MARCH 24 — looking in at our current apocalypse

feel very weird writing this, but also felt weird not writing this, so whatever!

TODAY IS THE DAY. I AM GOING TO SIT DOWN AND TRY TO WRITE ABOUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD EVEN THOUGH IT MAKES ME FEEL VERY BAD. IT’S IMPORTANT TO HAVE YOUR EYES OPEN. FEAR CAN BE HONEST. REAL FEAR AND PETTY ANNOYANCE CAN LIVE HAND IN HAND WITH REAL HOPE AND EVERYDAY TIREDNESS. I HAVE TO BELIEVE THAT BECAUSE THE OTHER OPTION IS OBLIVION.

Let’s start with JK Rowling, because you have to start somewhere, and so much of my life started when I read Harry Potter as a grade schooler. I became a bookworm, I became a nerd, I became fannish, I made certain friends, all because of Harry Potter. So it sucks that I can’t enjoy them anymore because their author has decided to aggressively transphobic. It’s not fun.

But this is not going to turn into another round of “what do we do with problematic art,” because I am thirty years old, and I can set down stories that were important to me as a child if I don’t agree with them anymore. It’s sad. I’ve let go. Whatever emotions I had about letting go aren’t worth writing about. 

What I’m struggling with now is the conversations I keep on having with people who aren’t paying as much attention to what Rowling’s saying, or maybe have heard about it and have decided not to care. My dad, who’s incredibly not online, decided to re-watch all of the Harry Potter movies recently, because they’re all on streaming, and he’s a retiree with a lot of free time. We owned the first couple films on VHS. He took me and my friends to an opening night screening of the third one. But then I got older, and stopped caring as much, and started going to the movies by myself, and he hadn’t seen the last few. I totally get why he decided to watch them all. It sounds like a fun waste of time, something I could have imagined doing, except, except, I can’t give that world any more of my mental energy because of the person JK Rowling has become and how she is actively trying to make the world worse. 

Dylan Morrison wrote a good newsletter about Rowling, and you should read it. I haven’t saved all the links, but I’m very grateful for all of the trans writers who I’ve read trying to unravel what to do with the problem of JK Rowling. There’s one part of Morrison’s piece that really struck a chord with me:

You think I can just reach out to the cis girl I knew in high school who posts pictures of her baby on Instagram in official wizard brand onesies and be like, “Hey, just so you know, JK Rowling’s steadily escalating transphobia has dramatically changed the political landscape for trans people like me and my loved ones, and is contributing to the ongoing deterioration of our human rights, and so I think your choices in baby gear are somewhat morally bankrupt?” You really think that will lead to anything productive?

This is such a mood. 

I talked to my dad about Rowling, feeling inarticulate, but he’s sort of stuck having to listen to me, because he loves me. I was willing to take the time to explain the whole Rowling thing until it made sense to him, that this woman is trying to make the world more dangerous for our family, and even passively enjoying her creations is participating in that. But that’s not an easy conversation to have. There are plenty of people who I’m not going to have that conversation with, because I don’t love them enough, because I don’t have the time, because I don’t think they’re going to listen to me, because I’m very midwestern and don’t like confrontation, I don’t know. I don’t want to offer more reasons why I’m not always up to having that conversation. I want to be braver, and more obnoxious, and start more conversations instead of letting things slide and then judging people later. I want to not have to have these conversations because I want people to understand already.

We started with JK Rowling because she exists within the realm of what this newsletter is usually about (what to do with problematic art). Obviously I think that how we interact with her work is important, I do think that continuing to give her your money and/or attention is pretty shitty. But like. She’s small compared to the rest of it. The rest of it is…

I guess this is what the newsletter is usually about too, in that this newsletter is about what it’s like to be queer and alive right now. But my answers about “what does it mean to be queer and alive right now” have usually had to do with like, Todd Haynes films, or reading Tenet as a love story, or crying and listening to Lucy Dacus, you know, fun things. Not fear.

I have not been doing the best job keeping up with the wave of anti trans and anti queer legislation. There’s a lot of it. It’s bad. I don’t really know what to do. 

It’s impossible to legislate trans and queer people out of existence. We have always existed, we will always exist. But these laws are going to do an incredible amount of harm as they limit what kind of lives are available to us. This article about rebuilding the closet helped me get my head around what the endgame of all of this is. 

It’s about conformity and control. A lot of this gets framed in terms of hate, which is certainly present, and certainly dangerous. But I’m not sure if trying to convince people not to hate other people is a solution. Instead of talking about hate we could talk about authoritarianism. 

Defector had a good piece about how Jon Stewart and other liberal pundits get things wrong by going after the right wing’s hypocrisy. The right wing don’t care about being hypocrites. There isn’t a coherent moral impulse behind the world they are advocating for. Their world view is full of contradictions, but they don’t care, they want to impose it on everyone else. 

My life is such that I’m not getting into debates with republicans, but I am surrounded by well intentioned liberals who enjoy the sort of moves Stewart pulls. If someone finds this good entertainment — sure, whatever. Today’s newsletter is not what do we do about problematic art. But with the way things are going now it seems like a waste of time to talk about hypocrisy when we should be talking about authoritarianism. 

