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astrophysicist-guitar-god · 1 year

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After the cut, the Rolling Stone article that elicited a response from Roger, written on an airline motion-sickness bag.

Queen Holds Court in South America: On the road with rock's royal spectacle (x)

James Henke, June 11, 1981. Buenos Aires, Argentina

We are the champions – my friends And we’ll keep on fighting – till the end – We are the champions – We are the champions, No time for losers cause we are the champions – of the world – —Freddie Mercury, “We Are the Champions”*

It was to be the Big Event. Queen, coming off its most successful year ever, was setting out to conquer South America and wanted to make sure the whole world knew about it.

That, certainly, was no surprise. After all, this was the band that had made a career out of creating spectacles. A couple of years ago, for example, when they were launching a U.S. tour in support of their Jazz album, Queen threw a bash in New Orleans that featured snake charmers, strippers, transvestites and a naked fat lady who smoked cigarettes in her crotch.

The real surprise was that Queen – a group with a history of hostility toward the press – had agreed to do interviews and had invited journalists from the U.S., England, Spain, France and other countries to come along for the first shows.

So here I am at Ezeiza airport, outside Buenos Aires. The place looks like a military installation. Young, peach-fuzz-faced boys who can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen are stationed along the concourse that leads through customs into the baggage-claim area. They’re all in uniform: big black leather shit-kicking boots that reach halfway up the calves of their legs, and regulation tan pants, shirts and helmets. And they’re all armed with submachine guns.

In Argentina, the military – and terror – reigns supreme. According to Amnesty International, about 15,000 people have “disappeared” since 1976, when Juan Perón’s second wife and successor, Isabel, was thrown from power in a coup d’état. Since then, a guerrilla war has been waging between the dictatorship and opposition groups, mainly Perónists, and citizens have routinely been plucked off the streets or out of their homes, taken to secret detention camps and systematically brutalized. But as VS. Naipaul writes in his book The Return of Eva Perón, “Style is important in Argentina; and in the long-running guerrilla war – in spite of the real blood, the real torture – there has always been an element of machismo and public theatre.”

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Amid the hubbub at customs, I notice a middle-aged man in gray – gray suit, gray tie, gray hair – making his way through the crowd, shouting something in Spanish. The only word I understand is Queen, and sure enough, he’s looking for us. He takes our passports, whisks us past the inspectors without so much as one bag being opened, and leads us upstairs to the bar for an early morning cerveza. He speaks little English, but there are two words he knows quite well. No matter what anyone asks for, his response is the same: “No problem.”

Maybe this won’t be so bad after all.

By the afternoon of day two, none of the writers has yet been introduced to any of the band members. We while away the time in the hotel bar, but in this country, where the annual inflation rate is around 100 percent, a bottle of beer costs the equivalent of twelve dollars, keeping us sober against our wills. Finally, Jim Beach, Queen’s business adviser, allows a few of us to attend the sound check at Velez Sarfield.

The Argentines have a rather nifty concept of crowd control, as I find out when I reach the stadium: a moat, about six feet wide and three feet deep, runs around the perimeter of the field and is filled with foul-smelling water and patrolled by dragonflies. Queen has brought its own artificial turf so that the promoters will allow people onto the field.

Up onstage, Queen – lead singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor – is rehearsing “Rock It (Prime Jive),” a track off The Game. And it sounds simply awful. The acoustics are horrendous in the 3500-seat stadium: there’s a thirty-second delay as the music drifts across the length of the field and reverberates off the scoreboard. Nor does the band’s musicianship seem inspired. The rhythm section is sloppy and sluggish; May’s guitar playing is limited to heavy-metal/hard-rock clichés and patented, though by now boring, harmonic lead breaks; Mercury’s singing is lackadaisical and without conviction.

“They’re not even up to the par of some third-rate New Jersey bar band,” another writer comments to me, and indeed, I’m somewhat mystified about what it is that makes this group so popular.

When I return to Velez Sarfield that evening for the show, the stadium is swarming with kids – and cops. These are crusty, corpulent tough guys – not the boot-camp boys I saw at the airport. And it doesn’t take long to find out that they mean business. When one American writer snaps a photo of the twenty-odd billy-club-wielding policemen who are cordoning off the backstage area, he’s pinned against a government-owned Falcon and threatened at knife point with the loss of a finger until he yields his film. “No problem.” Sure.

“Un supergrupo numero uno,” the emcee anounces as the lights dim, and with a burst of smoke, Queen appears onstage and begins hammering out its anthem, “We Will Rock You.” Mercury – dressed in a white, sleeveless Superman T-shirt, red vinyl pants and a black vinyl jacket – frequently stops singing and dares the audience to carry the weight. And carry the weight they do: the fans seem to know all the lyrics throughout the 110-minute show – which, if for no. other reason, is impressive for the number of hits the group is able to offer up, such as “Keep Yourself Alive,” “Killer Queen,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Fat Bottomed Girls” and “Bicycle Race.”

Though the band-audience interaction is remarkable, the crowd responds with such unquestioning devotion I get the feeling that if Freddie Mercury told them to shave their heads, they’d do it.

The musicianship still seems pedestrian, but what the group lacks in ability, it makes up for – at least to the fans’ satisfaction – in gimmickry. Smoke shrouds the stage at regular intervals; flash pots illuminate the audience at key moments and end the set. Compared to Kiss‘ fire-breathing antics, Queen’s use of special effects is in relative good taste, and after all, a Queen show is supposed to be a spectacle.

For the encore, the band reprises “We Will Rock You,” then bounds into “We Are the Champions.” Mercury, by this time wearing only a pair of black leather short shorts and a matching leather policeman’s hat, struts around the stage like some hybrid of Robert Plant and Peter Allen, climactically kicking over a speaker cabinet and bashing it with his microphone stand. Pretty ridiculous in this day and age, but the kids love it.

Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band. The whole thing makes me wonder why anyone would indulge these creeps and their polluting ideas. —Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone

What do I think about critics? I think they’re a bunch of shits. —Freddie Mercury

Queen’s relationship with the music press has been about as cordial as the secret police’s relationship with the Argentine public. Even so, the band hasn’t exactly suffered from the continual pans of its records and shows: eight of its ten LPs have been certified gold (the exceptions are the Flash Gordon soundtrack and Queen II), and its last three studio efforts – News of the World, Jazz and The Game – have gone well over the million mark in sales.

“I have some very strong views of some of the things the press do, such as The Rolling Stone Record Guide,” Roger Taylor says, looking out his hotel-room window. It’s day four, and the long-promised interviews have finally been arranged. “Now, I’ve never read the book, but I saw an ad, and I thought, ‘What the fuck is someone doing bringing out a book like this? Who the hell are they to say what albums are good and what albums are bad?’ I think it’s entirely a personal choice.” (For the record, Queen didn’t fare too well in the book; four of the seven albums reviewed were awarded two stars, a designation that means “records that are artistically insubstantial, though not truly wretched.”)

The shots at Queen have not been fired by just the press, however. When the punks came to fame in England in the late Seventies, Queen was one of the groups most often singled out for attack. Taylor and John Deacon, the two band members who seem most attentive to musical trends, apparently feel some of the criticism was justified. “It gave us a kick up the ass,” Taylor says. “It was so angry, so different, so outrageous. We were recording News of the World in the same studio the Sex Pistols were recording their first album in. I mean, the first time I ever saw John Rotten, I was really shocked, cause I had never actually seen the whole thing in person. He sort of crystallized the whole punk attitude, and there’s no doubt about it, the guy had amazing charisma.”

If the band’s pomp-and-circumstance delivery has recently fallen into disfavor among the rough-and-ready New Wavers, it wasn’t really in vogue either when Queen inaugurated its grandiose stage presentation in the early Seventies. “That was the time of the supergroups, like Cream and Traffic,” Brian May explains, “and it was more the thing to get into your music and not worry about the audience. Then, for a period, it became very cool to do a show. Now, the wheel has turned again. But we just think that kind of show is part of being professional. People are giving you two hours of their time, so you have to give them everything for those two hours. We want every person to go away feeling he got his money’s worth, and we use every possible device to achieve that.”

From the beginning, Queen wanted to put on a show that would be different. “We had a joke that we wanted to be the biggest,” Taylor says. “It was a joke, but underneath, it really was true. Number one is much better than number two. And we’re still working at it.”

To accomplish this goal, Queen opted for an unusual route. Rather than work their butts off playing the club circuit – something Taylor and May had done without much success in a band called Smile – they chose to spend two years rehearsing while they were still in school. May nearly completed a Ph.D. in astronomy; Taylor has a degree in biology; Deacon, one in electronics; and Mercury, a diploma in illustration and design.

Mercury and Taylor supported the band by selling artwork at a stall in Kensington Market, and it wasn’t until 1973 that Queen released its first album and had enough money – thanks to record-company support – to take the kind of show they wanted to do on the road. The LP, titled Queen, gave the band its first hit single, “Keep Yourself Alive,” and set the stage for what was to come. As Roger Taylor says, “It’s been quite a fairy tale.”

I just hate this,” Freddie Mercury says, “especially when that thing’s on.” He points to my tape recorder, sits down across from me and lights up a Salem. “There came a point where I was misquoted all the time,” he continues, “and they had the piece written before they even started. I’m not afraid of criticism – I don’t want to come across as Goody Two Shoes all the time – but it’s been purely vindictive.” A deal’s a deal, however, and Mercury, obviously under some pressure from the other band members and their record company, had agreed to an interview. “So here I am with Rolling Stone,” he moans. “It’s like being forced to talk.”

Up close, Mercury is more petite than he looks onstage: he stands only a fraction of an inch under five feet ten and is relatively slender. His short-cropped hair and mustache are jet black, and his eyes are a piercing dark brown. In addition to being the group’s lead singer and one of its main songwriters, Mercury is also most responsible for Queen’s image. He’s known for his flamboyance and debauchery both onstage and off: at a birthday party a couple of years ago, for example, he swung naked from a chandelier, and on one of the band’s Japanese tours, bored with the tedium of playing night after night, he appeared onstage with a bunch of bananas atop his head.

