Page 1 of Nearly Roadkill: Queer Love on the Run
To: Editor, They/Them magazine
From: D.I. Drew Sparrow
Subject: Nearly Roadkill aka Queer Love on the Run aka The Ballad of Scratch and Winc
Hi Asa,
Thank you so much for the go-ahead on this story.
I am excited! Since we originally talked last year, I’ve done some serious sleuthing.
I found witnesses, developed reliable online sources, and made deep dives into archival material.
I’ve been surprised and moved by what I’ve found; I think you will be too.
The story unfolds over the months and weeks leading up to the infamous “day the Internet went silent” in March of 1995.
Of course, the shutdown on that infamous day has been covered—I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hearing about it my whole life (my dad used it to lecture me about online safety)—but no one has ever told the personal story of the two folks who first called for the worldwide Internet strike.
Nope, Scratch and Winc have been reduced to footnotes.
Why? Who were they? Who were they to each other?
Here’s my elevator pitch: The story of Scratch and Winc is a love story, a queer love story, one of the great love stories of the age.
The bad news is, I haven’t been able to find a trace of Scratch or Winc in the 21st century. Are they dead? Still running? No one knows. It’s well-documented that they ran from the law and initially escaped. But what happened after they limped off into the sunset?
The good news is, the amount of material I have found is staggering: original logs, emails, reports, direct messages, and corporate memos.
I scored a ton of internal archives, phone logs, and confidential reports from the Federal Bureau of Census and Statistics.
It took me a full year to find and patch it all together into the right order.
Now the players can tell their own story of queer love on the run.
There’s no way I can duplicate the experience of reading/living their words live onscreen.
This was back in the wild and woolly days of the Internet frontier.
No TikTok or Instagram. People actually talked with each other in chat rooms, live chat, direct messaging, you name it.
I’ve formatted the manuscript to mimic, as much as possible, how it was coming down in real time.
The entire collection of archival material is book-length, but I’ve broken it into chapters with the idea of They/Them publishing it as a monthly serial. Can’t wait to hear what you think!
All the best,
Drew Sparrow aka D.I. Drew
To: D.I. Drew
From: Editor, They/Them magazine
Subject: Re: Nearly Roadkill aka Queer Love On The Run…
Hi Drew!
Wow, this is a cool concept! I remember our initial conversation and wondered what became of your idea. We’d love to see more.
Can you send some pages?
Thanks,
Asa
To: Editor, They/Them magazine
From: D.I. Drew
Subject: Floppy what?
Hi Asa,
Sweet! I’m so glad you’re interested. I’ve attached a few chapters.
A few things for context:
The most reliable narrative I’ve come across is written by a kid named Toobe. At the time he was a 15-y.o. computer whiz who kept a digital diary. He’s not the center of the love story, but he plays a special role—he documented the adventures of Winc, Scratch, and other Internet misfits.
Have you ever seen a floppy disk? Toobe backed up his own journals and chat logs from his friends onto about a million of them. Which is what I had to work from. Nods to SERVERPRO for their restoration tech. Toobe’s million floppy disks ended up on a 1TB flash drive!
The other logs I got from various sources as mentioned above; Scratch and Winc were very protective of Toobe and made sure he had no access to their explicit sex scenes.
Noting this just in case you’re concerned about a teenager lurking online with grown-ups doing adult activities.
They interacted with each other as part of a chosen family.
Note that there were no cell phones at the time, let alone smartphones or any kind of wireless Internet connection. Toobe would have to go to a huge “tower” computer just to write an email or join a chat room. Different times.
Right then, here we go!
Cheers,
D.I. Drew (she/they)
P.S. I think it might blow readers’ minds when this series gets published: queers (although they didn’t widely call themselves that) were already “refusing to submit to pronouns” in 1995.
Pretty radical. Maybe it’s romantic of me to think this, but I see Scratch & Winc as the early disruptors who led to the wave of pronoun-talk and genderqueer/agender identification that’s been growing for decades.
Even now, walking through the world as a nonbinary femme AFAB, it’s hard for most to grasp my fluid use of she/they.
But in 1995, these folks are using “hir.” Wild, right?