical or virtual space.

A book review blog, on the other hand, is presenting itself as specifically functioned, and while some may present the critique as simply one function of many, those which assert their dedicated status in that regard are establishing themselves as publications, as entries into the literary discourse. They may be amateur, self-published with zero funding or support, but just as self-publication does not exempt my chapbook Errata from treatment as an artwork in the literary discourse, so too with a publication setting itself as a virtual review magazine, not a quasi-private Yahoo Group of hobbyist critique but a legitimate entry into the literary discourse, the authors producing it cannot reasonably expect that work to be exempted from treatment as non-fiction. If I publish Errata on Lulu and distribute via Amazon, it is by definition not some special case for a private community alone, and I cannot expect to prescribe who comments on it where. Likewise if I publish a book review blog, I cannot expect to prescribe who comments on it where.

Any article's subject is perfectly entitled to try and communicate with the author of that article, or the editor of the publication, whether to correct a factual error in the article or simply to respond. As a magazine might leave a letter unprinted, a review blog might delete a comment, whether it be in a refusal to acknowledge error, a refusal to accommodate dissent, or a refusal to print abuse. The line between the last two is subjective, of course, but if feedback is printed at all, the integrity of any publication is dependent on the integrity of judgement here. To print a retraction is integrity. To print dissent is integrity. To print abuse or not is a matter of personal ethos. One is entitled to act either way, I'd say, selfishly or selflessly: to refuse them the platform; to give them the platform; to print and let the abuser hoist themselves by their own petard; to not print and spare them making a fool of themselves. Either way, a lack of integrity here is a lack of legitimacy.

This is pretty much a universal standard of discourse. This is DiscourseFail 101. Where author responses to criticism are subject to judgement it is on this exact basis. In the most extreme examples--e.g. the infamous Anne Rice Amazon meltdown--precisely what makes for a trainwreck is the author's vain and illegitimate attempt to extinguish commentary they cannot quell, fervently disacknowledging their own error, furiously dismissing dissent, foolishly treating every passing snipe on the interwebs as if it were direct hatemail. They abrogate integrity and in so doing legitimacy. If an author can engage with integrity--acknowledging error, accommodating dissent, maintaining good faith in the face of abuse, whether that means a stiff back or a sharp wit--the notion of an injunction on this becomes itself bad faith. That injunction is a dishonest defensive maneouver by one who is always already themselves an author and subject to the same judgement.

There are no exemptions here.

*

Asserting Illegitimacy

For a publication or the authors involved to claim the greater protection of a default injunction against an article's subject engaging at all is an abrogation of integrity so wholesale it's embarrassing to see. Such an injunction is a publisher's prerogative, but a magazine proclaiming that no article's subject should ever write a letter to correct factual errors or in polite dissent, that the mere receipt of a response is in and of itself a form of abuse--an invasion of space and an intimidating exercise of throwing around one's "canonical weight"--is so blatantly projecting a dread spectre of authority to pre-emptively veto any challenge to its authority that it's intellectually bankrupt as an enterprise in literary discourse. Hell, it's actively asserting illegitimacy.

It's like a novelist condemning as abuse any review by a critic of sufficient standing in the field--Clute, Wolfe, Kincaid, etc.--where that critic was not personally invited to review their work, the novelist being equally in a place to plead anguished timidity in the face of that swaggering authority. It is exactly like this, the author of article or novel both being authors, both acting to preserve an illusion of authoritative status for their work by excluding expert opinions as unwarranted authoritarian imposition by definition, regardless of the actual substance.

As far as the original author response that sparked this goes, it's worth noting, the substance of Aaronovitch's comment consists of: a correction of two factual errors; a request to "look beyond the META"; two questions on whether X or Y makes more sense if you think about Z; the teasing out of an implication of a textual fact; a question on whether X is (im)plausible given Y; a few lines on choices made during the writing; two mea culpas on decisions he regrets and their impact on the text; and an apology to anyone "broken or disappointed" with his work. There is nothing in all this that even remotely constitutes an attempt to "enforce" an authorised reading. Steering in a direction, yes, but his core comment is simply a request to reconsider, with a few suggestions of a potential alternative approach.

The outraged outburst that immediately follows from the review's author accuses him of insulting intelligence, disavows shipping while declaring it a right, argues for the shipping being disavowed, bristles at his audacity in "showing up to call people out," and challenges him to show where in the article she said something that he didn't ascribe to her. It's too short to constitute a tirade, but it's an apoplectic tantrum, and I'd say it's saturated with entitlement, except the entitlement is boiled down to an abrasive salt being ground into Aaronovitch's face. There is no comparison in the two comments, and no question of which is abusive, which is throwing around weight, albeit rhetorical rather than canonical, which is staking absolutist claims and trying to smash dissent into the ground.

*

Damned, Damned and Thrice Damned. And Then Some.

I'll also note that Aaronovitch's diffident request basically entails not imposing (from my understanding) a sexual dimension on a platonic male/female relationship, and that a platonic male/female relationship is exactly the sort of thing an author might construct specifically in an attempt to address gender issues progressively. Which is an all too close parallel to the potential issues I'm raising above with respect to privileged readers imposing a heteronormative reading on, for example, my Hellhound characters. And while an individual's reading is a long way from appropriative fanwork using the characters, when you're looking at a blog with seven times the number of Twitter followers I have, a published review there that stamped a sufficiently politically problematic reading on the discourse, one that aggressively asserted the author's Correctitude and my Wrongosity for having the temerity to not regurgitate and reinforce some fetishizing/demonizing/straightironing variant, one that was exercising this authority to a presumably receptive audience... that's a situation where I might choose to lay aside my general principle of non-response and intercede.

It is abundantly clear, I think, how that would be received: with every obnoxious tactic an entrenched sense of entitlement can muster when privilege is challenged.

The review blog itself can be pretty much dismissed, as far as I'm concerned. In its extension and abstraction of the axiom of avoidance into a a moral dictum of indulgence, a bastion of authorial privilege, it has demolished any pretence of integrity, any illusion of legitimacy, disqualified itself as in any way a contribution to literary discourse. That the entitlement at the heart of this mindset becomes truly repellant and, I'd argue, undeniable when viewed through the lens of membership in an abject social groups is doubly damning, but to be honest, I find it triply damning that, by all evidence, the entitlement requires the application of that lens to be exposed. And I have doubts that even this will be persuasive for some. Whatever. As far as discourse goes, such a bastion of authorial privilege is intellectually bankrupt. Even laying aside the expectations of actual published discourse, professional or amateur, accepting it as a playground for doublethinking fans to play out a fantasy of private publication, non-authorial authorship, even disregarding the fact this roleplaying is live action with every bit the impact of legitimate discourse, the toxicity of such privilege renders it an ugly joke even in social terms. Some of us don't have the luxury of not seeing how ugly that entitlement is.

What's really more damning to me is to see a professional magazine with a strong progressive ethos publishing an article like Renay's that springs out of that outburst of entitlement, spilling out its own entitled advocacy of entitlement, and with the same posturing of victimhood. That article: asserts a privilege of appropriation over any artist; rejects not just authorial intent but authorial ownership, asserting as a right the "non-author's" capacity to fetishize/demonize/straightiron a gay author's gay characters; justifies prejudice as a response to challenges to that privilege; rewrites the history whereby that privilege became so entrenched that privacy is no longer even required; laments the discomfort where the extended privilege of no legal challenge doesn't extend to a privilege of no challenge at all; suggests we salve that discomfort via more privilege by establishing a principle that everything from a specific book blog to Tumblr as a whole is basically a bastion of authorial privilege.

Because, yes, the solution to the angst of privileged authors of appropriative work and bad faith critique that distorts its subject in the lens of privileged appropriation... when those entitled boors can't even deal with an author diffidently requesting they rethink... the solution is to deny response rights to a class of authors who respect the rigours of discourse so as to cosset this other class of authors claiming exemption from such rigours.