“The Carmen Miranda of rock & roll,” he says, chuckling. “But what can I say? I’m a flamboyant personality. I like going out and having a good time. I’m just being me. The media pick up on certain things, and a lot of things get overexaggerated. I’m quite easy to get on with, really. I can be a real bitch at times, but that’s okay. I’m not that vicious. I use my influence. Why not? I’m not afraid to flaunt it.”

Thirty-four years old, Mercury was born Frederick Bulsara in what was then Zanzibar. His father was a British civil servant, and Freddie left home when he was seven to attend boarding school, first in India, then in England. “You learn to fend for yourself at an early age. I was quite rebellious, and my parents hated it. I grew out of living at home at an early age. But I just wanted the best. I wanted to be my own boss.”

Shifting around in his seat, Mercury tugs at his upper lip and reaches for his pack of Salems. “For a nonsmoker,” he jokes, “I smoke far too much.” He tells me he’s just purchased a house in London’s Kensington Park, complete with eight bedrooms and a massive studio with pillars and a gallery. “I can have minstrels play there,” he says with a laugh. “Very la-di-da, don’t you think?”

He’s having the mansion remodeled, which gave him cause recently to go on one of his celebrated shopping sprees. Just before their South American jaunt, Queen played five shows at the Budokan in Tokyo, and the promoter’s wife, a good friend of Freddie’s, arranged an excursion for the singer and his entourage through the largest department store. “I felt like Grace Kelly,” he recalls. “I got this huge Japanese bed, a lot of lacquer things and really nice hundred-year-old stuff. I think I spent a fortune, but I don’t know. The credit card pays for it.

“I like buying things on crazy impulses,” he continues. “I hate buying for investment. But I do like a lot of Oriental stuff; it’s intricate and delicate. I also like the cultural part of it, the way they do their gardens; they put a lot of thought into it. But I’m not into all the meditation crap, or those boring tea ceremonies. The raw fish, as well.”

Early on in his career, Mercury seemed bent on incorporating his interest in different cultures and art forms into Queen’s stage shows and music. “Mustapha,” off the Jazz album, was a miserable attempt at Arabic music, and at one point, Mercury told the British press he was “bringing ballet to the masses.”

“I went through this period where I thought I was making an impact on the fashion world,” he says, “then I thought, ‘Oh, grow up.’ And now, you see, I don’t take all this too seriously – I mean, I couldn’t be serious with the things I wear onstage. I have far more fun, and I enjoy it. It’s a great release. That’s what entertainment should be.”

He feels likewise about the band’s music. “It’s just pure escapism. It’s like going to see a film. People should just escape for a while, then they can go back to their problems. That’s the way all songs should be: you listen to them, then discard them like a used tampon. I don’t have any messages I’m trying to get across or anything.”

The forty-five minutes of interview time I’ve been allocated are rapidly drawing to a close, and publicist Howard Bloom knocks on the hotel-room door and tells us to wind things up. Mercury lights one last Salem. “You see,” he says, “you can tell I’m not very good at this. To be honest, I really don’t think I have much to say.”

A couple of years ago, Roger Taylor was doing about 145 miles an hour in his Ferrari on an alpine road in Germany when suddenly one of the chains went, the cooling system died and the car caught on fire. He managed to extinguish the flames just in time – there were about fifteen gallons of gas onboard. “Burned all my clothes to a cinder,” he recalls. “Another minute and it would have hit the tank and that would have been it. I would have been vaporized completely.”

Since then, Taylor hasn’t been quite as enamored of fast cars, but he still relishes the kind of lifestyle rock & roll has afforded him. In that sense, he’s probably closer in personality to Freddie Mercury than the other two band members. “Ah, yes,” he says when I bring up Queen’s rather decadent image. “I like that sort of thing. I like strip clubs and strippers and wild parties with naked women. Sounds wonderful. I’d love to own a whorehouse. Really, seriously. What a wonderful way to make a living.”

“Roger is very much in the tradition of the successful rock & roll musician,” John Deacon explains. “He wants the things that go with it, and it is what he really wanted to be. I’m sort of the opposite of that. It was never my burning ambition to be in a successful band. It has helped my confidence a bit, but it’s different things for different people. And we are four very different people.”

Offstage, while Taylor and Mercury are out carousing, Deacon frequently spends time with his wife and three kids. Though he may seem out of place in the flashy world of Queen, Deacon is actually the band’s stabilizing presence. He oversees much of the group’s business matters – Queen does not have an official manager; instead, it employs a coterie of advisers who leave final decisions to the band.

The disco hit “Another One Bites the Dust” is Deacon’s creation. “I’m the only one in the group, really, who likes American black music,” he tells me. “And with The Game, it was Freddie’s idea that instead of arguing over which songs to put on the album, we’d split it up: Freddie and Brian would have three tracks apiece, and Roger and myself would have two. But we had arguments over whether “Bites the Dust” should be a single. In the end, it began attracting a lot of attention on black stations and in discos, so the record company wanted us to put it out. But it would never have been chosen as a single by the group as a whole.”

Given his low-key personality, I wonder how Deacon feels about the image conveyed by Mercury. His answer is blunt: “Some of us hate it,” he says. “But that’s him and you can’t stop it. Like he did an interview in one of the English national papers, and it was all like, ‘We’re dripping with money, darlin‘,’ or, ‘What’s a mortgage?‘ Brian, for one, just hated it.”

Like Deacon, Brian May is quiet and tends to keep to himself. He, too, has brought his wife and child along. When not touring, he’s an avid gardener – “I’ve been known to be out there looking for slugs at one o’clock in the morning,” he says – and he tries to keep up with astronomy by reading journals and talking with his former university colleagues.

“I think it’s essential that you have things that you get into apart from music,” he says. “You have to maintain your balance.”

May seems to care the most about the group’s audience, and he supervises the fan club. “I think people can listen to some of our stuff and actually get something out of it spiritually, if I may be so bold,” he says. “I enjoy the fact that a lot of people have written to us and said that a particular song helped them when they were in a difficult situation. That’s a great feeling.”

All in all, the Big Event was a success. The attendance was staggering: in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the group played in front of 131,000 people one night and 120,000 the next. The press had also been good: one American writer even mentioned Queen’s shows at Velez Sarfield in the same breath as the Beatles’ at Shea Stadium.

Though this tour seemed rather tame compared with previous Queen endeavors, that probably says more about South American governments than it does about the band. When the group’s advance men first arrived in Buenos Aires, for instance, their backstage passes were seized briefly by customs officials, who deemed them pornographic (they depicted two nude women embracing).

But basically, things went smoothly – not unlike some master plan. That concept was brought up again and again when I discussed Queen with some of its associates. “They want to conquer the world” was how one person put it. For a group of this stature, a group that presumably has made enough money to last a lifetime, Queen maintains a very busy work schedule. After the release of The Game last June, the band did a major U.S. tour, recorded Flash Gordon and played some more dates in Europe and Britain. Then came the Japanese shows, the South American trek and a solo LP from Roger Taylor. This June they plan to begin work on another studio album, but before that comes out sometime next year, they will release a greatest-hits package (which reportedly will vary from country to country, depending on what songs have been hits in those areas).

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Four years ago, in Queen’s last interview with Rolling Stone, Freddie Mercury said, “Our goal is to get to the top, obviously. We’re not there yet; nowhere near it. And I don’t want anybody to tell me I’m there either.” And the band still feels that way. When I asked them what they thought they’d be doing in five years, each member was convinced Queen would still be together, still reaching for something more. After all, you can’t conquer the world overnight.

This story is from the June 11th, 1981 issue of Rolling Stone.

#Roger Taylor #my little drummer love #well-read .. well-spoken #he says what he means and he means what he says #your periodic reminder that Roger is in no way stupid #Brian May #John Deacon #Freddie Mercury #Queen #Queen: Academia

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xjaylahopkins · 9 months

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TASK #14

MERROCK WRAPPED

TOP FIVE MUSIC ARTISTS

one. Shania Twain

two. Olivia Rodrigo

three. Kelsea Ballerini

four. Kacey Musgraves

five. Maren Morris

TOP FIVE SONGS

one. All American Bitch by Olivia Rodrigo

two. Any Man of Mine by Shania Twain

three. Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl by Olivia Rodrigo

four. Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under by Shania Twain

five. Hole in the Bottle by Kelsea Ballerini

TOP MOVIES SEEN IN THEATERS

one. Killers of the Flower Moon

two. The Hunger Games: Ballad of the Songbirds and Snakes

three. The Little Mermaid

four. Taylor Swift Eras Tour

five. Trolls Band Together

TELEVISION SHOWS BINGE WATCHED (old or new!)

one. Reservation Dogs

two. Criminal Minds

three. Bear in the Big Blue House

four. Lucifer

five. Molly of Denali

TOP EVENTS ATTENDED IN TOWN (event tag!)

one. Summer Beach Bash

two. Railway 5K

three. Volunteer Week

four. Nature Week

five. Winter Market

FIVE FAVORITE THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN 2023 (personal, or in the world!)

one. Having her parents in town for Christmas

two. Ryder’s dad’s donation to the library

three. Time spent volunteering both at the Center and the Ranch

four. Getting a pool at the house

five. Finishing the Reese’s rankings

#merrocktask

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qnewsau · 18 hours

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How Shanny T-Bone overcame hate from within our community

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/how-shanny-t-bone-overcame-hate-from-within-our-community/

How Shanny T-Bone overcame hate from within our community

Each month, we ask local entertainers to spill the tea about themselves, their craft and the local scene. This time it’s Brisbane drag artist Shanny T-Bone.

Shanny shares her love of Kylie Minogue, finding the balance between femininity and masculinity and overcoming ignorance from within the LGBTQIA+ community.

The first time I did drag was…

In Maryborough in 2005. It was at a once-a-month LGBTQ+ dance party called Diversity, which was founded by a good friend Shawn Dern aka Donna Frock.

When I first moved to Brisbane, I was introduced to Sporties, The Wickham and The Beat, where I got to see incredible drag artists like Miss Synthetique, Yana Michelle, Crystal Dior, Venus Envy, Trixie Laumonte, Sasha Trajik Mole, Iona Toyboy and Dame Liz Taylor.

