me, thinking about Uea and King getting engaged and getting married the following year and loving each other until the end of time and living long lives together with a very healthy sex life and supportive friends/found family:
Me, remembering Thailand doesn’t have gay marriage equality:
no because listen to me. the outbreak happened in 2003. gay marriage was illegal. it never became legal. bill definitely lived his entire life before the outbreak trying to suppress this part of himself that the society he lived in deemed gross and immoral. it’s also definitely possible with the type of man bill is that he never would have come to terms with that part of himself under ordinary circumstances. but here he is in an apocalypse, falling in love with who he wants the way he wants because NOBODY can tell him not to anymore. you think he ever sat back and thought, hey, the world has gone to shit, but at least i can love who i want without it being harder than any other kind of love. the world is literally falling apart, but he’s living this life he may have never gotten to live and experiencing the best moments of his life because nobody is around to spread that hate. there’s no laws or norms anymore that keep them from being exactly who they want. it’s beautiful and it’s heartbreaking and im a wreck but man it’s so, so beautiful.
Saw someone on twitter say how this scene looked like Wade was introducing his boyfriend to his mom for the first time, and I want to say, what do mean “looked like.” This was Wade introducing his boyfriend to his mom.
helle: hey. i made you this bracelet
signe: oh... thank you, it's pretty
helle: you don't have to wear it if you don't wanna
signe: no i'm going to wear it forever. fuck off
Yall wanna hear a kinda funny, kinda sad story about my grandmother and hetero-normativity?
Ok, so... when my grandmother was in her 50s (I was an infant), she met a woman at the Unitarian Church. And, as can happen when you meet your soul mate, this event made it impossible for her to deny parts of herself that she had fiercely hidden her whole life.
All the drama- their affair being found out, the divorce with my grandfather, the court battle over who got the house, happened while I was a baby. Even in my earliest memories, it's just Mama Jo and Oma, and my grandfather lived elsewhere (first his own apartment, then a nursing home, then with us.)
But here's the thing- no one ever explained any of this to me. No one ever sat down and was like "hey, Rosie, so do you know what a lesbian is?" It was the 90s. It was Texas. I think my mom was still kinda processing all this, and just assumed that like... I was gonna figure it out. Don't mention it, let it just be normal. Like I think my mom thought that if she explained the situation, she would be making it weird? I dunno.
But like. In the 90s, in all the movies I had seen and books I had read, do you know how many same sex couples I had seen? Like. 0. Do you know how many "platonic best friend/roommates" I had seen? A lot. I had no context, is what I'm saying.
I literally thought this was a Golden Girls, roommates, besties situation until I was like...I dunno, 11? 12?
It was actually their parrot, an African Grey named Spike, imitating my grandmothers voice saying "Johanna, honey, it's getting late", that triggered the MIND BLOWN moment as I realized that *there's only one master bedroom and it only has 1 waterbed* when all the pieces finally clicked.
Anyway. I think it's a real important thing for kids to know queer people exist, for a lot of reasons, but also because kids can be clueless and it's embarrassing to have your grandmother be outted by a parrot because everyone just thought you'd figure it out on your own.
Anyway, here is my grandma and her wife, my Oma, after they moved to Albuquerque to be artsy gay cowboys and live their best life. They helped run a "Lesbian Dude Ranch" out there (basically just with funding and financial support. As Oma has explained "traditionally, most lesbians don't have a lot of money" so they wrote the checks and let the younger ladies actually run the ranch.)