#also ill be going to vietnam in 2 days for the graduation trip

[0yorixu]

update: i'm done with midterms and i did pretty aight

[purplesurveys]

1053

1. What did you do in 2020 that you'd never done before? Other than the obvious getting-a-job and other adulting stuff, 2020 was the year of my first cigarette, the first time I had to use eye drops, the first time I got sick for longer than a day, and the first time I tried my hand in embroidery.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don’t make any because I usually get tired of maintaining them after a few weeks. But idk, last night I had an idea that I want to try a new restaurant by myself every weekend in 2021. It’s very self-care-y which is what I need these days, and it’s definitely feasible now that I have my own money. Given my track record with resolutions I’m not expecting too much, but I still hope I’m able to hold out for as long as I can.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? I know a co-worker became a mom this year, but I don’t consider myself close to her. We’re cool with each other, but that’s about it. Her baby is the cutest though.

4. Did anyone close to you die? One of my great-aunts passed away in April.

5. What countries did you visit? I stayed put here. It wasn’t like I could get on an airplane this year anyway. The Thailand and Vietnam trips are going to have to wait.

6. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020? Me back.

7. What date from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? March 10 (the start of the lockdown); August 2 (my university graduation); September 15 (the breakup and Angela’s birthday); November 9 (my first day as an employee).

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Being able to be strong enough to stay.

9. What was your biggest failure? Self-harm, or blaming myself.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Yeah I got a UTI early in the year, which gave me a week-long fever. I’ve also gotten hundreds of scratches and play bite marks from Cooper since we got him in June.

11. What was the best thing you bought? My embroidery kits! I bought them on a whim and seriously doubting if I’ll ever enjoy it given my previous hatred for anything sewing/knitting; but I’ve already done two templates and I just ordered two more to do during the holiday break. I haven’t gotten much for myself yet because my first paychecks coincide with Christmas lol, but once the gift-giving is out of the way I want to get myself games on the Nintendo Switch, Airpods, and candles.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Andrew has been incredibly supportive and patient, and has stuck by me through the whole year whether I was on top of the world, stressing out over our thesis, or in my inconsolable black hole of sadness. No clue where I’d be without them.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Gabie, at least by August. I don’t know anyone who consistently let me down in the last 12 months.

14. Where did most of your money go? Christmas gifts for others; for myself, Starbucks coffee and pastries.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Graduating college and sharing my graduation photo with everyone. I remember also having been super excited to work on my birthday gift for Gab, which was to make a short video for her using iMovie (which I had never touched before until then). I was the best fucking girlfriend. Also, getting Cooper!!

16. What song will always remind you of 2020? Not sure. Music wasn’t a big part of my life this year. Maybe Why We Ever by Hayley Williams? I put it on repeat too many times in 2020.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

i. Happier or sadder? A lot sadder.

ii. Thinner or fatter? Said sadness made me lose my appetite and a whole bunch of weight by the latter part of the year. All of my shorts and jeans have gotten loose around my waist, so I’ve definitely felt the weight loss.

iii. Richer or poorer? I’m richer now, but only because I didn’t have a job before and I do now. My family’s finances have taken a blow due to the pandemic, though. I try to help by chipping in for the electricity bill, and buying my family nice food every now and then. 

18. What do you wish you'd done more of? Love myself, appreciate myself, thank myself. All the self-love crap I didn’t think I deserve.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of? Tolerating bullshit I knew I didn’t deserve but kept going with anyway.

20. How will you be spending Christmas? We’ll be with my mom’s side on the 24th; having family come over to our place on the 25th; and will be going to my dad’s side on the 26th. Gonna be the most hectic three days ever and I’m PUMPED tbh lol. It’ll be the busiest we’ve been all year.

21. What was the most embarrassing thing that happened to you in 2020? Meh, I just hated the times I made mistakes at work as I hate fucking up in general and looking bad in front of colleagues.

22. Did you fall in love in 2020? I stayed in it.

23. How many one-night stands? No thanks.

24. What was your favorite TV program? The Crown was, until it got associated with painful memories and I had to put my viewing indefinitely on hold. My favorite show this year would be either Descendants of the Sun or Start Up; both are amazingly good.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? I don’t think so. I don’t throw that word around a lot anyway.

26. What was the best book you read? Bret Hart’s memoir was a fun read.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? Beach House and Chase Atlantic. ALSO, Twice lolololol

28. What did you want and get? My first job.

29. What did you want and not get? Commitment from the one person I asked it from.

30. What was your favorite film of this year? I didn’t watch a lot of movies this year. I actually think I just saw one?? which is really unlike me; but it wasn’t a big year for film anyway. I have yet to see Ammonite, which I already think I’ll love.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I turned 22 and I just stayed at home with family while my best friend and her boyfriend sent over sushi for me.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? If I got to keep my relationship, which I thought had been faring well until she abruptly pulled the plug on everything.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020? Casual and didn’t really evolve too much considering I didn’t go out a lot.

34. What kept you sane? Good Mythical Morning. I owe my life to them. And embroidery.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? I didn’t develop a crush on him until this month lmaaaaaaao but Kim Seon Ho is so so so so so dreamy.

36. What political issue stirred you the most? The shutdown of ABS-CBN early in the year and the US elections.

37. Who did you miss? My friends in my org.

38. Who was the best new person you met? The people at my workplace that I ended up having a great rapport with.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020: From a tweet I retweeted: “You keep bad people around you and make excuses for their behavior because if you decided to hold even one person accountable, you’d have to recognize the offenses you’ve ignored and accepted. You’ll realize how much you’ve invalidated your own pain to ensure the comfort of others.” It was a harsh slap in the face, but I needed to hear it.

[homoliberation]

Just an Advertiser or a Founder?

Adding Insult to Injury: A Statement by Jearld Moldenhauer on the Founding of the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA), Canada’s First Gay Student Organization

🔥 Jearld Moldenhauer.com 🔥

Introduction 

There may be few people out there seriously interested in knowing how the Toronto modern gay movement came into being. But it is a story worth being told - accurately - and, as the founder of the University of Toronto Homophile Association (UTHA), I am particularly well informed to do so. 

If a Torontonian, or any other Canadian for that matter, had been able to establish the details of a factual and politically objective history, at some point during the last 41 years since the founding of the UTHA (in 1970), there would be no need for me to write this. But alas, this has not happened. 

Large urban cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia have all had hefty tomes about their local gay history published over the past several years. For example, San Francisco has had many books and films centered on the life and death of Harvey Milk. It also has a Gay Museum. Even Buffalo has a book chronicling its lesbian history. There are now also several volumes exploring the gay history of Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Australia. I start by mentioning these efforts only to put into perspective the shortfall in documentation about the gay movement in Toronto and in Canada generally. 