I was enamoured by their talent, sparkle and glamour. I consumed as many drag shows as I could. Soon I became friends with my drag mother Crystal Dior, and her friend Donna.

I would often talk to them about how I would do drag one day, seemingly that day would never come if it were up to me. One day Donna told me I had a month to organise a wig, some heels and a costume because I’d be performing at Diversity.

So I got some size 14 heels, a beach blonde wig and a costume made for me, and did my first show. The rest is history as they say…

Shanny’s drag

I would describe my drag as…

Big, bright, bold, bashful, busty, beautiful, bearded broad. And a bit of a cunt.

Having a beard as a drag artist…

Saves you a lot of money on razors, and you never get razor burn. For a long time, I thought I needed to fit into an archetype of drag to be considered legitimate and serious. I was conditioned to think I needed to shave to emulate the perceived fantasy of drag.

When I had time off performing, I relished in growing a beard and living my best bear life. When it came time to throw the heels on, I really resented and hated having to shave. For the longest time, I struggled with finding the balance between feeding my masculinity and femininity. Then something clicked, and I realised I could have the best of both worlds and be just as (if not more) beautiful in drag with a beard.

Letting go of the expectations of what others engrained in me early in my drag career has been so liberating.

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My best skill in being a drag performer is…

Makeup. It’s my favourite part of the drag transformation. I love using vibrant and pigmented colours in my looks.

I think it’s what I’m best known for, being a “Mugzilla”; a term created by Henny Spaghetti. It roughly translated as someone who uses a lot of cosmetics. I love experimenting with techniques, products and shapes.

I love the evolution of a drag artist’s makeup, and how everyone has their own style. I’d dare say it’s the fingerprint of drag, not one drag artist is the same. In the early years of doing drag, changing up my makeup was the cheapest way to do a new look without having to buy a new wig or costume.

Brisbane scene

The Brisbane queer scene is…

Inspiring. I love being a part of it. To share stages and spaces with some of the most incredible talent inspires me endlessly. It truly is a thriving and electrifying community. The queer scene offers a space where everyone can express themselves freely and authentically.

Whether it’s the alternative artists you see at alt, the girls who know how to hoot and hound at Purr, or showcasing stories and diversity of different cultures at POC, there is something for everyone. There’s a sense of community, belonging and connection for everyone to celebrate, and be inspired.

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Brisbane drag artists are…

Really underrated. For the longest time, Brisbane artists were slept on. But I think we have proved that we have some of the most outstanding talent in the country, if not the world.

The drag performer who deserves more attention is...

Dolly Kicks. If you haven’t seen a Dolly Kicks show, you’re really missing out. They’re an incredible drag performer and she needs to be seen on more stages in Meanjin. Producers reading this, book Dolly Kicks!

Overcoming ignorance

The biggest change I’ve seen in drag since starting is…

The perception, acceptance and celebration of drag. When I started, it was still quite subversive and underground. There was a stigma attached to being a drag queen, specifically in some subcultures of the queer community.

l rarely disclosed I did drag to men I dated. I would ask guys if they ever went to drag shows, and more times than I care to recall, I was often met with replies such as “drag is disgusting”, “I think all drag queens are fucked in the head” etc. I remember going to a bears’ dance party (out of drag) and was recognised by a patron. They said I wasn’t welcome there. It took a lot of work and self-reflection to not take those ignorant words on board.

When RuPauls Drag Race really took off, attitudes within the community started to shift. Jump forward 12 years later, I’m hosting events for bears, I have met my two best Judies, and am a celebrated part of the Bear (specifically BrisBears) community.

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Her adoration of Kylie

Kylie Minogue is…

A supreme goddess deity diva that deserves nothing but our respect and gratitude. Kylie Minogue means the world to me as a drag performer. She is not just a pop icon; she embodies everything I aspire to in my drag. Her ability to reinvent herself while staying true to her artistry has been a guiding light for me.

Her music, style, and stage presence have influenced every aspect of my drag, from the way I perform to the looks I create.

Kylie’s resilience, charm, and unwavering dedication to her craft inspire me to push boundaries and be the best version of myself. For me, Kylie isn’t just an icon; she’s the heartbeat of my drag journey.

If you haven’t figured it out, I’m a huge Kylie fan. I could talk about her all day. Want to piss me off, talk bad about her.

The best thing a fan has done for me was…

A lovely punter gifted me some Kylie Minogue collector’s items. It was so sweet, thoughtful and generous.

Drag experience

The best experience I’ve had in drag is…

There’s quite a few! Firstly, winning Miss Sportsman’s in 2022. To be a part of a legacy that has a rich history Brisbane’s drag scene was such a great accomplishment and an incredible honour. I was flippant about for so long.

It wasn’t until I was performing on that night how much it would mean to me to have that title and join icons such as Abril LaTrene, Chinta Woo Allcock, Mandy Moobs, and Vollie LaVont. Sporties has always been my home and I have met the most incredible people who are lifelong friends. To have that recognition from my peers and the community is incredible.

Secondly, performing on Mardi Gras night at Universal for World Pride in Sydney. I don’t think I’ll ever get an opportunity like that again in my life.

That experience was hands down the most exhilarating and one of the proudest moments of my drag career. To be invited to perform alongside some of the most incredible entertainers in Sydney was such an honour. It was electric, you could feel the love and pride, and everyone was so supportive and generous with their energy, a truly magical experience.

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One message I have for our community is…

Kindness costs nothing, give it out freely. Remember to be humble, the same people that were there for you on your way up will be the same people you see on your way down. And if a drag performer doesn’t want a photo, don’t be a twat about it, keep it cute and move along. If you see a drag performer in Crocs, mind ya business.

You can follow Shanny T-Bone @shannytbone on Instagram.

Other Queensland drag stars:

Sarah Problem-Hoe spills the tea on the Brisbane scene

Henny Spaghetti’s response to being slapped by a fan

Archie Arsenic calls for more accessible queer spaces

Get to know First Nations queen Chocolate Boxx

Spill the tea with Brisbane drag star Maxi-Bon

How AFAB drag artist Ladybird thrives despite shocking abuse

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

#Brisbane #drag

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okgooglenews · 26 days

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Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce Host Blake Lively Birthday Bash in Rhode Island - TMZ

* Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce Host Blake Lively Birthday Bash in Rhode Island TMZ * Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Reunite at Her Rhode Island Beach House ELLE * Taylor Swift & Travis Kelce Made a Secret Reunion at One of Her Controversial Homes Yahoo Entertainment * Taylor Swift is in Rhode Island this weekend (and she brought some famous friends with her) The Providence Journal * Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Reunite In Rhode Island Teen Vogue http://dlvr.it/TCMFGy

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labelleperfumery · 26 days

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Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce Host Blake Lively Birthday Bash in Rhode Island

Blake Lively’s getting by with some help from her friend Taylor Swift, who’s hosting a celeb-packed weekend celebration for Blake’s 37th birthday at her Rhode Island seaside mansion. TMZ got the first shots of Taylor and her man Travis Kelce… from TMZ.com https://www.tmz.com/2024/08/25/taylor-swift-travis-kelce-blake-lively-birthday-beach-house/

#TMZ.com

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beingallelite · 5 years

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#best friends #orange cassidy #sammy guevara #darby allin #alex abrahantes #chuck taylor #trent beretta #aew miami #all elite wrestling #aew #youtube: aew #posted on: 1.15.20 #bash at the beach

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hughesluv · 1 year

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Morning Routine | Luke Hughes

taylor’s beach bash ~ appreciating small moments that you get to share with your boyfriend, luke.

a/n: thank you so much for the request @heypeople2 ! this is short, but in my opinion, cute!!!

request: 🌊 “brushing your teeth together and looking at yourselves in the mirror” with luke please 🫶🏼

As you and your boyfriend Luke stand side by side in front of the bathroom mirror, you both grab your toothbrushes and toothpaste. The soft glow of the bathroom lights reflects off the mirror, creating a cozy and intimate atmosphere.

You can't help but smile as you watch Luke's reflection, his eyes meeting yours in the mirror. Pink paints his cheeks as he stares at the love of his life from the reflection of your shared bathroom mirror. As you apply toothpaste to your brushes, your hands briefly brush against each other, sending a tingling sensation through your fingers.

As you watch each other brush, you can't help but admire the little details – the way Luke's messy hair falls slightly over his forehead, the crinkle in his eyes when he smiles, and the way he looks so effortlessly handsome, even with a toothbrush in hand.

Luke spits out his toothpaste, a smug expression on his face, “Like what you see?” You turn to the sink to rinse your mouth, a huge grin plastered across your face.

“Yeah, maybe I do.” You respond. Luke’s arms snake around your waist, pulling you into his chest. You giggle, wrapping your arms around his neck and pulling him down into a small kiss.

Pulling away, your gaze locks with his. A huge smile graces both of your lips, and without saying another word, you exit the bathroom together, hand in hand.

Such a simple act like brushing your teeth together may be nothing to someone else, but to you and Luke, it was something you looked forward to every morning.

#hughesluv #taylor’s beach bash!#taylor’s writings 📷#luke hughes imagines #luke hughes #luke hughes blurb #luke hughes imagine #luke hughes x reader

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bebepac · 3 years

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Substitute Queen (Happy Birthday Queen Walton!)

This is a special edition of Fast Forward for my friend @queenwalton as she enjoys this series I've created a lot and it is her birthday! (Well a day early!)

I'm pretty sure you have been following along with me since I started writing on the fandom a little over a year ago. Thank you for your friendship and support. I hear from you after every chapter I post and I love it. Also thank you for being my trustworthy reader of infinite snippets. I hope you have an absolutely wonderful birthday my friend. 🥰🥰🥰🥰❤❤❤

A/N: Thanks @dcbbw for bouncing some ideas around with me, and giving me a few to make this birthday fic even better. Thank you girl.

Summary: Riley and Liam go on their first vacation alone since the events of Ellie’s kidnapping. Maxwell and Taylor take care of all the children. Maxwell throws a “Baby” Beaumont Bash.

Original Post Date: 03/24/21 at 11:55AM EST

The Book: TRH and Beyond

Pairing: Liam x Riley / Maxwell x Taylor

Warnings: None other than hilarious fluff

Word Count: 2425

Song inspiration for this chapter: Baby Shark (Trap Music Remix)

I don’t own rights to this hilarious music.

