gaypoetrycapstone

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People you may not have known were gay!

Emily Dickinson “Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.”

Hans Christian Andersen “ Just living is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”

Gore Vidal "Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice like, Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.”

Julius Caesar “Experience is the teacher of all things.”

Leonardo Da Vinci “Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood.”

Virginia Woolf “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

Walt Whitman “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

King James I “"A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

Tennessee Williams ““I'm starting to boil inside. I know I seem dreamy, but inside-well, I'm boiling! Whenever I pick up a shoe, I shudder a little thinking how short life is and what I am doing!”

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette “There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.“

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Biopics

*** movies about historical figures that aren’t artists.

The Danish Girl (2015) A fictitious love story loosely inspired by the lives of Danish artists Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener. Lili and Gerda's marriage and work evolve as they navigate Lili's groundbreaking journey as a transgender pioneer.

Frida (2002) A biography of artist Frida Kahlo, who channeled the pain of a crippling injury and her tempestuous marriage into her work.

Bessie (2015) The story of legendary blues performer Bessie Smith, who rose to fame during the 1920s and '30s.

*** The Imitation Game (2014) During World War II, the English mathematical genius Alan Turing tries to crack the German Enigma code with help from fellow mathematicians.

*** Milk (2008) The story of Harvey Milk and his struggles as an American gay activist who fought for gay rights and became California's first openly gay elected official.

Kill Your Darlings (2013) A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs.

Capote (2005) In 1959, Truman Capote learns of the murder of a Kansas family and decides to write a book about the case. While researching for his novel In Cold Blood, Capote forms a relationship with one of the killers, Perry Smith, who is on death row.

*** Gia (1998) The story of the life of Gia Carangi, a top fashion model from the late 1970s, from her meteoric rise to the forefront of the modeling industry, to her untimely death.

Gods and Monsters (1998) The last days of Frankenstein (1931) Director James Whale are explored.

*** Monster (2003) Based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, a Daytona Beach prostitute who became a serial killer.

Iris (2001) True story of the lifelong romance between novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley, from their student days through her battle with Alzheimer's disease.

Wilde (1997) The turmoil in poet/playwright Oscar Wilde's life after he discovers his homosexuality.

Tom of Finland (2017) Award-winning filmmaker Dome Karukoski brings to screen the life and work of artist Touko Valio Laaksonen (aka Tom of Finland), one of the most influential and celebrated figures of twentieth century gay culture.

*** Boys Don't Cry (1999) A young man named Brandon Teena navigates love, life, and being transgender in rural Nebraska.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) The story of the legendary British rock band Queen and lead singer Freddie Mercury, leading up to their famous performance at Live Aid (1985).

Rocketman (2019) A musical fantasy about the fantastical human story of Elton John's breakthrough years.

Prick Up Your Ears (1987) Biographer John Lahr is writing a book about playwright Joe Orton. Joe and Kenneth meet at drama school and live together for ten years as lovers and collaborators. Both want to be writers, but only one of them is successful.

*** The Favourite (2018) In early 18th-century England, the status quo at the court is upset when a new servant arrives and endears herself to a frail Queen Anne.

Christopher and His Kind How real-life British-American author Christopher Isherwood and his German boyfriend Heinz met and fell in love during the 1930s and the rise of Nazism.

*** I Love You Phillip Morris (2009) A cop turns con man once he comes out of the closet. Once imprisoned, he meets the second love of his life, whom he'll stop at nothing to be with.

*** Boy Erased (2018) The son of a Baptist preacher unwillingly participates in a church-supported gay conversion program after being forcibly outed to his parents.

Vita & Virginia (2018) It's the fascinating true story about the love affair between socialite and popular author Vita Sackville-West and literary icon Virginia Woolf.

*** Kinsey (2008) A look at the life of Alfred Kinsey, a pioneer in the area of human sexuality research, whose 1948 publication "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was one of the first recorded works that saw science address sexual behavior.

*** Aimee & Jaguar (1999) In 1943 Berlin, a Nazi officer's wife meets and starts a passionate affair with a Jewish woman.

