I want to focus on queer representation in culture, because recently I stopped just reporting on it, and through my publishing journey, became a part of it. The fact that I can place my own experience in the broader discussion of the necessity of queer representation has actually changed my analysis - my point of view has shifted my understanding of why we fight to get art made by gays in front of the eyes of the uncomprehending public.

But before I get to that, I’m going to talk about myself a whole bunch. It will eventually make sense as part of my greater point, but it’s also because someone foolishly gave me a microphone and nobody is capable of stopping me from doing whatever I want. You poor unfortunate souls.

So, let’s get indulgent.

My romantic comedy novel, In Spite of You, is not only a book about love, celebrating love, exploring the idea of love - it’s also a book that accidentally created a timeline that tracks the entire lifecycle of one of my own failed real world romances - from the giddy misplaced gooey nonsense of falling for someone, all the way through to the heartbreak and disappointment of the eventual breakup.

Unfortunately that relationship is bracketed between the pages of this book, just as much as my protagonist’s romance is - although at least they got a happy ever after.

hey friends, this is a chunky 4000 word essay - obviously I put a lot of work into it, so I’m putting it up as one of my rare paid subscriber only pieces. But I’m also offering DISCOUNTED annual subscriptions for the next couple of days, so please consider subscribing - it makes all the difference.

Subscribe for a discount

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Starring Bill Hader, a very new Vanessa Bayer, and Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig as the titular spokesmodels, the sketch is what looks to be a pretty simple parody of a gameshow, focusing on heightening the already humorous trope of beautiful gameshow ladies who present prizes. The Adriana Xenides of it all.

However, and I cannot stress this enough, this sketch is both very funny, and absolutely brimming with chaos energy. Very few sketches in Saturday Night Live history feel so uncontrolled, so spontaneously funny. Very few sketches manage to hold on to the structure of the gags, while seemingly careening into chaotic mistakes.

It’s also one of the premium examples of people breaking mid-sketch, and adding to the joy and humour of the sketch by doing so.

Let’s watch it now, before I absolutely strip all joy from this sketch by earnest breaking it down.

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He drinks a thousand cups of coffee, accidentally hits her in the face, and ends up making her cry. Eventually, Phoebe just has to do the deed for him, showcasing above all how useless he is.

In fact, this is the entirety of Janice’s arc for the full first season. Every time we see her, a dithering, sweating, evasive and dishonest Chandler is somewhere within the process of dumping her.

Chandler and Janice continue this on-and-off again relationship up until season four, but she is continually spun into the life of the titular Friends throughout the show — in fact, it becomes the gag. No matter where they go, what they are doing, there’s always a chance that a loud, nasal, drawn out “oh my goooooood” will announce the arrival of Janice, long nails splayed, hair high, and usually wearing leopard print or a lime-green jumpsuit.

In the final season, she even almost buys a house next to Monica and Chandler — the show knows how to commit to a bit.

She’s treated like a very loud “bad penny” — forever unexpectedly turning up, and almost perpetually unwelcome. In fact, from the very beginning — Janice, a cackling force of optimism and joy — is just treated like shit, because everyone finds her so aggravating.

But when I ask Maggie Wheeler, the brilliant actress who played Janice, she tells me that she wouldn’t have had it any other way for Janice.

“Well, I loved everything about playing that character because first of all, to be able to be so unapologetically annoying is a lot of fun.”

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I love finales, because they are SO hard to pull off - how to wrap up a story which the writer’s have spent seasons seducing us into being invested in through one tidy and emotionally satisfying episode? Disasters are common, successes are legendary. I think the Hacks finale will be the latter.

This is an accomplishment which means we’ve had five seasons of a comedy show that doesn’t ever dip in quality and ambition. Sure, I think some episodes are weaker than others, but a lot of that is about light and shade, and it’s not a show where you have to say “just get through season 1” or “season three was incredible but it dipped after that”. It’s an incredible achievement.

Significant and devastating spoilers for Hacks season 5 follow, be warned

Like Hacks as a whole, the finale expertly balanced emotion and character growth with a commitment to great jokes. I laughed - and at several points, I was swept up in great and unforced emotion. Upping the stakes to mortality instead of career was a big swing - the scene where Ava experiences anticipatory grief in the club and then attempted to convince and then beg Deborah to get cancer treatment was spectacular. Ava agreeing to support her assisted death equally good. Then Deborah having the moment, the full-circle moment from season 1 where she says “that’s a better joke” and realises she still has “an hour” in her - that was sublime television, that was brilliant storytelling.

Even though the stakes were raised (death), it focused on the core of the show - the relationship between Deborah and Ava and their love of comedy. It kept it simple - the push and pull of their friendship recognisable in this huge moment of vulnerability as it was in the first episode when Deborah decides to work with Ava after all.

I genuinely think I could write thousands of words just about the finale, let alone the season as a whole, but I only have time for one thought: and it’s all about ending.

Hacks has never been afraid to play out a kind of meta commentary between itself as a work of art and the fictional universe it creates - similarly, by having Deborah reflect on her legacy and the sudden and startling impending death, the Hacks creators are also working through how to end their show.

The reason I know they are doing this is because the three Hacks creators have always been in love with the act of storytelling - in much the same way that Deborah and Ava are both bound and burdened by their passion for the craft of comedy, so are the Hacks writers. They always planned on finishing the show at 5 seasons, showing that each new season was an intentional growth and advancement of the characters, a metamorphosis and evolution from the “hacks” they were in season one.

“Everybody knows what it feels like when a show you love keeps going past the expiration date. It was really important to us — in a way that is very Deborah Vance — to not run the light, so to speak, to try to go out when we felt we were still on a creative high,” said co-creator Jen Statsky . “As much as we love these characters and the people we get to make the show with, it just felt like the right time to bring this story to a conclusion”.

Deborah deciding that now was “her time” because she was on a professional high and wanted to be remembered that way, instead of as a sick and dying person, as a figure of pity, is the same style of thinking that goes into a finale.

How do we go out and own our narrative? As much as Deborah and Ava are defined by the purity of their love of comedy, we have to remember that Deborah survived this long due to her commitment to marketing - and ending her story on her terms is as much about marketing, about controlling the narrative, as it is about her fears around pain and death.

But her decision to take treatment - driven not by the begging of her friend, or by her hobbies (that scene where she finds the salt and pepper shakers in the market can be seen as the second “anchor” placed before her) was not only an example of the one unchangeable truth theory of character writing in play, but a gift to the audience.

The Hacks writers could have controlled the narrative by neatly wrapping up the show with Deborah’s death as the bow - there’s nothing more final than death after all (unless you’re Buffy). Death has been used as a narrative full stop in stories for a long time because it’s how we all end eventually. They did the work to make it narratively justified and even beautiful - most of the significant characters have been left with a new future - Kayla and Jimmy taking over the agency, Marcus with The Diva, and Ava working on the reboot of Deborah’s old sitcom could even be seen as a passing of the torch to the new generation.

Instead, Deborah chooses to fight to live and to keep making comedy - instead of tying up the story tightly with her dying, the bow as firm as a noose, we can see all these new projects as the next step of their adventures, instead of happy ever afters. They aren’t happy endings, they’re happy beginnings.

The final scene we’re gifted with isn’t Deborah’s death and Ava’s grieving - placing their friendship in the past, as something passed - but Deborah and Ava walking along arm in arm, laughing together, workshopping jokes, and scheming about the next thing.

We’re gifted with this eternal vision of them together, that as far as we know, will never, ever end. That’s the ending we were given and it’s gorgeous.

It’s genuinely perfect comedy for me — a long descent into gentle madness, as we watch Kristen Wiig’s oddball impersonation of famous actress and singer Liza Minnelli struggle and ultimately fail with one of the strangest foes in comedy, a stubbornly lit lamp. The stakes? Why, to make it in time to see Cats, of course. What a premise!

What a thing to to watch.

It’s strange and it’s bold and it means nothing at all. It’s a talented actor (Wiig) being an absolute idiot — but with power and purpose. It’s a spangly lady yelling nonsense at you. It’s everything I love in comedy.

