Miz Shoes is very sorry, but there will be very little snark hereabouts today. Miz Shoes has made a point of not reading any other recaps or reportage about this week’s episode and so does not know where she falls on the Metaverse’s spectrum of responses. She sincerely hopes for the majority.

This episode was sold as being full of the dramaz, and it was that. It was some pretty fucking compelling reality up on that screen. What Mondo did and what Mondo said could not have come at a more opportune time for the American soul, what with two very young men dead this week as a result of bullying.

But you know what Miz Shoes thinks about this? Miz Shoes would like to politely ask what the collective and ever-loving fuck is wrong with America’s collective morals that this behavior is considered anything less than criminal under any circumstance? Miz Shoes has plenty to say about this, but you want to know what it is that just irks Miz Shoes down to the very molecules that comprise her cranky existence? That the parents of the bullies are her age or thereabouts.

Would NinaGarcia like to hear the story behind why Miz Shoes is so incensed that her peers taught their children that it is somehow wrong and bad and deserving of public ridicule to be any other than a white heterosexual? Miz Shoes would be happy to tell her story to Miss Garcia.

Because twenty-five years ago, Miz Shoes had friends who were gay, and they were her companions from college. They were true and dear and it had cost them a lot to come out in the early seventies, almost forty fucking years ago. And then they started getting sick, and dying horribly, several of them alone and abandoned by their families. Some of them in hospitals, surrounded by love. And nobody gave a shit that gay men were dying in droves because they were somehow less than human for being gay. Really? It’s twenty-five fucking years into this epidemic and there are still people too afraid to come out to family or to tell anyone their HIV status? Well, where were their parents, Miz Shoes’ peers in the 80s and 90s, that they didn’t lose a single friend or relative and are able to pass along fear and prejudice to their kids?

Really, America? This is heartbreaking, but not for the reasons I suspect are being discussed around the web. This week’s episode was heartbreaking because it was true and people in situations like Mondo’s do have to live in fear and secrecy and that’s just unacceptable.

And, oh yeah, Mondo won his third challenge in a row, knocking a little sigh of pleasure from NinaGarcia over the exquisite tailoring and styling of his suit. Valerie finally and deservedly got the aufsie daisy. Next week, cheating?