Steamy or Stale? Analyzing the Sex and Storytelling in <em>Queer</em>

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In the video, my siblings and I stand with our mother on the large porch of a house somewhere in Virginia, before a small crowd gathered across the street. We’re dressed plainly, except for my mother, who wears a festive sweater and headband. And we are singing—“The 12 Days of Christmas,” “Carol of the Bells,” my grandpa’s arrangement of “Hey Ho, Anybody Home” with “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” For most of the performance, my mother conducts us from a music stand, pitch pipe in hand. Only during “Hodie Apparuit,” a somewhat intricate three-part Latin carol by Orlando di Lasso, does she leave her post, to sing “firsts” with me. I was not the youngest child in the family. But in choral matters, I always needed the most help.I am not a musical person. I do not play any instruments. I can’t read music or write songs, the way some of my siblings do in their spare time. And I have never described myself as a singer. (Although here, my mother would interject to reassure readers that I have a “lovely voice.”) I don’t generally sing at all unless I feel well assured that, shrouded in protective layers of other voices, no one can hear me, or at least not me in particular. The second those voices fall away, my voice breaks. I may be able to sing a tune, but I can’t carry one.Nevertheless, I sing a lot—even now, because that is what my family does when we get together. I often find this dynamic, in which music remains an enormous part of my life despite my ineptitude, tricky to explain to people. But it also encapsulates what I consider one of the undersung advantages of being raised in a big family: It can draw the best out of you by drawing you out of yourself.[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]I am the middle of five children, all of us born within the span of seven years. Growing up, I rarely stopped to consider whether I liked being in a large family, perhaps because in the Catholic circles in which my family ran, we were hardly the biggest. I would not describe us as any chummier than your average lot of sisters and brothers. We played together and have about a million inside jokes. We also fought a lot. Over the years, our relationships with one another have at times been deeply strained. But I am and always have been fiercely defensive of my siblings, which is why I find it difficult to know what to make of the research indicating that I’m worse off for having them.A significant body of evidence suggests, for instance, that kids with more siblings do worse in school than their counterparts from smaller families, across a variety of educational outcomes: math and reading scores, high-school graduation rates, college enrollment and graduation, and overall educational attainment. The relationship between number of siblings and achievement shrinks after researchers correct for factors such as parental education and income, Douglas Downey, a sociology professor at Ohio State University, told me, but it doesn’t disappear. A 2015 study found that as family size increases, children score worse on cognitive tests and exhibit more behavioral challenges; it suggested, too, that kids from bigger families are at greater risk of experiencing criminal conviction and teen pregnancy, and are more likely to earn less as adults.Yet research also indicates that coming from a big family can offer benefits. Some studies have found that, on average, the more siblings you have as a child, the less likely you are to divorce as an adult. “That’s suggestive that maybe you learn some interaction skills growing up that then translate into building long-lasting relationships later in adulthood,” Downey told me. Other research has found that quality sibling relationships can be a meaningful buffer against loneliness in adulthood.[Read: The longest relationships of our lives]Still, kids in big families do tend to struggle in a variety of ways. The prevailing explanation for this, initially put forward by the sociologist Judith Blake in the 1980s, is commonly referred to as “resource dilution.”The resource-dilution model notes that parents have finite means; the more children they have, the thinner those means are spread. And although reasons exist to question this theory—it’s possible, for instance, that the relationship between family size and educational outcomes isn’t actually causal, Downey said—I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something to it. To be honest, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t. Particularly in the United States, where so much of a child’s welfare is determined by their parents, the notion that those parents’ time and income would go further on two kids than five doesn’t seem far-fetched.In fact, I don’t think resource dilution quite captures how having siblings alters the divvying up of family resources. The term makes it sound as if each kid just gets a smaller cut of the family funds. But in my experience, it isn’t so simple. My parents weren’t poor, but even with help from my grandparents, they didn’t have enough money to send five kids to college, for example. Minimizing the amount of debt each of us had to take on meant we all had to compromise. I doubt I could have gotten into a really prestigious school, but it didn’t occur to me to try, because in my family you didn’t go to the best school you could get into, or even the best you could afford with one-fifth of the family college fund. You went to the school that gave you the most money, to maximize what was left over for your siblings. It was the opposite of meritocracy: The person with the highest SAT scores got the smallest slice of the pie.The scarcest resource was our parents’ attention. I saw my parents plenty, but my individual needs often got lost in the shuffle. I was constantly showing up to school without whatever form or costume or special hairdo kids were supposed to have that day. My brother—not my parents—dropped me off at college.