I didn't intend to say I felt you were being shallow. But it is interesting to allude to life and death issues, because it is in fact a life and death issue that gave me this perspective.

Back in the early 90s, I ran the HIV/AIDS area on America Online. We had a great deal of trouble with AOL's Terms of Service department, and also with fundamentalists and homophobes, who didn't want us to be able to have frank discussions of HIV transmission or even discuss our lives as (for most of the people involved back then) lesbians and gay men.

Eventually AOL not only gave us dispensation to have sexually explicit chats and information as long as only scientific terms for genitals etc were used, but also gave us special tools so we could throw people out of chat rooms and even block their ability to sign back into the service if they disrupted our chats. We actually had to have someone from their Terms of Service enforcement department sit in on our HIV caregiver chat every night, because it had been targeted by right wingers for disruption.

So my feelings are about my need to express myself as a writer, but the roots of those feelings are in my political self. And you say that you're more about what's in your heart than politics, but my politics ARE in my heart. I cut my teeth on "the personal is political" and it's a great part of why I loved QAF, that it was in your face and political and queer and unrepentant, both in its inclusion of political storylines and in its own refusal to be less than as explicit as it could possibly be at every turn.

And so I feel, passionately, with my heart, that I can't love this show and what it meant to me without holding myself to that standard too. It's not a... a political abstraction or an intellectualization. It's a core part of me, and it's not just about art but about life and death too.

Because if you can't show Justin getting rimmed when he's still in high school, I can't tell Justin how to put on a condom when he comes to my HIV prevention chat on the internet. To me, it's all one.

And I'm not saying this to change what you believe or do, but to explain myself.