The Wonderful Queer Story of Racetrack Higgins

The Story of Spot Conlon

With all these titles that are a lot alike I kinda feel like Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse when they whip out the comic book and are like "okay, let's do this one more time" and go through their origin story haha.

Shout out to Broadway_Crackers and annanymos_ (just pretend like I know how to tag, please) to reading the last two chapters suuper fast right after I posted them it was fun seeing you two race through the chapters leaving comments as you went and constantly refreshing my notifications to see a new comment pretty much every minute, and even quicker. It made my day haha.

Now you get to learn Spot Conlon's plot twist backstory! 

Enjoy! :)

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The less anyone knows about where Spot Conlon came from, the better. Once he loses his advantage as leader of Brooklyn, he's done for.

He started out in a big Irish family in Brooklyn, one of the younger siblings. One of the younger daughters. He wasn't allowed to do all the things that his older brothers got to do. And when his younger brothers got treated in ways that he wasn't, it drove him mad. He wanted to scream from his frustration daily. But no one would listen to him. No one would listen to him because he wasn't born the right gender to be listened to.

Not that they paid much attention to him anyway. He was just another daughter in the family. He got over looked.

So, when he turned eight, he ran away from home. He knew that none of them would come looking for him. Even if they did, he was determined to make sure that none of them would ever find him.

Because he immediately ditched dresses and donned over-sized shirts and slacks.

It felt great. People finally looked at him more.

Well, more than before. He still was a poor runaway kid with nothing to his name. He didn't even have a name for himself. So, he got recognized as a boy, but still overlooked by many.

And that made him just as frustrated as before.

Until one day he accidentally bumped into a big, intimidating, tall Brooklyn newsie. He was nine at the time. He stood his ground. The newsie was impressed. He took him back to the Brooklyn newsies' lodging house.

And for once, he wasn't overlooked.

Of course, he needed a name.

He told them he didn't have a name.

To his surprise, most of the newsies empathized with him. They told him that he could go by a new name, a nickname; most of them did anyway.

And so he began going by Spot. True, it was an unusual name, even for a newsie, but all the newsies had an easy "you do you" attitude about it--as well as pretty much everything else. Spot was thrilled.

True, because of his age, he was lumped in with the younger newsies, which annoyed him a tiny bit, but they played with him and talked to him as if he was one of them, in a way that his family never had. 

And so that's how Spot grew up. And he was happy.

Inevitably, Spot's body started changing in ways that the other newsies couldn't empathize with. To be honest, it didn't bug him too much. Well, yes it did bother him, he wished he had just been born a boy instead, but it was more of what it meant that bugged him. That his family's expectations of growing up and becoming a woman and having children would once again creep back into Spot's life. And he wanted none of that.