Since it aired, the sketch has apparently gained cult status in some corners of the internet — at least the corners I frequent — and I think we should pause and watch it right now.

Great! If that’s all you want from this article, that’s so fine. But if you want, I’m going to see if I can explore some of the reasons it’s so funny, because nothing makes a joke funnier than pulling it apart and sifting through its guts to discover how it works.

The Kristen Wiig Of It All

First off, we have to acknowledge that in its current incarnation, this sketch could only be done justice by Kristen Wiig.

You might be sensing a theme here, but there is no actor that brings me as much joy as Kristen Wiig, and her characters on SNL have been routinely iconic and strange.Sue loves surprises? Target Lady?Penelope? Gilly? They’re all amazing.

As a physical comedy actress she’s unparalleled, all long weirdo energy and perfectly elastic face. I have a rule that truly funny people have the most malleable faces, and hers is astounding. This particularly deranged version of Liza Minnelli is more Wiig than perfect impersonation.

I’ve never found any trace of Kristen Wiig talking about this sketch, but I often think back to the genesis of Target Lady, which began life as a character when she was with the LA sketch comedy the Groundlings, and eventually made its way to TV on SNL.

Wiig says that she was inspired to create the sketch after she was served by a cashier at Target with a particularly “eggy” voice. That’s it. Target Lady’s voice, as a result, is something glorious and weird. Nobody in the world says “almond” like her.

A lot of her characters have something “eggy” about them — a trait, or voice, or movement that Wiig focuses in on, and blows into absurdity. She finds the thing that she finds unique, different or funny — the game — and she develops a character out of it, like an enormous silly tree from a seed.

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If you’re a queer person, you know exactly what that looming hammer I’m referring to is, and exactly what it’s like to fear it — and more specifically what it’s like to expect it.

I mean, I’m clearly talking about homophobia — the only thing that queers automatically fear will happen to them, apart from couple-dressing (although I did spend a lot of my life expecting a very scary goose to jump out at me, but on average, queers are more worried about homophobia than geese).

It sounds dramatic, but I have literally never walked down the street while holding hands with a boy I’m seeing without expecting **something** homophobic to happen, and it often has. And it’s less about fear, than it is about a kind of certainty. It might not ALWAYS happen, but there’s ALWAYS the chance that it will.

So, it’s not like I was expecting Schitt’s Creek — which quickly established a set of gorgeous queer characters, and a notable and gorgeous queer romance from one of the main characters — to BE homophobic towards me. But I did expect it to tackle homophobia, for the characters to experience it within the story, for it to be a part of their world, as it is in mine. I assumed at some point that the beautiful bubble of David and Patrick’s romance would be threatened by the needle of homophobia.

I waited as their love story progressed for some kind of trope to pop its ugly head in — Patrick’s disapproving father perhaps, a plot about looking for apartments together where people assume they are just friends, being shot at by a bikie gang — whatever.

But Schitt’s Creek never did. Without fanfare, without struggle, Schitt’s Creek wrapped up their six seasons while depicting a world entirely without homophobia, completely without any depiction of it.

It was not only quietly revolutionary, it was a beautiful, beautiful gift.

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When I was a small and stupid child I was accidentally so good at swimming that I kept winning swimming races, much to my eternal dismay.

To most people this sounds like a good thing - Australia loves sport and winners of sport, and if I’d leaned into this, I would have immediately become accessible and understandable to Australian society in a way that I historically have not been. A winning sports boy is easier to get behind than a nervous book queer.

I swam a lot as a child, I did swimming lessons and then the much harder squad lessons, and as far as physical activity went I liked the fact that I was alone and didn’t have to engage with other people (I hate team sports) and as a boy raised on adventure books, I always thought it was important to be able to survive a ship wreck without relying on the help of a pod of dolphins. So I swam. I enjoyed it to a degree, but felt no qualms dropping squad when my mum got sick of taking me.

Even my squad swimming instructor, an angry man who called me “Wilhelm” and then got mad when I didn’t respond to his yelling (due to my name being Wilhelm) didn’t turn me off the activity of swimming.

The problem, unfortunately, was that my success led to more work, and as someone who didn’t value my achievements in the physical realm, this became a massive issue - I just wanted to read fantasy books about horny wizards.

What would happen is that every swimming carnival, I would be forced to enter a bunch of swimming races, where I would then accidentally win. I was particularly good at breast stroke (a skill wasted now that I’m dating a man). I would even try to fail on purpose - but the problem is that swimming slowly is actually incredibly hard work, and while I was excellent at swimming, I didn’t have a massive amount of physical stamina, being built like one of the starving zombies you see towards the end of 28 Days Later. So, if I slowed down too much, I would then begin to worry about drowning, and end up having to bring out the speed again in order to survive, thus meaning I once again won.

Curse my natural athleticism.

This meant that I would then have to go to the regional swimming carnival, then the state, then the national. I never won at national, thank god - I imagine I would have been drafted into the olympics. But the fact that i’d have to waste my weekends at this events was a horror - and even worse, nobody seemed to understand that I wasn’t thrilled about doing it.

Once you got past regionals (sounds like Glee) everything would get weird and feral too - the other boys would be genuinely competitive, trying to get in your head before the events, trash talking and even bullying. The parents were worse - they’d bail me up asking who my coach was, how many times a week I trained, what shoe size I was. The fact that I just stumbled into these races while their precious Dylans and Matthews were trying their darndest just infuriated them. Luckily, as I said, my unwanted innate skills got less impressive the higher up we went, and the older I got. By the end, I was coming dead last in every regional race - a massive relief.

It’s only as an adult that I realise I could have just… not gone. You have very little agency as a teenager, you just kind of go where people tell you to go.

The last time I tried swimming laps for fitness, I was in my twenties and I was wildly hungover, and I didn’t have goggles, meaning my eyes nearly burned in their sockets from the chlorine, and I vomited in the changing rooms. This time went much better! I’m hoping swimming will become my whole new personality.

My first feud was with a mean girl in my primary school, which I resolved by throwing a cooked fish at her while hiding up a tree, in an inexplicable act of revenge and food wastage that even I don’t particularly understand the logic of. But I think my second biggest feud was the school holidays in which I got shook down by the local volunteer firefighter squad.

When I was in high school, I was a weird loner, but I also had Strong Feelings about inequality and justice (shhh! I know what this is an indicator of and I am in denial!), which led to me volunteering for a bunch of charity organisations like Amnesty International and The Red Cross. One summer, I was tasked with going around my town and doorknocking for donations so the red cross could buy more blood, or whatever it was they did. I was shaky on the details, but I was very passionate about helping them in their blood mission.

I lived in a tiny town called Maianbar, which was smack bang in the middle of the royal national park. It used to be an artists commune, and still had some famous painters and authors living amongst a scattering of eccentrics and families who liked the cheap land. But now it’s full of rich people who have knocked down the beach shacks of my youth and replaced with disgusting beige mansions. This is another feud. In fact it literally is - some rich guy next to our house poisoned a hundreds of year old moreton fig so he would have more water view, and I spent a year trying to make him think the land was haunted by doing stuff like throwing rocks on his roof all night and finding bones in the bush and leaving them in little piles near his car.

ANYWAY. Getting sidetracked by my feud stories with other feud stories is Patrick culture. I was like 14 or something and after I left my third house, with none of the precious blood I sought, I discovered a group of eight volunteer rural firefighters lounging around on the street. They were wearing their uniforms but had the overalls folded down to show off their arms. The oldest guy wandered over to me - in my memory he was doing something deliberately nonchalant like chewing on a strand of hay, but that’s not likely.

“G’day champ” he drawled, which already raised my hackles. I have always hated the diminutives men in Australia use.

“Doing the blood drive huh? Nice work, good community spirit” he said. “Just one problem…”

“This is OUR town” said one of the other guys, which led to the rest chuckling. The leader waved them back, but he wasn’t disagreeing.

“See the thing is buddy, the rural fire service has been doing the blood drive in Maianbar for years now, so we kinda have it covered. You might wanna try somewhere else ok?”

