Myth Happens

spatch and I have performed our civic duties and received stickers in exchange for the exercise of democracy. It's been at least a year since we had to prove our residence in this ward and precinct, but the original experience was so scarifying that we still show up carrying utility bills just in case. The moon was brilliantly full and some of the leaves streetlight-orange in it. Earlier in the afternoon, I walked some distance by the side of a road where the afternoon sun had tinted the conservation meadows like ambrotypes. I have seen the news of the death of Dick Cheney. Twenty-five years sooner would have been better, but I had begun to wonder if he was even in the machine. Since Halloween, WERS has been playing a lot of the Last Dinner Party's "This Is the Killer Speaking" (2025). I am completely unsurprised that the band has covered Sparks.

P.S. w00t, Mamdani!

Having access this evening to a tableful of newspapers, I saw the front-page article in the Globe about the climatically imminent flooding of the Seaport and it was pretty much exactly like reading that water is wet. I still have difficulty regarding that neighborhood as a real part of Boston, not merely because of its glass-shelled gentrification but because it is even more obviously on loan from the sea than the rest of this flat gravel-fill town. As soon as there was sea-rise in the future, Boston was going to be under it, long before the governments and corporations of this world blew through the 1.5C deadline. I love the harborwalk and I have seen the harbor walking over it. Urban renewal was faster cash in the moment than streets that would not flood the next minute. I do not believe in the stupidest timeline because I was exposed too early to the folktale in which it could always be worse, but it is nonsensical and nightmarish to me that this is the one we are all trapped in. It is because the universe is an unjust place that so many in power are not found in the morning blue-lipped, salt-lunged, sea-strangled on land.

On the other hand, tonight I watched Hestia trot over to spatch's new computer on which was still stuck the silver-paper bow of its early holiday present and pluck it in passing, after which she hunted it up and down the front hall with much batting and biting and singing the high, clear song to her prey which is usually reserved for socks. Decades after bouncing off all the George Eliot I tried after Silas Marner (1861), I seem to be embedded in Middlemarch (1872). It washed out my plans for the day which I then did little with, but I slept a generally assessed normal number of hours.

I have joked for years about my paper gaydar, an improvement on my previous gaydar of a rock, but a viewer should not need even the gaydar of scissors to appreciate the rarity and joy of the happy ending granted its candidly queer couple by the semi-precious shoestring gem of Girl Stroke Boy (1971). It has as little time for coding as for pleas for tolerance when it can have a snow fight instead. Especially in these ever more gender-essentialist days, its cheerful one in the eye for cisheteronormativity feels more than historically affirming.

