He grabs at his friend’s drink. Everyone scrambles. His QPOC friend’s friend, a much larger man, gets up and tells him, “OK, my guy, time to move along.” It defies all reason that he’s getting ejected from a picnic just for airing opinions in good faith, by this swollen alpha dickhead flaunting his gallantry. This was the male ally they preferred: not the intellectual who challenged them as equals in an open dialogue, but this muscle-confused fucking silverback gorilla. They’re all happy to hide behind patriarchy when it suits them. He snatches up his READ MORE WOMEN tote bag and leaves.

On one of these long nights, an ugly curtain lifts in his head: he’s old enough to know that relationships don’t guarantee happiness, that the source of his pain is an illusion agonizingly elaborated over decades. His mental habits are so ingrained that even if he got a girlfriend, he’d still feel rejected. Around this time he starts to feel breathless, a constant compression garment around his lungs. [...]

the fact that not one has been, out of billions, is proof of a categorical failure, a mass abrogation of the social contract by the legions of treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets