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truthbeetoldmedia · 5 years

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The Bold Type 3x02 "Plus It Up"

Hello friends, and welcome to the second episode of the current season of The Bold Type. While last week fell a bit flat, I’m happy to say that this episode hit every mark. It was funny, heartwarming, meaningful, and as always, well acted.

Employee of the Month

Now, Sutton’s portion of this episode was the least gripping, but heartwarming nonetheless. Oliver has some uncharacteristic absences from work, both worrying Sutton and causing her to put in more time for the magazine. Oliver isn’t sharing what has him missing work and snapping at Sutton, which worries her.

To complicate things, she’s also struggling with sharing these things with Richard. On one hand, he’s her boyfriend, so of course she wants to discuss what’s happening at work and why she’s having to stay late. On the other, she can’t forget that Richard is also part of HR. She can’t exactly vent about Oliver without revealing he’s been missing work, so she’s forced into silence.

While handling this crisis at work, Sutton also has her new move to deal with. The change from her apartment with Jane to Richard’s penthouse is pretty stark. Living in a super nice New York City penthouse isn’t what makes her uncomfortable, it’s the “perks” that come with it. Richard has a housekeeper that does his laundry (really), which is something Sutton isn’t here for.

Sutton is super relatable when discussing this uncomfortable situation with Kat and Jane. While Kat also grew up with a housekeeper and Jane admits that having one herself is something she would want if she’s successful enough, Sutton quips that not only has she never had one, but she almost WAS one herself.

(She also reveals she didn’t get the job because she failed the drug test. Never change, Sutton)

I have to admit, I’m team Sutton here. I don’t care what other people choose to do, but I would never be comfortable having a housekeeper, ESPECIALLY one that does my laundry. My mom cleaned houses when I was a kid, and I did the same for a little bit in college. I really can’t imagine hiring one myself.

Essentially, Sutton is doing two jobs at once while having exactly no time to do her laundry. Honestly, who among us. (Later on Richard ends up doing Sutton’s laundry for her, bragging that even though he had a maid as a kid he still knows how. Congrats I guess?)

Sutton does find out that the reason for Oliver’s absence is actually really heartwarming. Apparently, Oliver’s ex-boyfriend had something of a drug problem before they were together and has relapsed after thier break up. The issue is that this ex has a daughter, to whom Oliver was essentially a step-dad, and she’s now in danger of being sent to a group home since there is no one to take her. Oliver is in the midst of applying to be her legal guardian to prevent this from happening.

Not only is this super sweet, it’s an important conversation to have. As Oliver mentioned, it’s not exactly easy for a gay Black man to adopt a child. As someone who happens to work for a group home, I’m really happy that The Bold Type is approaching this subject. Here’s to hoping that they go into depth with this and don’t just leave it as a side story.

Write it Out

This episode we see Jane begin her fertility treatments, the first step in the process of freezing her eggs. The whole thing is pretty daunting: she needs to inject her medicine every day at the exact same time, visit the doctor every other day, and stay away from alcohol, carbs, and sex for 10 days.

The irony is that none of those things bother Jane too much, especially when compared to her anxiety about sharing this process with Pinstripe. After all, she tried the same thing with Ben in season two: introducing the added stress of the egg freezing process (and Ben’s not at all helpful response) is essentially what drove them apart. She’s more than happy to do all these things on her own, but our new resident Terrible Dude ruins her plan.

Patrick, said Terrible Dude, decides that it would be a great idea for Jane and Pinstripe to write an article on the process together. They’re both writers, they’re dating, and they can offer two unique views on the process. Great idea, right?

Jane definitely doesn't think so. Throughout the episode we see her anxiety at not wanting to share this process with Pinstripe, worried that this will disrupt the happiness that they’ve settled into in thier relationship. She doesn’t want to make things “heavy.” Pinstripe interprets this as Jane not wanting to open up to him, so the disruption that Jane predicted becomes a reality.

Because this is The Bold Type, the negativity doesn't stay for long. Jane realizes that Pinstripe isn’t Ben, and his willingness to support her outweighs her worry.

