Hello friends, and welcome to the first Gay Buffet I've finished before Tuesday night! I always think I'll get ahead, and this is the first time it's actually happened. A little shake-up this week: I flipped the order of musing and relationships this week because I got a little too Aidan-centric in my answer, so I decided to turn it into a musing instead. But it's helpful to read the relationship section first. So read on ahead for:
Austin's Nonprofit
Austin Activist Dennis Paddie
Love Lies Bleeding
How to Deal with Friends Who Dislike Your Partner
Why Getting Hurt isn't Always a Bad Thing
QWell is a community-building organization in Austin. The organization began as a series of "conversations about why Austin, with the nation's third-largest LGBTQIA+ population per capita, had no community center connecting residents with each other and the affirming resources they need." As they started doing the research needed to solve this issue, the founders learned that more needed to be done than just a community center.
So, they began building the missing community components that they wanted. They:
Made a database of LGBTQ-friendly businesses in each neighborhood.
Launched a competition to help design a pop-up LGBTQ center
Made sure that the county's safety-net health programs were LGBTQ-inclusive and competent.
Secured up to $500,000 in funding over five years for LGBTQ mental health care
Developed new digital tools to help LGBTQ folx access all this information without having to leave their homes.
What really strikes me about this org is how deeply they go to connect and build communtiy here in Austin. Their mission is to engage, connect, and support, and I think that it is crucial to not just have a community center to go to but also to effectively build the community they want to support. They are also planning to build multiple community outposts rather than one singular center in order to make sure there are no geographical barriers to serving the community.
QWell is aiming to build these centers and their community through recurring donations, so if you can, $5 a month would be a huge help. Recurring donations help organizations plan for the future because they know how much money will be coming in!
Okay, I started doing my research for this and was committed to writing my own take about the history of Austin, but then I found the story of Dennis Paddie. I was all ready to reinterpret it into my own words, but I really think it's not quite as effective as hearing these historical accounts firsthand, so please enjoy this passage from the horse's mouth.
"When I was growing up, the word 'gay' didn't really exist as a descriptor for homosexuals. Even though I knew I was different, there was no context to put my feelings in. I joined the Peace Corps when I was in college and went to India. When I was in India, I had a crisis, and I realized I had to do something about my sexuality. I decided to fly to New Delhi to see a shrink. I had a condition called amnesia. It's in the Freudian lexicon. It had to do with my closeted sexuality. I was sexually frustrated and stunted.
I resigned from the Peace Corps, flew back to Washington D.C., and then to where I grew up in Arkansas. When I went back to Austin again in 1965, I became friends with radicals at the college, even though I wasn't yet politically active myself.
Around this time, I became aware of a group called the Liberation News Service. Through the Liberation News Service and The Village Voice, I heard about Stonewall. From 1969 on, I became a semi-public figure and was completely radicalized. In the Summer of 1970, we learned about the first Pride March in New York City. Up until that point, homosexuals tried to stay out of the light, but now, finally, they were out in the streets. It was intersectionality before that word existed. We were involved in the civil rights and women's movements and started an Austin chapter of the Gay Liberation Front. Austin was a liberal pocket in the South, and we were semi-embraced.
We performed numerous actions to get our point across. One of the early ones was about sexual health. There was a massive outbreak of gonorrhea, and Austin and the Department of Public Health wouldn't treat gay people. We staged a protest at the local hospital because we wanted the same access to healthcare that heterosexuals were afforded. We also protested the housing organizations because they could deny rentals to homosexuals.
In mid-1970, we prepared to host the first Gay Liberation Front conference in the upcoming spring of 1971. We wanted to bring members of the Gay Liberation Fronts across the country together. Our target audience was radicals who wanted to advance civil rights.
We mainly did this to put ourselves on the radical and cultural map. There were about 250 people who attended our conference, and it was very well organized. We had meetings in the morning and in the afternoon. We discussed feminism, the anti-war movement, and how we could fight for civil rights. It was more than just our rights. We wanted to help Blacks, Hispanics, women, and every minority."
On one of my rare visits to an actual movie theatre earlier this month I saw the new film Love Lies Bleeding. I remembered watching the trailer a while back, and within its two minutes, going from "this doesn't look like something I'd like" to "holy shit, this looks incredible and right up my alley." Obviously, a main factor in that was that it's about two women falling in love, but beyond that, its highly stylized nature and soundtrack got me mega intrigued. And let me tell you, I was not disappointed in the slightest.
The plot follows Jackie (an incredible Katy O'Brian), an aspiring bodybuilder, as she rolls into a town in rural New Mexico in 1989. Each shot oozes sex and sweat in a way that fully embraces the muscle craze of the late 80s. Jackie is on her way to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas when she meets Lou (Kristen Stewart), who is managing a gym where she works out. The two begin a heated love affair that gets complicated by additional characters: Lou's father (Ed Harris), brother-in-law, meth-addicted Ex, and a few federal agents thrown in for good measure. It definitely is not for the faint of heart; some of the violence is brutal (but never gratuitous), but it fits the aesthetic of the story and tone perfectly. It is gritty and campy and just beautifully constructed. As a strange compliment, the sound design took my breath away, and I'd never noticed sound design that way before. So, if you're in the mood for a rollicking, bloody, muscular trip back to the 80s, give it a watch!
