something queer going on

I have, for the first time since the pandemic started, successfully Watched A Show.

It was Our Flag Means Death, a comedy (more or less) about pirates (more or less), based (more or less) on a real historical figure, Stede Bonnet, known as the Gentleman Pirate because he was a member of the landed gentry who took to sea for reasons unknown. Fair warning, though: this is not a show that cares about historical accuracy, and it deliberately plays with anachronism in some ways, especially costuming.

At first I wasn't sure I was going to like it, because some of the comedy hit my embarrassment squick a lot. But the show quickly did two things I love: it developed all the characters and made them human even when they're ridiculous, and it was gentle. Things I initially feared were going to be laughed at cruelly (e.g. one very obviously gay supporting character, or Stede getting his crew to sew) were laughed at kindly instead, and valued in a clear and amazing way. Meanwhile, the show turns a much steelier eye on toxic masculinity and all the damage it does.

It's also a very queer show, with onscreen queer relationships. There's a nonbinary character, played by a nonbinary actor. There are a lot of characters (and actors) of color. The pirate setting means there aren't a huge number of women characters, but the women who do appear, very much have their own stories and their own agency.

There is a fair amount of violence, not super graphic, some of it comedic and some not. But if, like me, you bounced hard off of Black Sails because of its brutality, this may be the queer pirate show for you. (And if you liked Black Sails, it may be another queer pirate show for you!)

Also one of the stars is Taika Waititi and he is amazing. And beautiful.

Our Flag Means Death can be seen on HBO Max in the US, and is also available through more swashbuckling methods.

Now I'm going to start re-watching it.

1) Updating my stupid profile on stupid LinkedIn counts as job searching, right?

2) It is rumored that at my current job, there will be extra hours next week so that we can catch up from how behind we got due to so many hours being cut this week. *headdesk* (It has to do with the end of the fiscal year, apparently.)

3) I'm trying to generally unfuck my life. This includes a new approach to cleaning. I hate having a dirty apartment, but I also hate cleaning. So I'm trying a daily 10-minute clean. My place is small enough that if I do this most days, it should stay in reasonable shape. And somehow it's easier to cope with "I just have to clean something, anything, for 10 minutes, and today I'll spend that time working on the bathroom" rather than, "Oh, god, I have to clean the bathroom, there's my day ruined."

4) Have accomplished filing my taxes (the first time in years that I'm not doing them a week or less before the deadline) and switching to a cheaper auto insurance company.

5) I have to work tomorrow. Only a very short shift, and I need the hours, and I didn't work Tuesday or Wednesday. I am nevertheless annoyed, mostly because the store will be ridiculously busy and there will only be two of us there. And the other person will be the store manager, who is bloody useless most of the time and will undoubtedly get on my case about something that isn't my fault.

Oh, here's one thing that's not boring!!!

6) The BBC has started releasing old episodes of Round the Horne on the iPlayer, so anybody anywhere can listen to them for free. Once an episode is released you have a month to listen to it before it goes away again; right now it's still on the early episodes of S1.

Round the Horne gave the world Julian and Sandy, awesome fictional gay men played by awesome real gay men, and so it's worth listening just for them, but I love (almost) the whole show. However, there are sometimes the -isms you would expect from something made in the 1960s, so be prepared.

ETA: Now with paragraphing fixed, because apparently I have to do that by hand now. Still waiting to hear back from Support about WTF is up with that.

17. A song that you would sing as a duet on karaoke

I don't sing in public. But if I did, I might pick this song, preferably with two accomplices rather than one. (What's the word for a three-person song? Anyway, in the case of this song, "threesome" is probably as good a term as any.)

Mitch Ryder got famous doing blue-eyed soul in the 60s, then nearly tanked his solo career in 1979 when he released How I Spent My Vacation, which is mostly about his sexual and romantic relationships with other men.* He continued to release music but as far as I know it sold very badly. In 1983, he made a "comeback" album, Never Kick A Sleeping Dog, produced by John Mellencamp, which includes this song.