Fuck.

That.

Shit.

As Henry Ford Once Said of Nazi Germany...

"We believe a more positive impact can be made through continued involvement, rather than by sitting on the sidelines."

The Door, I Show You It

Dear citizens of New Sodom,

Dear commentariat of this blog,

But most of all, dear clueless cuntfucker,

On the previous post to this you will find a comment wildly misconstruing my crude détournement of the Sochi 2014 Olympics by the (hardly subtle) insertion of swastikas, in (fairly direct) reference to the IOC's stance of collaboration with fascism. This comment, asking how Russia sheltering Snowden classifies as fascist, is surprising and dispiriting--I'd have expected more civic responsibility of any citizen of New Sodom, expected enough savvy of the situation beyond New Sodom to get the significance immediately, or at least enough sense of the core concerns here as to not require a cluebat to send one in the right direction--but it is not in itself an outrageous faux pas. However, the responses to my correction of this incomprehension are... problematic.

A simple correction of incomprehension requires at most acknowledgement; what is neither required nor desired here is clueless nuisancery. In the eight or nine years this blog has been running, I've yet to ban a single commenter or even delete a comment for reasons other than spamming. Instead, even with outright homophobic abuse cut-and-pasted by flyby asshats, I've elected to respond, to let asinine comments stand as self-evidently asinine, preferring to unpack their idiocies for the entertainment of readers and for the exploration of folly's intricacies. I am not however a man of infinite tolerance, and there are particular (ill-)manners of discourse that will try my patience to the point of ire. Faced with persistent recidivism in application of such, having been quite clear at numerous points in the past on the fact I regard such behaviour as boorish, sadly it seems there is no other way to get through to some than to address a particular example directly and draw a line, to say that I will no longer tolerate this particular flavour of asshattery.

When I post something like the mock-up poster below, and you so wholly miss the point that it requires nothing more than a correction to point you in the right direction, this is a simple misunderstanding, and it should not be difficult to respond to that correction appropriately. The responses on the post below are not appropriate. They are so characteristically inappropriate, to be clear, that I have considered the possibility that there is a lack of sincerity at play here--that surely only outright trollery would produce such graceless rot. But trollery is not, I think, the case here, simply the bad faith of a snipewank who remains sincere even as he stretches his argument into petty dishonesty, untruths-to-self that are sustained (unlike those of the troll) but fundamentally insubstantive, expedient rhetorical nonsenses employed more for the gameplay of discourse than anything else. From the words snipe and wank, the meaning of the composite term should be clear. Suffice to say that this, more than crude cretinous bigotry, is what I consider inappropriate.

Even so, I would not be making this post were snipewankery the only problem. Unfortunately, the inflated self-esteem of the snipewank entails a hauteur that's bound up with one's sense of entitlement, a belief in one's authoritative judgement, and when the post in question is that of a queer writer addressing queer concerns, the hauteur of a straight snipewank can cross the line and become cuntfuckery. The arrant presumption of telling someone they're "doing it wrong" takes on a whole new dimension when placed in the context of members of abject social groups having to endure such condescension as a systemic refusal to recognise equality--as women endure mansplaining, so queers endure straightsplaining, and as the personal assumption of superiority automatically renders this snipewankery, the cultural interpersonal capital bolstering that assumption on the part of straight men renders it cuntfuckery.

And cuntfuckery is where I draw the line.

So, with this blog renamed to Notes from New Sodom and its ethos cemented in that conceit, with those responses in the previous post as examples of discourse incompatible with that ethos, in the interests of clarifying just where that line is drawn and why, here is a more appropriate response to the correction of your cluelessness, for future reference:

"Oh, you mean the combination of the swastika with the Sochi 2014 Olympics logo is a caustic comment on the IOC pandering to Russia's resurgent fascism? Doh! My bad. That should really have been blindingly obvious, shouldn't it? Now that I think of it, I'm not sure how I could be so oblivious as to fail utterly to spot the connection between the symbol of fascism and the actions of fascism. I mean, actions like in that photo all over the internets where the blackshirted Occupy Pedofilyaj skinheads have an Uzbek teen stripped and on his knees holding a dildo. Or the video with the kid who gets piss poured over him by another gang in this growing movement. Or the countless incidents over the last few years of LGBT activists getting the shit kicked out of them by organised mobs of street thugs while the Russian police looked on and/or helped the self-identified nazis--back when those LGBT activists were still actually allowed to march, that is. Why I wouldn't make the connection between 20th century fascist street thuggery and 21st century fascist street thuggery, I just don't know.

"Fuck, man, the fact that St Petersburg's law against the promotion of homosexuality is now state-wide, Putin happily riding the wave of prejudice in which 74% of Russians, according to a Pew Research Center study, say society should not accept homosexuality... the fact that Russia has confirmed it will apply those laws to visiting athletes and supporters... the fact that the IOC when questioned about the support they'd give LGBT athletes actually warned them of further punitive action should they step out of line... and what with Stephen Fry leading protests that made prime time BBC News, even drawing explicit parallels to 1936 in his open letter to David Cameron and the IOC... really, I'm not sure what I was thinking. What the fuck else would that image be about but the IOC going beyond complicity with Russian fascism and into outright collaboration? Why the fuck I thought it had anything to do with Snowden, I have no idea. The idea that imagery referencing Russia, fascism and the Olympics would be referencing Russia, fascism and the Olympics... it's really a no-brainer, huh?

"The more I think about it, in fact, the more I realise, using my natural human powers of Theory of Mind, that my utter obliviousness must surely have been... well, tedious at best. Sensing the irk in your curt response, I appreciate your forbearance in placing responsibility for my wild misreading of the obvious target--the IOC's appeasement of Russia's burgeoning fascism--not with myself but with the mainstream news which has so wholly failed to appraise someone like me of this dire situation. I can imagine how frustrating and dispiriting it is to run into such blithe ignorance of the resurgence of fascism, how difficult it must be not to lash out with a bitter fury at those of us who have the luxury of ignorance here, those of us who can afford to place homophobic fascism so far down in our list of priorities that we don't even see the blatant significance in that image. It must have been galling, I imagine, to see the resurgence of fascism in Russia--the kidnapping and torture of your fellow queers--so far off my radar. That you'd curb your anger in the face of obliviousness, withhold judgement on the ignorant individual and instead direct blame at the mainstream media... I appreciate that.

"Indeed, when I think of how I missed the point despite your increasing focus on queer politics here--c.f. the recent posts on segregation, or Bert & Ernie, or Da Vinci's Demons, or simply your identification as THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!--I realise now how my errant interpretation of that image wouldn't just be gobsmacking in its obliviousness of the queer political context, the obvious real world referent. I realise how it speaks of a complete disregard of your perspective as a human being with their own agency. Not only was I grinding your face in the fact that the situation on Russia so little impinges upon my consciousness that your image went over my head; I was grinding your face in the fact that despite everything you've been banging on about on this blog for the last few years, it didn't even occur to me that you'd be coming at this from a queer perspective. I fabricated an authorial intent out of whole cloth, imagining that you, a Scottish anarchosocialist sodomite, would for some unknown reason have suddenly become a zealously Americanist critic of a whistleblower on the current surveillance state overreach, and such a fervent one indeed that you'd (bizarrely, incomprehensibly,) compare the regime sheltering said whistleblower to the nazis. Of all things, I projected onto you a random stance of rabid US patriotism. To you, I can only imagine, that must have seemed a flagrant disregard of the very notion that you could have a queer perspective.

