#it’s not the catch-all watch you Must watch whatever sliver of representation you can get sorta thing

[lungthief]

it is kinda funny watching some people be like “yeah i didn’t really feel invested in s2 of heartstopper :/ i loved s1 but for some reason i just don’t care as much now” and it’s like. yeah. i think the reason is that you are now in your 20s

[feemarraine]

task 001: the interview

Ida has never respected the law. 

Even as a teenager, effervescent with life and enthusiasm, she felt untouchable, like the rules didn’t apply, like nothing could ever catch up to her. She drank at parties with her friends well into the morning hours when she was only sixteen, she stayed out until six and worried her parents. She was the rebellious of the Lawson twins, the one that, for all intents and purposes, should have ended up in trouble. 

She had escaped that fate, but only at too grave a cost. 

So when an unfamiliar man asked to speak to her, hands on his hips to display the glint of his badge in the bar lights, Ida, despite her best efforts not to, actually sighed, delegating the rest of inventory to Ella, handing her the clipboard as she made her way to the bar.

“Something I can get you, officer?” She smiled, though it was taut, insincere. A cop in a pub was never a good combination. A cop in her pub was only trouble. For a split second, the briefest sliver ot time, she found herself thinking the unthinkable: maybe this is it. Maybe this is what she’s waited in this town for six years to find. A break. A lead. A mystery solved.

“Detective Mickey,” the man corrected, and Ida’s heart jumped. Detective. The only field of law enforcement that typically worked on homicides, even those years old, even those everyone else seemed to have forgotten about. But just as quick as she’d allowed her hopes to raise, she let them deflate. This was about a death, certainly, but it wasn’t Kates. “Just have a couple of questions to ask you and your, uh…employees.”

Ida pressed her palms into the edge of the bar, eyeing Mickey with a knowing gaze. “I can vouch for my employees, but they might want to get some sort of representation. So I can’t have you interviewing them here without their consent.”

When the detective nodded, she continued, “But you can go ahead and ask me whatever you like.”

The ache from the pressure of the wood into her palms was a welcome distraction. 

“I’m sure you’re aware of what happened to Madison Redding,” Detective Mickey inferred, his tone hushed. Ida hoped no bargoers had heard mention of the girl’s name. “I’m just following up on that, ma’am. Trying to get some leads.”

Ma’am.

She assumed they must be desperate for them, with such a public figure and such a heinously crafted crime. 

“Of course,” she murmured, and crossed her arms. “Go ahead.”

“What would you say your relationship was with Madison?”

Ida scoffed, the question itself barely worth answering. “I didn’t have a relationship with her. She wrote about my divorce, as far as that’s concerned. She’s written about my ex-wife plenty. But I didn’t know her.”

“So…when was the last time you saw or spoke to her?”

“I honestly couldn’t say.” Ida replied with little thought. To attempt to conjure an answer, she’d need to dig into the annals of her memory. “She’d come to the pub every once in a while, but never to stay. Usually to spy. We didn’t necessarily speak.”

“Necessarily.”

“Okay,” Ida corrected, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “We didn’t speak. I wasn’t interested in whatever she was peddling, and she just took what she needed from…snooping around, and left.”

Whether Detective Mickey believed her or not, Ida couldn’t be sure, but she was resolute in her truth. Madison was twenty years younger than her, with a hobby so especially insidious that the idea of it made Idea annoyed, and she wasn’t sure if that was her age or just the fact that she believed people’s business should be theirs alone, not splashed on some blog like Page Six. 

After a brief hesitation, and a consultation with his small notepad, the detective looked back up to Ida. “Where were you on the night of February 28th and March 5th?” 

Ida, a human, and not a calendar, couldn’t precisely recall the events she partook in on each day. But if she were to guess, which, she was, “I was here. I close every night. And if I wasn’t here, I was either home doing homework or watching TV with my roommate.”

Detective Mickey looked at her with a quirked brow. “Roommate?”