Liam saw Riley standing in the study with her back turned to him. The King of Cordonia shifted seamlessly into stealth mode as he crept silently into the study, surprising his Queen by pouncing on her like a lion, grabbing her and slipping his arms around her waist, and sensually planting a soft kiss to the sensitive skin on her neck. He gently rubbed himself against her.

“Take a break for a little while my love.”

He felt her body tense up.

“EEEWWWWW GROSS!!! NOT YOUR WIFE!!! OOOOH GOD!!!!!!! NOT YOUR WIFE!!! PUT THAT THING AWAY!!!!!! YOU HAVE FOUR KIDS!?!?!?!?!? AREN’T YOU GUYS TIRED OF DOING THAT?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?”

Liam quickly recoiled from her. Liam looked genuinely horrified when she turned to face him.

“I’m so sorry Taylor. From behind, I swear I couldn’t…I mean I didn’t…..”

“Bleh!!!! Don’t finish that sentence!!!!!!

Riley walked in the room seeing Taylor and Liam visibly uncomfortable.

“What did I miss?”

“I need a bath!!! Your husband thought I was you. Apparently we look the same from behind.”

Riley glanced at Taylor. “I mean…. He’s really not completely wrong Tay. Now that you had the twins, we really do.”

Taylor scowled.

“And that right there is why no one will mistake us for each other from the front. Your scowl face.”

“Well this is a sufficiently awkward conversation, so I’m going to go, especially after I’ve completely embarrassed myself. Riley when you’re finished, please come by my study.” Liam still had a flush on his cheeks and ears.

“For real, put that thing away Liam, it’s barely lunch time.” Taylor grumbled.

“I will be there.” She winked at him.

Liam’s smile returned.

“Can one of you keep it in your pants please? You two are like horny teenagers.”

“I’m okay with that.” They both said in unison smiling at each other. Liam left the room.

“Are you going away for your wedding anniversary?”

“We probably should, but we have our date nights, and we can always sneak some time alone now that the kids are a little older, now that everyone is potty trained and not on the boob anymore. God I missed my boobs being mine, and now that they are again, of course they look like a dumpster fire after breastfeeding four kids.”

“Well that’s one hell of a bra then.”

“Who are you telling? They would be dragging the floor otherwise.”

Taylor laughed.

“Please don’t do that visual to our body.”

“It is our body right?”

Riley and Taylor giggled.

“You two should go away alone. You two never get adult time… And I don’t mean just for that. You two apparently get more than enough adult time for that.”

“Tay, it’s just that we haven’t really been away from the kids. Anywhere we go, we travel as a family. I feel safer that way, so does Liam.”

“Because of me right?”

“Tay….”

“It is. The last time you two tried to go on vacation was when I took Ellie, and you haven’t been apart from them a day since. It’s my fault you two are afraid to be away from your children."

“Taylor, Liam and I have forgiven you for that, a long time ago. We know that you’re not the same person you once were.”

“Prove it, you two take a trip, and it’s a trip you two desperately deserve. I promise the palace will be still standing when you get back.”

Taylor smiled at Riley.

“Please let me do this for the two of you. It’s been one thing after another, and you guys deserve a vacation. Let me and Max take care of the kids.”

“Tay… you do realize that would be your two barely crawling plus my four. You two would be taking care of six children.”

“And your kids are pretty self sufficient. They can feed themselves.”

“You’ll need some reinforcements, Tay. For real. I’ll call Drake and Hana to help.”

“I really think Max and I can handle it.”

“Tay…”

“Riley, we got this.”

*^*^*^*^* Taylor and Maxwell *^*^*^*^*

“You volunteered us for WHAT?!?!?!?!?”

“Oh come on Max, they’re just kids.”

“Yeah, and we’ve been lucky to keep the two of ours alive so far. We’re going to be outnumbered Softie. There’s going to be six of them and two of us. You have put them at an unfair advantage.”

Taylor laughed.

“This is not a war Maxwell.”

“Oh, it’s definitely a war.”

A week later, Riley and Liam were preparing to leave for their first vacation alone, since they had children.

Riley kissed and hugged each child.

“Now you kids behave for Auntie Taylor and Uncle Maxwell. I’m counting on you Miss Crown Princess for a report when I return. You know you’re first in command Ellie.”

Ellie stood up straight and squared her shoulders. “I promise Daddy, we’ll all be good.”

Ellie gave a little salute.

Liam gave one back.

“As you were, my princess.”

Riley, still kneeling, smoothed down Liberty’s little curls. Her little lip was already trembling.

“Mommy loves you baby.” She kissed her little cheeks.

“Are you ready to leave My Love?”

Riley stood up nodding. Liam reached out her hand for hers.

They started to walk towards the SUV.

“Mama.”

Liam felt Riley stop.

“It’s okay My Love we can do this.”

Riley’s eyes were quickly filling with tears.

Riley resumed her stride.

“Dada?”

The little inflection of a question in Liberty’s voice made Liam stop dead in his tracks. His grip tightening on Riley’s hand. Liam took a deep shaky breath.

"Don't look back Liam, you know we won't leave if we do."

Bastien and Nico could see how the King and Queen were struggling to leave their children.

“Your Majesties, come this way.” Bastien called out to them gently.

Both the King and Queen were in tears hearing their youngest burst into tears at the sight of them leaving, as they climbed into the black SUV.

“It’s okay. They’ll be fine Riley. They have reinforcements.”

“Taylor wouldn’t let me call Drake or Hana.”

Liam hit a button on his phone. He put the phone on speaker.

“What’s your location?”

“Already inside the palace.”

“Olivia?”

“And you fully understand the plan?”

“Let your tiny humans drive Taylor and Maxwell insane?”

“NO!!!!”

“I know the plan Liam! Not be seen and keep a watch on them, and only appear if they need help with the children. “

“Yes. Thank you Liv.”

“I do this because we’re friends Riley.”

“Liberty has a set of lungs on her, she hasn’t stopped crying since you two left. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

“Thank you Liv.”

“They’ll be fine, i’ll be watching. Enjoy your vacation already.”

“Where are we headed? Since you wouldn’t disclose a location to me, I literally packed for everything including plagues and fire rain.”

“For some fun in the sun on our own private beach.”

“Good thing I packed a bathing suit.”

“You won’t be needing it.”

Riley smacked Liam’s arm as he waggled his eyebrows at her.

*^*^*^*^*^* Meanwhile back at the Palace *^*^*^*^*^*^*^*

“C’mon Libby it’s okay. Mommy and Daddy will be back.”

Taylor picked her up, rocking her in her arms.

“Shhhhhh… it’s okay Libby. Auntie Taylor is here, so is Uncle Max.”

Libby’s cries subsided a little but not significantly.

“Can I try?” Ellie asked.

Ellie crossed her eyes and made a funny face at Libby causing her to break out into a fit of giggles.

“We’re evening out the odds. Three on three, I like those odds better Taylor. We might actually survive this. They will listen to one of their own. Ellie is like our super agent spy.”

By the end of day one both Taylor and Maxwell were exhausted, tending to and chasing around six children. At least their two were relatively easy to catch, as they were barely mobile.

“Why did I think the children being self-sufficient was going to be a good thing? I’ve never been this tired in my life.”

“Is this what we have to look forward to when they’re older?”

"Seems like it."

^*^*^*^* Liam and Riley *^*^*^*

“My Love?”

“Yes Dear?”

“You don’t have to cut up my food for me.”

Riley had absentmindedly cut up Liam’s chicken into very small child bite size pieces. She had also ruffled his hair and kissed his forehead.

“Oh! I didn’t even realize.”

Liam smiled at her, running his fingers through his hair. “We’ve been parents for so long, it’s been a long time since you and I have been truly alone.”

“You know what I want to do after dinner?” Riley inquired.

Liam raised his eyebrow with an intrigued smirk.

“I think I might have an idea of exactly what you want to do.”

Liam and Riley went to sleep after dinner. Both stretched out in the bed. Both had covers, and no kids arms, legs, feet, or hair in their face.

Every night was like that Liam and Riley got the most sleep they had, had in years…. Well after other adult activities. Liam had even turned off his alarm living in the moment with Riley.

*^*^* Baby Beaumont Bash *^*^*^*

Taylor was feeding the girls when she heard loud thumping music. Taylor could hear jingling. Taylor glanced up, seeing the chandelier above her head was thumping to the beat of the music. Thank goodness the twins were used to Maxwell's antics, and Lily and Violet were sleeping right through it. She put Violet back in the crib and walked down the hall. The closer she got to the east wing ballroom the music got louder.

Taylor pulled the doors open to the ballroom, smoke bubbled down the hall.

There were multi colored blinking lights, a disco ball spinning from the ceiling and a snack table full of candy, sweets and soda.

Maxwell had a DJ station set up playing a song on an endless loop, bobbing his head to the music with his headphones on.

And Riley's kids hopped up on kiddie cocaine (aka sugar) dancing and flailing around in what Taylor could only think to describe as a kiddie rave.

"Is that….. a trap remix of baby shark?"

"Heck yeah it is."

And the kids were loving it.

Maxwell let the music keep playing and he had a bottle of champagne in one hand calling Ellie and Adam over to him. He had a sword in his right.

"Adam you hold the bottle."

"You are not giving them champagne Maxwell! They're children!"

"I'm shocked at you Softie. What kind of Uncle do you think I am? It's just sparkling apple cider. Okay Ellie, you get the sword because you're the oldest. And what you want to do is slice just like I'm showing you. Oh, and don't kill your brother, that would be bad."

"I don't think Daddy would let us do this Uncle Maxwell." Ellie said wearily.

"Heck no he wouldn't. Well not with Maxwell teaching you. If anyone is going to teach the crown princess to slice anything while someone else is holding it, it's going to be me."

Olivia appeared walking out of the shadows of an alcove.

"Have you been here the whole week?"

"Of course! You know Liam and Riley. And these kids are never going to fall asleep, if we don't have them dance the sugar out."

"I've got just the thing.”

Max cranked up the music.

*^*^*^*^* Liam and Riley *^*^*^*^*

"Liam I miss them."