Professor Marston & the Wonder Women (2017) The story of psychologist William Moulton Marston, and his polyamorous relationship with his wife and their mistress who would inspire his creation of the superheroine, Wonder Woman.

Wild Nights with Emily (2018) Dramatization of the little known side of the writer Emily Dickinson's life, in particular, her relationship with another woman.

Total Eclipse (1995) Young, wild poet Arthur Rimbaud and his mentor Paul Verlaine engage in a fierce, forbidden romance while feeling the effects of a hellish artistic lifestyle.

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Step One: Pretend the sky isn’t shattering into billions of tear-shaped drops, And if you can’t, then collect the tears in buckets And rebuild the heavens with something stronger than hope And let the rain wash away all misplaced affection. Step Two: Repeat their name until it no longer sounds right. Disregard the sacrosanct utterance and forget it, then Repeat your name enough times to reteach yourself its importance, And if you can't, then say your name until it seems just as vital. Step Three: Cry until the world allows you peace. Let yourself break and blame the universe Because you are not Atlas, and the sky is not your burden, And when the weight is a little easier to bear, then pick yourself up and breathe. Step Four: Reinvent yourself into someone current. Take the time and the tears and the memories and fashion yourself Into a person a little stronger than you were, And focus on repairing the damage with something better than Band-Aids. Step Five: Let the forest consume your routes and find an original way through. Find unique flowers to plant on the path away from pain And when people begin questioning what happened to you, tell them Your plants were poisoning you, and you needed something fresh. Step Six: Forgive yourself for everything you’ve done and failed to do. If you can’t, then ignore the guilt just as you learned to ignore the truth Let your heart have the time to create something stronger, To keep them outside your walls instead of inside as a mockery of devotion. Step Seven: Don’t hate them for it; Because hate won’t surpass love so long as they are only separated By a distinction of virtuous or villainous instead of too much or too little passion. Remember that indifference is what you need to achieve. Step Eight: Lather, rinse, and repeat until you’re okay, And for every person that ever makes you weak.

How to Rebuild Ruins | h.m.l

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The moment the world splinters apart Into shards of thought,                   feeling,                    incredulity,                            Pretend it’s just another face and move on. Don’t recognize, don’t remember, it’s an emergency, it’s a triage situation. This man is dead. Please move onto priority one. Blink and the body in the bed is nothing but a chalk outline. People are dying and people are crying “You killed him, it’s your          fault.” Cry until the world turns into cartoon lines Cry until the colours fill you up with too-red blood Cry because the accusations echo in the room of human filth Cry because the cartoon walls don’t stop time and still people are crying “You killed him.” This man is dead. Please move onto priority one. It’s 10:31 pm and I want to text you ‘ruin me, darling, fill me with your knowing questions, and break me on the incandescent.’ I don’t text you, I never text you, I text the easy ex-lover instead. ‘It’s Shakespearean. It's a tragedy in five acts, so rip me open and pretend that it’s love.’ (I’m begging for pain afterall).                                 It’s one of those moments that feel Like it should be taking place in some long forgotten alleyway Illuminated by nothing but the desperate sounds of passers-by And the neon lights of seedy by-the-hour motels from every sad song. Except it’s not, it’s in the backyard where the apples are growing green. And the sun starts to set creating a muted gradient of beautiful sadness. This man is dead. Please move onto priority one. It’s 10:67 pm and somehow I’ve fallen into a summertime movie Turned backwards, or upside down because there is no happily ever after here. I kiss her in the back pages of old and empty notebooks I never filled. I kiss him and I feel  f r a c t u r e d. I kiss her and the exquisite pain in my chest turns to acid.                                                                                                         I don’t kiss you. The radio plays love songs and the sand comes pouring out of the speakers. This man is dead. Please move onto priority one. I spin until I am dizzy,                      and then                      I spin until I am stable. The tilting of the world becomes the metronome to a heartbeat I’m not certain is mine. I dreamt that we were on fire and we danced until the      morning Broke us of our reverie When we started screaming in beat with our hearts. When we started screaming from the pain of the flames. This man is dead. Please move onto priority one. I am sorry about this love, and about the fact you died. And how this tragedy destroyed us both. Tell me if you can forgive me this war. This man is dead. Please move onto priority one.

