Two things:

1# I swear, anytime Wawa is mentioned, I'm like a sleeper agent being activated. But instead of assassinating a foreign diplomat, I just talk about how much I love a Wawa and wish it existed outside of a small pocket on the East Coast.

2# I love how the relationship between Silas and his friends is likened to his addiction with him being the drug they can't seem to give up. I got this feeling during the prologue as well and I think it's solidly paralleled in this chapter.

I was a bit startled by the first use of the word "fuck" to describe sex in the introduction (in reference to Wilde and Bosie's sex parties) - the rest of the text is fairly academia-lite in style and it felt out of place. As the author continues to use it, I've been thinking about the words we as a society use to describe sex and the connotations attached to those words. As far as I can tell, the use of the word "fuck" is intentional.

My initial reaction to the specific use of "fuck/fucked", particularly to describe homosexual sex, was displeasure. As a queer person, it's hard not to notice the distinctions made between heterosexual sex and homosexual sex - hetero sex is often described euphemistically in literature and in real life (making love, doing the dirty, so on and so forth) and when "fuck/fucking" is used in that context it's often for sex that is emotionally distant (i.e. "just business"). Queer sex is often othered in pop culture, seen as dirtier or more depraved than heterosexual acts regardless of the actual acts being performed, so the distinct use of "fuck/fucked" here made me a bit worried. The term is harsh and a bit detached in most connotations, to be fair.

As the introduction continued, I realized the point the author might be trying to make. He talks about the movement to turn who you have sex with (in his parlance, fuck) into an identity, a part of who one is. Which is valid, it is that for many folks now. But the thing that makes one's sexuality an identity in today's culture is the long history of othering and oppression of those whose desires fall outside heterosexual relationships. Lemmey and Miller are detaching sex from identity by using the word "fuck" here - for some of the folks in this book it was just that, and they likely wouldn't have identified themselves in the same manner as we do today.

What do my fellow Boundlings think? These are my thoughts in the moment, so feel free to play around with these concepts with me as we read.