Thoughts on Pride 2024, Halfway In
Date: 6/17/24	Mood: Antsy
Listening To: Chemical Beats by The Chemical Brothers

So this is kind of a follow up to an episode of Around the Long Fire I did a few weeks ago where I talked about watching I Saw the TV Glow and how it made me re-assess my relationship to how I feel about being queer in the world. I highly encourage people to check that episode out, it meant a lot to me to do and I'm going to be picking up where that episode left off talking about this tonight.

Since then I've been continuing on with my life more or less as usual. Certainly feeling emotional catharsis is one of those things that can be difficult to hold onto long term, because no matter what might happen in my inner life on any given day, I still have to get up and go to work in the morning. I've still got laundry to do. This is the numbing inverse of 3 AM disease (when you are convinced at 3 AM that you have to blow up your life right now and you definitely have good ideas about how to accomplish that), where the highs are all sanded down and the resolutions stretched over boring Thursdays where your tummy hurts. It's hard to feel like you're changing and growing under such auspices, but important to remember that we are not actually narrative constructs, and people move glacially due to all the people things we can't just abandon.

My desire to embrace more queer media has run into a sort of gravity trap as I've just been pouring all my time into watching The L Word. It's exactly the sort of bad TV I love, earnest characters doing cartoonishly overwrought plots with often minimal actual stakes in favor of just the vibes of melodrama and comedy pushing things along. I'm midway into season 4, the gang recently formed a basketball team to show the young cool street lesbians they weren't bougie. It didn't work. Helena's accidentally fallen into a kakegurui gambling madness life debt thing. iykyk. Just a sense of where I'm at.

Going back and watching older shows is always a bit of a crapshoot, especially when they aren't for any sort of project. Nobody especially cares about The L Word in 2024. Most of my friends haven't seen it. The two that have, Dia and Destiny, both watched it back in the day as it aired and are eating up my reactions to it twenty years later where I just clutch my head and yell 'WHO WOULD EVER CONCEIVE OF JENNY IS A GOOD PROTAGONIST?' knowing the answer is of course Ilene Chaiken, who has to consinder Jenny an avatar of all the things she wished she could get away with at this point. Many of those things one should not desire to get away with. It's deranged.

But it does mean I'm mostly pouring my enthusiasm for this old thing into the ether, which is fine but I'm used to getting more instant feedback and positive reinforcement on projects I do. I don't think that's inherently better, and in fact am trying to work through feeling discouraged at all because I think the opposite, but lacking that it does end up feeling a little lonely being into a thing by myself during this moment.

It's made a little more complicated by the reality that a show like The L Word used to be very important, and is no longer especially important, and in fact in the intervening two decades has somewhat faded into obscurity in a media culture where (on its best days) things being about gay characters simply isn't enough to drive an object anymore. I think The L Word has more to recommend it than that, but on the face of it it's the groundbreaking but now creaky lesbian ensemble comedy. It's got a lot of really bad things in it, it's got a lot of dated things in it, it's full of middle aged actresses that were marginally relevant in the 00s and are even more marginal now. I get why the kids aren't watching The L Word these days.

But I also think there's value in the messy things that were there at the time as objects. Even and especially because of their eventual irrelevance in the present. I think it's important to remember that culture is both constantly moving around us, and that many of the arguments we find ourselves surrounded by and embroiled in in the world are not new but instead cycle through the world over and over. And I'm not just talking about the goldfish memory of twitter, but the reality of spaces pre-social media, where these things were happening just at potentially slower speeds. It's both refreshing and depressing to see how many things haven't changed fundamentally, but also how less normalized the really outlandish stuff in this show has become since. But not everything, some things honestly just got repainted and are still loitering around being the same problems. And that's also worth recognizing, when we exchange one problematic facet of culture for the same one under a different name.

Which isn't to say that I'm watching The L Word entirely in a curiosity-driven historian sort of way. That would be dis-ingenous (though certainly someone could do that). It's a show that used to mean a lot to people in my life who are important to me, and also it's very easy to sit down and watch four episodes a night of, because it's funny and most of the cast is extremely likeable. That's really the secret of good TV, they're people you can hang out with at length without actually expending the effort of socializing. Perfect, imo.

But it does mean I feel a little like I've been negligent and unserious about my desire to explore more things. I finished reading Stone Butch Blues and then went right back to reading my normal book diet (reading Solaris right now). It's not a problem, and in reality it's only been like three weeks and I should get over myself, but I do feel a little unfocused. But at the same time, I shouldn't turn every aspect of my life into some sort of project, and if I want to spend my nights just settling in with a cozy TV show there's nothing wrong with that. And I do believe that, but I also feel a little frivolous and indulgent about it.

This is a me problem, I recognize that. I can explore more serious works any time I want, and it's not like unserious work isn't without merit. But I just find myself feeling a little guilty about how I spend my time, is all. And I shouldn't. I truly should not. I work, both a full time job and a second job doing all my podcast work, and I've been going through a period of bad health where my energy overall is pretty low. So I have every reason in the world to not beat myself up over this expectation nobody but me is placing on myself (and that I couldn't clearly define if I wanted to).

I don't have a greater point or conclusion. I just wanted to get my thoughts out for my sake. I hope when I finish Solaris, and then finish the Eragon book I have to read for podcast deadline, I find a nice queer book of significance if I want to and enjoy it greatly. I hope I can go back to watching Important, Relevant Films about these subjects when I want to. But also if I don't it's fine. I can continue to poopsock The L Word until I'm out of show and then maybe watching the modern comeback Generation Q and just overeat all the Halloween candy until I feel sick of it. Nobody is holding me to account for any of this, other than myself. And even I know it's stupid.

Unfortunately, intellectually knowing a thing does not make it emotionally true, and I still feel guilty for just happily enjoying a culturally insignificant, oft-derided thing with the scant free time I have when I could be living up to all my big talk. This is fake! Nobody cares! I don't even actually care! But sometimes you just can't let go of your own projected misery. I simply have to be hard on myself for ???? reasons.

It's stupid. Maybe I'll change my habits in the last two weeks of June. Maybe I won't. It doesn't matter because I will have the weeks beyond it, and all the other years of my life, and also there's no deadline and none of this matters. I just am working out the other side of suddenly caring about a thing I haven't cared about before, where you start to attach expectations and desires onto it. Caring too much about doing anything 'the right way' has never brought happiness to anyone.

No conclusion. Change is slow, revelation rarely happens, and I've still gotta go to work tomorrow.