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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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?

—

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

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.

—

OK THAT’S ALL FOR NOW, LOVE YOU!!!!!

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Add in all the tiny personal challenges that affect my own stupid corner of the world, and suddenly I’m desperately in need of a full brain colonic, or at least a moment of respite from the horrors. And for the past three months, that’s strangely been the medical drama Greys Anatomy.

I’ve gone from being a full time staffed culture writer to some kind of weird semi-employed author monstrosity who freelances, which means that it’s no longer entirely critical for me to be across every single new TV show and movie. No longer is my job hinged upon having several marketable thoughts about every new release - instead, sometimes an article will come my way and I’ll watch a season of Only Murders in the Building, and then go back to the horny blood-soaked world of Seattle Grace Hospital.

Greys Anatomy has always been one of those gaping culture gaps in my love affair with TV, and as I’ve become more and more obsessed with the brilliance of Shonda Rhimes, I’ve considered going back and finally finding out what all the fuss is about. I’m often squeamish around medical stuff - I hate the visual of a needle going in, and over-empathise with the pain of surgery, so I always thought I’d struggle with a medical drama. But very quickly I realised that not only does the sight of a naked heart beating in some hot doctor’s hand not particularly phase me, but that the show is almost about everything other than the particulars of surgery. I have no idea if what they’re doin is in any way realistic, and it doesn’t matter - medicine in Greys Anatomy is like a magic system of a fantasy book, with consistent rules that make sense in the narrative, but which disintegrate under any real scrutiny. Derek Shepherd is a neurosurgeon, but he might as well be a mighty brain wizard for all it matters. When they’re doing a keyhole external laproscropic bowel surgery, you could easily tell me that Christina is casting an ancient infernal spell. It just doesn’t matter.

That said, my god the show has FUN with their medical magic. The “stunt” episodes are truly legendary - the man with a bomb in his chest, the surgery to remove a pole that has impaled two people, the girl who can’t feel pain, the guy with a tree growing inside him, the woman who can’t stop orgasming… each one not only creates a kind of candy bag of opportunities for the writers, but is expertly interweaved with the personal dramas and stakes of each of the characters. It’s a drama, that slowly turns into a soap opera - I’m up to season 4 right now, and the rot is setting in (I love soap operas too, so this won’t deter me), but it’s a marked difference from the tight focus and high stakes of the first season for example. The characters are brilliant - human, flawed, incredibly annoying, sometimes even loveable, and as TikTok has spoiled me, picked off along the way in increasingly traumatic ways.

All of this is exactly the kind of television that could provide the escapism I need right now - but I think it goes further than that. I think that somehow, Greys Anatomy has turned into a weird little pocket dimension, outside of time and reality and logic. As we speak, season 22 of the show is about to come out. I don’t know much about it - I know Ellen Pompeo, the titular Meredith Grey is still on board, but I’m still at season 4 so I can’t look into the future like this. The first season aired back in 2005 - one of the reasons I never watched it at this time was because I was living in sharehouses without TVs at that point, studying serious literature - and there is a comfort in going back to that time. I’m not saying that 2005 was without problems - but it was a time without our specific set of problems. That’s comforting, that’s an escape.

It’s also a show that deliberately carves out this picket dimension idea because of how they choose to construct the world of Seattle Grace - it’s a closed off dysfunctional ecosystem by design, a kind of timeless place where surgeons who seem broken by the very nature of their job, are stuck. We rarely see them outside of the hospital, and when we do, it’s their brief moments of rest in their houses, or drinking at the bar across the road. There’s one notable episode where all the men go camping and absolutely fail at it - there is a kind of symbiotic function, where they ned the hospital as much as the hospital needs them, like those parasites that live in the stomachs of whales.

All their relationships are waged in the depths of the hospital - sex in the on-call room, arguments in the elevator, divorces across the cracked open sternum of someone in surgery. This kind of hyper focus happens a lot in long-running shows - by the end of Friends you realise that they don’t seem to know anyone else? But this is not an accident in Greys Anatomy - we are given a fly on the wall’s perspective of an insane but necessary world, and the people who have chosen to live within it. For escapism purposes, this is next level - not only are we divorced from our current reality, but we are given a key to a private universe with its own set of rules.

Sometimes the escapism can be jarring - for example, my first interaction with the actor Sara Ramirez was as the lamentable Che Diaz in And Just Like That, and it’s been hard to go back in time and see her as Callie. Likewise, just knowing that most of these actors are now twenty years older can be weirdly displacing - for an example, I am obsessed with the glamour of Dr Addison Montgomery Shepherd, and found it disquieting to learn that the fabulous actress, Kate Walsh, now lives in Western Australia.

It’s also not like the show is entirely divorced from the problems of reality - in a recent episode I watched, Dr Bailey had to operate on a white supremacist ambulance driver with a giant swastika on his stomach. The dislocation is that we’re in a world right now, only 17 years later, where the uncontroversial placement of both Nazism and racism as being incontrovertibly bad would now be disputed, where holocaust denier and nazi sympathisers (and nazis) are twisting the objective truth of the situation and leading America from positions of power. Dislocations like this test the limits of the pocket universe theory, but also drive home just how restful it can be when the next episode is once again about Meredith’s weird commitment issues and tumours in strange places.

One of the more recent shows I’ve watched for an article is the latest season of The Boys spinoff, Gen V. I like it a lot - violent superhero dystopic fiction is very much my jam, and a welcome contrast to the increasingly toothless MCU. But since the beginning, The Boys extended universe has been a satire of conservative America, with a particularly deft commentary on the nature of propaganda and truth-bending narratives. What’s distressing about this season of Gen V is that the supposedly hyperbolic satire has in many ways been eclipsed by the reality of what’s actually happening in America right now. Sure - we don’t have ultraviolent superheroes running around, but Gen V has a more functional democracy in many ways than the country that currently is sending the national guard into American cities to abduct immigrants. There’s no comfort in escapism in a world defined by otherworldly powers like a guy with a quantum singularity in his butthole. That’s weird.

The fact that I have EIGHTEEN SEASONS MORE of Greys Anatomy is comforting and scary in comparison - i have probably a year worth of escapism at least to look forward to, a weird experience of watching these actors age from youth to late middle age in fast forward, cramming tragedies and medical mishaps and culture defining moments into one deranged marathon. Eighteen seasons of a show that exists outside of time and is untouched by our horrors - perhaps the upcoming season 22 will in some way reference Trump and many of our other issues, but regardless, back in season 1, we’ll always have Meredith Grey, unstuck in time, making terrible choices.

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—

Hey just a quick note, sorry for the moments of radio silence lately - I’ve had a bit going on, but I plan on getting a more regular schedule of this newsletter going again, especially once I deliver my next book draft. As always, thank you for sticking around.

—

Patrick Lenton is a writer and author living in Melbourne. His debut novel, In Spite of You, comes out in August and is available for preorder now.

One of my most deranged little projects is my spite playlist, which I titled “spiteful as fuck” in a flash of rare lack of inspiration - in this list I collect the most spiteful songs I can think of. Why? Well, why do people collect stamps? Why do birds collect bits of blue plastic? Why does The Santa Monica Ear Collector collect the ears of his victims? We’ll never know.

It began, as so many exercises in derangement and spite, after a breakup many years ago. I’d gone through the sad mopey stage, full of Phoebe Bridger and Bon Iver and dark rooms, and was moving into the next stage of grief, which is a kind of petty anger. I’ve only had this phase a few times after breakups - sometimes it’s more of a sad yet mutual thing, or just a huge relief because you were dating a walking red flag. Sometimes it’s more about realising you’re a strong and powerful woman who can have it all. But when you realise you’ve been screwed over, perhaps during the relationship or in the way that your ex has conducted themselves post breakup, you need to indulge in some spite music.

And that’s where this list comes in. It’s designed to be cathartic, to help you express those pent up emotions. Every single one of these songs should be able to be screamed at karaoke, while your friends watch on thinking “wow he’s not ok”.

It’s a list that’s designed to give you an echo of Stevie Nicks staring down her ex Lindsay Buckingham, as she sings one of the most spiteful sings in existence WHICH SHE WROTE ABOUT HIM.

@lastinglooksStevie Nicks sings “Silver Springs” directly to her ex Lindsey Buckingham on stage in 1997.🔥 #stevienicks #fleetwoodmac #stevienickstiktok #stevienickslive #fleetwoodmacsilversprings #fleetwoodmacconcert #silversprings1997

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Obviously it’s on the list.

It’s also the official playlist of my book, In Spite of You, a book about spite. I listened to Silver Springs CONSTANTLY while writing this book.

ANYWAY - here’s where I need your help. I am always on the lookout for MORE spite songs to add to my playlist, and it’s been a while since I updated it. Comment with your nominations?

I’ve been thinking about this feeling a lot, because I think it might be closest to what I’m feeling at the moment with my book out in the world. Very good! Very excited!

On a side note, one of the defining crimes of my childhood was when my sister was stealing my advent calendar chocolates, which in turn exposed the Santa Claus myth to me. Essentially, she would sneak down the hallway and eat my chocolate for the day in the dead of night, like a rat or a vampire or a hungry dad. The saddest part is that it took me almost a week before I was finally sure that I hadn’t just forgotten that I’d eaten them myself. I gaslit myself thanks to my own poor memory - or perhaps I was simply too naive and trusting, and this was my first introduction to the wickedness that lies at the heart of people (or siblings). As a result, I rigged my room with a complicated net of traps, that would ring bells and make a toy cow moo and awake me if the chocolate thief came a-knocking. Instead, on Christmas eve, I caught my dad delivering “Santa’s” presents to the foot of my bed. Childhood over!

At the Melbourne launch of my book, In Spite of You, my esteemed host Beverley Wang asked me what it was like having my debut novel out in the world. It’s such a simple question, but in the moment I felt exactly like that kid on Christmas morning, truly unable to quite come to terms with everything I was feeling. I ended up giving a weird nonsense answer where I described the feeling as “one of those nightmares where nice things happen”.

It’s mostly a good example of how my brain works a bit wonky - a friend once described talking to me as being similar to one of those arcade claw machines, where I’m clearly trying for a specific anecdote or description or point, but accidentally come up with a plush Pikachu instead.

I think what I was getting at is that I find a lack of control scary at the best of times - my nightmares always involve cars that don’t have brakes, for example. So the fact that my book, which I have invested my HEART and SOUL and PISS into is out into the world and I can barely do anything to make sure people read it with their eyeballs, is weirdly reminiscent of nightmare logic. Luckily, it’s also something I’ve wanted all my life, so it is actually a dream. But chasing your dreams is scary! Hence the nightmare.

See my point?

Amy Poehler wrote in her memoir, Yes Please, that the only things worth doing ARE scary. It’s scary to try to do something that matters to you. So when people are like “you must be so happy and excited”, I’m like “Yes! And it’s terrifying!”

I often think back to one of my first “breaks”, which was really just an opportunity, but at the time felt like the clouds parting and the hand of god reaching down to slap my ass. I was still at university, and managed to impress my script writing lecturer with an assignment I wrote, which she thought was very funny. Earlier that year, the very first short story I’d ever published had been selected for The Best Australian Writing, just to put things into perspective. I’d spent my first three years of undergrad getting pretty ordinary to terrible marks, and this was the first moment that I dared think “maybe I am a decent writer?”

Out of the blue, that lecturer gave me a call and told me that due to a weird scheduling error, The Old Fitz Theatre in Woolloomooloo had a free slot that they were desperately trying to fill, and they’d approached her to see if she had anything. Instead, she said that if I could turn around a one hour play in ONE WEEK, she would produce it for me. I would have a professionally produced and directed play on a real stage.

I basically didn’t sleep that week - every moment that I wasn’t in class, I feverishly wrote a weird play. At my terrible bartending job, I was jotting down lines of dialogue under the counter when someone threw a knife at me. For some reason I also had a job performing at a food and wine festival in Tasmania with a bunch of my comedy friends, and I remember getting blasted on free wine and heading back to the hostel to write incoherent dialogue all night and then going out and performing. At a family birthday party, I hid in the bathroom and wrote the final page.

And I loved every goddamn second of it. I have this strong immersive memory of the moment that the draft script was accepted by the theatre - I was on a train from Wollongong to Sydney, a clear blue sky and a sparkling ocean flashing out the window, and I’m listening to Chicago by Sufjan Stevens. I remember thinking that if I could do this - write weird shit for a living - then I’d be happy forever.

And then on opening night I completely flipped out - once again I was powerless to control what was about to happen, and I HATED it. I have a friend who is a playwright who once told me that the worst night of her life is the opening night. I remember wondering if this level of fear and anxiety was because deep in my heart, I knew it was a bad play, and that I was a bad writer. Now I know that what I was feeling was the excitement and fear that comes with taking a risk, and that I would become weirdly addicted to it.

We actually got a decent review for a play written in two weeks by a drunk 23 year old - but I just went back and read the script and I think that might be more down to the actors and the direction than my writing, which is wooden and disconnected. Some good jokes though.

It’s funny that almost 20 years later, I’m feeling that exact same mix of euphoria and terror. And by funny, I mean - what a goddamn joy. Imagine being bored. Essentially, this is me trying to write my way into trying to enjoy the sensation of fear and excitement around my book being out in the world.

Anyway, you should buy a copy for your friends and family.

—

Jeremy, troubleshooting the third act of a crisis involving anilingus and a popular brand of flavoured corn chips, noticed the invite pop up on his screen but was forced to ignore it. Someone was crying, various senior-management types had gathered at his desk like faux-Louboutin-wearing seagulls around a pile of old chips, and increasingly panicked emails from the CEO in Fiji were backing up his email in rapid succession.

‘At the end of the day, nobody wants to think about eating chips when they’re looking at someone munching on a butt, and that’s the predicament we find ourselves in,’ pointed out one of the glossy-blonde managers from sales who all weirdly had British accents.

‘Umm, homophobic,’ answered Aiden, one of the writers, his trendy bowl-cut hair and asymmetrical dangling earring bobbing with his faux outrage. He was wearing a shirt inexplicably featuring Hillary Clinton and the caption, How am I meant to live, laugh, love under these conditions? Jeremy wondered if it was a reference he was now too old and uncool to understand, or simply incomprehensible on purpose.

‘Sorry?’ responded the sales manager, who might have been named Samantha, or maybe he’d just typecast her as the Sex and the City character because of her propensity for shoulderpads. She looked as if she was trying to work out whether Aiden was making a serious accusation or simply an irony-poisoned one – allegations of homophobia in their office could be either.

‘I eat ass and Doritos,’ pointed out Aiden, nodding to Jeremy.

‘That’s beautiful, Aiden,’ Jeremy muttered. ‘Our very own “clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose”.’ His eyes were still fluttering to the Facebook invite looming in the corner of his screen, but he was unable to click on it with literally half the office gathered around his desk. He was also very aware of the old and quite ripe yoghurt container, the lip-balm-smeared wine glass from last Friday’s drinks and the dozens of chocolate wrappers that made up the ecosystem of his working environment.

‘Okay, well, I guess in many ways you can’t un-eat an ass,’ Jeremy said, trying to sound firm. In terms of crises, this was very much a Wednesday – but unless he nipped it in the bud it could spiral into more hysteria and, even worse, more work for him. ‘We’ve removed the Doritos ads from the article, so it shouldn’t be an issue any more.’

‘This is a million-dollar campaign – the damage is done!’ squawked the sales manager, who Jeremy was almost one hundred per cent sure was actually named Samantha.

‘Okay, okay – walk me through it. How did this get through our editorial processes?’ asked Jeremy’s big boss, Gina, PopBuzz managing editor, who’d been pulled out of whatever big important meeting she’d been in to deal with the Doritos– anilingus issue. As always, Gina managed to look effortlessly chic in a daisy-yellow blazer; she had the flawless skin of a former beauty journalist. She was new at PopBuzz, and good at her job. Jeremy was very aware of the fact that she was five years younger than him.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, confused but starting to understand the problem. ‘This is our editorial process.’

They locked eyes for a moment. ‘Oh,’ she said.

Sarah-Jessica , the writer of the offending article, sniffled, and Jeremy attempted an awkward pat of the arm, before thinking better of it and giving a reassuring thumbs up instead – which he immediately saw had come across as needlessly sarcastic.

The problem had first peeked its head out in a pitch meeting Jeremy was running with a surprising amount of mid-week energy, thanks to several large coffees he’d drunk to combat his mild mid-week hangover. Sarah-Jessica, smiling broadly, had turned her laptop around and forced them all to watch a popular electronic musician enact performative consensual anilingus on a female fan on stage at Coachella.

‘Didn’t someone already do this at Burning Man a few years ago?’ Jeremy asked, receiving blank stares from everybody.In the world of youth media, pop culture moments from as far back as two years ago might as well have been shards of ancient pottery found in an old farmer’s field.

