#Day 18 of drawing gay people every day of pride month | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

calacuspr · 3 years ago

Text

Calacus Weekly Hit & Miss – Carl Nassib & UEFA

Every Monday we look at the best and worst communicators in the sports world from the previous week.

HIT – CARL NASSIB

“I hope that one day videos like this and the whole coming out process are just not necessary," said Carl Nassib, the Las Vegas Raiders’ defensive end after revealing that he is gay.

In making his admission, during Pride month no less, Nassib becomes the first active National Football League player to come out publicly.

Nassib added: "I'm a pretty private person so I hope that you guys know that I'm really not doing this for attention. I just think that representation and visibility are so important.

"I'm going to do my best to cultivate a culture that's accepting and compassionate."

He followed up with a written message admitting that he had “agonised over this moment for the last 15 years” and it was only after he received so much encouragement from family and friends that he decided to go ahead.

“I am also incredibly thankful for the NFL, my coaches, and fellow players for their support,” Nassib wrote. “I would not have been able to do this without them. From the jump I was greeted with the utmost respect and acceptance.”

Nassib is also donating £100,000 to the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention service for LGBTQ youth in America, a creditable gesture which highlights his understanding of the struggles many young people face.

Amit Paley, CEO & Executive Director of The Trevor Project, gave thanks to Nassib for his generosity and said: “The Trevor Project is grateful to Carl Nassib for living his truth and supporting LGBTQ youth. Coming out is an intensely personal decision, and it can be an incredibly scary and difficult one to make. We hope that Carl’s historic representation in the NFL will inspire young LGBTQ athletes across the country to live their truth and pursue their dreams.

“At a time when state lawmakers are actively trying to restrict transgender and nonbinary youth’s participation in school sports, this news should serve as a clarion call for greater LGBTQ inclusion in the locker room and on the field.”

Of those who have admitted that they are gay in the past, Michael Sam came out before being drafted into the league in 2014, but never played a regular season NFL game.

Roy Simmons, who played for the Giants and Washington in the 1980s, was one of a number of players to come out after retiring. He told the New York Times in 2003 that he did not feel safe announcing that he was gay while he was in the NFL.

“The NFL has a reputation,” he said at the time, “and it’s not even a verbal thing – it’s just known. You are gladiators; you are male; you kick butt.”

Hall of fame quarterback Warren Moon revealed that gay players had long been a part of the NFL. He tweeted: “As long as they helped us win and were great teammates- their sexual preference was never a issue..

“We live in a different time now where diversity is much more accepted. Cheers Carl, and I hope this lets other athletes know, its OK to say who you are...”

The Raiders tweeted: “Proud of you, Carl” while club owner Mark Davis played down the significance of the announcement and said: “He’s a Raider. If he’s happy, I’m happy. It takes courage. I thought we got to the point where this wasn’t (a story). It doesn’t change my opinion of him as a man or as a Raider.”

The NFL was swift to offer their support for Nassib with Commissioner Roger Goodell saying: “The NFL family is proud of Carl for courageously sharing his truth today. Representation matters.

“We share his hope that someday soon statements like his will no longer be newsworthy as we march toward full equality for the LGBTQ+ community. We wish Carl the best of luck this coming season.”

NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith added: "Our union supports Carl and his work with the Trevor Project is proof that he -- like our membership -- is about making his community and this world a better place not for themselves, but for others."

Certainly 20 years ago, Nassib’s announcement may have ended his career based on the macho culture within the NFL locker rooms but the fact that his shirt was the top-selling NFL jersey on its network after his announcement according to sports apparel retailer Fanatics.

Nassib is now a poster boy for a new era in American Football and it is to his credit that he is embracing the challenge.

"I do not know all the history behind our courageous LGBTQ community," he added, "but I am eager to learn and to help continue the fight for equality and acceptance."

MISS – UEFA

The football community has been largely united in support for the LGBTQ+ community recently, from European players donning rainbow laces and calling out blatant acts of homophobia.

However, UEFA have been criticised for not explicitly challenging or condemning homophobia during Pride month.

German captain Manuel Neuer’s decision to wear a rainbow-coloured armband was initially banned by UEFA before they quickly changed their position.

UEFA then last week rejected a request to illuminate the Allianz Arena in Munich with rainbow colours during the EURO 2020 Group F match between Germany and Hungary.

There was suspicion that the proposal was a response to new Hungarian legislation, which has banned the promotion of homosexuality to those under the age of 18.

