#And if you think being gay is an affront to his masculinity then he's still more of a woman than youll ever get!

[little-candy-store-of-horrors]

And at the rate things are going, I fear I am not any way inclined at all! *Laugh track*

[salsa-and-light]

"I have no patience for priests who ‘come out’ as gay and insist the priesthood is some sort of cage..."

The priesthood is intentionally designed to cage certain human behaviors.

Moreover the fact that people are complaining about gay priests is further evidence that the priesthood cages people unecessarily.

You can't say that they're is no cage as you try to beat someone back into it.

"Nobody forced you to become a priest."

Nobody forced the author of this article to be a priest either, though admittedly he's playing fast and loose with his Christian duty of being kind.

"The faithful don’t need to deal with your issues, pal. They don’t deserve to deal with any of our issues. We serve them. Period."

And that is one of the fundamental issues with a priest class.

All humans need guidance, all therapists need therapists.

No wonder so many priests turn rotten when they're supposed to bottle up all their issues and hide them from the world like an emotionally repressed father. Maybe the parentification is part of the problem.

"Priests who insist they ‘can’t be who they are’ in the priesthood mean to say ‘who they are’ isn’t a priest as the Church has ‘always’ understood priesthood. The last thing the faithful need are priests who make their sexuality their primary identity."

Another problem with the priest class is that the job of priest is apparently expected to be their "primary identity".

Never mind that this is a misrepresentation of what gay priests are saying.

No healthy Queer person of any occupation wants to make their orientation or even their sexuality their "primary identity".

That is the preoccupation of those who refuse to see Queer people as anything else.

A priest can not simply be gay, when you don't see Queer people as full humans the fact that they are Queer overpowers everything else.

"'Being gay’ and ‘coming out’ may seem to you, Father, as being true to your authentic self, but that’s contrary to your ordination"

Only if you don't see Queer people as full humans and wrongly assume that Queer people are inherently sexual.

If someone is keeping their vow of celibacy, does it really matter which sex they're not participating in.. or with?

"...which makes your authentic self a person in persona Christi in the service of the people of God."

Irrelevant.

Celibacy is not a requirement for that at all, some Catholic priests are married. But even so, telling the truth about yourself doesn't actually change anything about the responsibilities of the priesthood as I understand it.

"If you can’t live that way, if you can’t give yourself freely, without making your sexuality 'a thing' in this equation..."

And this we get to the crux of the problem.

Homophobes are resentful of having to hear that Queer people exist.

These people forget that their sexualities are also such "a thing" that they have to specifically forswear it before God.

But when they acknowledge their latent sexuality it's normal, when Queer people do it, even Queer celibates, it is an affront.

Because there is no acceptable way for a Queer person to exist in the eyes of a homophobe.

"then be a man, be noble, and as our Holy Father Pope Francis says: leave the priesthood."

Homophobe invalidates gay man's masculinity and tries to force him out of the church.

shocking.

This is nothing but a thinly veiled attempt to condemn Queer people for existing.

If the only difference is that you know a priest's orientation, then there is no reason to remove them.

"The same is true, btw, of any priest who finds himself engrossed and completely distracted by the attention and subtleties of the fairer sex. If your priesthood is about being with women you’re attracted to, your thoughts and language always sexual, you’ve got a problem."

Once again failing to comprehend the concept of a celibate gay person.

I think that enforced celibacy is stupid, I make no bones about that, but if we remember that Queer people are still people, it shouldn't take a herculean mental effort to realize that a Queer man is just as capable of a vow of chastity as any straight man. Moreso in some cases; how many straight men manage to hide or suppress their attractions for decades at a time.

"A Father cannot help his children if he’s a broken distracted mess of a man requiring them to pick him up and set him aright. That’s the classic role reversal of a dysfunctional family."

Well if you couldn't already tell that the author is American.. sheesh.

A father who is too stubborn to ever ask for help and support from the willing is a man who will grow into a burden to everyone around him, including himself.

An obsession with projecting strength, even to those closest to you, ensures that you will be alone when you're weakness inevitably gets the better of you.

The New York Times report discusses interviews conducted with several priests in the United States who have “come out” as gay, and insists that the ability to do so is freeing and allows them to “be themselves.”

However, several faithful Catholics have responded to this article, including Fr. Thomas Petri.

“I have no patience for priests who ‘come out’ as gay and insist the priesthood is some sort of cage. Nobody forced you to become a priest. The faithful don’t need to deal with your issues, pal. They don’t deserve to deal with any of our issues. We serve them. Period.

“Priests who insist they ‘can’t be who they are’ in the priesthood mean to say ‘who they are’ isn’t a priest as the Church has ‘always’ understood priesthood. The last thing the faithful need are priests who make their sexuality their primary identity.

“‘Being gay’ and ‘coming out’ may seem to you, Father, as being true to your authentic self, but that’s contrary to your ordination, which makes your authentic self a person in persona Christi in the service of the people of God.

“If you can’t live that way, if you can’t give yourself freely, without making your sexuality “a thing” in this equation, then be a man, be noble, and as our Holy Father Pope Francis says: leave the priesthood.

“The same is true, btw, of any priest who finds himself engrossed and completely distracted by the attention and subtleties of the fairer sex. If your priesthood is about being with women you’re attracted to, your thoughts and language always sexual, you’ve got a problem.

“A Father cannot help his children if he’s a broken distracted mess of a man requiring them to pick him up and set him aright. That’s the classic role reversal of a dysfunctional family. It has no place in the priesthood and the Church.”

[hopefullystillatheatrestudent]

okay so i’ve been going crazy these past few days. all about cockles/jensmish and obsessively watching their panels or reading the transcripts BECAUSE. THEY ARE LOUD. LIKE. i saw some fancams on twt and i thought people were just exaggerating but noooooooooo!!!???? so, getting to the point. you said that how do we know that jensen is performing masculinity? because jared isn’t and THAT IS A BIG BRAIN MOMENT. ON POINT. I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. a particular moment from gag reel that jumps out (which you’ve talked about) when jensen goes ‘cas, you are my baby daddy’ and misha goes, ‘i know i love you too’ and jensen goes, ‘i didn’t say i love you’ and misha goes, ‘i know you wanted to’ and jensen says, ‘i love you’ WHAT THE FUCK! that was NOT a joke. yes, people took it as a joke and had a good laugh BUT I HAVE WATCHED IT TOO MANY TIMES AND IT LIVES IN MY MIND RENT FREE BECAUSE IT WAS NOT A PERFORMANCE. THAT WAS JENSEN. THAT WAS MISHA. jensen has a had trouble with the pda and being all touch feely (the breakup theory) and he gradually grew into it, accepted it and misha was right there all along, never pushed it. it was like a deancas au but tbh, 99% of destiel is because of cockles and we all know it. i just. jensen has latched onto dean as an emotional support because he tunes with it. understands it. projects on to it. yeah, i just had to say it and get it off my chest. (and what about those poetry pages on instagram? alma? what is your opinion?) btw, you have a lovely blog and your analysis are right on target.

so there is a LOT i’m going to address here(how dare you bring up [gunshot] i HAVE to talk about it now) so again!!!! under a cut it goes but i hope you appreciate my rambles anon it seems like you do :,)

1. jared vs. jensen and performing masculinity. hell yeah man. jared and jensen are both just ‘guys from texas’ but they are still so vastly different. today i actually had a revelation that i’m pretty sure has to do with me being bi. and it’s that i have a group of straight friends(that i love dearly but they care too much about hockey and pitbull imo could not be me) and i have a group of queer friends(who are also batshit[affectionate]). and it’s like whichever group i hang out with a different side of me emerges? they’re both me, it’s just that certain aspects of who i am as a person only surface depending on who i am around. however, i will say i feel like i watch what i say around my straight friends more. i see that very clearly in jensen as well. around jared during panels and on set, he’s definitely putting on an air of machismo and engages in typical guy talk. i do think an element of it is performative, because he wants validation from jared that they’re still just two dudes from texas taking on the world together despite his sexual identity. does that make any sense??? i hope so. but when he’s with misha he is an entirely different person and his sense of humour becomes wildly different. the machismo fades away, he’s way less caught up in what people think about him, lets his guard down, etc. to go back to my original point which is how j2 are different in that regard....jared does not do this. he is a constant. he does not flip a switch between ‘performing masculinity’ and ‘not’ because he isn’t performing any part of who he is. he just IS. so yeah these two are similar in many regards but there’s somewhat of a dissonance between them when it comes to how they perform masculinity because one of them is putting on a show and the other is merely being.

2. that crypt scene blooper(here just in case you need to see it again. do it. as a treat.) when i tell you i have easily seen this over thirty times??? since it first came out??? i mean it. it is such an overlooked(r*mantic) moment and it means so much more than people think it does. i’ve talked about the context behind it, and i think that’s why this blooper was so meaningful, so i’ll mention it again. jensen and misha had a LOT of trouble with this scene. the reason is that jensen couldn’t wrap his head around why dean would be saying these things, if i remember correctly, and both of them sat down and scoured over how they should play it for a while before filming(teamwork ;) teammates *ahem*). [to be honest we all know why jensen had a hard time with that scene and it is because it is blatantly romantic. rip to him but i would simply give in to it at that point but oh well] so anyway, their heads were scattered going into shooting, which is NEVER a good headspace to be in for a scene, ESPECIALLY not a pivotal one. but they had each other to help them through said weird energy on set that couldn’t possibly have invoked the best feelings, especially considering jensen STILL doesn’t think he played that correctly(but he praised misha on his performance :,) ). and with that context every single part of that video hits haRD 

-’stop pulling my face towards your crotch’ i think this is objectively hilarious because it really really looks like jensen is pulling HIMSELF towards misha’s crotch. again, you’re fooling no one, jensen. misha’s wheezing laugh and the way he wraps himself around jensen is also,,,sweet??? like i don’t know how else to describe how i see it but this moment really reads as jensen, in his weird ‘constructing elaborate rituals’ way is asking for security through a physical touch from misha and he happily obliges and gives jensen what he needs. because i mean...watch it again. jensen ‘fights back’, but not really at all, actually. pretty wimpy counterattack. he literally lets himself be smothered by misha, and i would literally describe what they end up doing as cuddling. 

-’i need you, cas. you’re my baby daddy’ i love having an actor’s perspective on things bc i think i can explain what’s going on here. jensen just delivered what was(in his own mind) a rotten take of the lines he’s most scared of delivering. so the scene was already messed up. therefore; ensuing fuckery is warranted to help him feel better. but there’s also for sure more than meets the eye for what he says here because of misha’s reaction after??? like he seemed genuinely touched. first of all, he’s saying ‘you’re my baby daddy’ as half-jensen, but not necessarily dean either(because he didn’t say the previous lines as true to his character...you get it), to misha, not cas. i think i’ve made this point before, but every single innuendo in the gag reels is to misha specifically, never once cas. therefore; logical conclusion: ‘you’re my baby daddy’ was for misha and it meant something deeper than we think because of what follows it

-this part. jensen’s giddy ass smile after he sees misha crack and then misha says ‘yeah, i know’ (can i just say his voice when he says this is so intimate???? like am i intruding guys??? sorry i’ll let myself out) also he is smiling SO BIG

- ‘i know’ ‘why are you laughing?’ ‘no i know i love you too’ this analysis is already so long but i still want to get into what THAT whole exchange means. ‘why are you laughing?’ to me sounds like jensen’s pretending to be affronted by misha laughing at something that is serious. and it’s serious because he quite literally meant ‘i love you’. he did. misha knows it. misha’s really REALLY good at cutting the bs and just getting to what people are actually trying to say. he has an innate sharpness to his sense of humour. so yes, misha is being 100% accurate when he says ‘i know, but you wanted to say it.’ misha isn’t lying here. jensen did want and mean to say ‘i love you’. and then he actually does say it(in a jokey way but not really). 

- so yeah. it is actually so romantic??? like in a weird way jensen was professing his love for misha here?????? and that’s why this clip will NEVER. ever. get old. 

3. jensen having trouble with pda and projecting onto dean: we can all call ourselves dean coded cas girls but NO one deserves that title more than jensen ackles himself. he is dean winchester but marginally less repressed because he actually did admit he was in love with his best friend and let himself be happy, and pretty early on too. one year and two months as opposed to twelve years. so. happy deancas au is correct. and yes about the pda thing: one day i want to write my own post about both of their body language when it comes to each other, but all i can tell is jensen, even in the early days, couldn’t help himself from flirting with misha, but if misha ever crossed a line, jensen would not be happy. clearly he’s come around, however. what i find sweet is that misha always follows jensen’s lead when it comes to how much affection they’re allowed to show each other onstage. it touches my soul

4. destiel is cockles fault. yeah. and the thing is everyone knows it, too. even non-cockles shippers will explain early destiel as entirely dependant on jensen and misha’s wild chemistry. and that chemistry is easily explained by the fact that misha and jensen are literally just wildly horny bisexuals who were crazily attracted to one another and were falling in love on screen before our very eyes. and when you have THAT insider info(which sounds cray doesn’t it!!!! the destiel actors are in love irl??? huh???) everything really does click into place. why destiel got SO popular when the show and actors never ever intended for it to happen.(i know some people think misha was playing cas as gay the whole time for shits and giggles, and i won’t deny that[especially considering he found out early on that destiel was why he was staying on the show], but i don’t think he really wanted it to amount to anything, nor did he care??? i mean he has the real thing with jensen, for one, so their characters aren’t really as important. for two, he loves joking about destiel because it’s a cultural phenomenon and it’s fascinating, and i’m sure he did ship it because he’s unhinged, but i don’t think it was vastly important to him either way.) destiel got popular because everyone was and is unintentionally reading into the real deal. i could pull up countless gifs that people have used as destiel proof that is actually just jensen and misha being messy. mainly jensen. if i’m being honest.  the symbiotic relationship between destiel and cockles is why i’ve stayed onboard the destielcule and shellerscape for three solid months now; because it is utterly fascinating to witness and kind of super beautiful, too. 

5. alma(and others). so. i do NOT want to really REALLY get into this in its entirety here and now so i will just give you my opinion on if i think alma is misha or not. also; i don’t want to mention the other poetry accounts here bc i feel like that’s a bigger breach in privacy, but a lot of people do know about alma now. way too many, actually. this is why we can’t have nice things. anyway-to answer your question-there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that yes, misha is running that alma poetry account. i am 100% certain. some people think it’s actually three people and they’re all connected to misha in some way but that is so needlessly complicated. as it goes in psychology; the easiest explanation is probably the right one. it’s just one person running that account, and it is misha collins. i don’t know why it’s so hard to believe KNOWN POET misha collins(who is known to spend most of his free time writing poetry anyway) would have created a secret poetry account to write about his intense secret relationship under an alias and also get legitimate feedback since no one used to know it was him. oh and the handwriting is identical??? you are blind if you do not see that i am sorry. and a million other things prove it’s misha too but yeah all you need to know is yes. it’s him. it would take a literal livestream from a random woman on that account to convince me otherwise. and honestly not even that because a random woman could technically still log in if misha asked her too. so. it would take a hell of a lot to convince me otherwise, clearly. that said DO NOTTTTTTTTTTTT GO ONTO THAT ACCOUNT WITH A SUPERNATURAL RELATED USERNAME AND COMMENT THINGS THAT ARE COCKLES RELATED. ARE YOU BRAIN DEAD WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT’S OKAY. sorry i got heated but god please just don’t be dumb so many people have already gone way too far 

6. thank you for your lovely compliment on my analyses!!! i love doing them but i don’t know if people actually like reading them so i really appreciate it

[gallavictorious]

11x03 Fill-In Ficlet: Use Your Words (Or Don’t)

How do they go from sniping at each other in the kitchen to enthusiastically banging it out just a little while later? And why on Earth is horrible, horrible dirty talk suddenly a thing?

Well, they have this whole conversation where they basically talk things through but, you know, in their Ian and Mickey way of not talking things through but totally talking things through. You know? Also, there are kisses.

Warnings for some truly atrocious attempts at dirty talk but no actual smut. Also vague displays of a fucked-up relationship with violence, and clueless dumbasses trying, and only halfway succeeding, to chill with the misogyny and toxic masculinity. For all that this is mostly ridiculous and self-indulgent fluff.

Read below or on AO3.

---

They walk home from the Alibi together, but six feet apart and in silence.

Dinner is mostly silence, too, the celebration of Carl's first arrest dampened by Lip's outburst and Debbie storming off. Lip and Tami soon excuse themselves; Liam has homework; it's Carl's turn to do the dishes. (That mostly means they won't get done, but at least they'll know whom to blame when there's no clean plates or knives in the morning.)

Mickey's pours himself another glass of Jameson, but pauses when Ian abruptly rises from the table. His husband doesn't spare him a second glance though, but merely puts the half-thawed vegetables back in the freezer and walks off with a half-hearted “night” to his two younger brothers.

Well, fuck you too.

Mickey can feel Liam's eyes on him, but for once the kid keeps his mouth shut.

Smart kid.

Mickey takes his time emptying the glass. Takes the time to fill it up again and empty it once more too, while pointedly not listening to a single word Carl is saying about the fucking arrest he made.

Then it's getting late and there's nothing for it and he's sick and tired of them not being fine anyway, so fuck it.

He leaves the glass on the table for Carl to tidy away.

In their room Ian's sitting on the bed with his back towards the wall and a book in his lap. He looks up when Mickey enters, but doesn't say anything and promptly turns his attention back to his paperback. His jaw is set, but his shoulders slumped. Angry still, then - but tired even more than angry. Defeated, maybe.

Mickey fucking hates to see it.

He busies himself by the drawers, aimlessly rifling through the socks for something to do with his hands. “So. Quit your job?”

There's a brief pause, as if Ian's trying to determine whether Mickey's trying to start something again, and whether or not to strike first with a snarky reply. In the end he settles for a soft exhalation and,  “Yep. Tried to make me to work for free through my lunch break.”

He'd told Mickey as much already, at the Alibi. Hadn't gone so good, so this time Mickey tries for a different response: “Fuck 'em. We'll be fine 'til you find something else. Too good for that fucking place anyway.”

Another pause, long enough that Mickey turns from his fumbling with the socks to look at his husband. Ian's staring down at his book, mouth opening and closing a few times, like he's on the edge of saying something but then thinks better of it.

“Yeah,” he mutters at long last. “Don't know that I am anymore. Bipolar ex-convict in the worst economy in fucking lifetime? Not seeing a lot of options for me here.” Before Mickey has time to think of an appropriate response to that Ian's eyes darts to his face; darts away just as quickly. “Manager called me a little bitch.”

Oh. Okay. Yeah. Fuck.

Moving over to the bed, Mickey sits down on the edge of it. “That manager's a fucking idiot. The hell does he know? That's bullshit.”

Ian lifts his head at that, looking at Mickey with something that might be hope tempered with wary skepticism, and a hint of challenge. “Really?”

Mickey meets his gaze without flinching; holds it for a moment. “Yeah, man. Bet that asshole knew you could break him in half without breaking a sweat, that's why he's spouting stupid fucking stupid shit like that.”