Queering its social message conventions from jump, the film wastes no time setting the outrageous scene: the straight, white, snowbound middle-class home which a jam in the central heating has rendered a sort of Buñuelian steambath of locked windows, stuck doors, and taps that burn to the touch in which George and Lettice Mason (Michael Hordern and Joan Greenwood) are literally sweating the arrival of their adult son with his girlfriend, a momentous day for a household that has not so covertly worried about his sexuality for years. "Mallinson, you know, woodwork and biology, said that Laurie was the only boy in the class who never giggled during sex instruction." He's never had a girl that his parents know about, much less brought one home to meet them. Anyone expecting a white wedding reset to straight time, however, should clutch their pearls now because while the Masons have braced their suburban sensibilities for the daughter of a West Indian High Commissioner, at the sight of the resplendently femme Jo Delaney (Peter Straker) with her soft midi-Afro and fashionably leopard-lined eyes and several inches on their son even without the go-go heels, their social script drops all its pages on the floor. The appalling scribble shoved by Lettice at her mortified husband says it all: Is it a man? To the credit of the lovers, neither of them has walked into this ordeal unprepared. Fresh out of hospital for some unspecified crack-up which may have boiled down to contact with his family, Laurie (Clive Francis) is fair and fragile and sardonic and devoted to Jo, emphasizing her pronouns with dry unexpected firmness where he remarks ruefully of himself, "Mother really wanted a romantic hero for a son. I must have been a terrible disappointment." Jo kisses him lightly but meaningfully on the cheek; her own introductory act after an altercation with the radiator is a grave, sly fumigation of the parlor with her cologne, sounding out the local density of whiteness with icebreakers of mud huts and Tarzan. They may have an ally in George, the beleaguered secondary modern school head whose air of vague acquiescence to the absurd suggests an openness to new ideas so long as his instinct to please everyone doesn't strand him on the side of the status quo. "Your father's all right. I like him. Well, the bits of him that she's left." The problem is Lettice, the tiny, implacable romance writer who plumes herself on her progressive bona fides while blithely describing the heroine of her latest novel as an "octaroon" and professes confidence in her son with the lethal encouragement, "Darling boy, I hope you'll always do exactly what you think is right, after first having talked it over with me." Her conversation is a textbook in transmisogynoir, starting at microaggressions about spices and hair and spiraling into the ludicrous yet all too real determination to prove the masculinity of her son's girlfriend as if it would be news to him, the virginal innocent deceived. Her eye on the position of the toilet seat would challenge a cat at a mousehole. Her baited hooks on the natures of the sexes are as uncalled-for as they are off-base. At least when she bullies her inarticulately uncomfortable husband into dialing the Delaneys (Rudolph Walker and Elisabeth Welch) at their official address in Belgrave Square, the inappropriateness of her enquiry provokes the clapback it deserves: confused, scandalized, and inevitably, "Is that girl Laurie a boy?"

As a comedy of manners whose joke is not after all on the outré intersections but the straight and exceeding narrow, Girl Stroke Boy is an amazing transmission from 1971. As an experience of cinema, it's a more awkward proposition. Director Bob Kellett was an accomplished farceur and it's a clever reversal to play the cishet older generation for burlesque while allowing the queer young lovers to be the mimetically textured pair, but since most of the scenes are four-handers, the tonal results are uneven and the shedload of transphobia can wear on the viewer even when it is visibly, risibly in the wrong. It would slice the 86-minute runtime in half, but no member of the audience who ever once had to grit their teeth through misgendering, passive-aggression, or just plain familial rudeness would fault Jo and Laurie for lighting out for London in the middle of the night. What saves the film is that it is always on the side of the lovers, especially the self-possessed Jo who meets this nightmare-in-law with the grace and fierceness of someone long past needing to explain herself, if she ever did. "Well, there's at least six couples in my block of flats that don't agree." She is never treated as a trap or a riddle, her femininely tilted presentation as drag or a gag or an effort at heterosexual camouflage. Beyond her portrayal by a cis male actor, the character can be textually confirmed as AMAB and so what? Both she and her boyfriend arrived as flamboyantly as if they had heisted half of Carnaby Street on their way out to Shenley Hill and it just happens that she's minimally accessorized with polished nails and her mod handbag and a silver labrys pendant when she says bluntly across the breakfast table, "Sex isn't what you wear. It's not being face up or face down in bed. Nowadays it's simply a matter of personality . . . Look, who gives a hell whether it's a girl or a boy? We're all a bit of both, aren't we, Mrs Mason? I bet you don't get many absolute heteros in your school." Full Judith Butler ahead, gender as performance does not require conformation to its most stereotypical signifiers. Jo's level-headedness does not invalidate her femininity any more than her light-chested voice, any more than Laurie should be considered less of a man just because his sharp-tongued inclination to put in his oar casts him fairly as the bitchier of the two. Certainly the higher-strung, he channels the audience's own incredulity in the face of a delusion that might nowadays call itself gender-critical feminism: "Mother dear, doesn't it ever occur to you that I might know everything that she is and isn't by now? I know that she's never going to beat you at Scrabble. I know that she's never going to be Home Counties Badminton Champion or President of your Needlewomen's Guild or good at church flower decoration—" The most extensive meditations on sexuality and gender are not loaded onto the queer characters, however, but free-associated by the heat-rumpled George as he botches his way toward acceptance through a waveringly touching mix of conviction and cluelessness, early on throwing down the unprecedented gauntlet of "Laurie says she's a woman, she says she's a woman. With such evidence, I am prepared to take her femininity on trust," and even after his wife has browbeaten him to accept her conclusion of the assembled facts, holding his ground as if somewhat surprised to find himself standing on it:

"Whatever my son's taste in sex, I'm not ashamed of him. If Jo is a man, I don't think I'm disgusted. If they have a taste for one another and it adds to their life, then as far as I'm concerned they can be as loving as they like. We're none of us so normal, so self-dependent that we can turn down all the good sex that comes our way—or the chance of having someone to love us. Don't you agree? I don't give a damn if she's a man. If she is, she's a jolly good chap."

Coming from a father so generally, pricelessly flustered that he fumbled which sexual orientation he was supposed to be championing in the clinch, it's an extraordinary statement. It is not at all clear that he has a real handle on the concepts of sex and gender that he mangles so magnificently together in his last word and it doesn't matter. Jo was right to single him out for a sotto voce appeal for support. Quite a lot of parents in 2025 can't get as far.

( And no one is coming to dinner tonight! )

The title remains unfortunate. Girl/Boy obviously plays on the perceived ambiguity of Jo as well as her pairing with Laurie, but it's naughtier than it needs to be when spelled out; it misserves a film that is relaxingly, radically matter-of-fact about the presentation of its lovers. I cannot speak to the stage source material of David Percival's Girlfriend (1970), but the screenplay by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin steers remarkably clear of sad, hysterical, desexualized queer clichés while its intimacy is sexily, dreamily limned in montages of languorous heat and playful cold by DP Ian Wilson who would later shoot both Edward II (1991) for Derek Jarman and The Crying Game (1992) for Neil Jordan, the latter of which reassured me that I had not been reminded occasionally of Jaye Davidson's Dil by Straker's Jo only through the common ground of transfeminine Blackness. One especially lovely composition offsets her with orchids in the conservatory, a sensuous one intertwines their fingers over the curves of a tiger cowrie and interchanges their profiles like coins, a droller one cages the Masons behind the rungs of a ladder as they attempt to extol the virtues of heterosexuality to an openly hilarious Jo and a Laurie who looks distinctly as though checking himself back into hospital would be less of a strain on his disbelief. "Dad, is this what is called a man-to-man talk?" So soon after decriminalization, so soon after Stonewall, the film shows no self-consciousness or sensationalism over the kisses and embraces of a pair of actors, their stymied efforts at lovemaking. They touch one another with casual affection, sometimes with active desire, sometimes in defiant, assertive display. They are not a perfect couple. On the floor in front of the opened refrigerator on the theory that it should be the one place in the house cool enough to fuck, they briefly fight instead, the mood spiked by the cramp in his calf and her discomfort in the fish-fry heat even before his territorial nerves irritate her into an allusion to some past sexual failure and just a moment ago they were lying so comfortably together even in the horrible wicker of the guest bed, it's a relief to the viewer when they manage to laugh it out and get on with the getting off. "Not so loud! Look, I can't put a notice on the door—coitus don't-interrupt-us." It makes them more real, less like any idea of representation beyond the fact of their love for one another, their individual quirks, and the genuine stress of spending any kind of night in a house containing racist knick-knacks and a TERF. "It's like having it off in the British Museum!" Structurally, the interracial angle is submerged almost at once in the gender trouble, but it does persist in the reality of their relationship and it's pleasant to see just how much of an issue it isn't for Jo and Laurie, an entire other message picture dodged. That said, I had no idea a film had been released ten years before my birth in which a character defends their partner's pronouns to their parents, giving yet another lie to this tsunami of transphobia currently swamping the U.S. and the UK. The arc of the moral universe could tesser any time now.

