My spouse and I just had one of those “wait your brain works HOW?” exchanges, and now I am BURNING TO KNOW HOW IT WORKS FOR OTHER PEOPLE:
Fellow speakers of this feral bastard language (English), rb and tell me in the tags: what is the delineation for you, if any, between evening and night?
seriously I had some little TikTok teenybopper burst out laughing on my tour because I said that a historical figure was “most likely what we’d now call gay”
like
listen
you’re free to take a ouija board out to the cemetery and try to explain the dizzying array of current queer terms and get a solid answer as to how he identifies within that framework but
until then, I’m going to continue NOT definitively assigning someone identity terms they didn’t self-identify with, and might not have even known, when I’m responsible for representing them faithfully and they’re not here to correct me. even more so when they’re part of my own community
I mean, you know, as long as that’s okay with you. Bestie.
[ID: tags that read: “#time traveler: so now that i’ve explained our current understanding of sexuality would you say you identify more as lesbian or bi? #sappho: we went to the moon? #time traveler: yeah but remember what i told you about the gender binary? can we talk about- #sappho: the moon in the fucking sky?” end ID.]
one of my favorite this american life segments of late is about the people who played orchestra pit for phantom of the opera on broadway and how, like, a sizeable majority of them had literally been playing the show since it opened in 1988 (on broadway. I know it opened in 86 on the west end, you random pedants, but I am specifically talking about broadway musicians) because their contracts stipulated that they’d have jobs throughout the show’s entire run… but nobody anticipated that phantom would become the longest-running broadway show of all time.
and none of these people wanted to walk away from a guaranteed job, so very few of them ever quit. they just kept doing the same show eight nights a week… for twenty or thirty years… and by the time it finally closed last year most of these musicians (who had been working together for DECADES) hated each other and really really fucking loathed phantom. I can’t stop thinking about it. it’s indescribably hellish to imagine but also the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
can you imagine.
[ID: excerpt from an article reading: One of my favorite stories, which should drive anyone who has every played in a band crazy– there’s this bassoon player who has sat next to the same clarinet player since 1988. She’s convinced he plays half a note4 flat on every note he’s every played. He denies this. /]