In a statement posted on social media, UEFA defended their decision by saying: “UEFA is proud to wear the colours of the rainbow. It is a symbol that embodies our core values, promoting everything that we believe in.

“Some people have interpreted UEFA’s decision to turn down the city of Munich’s request to illuminate the Munich stadium in rainbow colours for a Euro 2020 match as ‘political’. On the contrary, the request itself was political, linked to the Hungarian football team’s presence in the stadium for this evening’s match with Germany.”

The major of Munich, Dieter Reiter, was one of many who saw this as a missed opportunity from UEFA and he had hoped that the illuminations during the match would “send a visible sign of solidarity” with Hungary’s LGBTQ+ community.

The Germany and Hungary game finished 2-2 and summed up the mood from the footballing community perfectly towards homophobia and UEFA’s decision.

A pitch invader took to the field with a rainbow flag as the Hungarian National anthem blared out around the stadium, while Leon Goretza celebrated his late equaliser for Germany by running over to away fans and making a heart gesture with his hands, conveying the simple message that homophobia will not be tolerated.

Undoubtedly, UEFA have not a strong and clear position regarding homophobia throughout the EURO 2020 tournament.

Earlier, during Hungary’s opening Group F game against Portugal in Budapest, a set of Hungarian fans were seen holding a sign that read “Anti-LMBTQ”.

UEFA had an opportunity to react instantly to confirm the LGBTQ+ community as equals in society and in football but its delays had the result of many feeling unwelcome.

It took five days for UEFA to release a short statement on their website on the incident and no action has since been taken against Hungary.

The delay meant the message was not instantly dismissed, which suggests UEFA do not take the issue seriously enough.

Joe White, a spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ fans group 3LionsPride, has criticised UEFA’s messaging. In a statement, he said: “UEFA will tout themselves as supporters of equality and rainbow-wash their brand when it suits them, but rarely proactively engage or make improvements for LGBTQ+ people involved in the game.

“LGBTQ+ people across the game are not able to enjoy football when they have to face hatred in stadia and online.

“It’s clear that UEFA once again has its head firmly buried in the sand and is no ally of the LGBTQ+ community. Until UEFA start taking serious action against discrimination, the beautiful game is once again allowing its ugly side to rear its head.”

The rainbow symbol in football stadia reassures to LGBTQ+ individuals watching EURO 2020 that they are welcome in football. It demonstrates that attitudes towards homosexuality are improving within the sport.

Without the rainbow, particularly during Pride Month, those messages are lost.

Germany has led a continental call for greater LGBTQ+ unity throughout football. In the days following the UEFA Allianz Arena rejection, officials across Germany ignored the guidance, as stadia in Frankfurt, Augsburg and Nuremberg, as well as in Belgium, joined Munich by lighting up in rainbow colours.

Elsewhere, UEFA sponsor Booking.com, will use a rainbow outline in all of their pitch-side adverts for Round of 16 matches, including Holland’s game against the Czech Republic in Budapest.

Ahead of the tie in the Hungarian capital, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that Hungary has “no place in the EU,” unless they retract their homophobic laws.

UEFA have demonstrated that the rainbow symbol will not be universally accepted in football, which is hardly consistent with their own claims to be pro-LGBTQ+.

The inconsistency shown by European football’s governing body during Euro 2020 underlines the fact that they have a long way to go to regain the confidence of the LGBTQ+ community.

Perhaps it is time for UEFA to go back to the drawing board and come up with a consistent policy which allows freedom of expression in the promotion of sexual equality.

#Crisis management #EURO2020 #Carl Nassib #American Football #NFL #New York Times #Trevor Project #UEFA #Germany football #Hungary #Pride

4 notes · View notes

manicr · 3 years ago

Text

Coming out, Pride month

I thought I'd talk about coming since it's still the last days of pride month, and how different that can be for some kids, using myself as an example.

For some kids there's no dramatic Moment™ but a life lived and sometimes unknown, with pockets of 'outness' and places where the closet exists but only as a polite fiction.

To make some sense of this, I need to go way back for myself. I was always a queer kid; in all senses of the word. Undiagnosed autism was a factor but so were others.

W were many kids in my family, I grew up with 4 of my 5 siblings, a mix of boys and girls and I was the second youngest. In effect, my older brothers helped raise me and my sisters, and my parents had little time for me. They kicked us out to play to get some peace and quiet during the days, and I frankly became somewhat of a feral child, spending time in the woods and playing by myself a lot. Now, this might sound weird when you have 5 siblings, but we were a motley bunch, fought a lot, and played too, and I was autistic af. Being without them was easier and I could do what I wanted, which was usually play with dinosaurs, explore the woods and draw a lot.

