I’m a bit snowed under right now. It’s mostly for the best reasons.
First, I have to do minor revisions and then I will have a PhD. I’m meeting with my supervisors this week to work out the best approach. Once the adjusted thesis has been submitted, that’s the end of doctoral studies for me. I promise I won’t do another PhD!
Second, I’m meeting with a Robin Hood scholar for shared work on Eustace the Monk. That guy haunts me.
Third, proof-reading is being done for a novel. More about that when announcement time arrives… which is not far away.
Fourth, this weekend I’m at the virtual end of Balticon. I have some wonderful panels and the best possible company.
Fifth, Swancon (the Australian national science fiction convention in Perth this year) is the weekend after. I’m running the Huamnities side of the academic programme. I’m lucky in the people I work with, because it’s all a lot easier for me than I expected. This is through the hard and clever work of the chief runner of all academic things and because of the Swancon team as a whole.
Sixth, I have a novel I need to write and a NF book to find a home for.
Seventh, I’ve my ME/CFS back. Aren’t I lucky?
I’ve had it for a while, but it’s reached the place where I can do things and this means I can overdo things and get set back for a full year if I’m not careful. I’m one of the lucky ones in that I get remission. I’m unlucky in that I was finally succeeding with an exercise programme that was enabling me to walk a full kilometre and I was so proud of myself. Pride and falls – we have reached the time of the fall. Not all falls are bad. It’s autumn in Canberra, so, if I wander in the right suburbs, I get to see autumn leaves. A friend and I investigated leaves last week, and we jumped in them and it was lovely.
With all this going on, later today I’ll put up posts for the next fortnight. They will magically appear on the right day and it will look as if I’m diligent and at my desk. I will be neither diligent nor at my desk, but I will be spending time with wonder and friends and much talk of speculative fiction. Also, I will be giving a workshop.
The noise you hear in the background is the Australian Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. It’s not the Commission itself, but many who hate coming out of the woodwork and making sure we see them. Most of them complain that too much energy and attention is being spent on Jews. This is beyond irony.
I got my start as a writer back in the long-ago, writing Regency Romances. These were relatively short novels that charted the progress of two characters toward each other, ending in a happy ending and (presumably) a wedding, set against the backdrop of the English Regency. I wrote five romances and then stopped. Not because I didn’t love the setting and the era, but because nudging two people toward each other, with no possibility of a surprise (given the expectations of the form, if you buy a romance, you expect that happily ever after) stopped entertaining me. And I write to entertain myself, first and foremost.*
But that wasn’t the only reason I stopped. At that time the expectations of the romance genre were, um, broadening, and I found I wasn’t very interested in the way things were going. This was the dawn of the Big! Sweeping! Highly Sexualized! romance, with lots of sex scenes using lots of (to me, risible) descriptions of sex which I found as arousing as plumbing manuals.
I am pro sex, personally, and in fiction. But many of the books I looked at at the time were, um, sex-scene delivery systems wrapped up in a thin coating of historical setting. Most of the books had protagonists who were of the middle and upper classes, who were swept off by pirates or brooding Earls or some such, and not-quite-forced into having mind-blowing sex, swept away on a tide of passion that overcame all their prior training about what a woman of good family did or didn’t do and… And there were (in my admittedly smallish sample, because most of the books I looked at were not to my taste) never any consequences. Not the obvious ones–pregnancy and STDs**–but the very crucial societal consequences to a woman of good family. This drove me nuts, and is part of the reason I started writing my Sarah Tolerance books.
I mention this because I’ve been reading a lot of “romantasy” of late, for Reasons. And I have, therefore, staggered through a lot of plumbing. Er, sex scenes. And some of those books come off as sex scene delivery systems wrapped in a thin coating of fantasy tropes. Not my thing. For the people who love this stuff, it is exactly what they want, and I’m happy for that. Everyone should have access to the fiction they want to read. And I think the authors of these books are just as happy as their readers–I don’t believe it’s possible to write this kind of fiction unless you subscribe to it wholeheartedly.
But I would like to suggest to those writers (who are probably not seeing this) that sometimes less truly is more. A little less specificity as to what goes where allows the reader to insert their own idea of what is romantic/erotic. Lead me to the bedroom door, as it were, and my imagination can tailor a scene that contains everything I find satisfying. Giving too much specific detail (particularly when the details are in language that makes me snicker) makes that impossible. I once had a writing student, a nice guy who wanted to write Harlequin romances, and (as I put it at the time) filled his books with more thighs and breasts than a poultry counter… but lacked incense. Sometimes the thighs and breasts get in the way of the emotional core of the scene, which is what I’m there for.