A beat, to let that sink in, and then Mickey allows his lips curl into a grin, pulling his legs up on the bed to crawl over to Ian and crowd him: “'Cause you know you're the toughest motherfucker on the South Side, so big and so strong and so manly.” He reaches out to squeeze Ian's left bicep for emphasis.

“You're a dick.” But Ian doesn't pull away and he's starting to smile, as Mickey hoped he would; it's in his eyes first, softening and a glimmer, and then it's on his lips, growing wider.

Mickey feels his own grin grow wider too, as something in his chest loosens and lets up.

“Yeah?” he asks, eyebrows suggestively raised as he, ignoring the dull protest of his aching ribs, leans in to let his lips brush over Ian's in a not-quite-a-kiss. “Whatcha gonna do about it, huh? Gonna bend me over and pound me so hard I fucking scream? Gonna make me beg for your... your big, fat cock?”

Ian tilts his head to the side, brow furrowed in faux affront. “You calling my dick fat?”

“Think I've got the right to, Tim Kruger, I've choked on it enough times.”

A snort of surprised laughter and then Ian's hand is on the back of his head, pulling him in for a kiss that is hard and hungry and coming home. Mickey shifts to straddle his thighs, their lips never parting, and fuck, it's just been a few days but it's been too fucking long.

It goes on for some time; Ian's arms around him, fingers scratching against his scalp; Mickey's hands running up and down Ian's sides, as they kiss and they kiss and they kiss.

At long last, with a long sigh, Ian pulls back a little, his eyes searching Mickey's as he runs a thumb over his cheek.

“You want me to do that?” he asks after a moment, and there's just the faintest note of uncertainty in his voice.

Mickey doesn't like it. He doesn't want Ian to be uncertain about him, about them, ever. But he bites down on the urge to bristle. Takes a deep breath. “Do what?”

“Bend you over.” A tentative, lopsided smile. “Make you beg”

Ah. “Ain't never said no to that shit before, Gallagher.” How the hell is that even a question?  Okay, there'd been this morning, kind of, and maybe a few times when they just started fucking and he had issues and things got a little too intense or whatever, and he's not so much for the actual begging, but in general, Mickey's never been opposed to Ian getting a little – or a lot – decisive with him.

Least not as long as he doesn't make him feel lesser than for liking it that way.

“Mm.” Ian nods, but he doesn't lean back in to resume the kiss. Instead he reaches out to run his hand over Mickey's thigh, idly, and with a pensive look on his face.

Mickey very, very badly wants to tell him that now that that's cleared up maybe you could get on with it but he's determined not to be (too much of) an asshole tonight; to be patient. He waits, and eventually Ian looks up. The uncertainty has seemingly fled; the look in his green eyes is calm once more, and direct:

“So just to be clear: you're not exclusively a top now?”

“What? Hell no.” Mickey makes a face, genuinely taken aback by the notion, but then he shrugs. “Doesn't mean I'd mind switching it up once in a while, though. We've tried all kinds of new shit after we got married, figured it might be fun to try that too.” He pauses, chewing his lip. “Thought you'd be cool with it.”

Ian smiles, reaching out to give a playful little tug to Mickey's hair. “Give me some warning next time and I will be.” Abruptly, his smile turns devilish. “After all, how could I resist such a stunning embodiment of pure masculine prowess?”

Mickey's eyes widen. Oh. Uh-huh. All right then.

“I dunno,” he says, pushing hard for feigned thoughfulness even as he pushes his ass down on Ian's groin, wiggling just a little. “Seems like six pack-packing, strong-willed, stoic soldier boy like you could resist just about anything.”

Ian's quiet laugher is cut short by a sharp intake of breath as Mickey leans in to nip at his ear. “Even a – ah – man-swole hardass?”

“Yeah, 'cause you're such a top dog alpha male.“

“Ultra super power bottom.“

“Fierce and ruthless devastator of assholes.”

“Yeah, asshole is right... Ow! Okay, you're going down … you big manly boss man.“

---

If there is a moment, quite some time later, when they're both happy and spent and relaxing in each other's arms –

If there is a moment, when Ian's eyes stray to the bruises on on Mickey's side, and if he reaches out to let his fingers brush over them in the whisper of a touch, if a shadow passes over his face –

Mickey will catch his hand and bring it up to his lips to press a quick kiss to it.

“Looks worse than it is,” he will say and Ian's lips will twist, in rueful smile or grimace or both:

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Bastard who jumped me hits like a fucking - “ Mickey will break off and make a disgusted face. “Hits like a... a... a fucking weak person. Jesus Christ. Fucking V.”

Ian will chuckle. A bit weakly, perhaps, still a little lost to the lingering memories of the afternoon, but he will chuckle. Will pull Mickey closer to him, carefully; push his nose to his hair and breathe him in. “I love you.”

And Mickey will smile. “Mm. I know. Love you, too.”

---

A/N: Listen, I don't begrudge anyone engaging in bad dirty talk if that's what gets them going, but I didn't really expect it for Ian and Mickey. I guess this is my attempt to wed what we saw in mid-credits scene to my already established perception of the characters. Oh, and I have a kink for understated reconciliation so there was no way in hell I wouldn't jump on this. XD That also means I want to read ALL THE FIC written on this topic, so if you write/see any, please let me know?

Tim Kruger is a gay porn star with a huge dick, btw. I know this because I googled "gay porn star huge dick". I have some regrets.

[howtolistentomusic]

Dear people that think the Goodwill wants to sell your Ziploc baggie of used crayons: it doesn’t. That shit goes directly into the trash, right on top of your broken furniture. Surely you mean well when you donate, say, an old dresser with a busted leg. But good intentions can’t magically transform a ragtag crew of temp agency employees into proper handymen. 

If, however, you need an informed opinion on one of those homemade mixtapes that sometimes find their way into the warehouse, I might be your man. 

Once upon a time I managed to con my way into the world of online music writing. As one might expect from a blogger haughty & naive enough to write under the banner How to Listen to Music, many of my insights have aged terribly. But I was constantly learning from the best critics, journalists and bloggers in the field and HtLtM was gaining steam before my fragile discipline collapsed under the weight of increasing visibility. I still believe deeply in the merits of the template I created to analyze songs on Youtube, which was unlike anything on the internet before or since. Maura Johnston seemed to like it, at least. 

And yet I failed miserably at turning these creative endeavors into a sustainable career. So here I am, handling donations at my local Goodwill warehouse for minimum wage. Today old man Kenneth and I are inside the container, which is the detachable part of a freight truck the drivers dump on the dock for the roll-off team to unload. We’re placing the donations on the open edge for the guys outside to grab and toss into gaylords. Yes, the thick cardboard boxes with an open top we place on pallets to store donations in are called gaylords. And yes, my coworkers think this is hilarious. Death, taxes, and “they’re calling you!” from one roll-off laborer to another every time the term is overheard. 

***

“You dropped this,” Kenneth says as he hands me a crate of CDs. 

“If there’s no Justin Bieber, it’s not mine.” I say.

“You better cut that shit out!” David says. 

“He’s joking,” Donald tells David. 

I laugh.

“I know you!” Donald says.

“Dude, I’m a poptimist.”

“A what?“ 

Let’s start by pointing out that it’s a hell of a lot easier to be an "authentic” artist, as a certain orthodoxy of criticism dictates one should be, when your very existence isn’t under constant attack. You’re in luck, straight white dudes! Again. What a coincidence. 

Poptimism basically says nay! to all the noise. The Beatles go to Jupiter to get more stupider. Gaga goes to Mars to get more candy bars. Or college, I suppose, if your childhood sucked.

“It means I listen to pop.” Among many other genres, to be very clear. “Top 40. All the stuff you guys probably hate.”

“Bullshit!” Donald says.

I don’t know who he thinks I am but it’s clearly someone much, much cooler. 

“I thought you were smart!” David says.

“Am I no longer smart if I listen to Justin Bieber?”

“Nope!” says Kenneth.

“Oh shut up!” I say to the grizzled geezer. “Go jack off to Creedence.” 

“I’d rather get gang banged by CCR than listen to that little homo.”

You heard it here first. Listening to Justin Bieber: gayer than being gay!

“Really? Justin Bieber?” David says. “Wow. You think you know a guy.”

“Any recommendations?”

“Marvin Gaye! Stevie Wonder! James Brown!”

What’s Going On. Songs in the Key of Life. Think. These are all stone cold classics. I have a healthy respect for these artists but they aren’t in my regular rotation.

“Those guys are before my time. If we move up a few decades, I’m totally there. New Edition, Boyz II Men, Soul 4 Real …”

“Now we’re talking!”

“Bieber’s better though.”

David throws up his arms in wild exasperation, as if his favorite sports team just botched an important play. He doesn’t seem to understand that I’m trolling him.

To be clear, I do indeed listen to Justin Bieber’s music. “Baby” is catchy as hell, and the song’s DNA can be heard in other notable pop releases from the era such as Katy Perry’s blockbuster Teenage Dream and internet darling Carly Rae Jepsen’s Kiss. I also like “Never Say Never” if only for hearing Jaden Smith say “No pun intended / was raised by the power of WIll.” And for an album created by a former child star falling apart at the seams, Purpose has no business being as good as it is. Stand-out track “Love Yourself” contains the immortal roast “My momma don’t like you and she likes everyone.” And with its heavy utilization of short, staccato notes and sudden, dramatic rests, the song is my favorite example of a distinct style of guitar playing favored by many male musicians. Such “cool pauses” give these songs a slightly broken, incomplete feel that mirrors the artist’s self-assured “deal with it” tone and I love it.

Even Carlos, my arch enemy, likes “Love Yourself”. A while back we were inside the warehouse creating pallets of our best furniture to be sent to proper Goodwill retail locations. Supervisor Anna miraculously felt like hearing some contemporary hits that day and had the building’s three radios tuned to Live 105.5, our local top 40 station. “Love Yourself” played. 