*A lot of Ryder's music is not really my cup of tea. He first appealed to me because of the queer element, which I learned about around the time NKASD was released; astonishingly, within a couple of months I found a vinyl copy of HISMV in a secondhand store in the very small town where my family did its shopping** and listened to it over and over again on the sly. I only loved it for its queerness, but that was enough.*** I do genuinely like much of Never Kick A Sleeping Dog, though, and especially the following.

Mitch Ryder with Marianne Faithfull and John Mellencamp, "A Thrill's A Thrill"





**We didn't live in a town. We lived in the country about 40 miles away and only came to town for shopping and other necessary things.

***A queer element was how I discovered a lot of music as a teenager. The Smiths, for example, and David Bowie (like a lot of queer boys I wanted to be Ziggy Stardust; I just happened to want it a decade too late) and the Jam (via Paul Weller's later project the Style Council and the swirling rumors, all too vehemently denied by Weller, that he and bandmate Mick Talbot were a couple).

Speaking of the Style Council, ( this ended up getting long and not fun, so it's under a cut )

I'm quickly dashing in to say hello--my internet's out again and I'm using a free 1-hour trial from a wifi service.

1) Reading

As I mentioned, I bought myself Melissa Scott's Fairs' Point and Melissa Scott and Amy Griswold's Death at the Dionysus Club as a Christmas present. I've already talked about how much I enjoyed Fairs' Point. I also liked Dionysus very much, but not quite as much as Death by Silver. The plot of Dionysus works better, I think, and the worldbuilding feels more integrated, but the characterization and especially the relationship between Ned and Julian felt like it went over the same ground as the previous book. They had the same anxieties and misunderstandings, and despite the resolution of the last book, there wasn't much of a sense through most of this one of them having grown closer or learned to trust each other more. I realize that these things are a process, and in real life people/couples often do rehash the same issues again and again, but it still felt too same-y to me.

I also read Ben Aaronovitch's Foxglove Summer, the latest River of London book, and was sadly disappointed. It seemed to have about half a novel's worth of story (the resolution in particular was too easy and too pasted-on), and taking Peter out of London just wasn't a great idea, since part of the joy of the series is its vivid sense of place and history, and Peter doesn't have that same connection with the countryside, nor did Aaronovitch do anything all that interesting with Peter as an outsider. Also, not enough Nightingale. Not enough Nightingale by far. The one thing I really did like was that the book featured a gay man in a prominent supporting role, and Peter treated him in a collegial and friendly way without any of the nervous distancing he's shown towards queer people in the past. I don't know whether to credit Peter or Aaronovitch or both, but either way I was glad to see it.

After finishing Foxglove Summer I re-read the earlier books and enjoyed them very much, despite some irritating inconsistencies that become more noticeable when you read the books back to back. ( More on this, also on Nightingale and Peter/Nightingale )


3) Cooking

Since I had a lot of ham left over from Christmas, I have been doing Things With Ham. Besides lots of ham sandwiches, I've also cooked red beans and rice with the ham bone, and a potato, corn, and ham chowder. In both of these, besides the ham itself I used some of the juice from cooking the ham (with the considerable layer of fat removed). These juices are super super salty, but used in reasonable quantities in a large pot of beans or soup, incredibly delicious.

I haven't been doing much other cooking. We were still really busy at work until a few days ago, plus there are all the various Christmas leftovers. I'm still nibbling away at the fruitcake I baked, and also at a delicious cranberry cake that a customer at work gave me. When I see her again (assuming I can remember what she looks like, because I'm terrible at faces) I want to ask for the recipe. Though it seems to be a pretty basic pound cake with cranberries added. Yum.


4) Movies

Still haven't seen The Imitation Game. I'm hearing less than great things about it: that it fictionalizes too much and that it downplays Turing's gayness. I welcome comments from people who've seen it. One to see in the theater or should I wait for the DVD?


ETA 5) Awesomeness

I desperately want to read the story attached to this gorgeous illustration, but alas the link at the bottom of the Tumblr post I've linked to doesn't go to the story. It does, however, go to a website called "Vintage Homoerotic Illustrations," which is relevant to my interests and perhaps to yours. Warning: some of the "illustrations" are porn stills, but some of them are genuine old illustrations that fill me with delight.