We know how the plumbing works. Tell me less.
__________ *I’m sorry if that sounds selfish, but honestly, if I’m not having a good time why would a reader? ** And dear God, why everyone in Europe didn’t have syphilis at this time I do not know, so how any of these characters could have dodged that bullet…especially with pirates and brooding Earls, neither of whom were famous for restraint…
I’ve seen some news lately about people who are deciding to leave the United States. Apparently there is a long waiting list of people living in Europe who want to renounce their U.S. citizenship.
There are always articles on how to move to other countries, assuming you have enough money, focusing on which countries will welcome you and what the bureaucracy is, but while these used to be aimed at people looking to retire someplace where their money goes farther, it now seems more politically based.
After the Supreme Court’s horrible ruling this week gutting the Voting Rights Act, I saw some discussion by Black people on social media suggesting it was time for African Americans to go elsewhere. I can sympathize with that, though I doubt it’s a practical option for most.
As for me, though, I’m not going anywhere.
For one thing, the horrible things being done by the grifter and his minions to the United States are, unfortunately, not confined to the United States. I doubt there’s much of any place in the world you can be truly safe from the ravages of these people.
Also, I don’t want to live somewhere where I don’t have the right to participate in public life — to vote, to advocate, to march in the streets – and ties to other people as neighbors and friends. I’d want to be able to speak the language well enough to fit in and complain to local officials.
I don’t have any right to citizenship in another country except what they might allow through immigration, and I doubt I have enough years left to get that done, get really comfortable in the language, and actually become a full citizen before I’m too old for it to matter.
As I have written before, I am not a person with a deep connection to place. Whenever I visit somewhere else, I always think about what it would be like to live there. I’ve visited some lovely places.
Which is to say, I could probably live somewhere else. It just doesn’t seem like a reasonable course of action at this point in my life. And I don’t think running away would solve anything.
Recently it has been pointed out that anyone with a Canadian great-great grandparent can acquire Canadian citizenship. I don’t fall into that category, but I know others who do. And I know of people whose parents and grandparents came here from other countries who have recently acquired passports for those places.
If I did have the right to citizenship in another country, I would go after it, not for escaping the current regime but for the value of having ties to more than one place. Continue reading “Leaving and Staying”…
I am up to my hips with reading for World Fantasy, but I was reminded of this piece which I wrote about 10 years ago. Sadly, it is still topical…
I was once chased around my parents’ kitchen by a friend of my father’s. But I’ll come back to that.
One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was to leaf through a 25-year collection of New Yorker cartoons. Even at the time (the mid 1960s) many of them referred to a world that was vanishing or had vanished: references that must have been side-splitting at the time they were published, but were totally opaque to ten-year-old me. I still remember some of the cartoonists fondly–Chas. Addams, of course, but also James Thurber, Helen Hokinson of the deep-bosomed, slightly clueless club women, and Syd Hoff. But there was a class of cartoons–by guys like Peter Arno and Whitney Darrow, Jr.– that might loosely be termed a critique of modern relations between the sexes. They weren’t opaque, but even to me as a kid they were troubling.
A staple of these cartoons was the young, buxom woman being variously leered at, groped at, chased, etc., by an older, usually wealthier white man (well, yes, in the New Yorker of early days everyone was white). In some of these the woman is clearly playing along in hopes of–what, a diamond bracelet? A fur coat? As Cole Porter had it in Kiss Me Kate, “Mr. Harris, plutocrat, wants to give my cheek a pat: if a Harris pat means a Paris hat, Okay!” But in others, the woman looks uncomfortable and apprehensive.
As for the men in these cartoons, a few of them look hapless, as if they’ve stumbled into a situation where a woman is forcing them to ogle etc. “Honest, officer, I was just sitting here at my desk in my loud checked suit when my secretary perched on my desk to take dictation. What could I possibly do?” Others appeared to at least pretend to be looking at something other than the cleavage–pearls were a frequent fixture–but that was the joke, right? Because everyone, even a ten-year-old girl, knew that he was really ogling the woman’s breasts. But mostly these men look like they’re predators.