“This is Bieber’s only good song,” Carlos told me. He tried to sing along but quickly lost the words. “Sing it!” he said. “I know you know it!” 

I wasn’t sure if I should be offended by being stereotyped or impressed by his accuracy. Nonetheless, it was true! I did know the words! I picked up where he left off.

”‘Cause if you like the way you look that much / Oh baby you should go and love yourself / And if you think that I’m still holdin’ on to somethin’ / You should go and love yourself.“ 

It wasn’t a particularly strong vocal performance but Carlos, somehow, was awed. 

“Daaaaaaamn!” he cooed. It was perhaps the only time I ever impressed him.

Carlos, in case it wasn’t clear, is an asshole. He’s the type of open misogynist that progressives, in our insulated internet bubbles, are shocked to realize still exist. My masculinity isn’t up to par with his standards and he likes to torture me because of it.

Carlos is off today but there’s a small part of me that wishes he was here. He’d have no trouble buying the fact that I listen to Justin Bieber. At the same time, I know I need to be careful. After all, Bieber is far from my favorite musician. But I can’t help it. Playing Bieleber is such a fun and easy way to rile up my coworkers.

“You need a lesson in quality, my boy!” David says.

“I’m all ears!” I say, but he just shrugs.

If I wanted to be really mean, I could point out that David just might be the true Bieleber in roll-off. See, David the Bieber-hating quality expert is the same David that sometimes drops me off at the bus station after our shift ends. More than once on these trips, a Justin Bieber song played on the radio. Did he change the station? Nope! 

David seems to be harboring a lot of hate for a musician whose songs he doesn’t even recognize. This doesn’t surprise me, of course, because Bieber hate is barely about Justin Bieber.

Leonardo DiCaprio. Robert Pattinson. Zac Efron. Boy bands. The Biebs. Celebrities like these are cut from the same cloth in that they’re overwhelmingly attractive in a way that draws ravenous, predominantly female fanbases. In turn, this provokes intense contempt and ridicule from traditional dudes everywhere. This is bullshit. It’s retaliation against open female desire that, in an affront to their entitlement, isn’t directed towards Man McAverage.

Evoking “quality” is no exemption from these kinds of considerations. Many people treat the word as if it’s an objective and universal set of standards everyone intuitively understands but this is nonsense. Quality is more like a self-shaped hole we attempt to carve into the world, both encompassing and reproducing our ideals, desires, prejudices, etc. It sure as hell doesn’t explain itself.

I’ve been immersed in the world of music writing for a long time. My favorite publications tend to be ones that upend the very idea of quality. The Singles Jukebox gathers a variety of writers to weigh in and score the same song, and reading wildly different takes on what makes art good or bad is enlightening. One Week // One Band achieves something similar by inviting a different writer (sometimes a professional, sometimes not so much) to take over the blog for a seven-day deep dive into a musician they love, with “no rules and no canon” dictating who that musician can be. And then there was Hipster Runoff, the defunct but brilliant meta exploration of taste and identity that often delved into the ingredients of quality that we don’t like to talk about. 

I think I ‘like’ them because they are differentiated from 'traditional music’ and 'modern indie music.’ When I listen to them, I exist on a higher plane of musical appreciation and consume products for 'all the right reasons.’

- Carles, the voice of Hipster Runoff, on Animal Collective

Quality shouldn’t be a Get Out of Bullying Your Co-Worker Free card. But after a lifetime of living with what is often considered bad taste, I’ve learned to be on the offensive just in case.

Try harder, fuckers.

[ecocore]

FUCKING PANSIES:

Queer Poetics, Plant Reproduction, Plant Poetics, Queer Reproduction

Caspar Heinemann

with images from Lee Pivnik

‘Waking, I was certain my room was host to a demon; terrified, I watched the remorseless eyes in the half light, till dawn gave me the courage to bolt shivering with fear to my parents’ bed. My father laughed: ‘Don’t be such a pansy, Derek.’ -Derek Jarman, Modern Nature

Don’t be such a pansy, Viola tricolor, violet, heart’s-ease, love-in-idleness; Pansy goes by many names, and many names fit into and fall under ‘Don’t be such a pansy, _______.’ Don’t be such a pansy, even if there’s a remorseless demon in your room, crouching in the dark, ready to tear you apart. Even if there’s a whole remorseless world out there, even in your parents’ bedroom, ready and waiting to tear you apart.

The pansy has remained a staple in anti-queer lexicon since the last century, the humble violet symbolising weakness, effeminacy, all things effete, wimpy, and generally flowery. Propagating alongside its siblings sissy, fairy, and faggot, the pansy is a resilient flower. However, its roots as an insult are not strictly horticultural. The etymology of pansy (flower) is the French pensée, the past tense of ‘to think’, and a feminine reflexive. This occurred when, in a dubious feat of anthropomorphising, the pansy was seen to resemble a person leant over in intense contemplation, which in turn led to it becoming a symbol of remembrance. As an insult, it was applied to the ineffectual intellectual, implying an emasculating failure to embody a forceful, active, masculine ideal. The quality of thoughtfulness was already both feminized and feminizing, but the first known use of the word to describe gay men was not until 1925 (Partridge, 1984).[1] At some point along the way, the studious pensée became the flamboyant pansy, the femininity of the insult taking precedence over any other qualities. With ‘pansy’ having no non-floral meaning in English, in popular usage any association with remembrance is forgotten. The intellectual intellectual basis of the insult becomes obscured through time and translation and all that we are left with is the ontological relation of a human subject to the Viola tricolor itself, and the vague sense that there is something not right in the boy who thinks too much, looks too closely.

When the insult ‘pansy’ is thrown, there exists the obvious implication that the victim is themselves, physically, a pansy. But alongside this, to be a pansy is most likely to also be someone with an affinity for pansies, someone who would rather draw flowers in the garden than kick a ball around, a boy who would rather have a bunch of arum lilies than a brace of pistols (Jarman, 1992, p28). Being a pansy is seen as both a cause and an effect of an underlying affection for the delicate, the pretty, and the decorative. Pansies love pansies because they are pansies, which is why they are pansies. The love of pansies is a red flag on the slippery slope to becoming a pansy, and the pansy is a pansy because pansy is the word for people who love pansies. This is not an intentional morphing, but rather, after all those hours in the garden someone turns and says ‘Don’t be such a pansy’, and then there is a demon in your room, and it is clear a pansy is a bad thing to be, which is strange to consider for someone who loves pansies, but lots of things are going to be strange from now on.

The homophobia of the insult pansy is not just the implication of effeminacy from association with the flower itself, but the homophobic condemnation of perceived sameness. The pansies love of pansies is taboo in part because they are a pansy, there is no heterosexual difference in pansy desire. However, the pansy-pansy identification is not the same as Narcissus falling in love with his own image, not the egocentric self-adoration of the daffodil leaning into the pond. The pansy is intensely relational and curious, and loves other pansies (and daffodils and geraniums and buttercups and snowdrops). Remember, the pansy becomes a pansy through perceived similarity and/or attachment to other pansies. The initial recognition was with something they were yet to become. In this way, pansy is inherently a collective identity, inhabiting a multiple temporality. To clarify, this is not an essentialist argument that all pansies like pansies, as in, ‘all people perceived as queer men like Viola tricolor.’ But rather, that its formulation as a generalised homophobic insult, potentially applied to any queer man, or any person read as such, means that ‘queer men like queer men’ (uncontroversial) can be read as ‘pansies like pansies’. The collision of this meaning, with the horticultural association, begins to create a framework for a positive understanding of queerness, reproduction, survival and the natural.

As with many anti-queer insults, an underlying assumption in pansy is that there is an unnaturalness to effeminacy, that it signifies something gone astray that would never thrive or even survive in the state of nature, a rupture in the normatively gendered Arcadian ideal. The pansy clearly cannot be a real man, because he is a flower, and flowers are not men, and men are not flowers. But even the most ardent homophobe would find it hard to argue that flowers are not ‘natural’, even in all their selectively bred garden centre glory. Whilst not wanting to perpetuate the myth of queer sex as inherently unreproductive, it is important to not deny that queerness still exists with a turbulent relationship to reproduction, in the biological sense. At the heart of this is the existence of queerness in relation to a medicalised discourse that understands the queer subject in terms of biology, in a way that is inherently naturalised, assuming queerness as something to be located in genes and hormones, glands and chromosomes.

This is not a form of acceptance or understanding, but rather a naturalisation that implies a failure, a departure from the script of healthy, normative heterosexuality and gender. When the queer body is accepted as a natural form, it is always a defective natural body, an abnormality that reinforces the norm. Homophobic and transphobic discourse has adopted this position in recent years, in reaction to the realisation that an understanding of the queer body as unnatural has the unintended consequence of devaluing any biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality, rendering the cisgender heterosexual body equally unnatural.[2] In reference to the earlier (and still present) form of anti-queer rhetoric Greta Gaard (1997) points out the irony that when homophobes use the argument that to be queer is to be against nature, they are insinuating that they care about ‘nature’, which is rarely the case. This is especially true for people coming from a fundamentalist Christian theological perspective in which man’s dominion over nature is central. She writes that ‘in effect, the "nature" queers are urged to comply with is none other than the dominant paradigm of heterosexuality.’ Nature becomes a weaponised synonym for reproduction, and everything that does not directly contribute to the survival of a the species becomes an affront.