She wondered, then, if he’d read Madison’s writings.

“Ella. My co-worker.”

“Right.” He nodded. Ida smiled, this time even less enthusiastically than before. 

“Is there anything else I can do for you, officer?” Her tone was nearly saccharine, so sweet it disgusted her, but she wanted this man gone. After another conferral with his notebook, and a few errant scribblings, he returned his gaze to her, hazy and unfocused, like he had digested too much information and hadn’t had any time to process it, like he hadn’t rested in days. 

Ida tasted bile in her throat at the memory of how bitterly she fought to keep Kate’s case warm. 

“Ah…no. Not right now, Miss…”

“Lawson. Ida Lawson.” She ached to make him remember that name, but he looked too young—he was probably in high school at that time, eating up the gossip the way people were about Madison now. Errantly, Ida thought about Harriet. 

“If I have any more questions I’ll be in touch. And if you think of anything…” He began, reaching into his pocket to pluck free a card. Ida nodded, taking it politely and scanning it without actually taking in any of its words. 

“Of course,” she insisted, though she doubted this card would be of any more use than the dozen or so she had at home, all stacked away. 

“Be safe,” the man warned, before turning his back and heading out the door, the bells clanging against the door and jingling to alert his departure. 

There’s no such thing here, Ida thought. 

[drewkatchen]

The Castro District | Summer 1998 | Taken on a random 35mm camera that someone from my job gave me, not sure what happened to it.

“Every boy or girl must make a break and leave home sooner or later, and if he or she is gay, it’s probably sooner and a bit further.” -- Kevin Bently “Wild Animals I Have Known”

Saturday night in the Castro. 

Dan and I wedged ourselves into the chaos somewhere between the corner gas station and the millions of washboard abs slicked with sweat. We carved a sliver of space barely big enough for one, a tiny dot on a massive swaying canvas. Bodies in motion on all sides pressed against us, and Dan looked at me in a way he hadn’t before. He was up to something. The San Francisco air, cool and damp and curious in all the ways you’ve either heard about or experienced first-hand, felt full of life and cracking with possibility for every misfit that had left behind their small towns to be here, to come into the warm epicenter. I had goosebumps; air didn’t feel that way back home, and I felt the energy in my gut. Saturday was the night before the parade; closeted Jersey bankers and kids from Cleveland melted into the city’s welcoming soup for just a minute, life’s limitations left for Monday, not now. Across the street, two women, naked aside from sneakers and their full heads of hair, were locked in lust dining on each other atop a MUNI bus station, the very definition of gay liberation, of absolutely not giving a shit. 

I hadn’t talked to my folks in over a month, but in the fog of furry torsos and unencumbered breasts I could picture them three-thousand miles away at home watching television before bed, my stepdad snoring next to the dogs. Did they think of me at all in this time off? What did they feel? In a few months, I would crawl back across the country and return to my apartment and for my senior year of school. Maybe I would see them again?

From a booth I really couldn’t locate, the DJ sent rhythms and affirmations out into the night air, encouraging his audience to find love or sex or lock into the groove while rolling. “I dream about us together again/What I want us together again, baby/I know that we’ll be together again.”

Others were on the ground in different stages of embrace and undress, swigging drinks or sniffing things. Dan and I had been swaying to the music with thousands of others, but now his curving body slowed to a halt and straightened up. 

He had something to say.

“Can I live in the moment right now? Is that ok?”

No one had ever asked me anything like that.

“Sure, man. What is it?”

I still didn’t know what he was proposing.

A wry smile moved across his face, and his eyes closed. Baseball cap turned backwards, Dan took the lean in slow and dramatic, the cameras in his mind rolling, closing the negligible space between us, making it non-existent, taking his moment, offering himself in a new way. Not unwelcome but also not welcome, his kiss, kind and caring and soft, had the odd effect of drawing me more into myself, of retreat. Whatever free and wild is, the Castro that night was about a million hedonistic miles past that, but I found myself unable to dissolve into the broth, to fully let go of those limitations left for Monday and live in that same moment. That was just me. We were in the epicenter, but somehow I wasn’t there. That summer, I met too many creeps who were more keen on conquests than actually getting to know me, but Dan wasn’t one of them. He was a good guy, and he wanted to kiss me.

That night after the kiss and after just feeling strange about it, I wondered if mom was in the back yard watering her plants or talking on her cordless phone. Could she hear herself think over the thrumming cicadas and the dogs barking? Did she wish she could speak to me?

Dan and I kept dancing, the kiss neatly forgotten. Dan was someone I’d met that summer when I left home in a panic and came out West. We kept in touch a bit when I returned back to school, but I have since lost touch with him.

---

“I need to see if Terrence is there. Come with me?”

She was our age, couldn’t have been more than twenty. Unwashed blond hair falling over her faded Army jacket and denim backpack, trying to catch up with her as she sprinted down 17th Street in a fury, chasing something I couldn’t see. Who and why? She held an unlit cigarette; the soda in her Coke bottle sloshed and fizzed at her side. Her big blue eyes saying “Trust me, this’ll be fun”. Isn’t this why we were here, to see a little magic, to catch a contact buzz? I didn’t hear her name because I was taking in the sight and smell bonanza -- shops, stores, guys -- but I think Tommy did. We tailed behind, unsure of where we were heading, only that it felt interesting and non-lethal (potentially) and that it was time away from the van. Painted Victorians and the rainbow flags hanging from businesses and the provocative covers of men’s magazines in shop windows, a thrilling kaleidoscope to my eyes. Guys hung around in the bars we passed, but we kept walking. Was that man holding hands with another guy on the street and not being harassed? My god, FINALLY!!! It was as I imagined but better because it was real and in front of me.

The summer of 1997, what a strange time to be a young gay guy. Legal rights were few and tech had yet to revolutionize the dating world and everything else. Twenty years after Harvey Milk. More than a decade before Grindr. Nearly twenty years before marriage and a whole year before Will & Grace, but who knew? Three years after Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and a whole mess of teen years growing up in the South, being terrified by safe-sex literature in nightclubs and magazines, abstinence-only education at my Catholic high school and just positively burying the sexual side of my being. Sex frightened me, probably because it’s the one thing I wanted most, and reading Altman articles in the Times did nothing to help that fear. 

I needed a kiss.

On the train up from the Embarcadero, it dawned on me where we were headed, and it dawned on me that this was the whole point of this trip for me. The rest of our crew, all straight, didn’t see the fuss and went skateboarding instead. My gut rumbled. I had four hours to take it in and maybe location scout for a future life after school. This wasn’t my first time in a big city, but it was my first time checking out a neighborhood built by and maintained by my tribe. Overlooking the practical matters of affordability or even the notion of gentrification (a concept I was probably unfamiliar with at the time) and displacement, the Castro felt like home in a way that home didn’t or so I’d convinced myself. I think I had $20 in my wallet and maybe $300 in an account. It didn’t matter that back home I still was only three-quarters out; the band was all the way across the country, and there was no one to fear out in the cool San Francisco evening. Up and into the station, the heat and bitter scent of machine oil and burnt brakes clung to the shirt I’d been wearing now for days. Tour life is hell on laundry. Would this someday be my home?

Out on the street, we met her almost immediately after chatting up strangers on where we should go or what we should see. Being kids from the sticks upped our charm with the big city folk or so we thought. Just a couple of kids from Carolina. She, our demimonde guide, our Queen of California, maybe got here herself not long ago perhaps by boxcar, by thumb or in some other curious way, but had clearly stuck around the neighborhood for reasons that in hindsight probably weren’t great.

We went along for the ride a few blocks, which ended fast when she started climbing an apartment stoop and rang the buzzer. But where were we and why? 

“This is a sex club that my friend helped open. I need to see if he’s here.”

I think she needed money?

