Yeah so I was in my hometown for two weeks and one night my sister and I took her shitty car and we drove around to all the places I used to run around at and we looked at the stars and I was hit with so many deep memories of being queer in a tiny town and please take this as my weekend sacrifice 💙
Piarles, of course
Charles shifts around in the seat as his truck idles on the curb.
It doesn’t matter that the athletic board sprung for the higher quality leather after they won state this year, the letterman jacket is still new and stiff.
He texts Alex again.
here
Alex is late. He's always late, but Charles gets it so he lets it fly. He thinks the two of them maybe wouldn't be real friends if they weren't the kids marked by tragedy.
George and Alex were always closer, but something happened with them last year after...well, after and now they hardly talk and Charles gets it because if Pierre hadn't been a stubborn bastard, Charles would have probably pushed him away after his dad died, but also...
Well, his relationship with Pierre is different and he's thinking about texting him now, telling him that he's going to try and dip out early, but then the door of Alex's apartment bangs open and he strides out, pulling his own letterman jacket around his shoulders and so Charles drops his phone in the cupholder and puts his truck in park.
.
They're the last people to show up - which is expected. Everyone else probably came together.
Lando is sitting with some girl that Charles thinks looks vaguely familiar and George is sitting on the toolbox of his truck and Max is standing in the middle of the half-circle, waving his arms around telling some story and Charles backs in, revving his engine like he's going to run him down and Max smacks his tailgate, calling him a motherfucker.
It's a typical Friday night.
Nothing changes.
Not even Caddo driving by in his cop car, shining the light on them and calling out from his driver's seat ain't drinkin, are ya boys?
Lando is absolutely drinking and Charles knows Max is too, but he also knows that Caddo won't do anything about it and that they'll all leave well before curfew.
Max will invite them all back to his dad's place off off 1255 where the alcohol is free as long as Max is winning - that state championship doing work for everyone.
But, Charles also has no plans to go and neither does Alex.
Alex has a bottle of water he’s been sipping out of all night and Charles has a styrofoam cup that he is going to pretend is half liquor if anyone asks, and he's preparing himself for that lie when Lando starts to laugh, pointing at him before the worst thing possible happens.
"What's that on your neck, Leclerc?"
Charles wants to disappear through the pavement. He wants the entire truck to be sucked through the asphalt because Max strides over and shoves at the collar of Charles’ jacket, exposing the hickey there that he has managed to keep out of sight all week until now.
"Holy shit," Max laughs that stupid half-drunk laugh of his. "It's fucking a hickey. Man, who gave you that?"
"Bet it was that girl from out in Cedar Creek." Lando laughs, bumping his shoulder with the girl he's sitting with. She must be from Cedar Creek.
George is the one to say, "Bro, that girl is his cousin."
"Nah," Lando turns around, chunking his empty coke bottle at him. "That's Zo's cousin. That's like, not the same ‘cause they don’t have the same dad?”
"You need to get out of this place, man." Alex says. "It's close enough that it's -"
But Max slaps the tailgate of his own truck and he says, "Let's go back to mine. I'm out of whiskey."
Charles is thankful for Max Verstappen for like the second time in his life and he sinks back against the edge of his truck bed.
"Y'all comin'?" Max points at Alex and Charles even though he knows they're not.
"Visitation tomorrow," is all Alex says, but everyone nods and Charles makes a little driving motion to mean that he's Alex’s ride and they're waved off in a chorus of see you Sunday's and Charles is thankful to escape quickly when he sees George staring at the hickey on his neck with his head tilted.
George is fucking smart. Charles doesn't need him to figure it out.
Alex is waiting for him in the passenger seat, tapping his hands on the dash and smiling at him brightly. "You gonna sneak off to see your Cedar Creek honey?"
Charles knows it's a joke, but it doesn't land on him in a comfortable way. He's tense and worried and it hurts and so he tries to laugh - it comes out all wobbly and Alex immediately stops laughing.
He doesn't say anything else as Charles gets them out of the parking lot and over to the other side of town and he's starting to feel really guilty about it, but then Alex says, "Pierre was visiting from Oklahoma State this last weekend, wasn't he?"
Charles wants to slam on the brakes and throw him out.
Instead, he says real tight, "yeah, he was."
Alex makes a little hum and then taps twice on the dashboard, "Thanks for the ride, man. See ya Monday," and then he all but bails out of the cab before Charles has come to a complete stop and Charles is left breathing too hard.
There's no way he can know.
That's what Charles repeats to himself a hundred times while he drives home.
There's no way he can know.
There's no way he can know.
The lights in his house are off. Arthur is out somewhere and his mom is already in bed so he lets himself in the house and heads straight back to his room, peeling that stiff letterman off and tossing it over the back of one of the dining room chairs.
He's tacky with sweat underneath it despite the temperature being near freezing outside. The panic had crawled all over him and he couldn't shake it off, but he knows what will quell it.
What always quells it…
He pulls his shirt off in one motion, letting it drop in the hamper right inside his door before reaching immediately for the one folded on his desk - plain white, nondescript. Except for the P. Gasly in block lettering on the collar and the shiny white logo on the front that marks it as an official shirt for the Sooner football team, it could be any number of white shirts in his possession.
The faint scent of Pierre's cologne clings to it but that will disappear completely before he can exchange it for a new one so the knowledge that it's been on Pierre's body has to be enough.
Pierre answers on the second ring, a soft baby rings down the line as Charles flops down onto his bed, pressing the phone closer to his ear until it aches.
He breathes in Pierre's scent and he whispers back to him "calamar" and he dreams of a time in which football and this town doesn't keep them in the shadows anymore.
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I wasn't a Lewis Hamilton fan before Max Verstappen became a title threat around 2020.