As much as the queer is being called a flower, the flower is being called a queer. As much as the pansy lends its prettiness to the queer subject, the queer subject lends their effeminacy to the pansy. Although this could be read as a reductive anthropomorphising, there is also the potential for something else if the relationship is not read as one-way mapping of human characteristics onto flowers, but also flower characteristics onto humans, with implications for the agency of both. Gaard asks us to think not only in terms of the dualisms traditionally associated with conversations around gender, race, and nature, but the ‘vertical’ associations, ‘between reason and heterosexuality, for example, or between reason and whiteness as defined in opposition to emotions and nonwhite persons […] the ways queers are feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized in a culture that devalues women, animals, nature, and sexuality […] how persons of color are feminized, animalized, eroticized, and naturalized. Finally, we can explore how nature is feminized, eroticized, even queered’ (1997). Taking this as a call to arms, there is the potential for a queer identification with what is termed ‘nature’ to have positive political implications not just for queerness, but for a wider ecological and social struggles.

When read against a binary understanding of human reproduction, flowers are inherently queer. This is not a modish application of the term ‘queer’ to anything remotely ‘strange’, divorced from its roots as a slur or any analysis of human sexuality and gender, but rather a comparative statement about human understanding of gendered bodies across species.[3] While the term ‘queer’ is referring to a very specifically human (and mostly white, Western) subjects navigation of a social world, it is also inaccurate to think of plants (and other species) as exempt from and untouched by this discourse. Given the prevalence of anthropocentrism, the reading of gender in plants inevitably reverberates and affects human understanding of human gender, and the reverse. As well as not wanting to make an anthropocentric imposition onto plants, I also want to avoid essentialising queerness in humans. To borrow from Nicole Seymour, I do not want to ‘claim that queer individuals necessarily have a particular kind of relationship to the non-human; [but focus] primarily on the queer relationships that humans might develop with the non-human, and how environmental ethics might emerge from queer practices and perspectives’ (2013, p29). I would add to this an investment in thinking through how queer ethics might emerge from environmental practices and perspectives. The queer anarchist collective Baedan define queer as ‘the inherent decomposition which afflicts gender […]; not this or that historically constituted subject category, but all the divergent bodily and spiritual expressions which escape their roles’ (2014). Rather than a positive, universalising usage of queer, queer is a contingency. I hope the clumsiness of attempting to talk about how plants fuck spills over, somehow, into somewhere productive (or unproductive).

The number of scientifically validated genders for plants far exceeds those commonly understood and accepted for humans. At the most basic level, single flowers are either male, female, or bisexual (also referred to as ‘perfect’, hermaphroditic or androgynous). However, categories proliferate due to the fact that different plants grow different combinations of male, female, or bisexual flowers. This does not mean that all species have male, female, and bisexual flowers - it is possible for plants to only have either bisexual or female flowers, for example. This is complicated further by the fact that in some species, the flowers will change gender. It is important to clarify here that when we are talking about plant gender, we are potentially discussing at three different scales - the gender of an individual flower, the gender of an individual plant, and the morphology of the species as a whole, all of which determine each other. Although obviously not directly translatable, these multiple scales of plant gender provide a nuanced and useful framework for thinking through human gender, in that we are always referring to a complicated enmeshment of biological sex, individual identity, collective identity and socially enforced role, none of which can be considered independently of one another.[4]

To avoid reducing the link between the flower body and the queer body to being purely to do with reproduction in a mechanical and biological sense, it is important to think though the specificity of the situation. For one thing, many species have reproductive practices entirely contrary to the ideals of human monogamous heterosexuality.[5] For another, the conceptual reduction of reproduction to a process of sexual reproduction and the continuation of a species is profoundly anti-queer, both in a literal and abstract sense. There is clearly a specificity to flowers that has led to the association with queerness, beyond ‘flowers are not straight and have multiple genders’. Whether or not explicitly acknowledged, research and discoveries into non-human lifeforms are always embroiled in human social questions, both in process in terms of methodology, and in their consequences and applications. In their essay Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters, Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers begin to explore this tension between botany and ideology. They write of Charles Darwin’s flower experiments, and his downplaying of the evolutionary role of self-pollination (reproduction by an individual plant possessing male and female reproductive organs) in favour of cross-fertilisation (reproduction by two plants, via insects) which was seen to be necessary for the survival of ‘higher organic beings’. Hustak and Myers write, ‘Orchids, it turns out, were caught in a queer interspecies assemblage that disrupted normative Victorian sexualities and species boundaries’ (2012, p82). Flowers must be kept at arms length to prevent them from contaminating human sexual norms, but the mapping of those norms onto the flowers becomes necessary to attempt to rationalise what is found when those flowers are not kept at arms length.[6] The flower is constantly indexed onto human sexuality and yet remains impossible to entirely understand within or assimilate into a human heterosexual framework.

CAConrad is a queer poet who for several years has been working with what he refers to as ‘soma(tic) rituals’, ritualised bodily practices which he completes and then writes from his experiences of. One of these is called Security Cameras and Flowers Dreaming the Elevation Allegiance (For Susie Timmons). CA describes his frustration at the prevalence of security cameras in his home city of Philadelphia (‘FUCK YOU WATCHING US ALWAYS!!’). The ritual resistance he describes involves taking a basket of edible flowers to the scene (‘I eat pansies, I LOVE pansies, they’re delicious buttery purple lettuce!!’). He then looks directly into the camera and proceeds to place his tongue in the flower ‘in and out, flicking, licking, suckling blossoms.’ When confronted by a security guard he responds ‘I’M A POLLINATOR, I’M A POLLINATOR!!’ As soon as it is declared, it becomes obvious that of course he is, undeniably, a pollinator. Despite not being able to facilitate the actual reproduction of the plants, due to species constraints, the small act of resistance towards the security cameras becomes an act of potential pollination, a pollination of politics and ideas and poetry and joy, both a self-pollination and a cross-pollination.[7] The security cameras that CA is resisting are a part of an ecosystem, and he uses his agency as a being within that ecosystem to make a somatic and semiotic intervention against a mode of biopolitical control.

In CA engaging in a sexualised public ritual with flowers, there is also an implied parody of straight anxieties around queer sexuality, such as the argument that legalising gay marriage is a slippery slope towards people being allowed to marry their dogs. Apart from the obvious association of queerness with animality and the non-human, these anxieties are often explicitly or implicitly predicated on the notion that all unreproductive sexual practices are on some level unethical, prioritising pleasure over the continuation of the species. CA’s pollinator intervention gains another dimension when understood in terms of certain species of orchids that have the ability to attract pollinators without a material prize (nectar), but purely on the basis of their imitation of insect sex pheromones, attracting insects on the basis of desire, rather than physical sustenance.

In Animacies, Mel Y. Chen discusses linguistic animacy hierarchies, the way in which language is used to assign different levels of agency to matter, both living and non-living. In English, firmly at the top is the white male subject, everything else placed on a scale somewhere between him and a rock, or other perceived as wholly inactive matter. The argument is that to be compared to anything lower down inherently operates as an insult, in that it implies loss of agency, which is then linked to intelligence, ability, value, and social standing. Chen asks us, ‘If language normally and habitually distinguishes human and inhuman, live and dead, but then in certain circumstances wholly fails to do so, what might this tell us about the porosity of biopolitical logics themselves?’ (Chen, 2012, p7). What are the implications when a being higher up the animacy hierarchy (a human) chooses to align themselves with a ‘lower’ being (for example an insect pollinator)? The act of solidarity both implies a rejection of the value system which places life forms on such a hierarchy, attempting to level the playing field, and recognising how in certain situations it can be desirable to disassociate from the expectations associated with being ‘human’. The situating of ‘homo sapiens’ as something that can be disidentified with and opted out of, rather than a taxonomical fact, finds affinity with Giorgio Agamben’s assertion that ‘Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human’ (2003, p26). In addition to active verbal identification with other non-human agents, In The Greenhouse by Veronica Forrest-Thomson highlights how simply the experience of embodied encounter with the non-human can render taxonomies feeling arbitrary and redundant:

The silent rhythm of pulsating pores

filling my lungs with filtered earth

is all I feel or know of alien shapes

that once were flowers.

I breathe their breath

until all definitions are dissolved,

and homo sapiens is nothing more to me.

Perhaps less aligned with Agamben’s definition, these lines find more affinity with Karen Barad’s position that ‘“Humans” are neither pure cause or pure effect but part of the world in its openended becoming’ (2003, 821). Acts of Youth by the late queer poet John Wieners provides another instance of flower-consumption as symbolic of freedom from oppressive power structures.[8] He writes:

The fear of travelling, of the future without hope

or buoy. I must get away from this place and see

that there is no fear without me: that it is within

unless it be some sudden act or calamity

to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without

memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If

I could just get out of the country. Some place

where one can eat the lotus in peace.

Give me the strength

to bear it, to enter those places where the

great animals are caged. And we can live

at peace by their side.

