What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Anonymous asked: I just re-read Scar Tissue for about the 9th time, and it's honest to god one of my favorite pieces of literature. You handle it beautifully -despite how awful the abuse is - and I'm so glad it doesn't wrap up neat and tidy. The journey is about start of recovery (inspired choice), but it's still positive and I wish people outside ao3 could see this. It's phenomenal. I don't have enough characters to sing your praises. I do want to ask - how do you think Kent would handle the #MeToo movement?

Thank you so much! :D

To answer your question, I think Kent as I’ve written him would have a really complex relationship with the #MeToo movement. Like, he’s unquestioningly in support of it and sporadically retweets a bunch of stuff that women have written about it, but always has to take some recovery time afterwards, because it’s stressful. And just, like… he knows, he knows what happened to him was abuse, that it’s objectively not his fault, but the thought of people finding out en masse brings him out in a cold sweat, never mind the fact that he doesn’t know how he’d fit in that conversation even if he wanted to. Like, there’s so many people already lining up to conflate being gay with being a paedophile, especially after the Spacey bullshit, that there’s an inherent double burden on anything he might say, and once you throw in the added homophobia of sports culture… well. And then, at the back of his mind, there’s the added knowledge that, to the best of his knowledge, the very few pro hockey players who’ve talked about being abused as kids are straight, whereas Kent isn’t, and that shouldn’t make a difference, but the thought that even one person might get up and say that he’s only gay because he was abused is nauseating to the point of panic. 

Maybe he’ll be ready to talk in another five, another ten years - maybe when he’s retired, or maybe never. But right now, hearing over and over again about how many truly shitty men exist in the world when he’s trying to recover is Hard, especially when almost no one around him knows what he’s dealing with and telling them would just be a new sort of trauma. So he keeps quiet, and retweets what and when he can, and quietly makes donations to groups that catch his eye, and lies down afterwards with his head in Day’s lap and Kit on his stomach, and lets them both remind him that he’s okay, he’s here. He’s here.

  1. forgetful-fox reblogged this from fozmeadows
  2. fozmeadows posted this