Dear Reader,
I have spent the last week processing a swell of primal rage over a comment tweeted by some right-wing asshat. This asshat was described as a business person who lost his recent campaign for public office, but I’ve forgotten his name and I’m not going to go looking for it because he doesn’t deserve the clicks. His tweet was something like, “People who support gender-affirming care for trans kids should be lined up against the wall and shot.” I probably am misquoting the first half of that sentence, but I pretty vividly recall the “lined up against the wall and shot” part.
This makes me feel a lot of things.
The first, easiest, most obvious knee-jerk thing is that I want this guy to die in a fire. Because fuck this guy, and fuck his gestapo ideology, and fuck his failed political campaign and all his future business endeavors.
But apart from that.
People sometimes use this sort of phrasing as if it’s purely rhetorical. Like, people who put mustard on french fries should be taken out and shot, hardy har har. But in fact, repeatedly throughout history, people actually have been lined up against walls and shot, or macheted or gassed or lynched or otherwise murdered, for their political beliefs, or for who they are, or who they love, or what they look like, or how they worship. Those are the primary reasons throughout history for lining people up against the wall to shoot them.
I can’t really write anything sensible about this. I keep chasing it around in the same circle, but this isn’t a dialogue. This is me reacting to someone scribbling swastikas on a street corner.
It does inspire me, though, to dig in and figure out what else I can do: to be a better trans ally, to support queer representation in books and other media, to be a more active and more useful advocate for issues important to the queer community.
Years ago I read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin, and this bit stuck in my mind like sand in an oyster (boldface mine):
To oppose something is to maintain it. They say here “all roads lead to Mishnory.” To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.
I don’t want to get into the business of exchanging violence for violence. If it comes down to lining people up against the wall, I know which side of the guns I want to be on, and it is never going to be the trigger side, and it doesn’t matter who is up against the wall. And I don’t want it to come to that, for any of us. History has shown us what that road looks like. I would rather find a way to go somewhere else, toward a better goal, down a different road.
Here’s the poem that I wrote earlier this week, as I was thinking about all of this:
Love wins.
Love wins because you can't stop itYou can't stomp it outBecause love persistsLove finds love, attracts love, makes loveLove wins because love has gravityThe arc of the universe bends toward itLove wins because I say soAnd if you strike me to shut me upI'll turn my other cheek and say it againAnd if you cut out my tongue, I'll sign itAnd if you take my hands, I'll dance itAnd if you take this body, my ghost will shout itBecause love winsLove wins
So, I don’t really have a good segue from there to talk about books, except maybe that “love wins” definitely describes my taste in books, and also the one I want to talk about takes me back to the goofy nerd kid I was with an almost wrenching nostalgia. Or perhaps it reconciled me with the goofy nerd adult that I am.
Looking for Groupby Alexis Hall is the story of a university student who falls for someone online who he thinks is a girl, who turns out to be a boy, and it turns out not to matter because he still really likes him. And the thing is, while I’ve never properly gotten into online gaming myself and have no direct MMO experience, I did spend a fair amount of time in close company with gamers. I also like to think that what my geekitude lacks in depth is made up in breadth, and also over the years I have spent probably an ungodly amount of time online. So in a very unexpected way, this book felt like sinking into a warm bath of pure homecoming.
We meet the characters online, through the guild application and chat dialogue where they first encounter each other, and then in their first, um, dungeon raid thingie. There’s a lot of gaming vocabulary which I didn’t especially stumble over reading, but which I’d be hard pressed to use back correctly in a sentence; there’s also a glossary at the back for the reader’s reference. I actually really profoundly enjoyed this aspect of the book. I also like the way that chat dialogue was represented, simulating the format of chat in a game, including the manner in which conversations can cut through each other depending on who’s talking to whom. Likewise, some of the action in the book takes place in the online world of the game that the characters are playing together, and some takes place in the real world, and I loved the mix, which of course is all taking place in the virtual space of the book itself.
This isn’t a super sexy book insofar as it’s all closed door, apart from some kissing. But it is absolutely breathlessly sexy in the way that it evokes being young and in a world shimmering with potential. (And the kissing is really lovely too.)
Particularly if you have any background with gaming or game development, or if you went through a phase of heavy chat usage or are otherwise steeped in game culture by osmosis—or if you don’t have a background in any of those things, but you are willing to bring your adaptable brain to pick it up as you go—then I highly, highly recommend this book.
One last note, I’ve been keeping up a twice-weekly cadence since I started this newsletter, but I’m finding that now I’m spending so much time thinking about what I’m going to write that it has started to take me away from actually reading. So I’m going to try dialing back my love letters to weekly, and maybe I’ll have some other silly art for you as well.
Take care.
Love,
Beas