"We'll be home to see them by noon tomorrow."

"Liam I know you miss them too, log into Crown Cam, so we can see them."

Riley sat next to Liam as he logged into Crown Cam.

As they went to each room they noticed none of the children were in their beds.

"It's past their bedtime."

"Did you really think Max and Taylor would get all kids to bed on time?"

"No but…."

They clicked on each room, until they got to the ballroom on the east wing.

Both gasped at the scene. Liam clicked the button enabling the cameras to pick up sound in the room.

Both looked at each other, seeing their kids wildly dancing and flailing about. Libby was excitedly jumping up and down with a glow stick while Olivia sang on stage.

"Is Olivia really singing and rapping to Let It Go?!?"

Olivia's Rap

Liam nodded, watching the scene for a few more moments before slowly closing his laptop.

"I'm sure there is a perfectly good explanation for all of this."

*^*^*^*^*^* kiddie rave *^*^*^*^*

Taylor danced with the kids while Max continued at his DJ station.

"Olivia can flow, can you believe it Max?!?"

"OLIVIA!!!!! LANGUAGE!!!!!!! THEY'RE CHILDREN!!!!" Maxwell screamed.

"Are you serious with me right now?!? Language?"

Olivia rolled her eyes in complete annoyance.

"Of all the things you've done, LANGUAGE is your hard stop? You gave the crown princess a SWORD to slice a bottle out of her younger brother's hands, and instructed her not to kill him. That's entirely okay, but CURSING is where you draw the line in the sand? Seriously Maxwell?"

Both Taylor and Olivia glared at Maxwell for a few moments in confusion.

"Liv keep going!!! We have to tire them out!!!"

Olivia resumed her rap battle….with herself.

Within an hour it looked like a crime scene in the ballroom. Children were passed out everywhere.

Taylor picked up a sleeping Ellie, Olivia, grabbed Adam, and Maxwell carried Jaiden and Liberty upstairs to their beds.

"They need baths, their faces and hands are dirty with crumbs and sweets."

"We'll give them baths in the morning, before Liam and Riley get back." Maxwell was confident they could get it done.

They didn't. They all slept in instead.

When Liam and Riley arrived back at the palace, they didn't know what to expect.

They saw their kids, all lined up wearing yesterday's clothes, dirty faces, and wild chaotic hair, looking like they had their own kiddie walks of shame. But each child had a huge smile on their face.

Liam walked up to Ellie.

"Your report my Crown Princess?"

"Daddy! I sliced a bottle top off a bottle while Adam held it."

"And I didn't die!" Adam screamed confidently.

"We had fun!" Jaiden exclaimed.

"Daddy did you know Auntie Liv is a gangsta rapper?" Ellie's voice sounded like she was in complete awe.

"Yes My Princess, we saw."

Olivia turned pale, then she knowingly nodded. "I should have known you two would access Crown Cam."

Riley turned to Maxwell.

"So you threw a Beaumont Bash…. for our children?" Riley asked.

"Of course, gotta train them up right!! Little Blossom!"

"Sure, they're a little dirty, but at least the palace is still standing, what else would you expect from the Substitute Queen?" Taylor commented with a smirk.

Happy birthday! I hope you enjoyed this!

Tagging the comments

#bebepac writes #birthday fics #happy birthday queenwalton #trh fanfic #trh fandom #riley x liam #fast forward #choices fic writers creations

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coochiequeens · 2 years

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The Cut could have chosen from many articles if they wanted to cover “cancel culture”. They published one that made a 17 year old boy who released his ex girlfriends nudes look like a victim. And this shit was written by a woman?

Twenty months after he developed a crush, 18 months after he’d fallen in love, Diego, who is enormously appealing but also very canceled, boarded the bus with Jenni and Dave. They were going to the beach, and it wasn’t a big deal — except for the fact that pretty much all of Diego’s friends had dropped him, so, yeah, it was. The three, all 17, sat in a row of orange seats that ran the length of the bus, Diego’s eyes dark, goofy, and sad; his body freshly stretched to almost six feet; his oversize Carhartts ripped on skateboard ramps. This could have been in any American city this past January, on any bus. (First names in this article are pseudonyms.) Jenni kept her face tilted down toward her lap, hidden by a scrim of shoulder-length hair.

Then, a stop away from school, another high-school student boarded the bus. Just one more kid with a backpack in a hoodie, and at first Diego waved and Jenni smiled. Diego because he wanted to show he wasn’t scared, as this kid had thrown accelerant on a stupid mistake Diego had made, thus blown up Diego’s life. Jenni because she’s pragmatic enough to play along with social rules, plus this kid sat right in front of her in AP Statistics. But instead of waving and smiling back, this boy just stared, his eyes flat and certain. Jenni began to hyperventilate.

When, the month prior, Jenni first befriended Diego, he tried to warn her: You really don’t want to be canceled. It sucks. No one looked at him during the day at school. His teachers marked him present, then sent him to study by himself in the library because kids changed seats if he sat next to them in class. Diego no longer wanted to get out of bed. But he had talked to Jenni at the climbing gym, where he’d started going after the skate parks filled up with “opps” — kids who hated him. She noticed that Diego was surprisingly sweet and funny given how much his life had turned to shit.

She also asked him what had happened, which almost nobody did. She decided hanging out with Diego was okay.

This okay did involve putting a jacket over her head when she rode in Diego’s car near school. But it was too late to hide now. After the kid got off at his stop, he took a picture of Jenni through the bus window. Jenni started crying.

Later that night, Jenni, whom Diego described as “a solid, solid woman,” tried to do some damage control because, as she explained, if you get an Instagram post about you, your life is over. “I know what this looks like …,” she texted the boy. For months now, he had played the role of self-appointed enforcer. In Statistics class, he’d announced, “There are not many people that I would bash in the head with a hammer. Diego is one of them.”

“I was on the way to the beach,” Jenni wrote. “And I saw Dave, who I know.”

Dave attended a different school, but he was such a good wingman — his earnestness was so disarming, his golden curls fell so adorably into his eyes — that everyone, boys and

girls alike, was at least a little smitten with him. Dave was the one friend of Diego’s who had never disappeared. “It never even crossed my mind, like, Am I able to handle this?” Dave said. “Diego is like my brother.” Still, he kept their friendship quiet — which is to say he didn’t post pictures with Diego on Instagram. That seemed to appease his peers.

The boy from the bus left Jenni’s message on read overnight, meaning he’d seen it and not responded, a very bad sign. In the morning, he wrote back, “Yeah, I know Dave, too, but I don’t go sit with him and Diego.”

Jenni wrote again: “I’m friends with Dave and I can’t help it.” She wasn’t involved in the situation, she explained, and she didn’t plan to be. Still, the day after the bus ride, the enforcer turned around in Statistics and said as a threat, “Fuck Diego. I love cancel culture. If you were to cancel anyone, who would you cancel?”

This nightmare began sweetly. Diego — fan of Nivea deodorant, Air Jordans, and Taylor Swift; dragged on annual camping trips by his parents; his father white, his mother Filipina; 8.5-by-11-inch prints of every school photo of him and his sister hanging in his family’s upstairs hall — started high school and met a girl. They dated for a month. (According to Diego, this doesn’t really count.) They broke up. He spent a lot of the next year hanging out in skate parks, learning to do frontside 360s. Summer after their sophomore year, the two started going out again. Fiona was Diego’s first real girlfriend, and she was almost psychedelically beautiful: pale, celestial skin, a whole galaxy of freckles, a supernova of red hair. This made everything, even the pandemic, okay. Diego would do online school and skate and hang out with Fiona. Sometimes she broke plans with Diego to go on hikes with her parents, which Diego’s mother loved. He said, “I know, Mom!” when his mother, who taught college courses on parenting and child development, reminded him to ask for consent.

Then, in the middle of last summer, Diego went to a party. He got drunk and — Diego really fucked up here: Everybody, including Diego, agrees on that, so please consider setting aside judgment for a moment — showed a nude of his beautiful girlfriend to a few kids there.

Three weeks later, school started — senior year, finally back in person after 18 months at home, woo-hoo. Within days, teachers and administrators started noticing that the ninth- and tenth-graders were acting like middle schoolers — wrestling, invading one another’s personal space. “It was really clear a lot of them hadn’t been in school since seventh grade,” said the principal, who had held her job for only seven months before the pandemic closed in-person classrooms. Juniors and seniors, she noticed, also had “big gaps” in the skills they’d need “to navigate complexity” and “a very low tolerance for relational discomfort.”

Everyone seemed scared of each other’s bodies and breathing and out of touch with each other’s boundaries. Soon students started streaming into the glass-fronted administrative offices asking school staff to intervene in their relationships with one another, saying they felt unsafe. Students also wanted their administrators — the principal and the two vice-principals, all young women who led with a big-sister, let-me-make-you-a-cup-of-tea vibe — to investigate interpersonal incidents from years prior, stuff that no longer felt right after 18 months stuck at home.

Yaretzi, a young woman in Diego’s grade with walnut skin and a gentle voice that masked her intense focus, started attending school-board meetings on Zoom and speaking up during public comment about how disregarded students felt by the way the district handled sexual harassment and assault. “We were given the space and a lot of time,” she said, half-joking, “to reflect on why that kind of behavior was tolerated at school.” No way was she just slipping back.

This was a common pattern: the isolation of the pandemic producing both pain and insight, followed by a need to assert new power dynamics as people gathered up the shards of their social lives and tried to reassemble them. Diego’s school began working up a curriculum on harassment, a “tier-one intervention,” as one of the vice-principals called it, meaning the whole community needed help.

Two and a half weeks into the school year, a friend of Diego’s approached him between classes. He was like, “Yo, I heard this kid was walking around bragging that he was gonna tell your girlfriend that you showed some random dude her nude.”

Diego was like, “Broooo, what?”

Then the kid did.

Fiona dumped him, which, frankly, good for her. She felt humiliated, betrayed, and startled that someone she trusted so much respected her privacy so little. “I had put so much care into our relationship,” she told me. “Then I got screwed over.”