Today I treated myself to a movie and saw Pride, which I loved. It's the semi-fictionalized story of a group of gay and lesbian activists who worked in support of the striking miners in 1984-85 (and it's much, much more fun than that description makes it sound). If you've seen The Full Monty or Brassed Off you'll be familiar with a lot of the tropes, but really, "a group of disparate people work together against oppression and become friends in the process" is the kind of trope I can get behind. Plus, the movie refreshingly focuses on friendship and solidarity, and while there are established couples in the story, there's no central romance. (Though I did find myself rather shamefacedly shipping Mark/Dai.)

Other good points: 1) The story includes a fat woman whose weight is not in any way ever at all an issue. Isn't even mentioned, while her intelligence and courage are very important to the story. 2) The story is unabashedly political and doesn't feel any need to present the government and corporations' view. 3) It doesn't avoid difficult topics, like the increasing tension between lesbian and gay male activists or the growing AIDS epidemic, but these things never overwhelm the main story.

Also the performances are very strong. I especially like Andrew Scott as Gethin, Imelda Staunton as Hefina, and Paddy Considine as Dai. Dominic West nearly steals the show as Gethin's boyfriend Jonathan, and for once I actually liked Bill Nighy as Cliff.

I hope lots and lots of people will see this and start writing fanfic.

It seems today is going to be the day when I post enough to make up for the almost two weeks since I last posted.

So. This photo of Cary Grant lighting Randolph Scott's cigarette with his own (on the beach, in the twilight) may be the most romantic image I have ever seen.

( click here to see )

And this was a publicity photo! Arranged and paid for by the studio, which wanted to emphasize the supposedly un-Hollywood-like quiet domesticity of Grant and Scott's lives as housemates. It's got to be the definition of "hiding in plain sight," and I imagine the studio just wanted to deflect the suspiciousness of two wealthy, successful movie stars choosing to live together. Still, I'm not sure the message these photos actually send--which is pretty much "we're in love!"--is quite the one the studio intended.

At long last, a post from me that is not about moving or computer problems. Instead, it's full of nice things!

Let's start with nice things to eat and drink. It's summer in my neck of the woods, and since the new apartment gets a lot warmer than the old one, I've been disinclined to cook elaborate foods. For me this lets out a lot of Indian cookery (although I know that most Indian food is cooked and eaten in India, where I hear it often gets warmish) and I find my cooking is sort of wandering across Asia depending on my mood, the temperature, the amount of time I have, etc.

Let's start with two cucumber salads, one south Indian and one Vietnamese-ish.

( cucumber salads )

Now, how about a nice, easy dinner?

( Stir-fried noodles with beef, ginger, and scallions )

And now, let's have a drink!

( World's best limeade, vodka optional )

And finally, a musical dessert: Kay, Why?, by the Brothers Butch. Recorded in 1967 by a duo reminiscent of Julian and Sandy, this is a glorious string of double-entendres. Ignore the irrelevant (Laurel and Hardy?) video. A little more information, including the must-see sleeve of the single, can be found here. The Queer Noises album, which I was fortunate enough to find a secondhand copy of, has lots of awesome music on it, not least "Florence of Arabia," which is politically sketchy in about eight ways but also delightful. Alas, I can't find the right version on YT, just different songs with the same title.

I've been reading bits and bobs from The Weird, the newest anthology edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. It's huge and full of cool stuff, and through it I've discovered a couple of queer genre writers I didn't know about: Algernon Blackwood and Hugh Walpole.

Blackwood is difficult to read, because ( he will never use one word when twenty will do )

( Walpole is a more congenial writer )

In non-fiction, I'm enjoying David Kynaston's enormous tomes of social history Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 and Family Britain, 1951-1957. They're anecdotal as hell and organized by no recognizable principle, but wonderful for someone who, say, is trying to write Colditz fanfic set just after the end of the war.

This may be the best and gayest thing I have ever seen in my life: a newsreel clip of a British men's fashion show from 1951. It was connected to the Festival of Britain, which was meant to showcase a bright postwar Britain moving forward. Clothing rationing had ended just two years earlier; perhaps a lingering thrifty impulse explains the shortness of the shorts?

I have a cold and feel icky. But this, from the November 10 2008 episode of Good News Week, cheered me up immensely:

( click to read )