Priority Zero | h.m.l

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The light on my porch has never worked And I swear that it became a beacon For the monsters in the world to come and rest And take a place beneath my bed And now I’m at an age where I’m “Far too old for such childish fantasies” But I think that we all deserve a place to rest A bed to hide under, a porch light that was never lit A place for the ghosts to convalesce And all of this is to say That your hometown gets into your skin And the dark corners in your room Are only terrifying until you leave and the new ones Hold monsters you’ve not made accords with And the terror of growing up is worth more Than the falling dime collection You’ve had since you were five That taught you about the Victorian ghost in the attic The dimes scattered across the floor And got stuck in the hardwood cracks And above your shoulder was a voice That seemed upset that they fell And that the coins had changed from what they remembered When they were young and excited like you are now And not hung up as the piece of art that you adored I am learning: We are all the Victorian ghost in the attic That caused the dimes to fall when you were still a child Which is to say that we are all In a world that’s different than we remember And all wish to go back to days that seemed simpler In the wake of passing years and the fade from Colour to sepia-toned memory Before you had to sell the dime collection To pay for college textbooks And the new house with the new porchlight Dispelled the familiar ghosts And monsters under the bed I have never considered the yearning For the supernatural to be a part of growing up But I suppose that it all seems far more innocent Than the new terrors in the world That aren't so easy to pretend were just the wind And can’t be blamed on the porch light that never worked.

This, Too, Was a Lesson | h.m.l

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A Mythical Tragedy in Eleven Parts

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Why do you think I write? I write to reinvent the wheel, over and over again, until the circles become squares and up becomes down, and I can almost look at it and see a sphere or a cube– like it’s something new, something interesting.  And then I remember that it’s just a wheel, spinning, and spinning, and spinning. And I remember that I’m not doing anything new. There’s no new stories, they’ve all been done before, even if they have different names, or faces. It’s still the wheel, still the same tracks. But perhaps that is the point.

There are no new wheels, but maybe there are new paths to tread. (via poetiicdissonance)

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reasons not to love him

1. you’ll corrupt him. you will end up ripping pieces out of him until he’s nothing more than shreds. don’t do that to yourself.

2. The world isn’t his to grieve so stop making his bones a graveyard.

3. You killed five people with words alone. You don’t need a sixth mark on your body count.

4. I could love you is not enough. It is a half-strung lie, a maybe-ever-after, half the price of something worthwhile.

5. His hair tastes like lavender and sunrises. It’s poisoning your system.

6. He’s too pure to make a tragedy out of, even if you need tragedies to keep you alive and feed your body.

7. He gets sad each night, don’t make it worse.

8. You cannot afford to develop emotions.

9. You want to numb your heart that swells and beats faster each time he’s in close range.

10. Ripped things are never beautiful to watch and he’ll be splintered once you finish with him.

reasons to 

1. Sometimes I could love you is enough.

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The boy with the dark hair holds your head underwater. You cannot see his face, cannot feel anything except the haunting way his fingertips press into the tense muscles of your neck, holding your head deep enough that water fills your ears. The front of your shirt drips red into the wet and you watch twirls of colour dance in front of your eyes.

The boy with the dark hair holds your head underwater. All the air is out of your lungs, burning its way through your windpipe. You feel your life being sucked out of your body and the taste sits sharply on your tongue. Colours sprout between the cracked peeling greys of the deep underneath.

The boy with the dark hair holds your head underwater. He’s whispering something but you cannot hear it. You only feel his breath tickling the outer shell of your ear, burning right through you. His love is arson and you’re dying, choking up smoke.

The boy with the dark hair holds your head underwater. You don’t know his name but when he speaks, he’s a prayer for a religion you didn’t know you believed in. It’s like listening to the sound of rain, no greater comfort, than a loud sadness that you cannot touch.