"What I mean is, not only did I ram it down your throat how little a straight person could care to know about the homophobic fascism in Russia; I rammed it down your throat how little they could even have that iota of consideration required to anticipate you caring about such fascism. To you it must have seemed that I demonstrated not just a jawdropping ignorance of the situation in Russia but a breathtaking disregard of the very notion that a homosexual employing the swastika in a work of art might be referencing the fascism which strives to exterminate homosexuals. Wow. It's one thing for the kidnapping and torture of gay kids in Russia to have so little impact that, despite the agitation against the Sochi Olympics, a random commenter on such an image sans context wouldn't make the connection. It's another thing for your consistent advocacy on queer issues to have so little impact on a recurrent commenter like myself that I'd fail to make the connection even in the context of your blog.

"So I'm guessing that you read my comment and were staggered, aghast at my inability to get where you were coming from, that you could get your head around me being ignorant of the IOC's collaboration with fascism, but really didn't know quite what to make of the fact that after years of reading and commenting on this blog I still somehow managed to obliviate your core concerns. That even with the tub-thumping of the immediately preceding entry, I'd not just disagree with your priorities but lack even sufficient cognizance of their existence/possibility to prompt the realisation that they were in play. I'm guessing you were profoundly saddened by my failure to stop and think for even a second that THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!! might be firing off another of his potshots at the cuntfuckers. I'm guessing you wondered how indicative this might be of a wider disregard, how far other straights might be similarly bound into such a straight perspective, so incapable of imagining what goes on in a mouthy queer's head that it wouldn't even occur to them that you were being a mouthy queer again, despite your active presentation of self as a mouthy queer, as THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!

"Yup, thinking this through with my amazing human capacity of Theory of Mind, I see now how that oblivious comment probably played. And now that I know where you're coming from, that poster makes so much more sense. And having been oblivious of the situation in queer politics you were referencing--hell, so oblivious even of your queer perspective that I didn't even consider you might be applying it here--well, I'll simply stand corrected and accept your caustic comment on aforesaid situation for what it is. You see the IOC's collaboration with Russian fascism as collaboration with Russian fascism. Nuff said. I thought you were on about something else entirely. You're not. So I'll shut the fuck up now.

"Far be it from me to compound my cluelessness by blathering on about my own concerns with the US government's attitude to Snowden, spouting some irrelevant opinions about the motivations that will, in my not so humble opinion, underlie a US boycott, as if a Scottish sodomite would and should see Russian fascism and the International Olympic Committee's collaboration with it through a US filter. A Scottish sodomite who may or may not give a shit about that particular surveillance state politicking, but who's certainly made it clear that this is not the issue being addressed. As a regular reader of your blog I understand the concept of derailing, and I imagine you really wouldn't like me trying to draw you into a discussion of my unrelated concerns on a post expressing yours.

"Nor will I end that blather with a reassurance that there's no problem here... as long as your opinion on this entirely unrelated issue is acceptable, as if the onus is on you to renounce the stance I fabricated for you out of whole cloth, as if despite my total misreading of your actual target, what required to be resolved was not my error but the wholly imaginary disagreement I projected on you. For me to do that would, I appreciate, be just absurd. I imagine your gobsmack at the first comment would be veritably dwarfed by such a bizarre turn in the discourse, if I were to actually have the audacity to condescend so, to present myself as letting you off from an argument after I've been so resoundingly obtuse. I'd come across as a complete cock, wouldn't I? Or cuntfucker, to use your term. I can put myself in your head, imagine how it would look to you--as a near comic pompousness in which I actually think it's my station in life to discharge you of the heinous offense of disagreeing with me in my imagination. What an assumption of authority that would be!

"And what I certainly won't do then is condescendingly dismiss that caustic comment with a supercilious admission that it's amusing but... For a start, I can see how your combination of the symbols is hardly meant for my amusement. It might constitute a sort of visual satire, I suppose, but really... it's not exactly meant to be laughed at, is it? To see a comment on such an issue as mere joke would be a trivialisation of your intent, right? I don't imagine you were chortling to yourself merrily as you pasted it together. Now I know what it's referring to, I can quite imagine it comes from a bitter raging disgust at the IOC's collaboration. Given that I don't imagine everyone in the entire world bar me to be ignorant, I'm sure you of all people had no more illusions about the IOC's spineless attitude than I, see it similarly as mere dismal confirmation of an ugly reality, but that's not going to magically dissolve the furious contempt that surely motivated you in slapping that image up on your blog. So I wouldn't think to pat you on the back over how funny it is... but...

"Nor will I follow up that but with a bizarre analysis of an ex-KGB boss's agenda as idealistically anti-Communist--like Hitler's(!)--as if such an analysis somehow negated the situation: neo-nazi gangs kidnapping and torturing gay teens; 74% of the population saying society shouldn't accept homosexuals; anti-gay laws expanding from St Petersburg to the whole country; Putin presiding over all of this; the IOC collaborating. Or as if it negated the purpose of a pointed visual comment on that situation. I mean, I do understand how the word but works, so for me to use it like that would, I understand, be to essentially say that regardless of the value of humour I find in that image, really, there are other factors outweighing that value. Simply to include that but would be an unfathomable signal that I'm about to open an argument aimed at silencing you, at establishing the facticity of something countermanding the justification for the post provided by the humour.

"I understand that to place a but here is to say that what follows is a counter-argument. I understand that after completely missing your entire point in my first comment, I'd now be slingshotting from irrelevant US-blinkered waffle topped with an absurd acquittal (from the crime of an imaginary opinion) to the outright obnoxiousness of arguing that there are reasons against a caustic comment which, in slapping a few swastikas on the the Sochi Olympics logo, does little more than point to the current situation and say we're dealing with fucking fascism. Knowing how the word but works, I know that I could only be presenting what follows as a delegitimising criticism of that comment, as a challenge to your choice to construct and post it. It does offer me some amusement, I'd be saying. But still. And yet. However. Nevertheless. Regardless of this. For the following reasons, the implication would hang in the air, that amusement is inadequate justification.

"What could I even follow that with? Some nebulous handwaving about Putin being anti-Communist? And the next time you tell that story about not being allowed to debate Section 28 at school because the teacher feared it would breach Section 28, maybe I'd say, That's terribly droll, but Thatcher was actually anti-union. At best surely I could offer a false dilemma between criticising IOC collaboration with Russian fascism and criticising the Fellowship's instigation of Bahati's Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. I'd probably also betray my ignorance by talking vaguely in terms of US support and Africa, as if the former were mere cheerleading and the latter were an inchoate mass. But the main cuntfuckery would be my use of an either-or fallacy to agitate at you for your inaction on A when I could instead be agitating elsewhere for action on B, thus solving the false dilemma. That's generally how political agitation works, after all. If all of us wasted our time simply agitating for each other to do B instead of A, neither would be dealt with.

"In ranking Russia below Uganda here, I'd also be obliviating the exact same rhetoric being utilised in both, as I'm guessing you could link me to--but don't worry, I'll go look it up myself; I'm sure it's easy to find--of homosexuality being described as foreign to the native culture, unAfrican or unRussian. Why, I'd be obliviating the fact that you have, on this very blog, highlighted not just the Fellowship's influence in the very inception of Bahati's bill, but the supremely dubious links between the Fellowship and Invisible Children, the latter with their whole Kony2012 campaign to send US military advisors into Uganda to train their armed forces. I'd be obliviating the fact that you were agitating about B precisely when the Kony2012 campaign made this a priority. In my overweening assumption I'd be erasing history--albeit on a small personal scale--just to sustain my bogus argument against your present stance against Russian fascism.

"And without even a moment's consideration that you might be attacking homophobia on that other front in ways I don't have a fucking clue about, I'd be a straight man, of all people, telling you, of all people, a queer man, that as far as queer activism goes you're doing it wrong. How could I defend that? If you managed to curb your utter contempt at the sheer hauteur of a straight idiot like me trying to dismiss a single image post with my correctitude, if you refrained from pointing out my arrogance in presuming to enlighten you on what was more important--when I'm so fucking clueless on this matter that I didn't even get the queer significance of that image in the first place--if you made only the simplest acerbic response, pointing out that to highlight one massive festering boil of homophobia is hardly incompatible with action in the face of another... what could I say to justify my swaggering conceit in seeking to rectify your grave error in posting that image?