Ten minutes into the neighborhood and this is where we landed. I was single, but no, no thank you. If a peck on the lips petrified me then this whole thing was doom in a hand basket. And that was the brutal thing of being out then, at least to me. The nineties were clearly a more accepting decade than the one before and there was more representation from TV to magazines, but the reality of sex still carried so much weight and still inspired fear in me. In front of the club, a puzzled man in glasses stared at these gawky dorks in front of him and then shooed us away. No surprise, there was no Terrence. She looked lost.

“I’ll catch you guys in a bit. I’m going to walk around and check things out before we head back to the van.”

I bought a coffee from the Starbucks near the corner of 18th Street and a slice from Marcello’s, and it all tasted like freedom. Walking by A Different Light, I saw a Thom Gunn collection in the window, a thick tome I contemplated buying until I realized how lean my budget was for the remainder of the tour.

Little did I know while eating my Hot Cookie (my last food purchase that day in the Castro) and looking at the lobby of the theatre of what was to come next summer: After coming out to my folks and after their uncharitable reaction, I would be staying on the couch of some kindly strangers in a neighborhood not far from where I was then standing.

That night, we loaded back up in the van at the Embarcadero and headed north into the forest, but my mind was on that seemingly magical place I had just been and how to get myself back there in the future.

---

I keep this picture, the one from above, stored in a cheap frame on the nightstand next to my bed. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure why. Its luster has held up over the years. It’s just an average picture, taken up the hill on Castro Street. I think it’s just a matter of there were some pictures in frames that I found in storage and that was one that made the trip back home with me. But there has to be more to it.

For me now, the Castro as a place, as a potential destination holds little magic. It’s not a place I visit with any great frequency, nor did it ever become a true home for me aside from that summer between my junior and senior year of college. But it’s still a place and a time I turn over in my mind constantly. That was a really fragile moment in my life, one where I really could have broken apart from the weight of what I was carrying, one where I needed family and couldn’t really access it. I feel lucky that I never fell in with any sketchy characters that really tried to take advantage of me, but given the headspace I was in at the time, it wouldn’t have surprised me if that did happen. It’s no small feat that I didn’t actually crumble from everything. 

The stress also seemed to manifest itself in a strange tick that I never had prior and one I somehow managed to break over time: I continuously and compulsively touched the skin on my cheeks and around my nose, and the oils from my hand caused deep acne issues for a time. I never had skin issues and don’t now, but somehow the anxiety and the compounding stress of leaving home caused a real problem that no amount of Clearisil or Retin A could clear up. Of course, it was a matter of just not touching my face, but I couldn’t stop myself. I lived in front of a mirror, but not because I liked what I saw. It was the one time in my life where I was caught in a cycle of self-harm but didn’t seem to realize it.

Honestly, I think I keep the picture of the Castro next to my bed as a reminder of how much in the past I struggled through different phases of my life and how generally speaking I’ve been able to rebound and continue on with my life. Sure there were great moments that summer. Many of them. I ate a ton of burritos at Taqueria Cancun. I lived on the couch in a great neighborhood and had access to a beautiful back yard. I went for hikes in Point Reyes (where I managed to get poison ivy), and I saw the Locust and Tristeza play a show in Berkeley. I went to Esta Noche (RIP) and saw Joan of Arc at Bottom of the Hill. I saw Thom Gunn do a reading in the SOMA district while wearing leather chaps. That summer is also when I discovered Mark Eitzel’s classic (classic to me anyway) record 60 Watt Silver Lining, a haunted and haunting record that spoke to me so directly. There was a lot of beauty in that painful chapter.

But time can only be so great when you still have demons at home to conquer, and that I did. The picture of the Castro, an image of a brilliant sunny afternoon, reminds me that some part of my life has always been a struggle and that my family is complex and complicated and loving in their own unique and sometimes puzzling way. Sometimes looking at a picture makes me uneasy, as it does in this case, and I have to accept that is part of what I’ve been given.

But perhaps I should move the picture off my nightstand.