Crossposting also annoys me, so I simplified the matter by moving here entirely, at least where posting is concerned :D

Ditto. I haven't posted at LJ in over eight months in my own journal and just keep the account for keeping touch with others who haven't come to their senses and moved away from the Land of Lousy Service and Contempt for Customers i.e. LiveJournal.

It's the people that make it hard for me. I have successfully used GMail to corral comments to date, and entries is just a matter of filtering and being bad at keeping up in the first place. I just can't stand the emotional stress of investing over and over and thinking it'll be okay when it keeps not being okay.

I'm *so happy* to see you posting over here -- I've really missed getting the chance to read you regularly.

Heh, I did the same. Gosh, LJ was one of the best things on the Internet and now they're doing everything to make it worse and worse... >__

My normal system when people have anonymous comments enabled on their LJ or even their DW, is to comment anonymously but sign my name to it. But sometimes I remember to check if they've got a journal over here / if they cross-post!

I came to your post Apparently, my ability to handwave only goes so far. via metafandom, and was going to mention to you and to a couple of other commentators that I had written a longish story set in an AU where There Is No Homophobia - though there's a crapload of other problems with it.

Initially of course the reason the mirrorworld of MirrorM*A*S*H has no homophobia in it is that I wanted for it to be possible for Hawkeye to buy Mulcahy as a slave and take him back to the 4077th and the issues everyone else had about this (including Hawkeye) to be not that "Hawkeye's having sex with a man!" but "Hawkeye brought a slave into camp" and "the slave is apparently American" and "the slave is a Christian priest" because that was more fun for me. I could have gone either way - it doesn't matter that Hawkeye's having sex with a man, because he's actually having sex with a slave (the Greek model - where relative status matters more than gender). Or the way I chose; homophobia in Western culture simply never existed in this mirror universe. My rationale for this, not that anyone's asked, is that in a very handwaving history-is-simple kind of way, you can source the rise of homophobia in Western culture to the general acceptance of Christianity as the state religion/privileged/dominant/only faith, and in my Mirror AU, I had already specified that this never happened.

In the sequel, Through the Mirror (unfinished as yet), I dealt with this much more explicitly, because I'd had longer to think about it and what it would mean:

Hawkeye stared at the pile of books beside the bed. He hadn’t thought about it before, but that was one odd and oddly consistent thing about both the novels and all the short stories: he could not recall a single explicit reference to a romance or a marriage or an affair or even an attraction except where one person was male and one female. Not one. It was as if someone had taken an eraser and rubbed across the page to wipe out –

Everything except that look of disgust in Joseph’s eyes. Hawkeye put his hand up to rub across his own eyes. If Trapper were here – if Trapper existed in this world – would he have looked at Hawkeye with that same disgust? Would every man Hawkeye wanted –

Simultaneously with writing MirrorM*A*S*H I was also working on Sins and Virtues, in which I was dealing much more realistically and soberly with homophobia in the real 1950s America - I was most pleased as a writing exercise with a dialogue Mulcahy has in one chapter with a kind and compassionate and thoroughly homophobic priest, since this (what another commenter said) was what I was trying to do - to convey homophobia from someone who was clearly quite a lovely person who was striving to be kind and helpful.

Interestingly (since I was also dealing with the prejudices and problems faced by deaf people in the 1950s) I found there was a parallel, fifty years apart, of how deaf people in the US became conscious of themselves as a community, and how gay people in the US became conscious of themselves as a community: in both instances, the inspiration came from a federal regulation barring them from government work. (The regulation barring deaf people from government jobs was rescinded within a year, as I recall - that barring gay people lasted a lot longer.)