I finally understand why my new queer rom-com audiobook is still important in a world where five-year-olds in bunny hats are being snatched off the streets by ICE, and it’s all because of one Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, another Latino boy with a love of bunnies, a very Bad, good Bunny.
Now before you cancel me, hear me out. I’m not just another millennial striving to write some viral think-piece, except … that’s exactly who I am. If you are now hurriedly looking at my byline to see if you might recognize my name, or face, dear reader, 30 percent of you might remember who I am.
My name is Ash Perez, 36, male, a TV writer living in LA. If you have no idea who that is, you may remember me from the mid-2010s, when I was Ashly Perez, the “awkward Asian girl” on BuzzFeed who made all those videos in leotards pretending to be Beyoncé, or Oprah, or Taylor Swift. In short, internet girl of the 2010s, I was … you. The proverbial “you,” that is.
My job in 2014, the time Gen-Zers are now beginning to collectively yearn for, the “before” times, the pinnacle of millennial optimism when things could still be “fergalicious” and your Instagram feed was chronological, my job back then was to make you feel seen by being me. Isn’t that insane?
That was my job, a job that in my last years at BuzzFeed I got paid six figures to do. Now I substitute-teach, DoorDash until my back goes out, and pray that I’ll get another writing job in the next six months so my WGA insurance doesn’t expire.
This dark timeline and the spiral it’s brought us all into is why I’m here dissecting what it means to write love stories in the face of ever-present, real, terrifying fascism. And why it took watching Bad Bunny perrero “twerk” across the biggest stage in America during a time of civil rights violations akin to the 1960s and wealth disparity greater than what made Les Miserables so miserable to arrive at this simple truth—if artists can’t make art, and people can’t enjoy that art, then we really have come to the end of democracy.
I don’t mean the watered-down, four-quadrant, inoffensive art that’s intended for everyone and inspires exactly no one. I mean the art that’s real, that challenges the status quo (like a Super Bowl halftime show performed entirely in Spanish by an American citizen), or encapsulates the cries of those without a voice (like Amanda Gorman’s poems for Renée Good and Alex Pretti), or seeks to be a balm in a world that has forgotten people were sentient before computers were (like Lady Gaga singing Mr. Rogers’ childhood staple, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”).
We the artists, not the robots endlessly mimicking human art while using up our rapidly vanishing clean water, need to make art to prove that we are still here. We still feel. We still cry. We still laugh. We want to dance at the club with our girlfriends. Or run in the gym to the latest Megan Thee Stallion bop while planning our revenge fantasy on our ex.
We want to dream of vampires in the South and see them in IMAX! We want to wonder if we’d all be better off just joining the hive-mind instead of enduring this pain. We want to hold books, not ban them. We want to fangirl, not just hate. We want to cheer for our heroes, because it’s getting pretty fucking boring booing the same old bad guys (now with more filler!) and their all-too-familiar agenda to disenfranchise anyone who doesn’t look, talk, or act like them.
Isn’t this an old story? Haven’t we seen this film before? A remake of a remake of a remake no one asked for in the first place. Aren’t we all tired of all this division? Anger, pain, hurt people hurting people? We are all better than this. And we feel it. We feel all the dead weight of all this useless crap sloughing off us.
Our brains are rotted, exhausted, doomscrolled out. And for all the fellas who claim to love the Roman Empire, look around dudes, we’re in it! But we don’t have to repeat it. We can be the ones who know our history and thus circumvent it. Thank God. Only … how do we do it?
By telling stories. Human stories. Not robotic stories that two databases hallucinated at each other then posted on another database for us poor humans to read in horror, as we wonder why we can no longer afford eggs, or rent, or human decency, when just ten years ago all those things still seemed remotely in our grasp. And wait, yeah, why did they escape our grasp? Because we let them!
We let giant corporations harvest us for opinions, preferences, and silly little sayings, all so they could turn around and sell them back to the highest bidder for literal pennies on the dollar (RIP penny, you were a real one). That’s how much your soul is worth, dear reader. 0.0000007 cents, which doesn’t seem like much until you multiply it by 8 billion, and soon you have enough money to have your own private island of horrors and live outside the law that governs the rest of us plebeians.
Well I have news for you, fascism, authoritarianism, AI supergod, algorithm slop, patriarchal, binary hellscape timeline that we’ve all let ourselves slip into. No more. At least not for me. Because on February 8th I—as a bisexual, trans, Cuban, Korean, Filipino man whose father escaped communism and was granted asylum in this beautiful country by a deeply human president (RIP Jimmy Carter) only to die under a cruel, unfeeling president who politicized the very virus that ended up killing him and millions of other Americans—I felt something.
Bad Bunny’s performance unlocked something in me I haven’t felt in a long time: joy. Joy for being Latino, for being queer, for being an artist, for speaking even my broken first-generation Spanish (where “mi gente, Latino” at? IYKYK). For being someone who still believes in the capability of every man, woman, and nonbinary neighbor to find good in themselves, and then, hopefully, in others. That’s what the halftime show meant for me. It meant a return to joy, and right behind that another feeling I don’t think many of us have felt in quite a long time: hope.
Because that’s what art does: It creates, it moves us, it opens our eyes to different cultures, ways of thinking, points of view. It invites us to dance even though we may not know the lyrics, because they’re not what really makes music in the end. It’s the rhythm. And perhaps I’ll end with the words of another brave Latine pioneer who made space for us Latinos when there was so little to be had: “The rhythm [and the hope it carries]is gonna get you.”
My hope for myself, my neighbors, and my fellow artists reading this is that the rhythm of joy gets us and lifts us up before any more of this horrific, selfish nonsense can bring us down. In the face of fascism, art isn’t excess—it’s the antidote.
Ash Perez’s debut fictional audiobook, Speak Now, about his years spent as a yearning lesbian, will be released on International Trans Day of Visibility, March 31, 2026, by Simon & Schuster Audio.
