[He is doing this over text because like hell is he doing it over video. With text he can dip a lot easier, and he's still not sure he won't have a heart attack and die.
It's just that after the previous month he has... questions? Concerns. Concestions. And, unfortunately, he is only aware of one person that he thinks might be able to answer them.]
Stanford, I have a somewhat personal question I'd like to ask you if you don't mind.
[It takes a while for him to actually respond because he is typing and then deleting and then typing the same question in as many different permutations as he can think of and all of them feel Weird. Finally he figures it's best to just be concise, direct. Rip off the bandaid.]
You like men, right?
1/3 cw: also references to various forms of discrimination
[ It's not the 70s. It hasn't been the 70s for a while, from Ford's perspective. He has not only not been immersed in culture of America in the 70s in just as long, he's spent that time in a lot of literally alien cultures with a huge variety of perspectives on gender, sexuality, and romance.
Even so, his first emotional reaction is a panicked, How did his know?! Ford hadn't even known until after he'd fallen through the portal! ]
[ He gets a grip on that reaction a moment later, though nervousness still persists. This isn't a conversation he's ever needed to have before. The subject went comfortably unaddressed between he and Stanley, and the kids and their modern Californian sensibilities meant that neither hiding nor addressing it were ever necessary. He has no idea what Fiddleford's own perspective on the subject is, either, which means he has no idea where to start with his response.
He does know Fiddleford, though, and hateful isn't a word Ford's ever associated with him. Petty and stubborn and contrary and mean all at various points, sure. But Fiddleford is also one of the few people in Ford's pre-Deerington life that's never treated him poorly because of, for example, his hands, his social status, or his culture. Surely Ford can trust him now as well? ]
[ Still, it takes him a while to craft a response - several literal minutes, in fact. Much like Fiddleford he types and deletes and then retypes the same answer, then finally decides it's best to be blunt. ]
[ The question of 'why' should be off-putting, but it's actually a really interesting subject. While it's by no means Ford's area of expertise, it's something he thinks would be interesting to discuss.
It's almost disappointing when Fiddleford switches to a question that's easier to answer, even though it's going to make for an easier conversation. ]
I don't mind answering, but that is a somewhat long story. It wasn't just one thing.
[Frankly he's free to do both. Fiddleford will take any crumb of information right now, and he'd prefer to not have to keep formulating questions when it's very clear he's not good at it.]
Stanford with all due respect I know you well enough to know that when I ask you a question I'm going to get a long response. That won't be a problem. You say however much you feel's important.
Thoroughness and clarity are important, Fiddleford.
[ But okay. He can do this. He can be a little vulnerable and a little emotionally intimate if it's in the name of summarizing an old anthropology dissertation.
Still, he does just as Fiddleford expects and presents him with a wall of text. ]
After we parted ways, I wasn't able to return to Gravity Falls for years. I traveled a lot, and I spent a lot of time with a lot of different cultures. Some were similar to American culture, and others were so different you can't even meaningfully contrast them. Many weren't even human cultures.
There were some that had three or more 'primary' genders, or none at all, that didn't have binary sexes, or that didn't have any consistent links between their sex and gender at all. So of course, in some of them sex and romance were treated in ways I'd never considered before. I probably would have figured it out just from that, eventually.
Early on in my travels, I met someone and I ended up getting along well with him. His culture was one with largely binary sexes and genders, like ours, but the criteria for taboo relationships was based far more around social status and genetic potential. It only took a few weeks in that area before same-sex relationships started to seem common and normal to me. And he and I were both male, and he was a low-ranked commoner while I was a drifter that technically wasn't even the same species, so none of the taboos applied to us anyway.
It did turn out that courtship and dating worked very differently, so he thought we were already romantically involved for three full months before I did.
But once we cleared that up, accepting his advances felt more natural than I would have thought. And that was the first time I was consciously aware that I was attracted to men.
[Alright. Okay. He reads that wall of text -- honestly shorter than he thought it would be -- over several times to make sure he's got it sorted. It takes a couple of times because there's some hurdles there he has to jump, mentally. He's never considered the concept of genders that aren't male or female, and certainly he's never considered that gender and sex and sexuality are not all essentially the same thing.
But if men can like men then clearly they aren't, are they, and the rest of it follows logically enough. That's the one good thing about him: he's simply too mathematically-minded to not intuit logic when it's presented to him. It's just the equation is a lot more complicated than he thought it was, and he hasn't learned the theory behind it yet, and also this specific type of math scares him, and the metaphor is getting a little confused but that always happens to him when he's discombobulated.
Now of course the Trench corruption is making him more likely to purposefully engage with things that scare him, and for the first time that might be... good? At the very least, not immediately dangerous. Just awkward.
Which is all to say, he has this very thoughtful inner monologue but what he winds up writing is:]
Are you telling me I knew you were a queer before you did
That's not ALL I got from it but there was a lot to get, let me tackle it one bit at a time.
I've known since college. I figured it was obvious and I never asked because it wasn't my business to pry.
[And why was it obvious?]
You never brought girls back to the room, you never even talked about them. You didn't talk about ANYONE. So I figured you weren't talking because it wasn't the sort of thing you talk about in public and that was fair enough.
Also I had to sleep every night across from that poster of Carl Sagan making bedroom eyes. You cannot possibly tell me you bought that and didn't know.
Edited (how could i forget our good friend carl) 2022-08-24 03:45 (UTC)
Are all some pretty solid points that Fiddleford just made, which is the worst part. It's very hard to argue when you don't have a solid counter-argument!
