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himbobottomus.bsky.social
@himbobottomus.bsky.social
120 followers 160 following 280 posts
went places did things
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himbobottomus.bsky.social
the point of organizing isn't just to get every worker into the union, it's also to cultivate the mindset that an injury to one is an injury to all. racism and sexism - the idea that you are inherently better than another worker - WILL rot the foundation of your union
excerpt from "No Race-Baiting, Red-Baiting, or Queer-Baiting! The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union from the Depression to the Cold War" by Allan Bérubé The newspaper of the Sailors Union of the Pacific — which is antiblack, anticommunist, and antigay — calls them the “Marine Cooks and Fruits.” Sailors and firemen hurl racial insults at the stewards of color and even the white stewards. And they attack mcs leaders as “Reds.” Some hostile seamen put these insults all together and call the mcs “a third red, a third black, and a third queer.” Individual stewards respond by calling the sailors “deck apes” and “soupheads.” Revels Cayton, Ben Fee, Tom Baker, and Frank McCormick meet with other left-wing activists to develop a more organized strategy for the union to respond to all the name calling. They could have denied there were any homosexuals or communists in their midst or condemned them to win respectability. But instead they expose how the “baiting” itself divides union men from one another and plays into the shipowners’ hands. The union’s enemies are already connecting “red, black, and queer.” So these activists decide to keep the connections but turn them around instead, using them to unite rather than divide their community. Together they come up with a slogan that captures what they’re searching for. One version, Cayton tells me, goes like this: It’s anti-union to red-bait, race-bait, or queen-bait. Another version, he says, goes like this: If you let them red-bait, they’ll race-bait, and if you let them race-bait, they’ll queen-bait. These are all connected. That’s why we have to stick together. With these slogans they’ve captured a daring new idea of solidarity that grows out of their lived experience. Cooks and stewards quickly take up this slogan and put it into their own words. “You want to know about my union?” asks Pete Brownlee, a white heterosexual steward. “The most important thing was not that we had gays. It was that an injury to one was an injury to all — and we practiced it. We took care of each other. The mean guys were always the mean guys,” he explains. If a “deck ape” hurled an insult at a black steward, he says, a white queen would stand there until he took it back. Or if he insulted a white queen, a black steward would stand there until he took it back. “To them,” Brownlee went on about their detractors, “our union was all queers. They didn’t even call us homosexuals — they called us queers. So you had to kick the shit out of a few guys once in a while. I kicked the shit out of a couple deck apes on the ship — you had to do it. They would torment you, do a lot of stupid shit. So ‘fuck you!’ we said. We didn’t pay any attention to that shit. We knew that our union would back us.” The insults keep coming, but the gay stewards are getting bolder because they know their union is watching their backs. You can see the new solidarity at work below deck in the crew’s messroom. “Frank Bowers was one of the toughest queens I ever met,” Mickey Blair tells me. “One time a crew member came through the food line while Miss Bowers was serving, and he says to her, ‘Put some food on there, you fruit!’ And Miss Bowers pulls back and says, ‘Why did you call me a fruit?’ And he says, ‘Because you are a fruit and a cocksucker.’ Well she grabs a big soup ladle and, boy, she slaps him right across the head ‘Now,’ she says, ‘you son-of-a-bitch, I bet I’m the meanest fucking fruit you ever saw.’ And I mean she drew blood. He didn’t dare report her. That’s the way Frank Bowers would do it, so you didn’t fuck with the Marine Cooks and Stewards,” Blair explains. “That was his form of militancy.”
December 12, 2025 at 4:53 PM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
what about them
December 5, 2025 at 7:26 PM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
two houses, alike in grandmas,
November 23, 2025 at 3:05 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
metaphor break
November 23, 2025 at 2:54 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
well its a nice turn on the dime to go from all that to this. back at it again with the dissonant jazz
November 23, 2025 at 2:48 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
OwO whats this
November 23, 2025 at 2:48 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
PETEY???
November 23, 2025 at 2:43 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
fuck off!!!! this is such a funny shot
November 23, 2025 at 2:40 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
this diner set is also incredible. turqoise terrazo is inspired
November 23, 2025 at 2:34 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
ave~
November 23, 2025 at 2:28 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
angelo badalamenti you're a master of your work
November 23, 2025 at 2:27 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
PHEW
November 23, 2025 at 2:09 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
god the LIGHTING
November 23, 2025 at 2:01 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
starting to see a few Recurring Themes. and furthermore: jesus christ id marry her too
November 23, 2025 at 1:57 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
whats up with grandma's headband back here
November 23, 2025 at 1:56 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
D R E A M B O A T
November 23, 2025 at 1:47 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
as with all movies set in the past i can't tell if this was a genuinely cool haircut or if im being told something is off here
November 23, 2025 at 1:45 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
god these sets!!
November 23, 2025 at 1:33 AM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
November 20, 2025 at 5:27 PM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
have you not already had a glorious Dankwich from Cedar Park Cafe??
November 20, 2025 at 5:26 PM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
mentally I am here. actually I think what I like most about this passage is that it's kind of inscrutable, and therefore can mean whatever I need it to
November 18, 2025 at 5:51 PM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
GET THEIR ASS
Women, it should be noted, have dominated the teaching profession since the nineteenth century not because it’s a misandrist job-protection racket but because early public-education advocates found that they could expand the school system more quickly by hiring women teachers, whom they could pay less than men. One might ask if difficult, essential work might be well paid, at this moment in history, regardless of a person’s sex. But then much of the centrist manosphere’s rhetoric is predicated on refusing to see half of what’s in front of you.
November 10, 2025 at 3:31 PM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
alyssa battistoni hit the nail on the head in her "spadework" article for n+1:
We were all too busy, but the too-busyness wasn’t really about time, or at least not only. Being too busy meant people didn’t see why the union was worth making time for. Your job as an organizer was to find out what it was that people wanted to be different in their lives, and then to persuade people that it mattered whether they decided to do something about it. This is not the same thing as persuading people that the thing itself matters: they usually know it does. The task is to persuade people that they matter: they know they usually don’t.
October 26, 2025 at 2:55 PM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
yea ok gimme that shit
October 24, 2025 at 11:43 PM
himbobottomus.bsky.social
fascinating brain
October 12, 2025 at 9:41 PM