stir-up Wednesday

Well, once again, the surest way to bring back my internet connection is to tell you all that it's gone. After four or five days without, I can once again talk to you people who live in the box!

Today I have a day off and am baking. Right now it's bagels, later on it'll be my Christmas fruitcake, which was delicious the last time I made it, two Christmases ago already. I'm fiddling with the recipe a bit by using about 850 grams of fruit and 50 grams of chopped candied ginger (thus omitting the peel and glacé cherries, which I don't like). I'm also planning to bake it in a 9x5 loaf pan, which has nearly the same area as the deep 20 centimer round pan I don't possess. I'll make fruitcake muffins out of any excess batter.

Also today I'm going to cook some veggies into forms that can be kept in the fridge to eat over the next few days (green beans in mustard vinaigrette and, um, something involving cabbage that I haven't figured out yet). And I need to do my laundry. And I really really need to work on editing my Yuletide fic.

My life: it's one thrill after another.

December meme: queer subtext and queer text

lilacsigil asked me to talk about finding queer subtext and queer text and what each one means to me. I'm going to focus on male/male subtext and text because that's what I'm into.

For me it all started, literally, with subtext. When I was a younker and beginning to be interested in stories about men together, there wasn't much actual queer text to be found. The rare ones that existed were mostly biographies; I was probably the only ninth grader in history who went around reading a biography of Tennessee Williams. And it was actually some discussion in a Beatles biography of Brian Epstein's homosexuality that made me consciously realize that I was drawn to the idea of men having sex with men and/or loving men. But I'd been unconsciously drawn long before that, in everything from buddy shows to war stories. My first ship, unaware though I was, was probably Snoopy and the Red Baron. *facepalm*

In fiction in those long-ago days of the early 1980s, even when queerness was text it was usually subtext. ( more under the cut )