‘Great,’ Jeremy said. For better or worse, this was exactly what constituted breaking news for his publication. ‘Write it up immediately. We need to think of several follow-up articles too – we cannot, and I stress this, hit it hard enough. I’m talking reactions, I’m talking memes. Can we get a sex expert to write us a guide to butt-munching? Umm, is performative sex on stage the new rock’n’roll?’

‘What about the ethics of audience consent?’ asked Sasha, the resident hot-take writer. ‘Nobody in that crowd signed up to watch that ass get eaten. That’s actually quite a violent imposition when you think about it.’

‘That sounds insufferable. Go for it.’ Jeremy chortled.

Sure enough, the first news piece took off. The horrifying live graph of their audience that loomed over Jeremy’s shoulder, that filled his every waking thought, the number one trigger of his anxiety disorder, spiked with thousands of unique new reads per minute. He’d had a look at the piece before it went out, which was nominally the job he was hired to do as deputy editor, making sure they hadn’t told any egregious lies or included overt defamations. Apart from an overuse of the word ‘bussy’, Sarah-Jessica had done a great job, writing a very funny and mildly informative news piece. Another successful day in the content factory, Jeremy had thought, realising that viral ass-eating would probably get them enough traffic in one day to fill the monthly quota, satisfying their awful business model.

‘We did everything right,’ Jeremy now pointed out. ‘We wrote up a big news piece that falls perfectly in line with our tone and audience, and we did it quickly. It’s not our fault that Doritos chose to advertise with us.’

‘You put a video of someone getting their asshole licked next to the Doritos ad, and their slogan is Nothing tastes better than a treat!’ protested Samantha.

‘Honestly, I think we should be spinning this as a win for Doritos,’ interrupted Aiden. ‘That’s kind of an iconic line – might even rake in the pink dollar. They could be the official corn chip of Mardi Gras.’

Samantha stormed off, and Gina followed, clearly ready to do damage control. Jeremy shrugged and suggested Sarah-Jessica go get some air. There was an area behind the office building that was colloquially known as ‘cry alley’. Sasha, always the ladle in any office drama, went with her.

Jeremy – shocked and appalled that anyone was still using Facebook events – finally opened the invite that had popped up fifteen minutes earlier . As his worst fears were realised, an overwhelming sense of doom swept towards him and his heart plummeted like an egg dropped off a rollercoaster. His mouse shifted towards the Absolutely not going to this event ever button – which, let’s be real, was always the Maybe option – but before he could click it, Jeremy noticed his supervisor, technically the editor of the publication underneath Gina, marching into the office. He felt a different flavour of doom and despair roll over him.

‘Oh, good morning,’ Vanessa said, looking surprised to see him. She had a coffee cup, her security pass and some huge sunglasses all clutched awkwardly in one hand. It was three pm. ‘You won’t believe the day I’ve had. I was shooting an ad for Nespresso and that singer was there, the one who used to have cancer, and I could not remember her name and it was so awkward. Anyway, I’m here now! You know what would be fun? We should write something about that DJ who had sex on the Coachella stage!’

Jeremy smiled, very used to tamping down the bitter rage he was feeling, knowing it would just bounce off the impervious shine of Vanessa Montgomery’s glossy face. While many of the people in the office looked like models, Vanessa Montgomery was a model – and, in her words, an advocate, activist, trendsetter and changemaker. And it was mostly true too. Jeremy didn’t really have any issues with that. What he found upsetting was the fact that talking to her was like trying to grab the attention of a small, startled bird in a confined space and, most importantly, that he did all her work for her, and she still got paid much, much, much more than him – and somehow she had a grift going where she was also paid to do other flashy media and modelling work during the PopBuzz workday. If it hadn’t made Jeremy’s life much harder, he would have admired her influencer hustle.

‘I’m just going to pop out and grab a coffee,’ she said, not even sitting down. ‘I’m wearing shoes with beads on them!’

Jeremy smiled and waved. There was a chance she might return, but he wasn’t holding his breath, and it really made no difference.

While he’d been forced to admire the shoes with beads on them, Jeremy’s phone had filled up with messages from the share-house group chat, which was currently called Tales from the Fuck Factory. Jeremy sighed, massaging his forehead, as he considered all the work he was not currently doing.

Bradley: Fun question, do we have a broom?

Harry: How do you not know if we have a broom by now

Bradley: Do i look like some kind of broom gay, am i a witch, am i one of those old women who spends their twilight years brooming the sidewalk.

Harry: Do you not even know what the word SWEEPING is omg

Bradley: I know but I refuse to endorse it, because I think brooming is a gateway drug to other toxic behaviours like toilet cleaning

Harry: Oh god have you never cleaned our toilet either

Bradley: Follow-up question re: do we have a broom, can vacuum cleaners suck up glass? That’s probably okay right

Harry: No! No!!!

Bradley: Omg fine. On a side note, if anyone wants any wine any time soon, they’re going to have to get some wine glasses, we’re out

Bastian: Are we doing shopping, we need toilet paper

As a veteran share-house dweller, Jeremy had long consigned his wine glasses’ souls to hell. You couldn’t be precious in a share house. This one was honestly pretty nice compared to some of the mould-infested shitholes littered with bearded men sitting in their underwear watching Becker DVDs at seven am in which he’d previously lived. All his housemates were like him – cresting or post thirty, with real jobs, who wanted to live somewhere clean and drama free: a refuge. The reality of the house was another matter, but it was the thought that counted.

He decided to ignore the chat, filing away the fragmented glassware in the long list of grievances he was having with today. He went back to the Facebook invite, double-checking the date, and read over the scarce information again as if it would make any difference. Then he bit his lip, took the plunge and looked at the guest list – a bunch of names he recognised, all pulled from the distant past, echoes of another time . It didn’t take long before he saw the name he was looking for, sitting there like a sullen portent of yet more doom, acting innocent, camouflaged, like one of those deadly toxic fish that look like rocks.

Miles Martin. His ex-boyfriend. The person he hated most in the world.

‘Fuck!’ Jeremy yelled, closing Facebook. Nobody even looked up, they were so used to loud profanities coming from the editorial team.

‘Aww, you look sad,’ said Aiden, flouncing into the vacant seat next to Jeremy, where the editor of the publication was meant to sit. Through the window Jeremy could see Vanessa wandering up the street holding a basket full of baguettes, looking like someone on a Parisian postcard had somehow got loose, lost and anachronistic .

‘Urgh, do you ever feel like you made a wrong choice at some point, and because of that you’ve fucked up your life forever?’ he said, wresting his gaze back into the room.

‘Ah, a Sliding Doors, 1998 moment,’ said Aiden wisely. ‘You’re worried you’re the Gwyneth with the bad hair instead of the good hair.’

‘I am definitely the bad-hair Gwyneth,’ Jeremy moaned.

‘Aww, sad.’ Aiden sipped from a huge mug of Mixed-Berries Berocca. ‘It’s like how I tried to go the peroxide gay vibe, and it made my hair go piss yellow. But then it actually kinda slayed, so I went with it, even though it burnt my ears a bit.’

‘So, not really the same at all,’ Jeremy said.

‘The point is, maybe you should be happy with your bad hair,’ said Aiden. ‘Like, you’re a disgusting slut with no talent, but there are definitely worse people to be. You could be a YouTuber.’

‘Once again, please don’t call your almost boss a disgusting slut – and thank you, that’s actually quite nice for you.’

‘What brought this on? Are you reading the comments section on your articles again?’ asked Aiden. He took another loud slurp.

‘Wait, are you just being sympathetic so you don’t have to work?’ Jeremy asked, ignoring his shrug. ‘Look … it’s the worst thing that can happen to someone. A reunion.’

He pulled up the Facebook invite again, ominously titled: It’s time – The Parker Workshop alumni showcase, 2015 He was sure there was also a glossy printed invite currently being eaten by snails in his mum’s letterbox, but right now Jeremy had to receive this psychic damage through Facebook, which really added insult to injury.

‘Oh no,’ said Aiden. ‘A high school reunion? I’m not going to mine.’

‘No, it’s worse than that,’ Jeremy explained. The somewhat prestigious creative writing degree he had done, the Parker Workshop, was named after Dr Hector Parker, a patron of the arts (and, unfortunately, a pre-World War II Nazi sympathiser), and each year’s class – called a ‘workshop’ to further lean in to the pretension – was only around twenty people, simultaneously coddled and abused by staff into forming a tight-knit unit, competitive and supportive at the same time.

Jeremy hadn’t seen anyone from his year of the Parker Workshop for a long time.

The course had a lot of little traditions: Hogwartian flourishes like sorting hats and predatory academic staff (they joked through the trauma) who convinced the kids accruing a crippling amount of HECs debt, that they were going to be the next literary sensation, that they’d somehow write the next great American novel from Australia.

One of the most long-running of those traditions, which had been going since the eighties, was the alumni workshop showcase, where a graduating class was invited back to the university, feted and celebrated if they’d become something, ignored and pitied if not. Jeremy remembered being overawed at his first showcase when he was a first year student, as a particularly famous novelist cried while thanking the workshop for making him who he was today, for all his success. Jeremy had rubbed shoulders with big names in poetry and philosophy, writers across media and TV and film. The arts minister at the time, a long-ago graduate, had wandered around shaking hands like he could steal souls through his palms.

‘It’s a big deal,’ Jeremy explained to Aiden. ‘The only thing worse than going and being a huge fucking failure is —’

‘The bad-hair Gwyneth,’ Aiden supplied.

‘Thank you for extending the metaphor; that’s exactly the kind of thing we were taught at the workshop. The only thing worse than going with your bad hair is not going – it’s like admitting you failed. It’s noted. You basically have to go. We used to make fun of anyone who didn’t turn up.’

It was basically a workshop-wide hobby to keep track of graduates – seethe at their success, laugh at their failures, and criticise their books for being derivative.

‘You should go. It will be fun!’ said Aiden, clearly bored by the conversation.

‘My ex will be there too,’ Jeremy said, a tremble entering his voice.

‘Oh … the one who …?’

‘Yep,’ Jeremy said. ‘That one.’

‘Ah.’ Aiden patted him only semi-mockingly on the shoulder. ‘Oh, I did come over to tell you that the butt eating DJ has spoken out about eating the butt, so I’m writing about that. It’s actually quite a beautiful statement.’

‘Well, the news never stops,’ Jeremy said, swivelling back to his computer. ‘Anyone else feel like Doritos?’

He hovered over the Maybe button on the event again, then closed the invite.

In Spite of You is out THIS WEEK. You can buy it from literally any bookshop in THE WORLD.

I didn’t want to write multiple pieces about how gay characters deserve to suck and fuck on screen too. I could have been doing literally anything else in the world. I could have been writing about cool islands to visit (and therefore get to go to those cool islands), or I could have been one of those journalists who understand how elections work. I could have learned a trade. I could have been happy. Instead, I had to fight the battle for representation on the side of representation, despite knowing it’s not even an advocacy goal in itself, and more of a campaign for a depressing bare minimum.

Which is why I’m not particularly surprised to add to my representation beat by writing an article about How Superman (2025) Features Important Bad Dog Representation.

Finally Hollywood is giving is the representation we need: dogs who are bad boys.

Krypto has currency

The new Superman film is probably the best thing DC has ever done - positing Superman as a handsome slightly goofy himbo with a heart of gold who just tries his best. I had a really good time. (On a side note, the film is not making any explicit statement about Israel’s war on Palestine, it’s just that we’re living in an era where Israel is acting worse than literal comic book supervillains).

The casting is actually insanely good in general - but the runaway star has to be Krypto the Super Dog, a cute white dog that lives in Superman’s ice fortress and who features extensively through the film. Krypto has been so popular that it’s reportedly led to a surge in dog adoption.

Krypto is undoubtedly one of the heroes of the narrative - he is instrumental in helping Superman beat the main villain, and even spends some time kidnapped by Lex Luthor, all while being very cute and fluffy. It’s no surprise that he’s beloved by audiences. It’s basic storytelling to make the hero rescue a dog.

But what excites me is that Krypto bucks a certain action film trope that I hate, in a very welcome way.

Become ungovernable

The thing about Krypto is that he’s an agent of chaos. He’s a dog that has the power of superman - he is super strong and he can fly. A later scene explicitly confirms that he is not trained. The film is smart enough to project a very accurate representation of what this would entail: mayhem.

Without spoilers, Krypto spends the entire film flying around being a menace. He actively makes the heroes jobs harder in multiple scenes, because he is a dog with super powers. He is not smarter than a regular dog. He is a dog with super powers. He does dog things, including chasing things. It is an accurate representation of not only a dog who can fly, but also of what most dogs would be like in action films: wildly unhelpful, if not a liability.

This bucks a trope that I’ve noticed about dogs in action films. There are multiple examples of this, that usually show dogs as being some kind of asset to the hero. Sure, you’ve got films where it’s implied that they’re exceptionally well trained - think Halle Berry’s death hounds in John Wick 4, who apparently have spent their life learning how to murder. In a world where assassins have a complicated hotel based system of currency, well trained dogs get a pass. Similarly, the excellent scene in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood where a tripping Brad Pitt sics his dog onto the Manson family killers gets a pass because you can logically see the training that a police or army dog might get to disarm people with guns.

But it’s the representation of dogs as quiet and helpful perfectly trained followers that always drives me crazy. Think Sari in Prey, who helps Naru take out a Predator, the zombie detecting dog in I Am Legend, or Dog in Mad Max 2. In all these representations, dogs aren’t so much “well trained” as just quietly competent, a boon to the hero in the matter of survival.

It’s very specifically the dogs in action/ thrillers that fit into this trope - obviously I’m not watching Wishbone or Lassie and being like “this would be a great show if the dog was less unrealistic!”

If the apocalypse comes, shoot me

Whenever I watch these gently competent background dogs, I think of my own hound, Basil, a boy who I adore to death, who is my best friend, my child, who I would do literally anything for - and I know that if we were in any kind of action film scenario where I had to rely on him to do a single thing, I might as well just shoot myself. Probably him first, because the idea of him being alone during an apocalypse has GENUINELY made me cry before.

Recently I went to pick him up from doggy day care, and he was returned to me wearing only one leg of his cute little dog onesie. You see, despite the fact that he gets dressed most days, he got scared and ran away before the second leg could be put in. There is a whole side of Coburg we cannot walk down because once, over a year ago, an errant balloon floated across his path from a child’s birthday party. I wish I could finish that anecdote, but that’s literally where it ends.

Moving beyond his anxiety (earlier today I had to put him in my bedroom under a blanket because I decided to monstrously vacuum the house), Basil is also just kinda a piece of shit sometimes. Wilful, stubborn, confused, with the survival instincts of a plastic bag floating across the freeway, the idea of relying on him to undertake even the simplest task is frankly laughable.

It’s not that he isn’t trained - I work incredibly hard with him, with mostly positive results. But as anyone who has had a greyhound can attest, sometimes they just don’t want to. Do what? It. Why? They don’t want to. There have been walks where we had literally stood in the same spot for over twenty minutes, because he has decided he wants to go somewhere where I physically cannot take him (the garden of an old Italian lady who hates him, train tracks, out of hours Bunnings), or simply doesn’t want to move anymore. In the early days, the latter was very common, where he’d simply decide the walk was over, and that he required being teleported home immediately. As this anecdote proves, he has a casual idea of the concept of cause and effect, and will usually try to solve most problems one of two ways: staring at me to fix it, or standing incredibly still. It’s very funny to imagine him trying to navigate the water wars or the zombie apocalypse with this tool belt.

A while back we had the misfortune of being attacked by a dog that escaped its house while we were on a walk, which means I can unfortunately confirm that in a moment of violence, Basil will simply just stand there, despite being bitten horribly.

He’s pretty anti-birds, so I could see him perhaps being helpful in an Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds type situation.

Working within limitations

Ultimately, Krypto helps Superman win the day - not by exhibiting un-doglike behaviour, but by Superman working within his limitations and love of chasing spherical objects.

While my love of badly behaved dogs being represented on the silver screen is mostly tongue-in-cheek, there is a lesson here that I adore - too often people adopt dogs expecting them to fit in seamlessly with their human lives. This is the best way to create a stressful environment for everyone involved, especially the dog. If you throw an anxious dog into a stressful environment and expect it to go smoothly, it will probably go badly for everyone involved. On the more comical level, something will probably be urinated on - but more seriously, this is how children are bitten and dogs run over.

Domestication is not a one way street - evolutionarily we have also adapted for our pets, as much as they have for us. Likewise, when owning a dog, especially a rescue dog, I believe it’s imperative to go into the responsibility knowing that your life has to be malleable in certain ways to accomodate them. Obviously some things can be trained into a pet, some things can be enforced - we’re not just going to roll over for the dog and their often insane and self destructive urges - but working with the dog’s limitations are an important way of sensibly going about dog ownership.

I hope that this implied lesson in Superman (2025) filters into the brains of all the people inspired to adopt a dog after seeing Krypto - but I have a feeling nobody has ever gone into a DC movie with the intention of learning a single thing.