However, I’m afraid that they’re glossing over a pretty problematic point (say that ten times fast) of Jane’s arc this episode, which is Patrick’s complete disregard for Jane’s feelings and privacy. As a man, Patrick has no idea of the physical, emotional, and mental stress that Jane is dealing with. He completely ignores her when she’s clear about not wanting to write the article with Pinstripe. Jane’s right to discuss her own body and her own medical journey isn’t a thought. Sure, she was willing to write an article on her own, but doing so ensures that she writes it on her own terms. The article and her relationship with Pinstripe worked out in the end, but Patrick’s disregard for Jane the person at the expense of Jane the writer wasn’t lost on me.

We saw the same behavior from Patrick last week as well - he all but forced Kat to use her Blackness and her Queerness to lift up Scarlet. Now, Kat doing that is not the issue, but her choice of when and how to do so was taken away.

Patrick is also pretty rude to Jacqueline this episode - he’s insulted when he realizes that both he and Jacqueline are gunning to interview Cardi B, claiming that he needs to “up his game” since he feels that he is more on top of things than Jacqueline is. He also talks down to her later, over explaining what Rupaul’s Drag Race is with the assumption that Jacqueline is a little too out of touch to be familiar.

We do see Jacqueline put Patrick in his place later on by bringing Sasha Valor of Rupaul fame to Kat’s Queer Prom, revealing that her and Sasha are great friends and that she’s been her long time supporter. Melora Hardin deserves an Oscar for the look she gives him when he realizes that he’s underestimated her.

Raising Some Hell

Before I start, I need to mention how good Kat (Aisha Dee) looks in this episode. Her dress? Her hair? She’s a gift.

Kat’s journey this episode is by far my favorite. She’s back to being proactive and ballsy, throwing everything she has at a Queer Prom fundraiser for a local Lesbian bar that’s in danger of shutting down. She also discovers the reason for the shutdown; the neighborhood is looking to gentrify, and that means pushing out businesses like the aforementioned Lesbian bar. Apparently there were some fines that were brought up from many years ago that the bar wasn’t aware of, and combined with late fees they need to pay over $42,000 or close.

Here’s a definition for gentrification, just to put this into perspective:

“The process of repairing and rebuilding homes and businesses in a deteriorating area (such as an urban neighborhood) accompanied by an influx of middle-class or affluent people and that often results in the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents.”

It’s the displacement aspect that we’re paying attention to here. The bottom line is that the influx of wealthy white people would rather live next to a Lululemon than a Lesbian bar, and by design gentrification seeks to clear neighborhoods of People of Color, Queer folks, and anyone who happens to be poor. I suggest reading a bit about this, so you should check out articles like Examining the Negative Impacts of Gentrification and 7 Reasons Why Gentrification Hurts Communities of Color.

Also, just a fun reminder that neighborhoods can and should be improved FOR the people that currently live there.

Before Kat thought of throwing a Queer Prom, she met with the local councilman to discuss options. She discovers that he’s written the bar off as a lost cause, telling Kat that unfortunately there is no way to get around paying the fine. He would love more than anything to save the bar for his constituents, but it’s just not possible.

Turns out, that councilman doesn’t actually care about the bar or his constituents. Shocker, I know. He shows up to the Queer Prom for some photos, and while talking to Kat he lets slip that the new condos they’re putting in when the bar closes wouldn’t be so bad afterall. She calls him out for attending the event and using it as a photo op to prop up the illusion that he actually cares about his neighborhood, which was amazingly satisfying to watch. During the end of the episode we see Kat searching up and coming female candidates for office, in what I hope is a bit of foreshadowing.

I’m super happy with this episode. It was uplifting, entertaining, and well executed. I can’t wait for next week!

The Bold Type airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on Freeform.

Alyssa’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝🐝

#The Bold Type #Plus It Up

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transstudiesarchive · 6 years

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Poems from a young queer trans kid who eventually made it out

New offering for this project below (click “Keep reading”). Full text for the four poems above included below that. ______________________________

Four poems written by a young queer trans kid, raised Mormon, who didn’t know out queer people existed and had never heard of the concept of being trans. I lived in a small, conservative agricultural town with seemingly more churches than people. I was the fifth of eight kids. When I came across a bunch of my childhood poetry a while back after coming out as trans, they all made so much more sense…

Once I’d Seen Seattle

I think I’m glad I didn’t know sooner—

I’m not sure I’d have made it out.