This lack of any seriously researched information on the earliest post-Stonewall event in modern gay Canadian history made it necessary for the Ontario Heritage Trust (OHT) to conduct its own research into the founding of the UTHA. Amanda Robinson, a history graduate student at York University, was hired by the OHT to carry this out. However, by the time the U of T and the Ontario Heritage Trust had finally decided on a plaque as a way of commemorating the founding of the UTHA, there had already been a number of misleading pieces of journalism written that attempted to tell the same story. The latest of these appeared in the University of Toronto Alumnae Magazine in June, 2009. 

On a more positive note, Canada has at least three decent gay and lesbian archival projects of which I am aware. An example of one, online, is Rick Bébout's website, which is still the only serious attempt to capture Toronto's gay history, starting in 1970.

In addition, during the past year (2011) or so, a few university students have published research papers on some of the historical aspects of The Body Politic. 

(Personally, I have long lamented the apparent disinterest in a broad-based oral history project which recorded the lives and social dynamic of the homosexual working class, the class which seemed to dominate the Toronto scene when I first settled here.)

My Own Liberation 

The story of my own gay activism began at Cornell University in 1967. I had come out in my second year in 1965 and I spent much of 1965-67 immersed in the reading of books related to the history of sexuality. I wanted to understand why it was that society had placed such strong taboos on homosexuality, making it both a criminal act and a mental illness. The more I read, the more radicalized I became. Of course, this was during the 1960s, a time of prominent protests by the Counterculture in America, fueled in part by the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. My generation was open to questioning most everything and this encouraged me to develop an analysis of sexual repression and oppression in Western society. 

In May of 1967, The New York Times ran a front page article headlined "Columbia Charters Homosexual Group". After reading the piece, I contacted "Stephen Donaldson" (AKA Robert Martin), the student who had founded the group. His organization, like the ones founded later at Cornell and U of T, was called "The Student Homophile Association" (or League).

During the following year, I made a few trips from Ithaca to New York City: (1) to explore the Village scene, (2) to see Martin and (3) to attend meetings of the East Coast Homophile Organization (ECHO). It was there that I first met Franklin Kameny, Barbara Gittings and Foster Gunnison, the leaders of ECHO. I admit that none of these activists really excited or inspired me as these older homophile leaders were far too conservative. Even Martin himself proved to be an army/navy "brat" whose sensibilities were quite disparate from mine. 

Nonetheless, I went back to Cornell and made the decision to form a local student gay organization. The Cornell Homophile League was officially recognized in May of 1968, more than a year before Stonewall! The Cornell story is a separate one with many tales worth telling (some of these can be found elsewhere on this blog.) However, for the purposes of this document, it is sufficient to say that I arrived at the University of Toronto with a "founding" event already under my belt. (For some reason - I suspect nationalism - almost no Canadian reference ever mentions my international activism.)

Ian Young 

I should start by admitting that I had no previous idea about exactly how Ian Young characterized me or the founding of the UTHA ... except for what can now be found on the record. Generally, I found these public comments both inaccurate and deceptive. He may just have ridden the wave of misinformation flowing from some poor journalism or perhaps he simply took advantage of the group's own weak sense of history. Once an erroneous wave of reporting is established, it is indeed relatively easy for an individual, especially a writer, to embellish some points and to diminish others for that person's benefit. 

However, this is my written record; my response to Mr. Young's quotes found on both Rick Bébout's website and in the U of T Alumnae magazine article by Anne Purdue ... and I wish to state, unequivocally, from the outset, that Ian Young had no part in the founding of the UTHA.

Furthermore, he was not at the first meetings attended by a handful of friends and the people who responded to an ad I had originally placed in the student newspaper, The Varsity, soliciting members for a new gay group on the U of T campus. Philip Atkinson, my oldest Toronto friend, attended those first meetings in "the cave", as my off-campus McCaul Street apartment was humorously referred to. He was considerate enough to respond to my written questions about those foundational gatherings and he attests to the fact that Mr. Ian Young was not in attendance. (That interview, conducted through an email exchange, is available upon request.)

Let's now proceed to examine some other assertions that can be found in a couple of Ian's quotes that appeared in Anne Purdue's article: 

"My first meeting with Moldenhauer was not at a party. I must have been given his number by a mutual acquaintance; I phoned him and he asked me to come see him at his place of work at the U of T. I remember very clearly that the first time I met Moldenhauer, he was vivisecting a dog. You don't forget something like that!” 

"We were never friends. As a long time antivivisectionist, my first encounter almost led me to have nothing to do with him, but I thought, 'well, I'm going to have to work with lots of diverse people in this cause, so I'd better get on with it.' Still don't know whether that was wise or not.”

These are outrageous statements! I was "vivisecting a dog"?!? Yes, I worked for a physiologist who used dogs in his experiments but there were very few operations ... and they took place in a surgery room into which Ian Young (or anyone not connected to the staff) would never have been invited. Yes, I would have given him my phone number(s), possibly those for my home and work. And yes, he probably did call and then visit my laboratory, but he certainly did NOT attend any surgical procedures. I assume he concocted this tale to elevate himself morally. And I note that he refers to me somewhat bluntly and disparagingly as only "Moldenhauer", not "Jearld" or "Mr. Moldenhauer". In my mind, this was Ian's attempt at a form of highhanded distancing and at expressing disdain for me, a lab technician who spent most of my days analyzing the digestive juices of Dog A, B, C and D.

He goes on to state that "We were never friends." The truth is we had been friends (of a sort) in the months before I went ahead with the founding of the UTHA. (I believe we met in one of the many Yorkville "hippy" cafés of the time or perhaps at the somewhat experimental Rochdale College). Our friendship was based on a mutual interest in both boys and gay literature. I was even invited to at least one of Young’s 'tea parties' out in Scarborough, where he lived with his parents. And as you can see in the accompanying photograph(s), Ian also sat for one of my portrait shoots. 

I also remember that, on one occasion, Ian even brought the controversial Canadian author Scott Symons and his young lover, John, to my basement apartment on McCaul Street. They had just recently returned from Mexico where they had fled following a RCMP arrest order after the publication of Scott's homoerotic novel, Place d'Armes. (Decades later, Scott would come into Glad Day Bookshop ... but only occasionally. He never bought anything and, oddly, he even appeared to be disinterested in the books. He just took up space, sitting in the office, smoking foul smelling Gitanes and asking to look at pornography.) Later, Ian introduced me to Norman Elder, another born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-hismouth Anglo Canadian homosexual. Interesting people ... even more so after Young published accounts of their lives ... but rather bizarre individuals, born with a deep sense of entitlement, something far different from my own class origins. I am unaware that either of these two personalities ever really contributed anything to their local gay community.

So much for the queers from English Canada's ruling class! 

(I only mention these episodes to counter Ian's dismissive statement about our shared history.) If I recall correctly, Ian was born in London, England but grew up under the Apartheid system in South Africa. Because of his upbringing, he possessed strong racist views by the time we met and, once these became apparent to me, it was I who ended the "friendship". (In fact, back then, my closest friend in Toronto was a black American draft dodger from Ohio, named John Mitchell. I once witnessed Ian and John getting into a dangerous physical fight in my McCaul Street apartment, after Ian had started spouting his views defending segregation for privately-owned businesses, such as restaurants.)

Of course, I had discussed the Cornell gay group with Ian and told him about my plans to start a similar organization at U of T. He actually spoke with me about trying to link this as-yet-to-be-founded gay group with the Don Andrews/Edmund Burke/Western Guard crowd to which he was connected. This, combined with the altercation he had had with John, made me want to distance myself (and keep any gay projects I had in mind) from Ian Young. Imagine if the first Canadian gay group of the post-Stonewall period had been exposed as having Right Wing or racist ideological connections ?! I was schooled by the analysis of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. Unsurprisingly, Ian Young was an ardent follower of Ayn Rand and her 'cult' of selfishness and greed. (She was the heroine to so many in this shallow culture.) Again: despite our mutual aesthetic and cultural interests, once I realized where Ian was coming from, the relationship ended.

There are other Ian Young comments in Ms. Purdue's article that are calculated to further pull an obscuring scrim over reality: "I wanted to change things" he says, reflecting on his student days at U of T". Funny, I do not recall him ever joining any activist gay political organizations in Toronto during the early 1970s. (He did not even bother going to an important gay rights demo in Ottawa.) Ian was interested in Ian ... and in advancing his career as a writer. And this did not include involvement in political activism or any civil rights organizations.

So what exactly were his "student days" at U of T ? When we met, he had no official standing at the university and, in fact (according to Ian), he had dropped out of the Undergraduate Program the year before. Indeed, if Ian Young had had some legitimate affiliation with the University, I would have reluctantly involved him from the beginning. To my knowledge, Ian never returned to U of T in any capacity, except to attend UTHA meetings once I had submitted an amended "Statement of Purpose" to the Students' Administrative Council/SAC (derived from the Cornell document ... which, in turn, had been influenced by the one at Columbia University). We were then granted official status as a student organization, thereby allowing us to list our meeting time and to place announcements in The Varsity newspaper. However, from his first attendance at a meeting, and throughout our shared history with the UTHA, Young never stopped trying to attack and undermine my position within the organization. Sadly, Charlie Hill (see below) always just sat there, passively letting Ian spew his negativity towards me ... again and again.

Young also said that he wanted to be a teacher "but, in those days, you couldn't be openly gay and teach at any level". This was probably true at stuffy old U of T or in the secondary school system. I admit that this posed and still poses a major challenge. Nevertheless, I remember that, at Cornell, the most popular professor on campus was about as "openly gay" as could be. His lectures were a "camp" highlight ... and he could always be found cruising the student bars at night. [Unfortunately, he was also a very self-oppressed man and taught a course in "deviance" using Irving Bieber's - no relation to the Pop Star! - classic text on homosexuality as a mental illness and homosexuals as mentally sick ("Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuality"). Indeed, pressuring him to stop using that book was the one political action undertaken by the Cornell Homophile League when I was at the helm.]

To conclude my remarks about Ian, I wish to add that I do not think he maintained many of the political ideas that defined his arched personality/identity back in the early 1970s. There have been indications that he has since shed at least some of his Right Wing and racist views. 

It is also true that, back in 1970, my seeing his (then vast) gay library was something of an inspiration for me, both in finding my role as a gay bookseller and as a serious book collector. And, as that bookseller, I always respected his published efforts and treated his books in the same even-handed way that I did all the titles I promoted and sold during my career. But, as far as the University of Toronto Homophile Association goes: he was a joiner, never a founder.

Charlie Hill 

Charlie Hill and I met a few days after The Varsity ad was published. It had been a simple ad; my way of reaching out to a student body I barely knew. It asked those "interested in discussing the establishment of a student homophile association" to contact me. I provided my home phone number and, when a few people did call, they were invited to my apartment to discuss launching the group.

Charlie and I had spoken in the notorious UC washroom after an "encounter". The UC washroom was probably the most famous place in all of Toronto for a "quickie" (to say the least). It was almost always busy: not a day went by when it didn't see some sex action from students, Faculty, Staff, Queen's Park employees and "townies". I even met George Hislop there as well as a few well known people from the "Arts Community". If there ever was a cauldron for this nascent local gay movement, it may well have been that famous loo.

Unlike other similar underground venues, however, people actually carried on conversations from time to time ... so it served a social function at a time when there were few places - outside of a limited bar and dance club scene - where queers met and talked. And that is exactly what happened between Charlie and myself. He simply asked me if I knew who had placed The Varsity ad. When I told him that I had, we ended up further discussing his student status and I invited him to come to the meetings held in "the cave". Because I saw myself as an organizer/founding force and because I was neither a student nor a 'power broker', Charlie seemed to be a good choice to act as Chairperson for the UTHA.

Once word got out about the University's recognition of our new group, The Globe & Mail published a letter whose author stated that it was a mistake for SAC to have recognized it. As the group's founder, I wrote a reply. Anne Purdue's article quotes from my letter: "If the homophile represents a challenge to society, it is only that he promotes an increased freedom of expression between human beings." This was pretty basic stuff, reflecting my larger worldview. However, my boss at U of T, Dr. Roy Preshaw, then called me into his office to inform me that the old gentleman who was the Chairman of the Physiology Dept. had seen the letter and had asked Dr. Preshaw to dismiss me ... which he did.

At the time, I neither asked for, nor received, any overt support from Charlie or the group. It was a fledgling organization still learning to find its way and, internally, the waters were already murky thanks to Ian Young's obsession over my leadership. And so I paid the high price for taking the initiative in founding and then defending the UTHA ... but, with this turn of events, I was left alone - 'high and dry' - to deal with the results. 

[I recently tried to get answers to a few questions that I had for Charlie, to feel out his position and memory of these events. I wrote him, hoping for his support but, ultimately, I got the sense that nothing had changed about Charlie's wishy-washy ways. He wrote back once and I could see that he was waffling, claiming an uncertain memory. My follow-up e-mails to him then bounced back and I can only assume that they were being blocked ... Well, at least he is consistent.]

Forgive me if I admit that, after reviewing Charlie's comments in Anne Purdue's article, I felt that some of them were embarrassingly shallow. When she asked "the Curator for the National Gallery and a member of the Order of Canada how he mustered the courage to be the leader of the Homophile Association", he replied: 'Anger and irritation.' " OK. I know all about anger, but I still don't understand what he meant when he said that he had been irritated. (I get irritated waiting for the TTC, or for any number of reasons ... such as having to constantly defend my role as "founder".) He goes on to speak about "coming out" and "being out" and says: "We were an invisible minority and, as long as we were invisible, people could make up their own theories about us." Well, hurrah to all that!

So: Three talented people, all successful in their own right. Charlie Hill ... the author of a well reviewed book "The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation", published in 1995. In 2001, he received The Order of Canada for his book and for his long career as a curator at the National Gallery. Ian Young ... the author of some 10+ books. And Jearld Moldenhauer ... in his youth, a firebrand who established many gay organizations and institutions internationally.

The Researcher, Her Conclusions and Freedom of Information 

I first heard about the "Plaque Project" in an e-mail on March 18th, 2011 from David Rayside, who immediately assumed that the news would "make me smile". (Rayside was formerly the Director of the Bonham School for Sexual Diversity Studies at U of T). He quickly sent a second e-mail to inform me that similar messages had been sent out to Charlie and Ian. Yet another e-mail followed and I started to see the writing on the wall. He referred to me as someone who had "placed that first ad" and I began to sense that the University's version of the historical record was about to reduce me to an "advertiser" for the group rather than its founder.

Even before Ms. Robinson began her research on the project, I sensed in what direction things would be heading and I wrote to tell her: "I truly would rather be left out, denounced or simply ignored rather than be framed within a dishonest rendering of historical fact." (OK. I am not known for mincing my words. Needless to say, many have recoiled at my bluntness.)

On September 27th, David forwarded the Ontario Heritage Trust's Invitation. I wrote back asking about the wording on the plaque and was informed that the "plaque's text is not being revealed to anyone prior to the actual event." I reminded David that, a few months earlier, I had written a polite inquiry to Ms. Robinson about the conclusions of her research and she had responded in an ambiguous way. That had sent another signal that something was afoot. David responded that he had "considerable faith in the preparatory process used by the OHT." Writing him back, I declared my own lack of faith in the "system" ... and I think with good cause as there could be no healthy reason to withhold the wording from me except to prevent a response. (It was not as if there was some sort of national security threat here.) In his next e-mail, David ended the communication rather haughtily by stating "I see no particular advantage in continuing this exchange."

How I Received the Press Release and the Plaque's Wording.

On Oct. 14th, a friend sent me the Press Release about the Plaque's unveiling. No one officially associated with either the OHT or the SDS sent this public announcement to me. A few days later, on October 19th, another friend sent me the precise wording of the actual plaque. So much for courtesy and officialdom! So there it was: my name as "advertiser" in the Press Release but no specific recognition on the plaque itself (in fact, no names appeared).

All of this felt like déjà vu, reminding me of an award the old Gay Academic Union had presented, some decades ago, to "Glad Day Bookshop", instead of to the person who effectively was Glad Day Bookshop: me. The human being behind the organization seemed to matter less than the name of the organization proper. (Why not be as impersonal as we can!?) Obviously the people who make such decisions have no idea how this makes the person - the legitimate founder - feel ... the person who did the hard work and paid whatever price for these groundbreaking initiatives. Or maybe they do it intentionally ... as a way of negating the individual. Somebody should ask them.

During my communications with Ms. Robinson, I took what I considered a straight forward factual path. I assumed that, as with any researcher who was up to the task, once any facts were disputed, she would investigate further and, in this case, I would hear back from her. (How else can a person doing historical research proceed otherwise, assuming they ARE 'up to the task'?) When, after several months, I had heard nothing whatsoever, it became obvious that either the wool had been pulled over her eyes ... or it had been decided that the "safest" path to proceed on would be to leave all names off the plaque, even if this diminished the role of the legitimate founder.

Founder or Advertiser? 

The title of "Founder" has a basic enough definition in the Oxford dictionary: "A person who establishes an institution or settlement." So it's the idea and implementing of that idea that makes one a founder. In psychological terms, founders have special qualities that followers do not have. They have the guts to take on the world and to try and change it. This requires not only unusual courage but also a heavy component of naïveté, something you often find in youth. Take me away from the UTHA, (or Cornell SH, or Glad Day Toronto and Glad Day Boston, or even from The Body Politic and the CLGA) and what do you have? I believe that it is obvious that founding the basic institutions of the gay movement was my special talent, my contribution to the evolution of the culture. Why then, I wonder, have I had such a hard time getting the simple credit that is due?

[As a small additional note to this "founding" issue, I refer people to a website from Thunder Bay, Ontario call "Ebb and Flow - The Seventies." 1974 

“Lakehead Gay Liberation (LGL) was formed in Thunder Bay at Lakehead University, sparked by a visit by Jearld Moldenhauer (of Glad Day Bookshop fame). LGL was recognized as an official club by the Lakehead University Student Union (LUSU). In February, a live interview aired on CBQ radio. The group was short lived as most members left for Toronto that summer, and attempts to revive it in the fall were unsuccessful.”

This specific visit had happened on a National Tour sponsored by GATE Vancouver and GATE Toronto. I had been sent by train west from Toronto to rally the troops in any and every city I was invited to, in order to forge a national front for the "Movement". Yes, this particular group, LGL, was apparently short lived but it marked the beginning of gay political awareness for the Thunder Bay community and they were kind enough - and upfront enough - to remember this history. Their historical memory and honesty does not go unappreciated.]

So what was gained by mentioning my name in the Press Release but excluding it from the plaque? The avoidance of controversy? The conclusion - or at least the one I feel they reached - was that it was better to deny the person the honest credit he deserved rather than to pass judgment on the other (misleading) accounts of what had happened.

As I said in Anne Purdue's article: "Somehow I don't expect to receive an apology 40 years later." First off, they would have to acknowledge the true reason for my dismissal. Apparently no one wants to do that. After all, these days, is any Canadian university anywhere willing to admit that it fired, without cause (other than homophobia), the founder of a gay group ? I somehow doubt it. Yes, U of T may not be what it was back in the early 1970s ... but that's all the more reason for finishing this chapter honorably.

During the 1970s and up until the mid-1980s, there seemed to be no question about who had been the actual founder of the UTHA. Sometime during the 1980s, I was even invited to give a talk about the gay history at U of T (as I remembered it). In 2005, the group - now called LGTBTOUT (what a mouthful!) - had a major 35th Anniversary Party at the ROM. I had, of course, heard about this but had NOT been invited. Closer to the event, I became aware that Ian Young was being touted as the founder of the group. About two days before the celebration, someone from the organization finally contacted me and invited me to attend. (Feeling insulted, I did not do so.)

That was the beginning of this serious distortion of UTHA history ... later reinforced and amplified by the Alumni magazine article. None of this really surprises me when you consider that members of the Executive Committee of the current group do not even use their last names on the LGTBTOUT website. When I asked about this some years ago, I was told that it was a "tradition". If so, it's a sad one. Apparently, whatever we gained from 'Gay Liberation' and the central role of being "out" have been diminished for some time now. If this phenomena is widespread - and not just present at one of Canada's major universities - perhaps it partially explains the increase in gay-related bullying and in the continued high suicide rates of gay teens. One has to ask where the leadership is from people at such a major university when they so fear for their careers as to opt out and become the anonymously named Jane D. or John Q. ?

Egomaniac or Deserving Activist ? 

I have become so very tired of being put on the defensive about my role in the gay movement in Canada. This has, no doubt, something to do with why I no longer live there. People should ponder the fact that some of us early activists paid a price for the public positions we took. In my case, the price was a rather heavy one although one I took in stride. 

