Galactic Red Flag

Read time: 2 min 25 sec

Whatup Reader!

If you don’t talk about things, people don’t know about things.

If you’ve made it to the end of my at-times lengthy emails, then perhaps you’ve seen my footer that reads: I write different over here. Less advice, MOAR musings.

If you click on that first part it takes you here, the the information page for my paid blog, Maestro Musings.

I started Maestro Musings a little more than a year ago, on March 21^st, 2025, and then, largely fueled by a desire to give a big middle finger to Substack, dove into the computer for a few weeks and figured out all the tech to make it a subscriber-supported (read: paid) blog.

The first Saturday Slowdrip (an email round-up of that week’s Maestro Musings) went out on May 10^th, and I’ve sent one out every Saturday since.

I started Maestro Musings as a way to make good on my 2025 word for the year, WRITE, and then really leaned into it when I realized it was a space with no algorithms, no rules, and no noise.

Maestro Musings has become a creative safe-haven for me, and for that reason I’ve made pretty much zero effort, outside of that bi-colored footer, to promote it.

But every now and then I go and scan through the alliterative titles and clever (if I do say so myself) excerpts, and I’m proud.

So I figured I’d use today’s Maestro Mail to talk about Maestro Musings and share one of my favorite posts that I wrote last September, before I settled into the alliterative titles.

Because, well, if you don’t talk about things, people don’t know about things.

Without further ado, Galactic Red Flag:

On Kim’s recommendation I’ve started watching Foundation on Apple TV.

I had given it a half effort maybe like two months ago, but it turns out it’s one of those shows you legit have to pay attention to in order to know wtf is going on (at least in the beginning), so it never took.

But I’m like four episodes in and I can’t help but notice the complete and total lack of gay people.

Like…this is a sci-fi series that has space travel and cloning and cyborgs and interracial relationships…and no fucking gay people.

It’s a glaring omission.

On top of that, it has two female characters as the lead, both of which are Black (how progressive), and both of whom are straight.

Big masculine energy from one character, lone wolf vibes, provider, protector, visionary…and also straight.

I mean, it’s not impossible but it also feels very much like a white man wrote this. (Spoiler, he did.)

One of the cool things though, perhaps I’ll call it revelatory, is that in watching sci-fi and high fantasy shows, I think that the existence of gay people can be viewed as a proxy for the health of that society.

I mean, if you take a step back and think about it it makes sense.

A healthy society where people are resourced and sustained and not spending every single moment just trying to survive oppression (often times by enacting their own version of oppression on others)…you get more representations and varieties of love.

Live and let live, baby. Celebrate difference. Rebuke manufactured scarcity.

All that to say, if I don’t see any gays, I know that society ain’t thriving.

if you don’t talk about things, people don’t know about things.

Happy Tuesday, Reader.

Maestro out.

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