Post holidays and A New Year:

Last year, was a collection of milestones for me. I put out a book. I was a best seller for a whole weekend. People I never met were playing my game and complimenting me over how good it was and how much they liked it. It was a validation and relief that the 2 1/1 years I poured into the experience were not in vain.

And I hope, honestly, truly, that this these milestones are first rather than highpoints. I want to keep making better games. I did a lot this year. And with that in mind and under the insistent demands of friends  I spent the back half of the month taking a break.

I'm very bad at those.

That's not to say there was no work done. I still have a preview to show off. I still reached a major milestone in the outline (my demand before I took a break). But  I also did a lot of thinking about what  I want to do next:
-A Big Game
-A Small Game
-A Potential Talk Show
You'll be hearing a lot about all of these very soon. I just got to finish Welcome to Reedsboro.

Now, how about that preview? Enjoy more of the chapter 1 intro.

The Push for Civil Rights

Americans have this tendency of thinking of the struggle for civil rights, or the bare recognition of our humanity, as this nebulous 20 year period centered around the 60’s. It is an encouraged framework that sets up an idea that these fights, racism and it’s structures, ableism, women's and queer liberation, are solved instead of ongoing problems. In truth they were, and are, part of a greater history of movements that stretches far into the past and while continuing into today.

Why it defines this era is that these fights were more visible than they ever had been before. With TV’s and radio finding themselves into more peoples homes, people could see the people fighting for their rights and the violence they faced clearer than ever before. And while this raised awareness and documentation that was hard to deny, sure, the real power was in allowing smaller separate movements that were previously isolated to see and organize with each other, share tactics, and communicate. What was once a neighborhood struggle became city, county, or even state-wide fight. Those state fights became regions fights.

In 1958, the Grand Wizard of the KKK, a toad-sucking clown known as James W. “Catfish” Cole, made a big grand speech out about he was going to put the Lumbee their place as a response to a native family moving into what was considered a “white” neighborhood. They started with burning crosses in their yard and tried to escalate it to a rally in Hayes Pond in Maxton, NC despite being warned by the local authorities that was a bad idea.

But James W. Cole, full of toad and hot air, decided to do it anyways. So he and 50 of his toad-sucking buddies sat out in the freezing cold huddled around a pole attached to a car battery, using it to power one dinky lightbulb and blarehate speech and religious music over a public speaker system, riling himself up for something more violent.

The KKK, like all of their ilk, are as loud as theyare spineless as racism is inherently a malignant form of cowardice.

They put great effort into trying to make them seem bigger or more popular than they actually are because they need to believe their world view is secretly shared by most others. But that’s the big secret bigots of all stripes don’t want you to know, it very rarely is. The backup James W. Cole was counting on from the surrounding areas never quite materialized.

The Lumbee on the other hand, showed up to protect their community and they out numbered the KKK by the hundreds. So they did what any sensible person should do when confronted with the KKK. Beat the everloving shit and stuffing out of them. They put the fear of the righteous god they were so ready to evoke into their bones and they KKK scattered because these types rarely stand up to direct confrontation.

Cole ended up abandoning his wife and leaving her to fend for herself when he fled. She ended up driving her car off into ditch and had to be driven to safety by a Lumbee man much nicer than I am.

For all his bluster, the only thing Cole accomplished was a conviction for inciting a riot and a sentence for 18-24 months in prison (by a Lumbee Judge no less) while the Lumbee made national headlines for driving the Klanoff. Including a picture of two men victoriously wrapped in a flag they tore down in pages of Life magazine.

On February 1st, 1960, in the city Greensboro which is a bit inland towards the middle of the state, four students of a local college (Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond) were frustrated by the segregation of public services and stores. So these four students put a plan together inspired by both the non-violent protest of Mohondas Gandhi and the previous work of the Congress of Racial Equality with the Freedom rides in 1947. Their target was a local Woolsworth.

After buying common items such as toothpaste at a desegregated counter, The Greensboro Four attempted to order coffee from the Whites-Only lunch counter where they were denied service. This is despite the predesignated segregated space these Black men were allowed to purchase from being only a few feet away. But no one ever accused racist of being logical.

So they sat and waited to be served, enduring verbal abuse from those around them. Rather predictably the police were called on them, but were unable to act because of a lack of provocation. Whats-more, by the time the police had shown up, the media had already been alerted as well.

These four, before entering the store coordinated with a local white businessman by the name of Ralph Johns who contacted the media on their behalf.

These four stayed seated and in place into the store shut down for the night. Then, the next day the returned with 20 black students and repeated this process and were once again refused service. They planned to do this every single day until they received service and by the 4th day over 300 people were taking part in this protest, which had also spread to the nearby Kress store (what is now K-mart).

These protest spread through what’s now called the Research Triangle, Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, Winston-Salem as people started their own similar campaigns. From there spread all along the Atlantic South in places like Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta, Georgia; and Richmond, Virginia. These protest took place in not just chain stores, but any place where segregation was an issue likes buses, swimming pools, libraries, museums and more. A total of 55 cities across13 states had protest within 3 months.