(Not only did U of T dismiss me but, a year later, the Toronto Western Hospital did the same after I brought Issue One of The Body Politic to work. The next year, I got a job working for the City of Toronto as a gardener. Once I was established and past my probationary period, I gradually came out, once again, by bringing gay newspapers to work to read during break times. Despite my good standing, I was not only fired but was sent to work in isolation for 2-3 weeks at the Woodbine Beaches before they officially terminated me.)

After this introduction to the real world, I decided to build Glad Day into a real bookstore ... instead of operating at half throttle from my home. It was the silver lining in a cloud of some despair. Eventually, I developed myself into a professional bookseller with an encyclopedic knowledge of most every title and author who ever addressed homosexual topics. That career lasted from 1970 - with the inception of Glad Day out of a backpack - to the year 2000, when I closed the successful Glad Day Boston.

However, little did I realize that, within a few years of starting the Yonge Street store, Canada Customs would begin seizing and censoring gay and lesbian literature. What started as an "irritating" occasional event grew into an all-out assault by 1985, with Mulroney's internal Memorandum D-9-1-1. People know something about the court battles (such as the one over "The Joy of Gay Sex") but I doubt that they have any idea about what this "war" costs, not only in legal fees but also in its psychological impact on someone just trying to do his job as best as he can. Until 1991 - when I finally wearied of these "Customs" battles - it was a daily fight for survival as all the power of the State was unleashed upon a tiny business in an attempt to destroy it.

Glad Day Toronto is now the world’s oldest surviving bookshop, specializing in gay and lesbian literature. In its time, it hosted readings and book signings by most of world’s greatest living gay and lesbian writers including Christopher Isherwood, William Burroughs, Edmund White, Michel Tremblay and Jeanette Winterson.

As far as my ego goes, I think it's both pretty humble and low key. My class origins are lower middle class, something that helped me break through the barriers middle class and upper class individuals often find impossible to transcend. In sheer biological terms (my area of study), I saw myself as a sort of "sport", a hybrid with the right combination of genes, class and education to push my society a tiny bit forward.

I can remember when I was just 14 years old and my grandmother gave me - at my request - the Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson ... Thoreau's "Walden Pond" also arrived in my hands soon thereafter. So, at a very young age, I was schooled in the principle of selfdetermination, with a belief in one's own intuitive grasp of reality. Given the battles that I have had to fight against an array of opponents, I feel these imbedded ideals have served me well. 

Jearld Moldenhauer  Fez, Morocco October 30, 2011

The above text is in the process of being published as part of a larger autobiographical account. All photos by Jearld Moldenhauer are copyrighted.

🔥 Jearld Moldenhauer.com 🔥

[etouffante-x]

August 2nd, 2018; false alarm

My one and only resolution for 2019 was to be (to a reasonable extent) more vulnerable and open, be it letting people in, letting people understand me, or letting people love me. It already sounds so fucking difficult lolllll, but I’m going to do it because I know it’s a place I need to grow - I can’t keep my walls up forever.

Ahhhhhhhhhh, I still get emotional reading my feelings from this time, but here it is, only slightly edited from the initial draft:

__________________________________________________________

August 2nd, 2018 probably around 3AM

Happiness is rarely ever a catalyst for writing - it is often the difficult situations and the accompanying trying emotions that motivate us to write: being in love, anger, frustration, grief,

sadness.

Today, I write about my mom.

I have these thoughts. Like how this might be the first (of many; all) Thanksgivings we will have without her, Christmases, birthdays, accomplishments, milestones. How my dad will have to learn how to cook and learn how to pay the bills. How she won’t see me get my PhD. How she won’t be able to see or hear me play piano anymore. How I should’ve taken more pictures of her smiling face or more pictures with her.

I am at my emotional wits’ end.

I feel like I will break at any moment.

There are times when I am calm with chaotic undercurrents threatening to rupture my controlled facade, and then there are times when I just cry and cry and ugly cry. Nothing helps - talking it out or trying to distract myself - it is there, staring me in the face, her mortality.

Mom’s been in the hospital since the beginning of July, right when I began my week-long vacation in Portugal. When she said she was in the hospital, I had only begun talking to her again after the massive fight she had with my sister in DC (because I took my sister’s side). At first it was pneumonia. She was old and getting pneumonia is common in people her age, I told myself. I didn’t think much of it, even when she was transferred to the ICU. Whether it was hopeful naivete or plain stupid naivete, I couldn’t tell you. My thought was that they simply moved her there because they couldn’t figure out what bacteria was causing the pneumonia (one of my fatal flaws is I could [over]rationalize anything). But then she was there for a week. Kelly told me later when we were talking about it that she was really worried because her grandma (who passed away from lung cancer recently) started out the same way.

When I got back from my vacation, a very weird set of coincidences and twists of fate happened: the weekend immediately following my return, I was supposed to fly to New York City for Panorama (a music festival). I arrived at the airport for my flight, which was already delayed from the original time. As I sat there watching the screen, the flight got delayed another 30 minutes; 10 minutes later, the delay became 1.5 hours. Another 10 minutes later, the flight was cancelled altogether. I was really tired. I grappled with the decision to either just go back home and stay that weekend or try to switch my flight to Boston to see my mom, with a slight chance that flights to Boston would also be cancelled. But then I receive an email that Panorama was cancelled for the day that I was originally going to go and that refunds would be issued within 3-5 business days. I stood in that long line waiting to talk to an agent about changing my flight.

“Hello, since my flight is cancelled, could I just get a refund for my flights to and from NYC”? “Sure, give me a minute.”

.....

“Actually, what would the fee be to switch the inbound and outbound flights to go to and from Boston instead?” “We could change your flight at no extra cost, the earliest flight to Boston would be tomorrow around 7 AM.”

I went back to my apartment, scheduled a Lyft for 4:30 AM, and went to bed.

To summarize my short weekend trip home to see my mom: Day 1 - my dad picked me up from the airport and we got breakfast together at the hospital cafe and talked very quietly and calmly about anything but my mom’s condition. We picked up some soup for her on the way up to her room. We were all exhausted. - the nurses were so kind. - I wanted to strangle the thoracic surgeon who came to take out my mom’s chest tube. She had gotten a lung biopsy done so that they could run labs and tests - dear LAWD I was NOT ready for this at all. The first time he tried to yank it out, he forgot to remove the stitches that held it in place. It took everything in me to not lash out and then lunge across the bed to slap him upside the head (imagine trying to quickly yank out something that is physically attached to your skin). Then after he got the stitches out, it was go-time. I nearly fainted I shit you not. I held my mom’s hand as the surgeon yanked out a nearly 2 foot long tube from my mom’s back (that was in her chest!!!) as her face just scrunched up in pain. I knew from my neuroscience background that you can make pain feel less... painful, by “distracting” the body with pain in another part, so since I was holding her hand tightly, I started squeezing hard and slapping it gently and rubbing it and talking to her so she wouldn’t focus on the pain. I really don’t know if it worked. I probably needed to slap harder. Lol. - I didn’t want to leave, but she was finally able to rest a bit more comfortably with the chest tube removed, and my dad and I went home. My heart broke a little knowing she’d feel lonely and scared by herself in that sterile hospital room.