"Not being an ignorant cuntfucker, I've heard terms like mansplaining and straightsplaining. I know that the latter is what I'd be doing with you, that you'd class this as cuntfuckery, and that given your lack of compunction in dealing with cuntfuckery, I'd be positively begging for the full brunt of your fury. What could I, a cuntfucker, possibly say after telling you, a cocksucker, that you're doing it wrong when you point to the situation in Russia instead of to the situation in Uganda? Were I to impose my bumptious egoism on you in your own virtual home, with neither cognizance nor consideration of the fact you do not need some random cuntfucker to enlighten you on how important Uganda is, what could I possibly say to make this anything less than insufferable boorishness?

"Would I quibble? Would I concede that in principle one might object to both, that in theory one might post a cut-and-paste image attacking IOC collaboration in Russian fascism and yet still, with the 23.5 hours of the rest of the day, and with fuck knows how many hours of the days before or after, manage to also agitate against US activities in Uganda? Would I deign to allow this as a speculative potential, but do so only as a preliminary to the assertion that (in practice) you must choose your priorities or have them chosen for you? As if this were some grand wisdom I were dispensing unto your pitiful folly. As if you needed me to tell you this. As if it didn't occur to me for a second that you might actually be exercising that capacity to prioritise what matters now, that you might have actually been exercising it as regards Uganda during that whole Kony2012 thing--maybe even before! In context, surely that would be of a kind with the infantilisation of women or people of colour, the inveterate tendency of the white cuntfucker to treat the abject as intellectual and emotional inferiors requiring education. It would also be head-deskingly ironic for me to warn you of how, in your feeble inferiority of unfocused aims, you risk having priorities imposed on you... precisely as I myself am seeking to impose my priorities on you.

"No, no, I wouldn't be so patronising. I wouldn't spew out some more blatherous opinionation when I'm pretty sure you couldn't give two smears of a shit on a stick that I think Putin's trying to curry favour with the Russian Orthodox Church--being more concerned, I'd guess with that 74% of the population who'll actually give serious exterminationist power to any opportunistic demagogue who knows how to capitalise on it. I'm pretty sure you don't give a flying felch-crazy flip-fuck what I think about US politicking over Snowden; I mean, having completely gotten the wrong end of the stick over this and met with only irk at my doing so, it's clear you're not remotely interested in arguing about this with me, defending the opinions I imagine you have so I can impose my correctitude on them; so I'll shut the fuck up about that. You probably don't much care about my judgement on the notion of the Olympics in principle either. Or what I think of the wholly irrelevant subject of Zionism. To start throwing such random opinions would just be a smokescreen.

"All of that would be empty prattle, and obviously unwelcome in the face of the brusque sarcasm I'd no doubt have got from you for you're doing it wrong straightsplaining. The idea that you shouldn't make a caustic comment about Russian fascism and the IOC because it's a terrible waste of the time you should have spent making the noise you already made a year ago... clearly that would raise at least a derisory snort from you, and in the face of such it would be clear that I am now, at best, as far as you're concerned, an excruciatingly tedious oaf whose inveterate snipewankery long since left you wondering why the fuck I even read your blog. I think the message would be clear, no? That my seemingly infinitely high valuation of my opinion is in inverse proportion to your own valuation of that same opinion. If I carried on despite the cues indicating you considered this behaviour obnoxious, that heedless discourtesy would surely seem born of the sense of entitlement that leads a guest to to so take their host's hospitality for granted that they think nothing of insulting them even as they hang around long after they've outstayed their welcome.

"So I wouldn't do that. I'd just shut the fuck up. I wouldn't end my pointless self-absorbed wittering about Snowden and Putin and Miranda and corporatism in sport and Zionism(!) with a comment that an author's meaning can sometimes be lost, despite their best intentions. I'd know by then that all you'd hear is the soulsucking nasal whine of an ignorant egoist with too much self-image invested in their smarts not to spin their mistake as an author's meaning being not actively misunderstood but passively lost, spin it indeed as the author's failure to live up to best intentions. I'd know that such a comment, after all the clueless incomprehension and arrogant assumption, all the condescending dismissal and insufferable correctitude, after all the utter guff, would just seem a final cherry on top, an attempt to recast my obtuseness as your opacity. In the face of outright incomprehension that symbols of Russia, Olympics and fascism might refer to Russia, Olympics and fascism, you'd surely be thinking, I still have to make it about you being wrong. I'm not sure you'd call that blaming the victim, but it would certainly be a self-serving attempt to turn responsibility for my cuntfuckery on to you.

"So I'd inflict none of that obnoxious wordspew on you. If you corrected me without even a sniff of personal criticism, just a roll of eyes at a lack of good reportage, I'd simply acknowledge that correction and move on. It's not like I'd need to save face, after all. It's not like my egoism is so bloated (or so small and desperate and over-compensating) that I can't accept I was wrong even when tacitly absolved of responsibility for it. It's not like I need to wheel out a whole set of rhetorical maneouvres--derailing, assumption of authority, trivialisation, silencing, delegitimising, false dilemma, erasing history, correctitude, straightsplaining, infantilisation, smokescreen, sense of entitlement, blaming the victim, whatever--in some vague hope that something in all that cuntfuckery will... what? Draw you into a spurious debate on my bogus nonsense so that somewhere in the mire of bad faith I can persuade myself that I've re-established my correctitude, that regardless of my complete incomprehension of an image well nigh as simple and obvious as they come, I can be proud in my correctitude and disdainful of your wrongosity? Why the fuck would you put up with that sort of shit?

"No, there's just no need for it. Actually, come to think of it, since I'm not going to lay that sort of shit on you, it's not like I even need to tell you that. You don't need to know what cuntfuckery I'm not going to crap all over your blog. So I could probably boil all of this alternative response down to something much simpler. When it comes down to it, at the end of the day, there's really not much more I need to say than this:

"Oh. Right. My bad."

And there you go. Oh. An expression of surprise. Right. An acknowledgement that the correction is received and understood. My bad. An acknowledgement that as a citizen of New Sodom such a spectacular obliviousness is something of a faux pas, a disregard of the core concerns here, where you are at least expected to exercise the minimum of awareness of what those concerns might be. Hell, even if you don't know shit about Sochi and can't think it through enough to use the arcane mysteries of Google and your amazing human powers of Theory of Mind to ascertain the obvious, that faux pas isn't even a big deal. I find it hard to imagine how you can read this blog, have that misconception cleared up and not face-palm at how obvious the referent is in retrospect, but I'm not one to require a show of apologies for a stumble--or for anything really. What I do ask is that you don't take that stumble as an opportunity to springboard into snipewanking cuntfuckery so tedious it seems designed to irk. Those bolded words throughout, they're not that hard to avoid if you put a bit of effort in, if you have the respect for others required to do so.

If you are incapable of commenting with even the modicum of respect required to construct such a response--of either the long or short variant--then simply do not comment here. You are not welcome. Fuck the fuck off, you cuntfucking cuntfucker, and never darken my fucking door again. Capiche? Do not argue with this, my dear Snipewank. You have the choice of either accepting that, as far as I'm concerned, you're clearly incapable of communicating with me other than as an insufferable boor, or of believing what you will of my antipathy and knowing simply that this virtual abode will no longer offer virtual hospitality. Should you choose the former, the above should, I hope, provide you with an adequate dissection of why and how that effect is engendered in your manners of discourse. Please to learn from it and apply the principles in future.

