[s2b2] Boys Keep Fucking Up My Car

[ladysisyphus]

To understand where this story came from, you have to be familiar with the Onelinedrawing song 'Oh Boys':

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And now you've listened to that, it'll be stuck in your head all day, and I hope you enjoy belting along to it at inappropriate times.

This is also what happens when you've been reading way, way too many scatching indictments of a) 1980s gay scene culture and b) modern masculinity. Dallas is the best one of the bunch because he's not trying to pretend to be anything he isn't, and he doesn't think his more traditionally masculine aspects (auto repair skills, big fuckoff truck) entitle him to anything in particular. He is a dude who has nothing to prove. Against this, all of Gabriel's carefully cultivated skills are useless, so he falls hard for the guy.

And speaking of performance, I'm sorry that all you really get to see of Sugar is through Gabriel's very, very exasperated POV -- because he and Sugar love one another, they really do, they are hetero homo lifemates and close as siblings. But Sugar and Gabriel are having two very different experiences of performativity right now (as echoed in Kael and Aiden's conversation), where Gabriel is getting disgusted with what he perceives as mandatory fakeness, while Sugar is making it work by refusing to be pinned down to a single expression of anything. (Let the fact that Gabriel may not even know Sugar's legal given name show how deep the performance goes.) Sugar goes the full camp because if everything is performed, nothing is real, so fuck it all and do what you want when you want, with no need to explain anything you don't want to.

Gabriel, on the other hand, is sick of that kind of performativity because he's gotten on the bad side of people who are using it irresponsibly (unlike Sugar). Worse, he feels compelled to keep up a false front that he used to feel comfortable in but just doesn't anymore, and that just makes him pissy about everything.

And whatever, Sugar and Gabriel are both barely twenty-two, they've got plenty of time to be stupid and try out different things and see what works for them. If anything, that's Gabriel's biggest problem -- he's gotten stuck in a rut of performance and expectation. Dallas can win because Dallas refuses to play.

It was initially going to end with a big ol' sex scene, but ... yeah, when I got there, it felt all wrong. No, they can order pizza and watch stupid television and maybe just fall asleep on the couch after. They'll have time for everything else later.

I am semi-disgusted with myself that the easiest part of all of this to write was Kael and Aiden's garbage conversation. Note: They are making some valid points. They're just shoving their own heads up their own asses while they're doing it. Behold, the native language of the slime pit out of which I crawled.