‘Some place where one can eat the lotus in peace’ is presented as the ultimate sanctuary from the fear and violence of his world, both inner and outer. Flower-eating operates as a literal form of, and metaphor for, spiritual survival precisely because of the low nutritional value of flowers, especially when compared to their high symbolic value. To eat a flower is to aesthetically nourish the body. Eating the lotus in peace is to embody a form of consumption not predicated on a violent conquest, but a gentle taking in of the other into the self, a pleasurable participation in an affective-aesthetic ecology. Wieners desire to live at peace by the side of the great animals in their cages demonstrates an identification with the feral and a siding with the non-human over the human (for who put the animals in cages?). But it is perhaps telling that even in the potentially limitless space of poetics, Wieners chooses to live with caged animals. Trans poet Verity Spott ends her piece Against Trans* Manifestos (2015) with the lines: ‘Determined as it is by a start and a finish, a false double, something that contains at least five harmonic falsities on a liberal map of social reality. Perhaps this is why we have a fetish involving cages; everything impossible to communicate.’ Read against this, Wieners collective desire (‘we’) to live with caged animals becomes a recognition of the contingency of pleasure, and of the description of pleasure as itself a form of caging, and how agency can be enacted whilst being trapped ‘inside’.[9] There is also the issue of temporality within cages, and to what extent temporality is defined by a sense of history and progress, necessarily implying movement and action. Hustak and Myers identify the stationary nature of plants as part of the reason they are placed near the bottom of ‘hierarchies that identify outward motion and action as signs of agency’ (80). This has resonance with the origins of pansy as an insult, as rooted in an notion of thoughtfulness and introspection as effeminate and inferior to active, assertive masculinity. In Our Lady of The Flowers Jean Genet describes the gender identity of the character Divine:

‘Her femininity was not only a masquerade. But as for thinking woman completely, her organs hindered her. To think is to perform an act. In order to act, you have to discard frivolity and set your idea on a solid base. So she was aided by the idea of solidity, which she associated with the idea of virility, and it was in grammar that she found it near at hand. For if, to define a state of mind that she felt, Divine dared use the feminine, she was unable to do so in defining an action which she performed. And all the ‘woman’ judgments she made were, in reality, poetic conclusions.’ (1988, p176)

Solidity and action are associated with the masculine, but this is complicated by the assertion that ‘to think is to perform an act.’ Divine dares to use feminine pronouns for her states of mind, but not in defining her actions. If thinking is an action, then ‘state of mind’ has to be referring to something other than thoughts. The ‘‘woman’ judgements’ she made, which are emphatically not thoughts, are ‘poetic conclusions’. The distinction between active masculine ‘thoughts’ and feminine ‘states of mind’ and ‘poetic conclusions’ is that in order to act, ‘you have to discard frivolity and set your idea on a solid base.’ Solidity and virility are found in grammar, and therefore poetic language is disqualified from the realm of ‘thinking’ due to its frivolity and instability. Its exclusion from thinking as a masculine exercise, outside of solidity and grammar and certainty, means that poetry is in a unique position to express possibilities and potentials outside of dominant thought.

In an essay entitled The Queer Voice: Reparative Poetry Rituals & Glitter Perversions CAConrad describes the somatic rituals he performed to write poetry and attempt to heal himself from the trauma of the homophobic murder of his boyfriend, Earth. One of these rituals results in a dream, where CA finds himself in a garden with Earth, although they do not meet human face to human face. In the garden Earth communicates with CA through flowers who explain to him the difficulty of Earth’s time on earth, acting as prophets from the spirit world whilst remaining entirely grounded in earth and syntax. CA explains that the flowers did not speak with mouths, but ‘their centers mashed up and down as they told me [Earth] could not see me now because he was busy repairing.’ In German the phrase ‘Durch die Blume Gesprochen’, literally ‘spoken through a flower’, means to subtly hint at something without giving away all the details, a minor verbal obfuscation to soften blows or gently allude to an issue. In English, there is ‘flowery language’, with some similar implications and an added air of assumed affectation and pretension (remember the origins of ‘pansy’?). There is also the Latin phrase ‘sub rosa’, literally meaning ‘under the rose’ and used to indicate secrecy and confidentiality. Flowers are seen as untruthful, dishonest in their embodiment, as hiding something under their opulent exteriors. However, in CA’s prophet-flowers the exact opposite is the case, the flowers are messengers of the deepest, most vital truths.

In common parlance there is something in the overtly elaborate and ornate that becomes read as at best wasteful, and at worst deceitful. As a bridge between morphology and semiotics, Georges Bataille colludes with this perspective in The Language of Flowers when he writes, ‘Thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty; if one tears off all of the corolla's petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft.’ (Bataille, 1985, p12) The flowers insides are seen as a betrayal of its exterior form, despite that exterior form existing partially for the purpose of attracting insects to the interior. Whilst admitting that some flowers (again, orchids) possess ‘elegant’ stamens, for Bataille this beauty is ‘satanic’, and ‘one is tempted to attribute to them the most troubling human perversions.’ (12) It feels redundant to say that flowers are sexualised, in the sense that they are literally reproductive organs. To be more specific, the sexualisation of flowers is both a cause and consequence of their status as feminine. Bataille makes this misogyny explicit, going on to state that once flowers die, they do not age ‘honestly’ like leaves, but wither like ‘old and overly made-up dowagers.’ (12) Flowers are singled out for their aesthetic qualities, objectified for their external beauty, and reduced to their reproductive function, a feminised position. Simultaneously, they are seen as performing in excess of that role, of being too flamboyant and melodramatic for the task at hand, their beauty seen as a form of deception and trickery. In addition to the obvious analogy with women under patriarchy, this mistrust on the basis of perceived inauthenticity and frivolity also has resonance with a queer position.

To deal first with inauthenticity, I want to suggest that the treatment of artifice as falsification and dishonesty is a feature of straight culture, with little relevance to most queer people. Despite the limitations and dangers of this kind of essentialising, there are material issues at hand. For example, for trans people there is often the sense that an external presentation that could be perceived from the outside to be inauthentic is in fact the most honest expression of their inner selves, and many queer people must keep their desires or certain aspects of their lives internal, or at least restrict who has knowledge of them. To exist as queer in the world requires a certain amount of ‘speaking through flowers’, acknowledging the impossibility and possible undesirability of an entirely transparent existence. Michel Foucault in A History of Sexuality describes the transition from sodomy as a practice into the homosexual as a subject position, ‘a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology […] [sexuality] written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away’ (1978, p43). The assumed knowability of the queer body through its naming as such, and that naming giving rise to the presumption of a specific sexual morphology, provides some context for the ambivalent relationship of many queer people to visibility and representation. Speaking through flowers could be a mode of engagement simultaneously flaunting and obscuring one’s ‘indiscreet anatomy’, operating as a form of resistance to and avoidance of biopolitical control, a tactic of conscious illegibility and subterfuge.

A concept closely related to inauthenticity is unnaturalness, both related to the idea that there is a true form that is being betrayed. When Bataille talks of being tempted to attribute to flowers ‘the most troubling human perversions’ it becomes clear that despite falling under the rubric of what is commonly referred to as ‘nature’, the sexuality of flowers is only tenuously perceived as natural. Timothy Morton describes nature as a ‘transcendental term in a material mask’, and the end of a potentially infinite metonymic list: ‘fish, grass, mountain air, chimpanzees, love, soda water, freedom of choice, heterosexuality, free markets…Nature’ (2009, p14). When we accept that there is no actual criteria for naturalness, apart from vague essentialist subjective perception, there is the awkward reality that if something is described as unnatural then it is unnatural, inasmuch as something becomes natural through the same process. As flowers are often read as suspiciously unnatural, they are in some sense are. The unnaturalness of flowers has to do with excess, which is to say wastefulness, which is to say floweriness. To be natural is to fit into a straight human logic of heterosexual reproduction, whether through direct participation or resemblance to the model, to refuse this demand is to be against nature. It is here that both queers and flowers fall through the cracks.

Historically, a large element of what we now refer to as ‘homophobia’ was religiously grounded in the Christian belief that any sexual practices not entirely related procreation were a sin, as they were wasteful of semen. There is an association therefore between queerness and wastefulness, as well as refusal of sexual reproduction, leading to a queer understanding of the necessity of what has been deemed trivial and non-essential, a celebration of earthly pleasures, and a respect for the temporary and fleeting. Nicole Seymour suggests there is something ‘admirable’ and ‘thrillingly ironic’ in queer environmentalism, ‘that those with a foreclosed relationship to “the future” in heteronormative terms would be deeply concerned about the future in ecological terms’ (2012, p63). In In A Queer Time & Place Jack Halberstam makes the argument for queer time as operating within a different logic from straight time, writing that ‘queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience-namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (2005, p2). Halberstam ties this specifically to the AIDS crisis, making links with Lee Edelman’s argument for queer anti-futurity (2004). Despite how it is sometimes characterised, this is not a case of ‘positive’ versus ‘negative’ models of queerness, because in theorising anti-futurity as a feature of queerness Edelman betrays a desire for some sense of ‘queer’ as a meaningful, and ultimately positive (by some definition), cohesion. Neel Ahuja argues ‘we might thus benefit from thinking more broadly about reproduction than Edelman does, recognizing that bodies and atmospheres reproduce through complex forms of socio-ecological entanglement.’ Without wanting to reinforce ‘repro-centric’ discourse, I would argue in parallel that what is taking place in queer culture is not a refusal of reproduction, but a cultural, which is to say unnatural, reproduction based on something other than the straight nuclear family unit.[10]

In a soma(tic) ritual entitled Suspension Fluid Magnificence (For Samuel R. Delaney & Stephen Boyer) CA describes approaching men on the street and requesting that they rate their semen on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being ‘thin and creamy’ and 5 being ‘cottage cheese.’ He describes this as an attempt to think through ‘how wilderness is memorised in the body’, looking for men to ‘step up to the quiet, feral interior.’ Dealing explicitly with the materiality of biological reproduction, CA does not dismiss the power or significance of semen but rather thinks through how it retains this power and significance as an aesthetic, semiotic, and social material. He writes ‘Semen is fascinating […] The orgasm the flash of light reconnecting to the original proliferation of cells and the construction of sensate flesh, which is a very marvellous thing, being here, all of us.’ In what could have easily been a glorification of straight reproduction CA manages to create an inclusive networked cosmology, a glorification of pleasure and the animistic power of sensate flesh, the wonder of being here, all of us, but no dads. #nodads was a meme originating in 2012 from ultraleft circles on Twitter. Being a meme, its meaning was variable and plural, however the central theme was rejection of the father figure in his oppressive patriarchal role, but equally in more paternalistic caring capacities. In his analysis of the meme Aaron Bady describes it as ‘a rejection of the category [of dad] itself—and of the manner in which it comes to seem a higher order category than many others—it doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with actual dads, but only by the sociological matrix that makes biology into destiny’ (2012). This feels like a useful model of thinking through biological reproduction, which is to say that none of this is a rejection of the continuation of the human species but rather a thinking through of how reproduction operates when enmeshed with a heterosexual culture which formulates it as the only form of reproduction and life worth celebrating. In this context CA’s cum poetry gestures towards a reconciliation whereby bodily functions can be celebrated as feral and joyous outside of a normative matrix.

