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jule1122 (jule1122) wrote in qaf_coffeeclub, @ 2009-04-09 22:41:00

The Pink Posse May Not Have Been as Pointless as I First Thought
The first time I saw the Pink Posse arc, I was horrified. I couldn’t believe the best they could do with the repercussions of the bashing was having Justin run around in pink laughing about pantsing some straight guys. I thought Justin’s trauma was being trivialized, and I hated it. Later, with some distance, I learned to appreciate parts of it specifically how obviously and opening Brian loved Justin throughout the whole arc. Brian also looks exceptionally good during these episodes. But Justin’s journey still baffled and frustrated me because I couldn’t understand it.

But as I was rewatching the scene where Justin tells Cody about Chris Hobbs, something clicked. While there are still things I take issue with, I think I finally understand just what Justin’s journey was. I call it “Don’t Fuck With Me or why Justin joined the Pink Posse and why he walked away.” Feel free to tell me how incredibly off base I am, but comments telling me I’m brilliant are equally appreciated.



It’s obvious to me now how personal this was for Justin. And I don’t mean because he was bashed. I mentioned in a comment to one of Xie’s meta posts how I was interested in how that fact that Justin knew his basher affected how he dealt with it. I felt the show never really addressed this, but clearly I wasn’t paying attention.

Cody gets Justin attention in 402 when challenges everyone at the GLC meeting to take an active approach to protecting themselves. “Nothing’s going to change until you fight back. Until you learn to say ‘Don’t Fuck With Me,’” he says.

Darren challenges Justin later about what he did to stand up for himself after he was bashed. And we are right back in the AIDS hospice. This is clearly what Justin is referring to when he tells Brian, “I was a coward. I should have done something, and I didn’t.” There was of course nothing Justin could or should have done, but what’s important is that he feels that he failed. He then goes on to reject Rage which has been his outlet for his feelings. “And this is all bullshit. It doesn’t do a motherfucking thing.”

So Justin joins the Pink Posse, and they take to the streets, chasing homophobes away and humiliating them when they can. But that’s not enough for Cody. He wants to do more than protect people or stop violence; he wants to teach straight people a lesson. Now we get to the part of the arc that bothered me the most. During the “wrestling for sex” scene in 404, Justin says to Brian “I don’t care if I get hurt as long as I hurt them more.” Later in that same conversation, he throws Brian’s own words back in his face. “There’s only two kinds of straight people in the world the ones who hate you to your face and the kind who hate you behind your back, and you know what? You’re right.” In 405 when Brian discovers the gun, Justin justifies it with “They hate us. They want us dead.”

I would watch these scenes and wonder what was going on. Justin had never hated all straight people. There is no “they” for him. His attacker has a name. Justin knows who hates him and who wants him dead. That is even emphasized in the earlier scene at the firing range. When Cody is helping Justin with him aim, he lists people he images shooting, and Justin remarks, “Sounds like you have a lot of targets.” But Justin doesn’t. We see one target sheet, Cody asks about who he was thinking about knowing it was one person. Justin only has one target. This is a one way journey for him straight to Chris Hobbs.

But Justin isn’t ready to admit that yet. He isn’t ready to admit joining the Pink Posse was never about protecting people or teaching homophobes a lesson, but was about facing his own fears and dealing with Chris Hobbs. When he tells Cody about Chris and the bashing, it’s an impersonal and factual: “When he saw me at the prom, dancing with Brian, he freaked. Afterward he followed me to the parking garage with a baseball bat. He smashed my skull. I was in a coma then rehab for almost six months.”

Justin tells him what happened, but not how it felt to know someone he’d gone to school with tried to kill him. He doesn’t tell Cody what the bashing did to him. Cody isn’t the person Justin needs to say those things to.

I always wondered why Justin didn’t walk away when the rest of the posse did. I couldn’t accept that he really wanted to go out at start fights in the name of justice. But now I see Justin couldn’t leave the posse because he hasn’t got what he needed from it. He still felt like a coward; he still hadn’t stood up for himself no matter how many straight guys he attacked. But since he wasn’t ready to admit that to himself, the only way he could justify staying with Cody when everyone else left was to adopt Cody’s beliefs. Suddenly every straight person was the enemy. Suddenly it was us against them, and the only way to win was to strike first. Justin is saying all the right things because he has no choice.

But Cody isn’t stupid. He knows Justin isn’t committed the same way he is. He tries the Preacher, he tries the gun, but he has to know Justin isn’t going to stay forever. So he offers Justin the one thing he wants, Chris Hobbs. Maybe Cody thought if Justin confronted Hobbs he’d get a taste for the type of justice Cody preferred and get hooked, or maybe he thought something like their final confrontation would happen only instead of walking away, Justin would do something that would bond him to Cody forever. Whatever he was thinking, it backfired.

In the end, what Cody did was give Justin a chance to feel like he stood up for himself. When he confronts Chris about what he did to him, there is nothing impersonal about his description of the bashing. It’s probably the first time Justin acknowledged out loud , possibly even to himself, how his life has been changed. “I want you to apologize. . .For bashing me. For causing me brain damage and permanent injury. For giving me nightmares every night for two years. For filling me with fear every time I walk out the door. For treating me like a subhuman who doesn’t deserve to love.”

When Chris walks away from him, we come full circle as Justin shouts “Don’t Fuck With Me.”

For me this scene is less about the gun than it is the words. The gun gives Justin the chance to say the words, but the important thing is what Justin says not what he does. It all starts with that “Don’t Fuck With Me.”

After Justin forces Chris to apologize to him, he tells him “Now you know what it feels like. The fear that all faggots fear all their lives, walking down the street, holding hands. Because of assholes like you. And you know what, we’re tired of it.”

And then he lets him go. Because he learned to fight back. Not the way Cody wanted him to, but by forcing Chris Hobbs to acknowledge what he did to him, by making him understand Justin’s fear and pain even it was just for a moment. That doesn’t mean Justin won’t still have nightmares or won’t still be afraid. But the fear that drove him wasn’t about nameless, faceless straight guys attacking him from behind. It wasn’t about strangers lurking in the dark. Justin’s deepest fears have a name and a face. And once Justin could face him and say “Don’t Fuck With Me,” he could at least stop feeling like a coward. It didn’t fix everything, but it was enough for him to move on.

So I still wince when Justin come back from his first night on patrol excited about humiliating a few bullies, I still cringe inside when he says that all straight people hate him or want him dead. But know I look at those moments as necessary to his journey that ended with him being able to walk away from Chris Hobbs with some measure of peace. And I’m willing to take that journey with him, every painful, stumbling step of it.