I had few friends, who I was intermittently clingy and distant towards. Typical ASD. And I can in hindsight say that by the age of 10-11 that I was queer: Xena Warrior Princess was an awakening -- in my case, it was the villainess Callisto, but Gabrielle and Xena were obviously in love with each other even before it was canon. But it wasn't an 'aha' moment to me. No great fanfares that I wasn't straight or panic about it. I hadn't understood homophobia, and I didn't much care about kissing any 'real' people, even though I was a big shipper of Hercules/Ares and Xena/Gabrielle. I understood slowly that my parents didn't approve of homosexuality or gnc stuff. So I just chalked it up to them being them and hid all that. Though I could never do feminity right. I was often mistaken for a boy as a pre-teen

When I was 12 I had my first kiss -- with a girl. It was on a dare and I didn't think anything of it. I was THAT friend then, with the few friends I had, the overly perverted verbally and clingy physically. Kissing a girl was nothing, but it was also natural. I played at liking boys at this age. Tried to like those snotty prepubescent boys in my school and tried to perform the obligatory boy band fawning. It was Backstreet Boys for me. But I felt nothing, I enjoyed shipping boys more than I did them. Nor did I want a girlfriend really. But my sister pointed out that I was too 'dykey' with my friends. Repeatedly.

When I was 13 I got depressed. It lasted all of 'high school' (sweden: högstadiet 13-15). It was bad. I was self-loathing, suicidal, and hated how I looked and felt. I explored my gender, my sexuality, and tried to find why I felt so wrong. I escaped into fandom. I lost friendships slowly, but I started to realize that they weren't all that good either. I started to realize that I probably wasn't straight, but still cis, and that I wanted to live differently than I did.

In gymnasium (swe: 16-18) I swore that I'd be happier. I came out as bisexual to my friends and school in my first year. I only chose to call myself bi because I liked looking at adult men, but fuck if I didn't like girls my age too. I was outrageously outspoken, without any borders. I dressed like in long leather coats, embroidered shirts, and cargo pants, pseudo-masc flamboyance, or full corsetted loli goth style - feminity taken to the max until it became unattractive or drag.

I let my friendships be intense, physically and emotionally, but never crossed the borders my straight friends set. Though they probably should have set them a little harder so I'd notice. I was no stranger to making out with my friends, and I had fits of jealously even -- leading me to 'share' boys with them when we made out. But despite this, I was never their girlfriend. Just an overly clingy and perverted friend -- but I was still happy. I felt loved. I kissed with one of my friends who's come out as a lesbian. It was her first kiss. No strings attached, as she said, and there weren't. I went to Pride every year after I turned 16. But I never said a word about myself to my family.

The closet was there, if barely. A polite fiction. The unspoken.

My family had all the chances to know: a gnc daughter who was too 'dykey' with her friends who went to Pride every year and was outspoken in support of queer rights. Who never brought home a boyfriend or said a word about dating. My sister sneered at me and called me a homo and a freak. But we never spoke about it. My parents stopped talking about boyfriends with me.

I left home when I was 19, to study in another city. I did, and I partied too, kissing boys and girls, loving dancing and touching, but I didn't date. I tried, a little but no one interested me more than to touch. I was out at uni. I was out online - I joked that I liked fictional men and real women. At work too. But I never spoke to my family about it, until my little sister had a gay panic moment since her bff was in love with her. I outed myself as she cried and talked her down. She's the only blood family member who I've literally told it to this day. My middle brother asked me if I like girls, I said both, and he gave me ecchi manga. Brothers.

When I was 21 I met the love of my life. The first and only man I pursued seriously. And I really had to pursue him since he thought I was a lesbian bc I was so damn queer and liked looking at women's breasts. After some comedy of errors, we got together. He always knew that I was queer and accepted it, enjoyed it even, since we could ogle at women together and he was fine with me looking/commenting on pretty men too. He had queer friends (pretty much half ), had tried it out, and decided he liked women, and he was also on the spectra of autism. I feel a kinship with him, love, and friendship. His family was queer (gay granpa and lesbian step-sister) and I was pretty much introduced as bi together with my name to them, as a matter of fact.

I married him. We've been together for 12 years. I was the first of my sisters to get wed, much to their surprise.

