Past Week Today For May 18 - 24
Some Grumbling, Some Ruminating, Some Snickering, Some Nerding, Some SQUIRREL!
Welcome to Sitting Queerly’s Past Week Today, a roundup of interesting things shared with me or found on the Internet and Substack in the past week, alongside some commentary.
That Was Fine But Next Time More Real!
There’s been buzz in some of my circles of bi/queer support around a video posted to YouTube about two weeks ago titled “How To Deal With A Bisexual Partner.” While there were (fair) criticisms about the wording of that title (bi/queer folk are not a problem to “deal” with) and the subtext of some of the illustrations (disapproving looks of a female character toward a clearly bi/queer male character, etc.), most of the folks in those groups have praised it for its messaging and potential to help non-queer folk understand and work with their bi/queer spouses.
I decided to finally take a look at it and see what all the fuss was about. And honestly, I’m not impressed.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not problematic or asserting things that are blatantly untrue or incorrect. It calls for empathy, communication, transparency and many of the other things that are necessary for a mixed-orientation marriage (MOM) to thrive. It rightly and ambiguously notes that while bi/queer folk are not necessarily promiscuous or non-monogamous, it’s careful to not eliminate the possibility that polyamory or an open marriage may be a valid need of a bi/queer partner. The music is calming if unremarkable.
The video as a whole just comes off as so…clinical. The narrator, if they are human, sounds like an AI bot. The captions lack pacing. The illustrations are bright and colorful although seem to present a pretty whitewashed bi/queer populace. The YouTube channel itself isn’t that old (less than a month) and has fewer than a dozen videos, most of them with fewer than 50 views (The bisexual video is the only major exception, having reached nearly 300 views), which raises a red flag about motives.
Perhaps I’m being overly critical. Any content that seeks to normalize the reality of bisexuality is better than nothing. And I need to be mindful that this video wasn’t created for me or others like me, but for our spouses, many of whom are dealing with anxiety, anger, fear and a gamut of other strong emotions. I can see how something like this video could draw them in and help them begin to process and realize the world isn’t ending.
But there needs to be more real people doing this outreach rather than canned talking points spoken in a monotone voice. One of the things I struggled with when first beginning to accept my queerness was finding resources that spoke genuinely and authentically, as well as informatively, to my experience. Eventually, I found that authenticity but it took a lot of digging through generic, pedantic and uninspired “affirming” content like this video.
We can do better, y’all.
The Depressing Realness Of Being A Man (Whatever That Means)
Folks at The Point this past winter asked hundreds of people—men, women, non-binary, trans and every gender inbetween—what they think about men and masculinity. There were five questions:
What, if any, is your most “masculine” trait?
How did you learn what it meant to be a man?
What would you say is the biggest challenge or hurdle that men face today?
Is there anything you think only men can understand?
What are men for?
They only shared the answers of nine respondents, which is far from a representative sampling. And yet, I was struck by the uniformity in those responses—stating their most “masculine” trait in a negative framing, how most learned about being a man from observing loved ones and yet still not learning what it actually meant, and how few people understand how truly lost men are.
On the one hand, it’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one who has had that same view and experience with manhood. But it’s also sobering realizing that so few of us really know what we’re supposed to do while being expected to know all the answers.
I did, however, laugh out loud at one response from college student Nate:
What are men to blame for?
Golf. Which is unforgivable.
How Anti-Abortionists And The Supreme Court May Have Unintentionally Thrown Qualified Immunity For Law Enforcement Under The Bus
Judd Legum shared this past week that a federal judge in Mississippi recently threw out a motion to dismiss a lawsuit against a police detective accused of depriving a man of their constitutional rights when they used a false accusation from another to charge and incarcerate the plaintiff for a crime they didn’t commit. Already, such a thing is remarkable, given the propensity for courts to side with law enforcement because of the “qualified immunity” precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 when it drastically reinterpreted a law aimed at penalizing Klan members using their position to deprive Black folk of their rights after the Civil War.
But Judge Carleton Reeves’ decision is a nesting doll of determinations that dismantles the application of qualified immunity over the past 60 years when it comes to rights-violating law enforcement officials. Not only did he rule the detective wasn’t eligible for qualified immunity because they violated the law, but that qualified immunity itself is ”unsupportable as a matter of history, text, and policy and the Supreme Court needs to rectify it. And that rectification is especially necessary since the Court’s overturning of abortion rights in its Dobbs decision back in 2022 shows that long-standing legal precedents are now open for reassessment.
I’m not saying I’m glad that abortion rights are gone so we can potentially rectify the egregious miscarriage of justice that has resulted from “qualified immunity.” I am always glad to see when the fucking around by intrusive social conservatives leads to some finding out for one of their key constituencies.
Today In Analog Obsessions…FONTS!
As someone who has spent his entire life writing and reading and writing and reading, much of it while working around printing presses, I have opinions on fonts.
I’m not talking obvious opinions, like Papyrus sucks (because obvs). I’m a bit of a traditionalist, preferring some of the older and similarly-inspired styles with serif or not. And while I’m a fan of calligraphy, I don’t have the patience for it myself and it can be a little overwhelming in anything but small doses.
Really, I just like simple, elegant and clean strokes and lines. Easy on the eyes while still creating an aesthetically pleasing page of type.
That’s why this story of a “mudlark” finding just a handful of the 500,000 pieces of lead type of the Arts and Crafts era Doves font in the Thames is fascinating. The guy was already working to reassemble the font digitally from extant documents but original source material is always best. And the story behind why all that type ended up in the river—a tale diverging interests in art and commerce—is interesting in its own right.