—

Patrick Lenton is a writer and author living in Melbourne. His debut novel, In Spite of You, comes out in August and is available for preorder now.

Buy In Spite of You

One of the defining metaphors that we used when selling books was the concept of a “roll of the dice” - touching on the fact that the success of a book often came down to nothing more than luck.

But in a mechanic that is familiar to players of Dungeons and Dragons, the idea is to fill up your toss with as many dice as possible, to that you’re giving fate as much as possible to work with, and achieve the highest score. Each dice can be the smallest thing - a recommendation from a friend on social media, your mum bullying the local bookstore into ordering copies for the entire family, 7000 annoying social media posts, a well-written and earnest newsletter article - and even if you’re adding just a handful of d4s into the mix, DnD players understand that sometimes it’s exactly what you need to score a high enough role for whatever nerd shit you’re attempting. We must beat the armour class of a book industry hostile to queer authors.

It doesn’t feel particularly good trying to promote your own book - it’s so wrapped up in my own concept of self worth that it’s impossible to be chill about it. But I also see so many debut authors worry too much about being “annoying” when promoting. What I always think about is when my first book of short stories came out I was SO worried about being cringe and annoying online, and tried to do it in a “cool” way, just kinda winky little cool guy nods. As a result, one of my closer friends saw me on the street two months after the book launched and was like “when is your launch, I can’t wait!”

Never again. I will now scream in the face of god himself and make sure his entire choir of angels buy my book.

Because this book is so important to me, I’m not going to shy away from hoovering up as many little dice as possible to make my roll of the dice as effective as possible - and one of the best dice to add to the pile is making sure people pre-order the book.

Why is pre-ordering so good? What’s the big deal?

• The number of pre-orders your book has signals to the publisher, bookstores, libraries (and the publishing industry as a whole) that people are interested in your book. And having a large number of pre-orders of your book makes people sit up and pay attention to you, particularly if you're a debut author. Bookstores who might not know who I am or how brilliant my book is, might only order in one or two copies - that’s a standard number for a debut author. But if they see people pre-ordering like mad, then they might decide to order in more.

• Doesn’t matter how many fancy bells and whistles you have, all we’re trying to do is generate word of mouth. Getting people interested and excited in my book enough to recommend it to other people is ultimately what sells a book - and at the end of the day, bookshop workers and librarians are people (the best people). Pre-ordering can help these people learn about my book (think about how many books they see a week) and get excited - and if they love the book, they recommend it to customers.

• Some book stores have bestseller lists! For example, getting on the bestseller list at Readings in my first week of release would be both amazing and important - it’s more marketing and visibility and therefore sales. And you know what counts towards those lists? You guessed it - pre-orders

• And how cool to just have the book out in the world immediately! When you performatively read it at a cafe, you not only look cool and hot, you are also being a grass roots influencer, a conscripted member of my street team.

Just some places I love that you can pre-order ‘In Spite of You’

Melbourne:

Readings: I’m having my launch at Readings in Carlton, because I wanted to have the quintessential Melbourne book launch experience. I think it’s the bookstore I’ve been to the most for launches. There’s also a bunch of different stores around - Readings Hawthorn is probably the only thing I liked about Hawthorn actually. I launched one of Jodi McAlister’s books at Readings Emporium.

Pre-order at Readings

Brunswick Bound: My local bookstore, crewed by absolute angels. I was meant to launch my last book of short stories, Sexy Tales of Paleontology, at Brunswick Bound’s store, but alas I was coronavirused. They were so lovely and hosted it online instead. Support indie bookshops!

Pre-order at Brunswick Bound

Hares and Hyenas: queer bookshop icons who I adore, and who have supported me many times, and who deserve our support, because we need to support queer bookshops and queer authors. It’s not up JUST yet with them, but it will be.

Pre-order at Hares and Hyenas

Sydney:

Better Read Than Dead: I’ve launched THREE other people’s books at Better Read Than Dead, so I’m very excited to launch my own there in Sydney too. Having lived in Newtown for most of my adult life, I think I’ve spent more time in this shop than any other establishment in the world. Once a dog ran into the store while it was just me and a worker and we looked after it for an hour before the owner came in.

Pre-order at Better Read Than Dead

The Bookshop Darlinghurst: MORE QUEER BOOKSTORES! This place is an ESTABLISHMENT and I love it. When I went and visited this store, I was quizzed on “just how much analingus is in the book”. They have their priorities right.

Pre-order at Bookshop Darlo

Kinokuniya: a goddamn WONDERLAND for book lovers. I launched one of my first books there, and it was an amazing thrill seeing it in the new release section. I’ve also helped a couple of authors, including the wonderful Julie Koh, launch their books here.

Pre-order at Kinokuniya

Gleebooks: I did my first ever public reading of a story I’d written here, when it was selected for the Best Australian Writing anthology back in 2007. Obsessed ever since. David Marr came up to me and told me he liked me writing, and I was just a weird little boy.

Pre-order at Gleebooks

Brisbane:

Avid Reader: the greatest and also only bookshop I’ve ever been to in Brisbane. At one point I knew an absolute ton of people who worked there, but then they all moved to Melbourne.

Pre-order at Avid Reader

Adelaide:

Dymocks Adelaide: I did an event at Dymock’s Adelaide last year and I was blown away by how beautiful this store is! It’s in an old theatre, which is perfect for someone like me, who loves to write and also be on the stage darling. That said, you can buy it at any Dymocks.

Pre-order at Dymocks

Online:

Booktopia? Amazon? Various other online retailers? It’s all there. It’s all there. If you’re not in Australia, this might be one of the best options for you!

Pre-order at Booktopia

Ebooks and Audiobooks

It will have both. Don’t panic.

Come to my launch why not?

I’m having a launch in Melbourne and Sydney, and then a whole bunch of other events in other places later, but the launches are what we focus on! Why don’t you come?

Also, I stole this entire concept from my friend Patrick Marlborough, whose book Nock Loose just came out, and you should go read it.

Subscribe now

I can’t stop thinking about the dancing scene in Andor season 2, because I think it captures the horror of attempting to live life normally at the moment, and also it’s where Mon Mothma went from Mon to Mother. Mother Mothma. Mon Mother? Let’s workshop this later.

Life is not normal right now, thanks to the rise of fascism, the genocide of the Palestinian people, the target on trans and queer rights around the world, the psyop of someone named “Benson Boone”: but for a variety of reasons - mostly capitalism - we are forced to pretend that it is normal (if we’re lucky enough to not actively be someone actively persecuted). It’s driving me quietly insane, and I think most people are feeling some version of this - even if it’s just about closing their eyes and trying to ignore it.

Andor is one of the best examples of a fictional engagement with the concept of living through the rise of fascism, up there with The Handmaid’s Tale, and brings a sense of sombreness and stakes to a fictional world that is equally capable of being incredibly goofy. Imagine telling someone you almost cried during a massacre episode of a Star Wars TV show ten years ago, when most people equated the franchise with a character named “Salacious B. Crumb”.

In the original Star Wars trilogy we’re introduced to the galaxy at a moment of fascist ascendency - they have won, they have eroded all the checks and balances designed to keep fascism out of power, and they are now in the process of policing their rule through atrocity and control. The rebellion, small and scrappy, seems an inevitable response - they are incontrovertibly the good guys, and the bad guys are destroying planets and are lead by an evil wizard. However, Andor as a prequel, shows us the terrifying rise of this fascism, and most importantly, the complacency and fear and collaboration of the general populace that allows it to happen. It shows us all the things we’re willing to give up in order to continue living comfortably, before finally the spotlight rests on you.

We’re given windows into communities that struggle to live their lives under this tyranny - and often we’re given the tragedies that lead them into small moments of resistance, or into rebellion itself. But what I found most fascinating and terrifying are the people we’re introduced to who are not directly affected, in the sense that they are not the target of the Empire, they are not the ones suffering - it’s their neighbours, or a neighbouring planet, or another race. It’s elsewhere. And it shows them continuing to try to live normally.

In season 2 this is beautifully shown through the Mon Mothma storyline - a wealthy senator, she’s an example of the elite. Her family, her friends, her peers, are able to not only live “normally” but even flourish - in fact it’s in their best interests to collaborate. And we see Mon Mothma live a double life, standing up for her ethics but also playing the game of conforming with this community. But it’s in this episode where another line is crossed - after she’s blackmailed by a close family friend, who endangers the resistance, and she is forced to tacitly give her approval for this man to be murdered. Much of the danger she’s experienced up to now has been hypothetical, potential - and perhaps she hasn’t been aware of exactly how much she’d have to sacrifice for her beliefs. In this episode, she kills off that comfort.

The dancing is an expression of not only that sacrifice, but the insanity of being forced to pretend that she’s not living in a time of horror and bloodshed, and that all the glitz and glamour of this wedding matters in comparison. She’s playing a double life for a reason - but when fascism rises like this and begins stripping away people’s rights, everyone to a degree is either pretending or wilfully collaborating. And that dance is a scream at how insane it is.

"Yes, it's this extraordinary, wild, free dance movement," said Mon Mothma actor, Genevive O’Reilly. "But it's also because she's writhing in pain because of what she's just done. She's just tacitly agreed to have her friend murdered, so she's dancing to stop herself from screaming."

This scene cuts to the heart of the question Andor asks - how to live ethically in a monstrous world, in a world of fascist supremacy. All our main characters are grappling with that - even the ones who we know are on the side of the Empire. We get to see the ways they justify being a part of the atrocity. But what’s interesting is that across the board, for every single character, we’re shown that there’s no comfort in this question. The heroes are as much damned by their ethics as the villains. We’re not given the triumph of rebellion like in the movies - no heroically blown up Death Stars, no lightsaber battles, no Yavin 4 award ceremonies. Instead we’re shown the gruelling sacrifices it takes on a day-to-day basis.

We get an amazing speech in season 1 from Luthen Rael about what he’s had to “sacrifice” for the rebellion - which really just showcases the idea that living ethically requires discomfort and sacrifice. This is paralleled with our main hero, Cassian, who is devoted and principled, but spends much of season 2 trying to work out how he can prioritise his care and love for his partner with his responsibilities to the rebellion, and to his ethics. It’s shown as almost impossible as a conundrum, but also deeply human. Is the rebellion more important than for his love for his family? Is his family more important than taking a stand? There’s no absolutely correct answer - but it’s also the way that the empire and fascism work, by making sure that you have to sacrifice the things and people you love in order to protest against their atrocities. It’s why people default into collaboration.

At the moment in Australia, we’re seeing a crackdown on people speaking on behalf of Palestine, who are losing their work, their livelihoods. We have the Antoinette Lattouf case where she lost her job at the ABC for sharing factual information about the genocide on her personal account. Recently we have Indigenous author Karen Wyld stripped of a fellowship for her comments. The entire point of this kind of campaign is to make people fearful of speaking up - and the fear works, because it impacts our ability to survive. When I was disciplined by the ABC for an open letter I signed before I even worked there, I was told that I’d had multiple complaints made against me by a lobby group - and while I haven’t stopped speaking out since, I have been more cautious as a result.

Combine this with the whole pesky “death of truth” thing we have going on in the media and it’s a perfect recipe to have those moments of exhaustion at living through the horrors. Hey, exhaustion is still a privileged position in comparison to so many things people are living through or dying from, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and it isn’t a reality. The way that Andor showed how the media was integral to spinning the Ghorman resistance and massacre into a “complicated” narrative should be immediately recognisable as a parallel. Obviously this is still a fantasy universe - so let’s not go too crazy about dissecting the efficacy of a fictional narrative to comment on real world events - but we can absolutely explore our reality through fiction. Fiction is drawn from real world experience, and is a way that we can retell the lessons we should be learning from history.

There’s even something inherently broken and maddening about using a fictional star wars show as an intro to comment on a real life atrocity that is happening. But it’s also a perfect example of the psychosis of being alive and privileged right now - I’m still, to one extent or another, living my normal life. I am watching Star Wars and comedy shows and going to musicals and promoting my books, and trying to work out how to do that ethically while 14,000 babies are starving to death. There is no real valid frame of reference to make sense of all this.

I have no answer to that, or certainly not one that I can summarise into a Star Wars based article, but I guess the point of this piece is to acknowledge how insane it all feels, and is essentially my equivalent of scream dancing at the wedding like Mon Mothma.

—

I’d like to plug Deepcut News in this article - two principled Australian journalists who have decided to report fearlessly on Palestine and other issues - very needed in the climate, and 10,000 times more useful than a star wars article.

Deepcut News

Independent journalism that cuts out the BS

One of my enduring memories, which I treat like a huge warning sign to myself, is going on some family holiday in my early teens, where our family and another stayed in a motel in Canberra. We left the day after my birthday, a fact relevant because instead of being excited by the bounty of culture of our nation’s capital (I genuinely have a toxic love for the War Memorial museum) I spent the entire holiday pining for my copy of the classic roleplaying game, Baldur’s Gate 2, which I’d be given for my birthday.

I don’t use pining lightly. I’d had just enough time to install the game and spend a few hours creating a character. I love creating characters. And it was just enough to drive a deep itch into my brain, a sense of mystery and anticipation. I knew nothing about the game - this was mostly pre internet, pre hype and easy access. I don’t know if I’d been recommended it by a friend, or read an article in a physical magazine, or just responded to advertising - but every part of it seemed to vibrate with an almost forbidden allure for me. At one point, I remember reading the user manual that came with the game on a pool chair in the sun while people swam and played around me.

It’s only in retrospect that this is an early sign of the absolute brain disease that I suffer when I become truly obsessed with something. I’ve now played Baldur’s Gate 2 upwards of 40 times through, which is a truly mammoth time sink. But it’s not just that specific game - I’ve famously played Skyrim for almost ten years now. I am so deeply, brain-warpingly obsessed with that game, that sometimes when I can’t sleep, I will walk from one end of Skyrim to the other IN MY MIND, with PERFECT RECOLLECTION, like I am treading the halls of my childhood home, except instead it’s a weird perspective skewed fantasy world filled with dragons.

This also happens with series of books, television shows, the film Mamma Mia Here We Go Again (which I once watched five times in a row on a long distance flight) - there is a switch that when flipped can take my brain from incredibly disciplined, work-focused, to a drooling obsessed monster. And it honestly scares me. It’s my one flaw.

I’ve literally promised myself a six month lost period when I finish writing the two novels I’m working on at the moment, where I will finally allow myself to play Baldur’s Gate 3. I know myself well enough that if I start now, I’ll wake up two years from now with an unmet book contract, an encyclopaedic knowledge of Baldur’s Gate 3, and a smooth empty brain.

Sometimes I yearn for an emptier brain, and it was entirely this flirtation with the void that led me to Marvel Snap in the first place. Over Christmas I drove my dog and I to Sydney to stay at my parent’s house. Basil, anxious and hating change, did not love being in a new place, and quickly became a limpet dog, freaking out if he couldn’t be glued to my side at every second. By the end of the three weeks, I could go for a swim or a walk and he’d happily stay inside, but it was tense for a while. I went to dinner parties and hung out with friends with him in tow, a huge bag of treats and toys lugged to every house like a newly single dad with a baby. Thank god for my friend’s understanding the divorced dog-dad life and accomodating my stink-son, because otherwise I’d have gone insane from isolation. Adding to this was the fact that my parent’s apartment is at the top of some steep narrow wooden stairs, which Basil couldn’t traverse on his own - meaning I had to carry him up and down several times a day to wee or go for a walk. My elderly parents couldn’t lift him to do this (I’ve been doing weight training), which meant that I was basically stuck with him for three weeks. And I was tired. I’ve done multiple jobs, run this newsletter on my own, freelanced, written two books, and I needed a break from it all. So, stationary, bored, craving rest, I downloaded Marvel Snap, because I saw Vic Michaelis playing it.

But as this year flamboyantly trudged along the route of tragedy and horror, I’ve noticed my Marvel Snap obsession isn’t diminishing in any sense, and furthermore, my need for an obsession like this has only increased. There is a lot bad in the world right now - the genocide in Gaza, the Trump administration, and the worldwide pushback against LGBTQIA+ rights to name a few at the top of my mind. I’m engaged in some activism and advocacy work, and I am deeply plugged into the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights, and particularly trans rights, as part of our work in this newsletter. I do it because I believe in the cause, and also because I hate to feel helpless, so I like to volunteer my time and my skills. But it’s also so, so, so tiring and dispiriting. I’ve found myself seeking the sweet phone opium of Marvel Snap more and more - and I’ve felt bad about it. As things get worse, who am I to be selfish enough to take these broken brained breaks from reality, while people suffer? I know that a newsletter can’t do much in the long run, but it’s kinda sad that the funding for the LGBTQIA+ Media Watch Project runs out in a week, right as we settle in for a huge fight for queer rights.