As a eight-, nine-, or ten-year old, what was I to make of all this? The takeaway appeared to be that all (powerful, elderly, white) men were letches. That working for such men inevitably meant some sort of harassment. That the wives of these men (who were all portly and dripping in the signifiers of their husbands’ success–furs and diamonds etc.) could do nothing but occasionally fume and nag. That the women being ogled etc. deserved it because they had breasts, because they wore provocative outfits and should have known what would happen, because they had jobs that took them out of their homes and into contact with the aforementioned predators. Some of the cartoons also suggested that there were young women who made the attraction of older, wealthier men into their jobs. All those portly, powerful, older white men were their marks (in which case it must be reasonable that the men would treat the women as prey, because the women were treating them as prey and…).
So there I am in my parents’ kitchen. I was 16 and home from school with a really horrendous cold of the streaming variety–my recollection is that I was a walking river of snot in a plush bathrobe. As I’ve said before, I grew up in a barn, and the living room windows overlooked a valley and a river and fields… very picturesque. One of my dad’s friends, a very fine painter, was painting a landscape of that view. I heard the downstairs door open, went out to the landing, saw it was–let’s call him Fritz–said hi, excused myself on accounta sick, and went back to bed. An hour or so later I went downstairs to the kitchen to make myself some tea and, being a well-raised child, I asked Fritz if he wanted a cup. He said sure, and I put the kettle on.
I’m not clear exactly how the subject of wouldn’t I like to have an affair came up–I was standing there in my blue plush bathrobe with a handful of tissues, blotting my nose and waiting for the kettle to boil. I answered in the negative (this was all rendered more surreal by the fact that I had a crush on Fritz’s son) and may have made some comment about Fritz being my parents’ friend, and it would be weird, shading toward wrong. I was still trying to be polite, and perhaps he took that as an invitation to explain why it would be fine, don’t worry about it. Note: our stove was on an island in the middle of the kitchen floor. Gradually, Fritz moved around the island toward me, and I moved around and away. I felt rotten, and this was the last straw, but I did not want to be rude to my father’s friend. And all the time the image in my head was the one above: “Notice, class…”
The kettle boiled. I poured the water, told him where to find milk and sugar, should he want them, and decamped to my room. I think I may have locked the door, but in the event, Fritz didn’t push the issue, and while I saw him a number of times after that, his invitation was never mentioned between the two of us.
When older people excuse men for predatory workplace behavior (or predatory behavior generally) by saying “they came up in a different time,” well, yes, they may have done. But even in that “different time,” the cartoonists who were depicting these “funny” chases got the look of dismay on the faces of the women, the look of “I need this job but…” The look of being trapped. Even when I was eight- or nine- or ten-years-old I couldn’t see how that was funny.
Today is Patreon day and tax day and sorting out many things day. I feel like a character in the Mikado. “If sometime it must happen that a to-do must be found, I’ve got a little list.”
Today there are health things, and tax, and I need to post many recipes on Patreon, and fill in two big forms, and do some research, plus there’s housework.
My body isn’t in The Mikado at all. It’s Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, shouting, “You shall not pass!”
I shall make a cup of tea, shout back at my body, and see if we can agree on a mutually convenient place to be.
Once upon a time, I spent an inordinate amount of my life answering questions from writers about the Middle Ages. A friend suggested this become a book and we worked together on this book for a bit, then she had to move on. I was introduced to an archaeologist (Dr Katrin Kania) and the book was much more accurate. My personal style wasn’t there and all the bad jokes had to leave, but, as a reference book for writers, The Middle Ages Unlocked was immeasurably better for Katrin’s share… even though it meant losing most of my jokes. She and I both laughed at each and every jokes as they were gently edited away.
It’s not a book to sit down and rad. It’s a book to check when you want something in particular while it’s technically about England in the High Middle Ages, we included much of France.
If we were doing it again, I’d add whole swards about life in Jewish England. Some researchers have been busy in recent years and we know a lot more about English Jews before 1290, thanks to them.
There were several writers who pushed us to finishing the book: Elizabeth Chadwick, Felicity Pulman… in fact, all the authors quoted on the cover, plus a few extra. Without their support, this book would not have happened. I didn’t want to write it, you see, way back when it was first suggested. My dream book was, in fact, an analysis of Old French epic legends, especially how insults were used and how some of the most interesting people were turned into their own kind of Medieval hero. This might be why I am guilty of writing the literature chapter in The Middle Ages Unlocked and why it just might mention those epic legends. Every chapter I wrote has something that shows it’s by Gillian. The food chapter contains information about pickles, for instance.