“I don’t have a car” I remembered saying - not that I was old enough to drive.

“Well, you head home and just know that we’ve got it covered, you understand mate?”

I nodded. The funny thing was that after this house I had been planning to go home - turns out I hated door knocking and found it horrifically awkward. I hated asking for peoples money or blood. I also hadn’t read any of the literature, so when people asked me questions, I just smiled goofily at them. But now that I was being told that I wasn’t allowed to siphon blood off the innocent in my own town?

Feud.

I went home and I read all the literature, I got up to speed with all the people who desperately needed fancy new blood. I grabbed my very cute poodle, and then I hit the streets again. Every so often I’d see the firefighters doorknocking, and I’d leapfrog them, deliberately hitting up houses before they could. But I was like smoke - every time they got near me, I’d disappear.

I didn’t raise much money - less than $100. But I hit almost every house in town, and I know if it weren’t for that beef, I would have probably given up immediately.

And that blood went on to save countless lives, probably.

Oh my other favourite feud thing to do when I lived in Maianbar was paddle my kayak around before school every morning and pull up all the illegal crab traps and free the blue swimmer crabs, and then cut the ropes so the traps were irretrievable.

If you are new here, please remember that I have decided to headline my regular author missives with clickbait titles, such as… breaking my silence. This is to bait you into being interested in my life and my journey and the silly little things that define me.

And if you’re reading this, it worked.

But genuinely, we have a lot to discuss today. Lots of new stuff going on, and I feel like talking about it! Sharing my thoughts and feelings. Updating you.

We’re having one of those coffee dates where we love each other but haven’t seen each other for like six months so there’s just SO much to get through, and like, half of the things we’re talking about have lost all emotional relevance so you’re like “yeah it was honestly crazy” but actually you feel nothing.

And then you return home and you’re like “wow we just listed all the things that have happened to us, but did we even enjoy each other’s company? Did we laugh and live in the moment? I don’t know. Have adult friendships become transactional, ritualised things divorced from joy? Ok, The Cut essay, calm down.”

And then you text them “that was so great!”

Million Dollar Dog Is Good/ I have a new agent

I have been working on my second novel, another queer rom-com which is currently titled Million Dollar Dog. Last year I smashed out the first draft, and early this year I did a re-write to make it clean and sparkly enough to send to my… new agent.

My new agent is Rach Crawford, and she works at a New York agency (ey, i’m representin’ authors here) called Wolf Literary Services. Not only will we be working on my rom-coms, I also have a FANTASY SERIES in the works, which I have pitched as a concept to her, and I couldn’t be more excited. I read fantasy compulsively, and have since I was a tiny child - it’s always been a dream to write in that genre too.

Anyway, I sent my second draft of Million Dollar Dog to Rach and the good news is that she didn’t spit on it and send it back to me with a hastily scrawled note which said “you suck and always have”. She liked it! I got many positive notes! I also got some really good structural notes which mean that I’m going to do another quick edit before I submit it to my publisher. One of the reasons I approached Rach is because I have some specific goals in mind for my next books, and those early editing notes will help support that quest.

It’s a lonely process writing a book, and much like that Orpheus dick bag, doubt sets in at multiple times along the journey. You cannot help but wonder if you’re wasting your time, if your book is irrevocably terrible, if one of the thousand other book ideas you have is actually the real answer. Its even worse writing books with a strong comedic element - no matter how funny you find yourself (very), those jokes lose their potency like overchewed gum, and if you aren’t careful you’ll second-guess them, or worse, needlessly add to them until they’re overly complicated, in order to try and find that original burst of sickeningly sweet flavour.

So that first moment someone reads your manuscript, and gloriously tells you that it’s ready for submission as is, cannot be overstated in the sense of relief you feel. You haven’t wasted a year, you haven’t wasted your life, your time in the creative writing building at the university of wollongong did teach you more than how to get stoned near a bunch of ducks.

Observing the stars

Hey I’m a journalist again! Some news from me: I now work at the Star Observer, Australia’s oldest LGBTQIA+ publication. I am their Digital Editor and Journalist, and I goddamn love it. I’ve missed reporting, I’ve missed sitting down every day and immersing myself in the news cycle, and I have missed writing articles that make terfs absolutely FURIOUS.

It’s been difficult finding my place in Aus journalism lately - being overly committed to speaking the truth about certain things like genocide and the rights of marginalised people to not be treated as a “debate” gives you a reputation in Aus media as an “activist”. Objectivity is a principle, and shouldn’t come at the expense of truth and facts. Definitely have had a little existential crisis after I lost my ABC job and tried to work out if there was somewhere I could work that wouldn’t compromise my ethics.

Anyway - reach out with stories! Some of my favourite stories I’ve written haven’t just been about big global news stories about the attacks on queer rights. They’ve been little profiles of queer businesses, or interviews, or local investigations. Being a community focused publication means I can prioritise these stories, and I love them.

patrick@ssonet.com.au

Read some articles I wrote

Puppy love: why asking my boyfriend to coparent Basil the greyhound was the most important proposal of all - The Guardian

wrote a cute little story about how much I love my boyfriend and how he’s a good step dad. Read here.

OPINION: Heated Rivalry Fans Have A Serious Homophobia Problem - Star Observer

We need to criticise fandoms more, especially when they happily consume queer art, but then penalise actual queer identity. Read here.

“The Worst Part Was The Shame”: What Happened After Jack Was Lured Into A Gay Hate Crime Ambush Off Grindr - Star Observer

I’m just really proud when I get to do some actual journalism - when the gay hate crimes are in the news, I talked to a young man who experienced them first hand. Read here.

Come see me do things

I’ve got two library talks booked for Melbourne coming up! Get in early???

1.

Preston Library Preston, VIC

Thursday, Jun 25 from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm

Overview

Celebrate Pride Month with an author talk by Patrick Lenton, writer of the queer rom-com, In Spite of You.

Book here.

2.

Hawthorn Arts CentreHawthorn, VIC

Tuesday, May 19 from 7 pm to 8 pm

Overview

Join Patrick Lenton for a discussion of his book for IDAHOBIT 2026.

‘In Spite of You‘ by Patrick Lenton is a wickedly hilarious queer romantic comedy exploring love, friendship and revenge. In celebration of IDAHOBIT day, join us for a conversation between Patrick Lenton and Charlee Brooks as they discuss the romantic comedy genre, writing about queer identities and the importance of LGBTQIA+ representation.

For adults aged 18+ years.

Book here.

And finally thank you

Thanks to everyone who upgraded their subscriptions to paid - I love my new job but weirdly community media doesn’t exactly leave me dripping in wealth or time, so the earnings from this newsletter are appreciated.

“Ordinary Australians don’t support this bullshit” people will tell me, usually about LGBTQIA+ rights, or protesting genocide, or watching Heated Rivalry. It never worries me, because I know it’s a mythology building exercise for weird conservative bigots who try to pass off being racist and voting One Nation and not getting vaccinated as something inherently “Australian”, as if they are hearkening back to a long forgotten stanza from The Man From Snowy River where a bushranger sucks off Gina Rineheart and praises dropping phosphorous bombs on civilians.

It also doesn’t bother me because I have never considered myself an ordinary Australian, but rather an extraordinary one. Who would aspire to be ordinary (asks the guy who has reads Lord of the Rings 10000 times and clearly failed to understand the message)?

Branding someone an “elite” is a way of dismissing their concerns as luxuries. Gay people and their pesky concern with equal rights is just out of touch “elites” who will never know true problems, which are usually sorghum related.

But even with this, sometimes I am reminded about just how removed I am from mainstream Australia’s interests, desires, and perspectives. As a culture journalist, I was confronted with this when the irredeemable Married At First Sight became the most popular show in the country.

And recently, I conducted an “experiment” where I listened to commercial radio for two years, which was a horrifying window into an Australia I’ve spent my life trying to escape.

When I say an “experiment” what I mean is that my car’s radio was stuck on one shock-jock oriented station and I couldn’t work out how to change it. Can you really call me an “urban elite” when I’m too stupid and lazy to work out how to change the radio in my car? Checkmate.