Should you choose the latter, I have no intention of suffering you being an insufferable boor over whether or not it's reasonable for me to see you as an insufferable boor. I have no interest in a tedious discourse with you on your correctitude and my wrongosity in that respect. There is no way for you to hold to this without judging all of the above to be written in bad faith, in which case you have zero respect and discussion is futile. If you can't get it through your skull how shit like that comes across and adjust your behaviour accordingly, I will in all likelihood simply start deleting your comments. To give no leeway, not to give the benefit of the doubt even when it is thoroughly trying to do so, goes against the grain with me, but I take comfort in the fact that I've no doubt--not an iota--that you'll consider this a proof of your correctitude and my wrongosity, a refusal to engage with the mighty ego intellect before whom none can stand. That is your prerogative, and I'll leave you to it.

I will also however invite you to leave with it. Go with my best wishes--genuinely, sincerely, I find you insufferable, but I wish you all the best, these well-wishes simply including a hope that you might at some point recognise the boorishness I'm rejecting as unacceptable discourse here, that you might realise how you're presenting yourself, interrogate your attitude to others, and become a better person for it. At the moment, I'm simply no longer willing to put up with it--which is my prerogative--so I'll bid you goodbye.

Hugz and kittehz

THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!

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UPDATE: Email response to an email received:

I'm genuinely surprised to hear that you're not straight. I'm assuming you've mentioned this before somewhere, so I happily accept that--I can only presume your mention of this at some point has just not stuck in my memory. Bear in mind, you're just a faceless "S. Johnson" to me, somewhere out there in the US, a teacher--science, as I recall? Your comments have been predominantly on science versus religion, sf versus fantasy; I don't know you beyond those opinions, and clearly I've missed or forgotten whatever mention of sexuality you made. I've been reading your comments for as long as I remember as those of some straight US teacher who seemed to have zero interest in me other than as someone to castigate for expressing opinions you disagree with, or for *not* expressing the opinions you consider (unquestionably) correct.

For that assumption on your sexuality, I unreservedly apologise, and only hope you'll appreciate that a whole lot of my frustration--not "hurt feelings," not sensitivity, but frustration--was based on a genuine belief that a straight man was lecturing me from a position of cluelessness, and determined to impose their concerns over mine. You can expect an amendment/retraction to that entry shortly. I'd rather not delete it, can't pretend it was never said, but I'll certainly not cover over my mistake. Maybe if nothing else, *that* will convince you that it was written in good faith, that no matter who you are on the other end of the internets, this is how you've been coming across. Perhaps the most open and honest thing I can do is post this letter beneath. If I look like a fool for that assumption, fair enough.

Other than that: I have no idea where you get the idea I'm right wing from. I'm not. I've lionised the Red Clydesiders and the International Brigades in my fiction. The latest novel is an anarcho-socialist atheist humanist détournement of the gospels. Kissing the ass of the US? I'd have thought I'd made it clear on numerous occasions that I find the culture self-deluded to the point of dangerous, its patriotism etc. beyond ethically bankrupt. I'm not fond of the UK either, which is currently having its own fascist resurgence, just with the EDL focusing on immigration rather than sexuality. Not to mention the actions of the UKBA. And so on. The idea that I wouldn't tell bitter jokes about David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald, and Bradley Manning because it "wouldn’t be good business" is risible. Trust me, if I were a stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe right now, the developing dystopia those stories reveal might well be the bulk of my material. If I refused to be drawn on Snowden, it's not from some support of these surveillance state(s), simply because I've found our exchanges increasingly sour and unproductive.

Why so? You repeatedly seem to decide that if I have not told you my opinion on something--e.g. Snowden, the Russian Orthodox Church, Miranda, Manning, all of which by all indications I basically agree with you on--I must actually hold the diametrically opposite opinion... and must be corrected on it. For fuck's sake, if I so much as say that I'm more concerned with the power of a massive homophobic majority populace, to you that means I "look kindly on the Russian Orthodox Church." It's not a see-saw. If I find X more worrying than Y, that doesn't mean I'm waving the flag for Y. Except to you, it seems, it does. Every single time we debate I find myself being castigated for opinions I *do not hold*.

Even in your email you project that I think "everyone will understand that a Sochi boycott is about fighting hideous oppression of gays." No, I expected people to understand the significance of the image. I see nothing in the US regime to make me disagree with your claim that a boycott, if it did take place, would have a whole other agenda. But I don't actually want a one-off boycott of Russia. If the IOC go ahead with Sochi, I'd rather see every nation with a concern for human rights withdraw forever, putting the bullshit lie of the "Olympic spirit" to the sword. (It's been bankrupt since 1936. Hence the "Timeless" in that title.) I've said so publicly, just on Twitter rather than the blog. I don't consider any such withdrawals remotely likely. Still, I'll happily make the connection between 1936 and 2014, because I think that connection needs to be made, in part to highlight the resurgence of fascism, in part to expose the collaborationist sideshow we're all likely to be having in two years--after which, with or without a boycott, we'll simply hold the next games elsewhere and everyone will spew utter bullshit about how they've been "redeemed."

Anyway, there's no real point in this discussion, is there? I'm glad you've written this as, to be honest, the contempt in your plain-faced insults is what I've been picking up from you since Day One; it's refreshing to see it without the thin veil of pseudo-courteous disrespect. So, as I say, I'll revise that post to make it absolutely clear how wrong I was about your sexuality. You are clearly not the cuntfucker I thought you were. But now that we're both nice and open about the fact we just don't get along, to put it mildly, can you please just find someone else to enlighten? Given your stance that my "tender regard for Zionism is bigotry," I'd suggest you go find that Red Wolf blogger to whom I'm that "Liberal Brit genre writer Hal Duncan who equates Zionism with fascism and Muslim extremism." I'm sure you'd get on like a house on fire.

Thanks.

The Timeless Spirit of the Olympic Games

Building New Sodom

Down at Nine Worlds, as part of the Queer Fandom stream run by Tori Truslow, I had a half hour talk to give on a subject of my choice. I thought I'd post it here too.

*

Afternoon, I'm THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!! That's capital T H E dot dot dot dot Sodomite Hal Duncan exclamation mark exclamation mark, so named in a lovely piece of hatemail from one whose linguiphilia, shall we say, shone through in their exuberant overuse of excess capitalisation and spurious punctuation. Not just some Sodomite, not just the Sodomite, but THE Sodomite. And not just the customary three full stops to signify a pause for effect, but four! Clearly being a queer, there's just a little extra... drama in my dramatic pause. Not just a single sad solitary exclamation mark either, but two, standing solidly together, upright and firm, proud as the morning glory of two cocks in frottage.

So... THE... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!

I guess that means I speak for Sodom. Fair enough. We have no ancient homeland to return to, we Sodomites, just a wasteland of salt, but I'll speak for the New Sodom that's being built in every gay village in every city in every corner of the world, in every online community where we connect with others like ourselves. In every gathering like this, in every heart in this room. Take a look around you, at your new neighbours.

Welcome to New Sodom.

Brothers and sisters--no, siblings, citizens, we who were born into exile are tasked with the reconstruction of a city in which every faggot is welcome. No, every freak. The New Sodom I'm talking about is not just for the queer in terms of sexuality. To be queer is to be deviant from a default, from a normative Us defined by the exclusion of an abject Them. Even white is an artificial default defined thus, a pretended absence of colour, an identification of all who have darker skin as deviant from the default, exotically Other, ethnically queer. If default can mean white, straight, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical, male... we only have to look at the exclusion of women to know that this default, this normative, is not even always the majority. What unites us as citizens of New Sodom is not that we are members of one minority or of various minorities. What unites us is that we're queer, in whatever respect. And we are many.

Being many, we have the power, I truly believe, to build this New Sodom, in our culture, in every progressive work of fiction, on the page or the screen. To reconstruct the city of the soul--call it Babylon or Byzantium or Birmingham--to rebuild it as a place of social justice. As audience or artist, we're always already rebuilding the city we live in, in the narratives we construct and consume. This is why I want to talk today about one specific problem in the fiction that has built and is still building a city that is not New Sodom, a city in which the abject continues to be misrepresented and excluded. I want to put a name that you will recognise to the system we're living in, in which members of myriad abject groups are not welcome at the heart of narrative, where they're allowed in only to perform certain roles of service to the normative protagonist--as the Gay Best Friend, the Magic Negro.