To reiterate, this is not to suggest that queer sex is inherently biologically unreproductive, but a reminder that there is a historical context in which queer sex has been framed as wasteful due to its association with unreproductive pleasure. Additionally, there is the factor that biological reproduction is not an organising principal of queer culture, as opposed to straight culture where ‘community is imagined through scenes of intimacy, coupling, and kinship; a historical relation to futurity is restricted to generational narrative and reproduction’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998, p554). If a function of the straight nuclear family is to reproduce the straight nuclear family, queer family cannot rely on this means of reproducing itself, queers cannot take for granted the immortality of reproduction, but this leads to more creative forms of intimacy, kinship, survival and ‘immortality’. Within this framework, it is precisely what is deemed nonessential that is the means of survival: art, poetry, music, fashion, and what Berlant and Warner refer to as ‘parasitic and fugitive elaboration through gossip, dance clubs, softball leagues, and the phone-sex ads’ (p561). In parallel, in flowers it is the colours and scents and delicate forms that are commonly read by human eyes as elaborate and ostentatious that are the bread and butter of survival. Hustak and Myers describe Darwin’s delight in orchids as he saw them as ‘a demonstration that even beautiful forms had utilitarian, adaptive value.’ (75) Although this could be read as an insinuation that forms only have worth if they have utilitarian value, it can also be an understanding that the form and function are inseparable, and the beauty is its own functionality. In a poem referencing the homophobic Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, CAConrad writes:

i need a soda to

wash this glitter down

it's dark in the stomach

next morning

bathroom light catches

glint of turd covered

in glitter

disco log in the bowl

fecal poetry ranges from

shocking to absurd

this is neither

this is pragmatic

it's my life as i need to live it

Ed Dorn i would kill myself if

i were you but i'm not and

get to live this spectacular

life of sparkling hygiene

CA refuses to frame his glitter consumption as anything other than a practical everyday ritual needed for survival, alongside eating or sleeping, he refuses to draw any distinction between physical, emotional and spiritual survivals. The reality that queer survival is inherently predicated on something other than the physical continuation of the species manifests in a personal sense as survival being about more than the day to day physical maintenance of a body, or more accurately, redefining what constitutes the day to day physical maintenance of a body. This is not to say that it is an abstract and disembodied survival, as what could be more embodied than eating and shitting out glitter? But rather that it treats the body as a vessel for a modest, everyday spiritual joy, no matter how temporary. Pleasure for pleasure and survival’s sake, and always the twain shall meet.

Another poem in the series includes the lines ‘Ed Dorn thinks faggots should drink directly from the sewer / i want to dress special for this.’ There is a provocative knowing that dressing special is not unrelated to why Dorn thinks faggots should drink directly from the sewer, and that dressing special for this punishment will add to his annoyance. In Dorn’s initial comments there is also the implication of queers as wasteful, as undeserving of the privilege of clean tap water; If the ultimate goal is reproduction, queers are a waste of resources. The poem goes on to imagine Dorn asking CA, ‘what camouflage will you wear to hide in the gingerbread house?’ and CA replying ‘none, I want the witch to find me EAT ME!’ This acts as a subversion of survival narratives and demonstrates a lack of belief in the inherent goodness of physical self-preservation and security at all costs. This is not say that physical survival is not important but rather that sometimes it is important for your spiritual survival to allow yourself to be eaten by a witch rather than accept a life of homophobe-endorsed camouflage in the gingerbread house. What are we potentially missing out on when we hide in camouflage in the gingerbread house? Is being eaten by the witch the worst that could happen? In Darwin’s Plots Gillian Beer describes the moment in which the intersection of evolutionary theory and psychological theory became important as it began to ask ‘what emotions and what reflex actions help the individual and race to survive’ (2009, p201). This instrumentalisation of affect seems to shut down the possibility of an ‘affective ecology’ (Hustak and Myers) based on anything other than reproduction.

When asked in interview about his reasons for becoming a writer John Wieners answers, ‘Immortality, in the sense of living after one’s own time has run out’ (1993). Again, there is the sense of ‘life’ as existing beyond an individual’s lifespan, attached to an individual but not necessarily to their physical form or genetics.

Dancing dandelions

and buttercups in the grass

remind me of other summer

flowers, simple blossoms

roses and tiger lilies by the wall

milk pod, sumac branches

lilacs across the road, daisies, blueberries

snaps, cut violets

three years ago still grow in my mind

as peonies or planted geraniums, bachelor buttons

in downy fields filled with clover

lover, come again and again up fern

path upheld as memory’s perennial

against stern hard-faced officers of imprisonment

and cold regulation more painful than lover’s arms

or flowers charming but not more lasting

No, the wild tulip shall outlast the prison wall

no matter what grows within.

In Wiener’s 1969 poem Private Estate, reproduced in its entirety above, a flowing list of flowers ebbs seamlessly into a lover, before the scene is abruptly cut by ‘stern hard-faced officers of imprisonment and cold regulation’. The ambiguous line break after clover leaves the possibility for the ‘clover lover’ as the lover made of clover, or the lover of clover. Years are things that continue to develop and change after their official endings, growing towards the sun, if only in the mind. The cyclical, nonlinear queer time of lover’s arms or flowers is sectioned off by the harsh linear institutional time of the prison or mental hospital. Despite this, these seemingly concrete and immutable structures are presented as ultimately more precarious and fleeting, being outlasted by the wild tulip. In an essay on feminist applications of Darwin, Elizabeth Grosz describes the sense in his work ‘in which the domination of species or individuals is inherently precarious and necessarily historically limited’ (2008, 42). The fragility of power structures and a nondeterministic time is drawn out as a central point where social struggles and biology could find affinity. The tulip is a perennial plant, meaning simply a plant that lives longer than two years, in opposition to biannual and annual plants, which must be replanted more frequently. The taxonomical listing of the poem suggests however that it is not a single tulip that will outlast the prison, but rather wild tulips as a whole, or perhaps even just the idea of the wild tulip. When Wieners speaks of ‘memory’s perennial’ it invites the possibility of the plants having not physically survived at all, yet continuing to grow and thrive in his mind.

This mirrors his statement of desire for immortality through writing. The lines ‘lover, come again and again up fern / path upheld as memory’s perennial’ operate on this ambiguous perennial time, the flirtatious talk of lovers mixing with the seasonal dying back and reblooming of the plants, taking place as a specific memory but also the substance of memory itself. In The Imagination through Time, Wieners speaks of the hour and minute as ‘false divisions of the moon’. The poem ends:

the cautious breath of a friend,

presumably, also up,

in the dark of his house,

who alike hears your thoughts,

wondering; that is a true meeting in eternity.

Not this petty worry

about days, months, proximities

to warmth. There are always fires

on earth, that burn immortally.

For Wieners, human intimacy is a form of immortality, only the ephemeral can come close to touching the eternal. The constant anxiety of looking for comfort and stability (‘proximities to warmth’) is quelled by the knowledge there are always fires burning immortally, somewhere on earth. In another poem about his murdered lover, I Loved Earth Years Ago CA explains, ‘He named himself Earth when planet extinction was clearest.’ The naming decision itself and CA’s recalling of it operate simultaneously as morbid foreshadowing and a hymn to survival and resilience. There is the triple, triangulated meaning of Earth to refer to CA’s lover, the planet Earth, and earth itself, the mud and soil of the world. There is the sense that CA used to love Earth, but there was some rupture that necessitates the use of the past tense, coexisting with the feeling that he has been loving Earth for a long, long time. The statement that he loved Earth years ago does not mean he does not love him now, but there is an acceptance of change. The temporality of the title can be read as an example of Wiener’s ‘perennial time’, neither endless reproduction nor something constricted to a single discrete moment, but something seasonal, ebbing and flowing, perhaps not itself forever, but something, somewhere. In Julia Kristeva’s essay Women’s Time, she suggests that despite being seemingly opposed, eternal and cyclical time, both associated with women, might be closer than they first appear as they both operate outside of linear time (1981). Not wanting to replicate the essentialism of Kristeva’s thought, and in reference to Halberstam (2005), I would argue that this exclusion from (or rejection of) linearity (or straight time) is present not only in women but all who fall outside of the timeframes of normative heterosexuality and gender.[11] In CA’s title there is the evocation of a measurement of time outside of ruling time, a different temporal space: ‘Earth Years’. Earth Years act as a counter to heteronormative timescales, of the years and milestones of straight reproduction, or possibly as a calendar more in tune with the seasons, a rejection of the arbitrary timekeeping divorced from them and enforced as a tool of (re)productivity.