By the time the protest ended on July 25th, 1960 it is estimated that the original Woolsworth lost about 200,000 dollars (estimated about 1.7 million in 2020) and the manager personally suffering wage cuts for not meeting sales goals. Stores all over being struck lost one third of their business leading them to drop segregation policies.

It’d still be 4 more years until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would desegregate public spaces officially but the greater impact was the organization it brought as a whole, setting the tone for civil rights struggles in the region and state as a whole even up to today. The Greensboro Sit-it also led directly to the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which organized freedom rides, held voter campaigns, and was a major part of organizing the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Where John Lewis, as a part of the SNCC condemned Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill for not doing enough.

Despite these victories, the struggle for civil right was a dangerous one. These were hard victories won in spite of danger and violence. People were hurt economically, socially, and physically for in hateful cruel ways for threatening the status quo they forced onto others. People were killed and assassinated out of fear, hatred, and the need to preserve how certain people benefited off the suppression of other.

Community self-defense became vital. Even in these examples of victory. The Lumbee’s confrontation of the KKK was armed and if you don’t think the KKK had guns of their own and were prepared to use them then you’re naive and factually incorrect. The Greensboro sit-in was met with multiple violent confrontations both in and out of the store, and wasn’t the only sit-in to do so. Their choice of non-violence was a tactic of self-defense rather than one strictly of morality.

It is not unheard of to hear stories of geno that were part of that self-defense. Genodivergence was still being recognized as a uniform identity, but for many folk it was not the only hat they wore. Passing geno and vigilante “mystery men” were still there marching, organizing, and protecting their communities along side others. That is the role a lot of folk played at the time.

Dirty 80’s

For many people, especially Queer and Geno folk, the 80’s were a time of radicalization. With Reagan era policies, from his malicious handling of AIDS to the racially fueled War on Drugs, many minorities found themselves with a target on their back and a righteous anger. But the south was much more slow to pick this up compared to other places.

This is, contrary to popular belief, not because we’re all white inbred hicks who believe Jesus invented guns for America or whatever other weird ass honestly classist construct you may have built up for yourself, but a couple very real sociopolitical factors. The first of which is that for many geno and queer folk in the south, there was a real lack of community. Southern cities have a tendency to build out in big massive sprawls rather than up and that made resources and community hard to find.

Unlike innate factors such as a person’s race or ethnic background, which comes with its own sense of community and identity based off culture and lived-experience, Queer and Geno identities often tends to be realized later in life. And while this can be alongside culture and community, it does mean a lot of the built in cultural and community spaces, such as the historically Black churches many civil rights struggles where organized through, were virtually non-existent.

What little there was found around highly urban college campuses clubs which were prone to infighting  and collapse due to the temporary nature of school and wildly different communities speaking for their needs without necessarily having ties to the area.

Outside of that there were the occasional gay bar in a non-dry county, which while it solved the issues schools had, suffered from requiring folk to know about it in the first place. Hard to do when you’re 2 hours away and they can’t advertise too loudly out of fear of safety and police raids. Then on top of that your patrons have to organize safe and discrete ways of getting to the bar and back in the first place.

Being notably gay in North Carolina is still a felony underneath it’s colonial-era sodomy law. Lawrence V. Texas, which ruled criminalizing homosexuality between adults was unconstitutional, wouldn’t be until 2003. Even after that, State V. Whiteley (2005) would rule that N.C. G.S. § 14-177 (a “crimes against nature bill”) was not unconstitutional because it could be used to criminalize things like zoophilia, non-consensual or coercive sex, public indecency, and prostitution. While largely unenforceable as long as Lawrence V. Texas holds, it was often wielded as a weapon against queer folk. Not only criminalizing visible and private queerness alike, but sex work, and as a way to go after or more heavily penalize queer populations.

Another thing that hamstrung organizational efforts was AIDS, which had a devastating effect on North Carolina queer and BIPoC populations, and especially where that intersected and access to healthcare was lacking. And it was intentional, the mishandling of the AIDS epidemic was premeditated and part of Reagan’s attempt to appeal to the Conservative Christian powerbase that Republicans cultivated as part of the Southern Strategy and after running on a “family values” platform. Reagan was already receiving reports on the so called “gay plague” coming into office and didn’t say anything until the deaths totaled over 20,000. By the time he left office the numbers were over 90,000. And those numbers may be vastly under-reported. To quote a truism about American politics “cruelty was the point”.

The Southern Strategy was what is usually referred as an electoral stratagem that sought to capitalized on the racist panic of the South as non-white folk fought for their civil rights (and once more, still do). I guess when you’re use to having the whole pie, someone having a sliver feels like a threat on your life and a lot of good ol’ boy and coulda-been southern belle austerity felt threatened.

In truth, The Southern Strategy could most earnestly be called an act of immense and continuing social engineering. It became unpopular in most places, or at least the important ones for a politician, to be directly racist. So they did it indirectly.