Yesterday I went into the city for a national day of action to protect trans youth, that was organised by The Trans Justice Project. It was an incredibly impressive feat - a national protest organised all around the country by a handful of people, with thousands turning up and a media spotlight on the issues at hand.

I left the event not feeling depressed and gloomy and tired about the state of the world like I have been for the last few weeks. Instead I left feeling revitalised in some way - not exactly hopeful, but perhaps less overwhelmed by the scope of it all. I was surrounded by my friends, and thousands of people. I also left feeling angry, but the kind of anger that gives you energy, makes you fighty. It doesn’t do anything, but I was immediately mean to some terfs online.

I think that it’s not bad to take a break every so often right now - a half hour where I allow my skull to turn into a big soup cup while bright lights are injected directly into my animal brain is probably necessary due to the horrors. But I think that by looking into the void so much, I forgot that engaging with the world can also help, that I should stop smooching the abyss every so often and allow myself to be neck kissed by reality. Hiding in my little game began to feel less like self care and more like flagellation. Reality is a rough and passionate lover, but it’s good to feel alive.

That said, I have played Marvel Snap at least 15 times since starting this essay.

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Most mornings I’m woken up by what sounds like a polite, gruff man outside my bedroom door saying the word “woof” in a New Zealand accent. It is Basil, informing me that the sun has risen and it is time to take him on a walk. “Whiff,” he says, impatiently.

2024 for me has mostly marched to the beat of Basil’s slightly eccentric drum, lots of slow, cosy days packed with a truly baffling amount of different writing work, punctuated by the unbreakable routine of my anxious dog. Sometimes the only time I’d speak during the day would be to narrate Basil’s meal menu to him, or to say hi after he’d spent the morning on his “sky bed” on the balcony, and would come inside all warm from the sun and lean against me while I work.

It’s been lovely - at the beginning of the year I unexpectedly became a single dog-dad, and Basil moved in with me full time, and we became a close-knit little duo. Like Batman and Robin, but with a completely different set of mental illnesses. There’s really only been a handful of times this year where he hasn’t been my constant companion, and it’s been both a delight and a privilege to watch him adapt to the trauma of being a child of divorce (for the first week, I had to take him driving around the neighborhood in the back of my car to stop him from crying at night), to spreading his bony little wings and thriving. He now has a robust social life, and in between doggy day care (his favourite place in the world), or illegal runs off leash at the velodrome with other greyhounds (everyone poised to scatter like criminals if the cops bust us), or long walks along the river, he’s become almost an entirely different animal to the repressed and shy dog I adopted over two years ago. He loves other dogs and adores people (within reason), and just seems happy.

But while I wouldn’t trade him or this experience for anything - not only has he brought so much joy into my life, I also just think there’s an ethical responsibility to commit to rescue dogs that we adopt if we feasibly can - I have had a lot of people ask me about adopting a rescue dog on their own. I think because I post so many cute photos and videos, and write so much about him, people only see the delights. But I want to caution people that the responsibility is real and not always particularly fun. I just took him to a lovely dinner party, and I arrived all harried because he was anxious, with his bed under my arm and a bag of snacks and activities for him, and set him up in the corner - and realised that I was giving the energy of a new parent, one eye always on him, checking to see why he is fussing.

As a compulsive Gilmore Girls re-watcher, I’ve long been resigned to the shift from identifying with Rory to Lorelai, that tracks with the passage of time and the inexorable curse of aging. Now impatient with Rory’s schoolyard turmoils and casual adulteries, I’ve watched with more interest at Lorelai’s attempts to build community and find friendship and date. With the full acknowledgement that it’s only a partial comparison, I’ve found myself identifying with Lorelai as a single parent instead - and let me tell you, many of her decisions, which have seemed inscrutable and annoying to me - suddenly make sense, because I can see the responsibility looming behind it all. Her responsibility for Rory has always seemed a given to me, just a normal adult and unremarkable thing. Now I understand (a fraction) of the fear and insecurity behind it. Not sure if it justifies fumbling Max Medina, (Maaaaax Medina), but as someone who has also made some strange decisions this year as a result of dog parent stress, I have more empathy at least.

When I got Basil full time this year, he arrived with an undiagnosed infection, which took a few weeks of vet appointments, two emergency animal hospital trips, and thousands of dollars before it was fixed. Stress aside, the financial burden is significant - as a result of his expensive anxiety medication and fancy single protein diet, I’ve had to take on extra work, which has also resulted in a bunch of the deadlines I’ve been working towards this year having to be pushed back, purely because finances had to take the lead. Hilariously, the more I work, the more I have to pay for day care and dog sitters, a classic capitalism catch-22.

It’s also isolating. I live in an apartment, so before I taught him to wee on the balcony in an emergency (you do NOT want to know the process behind that training regime) I could only leave the house for a few hours at a time, in case he needed to wee, or eat food, or have a walk. After work I have to rush home to pick him up from daycare, on dates I’ve had to smooch and run home at a sensible hour, or I’ve had to convince my friends to hold all our social functions inside my apartment (lured with baked goods). I had to quit a couple of regular hobbies, including my weekly improv show as a result. Over the winter, it was very lonely, and if it wasn’t for the gorgeous support network I’ve built who respect his boundaries, and come for walks with us, and are happy to build our D&D schedule around him, I’d probably have gone a little bit mad.

I see a lot of people on TikTok idolising the quaint Stars Hollow Gilmore Girls vibe, wishing to disappear to a small, perpetually autumn town and drink coffee and wear scarves and chat to the local eccentrics and perverts. But I have to wonder now if there isn’t something slightly sad about Lorelai’s life there - yes she’s found a home and a community and a support network for her and her daughter, but what about the opportunities she’s missed out on thanks to the lack of options and choices she has from that cosy isolation? She’s essentially lived one life through her late teens, twenties and thirties - no travel, few experiences, a lack of adventure. She has a responsibility over all- no wonder she both glamorises her Stars Hollow life, and also makes insane, knee-jerk decisions while trapped in her quirky self-made prison (like marrying Christopher).

I’d always said that I wouldn’t adopt a rescue dog on my own or without a car, and I think ultimately that would still be my advice to anyone asking. Everything is a logistical challenge - it’s why I drove nine hours to Sydney for Christmas with him farting in the back seat, because otherwise, with his regular dogsitters busy over the holidays, how would I see my family? It’s something to think about at least - responsibilities force us to trade our freedoms.

But what a trade! What joy a responsibility like Basil can bring into your life. And these things aren’t static, either. Both Basil and myself are less stressed (although he’s not LOVING his Christmas visit to the grandparents yet), and slowly over the year we’ve opened up from almost complete isolation to experimenting with freedoms along with the responsibility. I think it’s only going to improve, and I’m so privileged to devote my time and money and life to making this weird long awkward dog’s life better than when it was raced and abused for amusement.

Plus, in a few year’s time, he’s going to Yale!

Happy birthday, Basil!

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ANYWAY. The show is called Sex and the CBD, and the basic conceit is that we do a SATC episode set in Melbourne, which essentially means every show Samantha bangs someone while riding on the sadly defunct Melbourne Star. The format involves four (bad) wigs on stage, with the cast of 6 choosing the wigs randomly, and playing each character.

I’ve been Samantha twice, and she’s a delight to play: her entire role is being fabulously and hedonistically self-sufficient, which means that any scene she joins, she gets to be a flourish, a garnish, an innuendo-rich sauce that just propels the story along without derailing it. It’s a fun job in an improv show, not a lot of structural tasks. I’ve also been Charlotte once, and you just have to be uptight about stuff. But the last show I did, I was Carrie.

I didn’t want to be Carrie, because Carrie is the worst. She’s not just the worst character, she’s also the hardest to play on stage in a 45 minute improv show.

In her defence, she is a load-bearing protagonist in the show (Samantha voice: honey, i don’t mind being load bearing every once in a while), in the sense that we literally see everyone’s stories through her perspective, AND she can’t just be a passive observer, but must also make her own extremely messy storylines. She is pushed into never sitting still, never stopping making bad choices for the sake of narrative. She can never rest - and she can never stop being the filter through which we are served the other character’s stories, meaning we get full access to all her judgements, phobias and bias, along with her poor decision-making skills. Doesn’t make for a likeable person. Doesn’t make for an easily condensed comedic parody either.

There’s even a theory, which I prescribe to, that each of the girls (including the eponymous City) function as a hyperbolised facet of her personality: Charlotte is her romantic and optimistic side, Miranda all her cynical and career-oriented thoughts, and Samantha the avatar of sex and independence and hedonism. At any point, Carrie is going to side with one or two of those girls, and thus create the format for whatever episode we’re watching, a dialogue between different aspects of herself. It’s very rare for all her personalities to ever align on one issue.

I think I played Carrie fine - I just amped up her utter self-obsession, and made a joke about how everything had to be about her - but I had an epiphany halfway through the show when I made a joke about being a biphobic bigot. I couldn’t help but realised that I kinda hated Carrie.

And that’s mostly because of the infamous bisexual episode, annoying titled ‘Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl...’.

For those who don’t know, it’s a baffling episode. Carrie dates the incredibly cute Sean, a great kisser, who on their cute ice-skating date, drops that he used to date a guy named Mike.

Carrie then proceeds to have an utter freakout, for no discernible reason. It’s pure bi-panic, that seems to lack any of Carrie’s signature self-obsessed introspection. If I didn’t already have a very dim view of both Carrie and the standard of her sex and relationships column, I would be shocked at how close-minded she is in this moment. Actually, even by Carrie’s standards, it’s pretty wild how knee-jerk and unfounded it is.

It’s illuminated by the traditional meal meeting with the girls, where the various relationship monsters of the week are discussed over brunch. In this, the only person who sticks up for poor bisexual Sean is obviously Samantha, calling him “evolved” and “sexy”, which is true - but even she approaches this from a fetishistic way. It’s the hard-no’s from Miranda and Charlotte that truly define this scene however, exhibiting blatant and unrepentant disgust at the idea of dating a bisexual man. Charlotte finds it icky, Miranda repugnant.

Carrie’s confusion swings around wildly, but the defining quote is when she says “i don’t even believe in bisexuality, isn’t just a stop on the way to gaytown?”

Later on, Carrie goes to a party with Sean, and in the only real glimmer of Carrie Bradshaw spirit, ends up reluctantly making out with Alanis Morisette for a brief second in a game of spin the bottle, before deciding none of this is for her, and flouncing into the night, washing her hands on a concept somehow too confusing for her: bisexual men.

I don’t know if this is true, but I have a strong suspicion that this was the first piece of media I ever consumed depicting bisexuality. I’d come across the concept in the weird corners of the internet that raised me (elf roleplaying forums), stunted and strange as a teenager, but I’d never seen what a bisexual was meant to look like in the wild. At that point in my life, a stiff breeze could have flung me back into the closet, but not to be dramatic, this episode was a howling gale, sending me scurrying back for shelter every time I thought about it. Letting the tv show Sex and the City have ANY impact on your life is incredibly silly, but I actually reckon the reason it has such an impact is because it captures not only a personal fear that I’ve carried around for years, but a very real attitude from other people.

When I first went to university, I went to a meeting at the Queer Collective, my very first attempt at sticking my little head out of my shell, and had a bunch of aggressive gays tell me witheringly that I had to “choose a side” in order to join. Many years later, I was on a date with a woman who after finding out I was bisexual said that she was “looking for something serious”. In that same era, another woman unmatched me on a dating app saying that she was “concerned for her health”. The point of these anecdotes are to show that while the bisexual episode of Sex and the City is wild, it’s not crazy. It reflects a prejudice, that was definitely around at the time, and persists to this day. I was going to say “linger”, but that makes it seem like its losing strength - I’ve watched biphobia simply mutate, transform into fun new forms in recent years.

I used to think this episode was bad no just because of the biphobia, but because it was a wildly inaccurate position for a new york sex columnist to take - but actually I think it’s worse than that, in that it accurately captures a predominant attitude that I wish didn’t exist.

In retrospect, this is the most Carrie attitude I can think of. This is deeply Carrie. Ur-Carrie.

This episode is representative of a very typical unease. A lot of the focus is on the “generational” aspect of bisexuality at this time, with Carrie deciding she’s “too old” for this newfangled concept. The party is shown as a bunch of cool young people “dabbling” with bisexuality, perhaps for clout or attention. I wonder how much of the writer’s own anxieties manifested through these lines? But it’s no throwaway concept - one of the simplest ways to diminish something like a sexuality or a cause or a lived experience is to strip it of dignity by infantilising it. You definitely saw it with bisexuality twenty years ago, with both straight people and older mono gays or lesbians trying to pass it off as a trend, and therefore not worthy of consideration. Yet we persist. There’s more bisexual people than ever, with numbers rising astronomically with each generation. You see the same attempts to diminish now, with anything to do with gender. Hell, I even saw a liberal columnist use the same tactic to try to weaken the Palestinian liberation movements around the world.

I’m pretty fine with how the “annoying bisexual” has turned into a meme, I think most of the time it’s hyperbolising a joke with little malice - but I do sometimes wonder if it isn’t used as a fun little front for people to cement this hostility towards the concept of bisexuality a little further into the popular culture. Just another inch every time. Another tiny infantilising nail.

Arguably you could pair this episode with the arc of episodes that feature the gang’s treatment of Samantha and her girlfriend - an era which the label “bisexual” doesn’t even get bandied around, such is the added invisibility of female bisexuality - straight to lesbian (in both senses of the phrase). Male bisexuality, in this show is disgusting and infantile, female bisexuality just doesn’t even exist - both are unstable states on the way to something else (nice solid gayness).

Watching this episode again recently, as preparation for my show, I realised that as much as I’ve moved beyond the panics of my youth, the fear of being bisexual, and comfortably into a stable zone of confident annoyance to everyone around me, this episode just makes me kinda sad.

When I’m feeling strong, i’m sad that Carrie fumbled the handsomest and nicest man in the show due to weird societal bigotry, and feel the same way about the people who have had the same reaction to dating me, or have suddenly shown weird gender essentialist behaviour after years of dating. It’s also self-selecting - why would I want to date anyone who has an issue with it? But when I’m feeling less confident, I’m sad that there’s a part of myself that is treated with such malice and disgust by so much of the world. Thank god Sex and the City never did an episode about how much they hate improv, i’d never recover.

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The goal of this trip is multi-layered - it can never just be a holiday, it could never just be for enjoyment, that would be insane. It also has to be work. It has to be in aid of something. It also has to include some kind of grand symbolic gesture. Speaking of which, I was at the British Museum today, and a young ambiguously European couple were looking at the exhibit I was admiring, a totem pole from Canada. The woman clearly couldn’t read English as well as the man, and she asked him “what is it for?” and he made a show of reading the plaque, before confidently telling her “It is… uh… symbolic”.

There’s some fun and insane “symbolic” components of this trip too - just ASK me where I got the money from, it’s the end result of a sad story, which I’ve reclaimed so at least I can say I got to go to Europe as a result of mild personal tragedy. And the other component is that by the time you read this, I will have turned 40, somewhere in the sky, in that weird no-man’s land of time that is international time-zones. Being alone and much closer to the moon than normal when I turn 40 really amuses me for some reason. Turns out I’m not growing out of being a weird dramatic queen any time soon. Happy birthday to me.

The work component is all about my second romantic comedy novel, which I have decided to set partially in Edinburgh, which is where I spent most of my trip. It was my first time visiting, and I was right: it’s a city designed to have romance set in it, so I’m feeling good about that. I didn’t get a lot written, because I also made sure to spend every day looking at very old things and extremely beautiful paintings, but what I did write feels solid and strong as a result. The book has clarified. I also did a lot of research - I read, I saw musicals, and I watched a lot of rom-com films. I decided to re-watch the classics of the genre, including the Nora Ephron rom-com trinity.

There is a famous Nora Ephron quote that I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about, that at times I worry that I’ve taken too close to heart, and that I’ve almost certainly misunderstood for many years: “Above all, whatever you do, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.” As should be clear from the above, I am unfortunately the kind of person who does romanticise their life like a rom-com heroine, so on a surface level, that’s how the quote applies to me.

I believe the context of this quote comes from her (at the time) controversial decision to write Heartburn, a bestselling book, and later a film, about the destruction of her marriage due to her husband famously cheating on her while she was pregnant with her second child. The decision to mine so directly from her life was met with disdain, disgust and gossip - it was seen not only as messy and tacky, but at the time was directly gendered in its criticism, unbecoming of a woman and particularly a mother. She was labelled a “self publiciser” in reviews. She was even forced to put some of the proceeds of the film into a trust for her children as part of the divorce settlement.

Nora Ephron’s quote, in this context, is clearly about reclaiming power, and owning your own story. It’s rebellious against social norms. It’s powerful. I think the “victim” part speaks to a lot of people - especially women of that time, who had gone through divorce, had to fight against significant social scrutiny, despite the gains of women’s liberation in the 70s.