I'm out to the world; except for my older gen of family. But there were no dramatic moments of outing. No TV moment and teary confessions. Even as a child, to my friends, it was a bi by the way and they pretty much guessed it. My siblings, barring my older sister and oldest brother, got it in casual circumstances or guessed it. I think the rest know, but the closet is there as polite fiction so that they don't have to face it.

I don't feel like I'm in the closet. I've never really felt like it. I know my parents' and my older siblings' homophobia, and I know I'm a freak in their eyes, despite being married to a man. I don't care. They don't deserve to have a heart-to-heart with me about my identity, they don't deserve to participate in my joy, and I don't meet them more than a couple times a year.

I'm happy and bi. I love my husband, I love my friends, I love my new family; it's all queer. Coming out was never something that mattered to me. I lived my life and people with eyes saw it as it was. Those who refused had to look at me being queer af regardless. Naturally, I was drawn to queer ppl bc of this and they to me. There's only so much gnc queer shit straight ppl who aren't super queer-friendly can take. Sometimes all you have to do is live your life.

#personal #pride #coming out

5 notes · View notes

charlotteu · 4 years ago

Text

⟨ SON CHAEYOUNG. CIS FEMALE. SHE/HER. ⟩ though the mist might prevent some from seeing it, CHARLOTTE TAM is actually a descendent of H E P H A E S T U S it’s still a question of whether or not the TWENTY TWO year old CIVIL ENGINEERING/BUSINESS MAJOR from SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA has taken after their godly parent completely, but the demigod is still known to be quite PRECISE & TENSE.

heyheyhey girls gays & they’s. my og’s remember charlotte and how deeply i love her also the looming promise that i’d bring her back. and here are we so ✌️ if any of you don’t know, i’m dakota, i’m nineteen (19), i live in cst, and i’m a part time barista along with a full time political science major. i’ll have some vague wanted connections at the bottom of this but my dm’s are always open both on here and on discord @ wet ass politics#6969

trigger warnings: death

full name & nicknames :

charlotte chunhwa tam / lottie & lola

major :

civil engineering & business

sexuality :

lesbian

gender idenitity / pronouns :

cis - female / she/her

age / birthday :

twenty - three, december tenth, nineteen - ninety - eight

zodiac :

sagittarius

personality :

charlotte is known to find literal scraps of anything and manage to make something gorgeous from it - whether it’s food, metal scraps, or a nearly - ruined picnic table - it’s a skill that she takes great pride in. she constantly tries to bring her loved ones together in one form or another, which results in quite a lot of last - minute plans and “family dinners.” because of these two traits, if someone just happened to forget to plan a birthday party or a baby shower and needed it thrown together within a day or two (maybe that is on her bucket list, maybe not,) charlotte is your perfect person. regardless of this, charlotte is still considered that friend that never has their life together and has an extensional crises every few weeks. family wise, their relationship with their siblings is something that they take very seriously. even the ones that give her stress acne are still very much able to feel the affection and love she’s has for her family. she constantly checks in on all of her siblings and regularly makes an effort to be as involved in their lives as possible.

when it comes to school work, charlotte is perfectly organized. a well - planned and well - filled out academic calendar is always in her backpack and she has a few dozen notifications on both her phone and her laptop to remind her of class assignments. she is well - known at the tutoring center for her near constant sessions to ensure to that she is totally, a hundred percent getting the assignment. her math classes is where she thrives, and she has a record of taking several math classes during the summertime to further her knowledge. charlotte’s known for the immense pride that she takes in her work along with the very long academia career that they wish to have.

myers - briggs, vice, & virtue :

entp, temperance, & distrusting

hobbies :

welding, drawing, sculpting/general crafting, trivia games, meditation, going into nature & finding animals,

powers :

sensing faults in metal ores, technokenesis, and pyrokinesis. charlotte considers her technokenesis powers to be the stronger of her abilities now that she’s taken the time to work on it since her break. she uses it to help both students and professors on campus deal with their I.T issues and to make small devices to help her friends in their way to help with their daily life. she plans to use her sensing abilities to help with her career choice later on in life, so she continues to work on improving them to help later on. with honesty, she doesn’t use pyrokinesis beyond helping her forge things or as a cute party trick. they have very few plans to ever venture beyond the walls of a protected area ever again so her ability to control whatever flames she makes under pressure is virtually nonexistent.

backstory :

tam chaewon, aged thirty, had just finished her blacksmith apprenticeship abroad in the netherlands when she decides to go to a bar to celebrate with some friends before trying to find a job when she’s approached by a man claiming to overhear her accomplishment. eager to talk about her future, the two of them end up talking for three hours about it along with the various paths open for her to take. maybe it’s the willingness to sit and listen to her or maybe it’s the legitimacy in his interest that drew her in, but the two ended up spending the night together; they spend only two days together before he leaves with an address for chaewon to write to him if it’s needed. and she does, approximately two months later when she learns she’s pregnant with a baby girl. he writes back nothing but an apology, money to help with the expenses, along with a separate letter to give to the child when she turned ten.