Day 2: - my dad and I picked up some Vietnamese food for my mom since she was craving some actual food and was feeling up to eat. The way she eagerly ate made me so happy. - she was being moved out of the ICU, so we met her at her new room, which was more spacious and had more sunlight. A little comfy-er. A little less hospital-y. She slept most of the time I was there, but my dad and I bonded by my forcing him to take the Myers-Briggs test. I was thoroughly surprised (he’s an ESFJ). Lmao. - my dad took me to the airport and I flew back.

I left feeling hopeful. A few days after I got back home, though, we got a diagnosis: pulmonary fibrosis. The resident who called me with this information was wholly unhelpful. I asked what the treatment plan would be. I asked what the chances are of a wrong diagnosis. What the fuck is pulmonary fibrosis? Shouldn’t doctors sound more sure of themselves and have more information to divest if they’re going to call with a preliminary diagnosis? But I did my research: at the most, 2.5-3.5 years to live, with the average being about 6 months to a year.

I cried so much that night. I didn’t have the heart or the courage to tell my sister. There were so many things I still wanted to ask my mom and know about her: What was her childhood like in Vietnam? What’s her favorite poem? What foods does she hate? Who’s her favorite sibling?

I think of all these things in hindsight - I never wanted to get close/attached to people because - in the end, someone always has to leave. And I cannot bear the pain or sadness. Alas, I’ve become that kid who feels guilty because they didn’t appreciate their mom enough before it was too late - who didn’t text enough, call enough, visit home enough; wasn’t patient enough, gentle enough, loving enough. I have failed to do so many things I should have and I am lacking in being all that I should have been for them.

Today, when I called her, was the second time in my life that I heard her cry. She said she feels bad leaving me and my sister behind, with nothing; and that she worries about us - I told her not to worry. She said she feels sad that she might not get to see me graduate, her legacy, and that if it’s her time to go, then she will go. I thought of walking down that stage to get my PhD in my beret, and the caption that was supposed to be “I did it for the beret” being changed to “this one’s for you, Mom.” I thought of how she sacrificed her whole life for our family, with nothing - nothing - given back to her in return. She never took a vacation anywhere, never saw the world, but gave the world to us.

Perhaps this is her rest - a lifetime of sacrifice and oftentimes one-sided, unconditional love, rewarded with a breath at last (oh the fucking irony).

The doctors were/are infuriatingly incompetent and ill-informed. And I cannot stop crying. I think about how I will feel her loss forever, feel that emptiness in everything that I see and do. But that is what love is. To me, it is the yearning to have that person longer, selfishly. It is the sadness of their (impending) departure. It is the wish that they could have been afforded all the opportunities you had. But in the end, it is selfish to want to prolong and extend her pain and suffering for my own self-preservation. I can try to prepare, but I doubt anything could prepare me for the inevitable heartbreak I will have to endure.

I just hope, at some point in time, I made her happy; I hope I made her proud.

I hope that if and when she leaves, she leaves for some place more beautiful than here.

[hellofastestnewsfan]

Paul Volcker’s 6-foot-7-inch frame was draped over a chaise longue when I spoke with him recently in his Upper East Side apartment, in Manhattan. He is in his 91st year and very ill, and he tires easily. But his voice is still gruff, and his brain is still sharp.

We talked about his forthcoming memoir, Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government—about why he wrote the book and the lessons he hopes to impart. Volcker is not a vain man, but he knows that his public life was consequential, and he wants posterity to get it right. He also does not mince words. In our conversation, he assailed the “greed and grasping” of the banks and corporate leadership, and the gross skewing of income distribution in America.

Keeping at It, written with Christine Harper, an editor at Bloomberg, is primarily the chronicle of Paul Volcker’s public life, which was spent in the thin air of global finance. After graduating from Princeton in 1949, he studied economics at Harvard and then in London, where he focused on the operations of the Bank of England. For the next 20 years, his career cycled between the U.S. Treasury and the Chase Manhattan Bank, with a particular focus on monetary affairs.

Few Americans had heard of Volcker until he was nominated, in 1979, to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Board by President Jimmy Carter, a post he held for the next eight years. During that time, he almost single-handedly pulled the nation back from a near-Weimar-scale financial collapse. If there were a Nobel Prize for government service, Paul Volcker’s name would surely be on the short list.

Volcker’s career spanned nearly the entire postwar era. World War II had ended with the United States effectively controlling the major part of the world’s wealth. In a supreme act of statesmanship, Washington offered to provide trade credits and other aid to allies and former enemies alike, so long as they adopted reasonably democratic values. The American dollar effectively became the world’s currency at its 1934 peg—$35 per ounce of gold. That worked splendidly while America’s allies were in recovery mode, but by the 1960s most industrialized countries were competitive with the United States. Swiss currency traders, the nefarious “gnomes of Zurich,” realized that America’s gold reserves could no longer support its dollar issuance. So they started testing the dollar with sudden spasms of dollar sales in the hope of forcing a devaluation.

The classic method of meeting an attack on a currency is to raise interest rates to increase the attractiveness of holding it. But this was the early 1960s, and John F. Kennedy had promised to “get this country moving again.” Higher interest rates would have scuttled that ambition. The Treasury Department hit on a temporizing solution: a tax on foreign security purchases to curb the foreign traders’ enthusiasm for holding dollars. Volcker, then a deputy undersecretary at Treasury, drafted the enabling legislation. It did not take long, however, for traders to engineer an end run around the new tax by simply keeping their dollars overseas. Thus was born the “Eurodollar,” which would proliferate wildly, quite out of the control of the Federal Reserve.

Volcker returned to Chase for several years before rejoining Treasury as undersecretary for monetary affairs in the Nixon administration. The war in Vietnam—paid for by deficit spending rather than new taxes—had triggered serious inflation. Oil imports were surging, and currency traders smelled blood. But Richard Nixon had a genius for the bold stroke. Along with John Connally, his outsize Treasury secretary, Nixon in August 1971 brought virtually his entire economics team to Camp David, where he announced that he would cut taxes, impose wage and price controls, levy a tax surcharge on all imports, and rescind the commitment to redeem dollars in gold. In his 1975 book, Before the Fall, Nixon’s über-speechwriter, William Safire, recalled, “Volcker was undergoing an especially searing experience; he was schooled in the international monetary system, almost bred to defend it.” Everyone he had worked with “trusted each other in crisis to respect the rules and cling to the few constants like the convertibility of gold.” Volcker was charged with drafting the announcement of Nixon’s new economic policies, but his moroseness showed through. Safire did the final draft, proclaiming “a triumph and a fresh start.” About Volcker himself, Safire wrote, “It was not a happy weekend for him.”