So it’s also very funny that in my youth, I was a guy in my twenties reading that quote and saying to myself “this relates to me”, like I was a recently divorced woman in the eighties, dealing with the New York gossip scene after my political journalist husband had cheated on me. I think, honestly, that at times I read the first half of the quote and decided to be the “heroine of my own life”, in a queening out diva kind of way. As someone older, a bit more wiser, a bit more battered by life and romance, I can laugh at the shallowness of this interpretation now: unfortunately I’m ready to admit that I was the first shallow person in their twenties. Luckily, I am perfect, deep, and sublimely humble now. I’m cured.

It’s not a totally insane misreading though, because probably Nora Ephron’s most famous quote is “Everything is copy”, which essentially means that a writer can draw inspiration from almost anything in their life, no matter how personal or mundane, and use it as material. Writers have been doing this literally forever in some form or another, our experiences are the stock for any story, no matter how wild (King Lear is inspired from having children and how they suck, Lord of the Rings is about having fabulous jewellery and finding out it sucks, and the film Alien was inspired by owning a sassy cat, and finding out it sucks and wants to eat you!). But you can also draw a direct line from Nora Ephron, to Carrie Bradshaw, to Taylor Swift - all people who become, in some way, defined by overtly mixing their lives with their writing. I’m an enthusiastic devotee of this school of writing - this column is more than an excuse to talk about myself while I’m watching TV, it’s a way to use my own experiences to analyse culture, or do the inverse and use culture to help understand my own life. Writing is my primary way of engaging with the world, and therefore it feels insane to me that my experiences, my life, wouldn’t filter in to my work in some way.

Maybe the only difference between writers like Nora Ephron and myself (two of the greats, and a comparison I’m sure many people make), is that we’re not hiding it. We’ve put that chemical in the pool that shows if you’re pissing, while everyone else is just standing awkwardly in warm spots.

But the novel I’m currently writing, working title ‘Ticking all the Boxes’, is a work of pure fiction - and I think it’s been hard to start as a result. I have a great concept, but it hasn’t become clear to me yet why I’M writing it. The novel I finished earlier in the year (Spite Pie, but we have a new title which I’ll announce soon, coming out next year), is similarly a work of fiction - but there’s clear elements of my life in there. The protagonist of Spite Pie is an early 30s queer who works in a youth media company called “PopBuzz”, navigating the weird world of dating, which is clearly drawn from my time working at Junkee when I was in my early thirties, navigating the weird world of dating - some of the anecdotes from my time there have been ripped off and included. If any of my friends see themselves in those characters, please know that you are insane and narcissistic, and you actually don’t! I am not above gaslighting you. But, genuinely, it’s a hyperbole, a facsimile, as related to the actual facts of my life as a gryphon is to a house cat - in fact in this case, a lot of my real stories from Junkee, or that I’ve heard from friends at BuzzFeed and VICE and the like, are actually too weird for my book. Those anecdotes, that setting, is not WHY I wrote the book - but maybe it helped explain why I am the person to tell this story? Maybe it’s part of the humour? Maybe it’s easier for me?

‘Ticking All The Boxes’ has been a slow start - the book is about a guy who decides that he has to apologise to all the queer kids from his high school before he can start dating, after he comes out of the closet in his thirties. Not in any way autobiographical to my experience - and that’s stumped me a little. Is that because I’m a narcissist who can only write about myself? Or have I just failed to work out what part of my life I’ll use to fertilise this weird story? I hope the latter.

Re-watching the Nora Ephron holy trinity: When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail helped me work through this conundrum though. I have so many thoughts on all of these films, by the way (When Harry Met Sally is transcendentally good, You’ve Got Mail is low-key insane, Meg Ryan is a wonder, and structurally Sleepless in Seattle is bonkers), but knowing so much about Nora Ephron’s life, I started looking for clues in these films. Sure, there are a lot of journalists in the films(she was a journalist), there was a lot of New York (she lived in New York), but it wasn’t directly comparable like Heartburn. I did laugh at a jab at political journalists in Sleepless in Seattle, that gave a quick window into the more acerbic wit of Nora Ephron through the avatar of the bright and bubbly Meg Ryan. I realised I was essentially indulging in deranged Swiftie behaviour, and searching for easter eggs about Jake Gyllenhaals stupid scarf, and I hated it! Stop!

But these films are not autobiographical to the extend that Heartburn is, which puts a thin veneer over the reality of her life. There’s something more subtler, and perhaps more important from Nora Ephron embedded in each of these films - and I’m not going to categorically say what it is, because as that old literary theorist guy famously says, the artist is dead after all - but I think it’s her intentions. I think that what she wants to say about love and life and dating and new york are the real easter eggs. I don’t think we really need to look for her fingerprints on the story, but I’m going to anyway.

The holy trinity are three of the best rom-coms ever written, three of the most romantic films ever made - so what I can only assume powers these films are Ephron’s feelings about love and romance. Who knows what those precise feelings and attitudes are exactly. Is it her actual beliefs? In Sleepless in Seattle, we’re given a thesis from Annie about the “magic” of knowing when someone is the right person, a soul-mate style belief that transforms into a trope. Is that a blueprint from Nora’s mind? Is it wish fulfilment? Or is it just writing fiction? I don’t know. I can make guesses having read her memoirs, but I don’t know. I think the seduction of When Harry Met Sally is the idea that you might have already met the perfect person for you, and you just have to wait for the stars to align, and maybe that’s something she wanted but didn’t have? Once again, I don’t know. Having gone through such public infidelity, I’d take a guess that some of those films could be about hope. Hope to find someone to love, hope for something better? That’s what I take from it anyway, as a reader. That sense of hope. There are very few people in the world who aren’t going to relate to that in some way, which what makes it such good art. I need to specify that it doesn’t actually matter, and I don’t truly want to know what SHE thought, as a reader. It doesn’t matter. But as a writer, I’m interested. I’m interested in the jet fuel these stories fly on.

When I remembered that we can put these ingredients into our books, I asked myself what I wanted to write about, what I wanted to explore, what’s important to me. I cannot stress enough that these books are FUNNY and they are SILLY and they are about FALLING IN LOVE and SMOOCHING - but that doesn’t mean I don’t take the writing of them very seriously. I didn’t just want to scribe a story, to plot out the beats and tropes and characters. I think those are all the skin and organs and hair and proboscis of a narrative. What I needed to find is the mind, or the spirit, or the soul, I don’t know. Something more ephemeral, like “the intention”. What can I pull from my life right now that isn’t details, isn’t facts or settings or biography? What turns it from an idea into a story?

I’m not gonna go into the answers I worked out about this, because hilariously, they are derived from experiences that are too personal to share in a public forum, but it was a breakthrough for my writing. The whole trip was a success! It gave me the time and space to work that out. But it also made me realise that critics of Nora Ephron’s “everything is copy” quote have probably been viewing it too superficially all along - yes our art is inspired by our lives, but that’s actually so insanely mysterious and deep, because what do we have if not our experiences? What’s more complicated than our lives?

Or maybe I’m just looking for another experience to write about myself, who knows!

—

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“You can watch an animated film about a talking bucket of waffles that learns sorcery, and if there is an emotional core that points to a True North for that character, you will go, oh my God, that bucket of waffles is me, and I am it. And that's groundedness to me,” Brennan Lee Mulligan muses, rounding out a particularly delightful moral to our conversation about comedy and tone - and it’s a testament to his sublime control of comedy and storytelling that this is both a funny line, and an illuminating and meaningful point. One of the better waffle-bucket analogies I’ve heard recently.

I’m interviewing Brennan at 2am (not in a warehouse, but in my apartment), and it feels fitting that my energy is somewhat unhinged and excited from both the hour and the sheer excitement of talking to one of my favourite comedy people, because we’re talking about his latest show ‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ -  which is equally unhinged and excited.

It’s difficult to choose my favourite moment from Dimension 20’s action-film inspired new show. Is it the moment the White House rips itself from its earthly shackles and takes off into the atmosphere? Is it when Ally Beardsley’s character Jennifer Drips must roll to “get away from that plane that’s trying to rob me”? Was it the insane yet ultimately successful “bean slip” plan by Rekha Shankar that used beans to destroy a couple of stealth bombers? Or is it all of these and more, because why do we try to impose hierarchy on something as ephemeral and beautiful as joy?

‘Never Stop Blowing Up’, like its name suggests and enforces, is a big, absurd, manic show. A group of disparate “losers” who work at a failing video rental store get sucked into an action film and inhabit the avatars of action heroes - very Jumanji meets Empire Records meets Die Hard. It’s so hysterically funny that a very pregnant performer (the marvellous Izzy Roland) laughed so much that she pissed herself during the show at least once.

This isn’t a surprise - there hasn’t been a single Dimension 20 show that I haven’t been obsessed with, that hasn’t been very funny. For the uninitiated, Dimension 20 is a miraculous blend of comedy, tabletop roleplaying, improvisation and longform narrative storytelling, hosted on comedy streaming channel Dropout. It’s very much a new format of show, and one that is uniquely designed for my specific style of story-based nerdery.

Now in its 22nd season, the offerings range from the D&D/John Hughes mashup ‘Fantasy High’, to a Game of Thrones inspired fantasy world populated by different food groups, to a show featuring iconic queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race called ‘Dungeons and Drag Queens’, to more and more.

No two seasons really resemble each other, but even for Dimension 20, ‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ is pushing the boundaries of this new form again, with a gaming system that is perfectly designed for these huge comedy moments - which is why I was incredibly excited to talk to creator of Dimension 20, comedian and comedy writer and performer Brennan Lee Mulligan, and poke his huge beautiful brain about comedy and storytelling.

“There's too many pies and we're slipping on banana peels”

I start off the interview by taking the chance to sincerely and earnestly thank Brennan, as discovering Dimension 20 during Melbourne’s lockdown era was pretty much the only thing that kept me sane. 

I remember convincing my friend to join me in my new obsession by describing it as the perfect lockdown show because it is a “full meal” - the comedy I needed to cut through the crippling depression, the immediacy and joy of the improvised performances to remind me of what having funny friends is like, and the commitment to storytelling truths and stakes and pathos and meaning that I required to be fully immersed in a time where my attention span was absolutely shot to hell.

I’ve always been curious as to how that “full meal” effect is created - and why Brennan decided to pitch a delicious D&D/ tabletop roleplaying game storytelling fusion to a comedy channel in the first place. Traditionally, people have laughed AT people playing Dungeons and Dragons, not with them.

“My God, I love this question so much, Patrick. Thank you,” Brennan says.

“I refer to this in my work as the Casablanca Effect. Casablanca is one of the all-time great films. There's a lot of conversations in current media, film, television, content creation around tone. What is our tone? What is the tone we're striking? And there's something incredible when you go back and watch some of our most classic films like Casablanca, that tone is something that gets moved through at a rapid pace. That movie is a romance. It is intrigue and espionage, it has wild moments of comedy, moments of sudden shock or suspense, violence and, you know, death and things like that. And it's incredible.

I think when you look at that and go, oh, right, occupying a single tone for an entire work - we have a word for that - it's called monotone, one tone. It's not good, and it's not, I think, true to life.

So I really appreciate you saying that because I think that we strive in Dimension 20, especially in the long form of these two hour episodes, which, you know - actual play by virtue of being improvised scene length -  usually about doubles or triples from a normal television or movie scene. And you, I think, find within that that you need to vary the tone of the work through all of the experiences of life to be that more multifarious, tonal experience where there's comedy and drama and intrigue and danger all at, you know, all in a single episode.”

I’m nodding so furiously at this point, thinking about my own writing and the confusion and bafflement it sometimes engenders when I refuse to maintain a monotone and skip between tones and genres with gay abandon - but I want to hear how Brennan specifically balances these humours, in an old timey medial sense, in these stories.

“There is definitely a mathematics to it” Brennan sighs, “but I do fear, I have to say that it is largely an intuitive and instinctual math, especially depending on the performers that you're playing with. I don't know how to describe the feeling, but I do know that with my favourite collaborators, we are all almost on a shared internal clock that goes - ‘Okay. We've reached an apex moment of sorrow or tragedy here’. And occasionally we'll get to that apex moment and say, we need to let that fully rest and we need to get soft. But sometimes you'll say, actually, this needs to be punctured, we need a laugh here to come out of this. Occasionally the reverse will happen: you'll be in something so silly and slapstick.

I think about it in terms of what we in long form improv call editing, which is sometimes like ‘how do you get out of a mood or a tone’? Not because it's time for it to be over, but because you want to keep forward momentum or pacing. So, oh my God, we're in a scene. There's too many pies, we're slipping on banana peels, and there's a certain amount of slipping on banana peels, then you slip on your 10th banana peel and under that banana peel is the secret door that you can see an ominous red light coming out of. It's those tonal shifts that actually allow you to propel the story forward, and switching the tone becomes a way to communicate to your players  “let's advance the story in a new direction”. 

It’s honestly like Brennan just wandered under the box that I’ve propped up with a stick to get the juicy carrot inside, because I was gearing up  to guide this conversation to how much improv comedy plays in the unique recipe of Dimension 20 storytelling. Out of all the disparate elements that make up Dimension 20 shows, it’s the improvisation that I think provides the jet fuel, the spark of immediacy and stupidity that perhaps makes it unique. For my sins, I too am a longform improviser, and have been using the narrative and storytelling lessons I’ve learned from various improv schools in my own writing for almost a decade now, so I’m keen to ask Brennan how much of his improv practice informs his storytelling. 

“Wow. That's a great question” he says. (I’m leaving all of his compliments in the article because I’m not above being chuffed by them.)

“So fundamentally - the bizarre part about my biography is that it's actually the reverse. You know, I was playing D&D for 10-15 years prior to engaging in a formal improv curriculum. I studied at the Upright Citizens Brigade and became a house performer there and a teacher there, and it was the joy of a lifetime. I mean, I really, really value and honour that time that I spent at that theatre and loved the work that we did there. What's so fascinating is the honing of awareness  that I think improv really helps with. To know when you have found something funny, to understand what it feels like when you and someone click into a shared knowledge of something unspoken… I think in all those years performing on those stages, I know when a player knows that we've both arrived at something important.

Because of course, the whole thing with improv is that you can't check in with other performers because the show is live, the audience is there. So you have to find all these ways to check in under the surface of the water. Your characters can't say it, but you know how to have characters act in a way where you're pinging sort of your sonar off each other like, yeah, we got it right, we know what we're doing.

But of course, the funniest thing too, is what improv tells you not to do,  at least in the UCB curriculum, is you're not supposed to pursue plot. And the funniest thing about that for me was like, okay, well, I'm coming from LARP and tabletop games, which is basically about improvising the MOST plot. The plot is what we're here to do. And so I think there's always been a fun thing about marrying that game focused comedy forward improv style with heavily plot driven forms like tabletop or LARP.

Tumbling down the hill at full speed

As much as I’d like to discuss the absolutely punishing intricacies of improv and storytelling for another three hours, that actually segues quite well into ‘Never Stop Blowing Up’, because my fascination with this season has been how comedy weighted it is, and how chaotic the plot is - just like an improvised scene.

I remember the first moment that I realised this show is a very different beast from other D20 shows was when Jacob Wysocki’s Dang drove a car into outer space - successfully. The rules not only allowed that to happen, they encouraged it. And the show only got much crazier after that. The commitment to the absurd, to the hyperbole of action films, is infectious to watch. I had to wonder if Brennan expected the show to go so unhinged, to make him say multiple times that he felt like he “was in a fever dream” or just “unwell”. Or if that was the plan all along. Was he sick of of being the dungeon dad and wanted to let loose?

“Going into this season, we got this crew together for this side quest and knew we wanted to do action-comedy and knew we wanted to be in that genre. It's almost funny how these different sort of, creative, parameters fell together very organically. ‘Okay, we're going to do action comedy, but D&D doesn't really quite work for that, so we're going to go to Kids on Bikes. Actually, is there a way to adjust that too?”

Kids on Bikes is described as a “collaborative world building storytelling rules-light tabletop role-playing game, set in small towns with big mysteries”, which was further adapted by the team for Never Stop Blowing Up. It’s less crunchy and mechanics focused than Dungeons and Dragons, and the modified version features a “blowing up” mechanic that not only enables the insanity of the pace, but rewards it. In improv we’d call these kinds of moves “big choices”.

“I think with the cast we had, there was something really exciting about that on a creative level, if we say that the bar for achievement is that we ‘Yes, And’ as much as we can, and try to get into that hysterical comedy mania to to the utmost… Do we still have the ability to put pieces of a story puzzle together while we are tumbling down a hill at full speed? And delightfully, the answer is yes.

And it was really delightful to take a player like Ally Beardsley, who constantly has thrown chaos my way, and go, I'm not reffing anymore. I'm not the referee. I'm engaging in the madness with you. So if we're going to have this make sense, you're going to meet me as we surge forward.

To their incredible credit, all the players did an amazing job of seeing the wonderful freedom and comedic limitlessness in this space and still adding in pathos and character motivation into that spree.”

