Quarantine and the Punk Deprivation Presents: Quoomers!
About 11:30 am on Tuesday April 14th I’m once again staring at an erection, my second this day, that has set to mark the passage of another few hours since I first awoke at seven. This is fairly consistent. Each day I wake up aggravated and aroused with a pubescent level hunger that waxes then wanes (three hours later) when my body remembers what it’s missing. Or rather, what it’s being denied. Pre-quar in Gay New York City the sexual marketplace had supply outweighing demand. A seemingly endless stream of sub quality pricks were waiting on the internet for as much as you were willing to pay in pride and safety. Pretty picky? That will cost you stretches of abstinence and catfishing. Glory hole is fine? For the price of an HIV scare and avoiding eye contact with your boss next week it’s yours for the taking. Then along came COVID. We had AIDs so… easy, right? Lesbians swapped their fetish and cheese nights for six foot platonic walks and Lex’s bacchanal went picnic. Grindr introduced video chatting and encouraged you to self isolate by sharing self love. Only Fans engorged and Zoom orgies of a dozen gagged submissives stopped worrying about the shortage of doms.
The straights had another path. Tik Tok user activity skyrocketed and couples seeking to deepen relationships are now thigh high in shit realizing they’ve been lovingly trapped with their three week fling for who knows! Echos of baby making are heard through every nook and cranny as a natural phenomena to repopulate surfaces through our global panic. “Nan is dead,” get fucking! Bushwick Mayor Jil Averbeck said of COVID-19, “God corrected overpopulation by turning us all gay. Then gays kept having kids so he took another step and killed our grandparents.” Never ones to take heed, breeders are carrying on and a new set of 2020 quarantine boomers, Quoomers, will rise from the ashes of their 20th century predecessors, Breeders are carrying on and a new set of 2020 quarantine boomers, Quoomers, will rise from their ashes.hopefully with opposing insights and an attitude of resistance nonexistent in extant generations today.
Once life-threatening, the legitimate final frontiers of injustice have been parsed to microcosmic finger pointing schemes that cause corrosion in class solidarity and swapped collectivism for mid century modern marketing. Bathroom laws as gender politics. Demonstration as a means to gain social capital. The lack of true violence left us in flux between integration and assimilation. When once the tender queer off Halsey would have been subjugated to a life of typewriting and clerical work, now they can make the copy! It incentivizes everyone. Black Sheep once designated pariahs have been subsumed by the commodification of creativity and given marketing jobs in exchange for their integrity. There is capital in being cast out. “You can keep creating, bring your twisted mind, but do it this way, do it for us.” And what can the alt left, centrists and alt right agree on? That America should look like Scandinavia. From mediocrity came sublimated ideas of the perfect home that trick normies and club kids alike into a grey paste aesthetic of falsified success.
And I’m just talking about early millennials! There was still an air of hatred in their upbringing, some value in their fear, but the punks of 1990 who spoke to their derision have been homogenized by liberalism’s broom. Generation Z will never experience true punk for we were never denied to extremes of the past. We are coopting a sense of loss for subcultural spaces of which we never were witnesses. The .com boom gave us internet ubiquity and platforms so connected they lost constructive meaning; a mediocrity without edits and culls on bad content. Frankly, people don’t know what’s good for them. It has become a trend to play act as ‘other’ for clout when most of us can’t fully relate to oppression, only to its idea and aesthetics. It has become a trend to play act as ‘other’ for clout.The cues of cool have been cross contaminated with access. No matter the track, every social hierarchy has a traceable element of the internet’s derivative effect. Cancel culture could in theory mitigate this but in an all too predictable turn it instead enforces the inevitable corruption of anyone given power over others. (Has anyone been deplatformed for wasting time?) What begins as a genuine attempt to critique is delivered as thought suppression without irony; countering racism with discrimination, and patriarchy with come-one-come-all psychic mutilation.
The new generation of quoomers have some hope. I’m manifesting on their behalf that being conceived in a time of authoritarian uncertainty will give them a dissident perspective. Bernie is out of the race for 2020, a second Trump term is all but inevitable and beyond him establishment dems will likely retake the oval office once more. Though our two party bickering is opposed in all ways but outcome, the future is optimistic. Circumscription begets creativity. Within the necessarily guarded walls of excellence bloom egg shell fed roses of invention and compromise. Just as the Weimar Republic emerged from Germany’s authoritarian fall, so too will a new underground form beneath the body positive weight of illusionary freedom.