I say it's time to raise the sword of a word, to bring it sweeping down and cut the Gordian Knot of tangled discourse, to cut the crap and call this system what it is:

Segregation.

The status quo in the media, in our narratives, is segregation. It’s a state in which members of abject groups--black, queer, whatever--are deemed to not belong as main characters. This is the segregation of not being able to sit at the front of the bus. The abject may be allowed in as an exception if this “serves the plot” if there's a reason for the character’s gayness. This is the segregation of being stopped in a white neighborhood and challenged on your purpose in being there. The abject may be allowed in as Gay Best Friends or Magic Negros in service of the straight, white protagonist. This is the segregation of travelling into a white neighbourhood to work as a cleaner in someone’s house.

It’s segregation for the readers too. They may be able to go to a little corner of the genre where the stories speak directly to them--a gay imprint like Lethe Press, a magazine like Icarus, queer cinema, black fiction. This is the segregation of the ghetto. While this holds, for all that the abject may appreciate much in the narratives they’re written out of, the constant awareness of their erasure from these narratives is a barrier that prevents full enjoyment, an unwelcome sign that says, “No Blacks” or “No Gays” which they must choose to ignore. This is the segregation of water fountains at which the abject cannot drink and be refreshed as the normative can.

Segregation. I do not use this word lightly. I use it literally, not figuratively. I'm saying that segregation can be enforced normatively rather than legally, that prescribing the role you can play in a narrative is no less segregation than prescribing the seat you can take on a bus. And as these fictional narratives we construct and consume shape our readings of the world around us, segregation in them plays out in practical, physical limitations on where you can go without challenge.

What happens when narratives are segregated like the buses of Alabama in 1963? A kid coming back from the shops with Skittles gets followed by someone who can only see him in the role that segregated narrative has prescribed for him. That kid gets challenged because narrative after narrative says he doesn't belong in this neighbourhood. He gets shot and killed because narrative after narrative has allowed in black male teens only in a certain seat at the back of the bus, in the shadows, as a threat. And his killer walks free because all the jurors have read or watched that same narrative over and over again, so many times they actually consider the paranoid fear of a kid with Skittles to be reasonable.

This is what happens when your narratives are segregated, excluding the abject from protagonist roles, boxing them into bigoted clichés, thugs in hoodies.

This is what happens when your cheap and easy hackwork consistently erases the permutation in which the abject is central subject, the PoV character to whom the stalker in the car is the threat.

This is what happens when you blithely construct a culture of narratives in which it's second fucking nature to cast Muggers No.1, 2 and 3 with black skin.

This is what happens when you can't even write a black cop without giving him a stereotypical gang kid backstory---like his innately violent nature has to be "redeemed."

This is what happens when systemic segregation in narrative wires the bigoted clichés so deep, it defines how real life scenarios are read and in a vicious circle defines the stories real life inspires you to write.

This is what happens when every single Hollywood movie on a 2011 IMDB official list of the Top 50 Sci-Fi movies has a white lead:

Inception
The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars
The Matrix
Terminator 2
Alien
A Clockwork Orange
Aliens
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Metropolis
Back to the Future
2001
Return of the Jedi
Blade Runner
Donnie Darko
District 9
Avatar
The Thing
The Terminator
Twelve Monkeys
V for Vendetta
Star Trek
Frankenstein
Children of Men
Bride of Frankenstein
Planet of the Apes
Young Frankenstein
Brazil
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Solaris
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Moon
The Iron Giant
Jurassic Park
Iron Man
E.T.
Serenity

This is what happens when you lie to yourself that segregation doesn't exist, or that you're not swayed by its constant agitprop.

This is what happens when you think you're "not racist," but you don't even notice the absence of the abject on lists like the one I've just rattled through.

This is what happens when you resist pressure for social awareness in your subculture with denials, excuses and rhetoric of "PC fascism."

This is what happens when you blithely dismiss the import of bigoted clichés in fiction because that fiction pleasures you like a ten dollar hustler.

This is what happens when you automatically write a black male teen into the narrative you're constructing in the cliché role allotted him: threat.

This is what happens when you just don't, can't, won't construct your narrative with the black male teen in the central role, protagonist imperiled, a kid walking home from the shops, with a creepy-ass cracker as the true threat in the story.

What happens is murder with impunity.

I'm talking about race here because it's the obvious inroad to treat of segregation in racial terms. And because as a queer man, I feel solidarity with people of colour in a struggle that's shared in the abstract even if it's very different in the specifics of the prejudices. But most of all, as a white queer man, it's not my responsibility to fix your homophobia. It is my responsibility to fix my racism. When I talk about building New Sodom, desegregating narrative to stop refusing the abject protagonist roles, stop boxing them into bigoted clichés, it's not just about me as a queer man claiming seats for queers at the front of the bus; it's about me as a white man refusing to countenance the exclusion of people of colour from such a seat. Or people of disability, transgender, women, whatever. This is the ideal I mean when I talk of building New Sodom.

Still, being where we are, let me give a queer example of the sort of segregation to be found in fiction right now.

Only a few months back, from the pen of David S. Goyer, writer of the Chris Nolan Batman movies, Starz gave us Da Vinci's Demons, a fantasy adventure TV series based real loosely on the Renaissance painter I like to call THE.... Sodomite Leonardo da Vinci!! Here's a quote from the historical Leo:

"The act of procreation and anything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions."

Not a lover of the vagina, methinks. If you're not convinced, Leo also said this:

“A man who is ashamed to show or name the penis is wrong. Instead of being anxious to hide it, man ought to display it… with honour!”

I don't know about you, but to me... arguing for men to get their cock out, trying to persuade a bloke to drop his britches in the fifteenth century equivalent of a Tumblr selfie... it bespeaks a certain motivating orientation. Come on, man. Don't hide that cock away. Put it on display. Get that glorious virile member out for us all to admire. R U cut or uncut? Can you self-suck? SHOW COCK BB! When people talk about the gay agenda, I gotta say, destroying traditional marriage, undermining the fabric of society... not really priorities. Seeing the cock however. Ass is even better in my book, but hey, I guess Leo was a bottom. To each their own.

So, THE... Sodomite Leonardo da Vinci!! Cock-hungry power bottom. But in a system of segregation, the queer doesn't belong in that seat at the front of the bus, in the role of hero. This is so established, so enforced by our notions of the normative, that when news of Da Vinci's Demons hit, did anyone for a second expect the character not to be straightironed? Not me. Even before clicking through the link to the first trailer, I knew that Leonardo would have his sexuality erased, reset to the default. I expected this.

What I didn't expect--foolishly--was to see the queer snuck back aboard, to the shadowy back seats where the Predatory Pederast sits beside the Castrating Bitch, the Bitter Cripple, the Scheming Jew... and the Gangbanging Nigger, the vile lying spectre of a narrative role into which Zimmerman and the jury thought it was reasonable to place Trayvon Martin. What I didn't expect was for the erasure of Da Vinci's sexuality to have its flipside in the creation of not one but two Evil Predatory Pederasts. In the first ten minutes.

First, after a brief flashforward, in what's basically the opening scene, we get the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Mario Sforza. A short while later, we get Pope Sixtus the Fourth. If the system of segregation makes it eye-rollingly predictable that the hero would be straightironed, it's interesting to note what's done with these two characters, particularly the first, the Duke of Milan, who... well...how can I put this delicately? No, fuck that shit. Let me put this indelicately. The historical Duke of Milan was a cuntfucker.

