It's 7:43am. Scott's been lying motionless in bed for 17 minutes. There's a problem.

Mitch has a stalker. Why don't they believe him? *** "Maybe you think that you can hide I can smell your scent for miles Just like animals" /Maroon5 - Animals/ *** Celebrity worship syndrome fanfiction

Scott's vision is fuzzy. Hazy. Unfocused like it hasn't been since the LASIK. He vaguely wonders why, but his head hurts so much he's distracted and can't figure it out. He thinks for a second that he's drunk. That he's given himself the mother of all hangovers. But his shoulder and his arm and his chest and his side and his leg also hurt-shit, his shoulder really hurts-and he's never been drunk enough for that to happen before. Plus, if he's not mistaken, that's his steering wheel in front of him, through the haze and the dust and the noise and the red and whatever the deflated white thing is. Regardless of how drunk he's been, he would never be drunk in the driver's seat of his car. Fuck. Fuck, he hurts. The spiderweb pattern across his windshield is kinda pretty though, sparkling like that in the sun. Blink.

Mitch can't stand to see Scott in pain.

Scott's a little in love with the new air traffic controller at DFW, as much as he can be for someone he's never seen and who isn't even the right gender for him. She's always professional, but has a sense of fun, and her voice is warm and friendly whenever she's not overstressed. And when she is, or when someone fucks up, she's sassy and sometimes snarky as hell. And okay, maybe it's not really love, but there's a definite girl crush happening, which only seems to grow the more he interacts with her. He's friendly and flirty and happily admires her from afar, and she's just as friendly in response, once she recognizes his voice. But holy shit, he lives in fear of screwing up on her watch and having all that beautiful snark turned on him.

Scott, Mitch, and the 1990s gay scene - brought to the modern day in honor of Pride month. I began writing this during Pride month in 2017. The LGBTQ+ community's ongoing battle for equality has come so, so far, especially in the last 20 years. While there are a lot of factors that brought us to this point, one of the most significant, in my opinion, is the role the internet has played. It's allowed us to more easily connect with each other and has been perhaps the best vehicle for queer visibility since Gilbert Baker created the first Pride flag. It wasn't always like this. It was hard being young and queer in the 1990s, but that time period was pivotal; dusk was falling on what being queer had always been. It was the end of small pockets of queerness, of gay districts and questionable bars and kids not having anywhere to turn for help. After fighting hard for 50 years, advancing equality bit by bit, there's a very real fear that we may lose ground in the current political climate. In honor of #Pride2017, and as a reminder of why we need to keep fighting, I'm going to use the internet to take a jump to the left and time warp Scott, Mitch, and the gang back to the mid 90s. Only the wealthy had cell phones, the internet was rudimentary and haphazard, and the music was amazing. The experiences in this series will reflect experiences I personally had or that friends of mine had in the queer community during that time. This is more than a love story.