(trigger warning in the paragraph: death specifically during child birth.) fast forward through a tornado of eight months and chaewon is visiting her parents when charlotte was born prematurely in seoul, south korea in chaewon’s childhood bathroom. there’s a complication with both chaewon and charlotte shortly the birth and the paramedics sped through the streets to pick up the two, doing their best to keep the two of them alive during the ride. the woman’s family races behind them in the family car, barely able to find the room the two are in to see the nurses rush ahead of them. (no one can tell charlotte what the complication is, but her mom stays alive for an gruesome day and a half, straddling the border between life and death. she’s declared dead on december eleventh at 12:18 pm, 1998.) legend has it that silence ran through the waiting room that the family was in, an unearthly wail leaving charlotte’s grandmother as she realizes what she had to pay to receive her granddaughter. no one wants to touch the child, let alone raise her. their family is faced with a choice when they’re handed the death certificate of their daughter, the birth certificate of their granddaughter, and their granddaughter herself.

her uncle is the one that ends up taking her in that day. the oldest sibling to her mother by six years, he had been an entrepreneur bachelor his entire life up until that point. so it’s whiplash, to say the least, to completely upheave his life in seoul and move to the small town of parga, greece to raise charlotte. the transition period between being a bachelor to a single father is hard, but he does his best to not give up on it. along side the lack of support from his family, it makes it all such a draining process. when she turns six, her uncle hires the first person to help the family: a highly recommended local nanny by the name of phoebe who would stay with the tam family until charlotte turned eighteen. it’s around this time that her uncle begins to drift away more, trying to keep his business on track, but he always comes back with an elaborate apology and an equally elaborate gift for charlotte to make up for the digression.

when she turns twelve, she starts to develop ... slightly unusual powers that always came as a shock but were immediately chalked up to scarily accurate guesses. it’s a fun party trick she uses at classroom gatherings, guessing where faults where in desks, trying to figure out what was wrong with technology, etc. and it didn’t go much beyond that for a very long time. it’s a rainy summer day when her uncle sits her down with a strange man who explains to the both of them that she’s a ... demigod. it takes a whole afternoon to convince charlotte of this fact while her uncle looks at her like a monster. she promptly declines any move to go to a camp (much to her uncle’s dismay) and the next six years of her life is promptly laid out. a life lived in a private plane, tucked away from the world to live out of a few suitcases and bought time from others.

this quiet life sealed away from the outside world leaves her doing whatever she can to keep busy. building whatever she can, trying to stay as occupied as much as she can. it results in a suitcase full of little trinkets by the time she’s six months into home schooling. the next few years of her life pass her by in a terrible haze as she does everything she can to catch up to the life that has been set out for her. her life begins to slow down when she gets into college at the age of nineteen, where she finally finds a safe haven amongst people like her. however, at the beginning of 2020, charlotte finds herself catching deep feelings for one EILILDH GALBRAITH. a fiery, vibrant, and resistant spirit immediately draws charlotte into deep feelings for her. the relationship happens for several months before the relationship comes to an abrupt halt in the end of october. unable to come to terms with her first major breakup, charlotte cites a personal, family matter to switch to online classes before coming back to in person at the end of finals shortly before the evacuation.

wanted connections :

DREAMLAND / a v simple plot with room for extreme nuance! someone that charlotte can help bounce ideas off of and vise versa. enable each other’s terrible ideas but do it with much love and a camera on hand at all times. ( 0/2 spots taken )

HIT DIFFERENT / some type of fun flirtatious relationship. maybe they’re just friends, maybe they’re party buddies (for the rare parties that she goes to,) or maybe they just happen to keep meeting. hopefully it’s very relaxed on both ends. ( 0/1 spots taken, must be afab )

ALWAYS GOLDEN / best friends, ride or die type shit. can we get some friend group for it tho because i always love a good group dynamic ( 0/5 spots taken )