They, they being Republican strategist and policy making politicians, fed into the racist paranoia of fragile white egos by creating boogiemen. Villainizing progressives and civil rights leaders. Lambasting the idea of busing that force desegregated schools and the idea of affirmative action which did the same for work places. Attacking social programs that would hurt more people of color, namely black people than it would white folk. Reagan himself, coined the term “Welfare Queens” as a way to attack social safety nets such as food stamps.

But that was just one part of it. Power, good or bad, needs structure to act upon. This power came in two forms. Political, through empowering states rights as a way to de facto discriminate against folk while still allowing for plausible deniability. This took the form of things like gerrymandering around black populations, strict voter id laws, and limiting limited voting locations and hours in an attempt to negate Black voices. But it also meant cutting of social programs or funding that would go to these same communities as well as more harshly policing them with disproportionate penalties. See the aforementioned talk of sex work and the “war on drugs”.

The other half of this equation is social power. It’s well known and acknowledged that both Southern Evangelical and Baptist Churches empowered and in turn found power as part of the Southern Strategy (not including historically black churcheswho found themselves in active opposition). These communities, were the primary force of thatsocial engineering, crafting this idea of being Christians means the Romans are at the gate with lions in hand. The outsider is an enemy, and them enemy is convenient politically and for motivating this base. And there is always an enemy for the machine. A good chunk of confederate statues found themselves put up after the victories of the Civil Rights Movement for a reason.

The messaging is everywhere. A lot of folk who got rich off the backs of others and the racist conditions discrimination created through industries like coal, cotton, tobacco, and railways were the money that empowered the Republicans. They had a vested interest in keeping their power or expanding it and found that through media. By buying up newspapers, local stations, and radio they changed the narratives of how things were being talked about and the art that was being made. Suddenly union became a dirty word to people who had family that were killed in company towns. And it was a process of decades. And it worked so they exported it to other places.

Reagan was not the first to take advantage of the Southern Strategy, Nixon before him made use of it. And while the stock reply of accusations of these policies were a staunch denial that they existed until a formal apology from the Republican Party in 2003, recent history has shown the playbook is alive and well, especially in North Carolina whether you talk about it’s continuation of how it silence the black political voice or anti-trans legislation. Like I said, there is always an enemy for the machine.

And it is a machine. A grinding mess of economic circumstances and toxic community making a hole that can be near-impossible to escape.

Racism, and the visceral reaction of it to people asserting their human dignity, directly impacted queer communities. There is no salvation for one of us without all of us and NC politics has a way of showing that again and again. When it comes to queer rights and organization (because there was still organization) many of the most successful people were those able to get their voice out beyond their immediate community in one way or another, be it magazines, early web, or even letters. These were messages giving people a sense of community or knowledge that there were other folk out there dealing with the same things.

Many of these folk were people of color, like Mandy Carter, who brought with them community or ideas of community and what that means and needs. Mandy Carter herself ran a campaign to combat white supremacy in queer spaces and built upon that work to cofound SONG “Southerners on New Ground” which seeks to “build and maintain a Southern LGBTQ infrastructure for organizers strong enough to combat the Southern-specific strategy of the Right to divide and conquer Southern oppressed communities using the tools of rural isolation, Right-wing Christian infrastructure, racism, environmental degradation, and economic oppression" to quote their own mission statement.

Reedsboro found it’s leaders in husbands Jorge Santos and Henry Ho, who ticked all the boxes of Queer, Genodivergent, and decidedly not-White. Jorge was a local son of a repairman that, like many young queer kids from rural areas, found an excuse to get away. His was in the form of film school in a major coastal city on the other side of the country. There he met and started a relationship with business law student Henry, who had his own history as a part of the so-called radical Mutant Front which pushed for medical autonomy and better conditions for incarcerated Geno. Though Henry’s involvement often involved fights for civil protections from discrimination in both housing and work place.

Economic circumstance and a moral dilemma lead Jorge back home. He came to the conclusion that leaving home doesn’t inherently solve the issues entrenched in a society. It turns out no matter where you go, issues like homophobia, racism, or the discrimination geno face still exist. By getting away, even just for a little but, he was lucky. For every person that gets out, there are at least 5 more facing issues like homophobia, racism, or geno discrimination. By leaving, and only leaving,he just hoisted his share of the work on the rest of the community.

No judgment on those that do need to leave and when they do, especially not with my history. Activism, hell sometimes survival, means doing the best you can to your ability, and sometimes that means getting out for your own good and safety. But it does have a consequence like all actions. He just decided there was work to be done and he could do it.

When the historic Cairo theater, which was built post WW2 as a part of Roosevelt’s New Deal and in Reedsboro’s historic district, was repossessed by the US government, it offered the couple a fortuitous opportunity. Jorge and Henry rallied their community to raise money to purchase the place at a reduced price (locals rumor everything from a murder to ‘the mob’ but a bit of digging just showed good ol’ fashion white collar tax fraud). This, combined with Henry’s economic and legal knowledge allowed them to circumvent financing that would have likely been unavailable to them otherwise. The couple took the space and renovated it something for the local geno and queer communities, fighting every bit of red tape and community busybody committee along the way. By the end of the decade it was a landmark and touchstone that generated enough revenue and goodwill it was hard to attack.