I'm a fucking bitch.

Sean is taking an impromptu pineapple upside-down cake out of the oven, destined for Ladyslipper. 

“It’s been a dark week,” he says, “We deserve cake.” 

These things – both of these things – are understatements. It’s the 10th day of 2026, and living in America has visited as horrifying a whiplash as we’ve experienced in recent memory on all of us. 

“This is honestly the most chaotic start to a year I have ever experienced?” Flynn texted me on the eighth day of 2026 (with adult chicken pox, for the love of god). I agreed, offering that that was really saying a lot as we observed the anniversaries of white supremacist zombies storming the Capitol, and the beginning of the first global pandemic most of us had ever lived through.

So far this year, during the stupidest fucking blitzkrieg of all time, we’ve awoken to news of yet another American stab at regime change in Latin America (which included at least 80 civilian casualties that no one seems to give a shit about), altogether expected but no less tragic murder of civilians by the President’s paramilitary goon squad, example after example of our demented leader’s constantly diminishing grip on reality, and trickle after trickle of evidence that this gas-inflated loser is, in fact, the rapist pedophile we all suspected. And that’s just America. 

Why is January always like this? 

It’s taken me the better part of a decade to finally begin to learn the lesson that you can’t think about all of it all at once, and that for the most magnificent of the atrocities, the hardest activism of your life will amount to a bubble in the pudding of imperialism, if you’re lucky. That’s not to say don’t try. And it’s certainly not to say don’t pay attention. But you gotta take a break from staring at it, or your eyes will start to bleed. And if you’re going to talk about it on social media, you better have something to fucking say. Which is why Sean suddenly decided to make pineapple upside down cake while I was rage-staring at the internet so hard my eyes started to bleed (I said I was beginning to learn this lesson, calm down).

I left that nazi bar that was formerly called twitter over a year ago and beleagueredly wandered over to Bluesky as an alternative. In some ways it’s less satisfying – there are a lot fewer people I know there to make horrible jokes with, the news outlets and journalists I curated carefully on twitter for more than a decade have been decentralized, it just feels less like the “internet’s town square” and more like little corners of different kinds of nerd. But there are a lot fewer nazis! And there’s a lot less rage-bait. Which means that the rage you feel is usually about legitimate issues, not just some mansplaining dildo who can only cum if he’s arguing with a woman on the internet from his parents’ basement. Oh, and there’s no built-in chatbot creating child porn without consequence – that part is better also. 

I get into this somewhat painful explanation only to say that Bluesky is where I feel comfortable yelling on the internet. Sometimes into the void, sometimes at people who agree with me for solidarity, sometimes because the amount of vitriol I feel when we’re talking about the kind of things we’re talking about in America this year is too vulgar, too violent, too white hot for instagram – and even sometimes for actual human conversation. I’m so sorry that I’m talking about this. I can’t think of anything less sexy or helpful than talking about which social media platform you can be more of an asshole on, I promise it’s for a reason. 

Some weeks, like this week, when we all have access to multiple videos from multiple angles of an enraged, emboldened misogynist finally getting to fulfill his wish of murdering an innocent woman because she pissed him off, the line gets a little blurry for me, and I let this one slip to the normies. 

This one came out because I couldn’t stop it. The Margaret Atwood adage, of course, ringing in all of our ears, “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.” This searing familiarity with male rage made all the more painful and vivid after the release of the shooter’s video, where we see Renee Good’s last, calm words as she turns the wheel to follow their instructions and leave – “It’s okay, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

And the shooter, Jonathan Ross’ first words after he fires three rounds into her head, she slumps over her steering wheel, and crashes into parked cars as she dies in front of her wife and dog, “Fucking bitch.” 

It’s quite a juxtaposition. It’s achingly familiar. 

The poet David Gate nails this to the wall in his essay, “Obey or Die: Patriarchy’s Choice for a Queer Woman”:

You’ve likely already consumed enough hot takes about this horrible event (and the ones just like it that got significantly less media coverage over the last year) for the rest of your life. I have nothing new to offer. Except that I am a fucking bitch too. 