I DIDN’T FALL / some kind of missed love, like those missed connections on craiglist. maybe the two of them grew close during charlotte’s time away from university or maybe they almost dated before charlotte was out, either way there’s still some mixed feelings of resentment for not making a move, the deathly “what if’s?”, and mayhaps some feelings that still linger. ( 0/1 spots taken, must be afab )

SPORTS / someone who helped navigate charlotte through her own experience of coming out and how that fits into her cultural identity along and her career field. i have a decent idea of her coming out process but i’m definitely flexible with it ( 0/1 spots taken )

#i said i'd make her kind of different and wow :)#euintro

3 notes · View notes

millennial-ring · 4 years ago

Note

Can we get more on the three P's? Pain, Pride, and Pure?

17. PAIN

So this is actually the document where I saved the RP where Bakura came back to find Malik engaged to Seto, aptly named “PAIN” because it’s...fairly angsty. Me and this friend used to RP on Skype, making new group chats with side accounts before deleting them and leaving the two of us (which is so unnecessarily inconvenient lol but it’s what we had to do so we could rp multiple things at a time/not lose the rp in our regular group) and whenever we finished or got bored of an RP one of us would sit down, scroll all the way to the top, and copy and paste the entire thing into a word doc for re-readability. We rp’d it for well over a year, if not longer, so there’s no way to really reread it and condense it into a summary because sooo much happens. I guess highlights that I remember (or at least thing I remember fgjkdjh? we started this rp in 2016)

Bakura gives Malik a necklace he made himself (instead of a ring) before they part ways and Malik ofc keeps wearing it even after Bakura comes back and screams at them. There’s one scene early into the power relationship (when Malik still considers them fuck buddies) where Malik jumps into bed with Ryou, shoves his phone into his face, and starts screaming about Seto’s “you’re adorable” reply to a no-make up, bedhead selfie Malik had sent (bc how dare Seto be cute and do romantic things like that and kiss Malik’s hand and feed Malik chocolate covered strawberries before sex and buy him jewelry when they’re just fucking!) and Ryou’s just like “oh my fucking god just date him already gtfo my room I want to sleep.” Uhm... Malik and Seto are in the middle of wedding planning (visiting Isis and Rishid in Egypt at the time) when Bakura comes back, but they’re talking about a spring wedding in one of the parks/gardens in Seto’s neighborhood and Seto makes a comment about having the ceremony under the wisteria tree because he wants to see wisteria blossoms in Malik’s hair. Malik imagines brushing stray petals from Seto’s hair as they lean in for the kiss that will bind them for life - and then ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. Bakura passes out after using all his energy to scream at Malik (bc he JUST returned from the shadows, having had to go through multiple trials and actually give up some of his memories to be able to return) and they put him in the guest bedroom while Malik calls Ryou for help. While they wait for Ryou, Bakura wakes up and crawls out the window and runs away LOL. Uhm... Malik has a fluffy white therapy cat, ykno one of those grumpy looking smoosh faced ones, named Bakura. At some point while they’re still in Egypt Ryou takes Bakura to Kul Elna, where there’s a monument/memorial to the people that died in the massacre, and a very close knit community. Ryou takes Bakura to a community garden run by a pregnant woman named Adela who also owns a restaurant there - the food grown by the locals is used in the restaurant and iirc there was also some kind of donations thing going on where struggling families could come and take whatever they needed provided they bring back seeds or the scraps for compost or help a bit in the garden or something like that. I don’t think we ever made it explicit but we were pretty much implying that Adela was Bakura’s Actual Mom reincarnated. I think Bakura was also around for the birth, but I can’t remember much of it aside from him holding the baby. But the modern Kul Elna village actually practiced a lot of the old traditions and Bakura’s like “whoa... fuck it I might move here”. Uuuhh Bakura tells Ryou how every family in Kul Elna had a special “tzai” (tea) recipe and it could only be shared with people close to said family...before he makes some for Ryou. I think my friend got this from Star Wars? But I like it and we’ve included it in basically all our rps since. Uhm~ At one point Bakura kisses Malik and Malik slaps him and that’s how Bakura knows It’s Really Over. Malik and Seto play rock paper scissors to decide who bottoms every now and then, but it’s moreso a way to say “I want to bottom tonight but for some reason my pride keeps me from saying it outright” (dear 2016 us: bottoming is not shameful!) but also we never rp’d it, it was part of a time skip, but Malik and Seto had a threesome with Ryou and Ryou ate Seto’s ass. That’s all. We had Atem coming back and I remember he wanted to try and smooth things over but whenever Bakura saw him he had a panic attack. Uhm...that’s all for now lol, I can’t really remember much else.