[Read: Are siblings more important than parents?]I’d be lying if I said I haven’t occasionally wrestled with resentment for the inevitably unfair way my parents’ resources have shaken out. If I can overlook such grievances now, it’s because—I know I’m lucky to say—my most basic needs were never in jeopardy. I also can’t exactly blame my parents: I’m under no illusion that having a bunch of kids is a breeze. I myself became so overwhelmed with just two children that I felt the need to hit pause on having more until I could come up for air.Nevertheless, I think that in many ways my life is richer than it might have been had all my family’s resources been poured into me. And coexisting with all those people pushed me to try things that I likely wouldn’t have if I’d been an only child or one of just two. Which brings me back to all that singing, and the deep joy I’ve experienced as the only unmusical member of a sibling choir—descendants of a family with a long musical history.My great-grandfather was a violinist in the Cleveland Philharmonic Orchestra. His daughter, my grandmother, earned a scholarship to the Metropolitan Opera. Her husband, my grandfather, was not only a composer who wrote liturgical music, motets, symphonies, and string quartets but also a beloved music teacher who believed that music was as crucial to the development of the mind as math. An attempt to live out this belief drove my mother to teach me and my siblings to sing together from an early age. She started with simple rounds, such as “Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening.” Then she taught us to sight-read using solfège (the do-re-mi system memorably rendered in The Sound of Music), so we could tackle (or, in my case, stumble through) more challenging polyphonic tunes.My siblings took to music with ease. Today, if you hand any one of them the sheet music of an unfamiliar song, they’ll be singing it within the hour. If they mess up, you probably won’t know. They’ll wander from a given tune while maintaining harmony with it, then meander back without drawing notice. Then there’s me, the one whose lack of innate ability seems to have defied both nature and nurture. To perform a song halfway confidently, I have to drill it into my neural pathways through rote memorization, as if I’m hammering down a railroad. If I get knocked off track, forget correcting course. I’m a train wreck.And yet, at every opportunity, I’ve kept singing with my family. We sing when someone graduates, marries, or welcomes a new child. We still carol for neighbors, fellow churchgoers, and perfect strangers at every chance we get. My parents eventually divorced, but when my dad died a few years ago, my siblings and I gathered with our aunts, uncles, and cousins, and, with my mother conducting us as usual, sang as his coffin was lowered into the grave.By one view, this part of my life—the 10,000 hours I’ve spent honing a craft I do not have the talent or passion to master—is a missed opportunity. Perhaps, had I grown up in a smaller family, I would have devoted that time and energy to some other skill to which I was better suited. Yet that prospect only saddens me, because singing with my family is among my most cherished pastimes. It’s what I’m homesick for when homesickness strikes.Life in a big family is all about making do—with the hand-me-down winter coat that only sort of fits, with the sport that you only sort of like, with the fact that you will always be the worst singer in the group. You could see this as indignity. But I see it as a reason to be grateful. I get to sing because my family chooses, over and over, to make do with me.

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The first time I got a Novavax Covid vaccine, it felt almost subversive. Over the previous few years, every mRNA-based booster I’d gotten — the ones made by Moderna and Pfizer — had felt like a two-day bout of the flu. I’d gamely booked sick days into my calendar and sucked it up through fevers, headaches, and exhaustion, comforting myself with ibuprofen and the knowledge that at least I was keeping my elderly parents safe. Two and a half years into the pandemic, the Food and Drug Administration approved a Covid vaccine made by biotech company Novavax using older vaccine production technology. Licensed for people 12 and over, it was nearly as effective at Covid prevention as Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines — and, as I noted with great interest, it had fewer side effects. In 2023, I got one. The difference was staggering: Although I felt a little weak and shaky for a few hours on the night of my injection, I woke up the next morning feeling blissfully normal, with only a mild soreness in my arm and a smug pep in my step. This year, there was no question what I’d do — it would be easy, breezy Novavax for me. More than half of all people who get mRNA boosters have similar unpleasant short-term side effects to mine. But strangely, few of them seem to see Novavax as an alternative: As of August, Americans had received650 million mRNA vaccine doses, compared with only 83,000 Novavax doses. Experts told me Novavax has suffered both from its timing and from an unearned reputation as a dark horse. “There’s this perception that this is some kind of second-line vaccine that people take if they don’t want to get the mRNA vaccines,” says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, “but it should not be.” “They’re equivalent, and there may be some advantages to getting it,” he told me. Although the worst of the pandemic is long over, there are still plenty of good reasons to get a Covid-19 booster. The virus caused more than 76,000 deaths in 2023 and nearly 41,000 hospitalizations between October 2023 and last April. There’s still a risk of developing long Covid after infection, even if it is lower than during the earliest days of the pandemic. Still, more than half of Americans don’t plan to get a Covid booster this year, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, and the discomfort they cause is a big reason why. Sixty percent of people not lining up for a shot said side effects were a major reason for their disinterest. Maybe more people would get Covid boosters if they knew what I know about Novavax: Making the smart choice for your and your community’s health doesn’t have to feel like crap. Why nobody thinks of Novavax first Novavax is built differently from other Covid vaccines, which is part of why it didn’t enter our vaccine vocabularies until later in the pandemic. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — the first Covid immunizations the FDA approved in December 2020 — were created using technology that had previously only been used in clinical trial settings. The technology involves encoding genetic blueprints for the novel coronavirus’s spike protein onto fragile mRNA molecules and delivering them to the body’s muscle cells to produce an immune response. Like the mRNA vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer, Novavax was created to combat Covid-19. Unlike them, it’s based on older technology that mirrors methods used to produce many other conventional vaccines that have been around for decades. It takes a lot longer to create a vaccine that uses conventional technology. That explains why the first version of Novavax wasn’t approved until August 2022, almost two years after mRNA vaccines came on the market. It is also only approved for older children (age 12 and up) and adults. “In general, the first to the market tends to have a lot of advantage in terms of uptake,” Adalja says. Novavax’s later release means many people may simply not think about it when they think of Covid vaccines. Novavax has less severe side effects than either of the mRNA vaccines Before mRNA vaccines were even approved by the FDA, it was clear their short-term effects were more severe than those of other vaccinations that had come before. In early reports, participants in vaccine trials reported severe fatigue, headache, and muscle and joint pains that simply didn’t happen with other vaccines. With time, more data emerged. The vaccines had been split into two doses given a number of weeks apart. In vaccine trials, many adults had short-term side effects beyond sore arms, especially after the second dose. Their symptoms included fatigue (60 percent to 65 percent), headache (50 percent to 60 percent), and fever (11 percent to 15 percent) lasting for one to two days. For both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, post-vaccination symptoms were more common in children and adolescents, and less common in adults 65 and older. (Notably, anywhere from a quarter to half of people who received a saline placebo instead of either Pfizer or Moderna vaccine also reported these symptoms, except fever — so it’s not entirely clear how much of the vaccine group’s discomfort was due to the vaccine.) Once the general public started getting the vaccines, the full extent of these side effects became clearer. Fatigue, headache, or muscle aches occurred after the second injection in about half of people who participated in a voluntary vaccine safety tracking system, while a quarter to a third of those people had chills, fever, or joint pain. In one study, 37 percent of healthcare workers who got the vaccines were sick enough in the following couple of days that they had to miss work. When Novavax came on the scene a little less than two years after the mRNA vaccines rolled out, a large study suggested it would have milder side effects. In particular, fever was less common among people who got the vaccine, occurring in only 6 percent of people after a second dose. Other side effects were also less frequent, and all went away faster than the symptoms that followed mRNA vaccines — after a matter of hours rather than days. “There are a lot of people that are legitimately knocked out for a couple of days with the mRNA, and you’re not going to get that with Novavax.” There’s no big head-to-head comparison study of both mRNA vaccines and Novavax to quantify just how big the differences in their side effects are. However, a small Chinese study published earlier this year hints at just how much more tolerable Novavax is than its mRNA counterparts. Among people who got the current versions of the Novavax and Pfizer vaccines in late 2022, those who got the Pfizer mRNA vaccine were six times as likely to have fever and more than three times as likely to have chills and muscle aches. Only 2 percent of people in the Novavax group had each of these symptoms; the only symptom they reported more often than the Pfizer group was fatigue. Kirsten Lyke, an infectious disease doctor and vaccine researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, led a safety study on mixing and matching brands of initial Covid vaccines and booster doses. Although the study wasn’t designed to compare the side effects of different vaccines, it was clear people who got Novavax booster doses had milder side effects that resolved more quickly than those boosted with mRNA vaccines. “There are a lot of people that are legitimately knocked out for a couple of days with the mRNA, and you’re not going to get that with Novavax,” she says. Novavax works as well as mRNA vaccines So Novavax causes fewer annoying side effects than other vaccines. How well does it protect you from Covid? When the mRNA vaccines first became available in late 2020, the yardstick experts used to communicate their quality was their effectiveness at preventing infection. At the outset, Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines had 95 percent vaccine effectiveness, which meant that among 100 people at risk of catching the virus, they kept all but 5 of them from getting infected. Novavax was tested at a different time, after the virus had evolved, and many people had already been exposed to Covid-19. Its initial effectiveness was measured at 90 percent. The current evidence suggests that people initially vaccinated with mRNA vaccines who go on to get a Novavax booster are well covered — in Lyke’s study, they developed antibody levels well above the level needed to protect people from Covid. Although mRNA boosters may lead to higher antibody levels, “higher isn’t necessarily better,” she says. Other studies have suggested the antibodies Novavax elicits may hang around longer than the ones other vaccines provoke; still others indicate that when it comes to more real-world outcomes like developing symptoms after infection, Novavax is as good as any other vaccine on the market. Those studies are from 2021 and 2022, and involved Covid variants that are different from the ones circulating now. More recent assessments of how good the newest version of Novavax is at preventing Covid infection and severe illness — like the data the FDA reviewed before approving the 2024-2025 version of the Novavax booster — are from studies in mice, not humans. Still, they suggest the latest editions of Novavax are in the ballpark of its earlier versions when it comes to protecting us from the virus’ worst. You can check the Novavax website to find a pharmacy near you where you can get a Novavax vaccine. Fundamentally, it’s time to stop worrying about whether one vaccine is slightly more effective at preventing certain outcomes than others, says Lyke. “At this point, we’re kind of beyond that,” she says. “We have a lot of options and you can pick and choose,” she says, “and you’re probably not going to make a wrong decision.”

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