I like the music - hearing Sabrina Carpenter seven times in one hour is not an issue for me. What got me was listening to the hosts and their absolutely banal banter, and people calling in to share grubby little bigotries. It was wildly depressing hearing unfounded narratives about “African gangs” and “Melbourne crime waves” and “trans women in sport” just broadcast with no commitment to any sort of journalistic integrity or fact checking. But what was even worse was hearing what passed as “humour” from the hosts, which honestly felt like high school level jokes from middle aged men, joking about boobs.

All the recent news about Kyle and Jackie O - disgusting people who are inexplicably popular - has only confirmed to me that these shows are, unfortunately, representative. Did I need two years to work this out? Probably not, but let’s not forget the main issue here: I couldn’t work out how to change the channel.

The good news is that my new car’s radio is set to ABC Classic, and my new experiment is being calm all the time.

The discourse has scurried all over the place: who should be writing mlm books? who should be reading them, and why do so many women read it? When you add in the response to the Heated Rivalry TV show, which has included some delightfully regressive fan attitudes to the actor’s sexualities and private lives (including calling the one proudly out bisexual man on the cast a “groomer” for dating Connor Storrie) then we’re dealing with an infestation that seems chaotic but essentially comes back to one entry point - is there inequality at play in the queer romance world? Is there a heated rivalry between queer male authors and women authors? (to foreshadow my incredibly bisexual solution: we should follow the real Heated Rivalry formula and all end up smooching!) And does this discourse tend to flatten the existence of the many non-binary authors (like Alice Oseman and Casey McQuiston) who write these books and get serially misgendered? (we can answer this one now - yes, this happens constantly).

The other day I was out with a friend and the way the discourse was introduced was “isn’t it… interesting that mostly straight women buying queer male romances - how do you feel about it?” and as someone who worked for many years in publishing before becoming an author, and who knows who keeps the industry turning, it was like being asked “how do you feel about the sun coming up every day?'“ or “thoughts on gravity?” or “what’s your emotional reaction to the passage of time?”

But just because something is normalised, doesn’t mean we can’t explore it thoughtfully: so in this essay I will explain how gravity works.

Who gets to write queer stories?

Rachel Reid, who wrote the Heated Rivalry series is a woman. Many successful, blockbuster mlm romances out now have also been written by women, many of them queer, many of them straight. Many of the big ones have been written by non-binary people. The elephant in the room (it’s also on my dog’s bed) is that as of yet, we haven’t had a queer male author reach these giddying highs of success that Heated Rivalry or Red White and Royal Blue have. Rachel Reid is married and has children and has chosen to be private about her sexuality, as is her right - but this forms part of the discourse, with people implying she needs to “prove” her queerness in order to be allowed to write books about queer character. The same thing happened to Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, the actors from the Heated Rivalry show. I’ve written about this entitlement to people’s sexualities before, and it’s toxic.

Questions about representation and diversity have been drummed into us for decades now, where questions about who has the “right” to tell certain stories have butted up against ideas of diversity “quotas” - this has happened in tv an film and acting and sports and has been a pressing question in the high octane world of hooks. This has mostly manifested itself through the lens of race and gender, with a nod to class and disability sometimes thrown in along the way. To brutally summarise what is an entire academic field of study - people of colour in many western countries have been traditionally published less than white people, while white people have been writing and profiting off stories about people of colour.

In Australia, there was a real era of white people writing about Indigenous character, often in a well-meaning way, while Indigenous authors are left unpublished, their own stories less desirable. Often these are written in incredibly patronising, and racist depictions. Similarly, at certain times and in certain genres, women published less than men, winning less prestigious prizes, etc. Diversity and quotas and representation were always meant to be a first step in reparing inequality - they were never the point in themselves. When the language used around them is treated as the end goal, rather than the means to an end, we get regressive, exclusionary rhetoric come into play.

We get situations like the Love, Simon author Becky Albertali, who was effectively forced to come out as bi because she was so viciously attacked after publishing a YA MLM romance.

Much of the criticism of this trend of women writing mlm for women adopts the same language used in these other cases, and places this as a diversity and representation issue. But in order to do this, there needs to be a structural inequality at the heart of publishing (and society) that mean that queer male authors are being kept out of publishing, are being structurally disadvantaged in some way which precludes them from writing their own books and therefore reaping the large financial benefits that all authors enjoy. It’s worth noting that most of these big success story adaptations, like Heated Rivalry, Heartstopper, and Red White and Royal Blue were written between 2016 and 2019.

Obviously homophobia is real and rife, and I will never downplay the structural inequalities that come from being out - certainly I’ve had responses to my queer rom-com In Spite of You that implied my book was either “risky” or “niche”, in a very low level example of how these inequalities may manifest. A non-queer rom-com would not be labelled as such. In fact, the use of the term “mlm” or “MM” is, I believe, an attempt to divorce the consumption of men having sex and falling in love with each other away from the sticky “political” nature of queerness, and why I tend to avoid using it to describe my own book. My book is proudly and deliberately queer.

Who reads books about men fuckin and suckin?

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I’ve always been pleasantly surprised that despite my shameful love for literal bags of lollies, I have never ever had a cavity in my teeth. I have never needed a filling, despite having the frequent urge to eat anything in the form of a gummy, despite my love of baking and fine chocolates and smooching very sweet people. This lack of teeth holes is even more surprising considering my dental appointments are… sporadic (six years was my longest).

I have never attributed this to luck however - I have attributed it to my obsessive joy at the act of brushing my teeth. I can only recall a handful of incidences where I have failed to brush my teeth in my entire life - there are even anecdotal reports from my youth, of me basically passed out in the corner of a party, suddenly rising from the dead in order to brush my teeth only to collapse again once the job is done. I have even, at times, thought my brushing and flossing routine as indicative of some of my best personality features: disciplined and organised and clean.

However, I went to the dentist yesterday (only two years since my last appointment, iconic!) and discovered that not only do I need THREE fillings, but I need them because I have brushed my gums into oblivion. Yes, I still don’t technically have cavities - but my insane, ruthless commitment to brushing has torn away my precious gums and stripped my teeth of enamel, requiring filling to shore them up. Ironic, no - the action I took to ward away fillings actually created them.

Could my virtue actually be a vice? It’s a fine line between discipline and obsession, and if I could go back in time and stop myself from getting stoned and brushing my teeth for ten minutes, I would. But when you keep in mind my other great dental issue, the fact that I grind my teeth from stress every night so badly that I’m getting botox in my jaw to save my molars from being worn down like ancient mountain ranges against the relentless passage of time, then you start to see a pattern.

I am not disciplined and organised and clean, I am an obsessive stress-head who pushes too hard on both the world and my gums. I love that scene in Mean Girls where Tina Fey explains that she’s “a pusher. I push people”. In my time I have pushed people. When I was younger, I thought that the only way to show my friends that I valued them was to provide acts of service, often based around career or creativity. And considering all my friends were writers, that usually meant that I’d push them forward for opportunities, or sign them up for things, or suggest things they’d be good at - all without them asking. It’s because I thought they were all brilliant, and the world deserved to see that too - but I remember one friend told me that I needed to stop “managing” them, and just “hang out”. An ex of mine who is a stupendous writer told me after we broke up that I sometimes projected my ambition onto other people, which is “nightmarish”. I feel like I learned that lesson, and I stopped trying to “help” my friends as my primary form of affection. I now bake them cookies.

But it’s clear, now, thanks to the psychological lessons I’ve learned from my dentist (which was both cheaper than my psychologist and also involved little cups of green water) that I turned all that pushing energy back on myself. Not just on my gums, but when I look at how down on myself I have been about being on the job market for ages, or being slow to write my second book, or failing to commit to making regular TikTok videos, maybe it’s time to realise that might not be helpful self motivation and a can-do attitude - thats actually pushing way too hard on my gums and ruining my beautiful mouth.

