Do I really live in a shithole?

The downsides of going viral, city vs small town living, and the queer language police

A few days ago I went viral on TikTok. More accurately, Lynette did. I’d filmed a little throwaway video of her running back to the restaurant where we’d just had dinner to grab my forgotten lip gloss, and people went nuts for her beauty and her chivalry. (I get it; she’s gorgeous.) But we also received a few annoying, stupid comments — as is standard whenever you do the world’s most mild thing on the internet and it happens to reach a wider audience — mostly over my use of the word “butch.”

Lynette’s identified as butch for almost all her life, but multiple people felt the need to come in my comments and correct me about how I should refer to my wife, insisting she must be a stud. A lot of masculine Black lesbians in the United States identify as studs, but since it’s a specifically African-American term, it’s not one that Lynette’s ever really used to describe herself. Americans: Not everyone does things the way that we do things!!!! We need to get over ourselves!!!!!