FM Weekly 4.47

26 February 2024

content notice for this issue: Laken Riley’s murder, self-immolation, Nex Benedict’s murder, medical authority and the expectation of conformity (my new favorite phrase, thanks Dr. Anna Nelson)

Graphic Art by NDN Collective

I’m moved this week to uplift that every story in this newsletter is a script. Every life lived gives us the language to live ours as we write and speak and scream about how others are doing the same. Beautifully. Powerfully. With their full voices. All ten toes in the sand and hearts shining to the sky. From beginning to end and everything in-between. My heart is heavy with words and my hands tremble almost too much to write them as I learn what I can of each and every person herein, of each and every story they wrote as they lived, each and every story we write as we live now, and the scripts left for us to say with our entire chests the way they would have.

Aaron Bushnell’s self-eulogy of “Free Palestine” should be our everyday anthem, starting as a measured and clear statement and ending as repeated, dying cries with his last breaths, so that we may consider how we measure the desperation in our own voices as we carry his forward until, in our lifetimes including through his, Palestine is free.

Nex Benedict sharing that bullies antagonizing laughter started it all - whether because the laughter itself sounded queer or because queers themselves were laughing, and really what is the difference when it all comes down to queer joy - is a swan song for us all to laugh loudly, proudly, gayly, with our friends and because of them and because of the gloriousness of being queer in community, as our voices change with age and with hormones and with time and with identity over the course of our lives cut short or lived long.

Cecilia Gentili being remembered by queer family as the “mother of all whores” during her celebration of life in a Catholic church is a tome to be held, joyfully removed from the shelf and cracked at the spines, and reenacted on every stage be it the theater or the sidewalk or the church or at the protest, including in speaking against the religious violence against queer people in their lives and in their deaths.

These are the scripts this week. May they reach you.