I always knew I didn’t belong, but had no idea why.

I lived in a desert of ideas. Actually, it was worse than that.

I lived at ground zero where ideas that took hold were quickly censored or driven out; there was nothing in the air in my suffocatingly small, claustrophobic town to even let me conceptualize what I would later realize to be not only my truth, but my beautiful kaleidoscope of identities.

My town might as well have been an island because we never left the city limits. The only time anyone ever left was when my parents traveled to nearby towns for cancer treatments or other medical care.

I am the fifth of eight children raised in what I thought at the time was a staunch Mormon home. My dad was the eldest of six, all of whom lived within thirty minutes of us.

My siblings joked that I had to be adopted because it was clear I didn’t fit. Nothing fit.

But I kept trying.

I was a mama’s child and for some reason I was driven to be a golden child. I wanted to excel at everything and make my mom proud. But in my town, that meant Cub Scouts, then Boy Scouts along with church groups which became gender-segregated church groups and gender-segregated sports at school and at church. And outside school and church? Partying, partying, partying. And three-wheeling and fishing and shooting guns and hunting. But I never went hunting. (Even then, decades before waking to veganism, I couldn’t fathom how anyone could point a gun at a beautiful, innocent animal—a sentient being with a will to live—and pull the trigger.)

So I kept trying, sometimes channeling some fictional character to manifest some forced hyper-masculinity and jackass behavior. Somehow I survived all that and so did my closest friends. Even though at least a couple kids every year didn’t survive.

I learned about ‘homosexuals’ from the bible and felt a combination of curiosity and fear. Even as I sensed the repulsion and fear in others whenever it came up, I found myself fascinated. Was this me? Two close childhood friends later came out as queer.

Maybe, I told myself at the time, my discomfort in all-male spaces was because I was really attracted to guys and frightened it might show or that I would be tempted to act on those feelings.

But that didn’t explain how much discomfort, bordering on distress, I felt when I had to wear masculine church clothes—button-down shirts and jackets and slacks and ties and Oxford shoes. My mouth is getting that vomity sensation just writing this.

I remember the horror I felt one day when my sister pointed at my bare chest:

“You’re growing chest hair! You’re becoming a man!”

It’s the first time I remember feeling truly depressed. I found myself feeling more isolated as time passed and activities at school grew more polarized. Skipping events started to feel much better than staying and having to be one of the guys.

I loved nothing more than when I’d be invited to activities with the girls—but they were so heartbreakingly few! So I often stayed home, a devoted mama’s child, happy to help out with what she asked me to do.

In junior high school I had that rare teacher who loves what they do and has held onto the spark. He brought homemade borscht in when we were studying Russian literature.

I have no idea how, in a town like ours, he got approval to do this let alone budget, but he took us on an overnight trip to Seattle to see Shakespeare productions, art museums, art galleries and the science center. My world went from gray to a riot of color during that trip.

I don’t know if I saw something or someone in particular while there; if I did, it never registered consciously. But that trip lit something in me that gave me hope about who I was and who I could become. I knew there was someplace better for me.

In some ways, that made the next four years more difficult and more painful than the years before. Because compared to Seattle, my town was hell. Specifically, my town was a dull bathroom break in the red-state flyover part of hell. And I had four more years ahead with no clear path out even then.

I got contacts and became the class clown, but I lived under storm clouds I couldn’t dispel. My grades suffered. When I was at risk of not graduating, some friends of the family came up with a plan. I moved in with them and after graduation, at their encouragement, I left for a two-year Mormon mission to Japan.

Then I came back, moved to Seattle, met someone amazing, sang her Somebody by Depeche Mode without missing a word in the middle of the store at the mall where we worked. We got married in the temple because for some reason I was still doing that then. I struggled off and on with the feeling I might be gay. It was still all I knew; the only option that could explain the fact that I was different. That I didn’t belong.