Dear gb: I preface this by saying 'friends always know': What can I do if my friends do not like the person I'm seeing? Do I listen to my friends who know me best, or do I continue seeing the person regardless of how my friends feel?
Dear friend, What a pickle you've found yourself in. It can be really tricky on a number of levels when your friends (or family) don't like the person you're dating. It can also be really difficult to remove yourself enough to look at the situation objectively, but that's where I'd start. At the end of the day, your friends are looking out for you, and they may be correct in thinking that this partner might not be good for you, or they simply don't know your partner well enough.
On the one hand, your friends know you really well. They know your patterns, and they know your habits; they know your toxic traits, and they know your best ones. This can be really helpful for illuminating patterns in your dating history. They can be objective observers who point out things that you're doing that might not be super healthy. But those have to come from somewhere meaningful, and they can't just come from: "We don't like your partner." This can be where the objectivity challenge comes from. You have to be able to sit down with your friends and have an objective conversation about their worries. While doing this, try to remember that their concern is not a judgment about your ability to choose a partner (or shouldn't be) but just a respect for your well-being. Remember that friends are important, their concerns are valid, and it's never worth ending a friendship (on either side) over someone's dislike of a partner. Friends are too important for that.
But if you feel as though their concerns aren't valid, then let them know that. Try to do this as objectively as possible, too. If there is something that they view as a red flag that you're actually interested in learning about and growing from, that could be a really interesting conversation to have. I'd advise to look for all the areas of growth that are possible. Your friends disliking your partner can really make you investigate why you've chosen that partner and bring a new level of honest communication to your friendship. So once you're ready to hear it, I'd say invite your friend to a coffee and really get to the bottom of why they don't like this partner of yours. The conversation may get rocky, and some things may be hard to hear, but that is okay! That is how friendships deepen. Just remember that underneath it all is love and care, and that's what's most important.
Why Getting Hurt isn't Always a Bad Thing
So, this comes as a more self-focused part two to the question above. I found myself writing it and realized I wasn't actually answering the question but telling a story about myself, so I wanted to respect the question and expand upon it here. I've had my share of moments where friends or family have not liked the partners I've been with. In retrospect, sometimes they were correct, but sometimes they didn't know the full scope of the relationship and didn't entirely trust that I knew what I was doing.
In one particular atypical relationship, a lot of my friends used the noble phrase: "We just don't want you to get hurt." And this is a totally justifiable thing for them to say. It showed that they cared about me and my feelings and saw some potential red flags in the situation I was in. But what they couldn't quite comprehend was that getting hurt wasn't a reason for me not to be in a relationship. (Disclaimer: In this context, they meant hurt in the emotional sense.) They just didn't want me to get heartbroken because the people I was seeing couldn't give me a typical relationship structure.
And I really did learn through this that getting hurt wasn't my benchmark for relational success. I was entering into this particular relationship, knowing full well what I was hoping to get out of the situation and knowing that the relationship was not going to last forever (or even for a long time). Knowing that the relationship had an end date and that I might be sad freed me up to not focus so much on where it was going but enjoying my time along the way. Getting hurt wasn't something I was running from. I was sad when it ended, of course, but the end brought me so much growth, and the relationship as a whole brought me so much joy. And even though it ended and was remarkably atypical, it still was wildly successful to me. So that is my extended way of saying that sometimes your friends want what will make you happiest, but it might not be what is best for you. You've got to trust your gut and know what you're hoping to get out of a relationship, even if it's vague or has hints of the unknown. Listen wisely, but remember that at the end of the day, you know yourself best.
Well, friends, that's the end of this week. I'll be coming at ya from Texas for one more week next week, and then Casey and I go on a road trip after that, but I'm going to try to bank another edition. Wish me luck as I try to write ahead of schedule!
As always, all my love, Aidan
I love your musings about how getting hurt isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm all-in for growth and learning, and sometimes hurting a bit is how we receive the lesson we need to learn. There's no substitute for experience when it comes to internalizing an important truth.
I appreciated your advice to the letter writer, and I had another thought about why friends sometimes don't approve of a relationship--simple jealousy. They feel the new partner will take their friend away. And this isn't an altogether unfair worry because there's only so much time available to hang out with people, and having a new partner will likely syphon off some of the time you'd normally spend with friends. I have myself borne the brunt of this with two partners in my life, some of whose friends did not take a liking to me. I generally assumed they were jealous, though of course, I don't know for sure what their motivations were. But since those individuals didn't even make the slightest effort to know me, it seems like jealousy is the only answer.