In Permission Please To Be a Stone but You Are A Clock We Say CA writes ‘no wonder clocks aspire to granite’, becoming, ‘don’t allude to my spurt / don’t look at my thighs / you pernicious clocks / make the worst stones’. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen makes the argument that despite being seen as stable and fixed ‘stone is fluid when viewed within its proper duration’ (2015). Clocks can only aspire to the timekeeping abilities of stone, their constant sense of movement and progress overshadowed by the eternal. The honest breaking down of stone into sand usurps the arbitrary time of the constantly flipped hourglass. In Wieners’ words: ‘a true meeting in eternity. / Not this petty worry about days, months, proximities to warmth.’ Tim Dean proposes that ‘queer theorists of spectrality embrace asynchronous temporalities because they regard being haunted as an opportunity to produce a different future, one that the past did not generate but still might’ (2011, p92). This text began with the thoughtful pansy both as a symbol of remembrance and of queer effeminacy, occupying a place of perceived fragility and permanence, its individual lifespan coming up against its collective, symbolic lifespan. Thinking through what I’ve termed queer reproduction, I want to suggest this intersection as politically vital from an ecological perspective for imagining what abundance and joy could mean outside of cycles of physical re/production and consumption. Eternity is not present in static monoliths but in variable, shifting networks of pleasure and affect. In speaking through flowers, which is to say poetry, the consequences of communication are non-linear, cross-pollinated and dispersed, the eternal and cyclical affectively and effectively meeting to produce models of life which could be described as pragmatically opulent. Poetry becomes the language of survival in excess and weaponised floweriness, everything that is ‘too much’ pushing back against false scarcity and repressive taxonomies of gender and sexuality, creating breathing space for a politics of cornucopia, possibility and, propagation outside the already-existing. Fucking pansies speaking through flowers.

‘Do not think of the future; there is none.’

-John Wieners, 6th January 1934 – 1st March 2002

1. From Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English, 8th edition (1984): pansy, n. A very effeminate youth; a homosexual: from ca. 1925. Cf. Nancy (boy). Also pansy-boy: from ca. 1930; New Statesman and Nation, 15 Sep. 1934, concerning the fascist meeting in Hyde Park on 9 Sep., notes that there were, from the crowd, 'shouts about 'pansy-boys'". ↩

2. The term ‘cisgender’ is used to describe someone who is not transgender, i.e. someone whose gender identity is broadly aligned with the gender they were assigned at birth.  ↩

3. See: The Molecularisation of Sexuality by Jordana Rosenburg for a fuller critique of the problems of infinitely abstracting ‘queerness’.  ↩

4. Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex thinks through these questions of scale and transferability, for example: ‘The biophysical organisation of sex questions the accounts of a human-centred evolution that assimilates sex to sexual reproduction and sexual organs determining the progressive evolution of the body – from bacteria to humans – and sex – from unicellular to multicellular sex’ (p22).  ↩

5. See Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden (2009) for wide-ranging accounts of gender and sexual diversity in non-human species. ↩

6. This issue is explored by Eva Hayward with reference to marine life: ‘With the aquarium, the unnerving sexual variation of marine life moved from ocean depths—which was a gothic scene for Victorians—into the inner sanctum of social order and bodily regulation, the aristocratic home. Efforts to know, classify, and conquer the oceanic, and otherwise capture nature for visual pleasure, resulted in a counter conquest of the home by monsters and sexual deviants (2012, p166) ↩

7. This has echoes of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on the contagion: ‘We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes. Like hybrids, which are themselves sterile, born of a sexual union that will not reproduce itself, but which begins over again every time, gaining that much ground’ (1987, p241).  ↩

8. The flower-eating theme is potentially non-coincidental, as CA has cited Wieners as an influence, and recently edited a collection of his work, Supplication, in which the above poem appears.  ↩

9. For more on animal captivity, see Hayward (2012).  ↩

10. ‘Repro-centricism’, i.e. the centring of reproduction as the default mode in all discussions of sexual difference, is a term borrowed from Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson in their introduction to Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010), p11.  ↩

11. For perspectives on what ‘gay men’s time’ might look like, see: Edelman (2004) and Dean (2011). ↩

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[one-soul-two-brothers]

one-soul-two-brothers’ ultimate fic recs: wincest edition (part I)

how I chose these: Wincest fics are my (other) absolute faves to read First time fics are the best I like them to keep some semblance of canon Happy endings are a requirement A fic doesn’t have to have sex to be good (but it doesn’t hurt) They have all been thoroughly vetted (aka I’ve read them all at least twice, and will definitely be reading them all again)

ENJOY!

best SLOW BURN

title: Fumbling in the Dark: Love Advice For the Romantically Impaired rating: explicit word count: 72k summary: True Love really is blind... anna’s notes: Consists of 101 chapters that correspond to each episode from season one to mid-season five. It gives behind-the-scenes glimpses into how the brothers interact with each other in a very non-brotherly way, though they are completely unaware of how they come across to other people. First time fic. So so good.

best HURT|COMFORT

title: Sam I Am rating: mature word count: 13k summary: An alternative to The Born-Again Identity. Here Castiel doesn’t immediately think of the idea of transferring Sam’s madness onto himself. As a result, Sam's brain is still fried. He escapes from the Westville asylum wing by himself, steals a car and drives until he runs out of road in Idaho. In the parking lot of a motel in a small town, Sam finds a kind of peace for a while. anna’s notes: It’s just...so good. And I love the flashes to Dean freaking out and trying to find Sam and being super worried. Also, Cas and Meg are in this story but I like their rapport here so please don’t skip it because of that.

best CASE|FILE

title: The Truth In the Lie rating: explicit word count: 62k summary: Sam and Dean pretend to be gay lovers while they hunt a monster on a bus tour of Nova Scotia. excerpt: He wasn't quite sure why Dean always got so wound up when people jumped to the wrong conclusion about them. It was kinda annoying to have to explain that they were brothers, not lovers, but after the first few times, Sam had begun to see the funny side. Dean really hadn't – he still got ridiculously uptight about it every single time it happened. Sam wondered if it was because he felt it was some kind of affront to his masculinity, or whether he figured that if he was gay, he could do much better than Sam. Either way, Sam wasn't really surprised when Dean tried to put his foot down on this one. In the end though, even Dean had to admit that there was no other choice. They really didn't have any other leads, and they needed to get close to the driver and the guide to investigate them. Without taking the tour, that would be pretty much impossible, and the moment Dean grudgingly admitted that, Sam bought them tickets. anna’s notes: First time fic with just the right amount of angst and hesitancy, and the case they work is actually really interesting. (So like porn with plot.) Love this one.

best CURTAIN|FIC

title: Like a Fish Out of Water rating: explicit word count: 60k summary: AU after Plucky Pennywhistle's Magical Menagerie. During the final battle with the Leviathans, God finally makes an appearance and deigns to intervene. After granting Sam and Dean a few final requests, he 'packs his bags' and takes everything supernatural in existence with him. Left with nothing to hunt, Sam talks a reluctant Dean into settling down in a small town outside of Sioux Falls. Sam seems to want them live a normal kind of life, but between the ridiculous estate sale Sam bought to furnish the house, the arrival of a very human Castiel who's overwhelmed by human emotions, and their quirky, invasive neighbors, it's anything but. Dean's having a difficult time adjusting, convinced everything couldn't be more abnormal until Sam reveals exactly what kind of life he wants to have with Dean. Dean can't deny the part of him that wants it--but can he accept it? anna’s notes: This is the very first fic i ever read (almost 4 years ago!), and it is still one of my favorites. First time fic, obviously. And I don’t mind Cas in this one, so if you usually don’t care for that, please don’t let it stop you from checking this fic out.

best PLOT WHAT PLOT

title: Monumentally Stupid rating: explicit word count: 5900 summary: Sam's hurt both hands, so Dean has to shave him. Having Dean that close to him, focused with that little concentrating frown, breath warm on his face, Dean's competent hands tilting his head and angling him exactly the way he wants him -- well, Sam's not doing too well right now pretending he's not attracted to his brother. And he's only wearing boxers, Dean's bound to notice. Dean's going to have him all figured out. anna’s notes: Oh my god this killed me.

title: Suckers rating: explicit word count: 1300 excerpt: Sam covers his chest protectively, staring in affront. His dick is standing at attention, though, but Sam figures his nipples need the cover more from Dean’s restless and slightly invasive freakin’ hands. anna’s notes: Quick and hot one shot; first time fic as well. Love love love it.

best FLUFF

title: Couples’ Counseling rating: explicit word count: 6000 summary: Sam and Dean are working a case involving a ghost who haunts a marriage counselor’s office. So, of course, they have to pretend to be husbands to be able to get an appointment and check it out. excerpt: She looks at them expectantly. Sam has absolutely no idea what to do or say; he's expecting to hear Dean up and leave, but to his horror, he really doesn't want him to. He wants him to stay and do as she said, and he kind of wants to bang his head on the desk again because -- just when he though he couldn't get more messed up. It's - it's just that Dean hasn't touched him at all for so long, and Sam just sort of craves any sign that Dean isn't scared of him or disgusted by him or-- anna’s notes: Takes place in season five; voicemail fix-it and first time. Yay!

title: Basorexia rating: explicit word count: 5100 summary: In which Cas does not understand the meaning of "gift", Dean has selective amnesia, and Sam is confused as hell. excerpt: “You did something to Dean!” Sam exclaims, backing up and pointing in accusation. “Correct!” Cas says excitedly. “I removed Dean's inhibitions regarding his frequent desire to kiss you. Now whenever he feels the urge, he simply does so, and has no memory of it afterwards. It's my gift to you!”

best FICLET

title: Run Away With Me (Or I’ll Keep Singing) summary: “Dude, there's a guy outside, and I think he's serenading you.” In which Dean can't stop singing, Sam is embarrassed, and true love is the answer to everything. anna’s notes: Always and forever my favorite wincest ficlet.

title: untitled excerpt: Dean is spiraling fast and there is not a single familiar mark on his body with which he can ground himself. Only the raised handprint on his shoulder remains; an alien claim staked by a being looking to use him as a means to an end.

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