The magic bucket of waffles

‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ really is magically manic - all the players, including Brennan match each other’s freak, escalating each episode into mind-boggling feats of stupidity. But at the same time, there are still some beautiful and emotional and even profound moments scattered throughout the chaos.

There’s a strong commitment to character in all these shows, and I think that the high-absurdity concept of the plot and setting makes it all the more important for the characters to have truths and transfiguration at their core.

And it’s no surprise really that the format helps set this up - ‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ exists in the tradition of stories like Jumanji and even Narnia, where ordinary people are transported into a magical or fantastical world, in order to learn lessons about themselves to take back to reality. Throughout the season, there’s a lot of discussion through character growth around modern malaises like loneliness, community, and purpose. We have teenagers unsure of their futures, older people left adrift after divorces and heartbreak, and the oldest woman in the world who invented the first joke. There’s a heart to each of them, no matter how ludicrous they get.

There’s even a whole thesis we could write about the metatextual nature of this kind of show, with stacks of avatars on avatars, going all the way up to the performers themselves - most players of D&D and other TTRPG’s can confirm that the character’s we play in these worlds are a shard of our subconscious, and that we learn things about ourselves from our level 2 halfling rogues.

It’s no coincidence that I spent my teenage years roleplaying a drunk bisexual elf who didn’t know how to fight, only to essentially become that guy at university. I didn’t say we had to learn GOOD lessons from our avatars.

But I’m interested in how Brennan works to ground the story amidst exploding chaos enough to achieve this kind of emotional alchemy.

“I am still very much myself a student of this form. And every time we do a season, I think we try to take creative swings, because one of the most exciting parts of this that keeps the fire lit for me is, what more can we learn about this relatively new medium? What I would say to any aspiring DMs is groundedness gets mischaracterised as - I think a lot of newer artists will hear grounded and go, got it? Boring. Don't have exciting stuff happen. 

The amount of friends I have that go to commercial auditions where it's like the line is like, ‘God, I love my new Doritos Scoop flavour blast’. And a director will look at you and say, ‘don't say that animated, say it like you would say it in real life.’ And you're like, ‘say I love my Doritos Scoop flavour blast like I would say it… I would never say that?’ And what do you mean ground that, right? What does grounded even mean in this context? And I think grounded as a byword for low energy, boringness disaffectedness is the death of joy, and also of truth. 

To me, what groundedness means is do characters feel attached to the stakes of the story? You can be in total slumberland, dream world, phantasmagoria, and if someone's emotional core has a true north, all of that is going to be parsed pretty effortlessly. Right? The groundedness is not coming from physical danger. Physical danger has no limit on it in this world. Cars are crashing through fruit stands every day. Every corner has a new world ending plot of international cabal of criminals and, you know, wild card, you know, loose cannon law enforced like that's happening in every square inch of the world. What stays grounded is how these characters relate to getting back home, and how they feel about their own lives, now that an element of chaos has been introduced. So you see, like dang discovering Wolfman Ann and the secret radio. That is always going to feel grounded in house stakes, not only because Jacob Wysocki is such an incredibly talented performer, but because you see that the players are locked in on their true north. 

I don't need the stakes of this magical VHS tape to be grounded. I need my character to understand that I'm trying to get home, and that this these wild events are making me think very carefully about my life. If that's there, all the other stuff goes away.”

I think this is the heart of the “full meal” that is Dimension 20 - as much as I delight in the big, crazy moments, the big-tittied dinosaur ninjas, the fight scenes, the explosions - I wouldn’t care about them if it wasn’t for the fact that they were happening around characters who have that internal truth. There is an alchemy here, and  it’s not about whether comedy detracts or adds from storytelling - it’s about what you value, and I think it’s clear that Brennan values empathy, and people’s stories and their truths. It’s the people, the characters, who stay with us.

“I would like to put one last point in this room that we're almost out of time,” adds Brennan. “But to put one last point on this. I have watched movies in which nothing supernatural or surreal happened. I've watched student films at film school that were autobiographical, about things the filmmaker had experienced earlier that semester. All of the events were true to life, but it was still deeply ungrounded. The story did not feel real. But you can watch  an animated film about a talking bucket of waffles that learns sorcery, and if there is an emotional core that points to a True North for that character, you will go, “oh my God, that bucket of waffles is me, and I am it. And that's groundedness to me.”

We’re all buckets of waffles really, at the end of the day, I answer.

“At the end of the day. Who am I, if not a bucket of waffles?” agrees Brennan.

‘Never Stop Blowing Up’ is available on the Dropout app, and i really recommend it!

Thank you for reading! This newsletter is funded entirely by the generosity of our paid subscribers, allowing us to commission amazing queer writers and boost marginalised voices. If you like this article and believe in independent journalism, please consider subscribing.

I’ve always believed there’s an Occams Razor answer to this question - it’s because she’s a mean spirited bigot, like many other mean spirited bigots before her, desperately using whatever flimsy pretence she can find to try and justify her gross views. She is the Anita Bryant of our times, and will be remembered as such. I guess the only mystery is the enduring conundrum of how people get radicalised into hate movements.

Or so I thought. Because maybe her brain is full of black mould spores that are making her so sick and crazy.

Why is everyone calling JK Rowling “Mouldemort”?

There’s a tension in journalism (which this article absolutely is, I can’t wait for my Walkley) about platforming and boosting the voices of people who have been radicalised into the far-right or into cults - but considering she has more followers than most mainstream media, it’s not really a case of “don’t give her oxygen”. Unfortunately she has more than enough oxygen already.

Speaking of oxygen rich spaces, a recent photo pulled directly from her Twitter by the delightful Twitter user Sam (@mushycrouton) seemingly shows the wizard terf sitting in a room that seems absolutely covered in black mould.

Joanne! Buy a dehumidifier!

Like spores in the walls of a terf’s castle, the photo spread around the internet, and quickly became a meme. Twitter, and the internet in general, is always best when people jump on a joke.

And surely it’s a joke, right? A fun way to lightly dunk on an absolute monster?

But as an award-nominated journalist, I had to wonder - could it be mould, and if so, could mould turn someone into a bitter and detestable transphobe? And if it’s not mould, why did she almost immediately change her profile picture to a photo of a conspicuously mould-free room? So I decided to put on my little hat with says “press” on it, hit the streets (google), and investigate.

So is it black mould running up the walls or just horrible interior design?

Anecdotally, as a veteran of Sydney sharehouses I know black mould.

One sharehouse I lived in made me so sick and loopy that I ended up spontaneously moving to Melbourne. Sydneysiders only do that when they are VERY unwell! When I was moving out, I moved my bed away from the wall and found a rash of the stuff growing up the wall, growing closer and closer to my precious head (the cup where my brain lives). So I can say with pretty firm authority that it looked exactly like JK Moulding’s walls.

But I am not mould authority or a mycologist, so I hit the ground and hit up some contacts I have in science and academia. I had a couple of people say, off the record, that it certainly looks like mould, but wouldn’t feel comfortable being quoted. “What publication are you writing for again?” was a common question, followed by an awkward silence when I answered “it’s called Nonsense”.

I asked the science editor at my work and she said “I have work to do, Patrick”.

Most of my emails went unanswered. Some did respond, and seemed baffled by my questions.

My friend who is really good at foraging for magic mushrooms was the only one willing to go on the record, but she also is really good at foraging for magic mushrooms so I thought she might not really lend credibility to my piece.

Clearly, the science community are intimidated by Big Terf, and I’ll have to dig deeper for my pulitzer.

Can mould turn you transphobic?

We know that mould infestations have a profound effect on your health.  As Professor of Public Health from Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University, Jeroen Douwes writes for The Conversation:

“Inhaling mould fragments or spores can inflame the airways, causing nasal congestion, wheezing, chest tightness, coughing and throat irritation. Prolonged exposure to high levels of indoor dampness can reduce lung function and cause chronic health problems such as asthma. Those who already suffer from asthma and allergies are more likely to have more severe symptoms when exposed.”

And that’s just regular mould. The most infamous type of mould is “black mould” (Stachybotrys chartarum), which can grow on water-damaged building materials and produce toxic spores.

Professor Douwes also points out that research shows that people who live in damp and mouldy homes are also at increased risk of depression. To paraphrase Deux Moi, seems like a likely place to be depressed.

However, a 2020 study found that black mould inhalation can can elicit an immune response and have negative impacts on the brain, such as:

• Inflammation in the hippocampus (an important memory centre)

• Reduced neurogenesis (the growth of new brain cells)

Some of mould’s harmful effects on the brain are due to mycotoxin exposure, which are poisonous.

Research also shows that mould and mycotoxins may be a risk factor in Alzheimer’s disease. For example, one study suggests that a subtype of Alzheimer’s disease may be the result of exposure to mycotoxins and other toxic substances. My nan had alzheimers, but it didn’t make her transphobic.

In one study by the Environmental Health Center in Dallas, 100 participants were examined in an effort to uncover how exposure to mould that is toxic can affect the brain and lead to cognitive and emotional impairments.

After the mould exposure, nervous system challenges were observed in all 100 patients. In this study, brain scans identified abnormalities in a significant portion of the patients studied.

The science is clear - living for years in a mould infested room is essentially the equivalent of being hit by the brick thrown at Stonewall every day on repeat. Internet sleuths have found photos of the mouldy room going back to 2022 at least, meaning there’s at least a few years of mould poisoning. It also corresponds with a significant uptake in JK Rowling’s transphobic posting, and an increase in both vitriol and incoherence and “mask off” moments. You gotta remember that years ago, when she began “liking” transphobic and racist posts on Twitter, she declared that it was a “senior moment”.

So, I think we can conclude that if JK Rowling has been living in a mould infested castle for years, it could definitely have a significant impact on her cognitive functions, which could explain an increase in her obsession.

But what we can’t confirm is that mould CAUSED her transphobia. It was probably there all along - the mould probably just doesn’t help. Mould rarely helps, unless you are a cheese. JK Rowling is the farthest thing from a cheese that I know. I love cheese.

I’ve been here all along

While it’s fun to speculate about the mould corrupting Joanne’s brain, ultimately it doesn’t matter, because she’s such a toxic presence in the world in her own right. I was recently thinking about how I’ve been reporting on criticisms of JK Rowling by the LGBTQIA+ community since at least 2016, where she started grabbing at the pink dollar by declaring that Dumbledore was gay all along (but didn’t want to depict any icky gay kissing).

I’ve watched so many people in the terf movement essentially become radicalised into transphobia and homophobia because they can’t handle even a second of constructive criticism. And it’s wild - the queer community were OBSESSED with Harry Potter in the past, and were her most cringe and vehement soldiers. I remember some of the first trans friends I had back in 2003 would do a regular Harry Potter reading night.

Years ago when I was editing Junkee, I was working on a long form article (never released because I rage-quit and lost access to my email and the CMS) where I interviewed trans people who were getting their Harry Potter tattoos removed. I was flooded with case studies. One tattoo artist even told me they became known for specialising in converting Deathly Hallows symbols into other cool patterns.

I think it’s probably better to think of the black mould as a kind of metaphor for the misinformation and hate that keeps radicalising people into bigotry. It spreads in a similar way, and is goddamn ugly to look at.

After writing this article, I’m also leery of turning JK Rowling too much into a joke - the awful effect that her hatred has had on the trans community is very real, and the sway she has on British media and public is dangerous. She rubs shoulders with declared Nazis, misogynists and the far right. She’s sent flowers to, and expressed support for alleged abusers.

But at the same time, turning her into a figure of ridicule does also help diminish that power. Her recent doubling down on Olympic boxer Imane Khelif even earned her a negative article in right-wing tabloid nightmare The Sun, showing that she’s slowly hoisting herself by her own mouldy petard.

Besides - maybe we’re being too harsh on mould. Maybe she’s the toxic presence in the house, and the poor mould, desperate for light and air to propagate, is forced to absorb the angry sweat and furious breaths of a woman addicted to tweeting cringe. Maybe we’re watching a Last Of Us kind of prequel, where Joanne actually infects the mushrooms with her hate and bad detective novels, and they go mad and start killing people.

The scientists declined to comment on this theory too.

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Recently I had the pleasure of being one half of a true silver-screen coded romantic kiss.

We were huddled close together under the scant protection of a small purple duck umbrella, the pouring rain like a curtain swept around us cutting us off from the world, the only sound our breathing and the water cascading through the trees, the city turned soft and silver in the distance, our faces illuminated only by a distant streetlight. Time became meaningless. The water tricking down the back of my neck a distant annoyance. Even in that consuming moment there was a part of my brain broken enough to think “wow this is just like a movie”.

Which is funny, because not long after this cinematic smooch, I went and saw an actual movie that set us up for exactly this kind of classic film smooch, all the conditions were just right - precipitation levels, cloud structure, a sudden change in wind direction, Glen Powell in a tight wet white t-shirt - but for some reason the tornado of smooching we were all chasing failed to form.

That’s right, I saw Twisters, the movie about two people who just have so much god-damned respect for wind that they basically shake hands over it and never kiss. And movie-goers are CONFUSED. Where’s the kiss? Why aren’t our beautiful action stars rewarded for punching a tornado out of the sky with science by a huge, swelling crescendo, film-ending, lip smooch? Is it censorship or just bad storytelling?

It made me think about the narrative necessity of sex and love on screen.

Twisters is a great film - it hearkens back to the golden era of Hollywood action, an absolute romp that knows exactly what it wants to do and how to have fun doing it. It’s just a fun action film about some people who HATE the wind and want to kill it by any means necessary!

However, crucially, it’s not in any sense nostalgia-poisoned, which most reboots and reborn IP films we’re cursed with these days are, with none of the actors from the original Twister shoehorned into the plot, none of our characters spuriously related to Helen Hunt, almost no sneaky winks to the nineties film. As far as I can tell, the only time they broke this rule was a scene briefly using the old and iconic Twister technology, and a repeat villain (strong winds).

But like many films of the action genre, it relies on a strong romance to help propel the story and create depth to the characters. I would argue that most stories incorporate romance in some form or fashion, because love, romance, sex, yearning, friendship, relationships, horniness, heartbreak and all the other things that fall under the great umbrella of romance - because famously it’s a fundamental part of human existence. But in these action romps, it also plays an important function in storytelling, namely shortcutting our way to caring for the characters. Shortcutting is not laziness or poor storytelling - it’s the difference between plot and story. In improv, there’s a rule to start your scene with a defined relationship between your character and your scene mate - that way we don’t have to spent three minutes watching two zany characters be introduced to each other. We skip to the action.

Every part of the character development in Twisters is quickly served to us through the easily understood lens of romance - we understand the motivations from friend-zoned Javi to pull Kate out of tornado retirement. We get the enemies to lovers trope between Kate and Glen Powell (I know his character has a name but I refuse to use it). We understand the motivating factor that their rivalry gives to the story, and understand that it comes from frustrated mutual attraction. The recognisable dance between the two main characters humanises them, and makes us care enough about them for real stakes - their relationships with each other (quickly) make us care about them being picked up by a twister and thrown into the Oklahoma sky. We don’t have TIME in these films for long character studies - we need the romance as a shorthand to understand these are real people who do not want to be sucked into a vortex.

Romance on screen comes with its own language, and it’s almost universally understood - a semaphore of glances and touches. It’s often the epitome of “actions speak louder than words” - important by definition in an action film. Important in any film where storytelling space is at premium (even though they’re too long these days).

But also important in real life - my recent kiss in that wet and magical park made us cut to the feeling, to borrow a Carly Rae Jepsen term, more meaningfully than weeks of conversation could have. A kiss is a long essay wrote short, a Shakespearian monologue turned Cliffs Notes.

That said - I hate the idea of justifying romance, sex and in this particular case, the banality of an onscreen kiss through utilitarianism. Art, and films, are just ways that we use stories to engage with the totality of the world - and I’d argue that romance, kissing and sex (as well as friendship, rivalries and other relationships) are basic and fundamental parts of it. It might not be for YOU - and that’s fine - but it would be insane to pretend it’s not a pillar of existence, even if you reject it.

By the end of the film, we’ve walked through all the steps of a classic enemies to lover romance between Daisy Edgar Jones and Glen Powell, a woman who did a convincing job of pretending she understands wind, and a man whose face somehow looks like a Soviet era brutalist building that’s been converted into a dance studio. It’s done well - and in the final scene we have him running through the airport to stop her from leaving to New York, a classic and potentially even stereotypical romance trope. He literally bolts his tornado truck into the ground, such is the force of his love. And then… nothing. No kiss. Failure to Launch (2006).

In an interview with Collider, Daisy Edgar-Jones said it was a “note” from executive producer Steven Spielberg that led to the final kiss being cut from the film, rather than the Disney-style trend of capitulating to extremely conservative blocks of audience and de-sexifying every film.

