(unsent)

(unsent) is a story written by shukyou and illustrated by KMO. It ran in Issue 89 at https://www.shousetsubangbang.com/mirror/unsent/.

Summary

December 2, 1962

Dear Calvin,

Congratulations on your upcoming marriage! I hope that you and Michelle

Author's Notes

Again, here I am, using my historical knowledge of 20th century gay culture for evil. This is YET ANOTHER story that takes place (largely) in Houston, because I was pressed for time and didn't want to do extra research. (I actually initially planned it for Freddy to be in California, realized how little I knew about California, and just shoved everything a couple thousand miles east.)

There are a couple of things going on historically in the background that you might not immediately peg to:

• April 4, 1968 is the day Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated, so that's what Jorge's saying is on the TV. I also had to contrive a way to get them to the DC/Baltimore area, because there weren't subsequent riots in Houston proper.
• June 1970 is the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which got commemorated in San Francisco as Gay Freedom Day, and would later turn into Pride. Freddy and Jorge keep winding up in San Francisco at the end of June because there are no equivalent Pride celebrations in Texas at the time. (Freddy is probably on the committee getting together Houston's first Pride in 1979, but that's outside the scope of the story.)
• July 4, 1976 is the American bicentennial, which was apparently a hoot.
• In 1976-77, Dade County passed a law saying that you couldn't discriminate against homosexuals in housing or employment -- and then, because of heavy pressure from the New Christian Right and associated Republicans, repealed it. Freddy is there in May fighting against it, but sadly, his side is going to fail.

And there's also a lot of specific Houston stuff I assume Freddy is hooked in with, but there's no reason Freddy would have mentioned them in his letters to Calvin, so they didn't get mentioned here. (Also, these groups and events are uncommon enough that I didn't want anyone doing a Google search for them by name to come across this random gay short story.)

Many thanks to Iron Eater for not only helping to kick the idea off, but also giving me some excellent polishing suggestions in the home stretch.

And now, for real talk about the composition of the story:

Writing this story was, to put it mildly, a nightmare.

On a purely technical level, my laptop keyboard is failing, making several of my keys (like P and the apostrophe) unreliable. On multiple occasions, I lost huge chunks of my available writing time to frustratedly banging on keys, trying to get them to respond. It sometimes got to the point where I really did wish I could've written the whole thing longhand like Freddy.

But this was the slowest writing I have probably ever done. I tend to be a pretty speedy writer, who can knock off 10k words (the length of this story) in a solid few days, if I put my mind to it. This felt like writing through cement. It was an incredibly difficult process conceptually: decide what the letter was going to be about, decide what would make the letter ultimately unsendable, write the letter in a way that sounds like slightly stuffy midcentury longhand, then edit to make sure I'd both gotten across what I wanted and made it so that Freddy would have reason to junk it. That's a snail's pace compared to my usual speed.

The hardest part really was deciding why each letter couldn't be sent -- and then making that reason as clear as possible. Plenty of them fall victim to Area Homosexual Bad At Expressing Emotions, but they couldn't all. Nor could I treat the letters in general like a very targeted diary, if they weren't all going to be like that. No, every one of these started out as something at least vaguely intended to be addressed to Calvin, though obviously not all of them end up that way. I also didn't want Jorge vandalizing the letters on purpose (the two times he ruins one are completely on accident). I'm proud that I only used "actual physical letter accidentally destroyed" once.

The other snag is that when you realize you've fucked up a letter you're writing, you don't then (unless you are very frustrated) go in and explain, on the letter you just fucked up, what exactly it was you did that fucked up the letter. So a lot of these are ultimately left up to interpretation. Did Freddy get too overwhelmed to keep going? Did he get distracted and wander off? Did he put the paper down and then immediately lose it in the million other sheets of paper that are his life? Sometimes your guess is as good as mine.

And then, on top of that all, there was the need to make the letters actually sound like something a human would write. That meant no "as you know, Bob" moments, no awkward bits of expository fluff, no weirdly salacious Penthouse-forum sequences. For the later-year scenes, it also meant deciding what gets sent in a letter vs. what would more likely get saved for the infrequent (and expensive) long-distance phone call.

If I'd had more time, I would probably have combed through a little more carefully to make sure that the language was more period-appropriate. As it is, I think I did okay. It helps that Freddy is a very tight-laced, formal, slightly fussy dude, which means I'm not sweating heavy slang or anything like that. I hope that comes off as a personality quirk of his (which it is), and not just my running for shortcuts to an already lengthy process. (which it also is).

In conclusion: Epistolary shit is hard, kids. Stay in school.

External Links

This story is also available on Archive of Our Own (AO3).