#-dastardly

[duckiewashere]

So um. Finally got to 200… listened to it on the way home last night… I have many thoughts but

… this is what happened right JSJJFJFJS

[unsanctitude]

fur seals i drew . almost a whole year ago

[ravencromwell]

Rereading Dickens Christmas Carol for the first time in a long time. And the more I reread, the more it strikes me how seamlessly a queer reading could slip within these pages. Not an especially twee reading, wherein all Scrooge's troubles start and end with grief over Jacob Marley's death. For we know that Scrooge was a "Tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!" And we know that he and Marley were "two kindred spirits"

And perhaps that very fact makes the similarities to queer life, unintended as they most likely were by Mr. Dickens, achingly poignant to me. Scrooge is, we're told, "secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster." How much that resonates, for so many of us who shield our innermost selves but from a select group of friends. And we know that Scrooge and Marley were, at the very least, certainly that for one another. Scrooge is Marley's sole mourner; his sole executor and beneficiary; and even Dickens notes, "friend." How reminiscent is that of queer couples across history, estranged from their families?

Scrooge lives in a set of chambers that once belonged to Marley—clearly Dickens wanted us to believe Scrooge gave up his own dwellings after Marley's death to economize. But with only a flicker of change, those chambers become _their chambers, rented by Marley as the senior member of the couple. The place is so desolate Dickens notes "one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again." The perfect abode for two queer misers who wanted no one prying into their business.

Marley's name is still above the door of Scrooge's counting-house: a mark by which, no doubt, Dickens meant to convey Scrooge such a penny-pincher he couldn't bother to have it changed. But a thing can be both! mark of frugality to ludicrous excess and! mark of mourning. "sometimes," Dickens opines, "People new to the

business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him."

This is why "death of the author" matters so much, in expanding our interpretations of texts. It is vastly far from the lens Dickens would have intended. But, the idea of a ghost of queerness, so taboo in the society it could barely be glanced at sidewise in this tale that is all about the inexplicable and yet that lingers over everything becomes an astonishing lens through which to read this book. Thinking of Scrooge as a queer man, his "melancholy dinner at his usual melancholy tavern" becomes a eerie prefiguring of the hollowness of days spent by Isherwood's A Single Man. In this universe, little wonder Scrooge doubly hates mention of time with family, marriage, etc. when the precise nature of his grief is both unacknowledged and unacknowledgable.

And readings like this are vital, because the uncomfortable truth is, discrimination doesn't "discriminate between sinners and saints", to borrow a Miranda phrase. It is easy, in my liberal circles, to fight for queer people who hold "the good sorts of politics". But what about men like Michael Hess, culpable for supporting Reagan even as his contemptuous homophobia let the aids epidemic run rampant? How much harder is it to remember Michael had a partner? That he deserves empathy and compassion for being practically tarred and feathered out of the party upon his own aids diagnosis?

Expanding our imaginative universes to include queerness, not as redemptive panacea, but merely as one aspect of identity, personality, often in vicious conflict with others. Even! as we consider those stories equally worthy of being told feels vital if we're ever to truly express the complexity of what queer humanity looks like.

[dangocheeked]

2023.10.31 ☆ happy birthday, wei wuxian!

[gyancastle]

Danny is not having a very good time.

Commission info | Ko-fi

Versión en español : 👉 aquí

[caela-argent]

Melon Husk is stomping around Twitter HQ, ordering his employees to catch Dril and put the blue check back on him after the fiftieth name change like some sick cyberpunk CEO version of Wile E. Coyote.

I don't think it’s going well, tbh.

[zondearts]

au Akiyama sisters, because I can, I will, I just did etc. etc.

[bean-chinchilla]

Comment Where You Would Sit!

[sweeneydino]

Already showing signs

[devotion-disorder]

✶ Father Killian seems very pleased with you. ✶

well with eyes as beautiful as those, I don't think I'll be able to think clearly for a whole month.

noooooooooooo anon that's right where he wants you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111!!!!!

[repliiku]

sleepover roleplay

[duckiewashere]

Mmmm ballpoint pen and watercolor Michael in da sketchbook <3

10/10 waste of time as opposed to paying attention to my entrepreneurship class

[oyesteryells]

A Series of Delilah Events

[bittersnsweetz]

Do you ever think about kristoph and phoenix getting it on and then all of a sudden they both just. simultaneously lose interest and feeling but they have to play it up so the other doesnt know theyre getting sick of it and convince themselves that it was just the one time because if they dont have this they have nothing

do you think about their silences after physically intimate moments that arent quite awkward but theyre toeing a very tense line and neither of them knows what to say so you just hear the rustling of clothes and the spark of a lighter and the offering of a cigarette and how thats just their routine

yeah. i think about their collective development of apathy a lot.

[soath]

Mr. Mercer was clearly drawing a lot from classical Greek philosophy for Kryn Dynasty terminology; dunamancy, anamnesis. Typhros though has stumped me. Clearly Greek but I haven't been able to figure out a root... until now.

It's just soul imprints guys. Souls got ran through the printer too many times.