Diego offered Fiona a raft of apologies — “ ‘I’m so sorry, I’ll never do that again,’ that kind of thing,” Fiona said. He then holed up in his bedroom, ashamed, heartbroken, and furious with himself. He started writing songs with bald lyrics: “It’s all my fault / I hate me for that / And I’ll do anything to get you back … / You’re beautiful and perfect / I’m sorry.”

Over the course of the next three days, everyone in Diego’s old friend group stopped talking to him, which he didn’t really notice at first because he was too disgusted with himself to pay much attention. But by the following week, most of the other students in his grade had stopped talking to him as well. Diego’s parents reached out to the principal for the first time on October 4, 2021, to alert her that students were broadcasting their son’s “errors” and telling kids throughout the school that Diego was an abuser and if they remained friends with him, they’d be condoning rape culture. The principal, who was still planning the anti-harassment summit for November, did not respond.

A vice-principal walked Fiona through how to file a Title IX complaint. Title IX established a quasi-legal protocol meant to protect students’ right to access public education without discrimination or harassment. Every public school is required to have a Title IX coordinator. The principal and a vice-principal both held this job at Diego’s school. (“There was so much to share this year!” the vice-principal said.) In terms of securing equal access to school sports, Title IX works well. But with regard to preventing harassment in high schools? The regulation is a sieve, a piece of ed code, the vice-principal admitted, that is “not really written to protect students” but instead “revolves around protecting district and school from liability.” The result is a law that both does a poor job of stopping harassment and leaves students feeling ignored and enraged. “Students come in saying, ‘I feel harmed and uncomfortable and sometimes unsafe,’ ” the vice-principal told me. What Title IX mandates from there is that the students fill out a form. That form is sent to lawyers at the school district’s Office of Equity. A verdict comes back in legalese. The lack of shared vocabulary between students and the adults meant to protect them created an added layer of hurt. “Assault has a very specific meaning in the ed code,” the vice-principal said. “So sometimes difficult conversations arise when we say, ‘I acknowledge you feel uncomfortable and unsafe, and we should attend to that. This wasn’t assault.’ ”

Through the end of October, Diego remained heartbroken and depressed. While half his school canceling him seemed a bit much, he hated himself too. He spent a lot of time alone with his pet rat, Toe (named because he didn’t like the rat at first, but she grew on him), sitting under his lofted bunk bed, composing music on his mini Korg synth-vocoder, staring at the haute-adolescent mash-up on his walls: family water-park photos, concert-ticket stubs, Junior Ranger pins earned at national parks.

He also wrote Fiona a letter, but it was too much “pleading love letter” for her taste, too little “straightforward apology.” Besides, she thought, he’d brought this extended exile upon himself. He’d acted like a jerk that past summer, partying a lot, even breaking up with her for a bit. That had left Fiona feeling, she said, like “this person patiently waiting for him to come back, when he seemed he couldn’t care less about how I felt.”

Diego’s father, a high-school teacher in a different town, took the day off work on November 1 to try to dig his son out of his dark hole.

That same morning, posters with blood-red lettering that read GET ABUSERS OFF CAMPUS started appearing around school. “I just got really fed up,” Yaretzi, who made them, said. “My friend had called me to tell me about how her abuser wasn’t being held accountable after multiple reports were made about him.” She’d heard this from other friends too. “I printed like 60 posters in an hour and ran around the school and slapped them on the walls.” She herself had suffered through the fear and humiliation of sexual abuse, but her abuser did not go to the school — a “privilege,” she said, in that this made her worry less about retaliation. Yet she saw how girls on her campus felt more unsafe than ever. So she taped the posters up in the long, locker-lined hallways, in the bright stairwells, in the girls’ bathrooms, in front of the fishbowl of an office where the administrative staff worked.

That afternoon, around five, administrators learned students were planning a walkout the next day over the school’s handling of sexual misconduct. They also found a list on the girls’-bathroom wall labeled PEOPLE TO LOOK OUT FOR. Scrawled on the off-white tile in black Sharpie were seven names. DIEGO was one.

The list caught Yaretzi by surprise. “On my way home from school, I started getting calls,” she told me. “I’m like, ‘What the hell list are you talking about?’ ” Her intent was to lay blame at the feet of the school district, not specific young men.

Administrators phoned the parents of all the students named to tell them about the list and the walkout, which immediately got paired in everybody’s mind. School staff also locked the girls’ bathroom and repainted the wall, but it hardly mattered. Photos were already bouncing around social media, accompanied by tags like “stay safe please look out for these people” and “I wanna add [names] to this list.”

November 1 was also Diego’s mother’s birthday. When a vice-principal reached her, she was heading to meet her husband and Diego, along with a friend, for dinner. She pulled her husband aside to alert him, then they limped through the meal for the friend’s sake. Afterward, Diego’s parents sat him down.

“This is serious. I don’t want any surprises,” his father said. Diego laid out the facts: drunk at a party, showed the nude. His mother was relieved he hadn’t done something worse. His father was pissed.

“It was not good, actually really terrible,” he told me. “It’s embarrassing as a parent. You thought you raised your kid differently. You wish you had done things better.” Diego’s father was upset with himself, upset with Diego. He wanted his son held accountable, though he wasn’t sure what that looked like yet.

At 11:39 p.m., Diego’s mother wrote an email to the school:

Subject: My Son Is Not a Rapist. This situation with my son has gotten out of control and needs to be stopped. I’ll be heading to campus tomorrow with my son to help him file a Title IX Violation for those “Spreading a series of sexual rumors about a peer.”

Early the next morning — the morning of the walkout — a classmate texted Diego and said, “Bro, you shouldn’t come to school today.”

On campus, from the moment students arrived, administrators tried to stay on top of the situation, but even the simple task of keeping the bathroom walls clean felt exhausting and futile. Lists went up; administrators scrubbed them down. Lists went up again, not always with the same names. Nearly 20 students (not even the principal knows the full count for sure) were named in all. “People would put names on the wall and then other people would cross off names. And then people would write on the wall, like, ‘How dare you take that name off’ and ‘You don’t know the story,’ ” the principal told me. Fiona herself did not write Diego’s name. The principal’s whole focus became “How do we stop the bleeding?” As she saw it, “students are acting as judge, jury, and executioner for other students.”

At 10:30 a.m., 500 kids walked out of class, many dressed in red, as the organizers, most of whom were girls and queer people of color, had urged. Some had red-inked NO ABUSERS ON CAMPUS signs taped to their bodies. Others had written in pen on their skin: MAKE SCHOOL SAFE on an arm, I AM A SURVIVOR along collarbones. In the quad, Yaretzi led the crowd in ten minutes of silence to honor survivors. Then everybody walked up to the parking lot for speeches. Students punctuated these by banging on drums and rattling keys. They chanted “No abusers on campus!” and “Fuck admin!”THE PRINCIPAL’S WHOLE FOCUS BECAME “HOW DO WE STOP THE BLEEDING?”

“I have been here for four years,” one of the organizers told a local newspaper reporter. “I’ve walked people, hand in hand, up to the office to go report their assault, and a lot of times, they were turned away or they said, ‘Okay, here’s a piece of paper, fill out this report, and talk about what happened to you.’ ”

“There are known abusers in that crowd right now,” Yaretzi added in that same interview. “There’s so much protection for the abusers rather than the victims. We’re just sick and tired of it.”

“It was a wild day, a wild day,” the principal told me in her office, choking up, her back to the treadmill desk she had started using to ease her stress. “I’m having a hard time talking about it even now.” She had students screaming, the calls for systemic change wrapped up in very public accusations against specific young men, a disturbingly high percentage of whom were boys of color, almost none of whom she knew anything about. She had a whole student body aching, telling her to fuck off. Just two weeks before, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association had jointly declared a state of emergency in child and adolescent mental health.

In the popular imagination, the evolution of the crimes of the boys on the wall was rapid and steep. “You’re an abuser” quickly morphed into “You’re an assaulter,” which soon turned into “You’re a rapist.” The truth, according to Jenni, was most people didn’t actually care what they’d done. “Someone goes, ‘Oh my God, I heard he’s a bad person — don’t talk to him.’ And then people are scared to be on the wrong side. So they just do it. They don’t think about it. They’re just like, ‘Oh, I don’t know him, so I guess I won’t talk to him.’ ”

The unifying rally cry on campus was “We’re not safe here.” Even for students who’d never felt that way themselves, “suddenly there was a very compelling narrative to buy into,” the principal said. “There was a lot of social capital and relational capital to be found suddenly — I don’t wanna say it was a lie — in understanding your own experience within the context of this narrative.” That story line rested on the idea that the administration failed to do its most basic job. Parents started emailing the principal, asking if students were getting raped on campus.

This was not just Diego’s school. This was all over the country. A boy touched a girl’s waist without consent at a Spirit Week rally — shunned by his community and called a sexual abuser. A student accused a boy of touching her at a school dance — major investigation, lawyers on all sides. A student outed by the friend of a girl he tried to feel up after she reciprocated his affections while cuddling and holding hands — threats on social media, thoughts of taking his own life.

The case of Kathleen Kurtz and Robert Straub v. Lewisburg School District,in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, reads like a horror story in the form of a civil-action complaint. The plaintiffs were parents of a 14-year-old boy, Minor JX. In November 2020, classmates at school started calling JX a “rapist, pedophile, and child molester,” according to the complaint, and encouraged other students to do the same. Then, on March 19, 2021, a girl at his school made an anonymous report to ChildLine, the State of Pennsylvania’s child-abuse hotline, accusing JX of being a rapist. When a classmate was asked what JX had done, another girl said, “You know what you did, JX,” and refused to elaborate. JX started begging his parents to let him skip school. His parents sent a letter to the school principal:

JX is a sensitive soul and we fear this is damaging to his confidence at a very crucial time in his life where he is building his own Self-worth. These horrific verbal attacks he is undergoing can make or break what kind of human he becomes.

The local police investigated the ChildLine call. As the complaint reads, “the allegations were entirely fabricated.” Still, the bullying continued. “JX’s Mother reported that, given the ongoing bullying and name-calling from November 2020 to the present, the School was no longer an emotionally safe place for JX to be educated,” the complaint reads. He told his parents “his life was so bad right now that he can’t see how it can get better anytime soon.” JX’s parents sued under Title IX. The judge tossed the case, explaining the facts failed to prove JX’s harassment was based on his sex.