Our aim in writing it was to have a book writers could take form the shelf and find out more. Not just factually more, but to understand how we see the Middle Ages and where else they can find things. In the age of AI, it’s a surprisingly useful volume. It doesn’t invent. It doesn’t pull from random sources. The bad side it that when you argue with it, it does not argue back.
This was written in the late 1990s. I had lost the file, and frankly thought I might have imagined I’d written the whole thing. And then last week, looking for something entirely else, I found it. I’ve softened a little bit on Marmee: Abba Alcott was doing the best she could in very trying circumstances (don’t get me started on Bronson Alcott, The Man and the Ego). But I’m still glad my daughter liked me better.
It is three a.m. on a Wednesday morning, and my eight-year-old daughter has been throwing up for half-an-hour. Her bed is unspeakable. She’s changed nightgowns twice. Now, afraid to go too far from the bathroom, she is lying on a blanket in the hallway, curled around her misery and muttering to herself. I do the Mom-check again: no fever, no stiffness in the neck, no rash, none of the things that would have me rousting the pediatrician out of his bed; probably a stomach bug. I sit down beside her on the hardwood floor and push her flyaway hair out of her eyes, away from her face. She asks me, in fading tones suited to melodrama and sick children, to lie down and cuddle her, so I do, shaping myself around her, half-on and half-off the blanket. She is comforted and falls asleep. I am anxious, awake, and deeply uncomfortable. I want to be asleep in my bed, if not a thousand miles away. I do not want to be lying on a wrinkled blanket on a hardwood floor next to a beloved child who stinks of vomit.
And I’m remembering Marmee.
That Marmee: the mother of Jo March and her sisters in Little Women. Impossibly wise, patient, sage and loving. Beautiful, serene Marmee. I cannot tell you how much I hate her. Because while I’m taking care of Juliana and longing for my bed, there’s a little corner of my brain that is telling me that a real mother wouldn’t feel that way. Not a mother like Marmee. Marmee would clean up the vomit and feel it a privilege. Marmee would be elevated by the experience. Marmee would make her daughter believe that nothing in her whole life has been more fulfilling than swabbing down her baby and the floor at three in the morning.
And in a sense that’s all true. I love my kids, and taking care of them is my job. But there are moments, as with any job, where the work stinks–in this case, literally. And in those moments I wonder if I”m doing this right. That’s when I go back to Marmee, the Barbie of motherhood, the impossible yardstick against which I measure my parenting.
Okay, look, I know that the fictional Marmee was Louisa Alcott’s wish-fulfillment version of her own deeply imperfect mother, as Little Women was a retelling of her childhood with all the weird bits prettied up or left out. I know Marmee was never meant to be a user’s manual for parenting. But it’s the nature of people–certainly people of my generation–to look for role models. Perhaps I do it because my own mother died before my girls were born. Maybe it’s because, with the end of the Victorian mother-worship cult, we’re left mostly with Mommies Dearest and Mommies Amok. Or maybe I was simply bit by Marmee at a young age. In any case she continues to stick with me.
She must stick with other women, too. When I finally got up the courage to dis Marmee publicly, I was not met with the cries of horror I expected, but with a rush of fellow-feeling. It’s not just me, and that’s comforting. But it also starts me thinking: I have two daughters. Do I want to perpetuate the Marmee-thing with them?
A few weeks after the night on the hallway floor, Juliana asks if we can start reading Little Women at bedtime. I wonder if I should confront the Marmee issue with her the way I did the prince issue in Cinderella (“I don’t know. Would you want to marry a guy you only met once at a party?”). In the end I decide to stay out of it and let her draw her own conclusions. About three or four chapters in, cuddled into the crook of my arm as we sit on the couch, Juliana looks up at me and says “Marmee’s kind of–I mean she’s always lecturing and telling Jo to be better than she is. If I were Jo, I’d feel like she didn’t like me the way I was.”
A little unsteadily, I ask if she feels like I like her the way she is.
“Of course you do, Mama,” she says, in the tones of one stating incontrovertible truth.
Take that, Marmee. I turn the page and begin to read again.
This week includes autumn leaves for me and spring flowers for many of you, it has “Hug a Medievalist Day” and April Fools’. There are school holidays in so many places, and long weekends in even more. There’s Passover and easter and Orthodox Easter. I don’t have time to explore all the things I know I’ve missed because I have deadlines galore and preparing for Passover.