I had no idea about this film, period, and in its small, contrary way, sometimes well-made and sometimes wobbly and often suggesting that someone forgot to fetch the budget out of the boot of the car—it was shot in two weeks in an actual house credited to "Faggot's End," which looks in real life like Faggotts Close—it may be important beyond its apparent premise of Guess If Pat's Coming to Dinner. I found it in the filmography of Clive Francis and then on MyFlixer, although if you prefer not to wrestle with the necessity of adblock it can be more usually streamed and against all odds exists on a rather handsome Indicator Blu-Ray. I wouldn't hold it against any viewer not to want to spend a weekend melting with the Masons, but my hard sell on romance had no defenses against Laurie and Jo with their in-jokes and frank sex talk and soft gestures of loving, their astringent and forthright complement that I imagine made them treasures of elder queerhood. "We care for each other. We show others we care. Isn't that how it's done?" And let them still be doing it, onscreen and off. This personality brought to you by my absolute backers at Patreon.

For nearly the first time since the Cape, I slept. It required me to spend hours after midnight waiting for my body to get the unconsciousness memo and then repeat the process this morning after a doctor's office called back at the crack of business, but construction has been precluded by the recurrent nor'easter rain and it worked. The dreams were nothing to write home about, but at least I had them. And then we had a mild power outage, but still. Sleep! I could get used to it.

As part of my birthday month, spatch just presented me with a little black cat bag containing the Criterion flash sale fruits of Orson Welles' The Immortal Story (1968), which I had loved at the start of this month.



I just want an extra week in the month to do nothing but sleep instead of talking to doctors and bureaucracies. I can't believe we are almost out of October. It should be an inexhaustible resource.

I know it is no longer news in the ravenous cycle of horrors that passes for the front page these days, but the fact that the man in the White House took a literal wrecking ball to it feels once again so unnecessarily on the nose, at least if it were satire I could be laughing. I know buildings are not human lives such as this administration ends and ruins with such pleasure of ownership, but the roses of the concrete-choked garden were real things, not just symbols, and so were the bricks and the tiles of the East Wing. I have nothing revelatory to say about this particular destruction in the midst of so much more personal violence except that I didn't want to let it slide into a tacit shrug, as if it were an ordinary exercise of presidential powers, another rock through the Overton window. Or a bulldozer.

I can't listen to podcasts. It's the same problem as audio commentaries. They are difficult for me to extract information from. I make the occasional effort for friends or colleagues and otherwise read transcripts where available.

I have just discovered that Bill Nighy has a podcast. Apparently it launched on my birthday. It is the half-hour ill-advised by Bill Nighy. I am as we speak listening to the first episode which I selected at not very random considering there are only three so far:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you are on the planet. Welcome to ill-advised by Bill Nighy—and the clue is in the title, particularly on the first word. The risk of getting to my age is that you can not infrequently be mistaken for somebody who knows what's happening or how to carry on, and you only have to take a quick look around the world to see how that's going, and how my generation are managing the planet, for instance. I mean, you may have picked up a few things along the way which might be of use, like, I don't know, parking, or online shopping, or not taking cocaine, obviously. But other than that, in all the big important things, I remain profoundly in the dark. But I try and keep a straight face when people start acting weird.

After which he immediately begins to tell the listener about his recent eye operation. It does eventually pertain to the nature of the podcast, but frankly it was such an ideal segue for a programme that bills itself as "a podcast for people who don't get out much and can't handle it when they do . . . a refuge for the clumsy and the awkward . . . an invitation to squander time" that it won me over to treating it as an audio drama whose laconically anxious and slightly acid narrator has a very good fund of self-deprecating stories that wind their way around to some species of advice, defined by Nighy as "not actually making things worse." He sounds unsurprisingly the way his interviews read. The difficulty of extracting information does not improve just because I like the speaker, but apparently I will now make the occasional effort for actors, too.