At Oakland School for the Arts, vigilantism drew the attention of the NAACP. Before the pandemic, a group of students had been swapping nude images of female classmates. The administration disciplined the ringleader, but many felt his punishment was light. Then, while stuck at home for remote learning, some students formed a group chat to share experiences of sexual abuse and harassment and frustrations with reporting them to the school. They requested a Zoom meeting with the dean about how to make the campus feel safer. But the meeting was a disaster, two of the students told me. The dean wanted to talk about vaping, not sexual misconduct, and the students were incensed. “It’s hard to have somebody not necessarily believe you, but it’s even harder when it’s like somebody should be really concerned about you,” one of the students said. The group chat organized itself into the Student Safety Committee and in late September planned a walkout and rally in a park across the street from the school. The event devolved. While students, primarily women of color, shared their personal stories of sexual violence up front, students in the crowd screamed at specific boys, most of whom were Black: “Rapist!” “You need to go die in the ditch.”

The rally ended early, one of the organizers told me, after a school administrator approached her. “He was crying and was like, ‘You’ve got to shut this down,’ ” she said. “We don’t have the mental-health support for this.”

The organizers spent the next day in the school administrators’ office. “It was just, like, a horrible experience,” one said. “It was like talking in circles or like talking to a wall.” Parents of accused boys showed up as well.

“How are you going to put that genie back in the bottle?” a Black woman whose sons were called rapists asked the dean. She had no doubt that the girls who had singled out her sons had experienced real pain. “I’m not saying that they’re not harmed,” she said. “What I’m saying is that hurt people hurt.” No individual had accused either of her sons of any specific abuse or crime.

In the weeks and months that followed, parents and grandparents began showing up at Oakland School for the Arts board meetings, saying they were scared to send their children to school because of all the sexual violence. Families of the accused boys reached out to the local NAACP chapter to talk about consolidating a case. Parents told Black children about the Central Park Five. “This can ruin your life simply because she says so … The school empowered a group of teenage young ladies, little mini-Karens,” one of the mothers said. Another mother told me her son struggled with returning to a place where everyone thought he was a rapist. “To survive every day, going to school like that,” she said, “having to prove he’s worthy, a good person, when he feels like he’s going to a school of hundreds of kids who think otherwise?”

Oakland School for the Arts eventually sent a letter to the school community acknowledging that most of the “allegations of sexual assault against a number of predominantly African American boys” were “either not backed by evidence, unfounded, or in some instances a result of mistaken identity or assumed guilt by association” and that the community had real healing and soul-searching to do.

On November 4, Diego lost his job with a youth organization in town. “You suspended my son due to graffiti on the wall that you saw on Social Media?” Diego’s mother wrote to his bosses. “NOT ONE person has accused my son of sexual assault.”

One of the bosses wrote back that she was “not in a position to say that Diego has sexually harassed or assaulted anyone,” but the truth was not the issue. Other kids in the program, which was entirely online, now said they felt unsafe with Diego. The program had to distance itself from him “based on the fact that this has gone very public and has compromised the way participants feel and/or interact.”

The Title IX claim about Diego ended up with the incident being declared outside the school’s purview. The vice-principal told Fiona she could file a police report. She didn’t want to do that. In communication with her family, however, the school made a plan to help Diego and Fiona repair. Fiona’s family, the vice-principal wrote in an email to Diego’s, made two requests:

1. That all pictures are deleted from every possible device, cloud, storage/media platform, etc. 2. That it be made clear to Diego and his family that this was a serious violation that is having an impact on the student’s overall well-being.

Done and done. As individuals, at the beginning, the two had managed this incident okay. Fiona had no interest in getting back together. But a couple of weeks after their breakup, when Diego was still eating only a handful of peanut-butter pretzels a day, they’d met at the beach and talked. “I was like, ‘I don’t appreciate getting treated like an abuser,’ ” Diego said. “And she’s like, ‘I don’t think you’re an abuser at all. I know that.’ ” But this had grown way beyond them.

The public conversation recast Fiona’s view of Diego’s actions in a worse light. She was mortified knowing that every time people thought about Diego now, they thought about her nude photo. Still, she felt validated and supported by the list. After the clinical and pointless Title IX claim, “it was refreshing to know that, like, Wow, someone else is standing up for me,” she said. “Someone does care about my story.”

Everyone hoped that after Thanksgiving break Diego would feel comfortable returning to school. That didn’t happen. Other boys whose names had been on the list were doing horribly too. One had hitchhiked away from home earlier in the year after his ex-girlfriend called his mother one morning to tell her she was going to cancel her son that day. Then she did. He returned a day later at the ex-girlfriend’s urging. (“They couldn’t stay away from each other,” his mother said. “She didn’t want him to leave.”) But being in a town where everybody shunned him, except for the person primarily responsible for that shunning, was just too painful. His mother stayed up all night with him so that he didn’t slip into the bathtub with a kitchen knife. Then he ran away again.

Yaretzi tried to keep the focus on systemic change. One simple ask, which Fiona would have appreciated, too: more counseling support to complement the reporting process. Yaretzi spoke with the superintendent and the Office of Equity, pleading with them to, at a minimum, connect students with outside mental-health resources. “They’re like, ‘Well, what would you propose?’ ” she told me they said right after she made her pitch. “And then I just started laughing. I was like, ‘I just told you what I proposed!’ I mentioned the possibility of a Linktree. Have you ever seen a Linktree? It would take ten minutes and cost zero dollars.”

A scarcity mind-set — not just in terms of money but in terms of care, morality, and protection — set in. Students kept coming into the principal’s and vice-principals’ offices “upset over the fact that in the days after the protests, the school helped create safety-and-support plans for some of our male-identifying students who have been named,” the principal said. “And our female students saw that as ‘Who are you protecting? Whose narrative is more important to you? Who do you believe?’ ”

For instance, the school put Diego on independent study for the month of November. “The guy who caused a lot of pain to me now gets kind of like a GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card?” Fiona asked. Shouldn’t there be “something offered in the other direction?” (The school did offer her a safety-and-support plan, but she declined because she didn’t share any classes with Diego.) Meanwhile, some of the families of accused students had started deploying what has become the standard legal tactic in the Me Too backlash, displayed most publicly at the Depp-Heard trial: going on the offensive. The families demanded disciplinary action against the students shunning their sons. “But I can’t make your kids be friends,” the vice-principal told those parents. “I can’t stop kids whispering and laughing when your kid walks into the classroom.”

In the worldview that set in, being kind to a canceled kid is all downside. If you’re kind, you’re an apologist, then you too will be shunned. As another canceled kid told me, he’d really tried to press his ex-friends on why they ostracized him, but there was no point. “They were like, ‘You know why.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know why.’ And they’re like, ‘You know why.’ And then I just ended up leaving because how can you argue with that?”

The school’s official protocol on how to deal with ruptured relationships was to use restorative practices. This usually meant a facilitated conversation among the people directly involved, with the goal of creating empathy and coaxing kids out of angel/devil, black-and-white thinking. But Diego’s school had a countervailing policy: You couldn’t use restorative practices in cases of sexual misconduct. You also couldn’t make anyone participate in restorative practices. Given that the students existed in a universe where just talking with an alleged abuser made you an apologist — where you could lose all your social capital simply for suggesting that someone might deserve compassion — who would agree to restore?

It was an impossible situation, a whole world supersaturated with emotion, starved for common ground and facts. The school tried to get the stalled anti-harassment training back on course, but the advocacy group it had hired to run the workshop declined. “This is not the time for us to come,” its representatives said. “People need an open mind to learn.”

Diego barely ate for weeks. He slept 12 hours a night. He wrote bad poems. He stared at the pink Post-it note he had put in his phone case on November 1:

Reminders — Compliment people always — be kind and respectful to everyone regardless of previous encounters — be generous — Not wish for more or better — Think before acting — “He who is not satisfied with what he has will not be satisfied with what he would like to have” — don’t talk shit ever

What else did he do? “Cry? I don’t know,” he said. Eventually, he agreed to go with Dave to Dave’s family’s cabin for the weekend. On the way there, they stopped at a taco truck. Diego said, “Bro, I’m not hungry.” But Dave made him order three tacos anyway and stood there while he ate.

Diego’s parents kept pressing the school to do something, to at least use restorative practices with Diego and the students threatening their peers with social ostracization if they talked to him. Yet on December 2, 2021, the vice-principal sent an email explaining to Diego’s parents that a restorative circle was not going to happen. Those students canceling him, she wrote, “have no personal ill-will toward Diego but that the social pressures on them are so great that to be associated with Diego would cause too much harm for them.” She also said she’d reached out to “their peer groups, teachers, or classes but they believe these interventions would cause more conflict (at least at this point).” So that was that.

The bullying and harassment complaint that Diego’s parents had filed in November was closed on December 17. The outcome letter acknowledged “that the situation” — which in this case referred to Diego’s cancellation — was indeed “both severe and pervasive” and, as such, violated the district’s bullying-and-harassment policy. To remediate this, the letter continued, school officials had counseled the offending “students to stop that behavior.” Yet in a tacit admission that this made no difference, Diego now would be excused to eat lunch early and leave campus early so he could avoid interacting with other students. His teachers would also excuse him from class because they couldn’t stop the bullying.

Over Christmas break, Diego’s sister, two years older, came home from college. The whole family got in the car, as they did every year, to chop down a Christmas tree.

Diego’s sister had made the best of shelter-in-place, which she’d spent in her apartment near school — she pulled through all her STEM courses. She even earned a commercial driver’s license and now worked as a public-bus driver. Diego’s friends used to tell him they were jealous of how close he was to her. Now her politics, according to Diego, involved spending a lot of time on Twitter and, according to her dad, thinking he was a privileged white guy with a beard. He’d taken to saying to her, “Key word: Nuance!”

Diego drove the family car to the Christmas-tree farm. On the way, his sister called him a bad driver. He told her to shut up. She then said, “Abusers deserve to be canceled.” Like virtually all young people in their town, she’d seen the image of her brother’s name on the school-bathroom wall, posted and reposted many times.

