Dear LW,

Fuck you with a cactus.

I was sitting in the Eagle (yeah, THAT Eagle, the one with the nice deck and the live oaks and fairy lights) on election night. My straight white middle-aged lady ass was in there with some queer friends, watching CNN on the back patio. We thought we'd need a drink, and boy howdy, did we ever need a drink.

Did you somehow fail to notice that the man who is currently vice president allowed state government money to be used to try to convert gay teenagers into being straight? These programs took otherwise healthy kids and wound up with about a 50% suicide rate. Among previously healthy kids. What in the actual fuck? Aside from being mind-numbingly cruel, that sort of thing is what we generally refer to as "abuse" at best and "torture" at worst. And no, that's not hyperbole. Take the time to read some of the stories of people sent to conversion camps. Ponder the fact that but for the grace of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that you're old enough that you didn't get sent to one, and that you can look around from willing tail without your parents and the state attempting to brainwash you into eating tacos instead of flautas.

Did you somehow fail to notice that line about "killers, rapists, I assume some of them are good people?" that the man you voted for said about people from Mexico? Like, you know, my neighbours? I live in the Second Ward. It's really, really, really not okay to look at whole neighbourhoods of people and paint them with a broad brush. (I've been charitably keeping my mouth shut about what godawful ass crack of suburbia in the Woodlands or Sugar Land where you live, except for all I know you live in West U or Bellaire. Actually, probably you live on the west side of Cinco Ranch and you're rounding up to Houston because it's just a giant bedroom community anyway.)

Did you somehow fail to notice that you live in a town FULL OF REFUGEES? Including Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani, Somali, and all those other countries full of "scary Muslims!!!" (hopefully the rest of you can see the sarcasm here), not to mention the refugees from Guatemala and Honduras who were given illegal birth control by their mothers because they and their mothers both knew they'd be raped on the trip, and they hoped to make it merely with an assault and not with an assault and an unwanted pregnancy? Did you somehow fail to notice that all those yummy restaurants where you like to eat or the amazing conveyor belt of pita bread at Phoenicia is run by immigrants? In Phoenicia's case, they were fleeing a civil war in Lebanon. Hugo's and Caracol and Xochi are all run by a family of immigrants from Oaxaca. Did you miss that (you might have, if you were busy bitching to yourself about killers and rapists)? Did you miss that all the amazing crawfish restaurants around town are run by Vietnamese families whose families came as refugees after the Vietnam war and did well by themselves? All those things that you like to brag on about your city (New York, Chicago and Seattle, y'all have gotta come down here for a week in February, preferably when you're really hungry) are the things you shit on when you cast your vote.

Oh yeah, and that "chain migration" thing is translated as, "I have a good life here and I miss my mom and my little sister's oldest child is going to university and there are some good universities here." Ask me someday about my downstairs neighbour from Burkina Faso. Who had a cousin and an uncle already in Houston, and he came to study at UH, because he had better educational opportunities there than in Burkina Faso. And while we're on that topic, did you somehow miss that HIGHER EDUCATION IS A BIG BUSINESS and Trump and Pence's shenanigans with the muslim ban and visa comedy is...actually fucking up the lives and livelihoods of people in your community? (Make America Great Again! America! Fuck Yeah!!!)

If you missed it, then you weren't paying attention, which is shocking in a city of 3 million people. If you saw it and you looked at everything around you and you still pulled the lever (or rather, turned that stupid dial) for a pair of men who "said what they thought" and then did what they said, then you don't get to be surprised or butthurt that people in this amazing town where you and I both live decide that they'd far rather fuck people who aren't willfully cruel and dickish to people like them.

And instead of attempting to be a decent human being and looking for people who want to fuck you regardless, you're sitting there feeling sorry for yourself and wondering about the ethics of trying to fuck people who've already told you in no uncertain terms to not bother them.

Politics aside, why the hell would you want to do that? Why would you want to get naked and fuck someone who's made it abundantly clear that they don't want you?

You might try looking in the Woodlands, or Sugar Land, or Pearland to get some ass, because I don't think anything inside the Belt is going to be suitable.

Yours truly,

Slinky Malinky Catflaps

I don't know anything about Pearland as I've never done any work in that area. Last time I had to crunch Sugar Land's data was a couple years ago, and it was around 50% white. While that is more than inner city Houston, it's hardly lily white, etc.

I just googled Pear Land, and without any more knowledge than what came up there, it appears to be 48% white. Again, quite a bit more than the inner city, but hardly snow.

And yes, having grown up in Houston and then having returned to Texas decades later after living all around the world, I'm well aware of its history and racial/economic diversity.

No doubt you are absolutely correct about several of the neighborhoods. The United States is a very segregated place, especially in its cities, and Houston is no exception. This makes going out to eat rather fun (as you can eat your way around the world) but yes you are correct that neighborhoods themselves are often extremely segregated.

