TRIO #22

Tuesday December 9 2025

I wanted to be a part of the conversation so I watched Heated Rivalry, the gay Canadian hockey show, even though I don’t find either lead cute, I don’t like sports, and if I wanted to watch gay porn, I’d watch gay porn. I made it through the first sex scene before I realized that they weren’t going to give us even a crumb of hog, and then I turned that shit off. I won’t be watching any more (not even those asses can make me care about hockey), but it did confirm my theory that in today’s popular culture, guy-on-guy is the same as girl-on-girl was twenty years ago.

If you’re looking for sex scenes that will really make you blush, consider Fish Tales by Nettie Jones, originally published in 1983, another one of my favourite reissues of 2025. Acquired by Toni Morrison during her tenure at Penguin, Fish Tales is told entirely from the perspective of Lewis, a brassy party girl whose drug-fuelled sexcapades come to a screeching halt when she starts to care for and falls in love with the handsome and aloof Brook, a wheelchair-bound bachelor who (mostly) refuses to fuck her. Told through a series of short vignettes in the style of Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Fish Tales is a brazen sketch of freedom, yearning, and desire from a voice ahead of its time.

December invites a restless anticipation of the year’s crescendo. The days are short and the nights go on forever, so time starts to feel unmoored: you stay out late at a holiday party on a Wednesday, then fall asleep at eight on a Friday, waking at the crack of dawn to do yoga and clean the bathroom. Regular routine will have to wait until January, but you don’t mind; maybe you even needed the break.

Til next time,

Cason