He grabs your face and kisses you - and your head is underwater again.

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“You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.

Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. (via ligeia-of-the-rhine)

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Ocean Vuong- On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

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The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you,                     and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,                                    and you are ready to die in this swimming pool           because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means                                                                      your life is over anyway.                               You’re in eighth grade. You know these things.           You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do                      long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless                                     he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do,           because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore.

Richard Siken, Crush (via booksqouted)

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on falling in love with the sun. || a.r

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The sun continues to rise but it lacks the life it used to possess

“Your name is Icarus and you will do anything you can to reach him You fly high Your waxen wings feeling as sturdy as steel as you soar into the clouds Reaching for the sun

Your name is Apollo and you reach down Trying to catch the boy flying towards you His skin is dark and his hair a mess of curls and you hope You hope that this angel’s wings will hold

Your name is Icarus and you will be damned if your father does not approve His wings have long since failed him and his life has no say in yours You stare straight into the sun knowing that even if it blinds you it will be the most beautiful thing You will ever see

Your name is Apollo and you are the sun that shines and the bird that sings and you will not See this boy fall Your only desire is to hold him Your only want is to touch him Your only prayer is to feel him Him Him Him

Your name is Icarus and you tried to reach for god You try to meet him even when you know you could burn You know you could fall All you want is to hold his hand in your palm His lips against yours His breath on your neck His His His

Your name is Apollo and you have fallen for Icarus

Your name is Icarus and you have flown too close to the sun

Your name is Apollo and you will catch him

Your name is Icarus and you cannot be caught

Your name is Apollo and godhood is not worth this

Your names are Icarus and Apollo and you are a boy and the sun

Your names are Icarus and Apollo and the ocean boils around you

Your names are Icarus and Apollo and you finally are able to hold, to touch, to feel

Your names are Icarus and Apollo and you have no need to be the world’s sons as long as you have each other

Your name is Icarus and you have grasped the sun

Your name is Apollo and you have caught him”

                                                                             -Jackson Purcell

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“You Are Jeff” by Richard Siken

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[gaypoetrycapstone]

Views Towards Homosexuality in Modern Times

Globally, the views towards the LGBT+ community are more diverse than they ever have been historically, on a scale that didn’t exist before. In the ‘developed world, the issues have moved on from the question of ‘s this legal?’ and ‘can i marry the person I’m in love with?’. Watershed moments like the Stonewall Riots of 1969 permanently changed the politics surrounding LGBT+ people. 

The last several decades have seen major shifts in public acceptance. During the 1980′s, the AIDS Epidemic emerged. By 1995, approximately 95% of the victims were gay or bisexual men. The Reagan administration failed to adequately address the problem, and didn’t mention the growing crisis at all for years. During this period of time, the Lavender Scare was still policy. People didn’t understand what was happening, or why a disproportionate number of victims were gay men. It became known as the ‘gay plague’.

The AIDS Epidemic’s reaching influence on LGBT+ culture cannot be overstated. It helped to destroy what culture would have existed in the community, and legislation such as the blood bans are still in effect. 

In 2005, Canada legalized gay marriage federally, and America followed in 2015. These choices though, while important, have left some struggles in following years. As more and more places gain anti-discrimination policies,a d LGBT+ are increasingly characters in media, there has arisen a feeling that the struggle for LGBT+ rights is over. And in the ‘developed’, that can often be the way it feel. 

But that ability to remain apart, and unconcerned is very much a privilege only afforded to people who don’t live in countries where it’s not an option. More than ten countries still have it punishable by death. Sudan only changed it’s laws on that in 2020. In South Africa, their legislation is incredibly progressive. They legalized same-sex marriage in 2006 and have remained the first and only African country to do so, and they have constitutional protections against discrimination, but for the people who actually life there, the reality is different. 

The views surrounding LGBT+ people is changing rapidly as the conversation around it does, and the historical legacy and impact remains prevalent. It’s hard to estimate what will happen in the following years. International attention, and the ease of access to information have rapidly changed the societal views.