Update: the parking is a lie. Nighy spends most of the introduction to the second episode explaining that he cannot and never could park successfully. "I'd drive miles to find somewhere where you didn't actually have to park, you could just leave the car." Well done, Reginald?

We had to wait until the clouds were only bands sliding across the stars like transparencies, but we saw the Orionids like sparklers in the southwestern sky, short streaks at the triple stars of the hunter's belt, one incredible fireball straight from the red coal of Betelgeuse at his shoulder. The air was softer than we had expected, but still clear enough for all seven of the Pleiades. Jupiter looked like gold inlay under the arm of Gemini. The DJ on WHRB commented melancholically on the cold turn of the weather and then played what she called a lot of warm songs to compensate. This is being a wonderful year for meteors.

The rain eased off after four o'clock, but until I got to Chapin Beach I still thought I would be making an affectionately overcast farewell to Cape Cod Bay, not arriving just in time for one of those conch-pink flaming sunsets for which my camera creakily consented to make an effort for about five minutes before shutting itself back down again and stubbornly refusing to be coaxed further. I walked back and forth on the wet metallic sands and collected a fragment of white-and-purple-whorled shell and watched the clouds fade to peach and charcoal. I put my hands in the water where it ran clear over the wave-rounded litter all faintly green-tinged, just to feel it on my fingers colder than before. I had all the talismans necessary to remember myself.

( Did the shamrock on your shoulder bring good fortune and pay off? )

It was such good sea. I had not had so much of it daily in years. And it is not that I can get none of it in the still working seaport of Boston, and Cape Cod remains sandier than the mountain-folded ledges of Cape Elizabeth or the glacier-scraped boulders of Cape Ann, but it is still Atlantic and still cold to the touch and still live. I am home now and approved by Hestia for the second time in a month, an unusual sign of travel in my life these days. Dinner was with my parents and spatch and came from Szechuan's Dumpling, who thanks to my being literally the last customer in and out of the restaurant threw in an order from earlier in the evening that no one had ever come to collect, i.e. free crab rangoon and what it just occurred to me to recognize as suan la chow show made by a kitchen that wasn't Mary Chung's. I did not get anywhere near as much done with my brain as I had wanted, but I am working on thinking of it as recharge rather than failure. I am not acclimated to unemployment. Tomorrow I plan nonetheless not to move very much.

Having somewhat wiped out my reserves with the glories of Corporation Beach, I only made it out to the salt marsh for about an hour between low tide and sunset, which was still great. I saw the copper-glaze glint of fiddler crabs in their burrows in the crenellated banks of mud. I saw the dark-fringed silhouette of an osprey sailing over the green-rusted brushes of cordgrass and salt hay, where they nest with the encouragement of the Callery Darling Conservation Area which includes the wetlands around the Bass Hole Boardwalk. The engine noise floating over from Chapin Beach turned out to belong to a powered paraglider who so annoyed me by effectively buzzing the boardwalk that I let all the other sunset viewers with their phones out enthusiastically take pictures of him. The long-billed, long-legged, unfamiliarly tuxedo-patterned shorebird stalking the deeper edges of a sandbar looks to have been a vagrant black-necked stilt. With the tide so far out, I am afraid there was little chance of another seal.

( Take a little comfort from the little you've done. )

After which I ate dinner, read a little, and passed out for about an hour and a half. Family and friends have been sending me pictures of No Kings, the necessity of which I hate and the turnout of which I cheer. My mother told me about her favorite sign she did not carry: a photograph of the butterfly, the only orange monarch we need. I loved everything about the spare, specific exploration of marginalized languages and historical queerness in Carys Davies' Clear (2024) until the slingshot of the ending as if the author had lost a chapter somewhere over the side in the North Sea. Since the Cape is still autumnal New England, I am drinking mulled cider.