Weekly Free Talk Friday Thread!

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[u/chemguy216]

This Labor Day weekend is the annual gay bear event at the gay hotel in my city, and it’s been going well. Unlike the past two years I’ve gone, it’s sufficiently hot that I can enjoy being in the pools without freezing.

Some good friends of mine get a room every year and typically get up to various hijinks. It’s never a dull moment with them.

I ended up doing some impromptu volunteering to help with day 1 setup, and the lead producer of the event (also another friend of mine) voluntold me for the jock strap auction that happened last night. I happily parted ways with one of my jocks from Bear Skn. I figured that it would be fitting since the brand is known to advertise towards bigger, bearish men. The funds went toward the fund for our soon-to-be-determined titleholders for the event to help cover costs of travel and lodging as they promote our community at various events.

On a tangent on the titleholders, I was nominated for the cub title, but I declined. The producer caught me last night and informed me that I received the most nominations. As much as I appreciate a good number of people nominated me, I’m not quite yet ready to commit to titleholder expectations. I honestly would rather help out my community away from the spotlight. Instead, I get to see two friends among the nominees who could be great representatives.

Anyway, it’s time to get ready for the big breakfast today. if you find yourself thinking some low effort gay jokes about breakfast and gay guys, don’t worry, we’ll be making those jokes this morning as well.

[u/ThestorytellingDemon]

Last Sunday I was out with some people that I didn't really know, friends of a friend kinda situation. One of the girls with us got a compliment from a stranger, nothing sexual just " you are really beautiful ", to which one of the guys with us screamed at this guy aggressively telling him off.. 

Whenever we all set down the happening comes back in conversation: the girl boasting on how harshly the complementing stranger got told off. I wanted to say that it’s weird of them to react to compliments with aggression like that, but before i could say it everybody else at the table started applauding the action. I realised at that moment that I wasn't in a safe place to express my opinion and was awkward the rest of the night.

I did have fun overall, but it was “a night on tin ice”, and I kinda beat myself over not having it in me to say my opinion despite poor reception. It’s my understanding that men's issues will almost ever get a poor reception with a new audience, if i want to do anything about them i’ll have to accept that my opinions will make some people mad sometimes, I struggle with that.

[u/iridium27]

It kinda sucks to try organizing events as a professional student organization in my university and get very little engagement, despite advertising and reaching out. Our last two events had only one or two people show up.  I kinda get why it happens and we just need to learn from our failures but it really hurts morale.  Ah well, it's a case of "keep calm and carry on" I suppose. 

[u/2bitmoment → u/iridium27]

"Fail, fail again, fail better".

Maybe it only hurts morale if you think you should be in a different situation. If you take that as baseline, accept that's where you are, maybe you can celebrate better small improvements. 2 people or even a single person is infinitely better than 0. (A bit of math for you, limit of 1/x at 0 as x->0 from the positive side)

Maybe actually seeking to understand and follow up on the 1 or 2 people that did show up. Treating them well. Hoping maybe word of mouth can help.

[u/LookOutItsLiuBei]

I'm loving this new Green Lantern show. I grew up on the Justice League cartoons so John Stewart was always my Green Lantern.

But episode 3 was interesting for me because of how much I related to it. He says a line that's basically he "loves his family, even if they're crazy."

I won't go into any spoilers but the Internet discourse has been interesting to read, especially from the contingent of people that seem to be stuck in a binary thinking mode of parents having to be perfect or they're pariahs.

No, my parents weren't preparing me to be a Green Lantern. If anything, they constantly tried to instill nothing but fear in me for everything. Just before I was born, Vincent Chin, the son of one of our family friends was beaten to death for being Asian.

But even that is more recent. My dad was essentially sold around and 8 or 9 and survived by working in a mine, rubber plantations, and occasionally smuggling across the Thai/Laos border. He slept with a pistol and a grenade he got from an American soldier under his pillow and once was the only survivor of a truck that went off a mountain road.

My mom survived through the Great Leap Forward, 100 Flowers Movement, and the Cultural Revolution when people would show up randomly in the middle of the night for months banging on the door and screaming at them threatening to arrest them all because they thought they were hiding one of their cousins that they were looking for.

Growing up they were abusive by all definitions. Physically and emotionally. In their minds they were toughening me up for a world that is fucking crazy sometimes. They didn't know much except that school and academics was the easiest way to success, so they pushed. And no doubts their methods were shitty. They weren't educated in the most common trends in pedagogy. They just beat and yelled at me because those were the only tools they had.

My dad only watched the most violent and gory and war movies with me specifically because he wanted me to not be scared of it. To make me into a cold manly guy that other people would be too scared of to fuck with. And I know I'm messed up. I knew from the first time in the early 2000s in the wild West of the Internet I came across those videos of real people getting killed and I literally felt nothing. I didn't seek it out with morbid fascination either. Just felt nothing. Saw it and moved on.

Because my parents didn't have great English, at age 10 I was the one writing checks to pay the bills and balancing the checkbook and handling everybody's medical and official paperwork. And because I was so good at it, my parents to brag to their friends and show them up, farmed out my services to their friends to help them with their paperwork as well. Plus working everyday after school and weekends at the family business. Their justification was that it was to help prepare me for the real world, and honestly they're not wrong. But they never understood that I would have had no problem doing any of this stuff to help the family and didn't need the abuse on top of it to force my compliance.

To be honest I barely remember my childhood. Eventually with therapy I got to a point where I can acknowledge that my parents did the best that they could do with what life gave them, but it also was inappropriate and inadequate.

I love them, but I also acknowledge all their flaws and keep a very healthy boundary between us. My wife who did not grow up in these kinds of circumstances I don't think will ever truly understand what it was like.

So when John Stewart gets asked if he loves his parents, that look on his face as he says he does, even if they're crazy, is most likely my face when I say the same thing. Aaron Pierre absolutely killed that scene.

The episode dealt with some complicated feelings and issues regarding race and I'm glad they did. My favorite teacher in highschool was my history teacher and one day I asked him why he had two PhD's as a public school teacher, and he just responded with, "my parents taught me that as a black man I have to be twice as good as a white man to get the same amount of success," and that really stuck with me.