There is at least one point on which he can defend himself, though. ]
I'm only asking because that isn't how it happened for me and I'm trying to suss out how much of it was me and how much of it was this place messing with my head.
I don't think it's likely to be Trench. The Pthume
[ That's as far as Ford gets before what Fiddleford says really clicks into place in his mind. In his haste to scroll back up and make sure he really read what he thinks he read he hits send.
He can't even care about that, however. There's a lot he knows about Fiddleford, but this definitely isn't one of them. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cryptograms) wrote2021-09-04 07:34 pm
text;
It's just that after the previous month he has... questions? Concerns. Concestions. And, unfortunately, he is only aware of one person that he thinks might be able to answer them.]
Stanford, I have a somewhat personal question I'd like to ask you if you don't mind.
no subject
Of course. What's on your mind?
oh probably warning on this thread for 70s-era ignorance about sexuality
You like men, right?
1/3 cw: also references to various forms of discrimination
Even so, his first emotional reaction is a panicked, How did his know?! Ford hadn't even known until after he'd fallen through the portal! ]
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He does know Fiddleford, though, and hateful isn't a word Ford's ever associated with him. Petty and stubborn and contrary and mean all at various points, sure. But Fiddleford is also one of the few people in Ford's pre-Deerington life that's never treated him poorly because of, for example, his hands, his social status, or his culture. Surely Ford can trust him now as well? ]
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Yes, I do.
1/2
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I mean. How did you figure it out. What tipped you off.
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It's almost disappointing when Fiddleford switches to a question that's easier to answer, even though it's going to make for an easier conversation. ]
I don't mind answering, but that is a somewhat long story. It wasn't just one thing.
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Stanford with all due respect I know you well enough to know that when I ask you a question I'm going to get a long response. That won't be a problem. You say however much you feel's important.
[He readies himself for a dissertation.]
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[ But okay. He can do this. He can be a little vulnerable and a little emotionally intimate if it's in the name of summarizing an old anthropology dissertation.
Still, he does just as Fiddleford expects and presents him with a wall of text. ]
After we parted ways, I wasn't able to return to Gravity Falls for years. I traveled a lot, and I spent a lot of time with a lot of different cultures. Some were similar to American culture, and others were so different you can't even meaningfully contrast them. Many weren't even human cultures.
There were some that had three or more 'primary' genders, or none at all, that didn't have binary sexes, or that didn't have any consistent links between their sex and gender at all. So of course, in some of them sex and romance were treated in ways I'd never considered before. I probably would have figured it out just from that, eventually.
Early on in my travels, I met someone and I ended up getting along well with him. His culture was one with largely binary sexes and genders, like ours, but the criteria for taboo relationships was based far more around social status and genetic potential. It only took a few weeks in that area before same-sex relationships started to seem common and normal to me. And he and I were both male, and he was a low-ranked commoner while I was a drifter that technically wasn't even the same species, so none of the taboos applied to us anyway.
It did turn out that courtship and dating worked very differently, so he thought we were already romantically involved for three full months before I did.
But once we cleared that up, accepting his advances felt more natural than I would have thought. And that was the first time I was consciously aware that I was attracted to men.
no subject
But if men can like men then clearly they aren't, are they, and the rest of it follows logically enough. That's the one good thing about him: he's simply too mathematically-minded to not intuit logic when it's presented to him. It's just the equation is a lot more complicated than he thought it was, and he hasn't learned the theory behind it yet, and also this specific type of math scares him, and the metaphor is getting a little confused but that always happens to him when he's discombobulated.
Now of course the Trench corruption is making him more likely to purposefully engage with things that scare him, and for the first time that might be... good? At the very least, not immediately dangerous. Just awkward.
Which is all to say, he has this very thoughtful inner monologue but what he winds up writing is:]
Are you telling me I knew you were a queer before you did
no subject
[ Fucking really, Fiddleford?
Which would Ford would like to leave it but that comment has caused a surge of his greatest weakness: curiosity. ]
When did you know? And how?
no subject
I've known since college. I figured it was obvious and I never asked because it wasn't my business to pry.
[And why was it obvious?]
You never brought girls back to the room, you never even talked about them. You didn't talk about ANYONE. So I figured you weren't talking because it wasn't the sort of thing you talk about in public and that was fair enough.
Also I had to sleep every night across from that poster of Carl Sagan making bedroom eyes. You cannot possibly tell me you bought that and didn't know.
no subject
Are all some pretty solid points that Fiddleford just made, which is the worst part. It's very hard to argue when you don't have a solid counter-argument!
There is at least one point on which he can defend himself, though. ]
That is not why I bought the Carl Sagan poster.
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It seems to me that that's the kind of thing a man ought to have figured out before he hits thirty-something.
[Mainly because if it isn't, that is a troubling data point in the 'you might not be as straight as you think' evidence pile.]
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Maybe, but I was focused on my work for the entirety of my 20s.
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[Which... again... is an unsettling data point.
And also does unfortunately track for Ford. He knows Ford, and he knows Ford would never make a first move.]
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I suppose that's correct. And it's the short answer to your original question: I noticed the first time another man approached me first.
HERE WE GO
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[ That's as far as Ford gets before what Fiddleford says really clicks into place in his mind. In his haste to scroll back up and make sure he really read what he thinks he read he hits send.
He can't even care about that, however. There's a lot he knows about Fiddleford, but this definitely isn't one of them. ]
That's why you asked?
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once again i draw on a for real fucking conversation i have had
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cw: discussion of mental illness
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