I mean this both literally and figuratively. On the one hand as a simple natural analogue to cocksucker--which I'll happily own. On the other hand, figuratively, as a combination of cunt and fucker that combines the force of the two while transferring the contempt from a perfectly lovely piece of female anatomy to the fucker who approaches it with contempt. The point is, if ever a man was fit to be called a cuntfucker, it's Sforza who, according to Wikipedia, was as keen on putting the peepee in the vageegee as Leo was against it. In the figurative sense too, he was as cruel as you could ever want a character to be for narrative purposes. He had a poacher force-fed an intact hare with its fur still on. Another man he nailed alive to his coffin. Actually, he combined the two senses of cuntfucker into the perfect storm of cuntfuckery, in his reputed tendency to rape the noble wives and daughters of Milan. Not a nice man, in short.

So, how do we meet this monster in the opening scene of Da Vinci's Demons? How is his depravity demonstrated? We see him naked at the window of his palatial bedchambers, pissing in a chamberpot, turning back to his canopied bed, to pull aside the curtains...

"Out you go, boy." he says disdainfully, and tosses clothes to the naked young man revealed in his bed. He slaps the pretty youth's ass as the boywhore toddles to the door, tosses a coin or two, and turns away in utter disregard. In an instant, we know that he's a debauched powermonger of debased lusts, an amoral user of people, taking what he wants, throwing scraps of coin in contempt--less in payment than as sign of his ownership of your ass. In the phrasing used later, he's "a pig of epic appetites." A cuntfucker, as I say, and what better way to show this than to signal it with sodomy as subjugation?

If Da Vinci has been straightironed, the historical queer refused a seat at the front of the bus, not belonging there unless and until rendered straight, then Sforza has been gaybent, the historical straight not seated at the back of the bus until put into the blackface of a wholly fabricated queerness. Goyer takes this murderous misogynistic rapist, ignores his crimes, and flips his sexuality in order to render him instead as a stereotype of a vicious sodomite, this sin of subjugating sodomy an offhand narrative shortcut for the character's moral turpitude.

I can only guess that cramming a live hare down a man's throat just wouldn't do to establish Sforza's credentials as a man of vice. I can only surmise that nailing a man to a coffin was inadequate to purpose. To me, an act of brutal torturing cuntfuckery seems a pretty good way to establish brutal torturing cuntfuckery. Surely then, there must be some other narrative purpose an historically accurate Sforza would fail to achieve. Whatever might that be?

Where the historical Sforza fails is simply in advancing the segregationist cause. What the gaybent Sforza achieves is not just the visceral contempt of bigotry invoked in the audience. As an ersatz example of the abject being despicable, the gaybent Sforza offers a double-whammy: the validation of that contempt, justifying the bigotry such that subsequent exploitation is all the more likely and all the more effective.

So, only a few minutes later, we get another Predatory Pederast. In the centre of a large indoor pool, submerged with only their heads and shoulders exposed, are Sixtus and another pretty young naked man. Sixtus is embracing him from behind, a Freudian knife at the lad's throat, poised to penetrate tender flesh. As Sixtus plays rapey power games we get a clear shot of the youth's genitals, shaved to boyish hairlessness, flaccid in his vulnerability. They're off-screen when Sixtus grabs them, but we're left in no doubt that he does so, in no doubt that the evil rape-faggot Sixtus is fluffing that cock, forcing a physical response even as he threatens murder. Which is shortly performed.

Sforza was just an opening act to the this full-fledged monster--murderous, manipulative, a sadist who's gone so deep into the heart of Sodom he's found himself in Salo. It's a henchman that does the deed, Count Riario, but just for good measure, just in case we forgot which sexuality belongs in which narrative role, he's a queer predator too. He gazes admiringly upon the lad, no small sincerity in his voice as he draws his sword--"I am truly sorry"--and wades into the pool to slaughter the boywhore. Another sodomite, it seems, favourite of his papal uncle--buttfucked by him, I'll bet, into his black-hearted wickedness.

This is mainstream television. This is a series renewed before it was even aired, written by the man who scripted the fucking Dark Knight movies. This is agitprop being forced down the throat of every single viewer tuning in for some harmless hokum. It would barely be more blatantly so if it were a TV show on the World War Two adventures of Alan Turing which rendered him as a red-blooded womaniser, and opened on a scene of a black Hitler and a Jewish Himmler murdering a blond Aryan rentboy they'd just spit-roasted.

But the point of this is not to accuse David S. Goyer or Da Vinci's Demons of homophobia, as if these bigoted clichés were only spewed out here and there, whenever this writer or that work fell victim to their own prejudice. The point is, the driver and the bus may well be simply going along with the prejudice of the system. It's segregation that sits the straight guy in the front seat as hero, with the driver not even noticing. It's segregation that sits so many queers at the back of the bus that, as the villain takes his seat in the shadows, the driver automatically paints him queer in his imagination. And every time this happens, with every segregated narrative, with every journey we take as readers or viewers along for the ride, we're being taught to apply that segregation to the narrative of reportage or courtroom testimony.

We may have progressed to the point where the fabulousness of all those Gay Best Friends at least undermines the fear loaded into all the Predatory Faggots. The gay panic defense was thrown out of court for Matthew Shepard's killers. Not so with the black panic defense, successful last month, sustained in a court of law by every fictive iteration of the Gangbanging Nigger trope. It's not just a vague and nebulous racism that led to Trayvon Martin being killed and his killer being acquitted. In the culture of narratives that we create and consume, there is a mechanism, a system, nurturing specific paranoid prejudices, sustaining bigoted clichés that filter our vision.

Only by recognising that system for what it is can we deal with it, as we must and as we can. If we can desegregate the buses, we can desegregate narrative. When it comes to fictional representation of the abject, if we can understand what we are striving for as desegregation, articulate it as such, there is no argument against this. Otherwise? Simply demand better treatment for queer characters, and they'll say we're demanding special treatment; they'll call it political correctness. They'll say we want leather armchairs at the back of the bus. Simply demand more queer protagonists, and they'll say we're demanding quotas. They'll say we want seats set aside for us at the front, even at the expense of some poor old white fart called Art.

Demand desegregation, and all this straw man bullshit is exposed for what it is. As citizens of New Sodom, what we are asking for is only the dismantling of the system's constraints. This is not a politically correct demand for quotas. We do not want a queer character in every TV show, only to know that we are as likely to find them there as elsewhere, as likely to find them there as in reality, and not in service to the straight white hero, not as second-class citizens of the imagination, but as equals. We do not want a set number of seats allocated for us at the front of the bus. It is simply that we will no longer tolerate being sent to the back. We will not tolerate segregation.

Segregation. I know that for me this word resounds in my head and heart with a note so deep and loud it rattles the soul. Its toll is that of the heaviest of bells, for its weight is its own history, and all that history echoes in every utterance. In 1963, the Birmingham Campaign formed to fight segregation in Alabama. Fifty years on, and it is long past time that segregation was ended even in its subtlest, most insidious forms, even where it's prescribing narrative roles rather than bus seats. People of colour, queers, whatever, we can no longer countenance the abject being allowed into the gated neighbourhoods of our narratives only in the uniforms of service that segregation demands. We will no longer see our citizens-- siblings or selves--turned away from the water-fountains.

What we're asking for is not special treatment. It is no more and no less than that when we are thirsty for the stories that replenish the soul--because this is what all art does, high or low--that when we are thirsty for a tale that can speak to us as much as to any other, we are not turned away from the water fountains of the normative, forced to walk across the street to special water fountains set aside for us, to quench that thirst. If we will not be sent across the street to drink in silence, then we must gather at those water-fountains where the signs still hang, and call our exclusion and misrepresentation for what it is, and cry out for desgregation until those signs are torn down. We will no longer be turned away from the water-fountains, for this water is the water of life, and it is and must be for all who are thirsty.

Acquital/Indictment

This is what happens with:

"a state of segregation in which black, queer and members of other abject groups are not deemed to belong as main characters. This is the segregation of not being able to sit at the front of the bus. They may be allowed in as an exception if it “serves the plot” (c.f. your reviewer’s expectation of a reason for the character’s gayness.) This is the segregation of being stopped in a white neighborhood and challenged on your purpose in being there.  They may be allowed in as Gay Best Friends or Magic Negros in service of the straight, white protagonist. This is the segregation of travelling into a white neighbourhood to work as a cleaner in someone’s house."

