With the sudden ‘erasure’ of the Rainbum Crossing(four years after initial installation and all the damage seemingly occurring right on the eve of Pride Month), doctor’s surgeries in Arklow have reported a worryingly steep decline in patients presenting LGBTQAI bumming and fisting injuries. With a crippling cost of living and homelessness crisis, entire generations of Millennials and Gen Z exiled abroad-or still stuck at home-due to a deliberately ‘dysfunctional’ property market and the gruelling daily reportage of missing limbs and corpses of starving Gazan children, only an outright bitter fascistic cynic could say the Rainbum Crossing doesn’t overshadow all of these crimes as THE most pressing concern of our times.
With the arrival of the Rainbum Crossing in 2021, Arklow instantly and thankfully transformed from the parochial Jim Crow-era backwater it was to the enlightened, premier bum sex capital of the South East. Upon the very day it was officially opened, thousands of once-exiled Arklonian bummers and fisters set sail on HMS Bumrush from the sister LGBTIQ+ capital of the UK, Brighton, to finally destroy bodily orifices in their hometown. During an era of stifling Church rule, many of the older returning ex-pats remember only being bummed by clergy, music teachers, sacristans and family members, as it was an emotional first consensual bumming down the duckpond for many as tears of joy were mixed with the standard tears of pain.
“A typical trip to the duckpond during those peak bumming and fisting years from 2021-2025 would typically see a sea of heaving and thrusting bare arses and gashes from sun up to sun down,” proudly declared Councillor Billy Fitbollocks.
“Before this, bumming and fisting was only an elite pastime practised BEHIND closed doors and only spoken about with hushed whispers. Now, with some paint missing from the Rainbum Crossing, it’s tantamount to the collapse of Rome and swift descent to the Dark Ages, as bumming and fisting again is once more no more in Inbhear Mór. If re-elected, I promise to make Inbhear Mór, In-bum Mór once more! No arse or gash should be left behind or in front!” proclaimed a bullish Fitzbollocks.
“We were well positioned in becoming the San Francisco of the South East in terms of bumming and fisting, but with the disintegration of the Rainbum Crossing, not only has this monumental progress disappeared quicker than a bottle of poppers in the George, it has also opened a vortex to an alternate timeline where the 1993 decriminalisation of homosexuality and 2015 marriage referendum also cease to exist in Arklow,” garbled Fitzbollocks through a mouthful of cock.
Prominent local Rainbum Crossing activists are still shocked and puzzled at the fact that all over Western democracies, Pride festivals are being cancelled due to superficial, virtue signalling, blood-sucking, soulless, corporate sponsors ‘PULLING OUT’ of funding. Such a puzzling move could arguably reveal their sole objective was, is and always will be profit; whether that involves selling landmines to Africa, nerve agents to a Middle Eastern dictator, or disingenuously trumpeting any social justice bandwagon of the day to boost the only thing that ever matters to them, the bottom/bum line.
But an apparent split the size of a rectal prolapse seems evident to your humble narrator within the silent majority of Arklow’s “under siege” LGBTIQ+ community.
“The intergenerational wealth divide is not unique to the Cis-heteronormative community,” stated local queer Marxist, John Byrne.
“The disenfranchised, dispossessed, disenchanted, disillusioned Millennials and Gen Z of the gay community have more in common with the youth of the straight community than they do with any older, comfortable middle-class home owning, navel gazing gays obsessing over trivial shite like paint on a road.
Fortunately for those privileged elders, they have a forever home to forever bum and fist in peace, whereas I have to be quite silent with my partner in my parent’s boxroom. The gay and straight youth are all just as fatigued as each other attempting to navigate rapacious and brutal late-stage capitalism where jobs don’t pay and properties aren’t available or affordable. As Marx once said:
“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.”
“As both a Millenial and Queer, I feel the Rainbum Crossing vanity project betrays peak narcissism and a tone-deaf personal crusade which really hasn’t read the room, not only with the youth of their own community but also the larger public who are still coping with the bread and butter issues of the aftermath of the pandemic and the soaring cost of living.
Online social slacktivists often don’t conceive their roles as unwitting pawns/human capital within the social media echo chamber of the ceaseless ‘culture wars,’ which are solely designed to keep people endlessly bickering online, or as their corporate strategists like to euphemistically say “engaged.” Social media is not reality and people should get back out to the pub, or flower arranging class, and realise the vast majority of us are getting brutally bummed-by class warfare!” stated Byrne.
“Billionaires who fund the networks of misinformation and away from the economic policies—deregulation, privatization, austerity—that have stratified wealth so cataclysmically in the neoliberal era. “They rile up anger” which “gets diverted into culture wars” and all the while “the billionaires who bankroll the whole charade are safe in the knowledge that the fury coursing through our culture isn’t coming for them.”
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein
“The Irish have barley exited a century of stifling church rule only to merely be subjected to replacement ideological dogmas pontificated by equally unhinged ideologues, the pulpit has merely been replaced by the smartphone,” posited Byrne.
On a brighter note, Fitzbollocks is still hopeful about Arklow returning as a premier bum sex hub in the future: “I think if we just shirt lift the green jersey and bum for the town we should be alright. In-bum Mór has always been a fishing town full of gay sailors, so let’s keep it that way. The council will soon vote on renaming the Seabreeze Festival the Bumbreeze Festival and, if they do, I am willing to briefly forget my heterosexuality by lamping the arse off anything with a heartbeat on the Rainbum Crossing.