As the ’70s wound down, the dollar became a debased currency—but one that, for want of an alternative, still served as the world’s most important reserve currency. Nations might make other provisions, but that could take years. To make matters worse, an ideological cleavage between Milton Friedman’s “freshwater” Chicago monetarists and East and West Coast “saltwater” economists added an unusual testiness to the board’s discussions. Monetarists looked to the supply of money, which is the multiple of physical money—M1 in the jargon—times its velocity, or turnover rate. Friedman’s rigid version of monetarism assumed that the velocity of money was fairly stable over time, so policy makers could ignore it and steer solely by M1. (Indeed, Friedman also believed that you could eliminate the Federal Reserve Board.) Traditionalists, such as Volcker and most other saltwater economists, looked first to interest rates as a policy tool.

By the time Volcker was sworn in at the Fed, in 1979, inflation in the U.S. was running about 1 percent a month, and rising. In 1973, the OPEC countries had forsaken the hallowed $3 peg for a barrel of oil—tripling their prices and tripling them again six years later. By then, spot prices for gold were bouncing around from $235 to $578 per ounce. When the U.S. Treasury, in the early 1980s, needed to raise money, it would be forced to float bond issues in marks and yen, so far had the almighty dollar fallen.

Two months into his new job, Volcker attended a conference of central bankers in Belgrade and was shocked to find himself harangued by his peers. As he explains in his memoir, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was a friend, lectured Volcker for almost an hour “about waffling American policymakers who had let inflation run amok and undermined confidence in the dollar.” A shaken Volcker cut his trip short, got his fellow Fed members on board, and called an unusual evening press conference. Most dramatically, he stressed that he was shifting his key policy tool to monetarism. As a hedge, he also raised the Fed’s discount rate by a full point. The New York Times editorialized about the rate hike under the headline “Mr. Volcker’s Verdun,” noting that when it came to holding the line on inflation, the Fed chairman’s message echoed that of Marshal Pétain: “They shall not pass.”

At first, the experiment seemed to work. The objective was to reduce the money supply and thereby bring down prices. By January 1980, however, the numbers were going haywire. Perversely, inflation took off—it reached an annual rate of almost 15 percent. The Fed’s technical staff ruefully admitted that Friedman’s money-supply theory was not precise enough to form a basis for effective policy. The Fed board maintained its monetarist rhetoric, but Volcker shifted back to raising interest rates in order to wring inflation from the economy. This was language that all businesspeople understood. The bank prime rate eventually jumped to 21.5 percent, T-bills hit 17 percent, and prime mortgages were at 18 percent. Those rates were the highest the country had ever seen. Volcker went on a grueling speaking tour to bolster the case for what he was doing.

By the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in 1981, the U.S. economy had slipped into a deep recession, one for which the Volcker Shock was largely blamed. Unemployment neared 11 percent. Volcker became a target of popular anger. One welcome ray of sunshine came from the White House, with Reagan giving full support to the continuation of Volcker’s program. (Volcker later said, “I don’t kiss men, but I was tempted.”) Another came from the American Home Builders Association, in early 1982. Its industry had been badly hit by the recession, but Volcker gave a tough speech to the association about staying the course against inflation, and was amazed to get a standing ovation.

Inflation—blessedly—broke in mid-1982. The second half of the year saw a flat consumer price index. Real GDP for 1983 was a very respectable 4.6 percent and  a blistering 7.2  in 1984. By 1986 annual inflation had come down to only 2 percent. The crisis was effectively over. After 1982, Americans enjoyed the lowest interest rates (with a blip here and there) among the major industrial countries, and interest rates are low to this day. The second half of the 1990s was one of the most prosperous periods in history—there was a twin boom in high technology and in housing. Volcker attributes the crash that came in both industries to the same “greed and grasping” he cited when we spoke.

Volcker served two terms as the chairman of the Fed, giving way to Alan Greenspan in 1987. By that time, the challenges confronting the Fed had moved to new arenas—like the reckless “oil lending” by the big American banks to Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and a string of smaller countries. In Keeping at It, Volcker writes, “Looking back, I see Latin America today as a sad culmination of hard-fought, constructive efforts to deal with a debt crisis that, aided and abetted by reckless bank lending practices, grew out of a chronic absence of suitably disciplined economic policies.” Volcker will never escape a Fed-inflected prose style, but his assessment is spot-on.

Retirement has treated Volcker well. He did some teaching and loved it. He spent 10 contented years as the chief executive of Wolfensohn & Company, an old-fashioned investment bank, which mostly gave advice on mergers and acquisitions. When he retired, he had plenty of time for nonprofit activities and was much in demand. He chaired inquiries into the ownership of Jewish art sequestered in Swiss bank vaults; the massive theft from food and medical programs after the Iraq War; and corruption in the World Bank.

Volcker also played an important role in the cleanup after the 2008–2009 crash. His advice was widely solicited, if not always followed. In his memoir, he describes sitting at a conference and listening to bankers warn that new regulations must not inhibit trading and “innovation.” He finally exploded: “Wake up, gentlemen. I can only say that your response is inadequate. I wish that somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy, just one shred of information.” His lasting contribution from this period is the so-called Volcker Rule, which bars traders from taking risky positions with depositors’ funds, and which he summarizes as “Thou shall not gamble with the public’s money.”

[Read more: Wall Street has basically the same culture that led to the 2008 crash. ]

Keeping at It is not a tell-all book. Volcker’s subject matter is economic policy, and his praise or criticism is almost entirely directed at specific ideas and actions. His first wife, Barbara Bahnson, died in 1998. In 2010, he married his longtime assistant, Anke Dening. There is not much of a personal nature in the book, and yet, unwittingly, it paints an accurate personal portrait. The picture that emerges is of a man of granitic integrity, committed to what he perceives as wise policies—committed, that is, to what he calls The Verities: stable prices, sound finance, and good government.

The secret of Paul Volcker was his father. Paul Adolph Volcker Sr. was almost as tall as his son. He was an engineer, with a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and he went on to become a city manager. The city he was most identified with was Teaneck, New Jersey, a municipality that had fallen prey to a corrupt political machine. It was the kind of challenge that Paul Sr. leaped at. In his son’s memoir, Paul Sr. is always working; even after a long day, he drove around his modest empire and made note of broken traffic lights, spilled garbage, and other petty violations. They were not petty to him. The city fathers once tried to can him for hiring a professional police chief. They couldn’t fire him, but they could stop paying him. Paul Sr. went to court and got his pay—and got his police chief. Exactly what his son would have done.

There are few people like Paul Volcker in the U.S. government today, or in business, for that matter—respected and trusted by everyone, whatever the disagreements, and motivated by public service. Volcker reveled in his middle-class status. He notes in his memoir that, in the 1960s and 1970s, Washington was “mostly populated by middle-class professionals, including families of civil servants and members of Congress,” and that “there wasn’t great wealth.” Now, he writes, Washington is “dominated by wealth” and by “lobbyists who are joined at the hip” with people in government, whether on the Hill or in the executive branch.