Actually Slinky, I don't know why I was snarky above. Yes I know what Sugar Land was named after, but no, I didn't know that Pearland was named after the same. For myself, I grew up in the Galena Park area before my parents went in opposite directions in greater Houston- my father around League City (the plants) and my mother up in the Westpark area (little india). But then after being unnecessarily snarky to you, I reflected a moment and realized it has never occurred to me to wonder who/what Galena is, despite being the place where I spent the first decade of my life. ha ha ha. A few minutes of googling and I discovered A) a mineral and B) oil oligarchs have been doing oil business with really shitty people for much longer than I realized.

Morning EmmaLiz....

Houston is a messy, complicated place and yes, you're dead-on correct about the oil-igarchs and shitty people. And somehow, in spite of that, and with the magical help of flood control dams and air conditioning, it's managed to turn into the place that it is. It's got serious, entrenched problems, but I really love living here.

My office is in what's now called the Gandhi district, my morning commute takes me straight through the Third Ward (now home to some excellent street art, 10/10 would recommend visiting multiple times), and my soccer team plays in the near northside. Sometimes on my morning bike ride, I'll pass by a horse hitched to a tree in the 3rd ward, sometimes I'll get treated to an osprey hunting show, and in the fall I get treated to listening to the TSU marching band drum line practice. Always a good time.

Sugar Land and Pearland aren't 100% lily-white by numbers, but dive down to the neighbourhood level and you'll find pretty quickly that they get very white very fast. And those are, in general, the wypipo who had Trump signs on their lawns and agreed with the governor that we shouldn't give money to the lazy and undeserving sick people to get better, even after we had a category 4 hurricane trash the entire coast from Corpus Christi to the Sabine, or that it's fiscally irresponsible to open up the rainy day fund even to fix schools trashed by said hurricane. (I was at the George R. Brown, scrubbing toilets and helping take medicines to people. My parents were there working the medical tent. Listening to that kind of happy horseshit still, many months later, fills me with incandescent rage.)

lol When I grew up, the first gentrifications weren't yet happening. There was nothing in downtown but offices so after business hours and on weekends, there were only homeless people and cops. My father blamed it on Regan and the gutting of mental health services, and seeing encampments of homeless and obviously ill people in downtown was probably my first political awareness. Likewise, in those days, Third Ward still had streets that were not paved. As a kid I was told never to go there, never to get stuck there after dark. Once I was a teenager and had friends who lived there, I discovered that this was mostly hysteria- everyone loves to be terrified of someone different. I was not in the US during Ike or Katrina, but I was here during Harvey, though our home is in Central Texas now, and as much as I like to go eat and visit Houston, I have no interest in living there. I can't believe I've somehow made it this long without hearing or thinking of oilgarchs, omg so obvious and funny. But really, the CEO of Texaco (once called Galena it turns out) was a fascist, sold oil to Franco and Hitler- to the Nazis via SAfrica until 1940 when he was found out. You'd think such a blunder would end his career but no, he was up and selling oil to the Shah a little over a decade later, and if he were alive now, he'd no doubt be facilitating oil sales with ISIS.

I have no idea what the Gandhi District is having never heard that, so I can only guess you mean the Westpark/Harwin area with all the mithai and sari shops- yes that is where my mother's people are even now. We've always called it Little India which might not be so nice to the people from other parts of the subcontinent, and last time I was there, also increasingly north Africa.

Yes of course there are segregated very white neighborhoods in the Greater Houston area. There are neighborhoods like that in the central area too- I haven't looked into the demographics of River Oaks but I doubt they are very colorful. But this is the case for every city in the country, and Houston is only different in that it's more diverse than just about everywhere else.

30+ years ago in graduate school I was fucking a business major who I thought was nice (in addition to being well endowed). One day in conversation Jews were mentioned and he went into an antisemitic tirade which completely floored me (I just couldn't wrap my head around this any more than I could someone being a racist). After that I never could separate in my head his antisemitism from they guy I was fucking and shortly after called the whole thing off with him. Fast forward 30+ years: I feel even stronger about fucking anyone that supports and voted for DJT (a few moderate Republicans out there I might hook up with for a one-night stand or two but no MAGAs).

It never gets old hearing my husband talk about being propositioned by an account called "alt-right loser" that wanted a feminist to step on him. He wanted someone else to make a whole new profile just to play as an SJW to humiliate him. My husband strung him along to get a good anecdote out of it, but wasn't willing to make a whole new profile. After that, the guy deleted his whole profile and sent a giant "apology" to all the people he had begged to dominate him, basically saying anything to dance around his own cognitive dissonance about wanting what he thinks he ought to hate.

I myself have been propositioned by alt-right or 'alt-lite' twinks or (far more often) wannabe twinks, sometimes because they mistake my near-exclusive interest in feminine males for a disregard for their goofy LARP, or sometimes because they think I'll be cool with it because I had more of a hands-off approach to politics in the past and they just go along with the alt-right stuff because they like memes and have no taste. They're worth a laugh later, so I usually get as much info out of them as I can before rejecting them.

I identify as a CIS Woman and I was in a bar in Florida and watched the announcement that Steve Bannon was fired on tv. I felt inspired to change my Bumble dating profile and added, “and if you voted for Trump, go fuck yourself hard.”

Lost all of my prospects and deleted the app. The very LEAST I could do. Thanks for the read Savage!! The solidarity is delicious and just what I needed.