But that’s a hard thing to talk about. It’s so grandiose. Authoritarianism sounds so serious. It’s hard to talk about authoritarianism when you’re trying not to make yourself too afraid.

I don’t know the right amount of afraid to be. I don’t think there’s one answer. I live in a blue city in a blue state. Minnesota is doing alright. Minnesota, I love you. The Governor signed an executive order making Minnesota a trans refugee state. That’s a beautiful thing. 

Our wonderful trans real estate agent took a month off work, and when they got back the majority of the people who had reached out to them in that time were trans people thinking about moving to Minnesota because where they live now doesn’t feel safe anymore. I hope that my home can be what they’re looking for, but it’s a tragedy that we’ve reached this point. I have hope that my community of queers and radicals will be ready to embrace these people with open arms, but like. 

Minneapolis is still fucked up. Today the police are out evicting encampments of unhoused people. These evictions are cruel, and the cruelty is the point. A black trans woman was attacked at the Lake Street light rail station recently. I haven’t heard if they know the motivation behind the crime, but whether it was specifically aimed transphobic violence or a symptom of how society has made trans people, especially black trans women, vulnerable to violence is a bit beside the point. It was a bad thing that shouldn’t have happened. 

There was a rally to defend trans lives at the light rail station, which I didn’t go to, because I don’t go to things. Some of the organizers invited Andrea Jenkins, a black trans woman who’s the city council person representing this part of the city. Jenkins is also voting for more policing and continued environmental racism, which led to other organizers asking for her invitation to be rescinded. I didn’t hear what happened on the day, so it can’t have been horribly dramatic, but like. This is the conversation trans people fleeing from other states are going to be walking into. 

To make this newsletter about things this newsletter is usually about again (being a nerd about transit), what are we going to do about the light rail? I haven’t been on it for months, and there are mixed reports of how bad things have gotten. I don’t trust the strib’s fear mongering, but also people openly doing drugs on the train isn’t great. But the solution isn’t to put more police on the train, and it probably isn’t trying to get social workers on trains and asking them to police behaviors. It might be having public restrooms and safe spaces for people to drugs, but like. That’s not going to happen. And the real problem here is housing and mental illness, which… no one’s getting to the bottom of all that anytime soon. Certainly not in Jacob Frey’s Minneapolis. 

Why did I want to sit down and write all of this? I don’t have any answers. I don’t have any action items. I bet you read the news, some of this is already on your radar. I don’t think my take on any of this is particularly interesting. I guess, going back to what Morrison wrote about JK Rowling, and how exhausting it can be to have these conversations with all of these random people in your life that you don’t think are going to make a difference. I care about you all enough to give it a go. 

It’s interesting — my readership is split pretty evenly in two camps. About half of you are a lot like me, very online queerish millennials, who I assume are already thinking a lot about this, and are so tired of hearing anyone talk about JK Rowling. I’m sorry. And then about half of you are older, and care about me for some reason, and are interested in what I have to say. And I guess I’m writing this newsletter more for you, to make sure that you’re following these threads, to tell you that I’m a bit frightened and very tired. Maybe you have an idea of what to do. 

I think the really remarkable thing — and this has been the most remarkable thing for like three straight years — is that we keep on living our lives through all of this. I’m starting a new job that I think I like. Yesterday I got a really good sandwich, and ate half of it outside, and then hung out at the bookstore where we thought about how to make this city better, and also I read the first fifty pages of a novel about vampires. It’s spring. I walked home yesterday, and it was light out. I went for a walk today, and stomped through puddles in my rain boots while my dad had to go around. You can be tired and frightened and still have very good days.

If you aren’t already paying attention to the news, if you don’t think this is about you, please. See it for what it is, authoritarianism, not hypocrisy. If you aren’t sometimes having conversations with people in your life about stupid shit like JK Rowling maybe give it a try! Not all the time, but with people you really care about, take a minute to ask them if they’ve thought about this at all. It sucks, I know, this week I introduced my parents to The Whale discourse, and it wasn’t fun, but it felt better than letting them go around gung-ho for problematic art without having asked themselves “what do we do with problematic art,” and that’s like… way less serious than the rest of this shit. If you pay more attention you might be frightened, if you have more of these conversations you’re going to get tired, but better tired and frightened then letting these things happen without comment. 

PICTURE OF THE CAT

his head is so empty, and honestly I am so jealous sometimes

WHAT I’VE WATCHED

After I was so complementary of Essapekka Lappi’s little beard thing of course he crashed out of Rally Mexico. I didn’t expect him to beat Ogier, but it would have been fun to watch him try. Even without that there was plenty of excitement. 

I want to write something about rally as cinema, but I think I’m several months out from having enough thoughts on the subject to pull together. At its best rally reminds me of the opening credits of The Shining. I was lucky enough to watch The Shining for the first time on a 35mm print at the Musicbox, and watching this on a very large screen was one of the cinematic highlights of my life.

I did not watch The Whale, despite my parents renting it on my profile, which means I technically gave this film six dollars of my money. Yikes!

SONG OF THE DAY

yeah, this newsletter is just the opening credits of a horror film. sounds about right.