18. pride

Unfortunately, again, this is not a document about prideshipping. Every so often I get emotional and I start writing emotional things that I think I’ll post to Facebook, but then I either chicken out because I don’t want to be known or perceived. Let people continue to think I’m a hyperactive halfwit and have no deeper meaning to my thoughts. It’s chill.

But this one was about the concept of LGBT Pride and how I felt about it, how startled I am sometimes when I run across support and acceptance in unconventional or unexpected places, how I worked hard to be comfortable enough to make the “because I’m gay” jokes out loud because growing up in a rural Kansas town I was exposed to my fair share of homophobia, both from family and from community, and even the people I called friends. It was gonna be one of those “wow I love my friends and family because now that I’ve weeded out the assholes I’m surrounded by love and support and this is exactly how much it means to me and why!” kinda posts, but I’m really bad at those, so this stayed in my WIPs. Maybe when Pride month rolls around again and I get nostalgic and emotional again I’ll finish it.

19. pure

This one’s a “fic” written about mine and my friend’s OCs from an old superhero/supervillain RP group. My character, Zaine, was separated from his girlfriend, Tansy, during a battle with heroes that killed a lot of supers and civilians alike. They were reunited after a few years (both had assumed the other had died and somehow hadn’t run into each other at all asdkja, it was our excuse as to why the characters had changed so much (since we were coming back to rp these characters after a few years ourselves, and wanted to revamp them a bit without them losing their relationships or experiences). But in that time, Zaine became better friends with his buddy Forest, and before the gal who made Tansy rejoined the group, me and the guy who made Forest were debating if Zaine and Forest should get together. But Tansy came back and Zaine got back together with her, but I made it canon that Zaine was crushing on Forest prior to that/still a bit after Tansy came back. Zaine is in a band and it’s sort of a running joke that his band members are all betting how long it takes for a threesome or for Tansy (who’s a bit possessive) to attack Forest, and they constantly tease Zaine about how much time he spends with Forest, make “hey don’t fuel the shippers” jokes, some other stuff along those lines, etc. It’s all good natured tho.

Anyway that’s all canon. The fic was “pureshipping” - Zaine, Tansy, and Forest. It was kinda me exploring how a relationship might develop between the three of them and I was writing little bits for my friends at work based on the answers they gave me to the “How would they react to/feel about this” questions I asked before turning that into a proper story.

It started with Tansy trying to remember when exactly she became open to the idea of polyamory, since as I said, she’s a bit possessive and got jealous easily. She recalls a night Zaine brings Forest back to their apartment after a bachelor party, with them plastered and barely able to stand. They fall down, and Zaine shushes Forest because Tansy has her laptop out and she’s working. Forest shushes Zaine back, they put their fingers against each other’s lips and keep shushing each other, drawing closer until the only thing separating their mouths are their fingers, and Tansy’s just like “whoa” and something clicks because A) she sees Zaine’s lids lower while looking at Forest the way they do when he wants to kiss HER and B) why is she not freaking out about this isn’t she a poisonous little viper that hisses at anyone that tries to flirt with Zaine? But nope, she’s never been jealous of Forest even if his and Zaine’s relationship is fairly intimate for what most consider friendship. And then a few days later she sees one of those memes that’s like “Zaine has two hands” (bc Forest is also a famous musician, and he and Zaine do a lot together, both professionally on the music front and in like. Idk, livestreams and general hanging out. so ofc weirdos ship them, and since Zaine and Tansy went public there’s gonna be ppl that include her in the weirdness) on a TVD fan page she follows so she understands some of Zaine’s inside jokes and she sees a comment from Zaine’s official facebook that’s like “these hands were made for holding!”