This is what happens when you systemically segregate narrative, excluding the abject from protagonist roles, boxing them into bigoted clichés.

This is what happens when your cheap and easy clueless hackwork consistently erases the permutation in which the abject is central subject.

This is what happens when you can't even write a black cop w/out giving him a clichéd gang kid background---like he has to be "redeemed."

This is what happens when you blithely construct a culture of narratives in which it's second fucking nature to cast Mugger No.2 w/ black skin.

This is what happens when every single movie you produce on this (albeit slightly dated) list has a white lead.

This is what happens when systemic segregation in narrative wires the bigoted clichés so deep, it defines how real life scenarios are read.

This is what happens when you lie to yourself that segregation doesn't exist, or that you're not swayed by its constant agitprop of bigoted clichés.

This is what happens when you think you're "not racist," but you don't even fucking notice the absence of the abject on lists like that linked to above.

This is what happens when you resist pressure for social awareness in your subculture w/ denials, excuses and "PC fascism" rhetoric.

This is what happens when you blithely dismiss the import of bigoted cliché in fiction because it pleasures you like a ten dollar hustler.

This is what happens when you automatically write a black teen into the narrative you're constructing in a normative/default role: threat.

This is what happens when you just don't/can't/won't construct your narrative with the black teen male in the central role, protagonist imperiled.

What happens is murder with impunity.

Bert and Ernie

In celebration of the defeat of DOMA, The New Yorker had a cover:

Needless to say, this was  "controversial"

The June Thomas Salon article linked in that HuffPo article (I'm not going to credit it with a link here) ends with a little gesture of YayGayz! ("whoever goes to Pride this weekend dressed as Bert and Ernie is going to gay heaven"--to which I roll my eyes.) But even as it does so, it buys into the bizarre idea that to read Bert and Ernie as a gay couple is to sexualise them ("Bert and Ernie clearly love each other. But does Ernie suck Bert’s cock? I don't think so.") which is, in fact, simply to demonstrate one's own fucked-up mindset. Because, as I've pointed out before, no one in all the years of the Muppets has ever thought, "OMG, when Kermit and Piggy are portrayed as a romantic couple, that means sexualising these puppets, conjuring Kermy's frog tongue giving Piggy the best cunnilingus ever!" The disparity of reaction is prejudice in action. The straight romance escapes such prurient prudery but the gay romance is automatically collapsed to the sexual act itself: cocksucking.

And of course that article also trots out the statement from the Children's Television Workshop a few years back which could have said they didn't want to undermine the core intent "to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves" by making romantic love the factor over-riding difference rather than simple empathy, but that neither were they going to preclude the capacity of gay children to read into them a positive role model of same-sex romance; that they weren't going to change the entire point of the puppets by making them explicitly gay, but neither were they going to make them explicitly not-gay just to kowtow to reactionary prejudice. This would have been a perfectly legitimate stance, and even while refusing to cement them as gay out of artistic integrity, the CTW could have shown real ethical backbone by saying simply that, for the sake of those young viewers who saw a future for themselves in Bert and Ernie, they were not going to lend authority to homophobic influences who sought to deny a child that vision of love.

Instead though, the CTW came out with a cop-out: "they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation." This is simply a chickenshit attempt to side-step the question in order to accommodate the prejudice without appearing to affirm it by labeling them straight. In some ways, it's reassuring, because the cowardly stratagem reveals a shame underlying the self-delusion; that they had to rationalise it like this speaks of a guilty awareness that the pressure against the queer reading is wrong, pure homophobia. They clearly saw that to authorise the straight reading would be homophobic and reached for a neutral position, one that did not join in the imposition of heteronormativity.

Still, that statement does rule out the queer reading, and in its disingenuous self-delusion it does so for Bert and Ernie while being blatantly untrue as regards Piggy and Kermit. It's not remotely possible to sustain the idea that Piggy and Kermit, as puppets, are absent sexual orientation. They may be desexualised but they are not de-oriented. They may not be practicingly sexual characters but they remain actively heterosexual in terms of emotional attraction--i.e. romantic love. Piggy and Kermit put the lie to that assertion as a generality, as a principle that muppets "do not have a sexual orientation." It's clearly only really applied in the specific instance of Bert and Ernie as an expedient falsehood, only applicable there because as long as the focus is on them desexualisation can be conflated with de-orientation--will be, in fact, because the inverse conflation of orientation with sexual activity (as per the automatic collapse of gay romance to cocksucking) is part of the prejudice. That it's not legitimately applicable there (or anywhere else) only becomes self-evident if we widen the focus to include Piggy and Kermit--which of course isn't likely to happen even among the queer-reading advocates because it's natural to focus in on the point of contention.

And in all this, I haven't even touched on the fact that Piggy and Kermit are, of course, a pig and a frog, that were the conflation of orientation and sexual activity applied to them as it is to Bert and Ernie, we'd be dealing not with a queer reading of two gay men in a touchingly healthy relationship of mutual tolerance which is collapsed by prejudice to cocksucking, but rather with a straight reading of a rather unhealthy relationship of abusive jealousy between an awkwardly batrachian male and a female barnyard animal in which the muffdiving is erased because, one can only presume, the heterosexuals are OK with bestiality as long as the different species is of a different biological gender.

If we even accept for a second the notion that those objecting to the perception of Bert and Ernie's relationship as a gay romance are doing so for the sake of the children, from a fear that the chastely asexual puppets will become a locus of confusion and temptation luring innocents to a healthily homosexual human/human life-partnership, well, we've no recourse but to judge them supportive of Piggy and Kermit serving as a comparable lure toward an unhealthily heterosexual inter-species relationship of abuse. It can only be that they condone the promotion of sexual relations between animals of different phyla let alone species. Why, clearly in their commitment to polarity in relationships, to the radically oppositional biological difference of one partner from the other, these vehement advocates of heterosexuality reveal it to be a slippery slope to bestiality.

Or as I like to put it: if we can't trust you to stick to the same gender, cuntfuckers, can we really trust you to stick to the same genus?

I jest, of course. (Or do I?) But the fact remains that Piggy and Kermit stand as an evidential demolition of every nonsensical rationale brought to bear by the opponents of the queer reading of Bert and Ernie. As I say, I'd actually support the CTW in cleaving to their core intent--because as a writer I recognise how specifying them to be gay would write out much of the import. If they're in romantic love then that becomes the predominant reason they overlook each other's foibles--not the caritas the characters were invented to illustrate. Were I a spokesperson for CTW, actually, I'd offer this as my statement, playing to the conceit of their actuality, as the muppets often do:

Bert and Ernie do, of course, have sexual orientations, but these are private matters to Bert and Ernie. It is clear that they have a deep and abiding love for one another that overrides all differences, and this is what makes them, we think, important role models for children. This is why they keep their orientations private. If both are seen as straight, they're a wonderful role model of friendship. If both are seen as gay, they're a wonderful role model of romantic love. We'd ask you to consider the possibility also that one is straight while the other is gay, and that they won't say which is which because they want you to see that either of them could be, and that such a difference wouldn't change their love for one another any more than all the other differences. We at the Children's Television Workshop respect their attempt to serve as role models for viewers of all orientations, and we hope you will too.

Still, until such time as I get to write the PR releases for the muppets, we're going to have the argument over whether they're both gay or both straight, erasing that other option. And we're going to get the obliviation of the straight muppet couple sustaining the absurd nonsense that "they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation." In the aim of widening the focus then, I've made a few memes for you to take forth into the interwebs with you. Do feel free to blog and Tumblr and Tweet them. I rather think that image is eminently inviting of other captions, and easy to find by a quick Google, so do feel free to make your own too.