As a result, he says simply, “I stay away.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2CRHiWA

[purplesurveys]

608

1. What did you do in 2019 that you’d never done before? Lots of different things! I had an Actual™ photoshoot :o, I celebrated my girlfriend’s dad’s birthday with their family, I touched an Adobe app and learned that I’m pretty decent at it, I had a tooth extraction, I did shisha and vape (and found out I liked them, giving me an identity crisis for a while HAHAHA), I had my internship, I was fined by a traffic officer, etc. I had lots of grownup stuff to face this year, and it was all fun.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I don’t make New Year’s resolutions... if I wanted to do something I’d plan them any time of the year. Plus making them at New Year’s just gives me a whole chunk of pressure, and I’d rather not live with that pressure.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? I had a high school classmate give birth this year but I wasn’t close to her; Gabie was, though. Other than her, I don’t think there’s been anybody who had a kid in 2019.

4. Did anyone close to you die? Nacho. I still see him in everything, everyday.

5. What countries did you visit? Didn’t get to go out of the country this year. Hopefully that’ll change next year when I graduate!

6. What would you like to have in 2020 that you lacked in 2019? I dunno, this year was already suuuuper hectic enough. I’d ask for more time to rest, but I’m literally graduating in 2020 and it will only get busier from there. The two things I’d ask for is to get to go to a different country again, and to have a road trip that isn’t going to Nasugbu for once (I’ve only had two long drives ever since I was allowed to have em, and both trips were to the same beach in Nasugbu).

7. What date from 2019 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? Evening of September 28; it was when everybody was notified of Nacho’s passing. Toughest pill to swallow in my entire fucking life. My social media had never seemed so angry, so scared, so chaotic, so bleak, all at the same time. 8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? If we’re gonna be serious about ‘biggest,’ then probably not killing myself. Other than that, I was pretty proud of the way I handled and performed at my internship! I was never late to get to their ORTIGAS office (a tiny traffic hellhole in Metro Manila), I had a good relationship with everyone, and on my evaluations I saw that my supervisor wrote a lot of nice things :)

9. What was your biggest failure? I was a bad girlfriend on significant occasions. I also have two classes this sem in which my final grades are going to be held back because of supposed ‘deficiencies’ – but honestly I blame that on the prof because I think she held back final grades FROM EVERYONE ON ALL HER CLASSES this semester. Seriously, if you do that as a prof, don’t you think the problem is you and not us? I won’t call it a failure on my end, but I am pissed about it and needed a space to vent.

Another failure would be never getting to take out Gab’s mom out on a date. I already took her dad to an MMA pay-per-view and we had a lot of fun, but have never been able to do the same for her mom just yet. I really need to step up next year.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? I had a bad slip in school early this year and I sprained my ankle. There was also one day I felt bad enough to have to skip class but it never became a full-blown fever, so I don’t know what that was.

11. What was the best thing you bought? I bought tooooooons of new tops this year and totally upgraded my wardrobe, so I was really happy about that. The other is a day pass to a beach resort in Nasugbu that I went to with Gab, Angela, and Sofie.

12. Where did most of your money go? Food to keep myself in school. That and gas.

13. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Lots of things...I mean 2019 was a long-ass year. There was turning into a senior, doing my internship, getting invited to Gabie’s dad’s birthday dinner, going to my first few events to get me accustomed to the PR world, seeing my senior friends graduate college, I also went back to the National Museum this year so that was great, the aforementioned Nasugbu trip, etc etc blahblah.

14. What song will always remind you of 2019? Wonderwall by Oasis or Buwan by Juan Karlos, both because of Nacho. 15. Compared to this time last year, are you: Happier or sadder? Older or wiser? Thinner or fatter? Richer or poorer? (I don’t earn money yet, lol)

16. What do you wish you’d done more of? Seeing Angela. I probably saw her a grand total of 10 times this year, which is pretty fucking tragic.

17. What do you wish you’d done less of? [trigger warning: self-harm] Hurting myself. It’s been a while since I’ve seen my skin clean for a full year.

18. How did you spend Christmas? We will be spending Christmas Eve with one of my grand-aunts’ family. My mom is very close with her cousins on that side plus family from Vietnam is also coming over, so a get-together is certainly happening. On Christmas Day, we’d be spending the day with my mom’s sister-in-law’s family. They have a giant house and host the best party games which is why we like hanging out there. We’d spend the day with ALL of these people, but my grand-aunt and my tita (mom’s sister-in-law) have some weird friction going on so they can’t ever be in the same gathering lmfao.

19. What was your favorite TV program? I resurrected my love for Breaking Bad mostly because El Camino came out this year, but I definitely watched Friends the most. I have it on autoplay on Netflix 12-14 hours at a time these days because Netflix is taking it out on the 31st.

22. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? Yes, the aforementioned professor who gave me two Incomplete marks this semester. Last year, she was just my enlistment adviser; now she’s a witch who is keeping me from having a decent Christmas.

I also stopped talking to my younger brother around February or March after he slapped me in the face, so there’s that. No plans to forgive him or talk to him any time soon whatsoever.

23. What was the best book you read? I didn’t read a lot this year :( 2019 was all about readings for my classes.

24. What was your greatest musical discovery? THE JAPANESE HOUSE. Without a shadow of a doubt.

25. What did you want and get? My dog living another year, my relationship still healthy and intact, good grades, my teeth finally treated hahaha, new members in my org!

26. What did you want and not get? Courage on my end to go to a therapist or psychiatrist. More travel.

27. What was your favorite film of this year? Portrait of a Lady on Fire will easily take the cake. That was just breathtaking.

28. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I spent it internally disappointed in Gab for not making it. Outwardly, my mom took us out for sushi (my request) for lunch, then we went home and in the evening, Angela and I went to Feliz so we can have Yabu for dinner then played at Timezone until the mall closed. Not a birthday I want to remember but Angela went above and beyond to give me a good time, and that I’ll always appreciate.

29. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? More opportunities and time to travel. I mean we did go out of town a lot, but I just can’t get enough of travelling to different places.

30. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2019? Chic with a hint of haggard.

31. What kept you sane? My dog, my orgmates, my best friends, and good food.

32. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Kristen Stewart.

33. What issue stirred you the most? Duterte as a person is just one big fucking issue that riles everybody up in this country. I’m just waiting for him to die.

34. Who did you miss? Nacho.

35. Who was the best new person you met? My social history professor, Ma’am Luisa. I had always wanted to take a class that she handled, and she went above and beyond my expectations. I’m taking another class of hers next sem – history of women in the Philippines – so that ought to be fun. :)

36. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2019: Call-out culture is bullshit. I haven’t done it much since Nacho passed, but I wish it did not take me this long to realize how bad of a strategy it is. 

People who mourned him went back to their old habits soon enough and are again publicly shaming people whenever they make a misstep on social media, and it’s embarrassing and infuriating.