In this article in Vulture, Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung gave another reason, saying:

“The advice I was given that really swayed me was our editor, Terry, telling me, ‘It’s better to leave an audience wanting than to leave them overfilled,’” Chung says. “I think that’s what we’re doing with the kiss. If people actually saw it in the film, they might come away feeling like they didn’t really need it. It’s better to wish that they had kissed rather than to actually see it. Poor Glen jokingly said it was his performance, but it was not.”

@lislopesssDaisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell for Entertainment Weekly.🤍 #LisLove #daisyedgarjones #glenpowell #glenpowelledit #glenpowellinterview #animal #dogs #lovebirds #couple #couplegoals #twisters #movie #dogsoftiktok #fypシ #foryoupage

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I personally think that this is both bullshit, and antithetical to good storytelling - but you know, i’m also a romance writer (Spite Pie coming out May 2025), so maybe I’m biased. A romance narrative relies on a payoff, and in this case the kiss between them would be the cathartic expression of the romantic tension that the film deliberately set up. Stories rely on wish gratification as our reward, and we’re trained to expect stories to play out in logical ways. Even a “twist” should never be an actual surprise, it should be a subversion of the expectations that have been plotted out before us. I cannot stress just how much we are trained to expect a physical romantic conclusion between these characters - and how weird it feels not to get it, like pressing a button to blow up one of those grain silos and watching nothing happen. Also - next time you’re in the mood for a kiss, try asking your crush for a “physical romantic conclusion” - maybe you can justify it as a narrative essentiality.

I don’t know if the lack of kiss comes back to the puritanical strain of thinking that’s come into Hollywood recently - there’s a kind of gold standard essay for all culture writers at the moment called Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny which talks about the sneaky way that film has been desexed, and it’s worth a read. Even online, I’ve seen lots of puritanical young Americans arguing that sex scenes and passionate kisses don’t “add” anything to the narrative. I hate when old people like myself make sweeping generational generalisations, but anecdotally I have seen this kind of stuff explode in the online discourse. America has always had a huge puritanical attitude, even when they’re being more sex positive - they create a false binary between things like romance and smut, between “making love” and sex, so it’s not a surprise that we’re having one of those cultural turnarounds. But what it’s led to is a kind of weird pushback against sex and physical manifestations of romance on screen - and a desire to “justify” their inclusion. Weird that nobody bats an eye at something like violence in a film, and ask it to be justified as integral to the plot, but a smooch gets pearl clutching?

Asking what the “point” of a sex scene, or a grand climactic kiss, or a romantic moment, or a fingerbanging behind the bike sheds, is just the most depressing thing in the world to me. Even though I’ve spent this essay talking about the way the language of romance is narratively useful, it’s not the point. The point is to try and capture even a fraction of the beauty and mystery and joy and terror of human existence, in all its facets - and a big kiss with the wind cowboy at the end of the film is just part of that. A smooch in a dark park with a beautiful person is not the only reason to be alive, but it’s one of them.

A romance book is defined by having a “happy ever after” - an ending where the two protagonists fall in love and stay in love forever, creating a satisfying punctuation point for the story we’ve been told. Twisters didn’t need a HEA, but it also edged us right to that point where we assumed there would be one, and then denied us the catharsis. It felt like a rollercoaster climbing to the top and then just idling before the huge drop, making everyone get out and walk home instead. It felt like a truck full of special chemicals got sucked up into the sky, swirled around a whole bunch, and then did absolutely nothing at all.

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I recently tried the apps. I was on them once briefly many years ago, and managed to meet and date a broad spectrum of psychopaths - so yeah, you could say I’m thrilled. My motive this time was specifically as research for an article - I’ve decided that this round of singledom is going to be my Carrie Bradshaw phase, where I explore the trials and tribulations of dating through my incredibly lucrative column. The first “like” I got on Hinge was from a woman who proudly listed the following dating prompt.

 “A random fact I love is: Sunset”.

I guess that the concept of a sunset is a random fact. The next like I got was from some guy proudly looking for “The JFK to my Jackie O”.

“So you want someone to cheat on you and then die in your lap, with my brains in your hands?” I asked. There was no response.

 Over the hundreds of profiles I perused, I couldn’t help but feel whatever is the opposite of a spark of interest - instead I felt any hint of attraction turn soggy and crumble away like wet cake on the side of a plane. Oh, you like to TRAVEL? Really, how FASCINATING. Stop talking so I can remove my pants immediately, because that is so UNIQUE and BRILLIANT. Oh, you’re looking for someone who owns “at least one tent”? I don’t have a tent, but I do live in a house. Looking for the Jim to your Pam? Well, bad luck, because unlike Jim I have ambition and good hair.

I couldn’t help but wonder (ok ms bradshaw!) - have dating apps become the opposite of romance?

In the new season of Bridgerton, we find Penelope Featherington (played by the actual GODDESS Nicola Coughlan) in a regency version of the same quandary, forced to commit to her third season as a debut (which essentially makes her a spinster) in order to find a husband. Her motivation is nothing to do with love and romance - it’s so she can move out of her family home and the potential of having one of her idiot sisters in charge of her. A huge mood, for any adults who have been forced to move back home.

‘All these rules are to keep the marriage mart churning, but once you have performed your function and met your match, you are free,” Benedict Bridgerton says at one point.

I gotta say, finding myself single in my drastically late thirties feels a little bit like being out for my third social season - not only am I an old hand at the game, but I’ve grown cynical and tired and despondent at the prospect of ever finding what I want from the entire process.

While this is relatable, it’s also a common conceit in Bridgerton, a show entirely devoted to the belief that true love and romance not only exists, but is waiting for all of us, no matter how contrived the courting rituals are. Every season, we have at least one character who spurns the pageantry and pomp of the Ton’s social season, the balls and promenades and soirees that form the nobility’s “marriage mart”. In fact, in season 3 along with Penelope, we also have a new Bridgerton debut in Francesca Featherington, a somewhat shy, self-possessed girl who seeks to make a quick match so she can simply be done with the rigamarole and drudgery of courtship and the season. Another mood.

The comparison between the Ton’s marriage mart and modern dating apps is obvious - both are essentially formalising a courtship process - but I had to wonder if the upper crust of nobility in Bridgerton have a much better system than slamming your head against the wall while reading someone’s dating profile which confidently expresses that her “irrational” fear is snakes. Nobody on these apps knows the meaning of the word “irrational” - which is probably why they keep persisting in being on them.

Courtney Love

“It's weird because there's nothing that's 100% good or 100% bad, but I think at that time people were quite clear about their intentions, which I feel like was a nice thing. Like, you know, you'd have a ball and then the next day at calling hour they would come and see you if they liked you. So you're not waiting on a text”, says Nicola Coughlan to me on the subject of modern dating versus regency courtship. 

I am lucky enough to interview both her and romantic co-star Luke Newton, during an elaborate Bridgerton press event in NSW’s Bowral, which I also wrote about for The Guardian. For some reason, I’m convinced that their stint on the show might give them some kind of romance insight that can help me in my hour of need.

Nicola seems quite taken with the idea of ballrooms over Tinder, although as we’re chatting, starts to second-guess herself.

“But then, human nature doesn't change that much,” she shrugs. “I guess a lot of the apps nowadays are based on just people's appearance and in the Regency world, it was similar - you go to the ball and you dress up… so I don't know.”

“There are real similarities I guess in the Bridgerton world, although maybe they have more romantic versions of courtship than what we have today,” Luke Newton suggests. “But then, yeah, there's also a lot of rules which are quite restricting I think.  Like -  go to a ball but leave early so that you seem more desirable. It's like, I want to stay and party and have a drink!”

“Yeah yeah yeah yeah. And don't dance with someone more than once!” Nicola adds. They tell me that over three seasons of Bridgerton, they’ve become minor experts on regency courtship rules.

The interesting thing is that for the characters of Penelope and Colin, their romance (if it does occur in this season, no spoilers, but lol imagine if it didn’t?) essentially works outside the structures of the Ton, and follows the classic romance trope of “friends to lovers” - a romance that grows from an already established relationship, such as childhood friends, in this case.

“With friends to lovers, I think the most difficult part is believably taking these characters out of the friend zone,” says executive producer and showrunner Jess Brownell. I was incredibly excited to chat to Jess, because as someone in the middle of writing TWO romance books, I relished the chance to chat structure and tropes with someone deeply successful at crafting romance narratives.

“Why is Colin suddenly seeing Penelope in a new light? That was the challenge coming into the season. Fortunately, because Penelope is putting some distance between herself and Colin after last season, that creates space, I think, for Colin to see her in a new light and allowed us to shift their relationship.”

In fact, if you look at the season two of Bridgerton, you realise that the romance - a slow burn, enemies to lovers style affair, also happened in spite of the rules and restrictions of the courting season. Even the first season, with Lord Nevercum, used the Bridgerton courtship rules for their own purposes, attempting to utilise the system for their own practical desires - and ended up falling in love despite of it.

Perhaps the more we try to “game” dating, through either regency social seasons or dating apps, the less likely we are to find real love?

Do you want a relationship or a handyman?

It could be said that relationships are seen as more “romantic” if they happen outside of the sorts of courtship and dating structures we’ve been discussing, and instead occur “organically”. Certainly I’ve known people who have bemoaned the fact that they met on the apps, believing it’s a bad or boring story to tell at their wedding. 

If you’re on TikTok or single or both, it’s very likely you’ve seen the rise of in-person dating meet ups, singles groups, and even friendship clubs - Gen Z in particular seem to view dating apps as a kind of failed experiment, and are moving towards real life meetings as a way to find love and relationships.

Things like a “meet cute”, where two people collide spontaneously (sometimes literally) and find themselves helplessly attracted to each other, are valorised in Hollywood. However, this doesn't really translate into real life, with research showing that more Australians meet their partner online than through friends and work.

“Dating apps aren’t conducive to stumbling into just the right person precisely when you weren’t looking for them,” says two of my favourite romance scholars in the world, Dr Jodi McAlister and Lisa Portolan, in this fantastic article for The Conversation. Lisa is a specialist in dating apps and digital intimacy, while Jodi “Dr Love” McAlister, is an expert on representations of love in popular culture, so really they’re the perfect duo for my conundrum.

“Dating apps rely on a logic of active choice: you sign up to the app in pursuit of some form of coupledom. In interviews… conducted with dating app users, many described these apps as pre-meditated and strategic. When talking about what they might want in a relationship, many participants specifically desired a “Hollywood moment”, but felt this could never happen via a dating app,” they explain.

This actually rings extremely true for me - one of the things that drove me crazy about my foray onto the apps were the requirements that people felt compelled to list. Sometimes these were extremely functional - does or doesn’t want kids, already has kids, must be fine with several cats of varying sizes and temperaments. But others started becoming prohibitive - “looking for someone fit and can run marathons with me” or one that I enjoyed “must be career oriented, happy, and handy around the house”. Lady, you might be describing a plumber - you can just hire them, you don’t have to marry them.

This probably comes from a concept that I was reminded of when I read Good Material by Dolly Alderton last year (which I thought was meh, but had some interesting dating analysis) where people looking for a new relationship after a breakup put undue emphasis on the thing that basically broke up their previous romance or annoyed you about your previous partner. For example, if your partner was a terrible cook, you might fixate on getting a really good cook this time around - but maybe forget the other things which did work/ were important in your old relationship.

Dating becomes a kind of utilitarian checklist, full of red flags and dealbreakers and rules - the opposite of being swept off your feet.

But this matches with the conceit of Bridgerton season 3 - Penelope is not motivated to find a husband during this social season by real love or real desire for another person - it’s because she wants to get out of her family home, wants what little independence a woman of that era can find for herself through marriage.

Romance, the show often puts forward, is something you find DESPITE the intricate rules and traditions of courtship and dating. There is a conundrum at the heart of dating, that stretches all the way from the fictional era of Bridgerton to the blighted year of 2024 - does the action of trying to methodically find love through dating apparatus and courtship opportunities inherently strip the relationship of the romance?

The lesson is be yourself

I guess, at the heart of dating, is the question of what you actually want from the whole experience? The apps are certainly filled with thousands of specifics - people screaming into the void for someone kind and honest and with good banter. I can safely tell you that anybody who uses the word “banter” earnestly would explode at the quality of mine - but they’ll never know. People are looking for short, longterm, casual, polycule nightmare experiences, you name it. My favourite profiles are the ones that are clearly reactionary to their most recent breakup - I saw one which said “looking for someone who doesn’t want to spend any time with my bitch sister”.

Obviously there’s very practical functions to this - at my age, the conversation of children needs to be had clearly and quickly, because that’s essentially about what you want to do with the rest of your life. But it doesn’t really have anything to do with falling in love - it seems like all these “rules” for dating that we invent are our best way of trying to game the universe’s dating algorithm - if I like kayaking and lord of the rings and YOU like kayaking and lord of the rings, then maybe our share enjoyment of oars and orcs might make it easier for love to bloom? Or is it as useful as spitting into the wind, kicking the waves so that the inexorable ocean won’t suck you out into its depths to meet the mermaids? Is love something that hits out of the blue, or is it built together using tools like shared passions and joys? 

“The most attractive thing is when someone can make you laugh,” Nicola Coughlan declares. “There's gorgeous moments between them [Peneople and Colin] where they just laugh together and you feel that connection.”

This is true for me too - but would it be impossible for me to fall in love with some dour hottie? Probably. I am extremely funny myself, which comes with certain responsibilities (not dating anyone who enjoys Young Sheldon).

It shows that while you can try your best and hope for the best with dating, the only thing you actually have control over is yourself. As a wise woman once said, how the hell are you gonna love someone else if you can’t love yourself? Like everything RuPaul says, it’s trite pop-psychology that only sounds profound because it’s built on a fundamental truth.

“Our tagline internally for the season was, ‘you have to find your true self before you can find true love’”, Jess Brownell tells me, explaining that Penelope Featherington’s love story is about finding her own strength and internal truths.

“There's a reason why I'm not writing the posters - I think ‘even a wallflower can bloom’ is so much better. But that was a real theme for us. And so each of them do have to go on a very personal solo journey before they're ready to find love.”

Through this, I've realised I have basically no idea what I want from the apps, or from a relationship at this point in time. Like Penelope, there are a bunch of practical reasons why I think I might want a relationship - revenge, not dying alone, someone to buy a house with, another parent for my needy hound - but absolutely no idea if I want to put myself back into the emotional vortex of a relationship, and risk my already bruised and beaten heart getting wounded again. 

But when I do feel ready, will I sit back and wait for romance to find me - or will I set myself the goal of finding a husband, make myself sparkle, and throw myself back on the rack of courting and dating? Dearest reader, I have no fucking idea.

—

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I have recently moved into a new apartment after a breakup, and I have to tell you that I do not recommend the experience. Just in case you were considering uprooting your life in the most unpleasant way: Don’t! Stop!

I am leaving “getting dumped, losing your job, and having no house all in the same week” a very negative review on Yelp. I do not recommend. I’ve moved a lot in my life, because I lived in the Sydney rental market with rescue dogs for a long time. Once I moved four times in a year. It always sucks more than you can imagine, but even I was surprised by how badly I have emotionally dealt with this current situation - I’m still physically very unwell purely from the stress and horror of the whole thing.

I’m a relatively together kinda guy, not prone to big emotions - in fact, according to another person I used to date, sometimes intimidatingly goal oriented - so it was confronting to feel so completely out of control and… broken by a big life change, beyond the heartbreak. I found myself thinking wistfully of becoming the kind of man who could take this all in his stride, who could shrug off the sudden loneliness and anxiety and lack of confidence. A man who didn’t need to move seventeen boxes of snazzy pants to different apartments around Australia. A man so big and so huge that heartbreak can’t touch him.

I was thinking of Jack Reacher.

In any given episode of Reacher, the titular Jack Reacher will walk into a location and everyone will see him and comment on him. He’s the prequel to that elephant in the room that everybody notices.

This is because he is a huge dude, just a massive slab of guy, a thick cut of man meat. “Geez, I’ve seen skyscrapers with less floors than this guy” some goon will say, because the dialogue is pretty bad in this show. Then that goon will try to kill Reacher, which is ridiculous because he is the size of a truck. Every second we are reminded that this man is the closest thing we’ll ever see to The Hulk, like how in the first episode he nonchalantly snaps the cable ties binding his wrists, because “cuffs didn’t fit him”. This man has such muscular wrists that handcuffs do not fit around them?

The promo for season 2 was a photo of him facing away from the camera, with the slogan “Reacher’s Back” emblazoned across his broad and muscular back. Get it? He’s a unit.

It’s also his primary reference point to himself - “tall guys never get enough leg room” he’ll quip, before booting a crooked cop off a building or whatever.

I’m just annoyed that they haven’t gone for a “they call him Reacher because he’s always tall enough to REACH cups in the cupboard” style joke, it’s in the name people!