Whatever you celebrate, have a lovely time. If you have peace and quiet, enjoy it for me as well!
I just read a book that took me forever to finish. As it was one of the many, many books I have to read as a World Fantasy Award judge the slowness of the read was a problem. Well aware of the stack of “to be reads” teetering in my room, I kept wanting to move faster. But I couldn’t. Why? It’s not a bad book, the prose is readable, most of the characters are interesting, the setting, based on an African culture, is intriguing and lovingly detailed. Sounds great.
But there was a pronunciation guide at the front of the book.
I am a whole word reader: what this means in practice is that I will note a word without hearing it (trying to learn to read using phonics slowed me down so much when I was a kid that I thought I was developmentally challenged). Even with names with multiple diacritics (signaling intonation, stress, and pronunciation) I sort of note the shape of the word and zip on past. Unless there is a pronunciation guide at the front of the book. For some damned reason, paging past that guide meant that thereafter, every time I encountered a name, I was compelled to page back to the pronunciation guide and see if I was reading the name correctly–even with the names with no diacritics. Nine times out of ten I was correct. The thing is, to get to the story and keep everyone straight, I didn’t need that pronunciation guide. So why is it there?
I generally find maps, lists of characters, explanations of social hierarchies, glossaries, and other world building stuff to be distractions. If they exist, I think they should be at the back of the book (yes, even those pages long lists of characters in Dostoevsky which I think must be provided lest the Western reader get tangled up in patronymics). I also tend to think, in modern fantasy, that these things signal, either that the author has not done a good enough job massaging the world-building into the text, or that the author is so in love with their world-building that they want everyone to see what they’ve created.
I recognize that impulse, believe me, I do. 9/10ths of the worldbuilding work I do when I’m writing second-world fantasy never makes it to the page, and yet it is work I’m proud of, and why can’t I show it off? But I don’t think it helps most books, and in some cases it actively hinders it.
In the case of this book, I think there may have been another reason for all this front matter. The author is writing for a Western audience that may not be (probably isn’t) well versed in her culture. In using a pronunciation guide she’s offering that audience an opportunity to learn her language, to get it right, to hear the names as if she was pronouncing them.
The problem is that, by doing this, the author privileged her desire that the reader get it right, over the reader’s (which is to say my) desire to stay in the story and get pulled along with it.
The presence of the pronunciation guide at the front of the book made it impossible for me not to check each time a name showed up. Why couldn’t I ignore the guide? I am not certain–maybe because for me it turned the book from a story to get involved in into a lesson. I realized the further I went, the more invested I was in sounding out the names–even names I was familiar with. I don’t think that’s what this writer intended.
Don’t get between me and your story, please. I’m distractible enough.
Neither of them was the first person to be shot and killed by immigration enforcement officials over the past year. There have been numerous shootings and some deaths.
In September 2025, Silverio Villegas González was killed in Chicago under circumstances similar to Good’s death. Ruben Ray Martinez was shot multiple times by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Texas in March 2025, but their involvement was not revealed until nearly a year later. Neither Martinez nor Villegas González has become a household name, and their deadly encounters with federal agents have not drawn nearly the same level of media attention as Good’s or Pretti’s.
As a media historian, I’ve been struck by the similarities between the media’s coverage of Minneapolis and its coverage of Selma, Alabama, in 1965, when voting rights protests led to violence that left three people dead, including two white victims.
These two events reveal that the deaths of white activists often draw and sustain far more attention than the deaths of Black or Latino people in similar contexts. But the Selma and Minneapolis events also show that male and female white activist victims aren’t necessarily treated the same way.
Remembering Selma
Video footage of law enforcement beating and gassing marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge remains an iconic visual document of the Civil Rights Movement. John Lewis, who later became a congressman, was an activist at the head of the march on March 7, 1965, and was beaten in the head at the base of the bridge by Alabama state troopers. But he was not a household name in 1965, and media coverage at the time did not identify him.
Reporters also didn’t pay much attention to what had motivated the march: the killing of Black voting rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper during a nighttime march a week earlier.
Martin Luther King Jr. delivers a eulogy in Selma, Ala., for James Reeb, a fellow minister who was beaten to death. AP Photo
Still, the prime-time television broadcast of footage from “Bloody Sunday” at the Pettus Bridge shocked Americans, just as footage from Minneapolis has similarly distressed and disturbed many people today.