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Hello! Not to be a pusher, but if you are enjoying this newsletter, it would be great if you could become a paid subscriber, so I can keep affording to write it! Thank you! Plus I have some dental bills coming up.

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Interestingly, from UK terfs to US right-wing commentators, I’ve noticed a rise in attacks on the word “queer”. This has been a tiresome point of contention for basically the entire time I’ve been on the internet, leading me to write this piece in 2018 which explains why the term has been reclaimed and who uses it, and commission this piece for The Conversation that details the history of the word.

It’s completely fine for people not to use the term in reference to themselves - especially people of a certain generation when it was used widely as a slur. But as is constantly said in reply to this, for people of my generation, “gay” was the most prominent slur, and that hasn’t been “banned” from usage out of respect. Reclaiming is as much of a choice as abstaining.

What worries me is that, like any wedge in the LGBTQIA+ community, it’s been exploited by antagonists and has taken on a culture war significance. Much like “reasonable concerns” around child safety are exploited in attacks against gender affirming care, the use of the word queer has been weaponised. Now it’s gone beyond understandable confusion or issue with its former status as a slur, and has become representative of a kind of conservative separatist movement who take advantage of the transphobic members of the LGB part of the acronym, and are wedging a “gay not queer” style rhetoric.

And it relies entirely on capitalising on confusion or controversy around the world, and blantant and goal-shifting revisionism. Lies, basically.

Only recently a transphobic singer claimed that “queer” had never been used except as a slur before the 2000s, which is just blatant revisionism of our history by a straight person.

It’s so easily disproved that I literally had a photo on my phone from a women’s rights exhibition I’d been to in Scotland of a protest group in the late 70s.

A recent example literally happening right now is an innocuous tweet from BBC sport referring to an Olympian coming out as gay as being a “LGBTQ+” role model. The replies are SWARMED with people saying “he’s gay not queer” - proving that this separatist rhetoric is both planned and organised.

In order to do this, they rely on putting meaning on the word “queer” that simply isn’t represented - I’ve seen people say, for example, that the inclusion of “queer” in LGBTQ is part of a plan to include pedophilia and other paraphilia into the acronym.

Queer is being given a political meaning and weight beyond its intention or meaning.

This isn’t just happening around the word queer - it seems to be a playbook of imposing and projecting meaning onto words or phrases that were never intentioned that way, and then criminalising them. You only need to look at the pearl clutching around the Palestinian resistance slogans “From the River to the Sea” and “Globalise the Intifada”, which the former which currently under threat of being criminalised in Queensland under the new hate speech laws, and which activist and former Australian of the Year Grace Tame is being attacked over. These words are an integral part of Palestinian protest and resistance, and signify in their usage the sovereignty of the Palestinian people and their resistance to Israeli occupation and genocide in the conflict.

However, it’s been decided by people critical and inimical to the pro Palestinian cause, that these phrases are anti-semitic in nature, and are calls for violence. Resistance to a violent occupation probably justifies violence, but that’s beside the point - the phrases are not inherently violent and are not anti-semitic.

As Maha Nassar writes in The Conversation, about “from the river to the sea”:

“..the majority of Palestinians who use this phrase do so because they believe that, in 10 short words, it sums up their personal ties, their national rights and their vision for the land they call Palestine. And while attempts to police the slogan’s use may come from a place of genuine concern, there is a risk that tarring the slogan as antisemitic – and therefore beyond the pale – taps into a longer history of attempts to silence Palestinian voices.”

I know people who are not tapped into the bad faith discourse around these terms, so are vulnerable to the propagandised lies about them. That’s the goal - silence the legitimacy of pro-Palestinian resistance by imposing different meanings on the words.

At a recent talk about queer history I was a part of, an older woman approached me afterwards to chat about some of the points, and then asked in good faith “why do you identify as queer when the word is so offensive?” explaining that she was straight and had a gay friend her age who detested the term. She seemed happy with my answer and very enthused with the idea of reclaiming slurs - but for the people like her who aren’t in the position to ask these questions or be educated through other fashion, they are vulnerable to the bad-faith members of the community who are happy to split apart the acronym to further their hatred of trans people or non-binary identities, or the self-hating MAGA gays who think their faces are immune to leopards, or the many, many assholes who 20 years ago fought against gay rights, and now pretend to speak on their behalf.

Language is a not a new battleground - you could even make the argument that these tactics are a twisted appropriation of the tactics and types of concerns pushed in the eras of “political correctness” and “woke” around the cessation of using slurs in the first place.

The problem with misinformation is that lies spread and gain weight, and you can never push the genie back into the bottle, or all the bullshit back into Pandora’s box. Bad-faith actors wilfully spread these lies designed to destabilise and muddy the reality and the history of these words, and it’s very hard to fight against. Especially when they’re believed by idiots.

—

And 2026 is no different!

This month alone I’ve already moved house, my car exploded, and I’m finishing up a job. Also I got a haircut.

For THREE very exciting reasons which I cannot announce yet (👀), but I will be letting you know about over the next little while, some real “some news from me stuff”, I will have both the time and the desire to commit to regular publishing from Nonsense again. Subscribers will have seen that this year I’ve published a (more) regular slate of columns and articles, and I aim to continue that.

It’s so fun to write for this newsletter - with the shrinking of Australia’s media, there’s very little opportunities for me to write the kinds of things I love anymore. My time is also so stretched that often I can’t commit to freelance deadlines due to having a day job. I make my own time here!

Here’s an example of the kinds of things I will be writing:

I am going to aim for three articles a month, which will include my columns One Thing (weird little lifestyle/slice of life pieces), One Thought (brief pop culture and politics thoughts), Stupid! (longform culture and memoir), and my author updates. And other random stuff! If you like my writing, then there will be a bunch of it. You will be a baby bird overflowing with worms that I will stuff into your break from my own mouth.

The reason there’s been a gap was basically because I burnt out hard last year while editing The LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project, which many of you will have come to the newsletter for. With this project I was given a bunch of money to pay my writers, but like an idiot, I barely paid myself, meaning I had to take on several other jobs to support myself. I also had to write a book during this time. It was a lot, and I’m very proud of what we achieved with the project, but it also wiped me out financially in a rather severe way. Since then I’ve been working and recovering - I’ve definitely learned a lesson from this, which is trying to run a mini publication on my own would be totally doable if I hadn’t also signed up to… several other jobs and projects. And two books. And a “social life”.

Anyway, the Media Watch Project will remain up and in the archives, and will be available for paid subscribers. But now on to the next iteration!

It’s important to be transparent - this incarnation of the newsletter will be mostly a place for my own writing, as well as any time my dear collaborator Bec Shaw can give us (she’s also writing a book, so). Unlike when it was a place to boost other people’s writing as well as home my own work, I now don’t have the budget for commissioning, and will instead focus on my own writing. It’s totally ok if that’s not what you signed up for, and you would like to take your precious dubloons elsewhere. I understand!

It’s better to think of this as my personal newsletter now, and paid subscriptions similar to something like a Patreon - an extremely helpful way of supporting me as a writer. If you enjoy my writing, from freelance journalism to my fiction to my short stories - becoming a paid subscriber is the best way you can help support me. And I am very grateful. I am trying to pay my rent, buy meds for my sick dog, take my fancy boyfriend out for the wine he needs to survive, and MAYBE go to the dentist for the first time in five years, all on the shameful wages of a freelance journalist - so any way you can help will be appreciated.

You’re also going to see that some of my new exciting news 👀 will very much go hand-in-hand with Nonsense.

So, basically what I’m asking you is:

• get ready for more articles! If you’re excited, keep an eye on your inbox/ consider flagging Nonsense as a priority so it doesn’t get lost (I did this recently with some substacks I read every day, because they were getting lost in the chaos)

• If you are a free or new subscriber, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription and help this stupid boy get by in the big city! You’ll immediately get into a heaven of some sort (limbo at the very least, that’s the Nonsense guarantee)

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• If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you, I love you, please consider renewing when your time comes, and sharing with your pals

I want this newsletter to be a celebration of queerness and culture, and be a respite from the horrors. Hope you all come along too!

