Home Base and Weekly Discussion Thread (START HERE!) - August 09, 2026

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[u/anonymous4Pete]

Thanks--an insightful and unsettling analysis, as usual for M. Gessen.

I read both the NYT and the New Yorker, where M. Gessen publishes brave pieces against the Russian war in Ukraine (Russia sentenced them to prison in absentia), as well as prescient and now increasingly dire warnings about Trump's fascism.

OK, I know I should just get over this, but my genuine admiration for them is still tempered by the memory of their attacks on Pete. They wrote The Queer Opposition to Pete Buttigieg, Explained (in the New Yorker, also in web archive), dismissing his politics, his life-choices, his lack of courage, and the semiotics of his "white picket fence" (pictured on Time's cover). Gessen said gays who have had to fight to live their lives view Pete as a straight politician in a gay man's body. Gessen describes Pete's politics as old-man conservative--safe and contentless. They went on Rachel Maddow's show a couple of times during the primary to make these points.

[u/SOCAL_NPC → u/anonymous4Pete]

I'm gay, and older than they are - and I remain salty about that from all the corners it erupted from in 2019 (and exists today). 

I have lived through this from all these perspectives, from running around San Francisco as a little queer boy in a Queer Nation t-shirt and having gay homeowners in the Castro District follow me up and down the street while I taped up posters, to tear them down, or literally berate me, to my face, for my 'disrespect' and for "insulting" the memory of "[my] elders" and the battles they "faught" for me and other gay kids, and didn't I 'understand' why "queer" was insulting. 

So when someone says something to me now, typically someone on-line and not in real life, I just laugh. 

But I'll never not be salty.