In 1965, a small number of white Americans from around the country, including numerous members of the clergy, descended on Selma to stand with the brutalized voting rights activists. They included James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Massachusetts, and Viola Liuzzo, a wife and mother of five from Michigan.
President Lyndon B. Johnson contacted Reeb’s widow. She gave media interviews about her husband. Johnson also extolled Reeb at the beginning of his joint address to Congress calling for robust voting rights legislation, four days after Reeb’s death. Johnson never mentioned Jackson’s death.
Liuzzo was ferrying people back to Selma from Montgomery on March 25 after the conclusion of the final, successful march to the state capital when a carload of Ku Klux Klansmen, one an FBI informant, chased her down and shot her through her car window. Her death received even more coverage than Reeb’s, keeping Selma in the news.
So how does coverage of Reeb and Liuzzo echo the portrayals of Pretti and Good? And why does it matter?
Initial media treatment of Liuzzo focused on her status as a wife and mother. She was characterized as brave, putting the rights of others above her own. “Mrs. Liuzzo ‘Felt She Had to Help,’” was the headline of a New York Times profile.
But in both cases, although separated by six decades, condemnation, disparagement and misogyny soon followed. Government officials, commentators and far-right forces framed these women and their activism in darker terms. Liuzzo was smeared by a KKK grand wizard who blamed her for her own death, saying, “If this woman was at home with her children where she belonged she wouldn’t have been in any jeopardy.” Liuzzo was falsely accused of having sexual relations with a Black man, thereby being characterized as a traitor to the white race.
In 2023, a Detroit monument honoring Viola Liuzzo, who was killed by the Klan, and Sarah Evans, who raised Liuzzo’s children, was unveiled. AP Photo/Corey Williams
Official government and law enforcement responses to Good’s death echo the Liuzzo case; in fact, the responses have arguably been magnified. Vice President JD Vance blamed Good for her own death, claiming it was a “tragedy of her own making.” President Donald Trump characterized her as “disorderly” and vicious. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other administration officials labeled Good a domestic terrorist.
This attempt to influence the media’s framing of Renee Good clearly had an impact, since much of the early media coverage focused on questions about her actions and motives, with the New York Post derisively labeling her an “‘ICE Watch’ ‘warrior’ who trained to resist feds before shooting,” before attention shifted to Pretti’s killing.
Good, like Liuzzo, was also derided as a race traitor, somehow betraying white Americans by supporting nonwhites. Podcaster Matt Walsh disparaged her for giving her life “to protect 68 IQ Somali scammers,” a smear that made its way into mainstream media, including its appearance in an opinion piece by The New York Times’ columnist David French that criticized inflammatory MAGA rhetoric.
Men have been treated differently in both press coverage and political response. Reeb, a father of four, never faced the level of condemnation heaped on Liuzzo. Southern white segregationists certainly questioned the motives of the many clergy members who descended on Selma. Those sentiments, however, did not circulate much outside of segregationist press. Reeb’s status as a minister, along with being a white man, may have shielded his reputation.
Here’s where there are some similarities to the response to Pretti’s death. Initially, Trump administration officials brought out the same playbook they’d used with Good. Noem and Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser, called Pretti a domestic terrorist. Greg Bovino, the leader of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, along with a Homeland Security spokeswoman, claimed Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement.”
Like Good, Pretti became the target of vitriol in far-right media platforms. But little of that has gotten much purchase in mainstream media, just as the segregationist contempt for activist clergy members in Selma was not amplified.
Pretti’s status as a licensed gun owner who was exercising his Second Amendment right to bear arms, as well as his First Amendment rights to protest, may also have assisted his posthumous reputation. Right-wing critics who condemned a lesbian who was not adhering to a set of standards regarding femininity had a much harder time condemning a man licensed to carry a gun.
Liuzzo, Reeb, Good and Pretti all put their bodies on the line and made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of vulnerable nonwhite people. Liuzzo and Good suffered significant character assassination that their male partners-in-protest avoided.
Whiteness may help bring massive media attention, but being a dead white woman doesn’t necessarily bring respectful treatment. For some, especially those who put their bodies on the line for nonwhite communities, they are just “AWFL,” the current right-wing acronym for “affluent, white, liberal women” who step out of bounds.
I was once chased around my parents’ kitchen by a friend of my father’s. But I’ll come back to that.