When I go to a new city I usually spend my first day walking for hours, like the massive six hour trek I did through New York that was mostly intentional and only partially because I lack a sense of direction. I love walking so much that it was an aspiration of mine to never own a car.

Alas, the bullshit of being an adult usually manifests by killing our dreams, and years ago I bought my first vehicle, an old car off a family member when I moved to Melbourne, because I was dating someone who lived with their parents out in the sticks and I wanted to be able to drive to them during COVID lockdowns. I’m a perfectly functional driver, but I hate doing it with a fiery passion - it could be because my parent’s driving lessons always started with “remember you’re driving a weapon more dangerous than a gun and it’s your responsibility not to kill someone” or the fact that my first driving teacher was a very old man who once pointed at a shrub and said “there’s a pretty girl”. A blind teacher doesn’t make you feel very safe when you’re still learning what the brake does. Most likely I think my driving anxiety stems from a massive multi-car pile up that happened around me when I was on my P’s which I miraculously emerged from unscathed, and which I also wonder if I accidentally caused in some way? We’ll never know.

My old car and I swiftly entered a kind of odd-couple duo, with me being the tightly wound anxious perfectionist who would get too nervous to listen to the radio when driving, and my car being the cool laid back stoner archetype who would every so often decide to just “not work” and whose back windows would spontaneously open during rainstorms. I have a horror of car washes, so when I moved into an apartment where I couldn’t wash it by hand, it permanently looked like the least interesting vehicle from Mad Max. I never enjoyed having a car, but I was at peace with the necessity of it. When I became a single dog-dad and had to drive Basil to the emergency vets at 3am, I realised I needed a car in order to uphold my responsibilities.

But as the years passed, my anxiety about my capability to drive has lessened thanks to practice and familiarity and circumstance - but at the same time my anxiety directly relating to driving MY car has increased. As I mentioned before, every so often when you turned my car on, the motor would start and you’d start to drive away, only to discover that you were crawling along at 20 km/h and you could not go any faster. The only thing I could do would be to pull over and turn the car on and off again, using desktop computer logic, which tended to work. This was annoying but manageable, while still being terrifying - a few times I’ve almost caused accidents as I’ve swung out into traffic, only for my car to essentially stall at the precise moment it needed to fly. On multiple occasions I’ve crawled along fast-speed freeways with my hazards on, just waiting for a moment to turn off somewhere so I could restart my car. And gradually, as problems usually do when left alone, it became worse, with the incidents becoming more and more common. I dreaded the idea of starting my car, going out of my way to avoid getting stuck on a random side street near my boyfriend’s house, endlessly turning the motor on and off again for an hour. I had someone previously in my life who used to get annoyed at my recalcitrance to drive and my suggestions of public transport - entirely unsympathetic to how nightmarish an inconsistent car is.

Obviously I took this car to mechanics. For years I’d drive it in to see gruff men in polo shirts, and explain the problem. “When you turn it on, it will probably be fine” I’d say. “But you have to try it a few times!” They’d always look at me like I was a crazy person and then when I came to collect it, they’d say “oh yeah your battery was a bit loose, that was it”.

A day later it would fail again. I did this multiple times, to multiple mechanics, all for nothing. I truly felt like a woman in the medical system.

A few weeks ago I bit the bullet and booked it in for a big diagnostic at a specialty place, explained the problem, made them write it down - and when I came back to pick it up, they confidently told me they’d fixed the loose battery connector. Luckily, I started the car and tried to drive it away and then triumphantly crawled it back into the garage, screaming at them “drive it! Drive it! It’s still broken! I’m not crazy!” They had to concede they’d missed the issue. This is very gratifying - I don’t know anything about cars and not having any of the language to explain my issues was frustrating.

Days passed, and then on the day before I was moving to a new house, I got the call - the car, as they described it, was currently eviscerated on the floor of the garage. They’d pulled it apart to its bones and discovered that the engine casing is warped, that there’s a fundamental flaw at the base of its being that causes it to be like it is. Sometimes I wish people could find out the one thing that’s causing all my problems too, so we could remove it. Probably my brain though, and arguably, I need that.

Turns out the engine casing is fixable - just not by me and my limited funds. It will be cheaper to buy another car instead, meaning I will become someone who hates cars who will have voluntarily brought TWO cars in their lifetime, which fees like a betrayal of who I am. Bring on the mind control cities please.

There’s too many to remember, but one of the first times I fully realised this was a bunch of 30-something queers thrown together and told to be wholesome was when they had a big blow up about politics on TV, which was clearly unscripted. In fact the cast has fought about Trump and centrism, with Karamo even calling Trump ally Sean Spicer “a sweet guy”.

Then add in last year’s shock Bobby Berk exit which was supposedly thanks to Tan and Antoni trying to kick him out to hire their friend, the fact that only Tan was invited to Antoni’s bachelor party, and repeated claims that JVN was actually a “monster” with “rage issues”, and it’s clear that these people are not friends. They have to pretend to be friends for the show to work, and perhaps it’s a miracle that they got to ten seasons.

When I interviewed the Queer Eye cast back in 2018, I was mostly focused on the fact that Antoni hated me and it was an indescribably awkward interview. But even while I was being alpha dogged by Antoni and Karamo was being very rude, I noticed the fact that they were all sniping at each other quite regularly. Tan even apologised for something Karamo said to me. And this was after the first season…

Queer Eye is not particularly meant for the gays. The original season, back in 2003, was part of what I term the “gay jester” era, where queer men, mostly gay, were suddenly desirable on screen as entertainers - but more specifically as the entertainment. There were proscribed ways of how gay men could act, and it was always for the consumption of straight people, who would laugh and be entertained by the show of being camp and bitchy and queeny and gay. The new Queer Eye wasn’t like that, and was actually very wholesome and gently accepting and had some gorgeous moments of acceptance - but I’d say it was still for straight people, but in a different way. It was educational. It was inclusive. It’s for the straight mum of a small gay son, and that’s great. That said I did watch the second season with a boyfriend at the time and we did have a cry at one of the cute trans acceptance episodes - but overwhelmingly I’d say it’s for straight consumption.

Which is WHY I kinda love the fact that the whole time they were forced to perform for general, straight, cis consumption, they were also being huge messy bitches behind the scenes. It feels honest - you can throw a bunch of queers together and you’re not going to get five people who point in the same direction. Like the LGBTQIA+ community, we’re connected by sex and gender diversity and really nothing else - there’s a constant debate about what that means, and the rules of that connection too. Are we defined by otherness? Are we defined by the mechanics of how we fuck? Are we defined by the political goals of our rights and dignities? Who knows? But Queer Eye, by making the decision to showcase some of the diversity of our community (god I’d have loved a lesbian in the cast so much) - across race and gender and sexualities, has also captured the reality of how that plays out. There’s going to be political differences, lifestyle differences, and of course personality differences. I’m not a gay man, but as a queer man i’m often in majority gay spaces and sometimes it feels like a hot attic full of mean cats - at least until someone starts playing music videos on YouTube.

I adore the messiness because that feels real - and because just like the LGBTQIA+ community, they mostly overcame those differences to create something together, something which I truly believe helped sell us to an increasingly hostile world, and taught kindness and acceptance. All while being messy bitches! Thanks Queer Eye.

I will not be watching the last season however, I too am messy, and hold grudges against most of them.

—

One Thought is my new segment where I have one thought and just go with it.

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As we’ve done since time immemorial, Nonsense is wrapping up our year in culture, with a bunch of randomly selected categories and a selection criteria based on “whatever I can remember, I’m so tired”. Most of these have been pretty firmly held in my head since the moment I saw them - but there are a couple of late contenders in the mix, which is so exciting. I wonder if people worry about the Nonsense end of year list when thinking of their release schedule? I’m going to say: yes, they do.