You’ve heard this, haven’t you? If you have the audacity to be a femme-presenting person in our world that isn’t solely devoted to the protection of the masculine ego, I know you have. The most recent time I heard it was this summer in Provincetown. It came from the mouth of your average middle-aged, white, gay, cis man, as I had the temerity to ring my bike bell to let him know I was behind him. It was right there, like he’d tucked it between his teeth and his bottom lip; a poison chaw ready to spit at a moment’s notice. 

“Fucking bitch.” 

In these moments, even in the queer safety of Provincetown, I’m not protected by my queerness like we expect “straightness” will protect us elsewhere (it doesn’t). I’m not protected by my intellect, by my tone, by the idea that I’m trying to keep these men safe from an accident in the street, nor even by my status as a known entity in a town where I can decide whether you get a sandwich for the beach or a cocktail before dinner. I’m simply a woman in the way of a man’s comfort or pride. I am a fucking bitch. 

In truth, I am a fucking bitch. When I heard this hex come out of that man walking down the street, I cackled audibly – half because the velocity of it caught me by surprise, and half because I wanted him to know that I found his insult pathetic – that is a badge of fucking honor, you old cunt. Being a fucking bitch has saved me money, time, and heartache that I would have wasted otherwise. I have been on the wrong end of an object being thrown across the room more times than I would have preferred because I do not have the patience to protect a man’s ego when he is being ridiculous. I am a fucking bitch, and I have lived this long being a fucking bitch, and I will continue to be a fucking bitch because you people deserve it and so do I. 

But I’m a fucking bitch and I’m still here, and Renee Good is dead, and it feels fucking horrible.

Renee Good – a name that seems to be painfully accurate for the queer poet and mother of three we lost this week – probably wasn’t a fucking bitch. She seems like she was a helper, a conscientious observer, someone who cared about her new community deeply, someone beloved for her kindness who had a habit of showing up when people needed her. She doesn’t seem like she was a fucking bitch. And even if she was, it’s still not an offense punishable by death, you little fucking piss baby. 

And then Sean took this beautiful pineapple upside-down cake out of the oven that he made because we all needed it, and all this rage just lifted off of me, and I wanted to cry thinking about how casually we treat the Herculean effort of making people feel safe and happy even for just a moment in this increasingly intolerable world. I’m an Aries, and this is how fast emotion moves — I am so sorry if you’re not used to it.

In my own (admittedly feeble) attempt to look away from the horrors, I’m 2/3 through John Birdsall’s beautiful “What Is Queer Food?” It’s fascinating, and lofty, and more academic than I was expecting, and I just got to the part where James Baldwin gets to Paris on an empty stomach.

He falls into a rhythm of queer dinner party family — a lifeline I’ve rung more times than I can count, both hosting and being hosted. It’s not just feeding people, which is important enough; it’s looking around the room and knowing that these sluts will get your jokes. That your fit will get recognized, down to the cunty socks. It’s seeing that there are people like you, who love you for all your weirdnesses, not in spite of them. His happen to be populated by the likes of Eartha Kitt and Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington’s musical arranger: queer, Black, and famous for his paella).

Then we zoom back to New York, 1949, where Edna Lewis is about be the chef of Cafe Nicholson, the East 58th street “boho coffee shop” where the likes of Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal will be caught sipping tea and Chianti in equal measure at the same time. Birdsall mentions these places and dinner parties as havens, places where you’re allowed to be queer inside and outside.

Sean kisses me on the head and says he’s bringing the cake to the bar while I finish writing to you. I think about how if you stand on the porch at Ladyslipper, you can see the porch at the A-House, and how being in such close proximity to that hallowed, horny ground is both an honor and a weight. We’ve come so far, and we still have to work so hard to get where we’re going.

This is all to say, if you are a fucking bitch in my bar, I will buy you a drink and a piece of cake.

Here’s a pineapple upside-down cake for when you need to look away.

You’re reading “Soup and Despair,” a (sometimes) weekly newsletter by Sarah Flynn and Rebecca Orchant. It’s about food, feelings, and surviving the dark times. If someone forwarded you this email, it’s because they love you and they want you to eat. You can subscribe to it too!