I liked Lewis, I respected him, but I liked Sebastian Vettel more.
Verstappen fans constantly accuse Hamilton fans of "playing the racism card." But here's the thing:
1. Max Verstappen's dad has made close to borderline racist remarks about Lewis Hamilton. He's also a known abuser who assaulted his wife.
2. Max Verstappen's mentor, Helmut Marko, has made racist remarks against Lewis and Checo, and is the son of a Nazi.
3. Max Verstappen's father-in-law, Nelson Piquet, has made racist remarks against Lewis Hamilton and made homophobic remarks to Ayrton Senna back in the day. Senna also happens to be Lewis' idol. He was also a loud supporter of the far right, homophobic, misogynist, former Brazilian President, Jair Bolsonaro, who appears to have picked up all his presidential traits from Donald Trump, who he's a close friend of.
4. Max Verstappen's wife, Kelly Piquet is also a vocal supporter of Jair Bolsonaro.
5. Max Verstappen himself used ableist and racist slurs on the radio during F1 races.
6. Also, Max Verstappen fans are automatically Fernando Alonso fans, who turned up to the Spanish grand prix in 2008 in black face with posters of monkeys with the caption, "Hamilton's family".
And Max Verstappen fans are known to constantly make racist remarks about Lewis Hamilton. Ask the reddit mods of any F1 community about it.
And yet he keeps getting away with it. Red Bull fans would talk about MaFIA and Hamilton whining, but if you've followed F1 over the decades, you'll remember all the incidents when Hamilton was penalized by the stewards for the smallest infractions and usually given the harshest penalty for it.
The 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix also showed that the FIA is far from supportive towards Lewis and in fact it's the other way around.
I'm not saying that all Max Verstappen fans are racists or white supremacists or Nazis.
I'm saying that all racists or white supremacists or Nazis who follow F1 are Max Verstappen fans.
That's why I support Lewis Hamilton now.
Edit: Apologies for the error, Kelly Piquet is his girlfriend, not his wife. I thought they were married.
Edit 2: Some more thoughts for the half dozen Max fans who got really annoyed by this.
I'm not saying he's a bad driver. He is perhaps the most talented Formula One driver in history. On the same day and in the same car, Max would beat Lewis more often than not.
But the guy is surrounded by racists and bigots and every bigoted F1 follower I've encountered is a Max fan, and these two facts make me look at him with suspicion.
Lewis fans are loud, theatrical, hysterical people who find conspiracies everywhere but I also see why they've become like that. Having to constantly fight back against racist dogwhistling can take a toll on your mental health.
Daniel Riccardo probably has the most fun fanbase in F1.
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We talk a lot about Steve getting into Eddie's interests- playing D&D, listening to metal, having Eddie read LotR to him- and some people have written about Eddie getting into Steve's interests, but there's still quite an imbalance. So here are my thoughts on what aspects of Steve's life Eddie gets excited about.
Eddie really enjoys listening to music with Steve. While he may be a metalhead, that doesn't mean that's the only genre he listens to, and to limit him to that would be an injustice to his character. First and foremost Eddie likes music. He likes music that pushes boundaries and experiments with sound and makes people think. What a hypocrite he'd be if he refused to listen to anything outside his preferred genre.
One of his favorite things to do with Steve is swap music. They'll sit and alternate playing Slayer and Electric Light Orchestra, Dio and Billy Joel. They'll pick up new tapes from artists neither have heard of and talk about what they do and don't like about them. They like discovering tapes they have in common in their collections- Fleetwood Mac, Queen, and Led Zeppelin, to name a few.
They go to concerts together regularly as dates. Mostly local groups neither has heard of before, but always enjoyable.
Eddie figures out early on in their relationship that Steve likes to sing. That he's good at it. That he thought about a musical theatre career but decided he didn't want to deal with all the rejection that comes with auditioning. Eddie decides to learn all of Steve's favorite songs- pop and otherwise- on guitar so Steve can sing along when he plays. So that when Eddie is mindlessly strumming while trying to get out restless energy, Steve will know some of the songs. He even gets Steve onstage a couple times for some slower songs after they've been together a while.
Eddie listens to Top 40 hits with Steve (though he'd never admit that to the kids. Not because he's ashamed, but because they would never stop teasing him about how gone he is for Steve if they knew), and learns Steve's favorite tracks so he can play them for him.
It took a very long time, but after seeing how legitimately excited Steve gets over sports, Eddie decided to give that a try too. He watches games with Steve, tapes them for him when Steve has a long shift and can't watch it live. He still doesn't quite understand the rules and mixes up terms, but he can admit that it's fun to try and follow along and predict strategies and bemoan bad ref calls.
Steve has even gotten Eddie to go to a few games in person with him. It didn't take much convincing, Eddie talks a big talk, but he's a sucker for spending time with Steve and seeing him happy. He's come to the conclusion that being in a crowd at a sports game isn't all that different from being in a crowd at a concert (as far as people gathering to watch a common interest goes), and energy is infectious. He ends up liking the first game he attends much more than he anticipated.
It helps that he likes trying to get the Kiss Cam to show him and Steve.
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The NHL’s decree that players and teams are no longer allowed to wear rainbow-colored Pride jerseys to celebrate the LGBTQ community was bad enough.
Now comes word that the league front office has sent all 32 teams a series of memos that include alleged “clarification” on this policy.
On top of this — and most egregious of all — Outsports has learned that the NHL has issued a league-wide ban of Pride Tape on the ice with the players during warm-ups, games and even practices. A league spokesperson has confirmed this change in policy with Outsports.
This is, as far as Outsports is aware, the most stifling, anti-LGBTQ policy any pro sports league in North America has ever issued.
The message the NHL is sending: Hockey is not for everyone. [...]
Continue Reading.
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
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