Best TV show of the year: Andor season 2

I’ve said this before, but there was absolutely no reason for Andor to go this hard - the majority of the Star Wars tv shows have been enjoyable action slop, with varying degrees of proficiency. I like action slop, I will eat every serving. But both seasons of Andor are prestige television - a timely, thoughtful and often devastating reflection on the rise and resistance against fascism, with moments of cathartic triumph. All of it desperately needed in the current climate, and probably completely misunderstood by the people who need to watch it the most. My heart was in my mouth this entire season, the performances are immaculate, and the fact that they’re not doing another season despite how successful this show was, is another example of how the writers and directors wanted to honour the narrative they created.

Best queer culture of the year: Heated Rivalry

I love hockey!!! To use the parlance, this show was a total slam dunk! A home run!

An adaptation of a mlm romance that takes every part of the story seriously: the tropes, the helpless yearning, the eroticism, the queerness. I am just so incredibly impressed and thankful and horny. I love all my hockey boys so much. The fact that we’re getting hyperbolised queer men eroticism in the way we’ve seen hundreds of straight love stories get makes me so happy - and for the people who are criticising the show for not having “realistic” male/male sex, this is not a documentary. This is a romance, it’s meant to be larger than life.

This show could just be sexy fun - it really could - and I’d have been happy. But in episode 5 we get one of the greatest depictions of queer grand romantic gesture that I’ve ever seen on screen, something that hearkens back to the straight rom-coms I grew up on and adore, and it escalated Heated Rivalry from great to transcendent.

If you want me to write about the sticky queer rep discourse around this show, I will, just lmk.

Best music of the year: The Mayhem Ball

“Pop culture was in art, now art’s in pop culture, in me”.

Not only was Mayhem the best album of the year, but the Mayhem Ball was the greatest concert I’ve ever seen. My ex wouldn’t give me my ticket to the Eras Tour so I can’t compare, but I am pretty sure that Taylor could never have created the queer church experience that made me cry during Born This Way. Never have I felt as much joy as when I got to dance to Applause with my boyfriend, surrounded by queers.

Best comedy of the year: Smosh

Hey so I had my big YouTube era, back around 2011 and onwards, and I honestly never thought I’d go back to it. I’m an old man now, I should watch dignified things, like gay hockey shows. I also remember watching the original Smosh around this time and firmly deciding it was not for me - two bros doing bro comedy was not my vibe. So, I was very surprised when I discovered that not only was Smosh still around, but it had morphed into something I really love?

My intro was because they had a bunch of Smosh cast on various Dropout shows. Originally I decided there was a rivalry and I should hate Smosh, because I’m a weird spiteful yet loyal guy. But I soon realised this wasn’t the case, and I became obsessed mostly with Angela Giarratana from Smosh on Make Some Noise, and eventually I followed her back to YouTube and started watching Smosh. In 2025 I wasn’t able to do any improv or sketch comedy like I normally do, and I started to really feel that lack - I missed the feeling of goofing around with my friends. Smosh, I discovered, replicates that feeling beautifully - it really does feel like watching a bunch of comedy nerds pal around on screen and have a good time. It’s joyous and fun and has made me laugh excessively hard on the regular.

@vegasvixen_loveTOP 5 Funny Moments #smosh #shaynetopp #spenceragnew #chosen #compilations #comedy #fyp #viral #smoshgames #trivialpursuit

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Best film of the year: The Naked Gun

Comedy films are BACK, baby. This was an incredibly silly film and I adored it. It paid homage to the original films in a really interesting way - it used the joke formulas to inform its comedy, rather than trying to create a replication or fill the plot with easter eggs. What we get is just a film full of goofs, with some ridiculously memorable jokes and lines. I constantly think about the gag “and an ass that would make any toilet bowl beg for the brown”.

Best culture of the year: Grey’s Anatomy

Ahahah this year was the year I started watching Grey’s Anatomy for the first time and it’s a full body immersion, a total spiritual obsession. I’ve watched seven whole seasons - so many people have died. So, so, so many people. A new season did come out this year, so it technically qualifies for this prestigious award. Another pertinent point is that I make all the rules, so it qualifies because I say so.

I hate Owen Hunt so much, why can’t he be one of the scores of doctors who dies?

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THANKS FOR READING. Please considering buying my book, In Spite of You, as a last minute xmas gift or for holiday reading.

Buy in Spite of you

I recently did a workshop on how to hook readers, and I found a huge list of generic clickbait phrases which work, so I have decided that I am going to use them for my author update newsletters. So much more interesting than any headline that’s like “I am still frantically banging on about my book and pretending I’m not”.

I might get bored of this, but I’m excited for the next update to be like “I have sad news…” and then it’s just that my ebook is 20% off. That amuses me.

Get ready for my next book

All year I’ve been working on my next book, which is another queer rom-com, tentatively titled ‘Million Dollar Dog’. That’s all I’m going to say right now, but there is indeed a dog, and the dog is not the love interest. This is not a book about the future that conservatives imagined after gay marriage.

It’s been a hectic year, not just because releasing In Spite of You was pretty all-consuming, and I realised that if I didn’t do something drastic, I’d get to the end of 2025 with an unfinished manuscript. So, I decided to use the last week of October and the entirety of November to do a writing sprint, unwittingly paying homage to the horror of NANOWRIMO.

Basically what this sprint involved was finishing my manuscript (roughly half the book) by hitting a cascading series of word counts. So, the idea would be that I have to reach certain word counts by certain dates (usually the end of the week) in order to hit my target. The reason that I thought this would work for me is that instead of giving every day a word limit, I was able to capitalise on days where I had more time/ clarity/ and motivation, and not get absolutely torpedoed by an off day or a mishap.

This logic actually did work for me, mostly - the rolling system was both forgiving and motivating. However, I am also famously terrible at maths, so I got to roughly my third week and realised that instead of being ahead of my goal like I thought, I was actually behind. I then had to go to Sydney for the weekend, which put me further back.

But - the sprint logic helped as well. I knew that I had to make small term sacrifices to reach the goal, and was able to just fully immerse myself, and managed not only to catch up to my word goal through some epic writing weekends, but actually push past it, finishing a day early.

It was honestly very satisfying - sure I went a little bonkers and isolated, and definitely neglected my friends - but I also felt like I really toned my writing muscle. I’ve always felt like I’m a slow novel writer, but now I know that I can smash out 6000 words in a day - and then do it again the next day. It’s comforting and empowering.

I have also way over-written, and my next draft will involve editing down to roughly 75-80k. Hooray!

Competitions! Giveaways! Free stuff!

In Spite of You is currently part of two competitions on Instagram, both of which I highly endorse, and want to share with my faithful newsletter pals.

This Summer Love Stack comp is great for all of you who already bought In Spite of You - you just need it and two other books to win some prizes (there’s some good book vouchers).

And then there’s the Aussie Romance Mega Giveaway, where you can win signed copies of not just my book, but a HORDE of amazing Aussie books.

I saw Lady Gaga

I really do want to write a full article about Lady Gaga, because it was transformative, it was spectacular, and it was absolutely church for queer people. I still feel protected and nurtured by it, somehow, still enriched and inspired.

I’ve been a long-time Lady Gaga fan, with very clear memories of each of her albums coinciding with incredibly important moments in my life. Or just really fun moments, too. There are few musicians who manage to traverse the scope of emotion like this - a lot of the music that really matters to me tends to be heavily emotional and serious, ethereal crying music by sad ladies and bearded bird men.

Lady Gaga is often the soundtrack of my joy - I remember her music as the soundtrack of parties in my twenties, of gay clubs with my friends, of brief and wild hookups. I remember a Lady Gaga themed party that my friend Mim held, most likely for her birthday, where I got overwhelmed and hid in a bedroom for an hour or something, just listening to Lady Gaga pounding through the walls - I think it was in that weird moment of psychedelic assisted communion where casual fandom turned to love. Even more recently, the song How Bad Do You Want Me is the soundtrack of falling in love with my boyfriend, blaring in my car as I drove back from his house.

She’s just such an artist - unapologetically weird, always firm in her principles, and always trying to change and grow. Very much an inspiration.