Diego: “Bruh, that was a little out of pocket. Get the fuck out.” Sister: “Oh my God, I don’t want you in my life anymore.” Everyone started crying. Their parents kicked her out of the car and told her to find her way home.

New Year’s came. Then February. The experience kept rooting in the dark rut of its own logic. A kid spat on Diego in a stairwell. (It wasn’t clearly caught on security video, so no one took disciplinary action.) Diego’s mother started losing her own friends. (“There are levels of abuse, you know,” they’d tell her. “You don’t know what your son did.”) She started making Diego drive her to work to get him out the door to school. But he often drove to school and just sat in the car. His whole day was working by himself in the library anyway. Why enter the building at all? On occasion, he’d see other boys in the library whose names had been on the wall, and they’d sit together. But mostly he felt invisible.

Race remained a topic almost too toxic for the school to touch. “You are telling us that most of the boys that were accused were Black and brown students, and all of the kids who are canceled are brown or Black, and the white boys were able to walk back on the campus, no problem,” Diego’s mother said to the principal. “And yet you’re not telling these white kids this? That’s called white fragility and being afraid of these girls.”

A reprieve finally came in February, when Diego and Dave traveled to the South on a trip organized through Sojourn Project, a social-justice nonprofit that takes groups of students to places like Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham to learn about the modern civil-rights movement. It felt so good to be in a different place with different kids, tune in to the arc of history, focus on justice with a capital J. They talked a lot about how people use and respond to negative power. Diego described the trip as “one big therapy session.”

The universe snapped back into perspective for a moment. Diego had fucked up and hurt someone; people had ostracized him. That wasn’t the whole world. But the good feelings did not last long. Emboldened from their travels, Dave and Diego posted trip pictures together on Instagram: the two of them goofing off on buses; Dave, smiling, his body held up parallel to the ground by Diego and a pack of kids. This got Dave fully canceled. Within two weeks, he, too, was eating lunch out of his car, thinking about an MLK quote he had learned in the South and half-remembered now: “It was something like, ‘It’s not about what will happen to me if I help this someone,’ ” he said. “ ‘It’s about what happens if I don’t help them.’ ”

“When we’re home,” Dave said, “I feel like we’re in a bubble of hate.”

By this point, the guardians of the social order had changed. “Boys are worse, I’m not going to lie,” Diego said. “Guys just want to feel powerful, and they feel entitled to be mean to other people.” And they really didn’t want the girls to think they stood with abusers.

“My friend Ethan — I mean, my previous friend,” Dave said. “I have three classes with him. And he made it clear. Like, ‘I miss you. It’s just, like, this situation is so dumb, I just can’t hang out with you.’ ”

Dave tried to get his school to help. He approached “the counselor, dean person, I forget what she is, really,” he told me. “She said, ‘Canceling is very new to me, and it’s a very hard thing to deal with.’ ” He asked if she could set up a restorative conversation. “And she said, ‘Well, I can ask, but I can’t force them to do it.’ And so she asked and they said no.”

Reason and control felt like distant concepts. Diego and his sister pretended the fight had never happened the next time she came home, but Jenni was still putting a jacket over her head when she rode in Diego’s car. “I feel bad for putting my reputation before my friend,” she said. “But, ummm …” A boy threatened to beat up Diego while he was visiting Dave at school. Diego’s father thought about going over to this boy’s family’s house because the school district, obviously, was not going to intervene. Everybody was exhausted. Diego’s principal had decided to quit.

The absurdity of the situation caused something in Diego to crack, and that release allowed for new clarity: You’re only canceled if you’re trying to hang out with the people refusing to associate with you. The rest of the world doesn’t know — and probably doesn’t care. Diego and Dave started taking the bus to the beach on Friday nights and talking to anybody who looked their age. “Everyone I met, I was like, ‘By the way, this is what is happening at my school right now,’ ” Diego said. “ ‘It’s better to hear it from me than from some kid: ‘He’s a certified abuser. Oh my God.’ ” But almost no one met his disclosure with much besides sympathy. “They were all like, ‘Don’t worry, bro. You’ll get through it.’ ” Or: “ ‘Your school is wack as hell.’ ”

Let’s just come out and say it: It’s a horrifying time to be a young woman. The world is burning and bleeding out. Adults are not fixing it. Teenage girls are poised to have fewer rights over their own bodies than their mothers had. The sane response — the awake, healthy, non-nihilistic response — is to feel panicked, frantic, hung out to dry, devalued, and unsafe. Who are they supposed to believe is looking out for them: the schools? The courts? Elected officials? Will anything get done to make the world better if they don’t do it themselves? So we can ask, “How is this mob justice possible?,” and leave it there. Or we can ask, “What happened to this cohort to unleash what Northwestern legal scholar Deborah Tuerkheimer described as ‘a primal scream’?” — a scream that conveys in its raw, messy, full-of-collateral-damages way that “we don’t trust our institutions, we’ve been betrayed by our institutions, and so all that’s left for us is to do this.”

The principal at Diego’s school had not just quit her post; she was considering leaving education. “I have a lot of love and empathy for people who are trying to run schools and work in schools right now,” she said. How was anybody supposed to hold teenagers together through this? The mental-health crisis? The country’s convulsions around race and misogyny? The threats to democracy? The school shootings where adults in bulletproof vests stay in the hall while kids whose classmates are dying cower under desks and call 911?

Six weeks before the end of the year, students at Diego’s school taped up posters again: WALKOUT TO GET RAPE CULTURE OUT! THIS ISSUE IS STILL HERE — AND SO ARE WE! At 11:45 a.m. on April 15, 75 kids left their classrooms and gathered in the concrete quad. Diego stayed home from school that day. The principal was on vacation. The tribal, exorcistic energy of the fall walkout had burned off. The agenda included a teach-in on Title IX and how to work through school-district bureaucracy. How can students exercise their rights if they don’t even know what they are?

Yaretzi was clear-eyed about how the year had unfolded. She’d raised awareness and created social cohesion more than she’d fixed anything. “I’m gonna be so honest with you,” she said. “I’m so sick of the walkouts. They are calls to attention, but they aren’t effective when it comes to long-lasting change.” The list on the wall had derailed her efforts for real change too. Nobody wanted their name attached to this admission, because parents had threatened organizers with lawsuits, but students acknowledged that some on the list were falsely accused. The whole thing was a distraction, counterproductive, pulling focus away from the school district’s failings. This is not to say everyone was innocent — they weren’t. Students at Diego’s school were sexually harassed and harmed. Yet this is also true:

Rather than, like, the actual perpetrators, a lot of names put on that list were just random people,” a student told me. Classmates wrote them “out of anger and pure emotion.” This made the act reckless and destructive but not meaningless. “We need to look,” the student said, “at why those emotions are there.”

A few weeks later, Diego decided to attend his prom. He bought a black suit for $79 at H&M, pulled on fancy white sneakers, and took a girl with cupid’s-bow lips who lived in a town 45 minutes away. “It was like a Disney movie,” Diego said. So much buildup, “hella drama.” While there, a student pulled his date aside to tell her that Diego was an assaulter. “We had fun after we left,” he said.

The school hadn’t healed. The vice-principal announced she was quitting too. So was the principal at Dave’s school. Fiona rejected the narrative that Diego was canceled. That made it sound, she thought, like other people had done something to him. Time had caused her view of Diego’s actions to harden, not soften. She didn’t think he deserved to be friendless. “I guess it is harmful when people are jumping on the bandwagon,” she said. But his behavior had really hurt her. In hindsight, maybe he was emotionally abusive? Was it wrong to warn other students to stay away from him?

One morning in May, after sleeping late — because why hurry to get to a class you’re not going to attend? — Diego sat alone in the library in his ripped Carhartts listening to songs he’d written over the past nine months for his final capstone project: a presentation for his teacher “on the emotional roller coaster I went on this year.” He played all the instruments, wrote all the lyrics, sang all the vocal tracks, one song after another about love and regret: “I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you.” “I really shouldn’t have done that / It was asinine of me.” “It’s all my fault.” “My frail heart has crumbled — no one has seen it / Your incandescent glow could help me find all the pieces.”

A girl walked up and said hello. “She’s canceled too,” Diego said. That girl’s boyfriend’s name, he explained, had been on the bathroom wall, and she didn’t break up with him. It later came out that his name had been written entirely by mistake. His accuser meant a different kid with the same first name. But it didn’t matter. The photo spread. The story turned into he kidnapped someone and raped them at gunpoint.

Around lunchtime, another student, this one in braids, overalls, and a black beanie, sat down with Diego. “She’s canceled, too,” he said. At the start of the school year — her sophomore year — she had made a comment to a new Black friend about his “monkey ears.” The remark was dumb, full of implicit racial bias. She caught herself in the moment and apologized. The two discussed it. Then, on the second day of school, her second day in a building with students since the middle of eighth grade, he called her a racist in a crowded hallway. Now, despite all the public and private apologies she had made, all the months of therapy and reading, she was still “that racist kid” and probably would be until she graduated in two years.

“There’s no room for growth,” she said, eating the quesadilla she brought for lunch. “You do something wrong, therefore you’re a bad person.” There was no community that, as part of holding you accountable, made space for you to learn; no presumption that you could — and will — change. Who could survive adolescence like that? “My brain isn’t fully developed,” she said. “None of our brains are fully developed.”

She was stoned all the time now — her way to manage her anxiety and get through the day. “People are trying so hard to, like, be the good person in the situation. They always want to be the bigger person. They want to feel like they’re right.” Some girls recently tried to fight her in the bathroom. “I was just like, ‘You need to calm down, you’re acting like a child, please grow up.’ ” She waved to her ex–best friend in the hall.

All around us, kids were falling asleep on the library couches. Staring. Flirting. Scrolling through TikTok. Being teens. Sometimes, Diego wondered what his peers would think when they were older. “If they’ll look back with their kids and be like, Damn, I was so hateful in high school.”

Diego skipped his own graduation. He attended four proms, and after the last he found some drunk kids from his school waiting on his block, at 1 a.m., just to tell him to fuck off. Soon after, the school emptied for the summer, nothing fixed, the clock run out. In three months, Diego was leaving town to go to college hundreds of miles away. He didn’t know if he’d return.

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