Everything I Wrote In November 2015

image

You might have noticed that since June, I’ve been using Patreon to get paid for the writing I do. (Patreon, if you haven’t heard of it, lets readers pay content creators a sum of their choice per post, up to a monthly maximum—for example, $3 per post up to $15 in any given month.) When I first started using it, one of my pledges was to post at least twice a week, or eight times a month. For lots of reasons, including homelessness and a bout of ill mental health, it took me till November to make good on that, and now that I’m being as productive as I want to be, I’d like to do some self-promotion again.

One thing I’ve found with Patreon is that it pushes me to write longer, more serious posts I might not have otherwise: getting even a few dozen dollars per post from a small group of patrons has focused me on content I really care about. I mean to keep going in that vein, and for this blog to continue to grow—November was its biggest month ever, largely due to me getting paid enough to concentrate on it—I need to keep up the momentum, so I’m going to try and get into the habit of advertising. In case you missed any, this post is a recap of everything I wrote last month, and I’m hoping to publish a compendium like it every month, partly as a portfolio, partly to motivate myself. Continue reading “Everything I Wrote In November 2015”

Everything I Wrote In November 2015
{advertisement}

What If James Bond Fucked Men? Sex, Violence And Genre In London Spy

Moderate spoilers for episodes one and two.

Twenty-five minutes into London Spy’s first episode, two men have sex. The Daily Mail wasn’t pleased about this, tutting that ‘a viewer complained of a graphic gay sex scene which included nudity’, only to be ignored. (The fact the series airs post-watershed, when naughty things are known to be broadcast, is treated as a technicality.) You’d think most sex scenes featured nudity, indeed that fucking with clothes on might have more power to scandalise, but then is this is gay sex—depraved and disordered, in the Mail’s eyes, unless it’s a brown person saying so.

Today’s conservatives have nothing, heavens no, against the gays—they’d just prefer not to be reminded they’re anatomically correct. The novelty of lifelike queer characters is such that realism feels unrealistic: it must be due to a quota, the Telegraph suggests, that in all of spy fiction, one queer lead role now exists. Whether despite or because of the number of gay historical spies, espionage is a fiercely heterosexual genre, and after half a century of straight secret agents in dinner jackets getting laid, the fury London Spy’s premiere drew with one sex scene shows just how overdue it is. This never happened to the other guy. Continue reading “What If James Bond Fucked Men? Sex, Violence And Genre In London Spy”

What If James Bond Fucked Men? Sex, Violence And Genre In London Spy