Don’t Worry Darling, Part Three (I Ruin Every Party)

 

Alexis Bledel On Madmen. All the pop culture Prismas!

In Victory, if you start seeing through your hypnosis, you have to be removed or electric shocked into submission. (Just like Rory Gilmore was that time she was on Mad Men. Fucking Pete.) It’s not good enough to apologize and try to obey, try to fit in, try to follow the script you’ve been given. You have to sacrifice either your life or your memories for the men of Victory to properly feel the confidence, worth, and control they’ve paid for.

The littlest disturbance in the illusion they’re creating has to be snuffed out before it can spread.

In 2008, my then-wife and I were at a family birthday party for my second-littlest cousin. We were playing the family’s favorite game, Encore! wherein you pick a card with a word or theme and sing songs back and forth in teams.

Maybe the word was “kissed” because someone, maybe me, started singing “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry. (OHBOY the queasy-cute aughts version of bi visibility! See also the movie Jennifer’s Body, from the same year.) My first-littlest cousin, maybe six at the time, said “That song is disgusting.”

And, though I hadn’t yet developed my eerily calm teacher voice, I think I was pretty chill when I said “You never know who might be around when you say something like that.”

And my brother, sitting across the gameboard from me, LOST HIS MIND. He was INCENSED with me for saying something so political. I don’t remember what his words were, but they were SPAT.

When I asked him to talk outside and told him to please not treat me with so much contempt, I wasn’t that articulate but I was still pretty calm. Until he said the following:

“You ruin every party.”

(To which Thanksgiving 2016 me could have responded: “Hold my pie.”)

Further back, when I was away on the West Coast, my mom said “We’re so much happier without you.”

Even further back, when I was a little kid and the parents were fighting and my mom told me “This is your fault. I wouldn’t have had to marry him if it wasn’t for you.”

For some reason, the mom ones don’t hurt as much as the brother ones (Though apparently, I do carry them around like rotten treasures.) I identify with my mom’s ability to say the cruelest, stupidest thing when angry and flustered.

But my brother’s contempt is so measured, so purposeful, so sure of its righteousness. It feels like hurting me is a first aid kit he keeps. Like putting me in my place is the surest way to safety, a roadmap, a prayer. It doesn’t matter as much if his world is disrupted if he knows his place in it, above me.

Don’t Worry Darling: Being Chaos, Part Two

Rule number one of On Tyranny!

***content warnings: sexual assault, family violence, the Bush Years, 1/6/2021***

Being admonished/censored on the family facebook page is not at all like being frozen in a dream cul-de-sac by the evil incel version of Harry Styles, but the horror it brings up in me is the same. It happened over the summer, I realized it close to my birthday in September, and it crushed any hope or illusion that my brother would ever be on my side, or on the right side of history at all.

Like lots of queer folks and probably non-queer folks too, I’ve struggled with the reality of right-wing relatives. I’ve wondered how some aunts and uncles and cousins could profess to value me and my then-wife-now-BFF, how they could invite us over and treat us with such hospitality and also vote against our right to love who we want to, against our right to own our own bodies.

The cognitive dissonance of hearing the aunt who emotionally rescued me after my teenage sexual assault brought household abuses to a head saying in recent years that the idea of consent was ruining relationships, ruining men. The pain of hearing the mom who did her best to stand by me in that time tell me in 2016 that I create more rape in the world by thinking about it too much. Even after years of good trauma work and wonderful therapists and lovely, LOVELY Prozac, it’s hard not to feel like that lost and bruised teen, lost in a cyclone of random violence, practiced abuse, and institutionalized hopelessness.

That rescuing aunt grew into the most right-wing of us all, and at least one of my cousins followed suit. He worked in Bush’s NSA. At his (the cousin’s, not Bush’s) wedding, which I attended with my then-wife, the priest blamed both Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq on gay marriage having recently become legal in some states. (I want to say he also blamed us for 9/11, but I think I’m conflating that priest with Pat Robertson.) (Jeez a lot of things are supposed to be our fault!)

But! The same cousin had been at OUR wedding, cordial as can be albeit in an American flag necktie! (American flags were strictly a right wing thing in those early war years, it’s weird to remember now that we’ve devolved to other, more upsetting flags.)

I stayed pretty close with the right wing-est aunt, too, until a couple of things happened:

1.     My nice liberal cousin-in-law told me that Aunt Connie (the NSA cousin’s mom) and Aunt Patti were planning to march with the Proud Boys et al on 1/6/21. (The hero cousins of Aunt Patti’s fam talked her out of it! What a bunch of badasses!)

2.     Cousin Jimmy briefly left his wife and kids for another right wing lady and, OH YEAH, TO WORK FOR GUILIANI.

NOTE: I got this info secondhand from Nice Liberal Cousin-in-Law, who got some of it from Aunt Connie, a noted unreliable narrator. BUT! The day did come where I heard his name on Maddow—he was part of the scheme to invoke martial law and seize the voting machines.

HE WAS PART OF THE SCHEME TO INVOKE MARTIAL LAW AND SEIZE THE VOTING MACHINES. And everyone in the family but me is like, oh, this is totes normal.