I knew I’d made it out when I went back to visit my parents one year and the clerk at the drugstore asked my partner and I if we had ever visited the area before. I asked how they knew we were from out of town and they said, “I can just tell. Are you from Seattle or something?”

Almost thirteen years after saying “I do,” we divorced after giving an open relationship a try. I was a workaholic the entire time. A had a few relationships of varying duration, including some casual relationships with men. A couple months after swearing to stay single for a year I met the person I hope to spend the rest of my life with. We met through mutual friends, but both had online dating profiles and both had ours set to exclude vegans because WTF? How does that even work? Then we got together and went vegan.

Over the last several years before we met, the idea of being trans hit my radar. I’d talked with previous partners about it. I’d even gone through the not-atypical pattern of splurge-and-purge where I would embrace my sense of who I was and buy a bunch of skirts, cute tops, dresses and other things that never saw the world outside our house. My partners were supportive. But then I would panic and get rid of everything and go back to life in drag. I would do things like let my fingernails grow long, shave my armpits and some of my body hair, pluck my eyebrows—but never enough to “give me away,” as far as I knew.

Then at the age of 47 I learned my company was going through a restructuring and my department was being eliminated. Having grown up in poverty, I’d always let a stable job and reliable income take precedence over everything else. And my life history reflected that. But because of my partner, my circle of friends and who I’d allowed myself to become, I did something I never thought I would do. I left my job, volunteered at the local QIATBLG+ community center two days a week, did other social justice organizing and volunteer work, came out as trans, changed my name, updated all my legal documentation (including the non-binary X gender marker on my driver’s license) and enrolled in school full time. I had been on the fence on whether to start school or start a non-profit to serve the area trans and queer communities. When I learned about the brand new major at PSU—Sexuality, Gender and Queer Studies—I knew what I had to do. And I knew my life was right on track. - Iris @ Age 49

Signs of Humanity

Why can’t I be human? I’m called a child when I cry So I hold my feelings deep inside. Again I ask you, why?

Why can’t I be human? When I laugh, they think I’m weird. So I just smile to myself. Are feelings to be feared?

Why can’t I be human? When I’m quiet, they ask what’s wrong, So I think of something to talk about. Must I do this to belong?

Why can’t I be human? I’m scoffed at when I make a mistake. So I just turn and walk away, Though deep within, I ache.

Why can’t I be human? Why can’t I act like me?!?! Instead of just another model in… Series: Humanity. - by Iris @ Age 14

Close Your Eyes and Look at Me

Do not judge me by appearance. You have eyes but cannot see. Look at my spirit and my feelings. Close your eyes and look at me!

Hold your ears so you can listen. Hear my meaning, not my words. It is my heart that is speaking now. Is my language so absurd?

Quell your pride so you can feel. I know that you care deep inside. Why must these feelings that are so human Be held within, always denied? - by Iris @ Age 15

Balanced Confusion

Just sitting here, my mind is spinning With contemplative images. Caught in limbo between past and future, Unable to focus on the present. Trapped in a loop of unanswerable questions, I seek out nonexistent facts. Falling toward my termination— Groping for what is not there. Each time I sense a certain order And settle to a steady state, A new unknown begins to form And throws me into chaos. Emotions reign in my subconscious Running rampant, take their toll. I struggle to cling to reality, But slip across the line… Perceptions are nearly nullified. I no longer trust my senses. I crawl to the center of my mind And slumber in balanced confusion. - Iris @ Age 14

Sitting in the Oven

Sitting in the oven Wondering why the hell I’m here. I’m thinking and feeling something… Not sure what, but sure not fear.

It’s not too comfortable in here. I’m sitting on the wire rack; The bars aren’t big enough for my butt And there’s nothing to support my back.

Looking through the dirty glass I can see life passing by outside. Something is welling up inside me; I’m not sure what, but it’s sure not pride.

I guess I don’t like it here, But there isn’t much that I can do. Maybe if someone opens the door I’ll jump and try to make it through.

I’ve come to the conclusion That this is not the way to live. I’m thinking and feeling something… Not sure what, but sure not initiative. - Iris @ Age 16

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