But what really surprised me about the Mayhem Ball, which was **art** in its entirety, was how affected I was by Born This Way. It’s never been my favourite song, and even became slightly overplayed for me at various queer parties and mardi gras style things, almost a commercialised shorthand that rubbed on me a little. But when she came out and beautifully dedicated the entire concert to the queer community and sang this song, I had a big old cry. Ridiculous.

Book events coming up

Speaking of queer stuff, I’m doing a bunch of events early next year for Midsumma Festival, which I’m not emotionally ready to engage with, but I probably should. They’re also quite fun, what is my brand?

I’m doing an event on the queer culture of FURBIES:

I am speaking to my friend and gay icon Dennis Altman, which I am both excited about and incredibly honoured:

And finally I am doing an event about gay dogs!

Buy my book as a christmas gift?

You should buy my book for your friends and families, and in the spirit of spite, buy it for your enemies.

OK BYE!

Buy In Spite of You for Xmas

Basically, now that i’m a working author (!?!?!?!??) I want to keep readers and potential readers up to date with my books and what’s happening and why it’s happening. I want to give you a front row seat to whatever flavour my mental breakdown is today.

If you’re a Nonsense subscriber but you HATE my books for some reason, you can unsubscribe from Stupid! and remain a subscriber of Nonsense, but I’d also be kinda hurt. But I’d get it. It’s an option. But don’t. But you can!

Three months of In Spite of You

My debut novel In Spite of You came out in August and it’s been such a goddamn dream. I had launches in Sydney and Melbourne, visited some of my favourite bookshops to sign books, did a bunch of events, did radio interviews, and was a guest at the Writers Assemble! festival in Adelaide and at the Brisbane Writers Festival more recently.

It’s, without hyperbole, been a dream come true.

People love to ask me things like “how’s the book going?” and I like to answer with “I have no idea”. I can probably safely assume it’s not a runaway bestseller at this early stage, but that’s ok! It’s my debut novel! We’re building! But that said - if you like my book, please recommend to other people, word of mouth is absolutely the only way In Spite of You can flourish. You can also leave reviews on Goodreads…

Buy In Spite of You

Reviews and praise

I haven’t stopped being very touched by this gorgeous review of In Spite of You in the Star Observer by Chloe Sargeant.

Let me open by saying: hooooly fuck, do we all get absolutely read for queer filth with In Spite of You. Lenton has created something spectacularly tender, yet gloriously messy here: a rom-com that understands us — queer grudges and emotional scars, queer joy and beauty, queer failure and queer triumph. Just… everything. All of it. This book is a beautiful mess of queerness that feels as though it is buzzing off the page.

Also THIS was a moment:

Upcoming stuff

I’m helping the wonderful @oliviadezilva launch their novella Eggshell, as part of the @spineless_wonders Writers on Writers mini festival. We’re gonna chat WRITING, and it will be FUN, and you should be THERE. Olivia has released two books this year, so we’re gonna chat about what it’s like being an over-achiever.

Thursday October 30, 7.30pm, online!

Work in Progress

I’ve been working on my NEXT book, which I’m currently calling Million Dollar Dog, another queer rom-com (this one with a bisexual woman protagonist and a bisexual man love interest - I am PUSHING the bi agenda). I’ve honestly struggled with it over the year - real second book syndrome. I think trying to go directly into a new story while still doing edits of In Spite of You and then navigating the whole release of the book meant I struggled to extricate my brain from it into a new story. But nevertheless, she persisted, and I’m now well over half way through the first draft.

Furthermore, I’m in the middle of a WRITING SPRINT, with the aim of finishing the first draft by the end of November, so I can take December off and not be actively writing something for the first time in a couple of years. It will also mean I’ll meet my (new) deadline easily, after doing some edits next year.

It’s actually going so well - i’ve given myself a cascading word limit, so rather than try to hit a certain amount of words each day (which I’ve tried before and found that I dislike), which means I just have to hit certain word goals BY various dates, usually coinciding with my current days off from my various other jobs (friday and sunday). Over the last few weekends I’ve been hitting 3000+ words, which means I’m ahead of my schedule, which is doing great things for my confidence.

It feels good to feel myself learning new skills and tactics as an author - I hope to be writing books for the rest of my very long life, so discovering new successful techniques feels important.

What I’m reading

I’m going to leave you with a recommendation of a book to read that’s not my own. I’m so selfless. I was lucky enough to endorse the wonderful Darcy Green’s new queer AFL romance After The Siren, because it’s SO good, I was utterly obsessed. And I hate AFL! That’s how good it is.

You can pick up a copy here.

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OK THAT’S ALL FOR NOW, LOVE YOU!!!!!

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We all know that “mart” is a contraction of “market” that became a shorthand in the mid fifteenth century, and is typically used these days to highlight the difference between this humble purveyor of staples, as opposed to gaudy supermarkets and their disgusting excess of choice. I have partaken of miniature marts in my time - I have purchased milk, bread, Panadol for my hangovers. I have gone to them for generic sweet treats when I have decided that the winds of fate have buffeted me to such an extent that I deserve a snack. They provide a function, and on the whole, I am grateful for their existence. In New York they have “bodegas” which seem to provide a lot more utility, but really they are just mini marts putting on airs. We get it, you can buy cheese sandwiches or whatever.

I have been in my apartment almost two years now, and it was only recently where I felt the need to go to the local mini mart. The situation was dire - I had returned home from a small interstate trip and forgotten to buy milk, and I needed milk for my gluten free cornflakes, which I need because of my rotten stomach, which I acquired from bad life choices. I didn’t have time to walk all the way to the supermarket, so I decided to pop in. Not a big deal, right? You couldn’t be more wrong.

The mini mart has always had a forbidding air - while the door is always open, there are dark windows covered by shades meaning you can never get a good idea of what is going on inside its dank depths, what treasures are on sale. The outside is plastered in community notices, including roughly a dozen fliers for a middle aged woman wearing a beret with more determination than flair, who teaches english to high school students. If it was French, the beret would make sense. For english I guess I’d recommend a crown, or maybe a pie, or perhaps something transphobic? I walk past this shop constantly, and they often leave little plates of things they’re trying to move next to the door, with price signs next to them. For many weeks it was three DVD copies of the Will Smith vehicle ‘Hitch’. Once it was a single keyring with a blue car on it. Another time a handful of wilted herbs. Once a child’s painting of a cat.

Quirky! I thought. On this day, there was a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code, but I needed milk, so I left it behind. The shop, I discovered, was roughly the size of a closet, with a woman sitting behind a counter, looking at me like I was a trespasser in her house. “Oh!” she said. “Good morning!” I said politely. We stared at each other for a bit, and then I looked around. There was one fridge - and it was entirely full of a knockoff brand of Gatorade. There was a wall of what I could only describe as “miscellanea”, which makes sense for these kinds of small stores, except I couldn’t understand why anyone would ever want any of these things. I could not see a single snack or confectionary, although on its own near a bucket full of extension cords, was a single can of red lentils. And most importantly, no milk.

Every time I walk past, I think - who is this for? How does it exist? How does it survive? I don’t live in a super classy area or anything, but I still have to imagine the rent would require some form of earning money. I even wondered if I was being un-woke - perhaps it catered to a particular community or demographic, and something like milk is incredibly white-oriented as a “staple”. But even then - which racial group requires only forty bottles of knock-off Powerade and some beans? It doesn’t make any sense.

There was a pizza place in Sutherland near my high school which everyone said was a “drug front”, which I assumed was typical high school rhetoric. The same girl who told me that also confidently told me that “the internet” was in Antarctica. However, years after I graduated, it apparently was confirmed that it was in fact a drug front. Maybe this mini mart operates in a similar way? But it’s such a bad front. It’s the most suspicious place I’ve ever seen.

I think what scares me about this place is that it’s somehow immune to the terrible pressure of capitalism, the awful system that keeps us in our places, keeps us downtrodden and hopeless. It is terrifying because it makes me yearn for a world where I am not ruled by the dollar. It scares me because it has a freedom I can only dream of.

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Patrick Lenton is a writer and author and the editor of Nonsense Newsletter. His debut novel, In Spite of You, is out now.

Buy 'In Spite of You'