If you’re not across the rich and storied world of Jack Reacher, the show is an Amazon Prime series with a confirmed third season coming, that stars Alan Ritchson as a big, big guy. In the Lee Child books that the series is based on, Jack Reacher is 6’4 or maybe 6’5, but more importantly thick. I’m 6’2, but I’m built like one of those wavy armed balloon men out the front of car dealerships. The books are equally as impressed with his biggitude - which makes the 2012 film’s casting choice of famously excited little man Tom Cruise even the more baffling.

Reacher is an ex military special forces investigator type person, and the show revolves around things from his past rearing their ugly head and forcing him to leave his nomadic lifestyle and punch and kick and shoot baddies. It makes sense in the moment, but I’m left with a pleasant vagueness when I try to remember the overall plot of the show. He’s too big for much plot to fit in around him.

Apart from the advantages that his hugeness gives him in headbutting generic bikie gang members, and the distraction it gives the audience from the stilted dialogue, I spent much of the show trying to work out why Jack Reacher was so big?

Was it the joy of the carnival freakshow alone? Or is it because Jack Reacher is the manifestation of a long forgotten masculine archetype - the man too big for feelings.

The smooth waxed chest of stoicism

The other major character trait that Jack Reacher possesses apart from gigantism is that he’s a lonely wandering minimalist.

For some reason, he’s created for himself a life entirely off the grid, unburdened by belongings or connections. He buys a single cheap outfit from op shops, and only carries a toothbrush with him. Yet somehow he always has a perfectly waxed chest, which posits the theory that he actually organises his nomad wandering entirely around available waxing parlours.

He drifts from town to town, an ultra-violent Paul Bunyan, listening to Blues music and accidentally solving military crimes. His few remaining friends, who somehow tolerate being pals with someone with no conceivable way of being contacted, just accept this lifestyle as part of his personality, a quirk. At one point they contact him by putting a suspicious amount of money into his bank account.

When I first started watching this show, it read more as a cry for help to me, an avoidant strategy probably based off some kind of PTSD from war and whatnot. This is a man who merely grimaced when he found out his brother had been murdered, and got to work getting justice-based revenge on the killers.

But now, weighed down by the dreadful weight of my awful belongings and wanting nothing more than to flee my problems and the unbearable weight of sudden loneliness, I began to see Jack Reacher as more of an aspirational figure for men. Someone so big and huge they can endure feelings, so stoic that they would never go crunning (cry running).

There’s something archaic about the Jack Reacher archetype, a throwback to an old idea of what it means to be a man, that almost makes him feel anachronous, in the wrong world. When you realise that he’s modelled off that old film hardboiled kind of figure, whose primary trait is an inability to give up, and who can take a beating, then you begin to realise that Reacher and his bigness and hugeness is not just a random character choice but a manifestation of a kind of ethical perspective. He might be anachronous, even slightly ridiculed, but that’s because he hearkens back to what’s seen as a kind of atavistic model of masculinity, a simpler and stronger time where men were men and they were just so massive and emotionless. He is the physical manifestation of what we would consider (toxic) male stoicism.

You only need to look at the current conservative, alt-right obsession with things like ancient greek statues, tradwives, and oddly, Sydney Sweeney’s massive honkers, to realise there is a weird yearning for a non-existent bygone era where everything was apparently simpler (more outwardly racist). It’s a projection born from feeling uncomfortable with progression - or more specifically, uncomfortable when straightness, whiteness, and maleness is not automatically top of the pile. I believe Jack Reacher is part of this.

In fact, the male action star has often delved into this aspirational male stoicism - your John Wicks and Jason Bournes and even James Bonds. People who have seemingly traded emotions for joyless efficiency at shooting guns and solving mysteries. Sure, they’re allowed to have a motivating tragedy - dead wife, dead other wife, dead girlfriend, etc - but they’re not allowed to ENGAGE with that emotion. They must take action instead.

It’s why I love Die Hard so much - John McClane is the opposite of stoic (although his communication style is pretty grim). Instead, he spends each of his action-packed movies griping and groaning like a suburban dad who just trod on lego, just really peeved about all these terrorists, visibly annoyed by his faltering relationship. He’s also not joylessly efficient - he’s a scrapper, using wits and tenacity to win, rather than flawless aim and grim aptitude. He’s a different kind of male archetype, equally reductive in many ways - but at least his strength is not based on a lack of feeling.

Lonely (Supalonely)

As someone who loves to be alone and requires long stretches with no socialising, I was very surprised to find myself so lonely during this huge life upheaval that I felt I might die from the feeling.

That isolation, that feeling that nothing I do matters to anyone else was both isolating and at points terrifying - I found my usual brazen confidence weirdly lacking, my own terrifying efficiency no longer a certain thing. I can’t shoot guns really well or do flips or take a beating (as far as I know, I might be a natural at peow peow), but I can churn out an article in a hot, efficient hour. I found myself spending days on writing instead.

While I was trying to find a new job and a new house, I stayed at my parents place in Sydney, and while that was a huge comfort, it didn’t mitigate the loneliness because I felt like a burden. I felt like my absolute inability to handle the weight of my feelings made me impossible to be around. It was here that I started dreaming about being the kind of man who could shrug this all off, whose giant ham-hock shoulders could carry it without complaint. I felt guilty. I felt pathetic.

It’s easy for queer people in non-queer presenting relationships to sometimes fall into heteronormative expectations, to accidentally get moulded into modes of gender expression that you’ve deliberately tried to leave behind. I think a lot of the reason I felt so destroyed by this loneliness was because I’ve found myself expected to have a kind of default masculine stoicism recently, and to always just be “fine” with things.

My friends and my family of course kept telling me that I didn’t have to be fine, that I’m allowed to be upset and sad and, frankly, absolutely batshit. But it was genuinely only when I found myself trying to model myself on JACK REACHER, a fictional character designed as a tribute to a style of man who never really existed, that I realised that my spindly shoulders were labouring underneath something even more insidious: patriarchy.

One of my mottos - I have several because I usually forget them - is "I never promised to behave with dignity”, a deliberate middle finger to the ideas of social propriety that straight men are meant to adhere to. It’s tongue in cheek, but it’s also real, a promise to live my life on my terms, and by my own personal standards - and certainly not held back by reductive gender stereotypes.

It’s not that I’m too small and fragile to bear the weight of male stoicism, it’s more that they had to invent a man huge enough to carry it, a fictional projection.

The actor who plays Reacher is a huge man, but in reality he’s the same height as me. They use camera angles to make it seem like he’s taller.

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By the middle of season 5 of New Girl, you’ve mostly forgotten why it’s even called New Girl in the first place - you’re deeply immeshed in the intricacies of all the character-driven storylines, usually relating to romances and career aspirations. It’s a sitcom that, like Friends or even Sex and the City, focuses on the lives of a group of friends, and their hijinks. There’s just an abundance of hijinks, a saturation of them, with not much but setting connecting them all together. There’s no big bad, no overarching mission except some gentle goofs. I think it’s a really funny show - and it gets more unhinged.

But when you go back to the pilot episode of New Girl (which is SUCH a pilot, strangely stilted and full of exposition), you’re forcibly reminded that the show actually does have a defined angle, that the name means something. After finding out that her longterm boyfriend is cheating on her (and catching him in the act, Bridget Jones style), Zooey Deschanel’s Jessica Day is forced to move into a loft apartment with three single men. A robust opportunity for hijinks.

Who’s that girl? She is the titular new girl in the apartment, and the situation is considered a kind of fall from grace for her. She went from having a boyfriend, a house they shared, a career and a romantic path towards marriage and stability - to having almost nothing. She is adrift on the chaos of life, battered by the winds of misfortune, and that loft apartment is the cobbled together ship that she’s trying to ride it out with, her crew a band of loveable weirdos.

At the end of the pilot, she gets stood up on her first rebound date, and her new housemates and friends turn up to the restaurant and loudly serenade her. It’s the romantic grand gesture that you get at the end of a rom-com, except it’s not romantic - it’s friendship. It’s a show where the grand gestures are often from friends, showing their friends how much they mean to them. I’d personally rather die, but it’s the gesture that matters here.

When you truly remember this as the premise of the show, it makes all the hijinks that come afterwards, the chaos of being in your thirties and not “settled down”, the messiness of every character and their foibles, much more interesting and funny - and relatable.

Soft rebooting your life

I’ve been watching New Girl recently because I’ve found that it’s an oddly comforting show, entirely because of the premise of Jess and her friends scraping together meaning in their lives from community and friendship after having everything blow up in their faces.

I’ve found myself in a similar situation this year. At the end of last year, I was working as a lifestyle reporter for ABC News, having a great time and really enjoying my team and the writing I was doing - but also found myself in trouble after signing an open letter from journalists to media outlets asking for fairer standards of coverage about the invasion of Palestine by Israel. I was pulled into an official disciplinary over the letter (and specifically my tweets sharing the letter and repeating the sentiment), despite the fact that the letter actually repeats the stated aims of the ABC’s impartiality rules that I apparently transgressed. There was also a funny tweet about Albanese being so spineless that he could suck his own dick backwards, which I just genuinely forgot would be seen as biased. While this was happening, other ABC employees including Antoinette Lattouf were being fired, so combined with some other incompatibilities with the position and some exciting new book opportunities, I decided to quit before I was officially let go or whatever, and stand in solidarity with the journalists losing their jobs for making an ethical stand.

While I was at peace with my decision (I have no desire to be a journalist if I have to compromise on truthful reporting - but also I was a lifestyle journalist, I was writing about different kinds of SANDWICHES mostly, so I’m not sure why it was even an issue, but whatever), it was a disclocating situation to find myself in. Suddenly without a job, unsure about the future of my journalism career, and desperately hustling for freelance money because I was crazy broke.

Then only a week later my relationship was ended, and along with having no job or money, I had no house or belongings or dog or partner - and instead left floundering in the deepest pool of loneliness and heartbreak and fear I’ve ever experienced. (I’m fine, no bad blood, it is what is it).

When dramatic things like this happen, a common phrase is that you are “torn” away from something. I’d never really examined that language, but when everything like this happens so quickly, so surprisingly, torn becomes the only relevant word to describe the feeling. You’ve been ripped away from everything you know, and it’s shocking and painful and raw and messy.

This isn’t a pity party - in some ways lately i’m actually thriving lol, some amazing career news recently. But I mention it because I think it’s put me in the same place as Jessica Day in the pilot, and has confirmed for me that New Girl is the show to watch when your life has imploded.

Just friends?

Before I left Melbourne to go and stay in my parent’s guest room, my friends in Melbourne got me out of the house and gave me a space to be an absolute gibbering wreck with them. If you’ve ever wondered what to do when someone you love has had their heart broken, that warmth of friendship is absolutely the answer. It was the first of many friendship gestures from the people in my life that kept me sane and loved. I had friends send me flowers, I had friends inviting me to dinner. I’ve had a lot of very patient people endure my trauma dumping and my shift into being an unrepentant crisis friend.

I also started reading Gyan Yankovich’s new book Just Friends - it’s an eminently quotable book, and taking some time to read her warm and astute study of friendship has been comforting in itself. It’s a reminder of the blessing that friends bring to my life, and how I can continue to nurture them and prioritise them in my life (I love my solitude, so this is often a balancing act for me).

But one takeaway that I found really interesting was her point about the “difficulty” in finding friends. I’ve been through that recently, as I wrote about here for the ABC, and it was my newly cultivated friends who were there for me when I needed it.

Gyan makes the point that “meeting new people and finding community isn’t always necessarily easier than finding somewhere to live or work. In fact these things are often more connected than we might imagine”. She goes on to say that cultivating friendships has barriers beyond things like having bad vibes or being unpleasant to be around - there are financial barriers, time issues, the rapid diminishment of third spaces to socialise in.

For me, this confirmed my decision to move back to Melbourne - while I had no job or house or any other pressing reason to be in the city, I did have something that I realised I’d done a disservice by not prioritising - three years of cultivating friends and community. We are taught not to prioritise our friendships and community in mainstream society - but that’s something I’ve decided to do. (also, the rent in sydney is fucking insane, I’d have to be an idiot. I do love the beaches though).

Loveable loser seeks loveable weirdos

The comfort I’ve found in New Girl is a really simple truth - doesn’t matter who you are, doesn’t matter what your situation is, sometimes your life falls apart. And sometimes you find something really beautiful, either as a result or because your priorities are forced to shift.

Jess Day is a particular sitcom trope, a “loveable loser” - but unlike others of the genre, the Liz Lemons for example, she’s not someone at peace or static with that designation. She sees herself as a motivated, happy person, who in the first episode is forced to slum in failure Her growth, like many of the loveable weirdos in the loft with her, is actually finding out who she is when life isn’t bending to what she wants. Finding out what’s important to her, outside of jobs or relationships. And the base constant, the foundation for the show and eventually for her, is this community in the loft (I will NOT say ‘chosen family’). It’s very heterocentric - but it doesn’t diminish the message.

I actually wonder if New Girl’s somewhat underrated status comes from the fact that the show didn’t lean into the millennial hustle culture that defined shows of that era. The fact that friendship as a priority was the base message of the show, rather than something like Parks and Rec’s career centred happiness was off message - and actually feels more relevant today in this era of quiet quitting and the like.

Age is somewhat fluid in this show, but it is nice that mostly everyone is in their 30s - this kind of sharehouse chaos lifestyle is seen as normal for twenties, but weird for (het) adults, who should be raising children in the suburbs while working at a mysterious nuclear factory, or whatever the plot of Don’t Worry Darling was, I’ve forgotten. While it’s sometimes confronting for the character’s to be younger than me and bemoaning their terrible life choices while I’m in an objectively worse situation than them, it’s mostly just relatable and even joyous.

There is so much joy to be found in New Girl, and as a result, joy in community. One of my favourite recurring things is the invented game of True American that they play in several episodes, an explosion of chaos and hilarity that mostly involves excessive drinking and shouting about US history. It reminds me more of my time at university than it does my 30s, but it shows that things like proximity are a big part of what can define a friendship. My university friendship group is no longer a cohesive unit, after we lost that unifying glue that is physically going to a campus together every day for three (or nine technically, I’m very slow) years. The loft creates a physical foundation for them too - but even when apartment hunting in Melbourne, I’ve kept proximity to my pals in mind (I can’t do the share house anymore, I’m so old and cranky).

A friendship should and will change over the course of a lifetime, but there’s nothing wrong with making the decision to help friendships and community flourish in your life, by making choices to live with them, or lean into hobbies, or whatever.

But the final comfort I’ve found in re-watching New Girl is the fact that as all the loveable weirdos become more fleshed out, and Jessica Day becomes less of a protagonist and more a part of the ensemble (which is pretty much done by season 2), you realise that every character is a kind of blueprint for different forms of life chaos. Each character is a different flavour of mess, meaning when you’re going through just a whole storm of different feelings, you’ll always find someone to hold on to. Someone who speaks to you with their poor decision making.

You’ve got Schmidt who is objectively successful in his career but also ridiculous and not able to admit he craves love. You have Winston who struggles with both purpose and confidence. You have the avatar of chaos himself, Nick Miller, who has all the mannerisms and politics of an eighty year old man, who keeps all his money in a sack and thinks the moon landing was “definitely fake”. I relate to Nick a lot, as for many seasons he’s whole thing is writing a truly terrible zombie novel, and as someone who is usually writing a book, it’s a weirdly humiliating process - my favourite quote from Nick’s book is: “Mike Jr said to his father, Mike Sr, who sucks”.

You have Coach, played by an actor who was in the pilot and then brought back later in a stroke of luck, and whose character just subsequently never really got fleshed out. All of them are flailing wildly through life, and leaping from minor victories into defeats, struggling to find meaning in their lives. And the best bit is that they’re never ever given a magic elixir that provides that meaning - they never find a relationship or a job or a marriage or a calling that “saves” them from their circumstances.

“My room mates are killing me! No, you’re right. I like them, I hate myself,” admits Nick to his old man best friend Tran. There’s an idea, underlying the hijinks and the goofs and the monster of the week romances, that we are never brought truly and inherently low by these big changes in our lives, never humiliated by, say, being an elder millennial living in his parent’s guest room, watching New Girl and sobbing quietly so I don’t wake up the dog.

“You’re not the only one who’s hurting here Jessica Day. The economy stinks, the bees are dying, movies are pretty much all sequels now, and I… have a broken penis”.

There’s an idea of misery in New Girl as an unfortunate experience - unlike some shows it doesn’t make bad luck and suffering the point or humour of the show - but one that will pass, and not because of any kind of toxic positivity (although that is Jess’s biggest character flaw).

Instead, and this is what makes it comforting, failure is seen as a normal thing that will affect everyone at some point, but one that doesn’t reflect inherently on who you are. When your life is stripped of important things, comforting things, even necessary things, New Girl basically shows that there’s no right way to deal with it, that chaos is storm that blows on us all, and that at our lowest we can still find something - a group of friends, a crazy loft full of weirdos, a nice dog - to rely on.

That’s comforting. I don’t think it matters HOW your life has blown up, but chances are New Girl would be a good show to sink into like a bathtub full of warm jelly.

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