and Tansy’s like. “Oh shit. Zaine DOES have two hands!” so a few days later over breakfast she asks Zaine how he REALLY feels about Forest and ofc he’s like “he’s my best friend???” and Tansy’s like “ok but no for real how do you REALLY feel about him” and then calls him out about about having a crush on him and Zaine, who’s canonically weirdly monogamous is like “no!!” but Tansy whittles him down until he admits he “HAD” a crush on Forest before he and Tansy reconnected, but swears nothing happened between them and Tansy’s like “WOULD YOU LIKE TO?” and brings up the idea of Zaine dating Forest, and Zaine’s like “I’m with you, Tans, I didn’t mean to make you feel inadequate” and she’s like “I appreciate it but not what I meant. I know you, Zaine, I know you’re a lover and not being able to tell Forest how you really feel is hurting you, so if you want to then I highly encourage you ask him out” and after like 2 whole days of debating Zaine comes back to her saying he was going to, and then a few days later they invite Forest over to have The Talk and Tansy says they’re free to date, but Forest is still mourning Kelvin, his fiancé that “died” ((in quotes bc these aren’t our characters to actually kill so all characters are just assumed dead if the roleplayer didn’t rejoin but ofc if they came back “hey surprise i’m alive!) in the war between heroes and villains and says he needs time to think about it. He thinks it over for two whole weeks -and in the meantime, Tansy is happy to see his and Zaine’s relationship hasn’t changed at all- before agreeing. They sit down to discuss boundaries and permissions and whatever, and this line:

Tansy would never dream of forbidding them from doing anything that she and Zaine would do, especially because Zaine was a lover. He loved with all his heart, soul, and body, as if his purpose in life was to treasure his partners so thoroughly they would never question his feelings for them. It would be unfair to Forest and downright cruel to Zaine for Tansy to restrict them.

aaaa I know I wrote it but I love it. So after boundaries are discussed and all that Zaine and Forest have their first proper kiss, and it’s so sweet Tansy feels breathless alongside them. The three of them cuddle up to watch a movie but Zaine’s paying more attention to the two of them, taking turns kissing each of them while Tansy and Forest accidentally start competing for who can pull the most reactions from Zaine. Forest starts spending every weekend at Zaine and Tansy’s place and it always ends with them cuddling on the couch while watching movies, Zaine between them, but overtime Forest and Tansy become more affectionate with each other and end game was obviously the three of them, but I stopped writing it just after Forest spent the first night in bed with them.

Tansy smiled and looped her arm around Zaine, cuddling up to his side like a cat seeking attention. Zaine’s own arm found its way around her shoulders to keep her close. The last thing Tansy saw before her eyes dropped closed was Forest on the other side of Zaine mirroring her, and the last touch she registered was Forest’s hand brushing over her arm.

#wip tag

1 note · View note

starswallowingsea · 4 years ago

Text

Catholic Guilt

1400 words and very, very personal. This is mostly based on my personal experience but I don’t doubt that some of it will ring true for other lgbtq+ ex Catholics. Content warnings for homophobia, transphobia (internal and external for both), and anti-choice sentiments.

Today, you were born. Congratulations! You have been brought into this world by your very loving parents. They give you a name and swaddle you in blankets to take you home in a few days. You will be baptized in a few weeks, dipped into the holy water to cleanse you of your sins before you can do anything besides eat, sleep, and poop.

You spend the first few months attending Mass with your parents. They give you some teething toys or your bottle to keep you from disturbing the rest of the Congregation. Having a baby disrupt the Mass will make your family look bad, after all.

You are now three years old, old enough to walk and talk. You pull out the Misselletes and flip through them, tearing out the flimsy pages and laughing. Your parents pull you away and give you a cardboard book with pictures to look at. They look away and you run off again.

You are five years old now! Such a big child, I remember when you were a little baby crying from the baby carrier in the back of the Church! It’s time for Sunday School! There are only five children there for your age group. You spend an hour after Mass every Sunday eating snacks and doing Catholic Crafts.

Happy First Communion! You are eight years old now, still not quite old enough to think for yourself, but you have to go to Confession for the first time now. You aren’t sure what to say and make something up about hating your siblings if you have any. Maybe you stole some chocolate from your family, but you don’t really know what needs to be confessed. The teachers told you to tell Father everything, but some things feel too personal to tell. Your parents dress you up in the fanciest clothes you remember wearing so you can go up and eat some bread and drink some wine in front of everyone. There are pictures afterwards.

Welcome to Middle School! You are 12 years old now, starting to think for yourself. You say you still like the Church and you still mostly blindly follow their teachings, but sometimes you think other thoughts. Sometimes you see ads that are pro-Choice and you think “that’s stupid,” but then you think about what you would do if you got pregnant. You banish the thought, because having sex at age 12 is not something you should be thinking about anyway (even though you sometimes think about your classmates like that). You’ve already been questioning your sexuality at this point, but you try not to think about it, because being gay is a sin.

14 years old and still following the Church. You’ve shaped some vague opinions on hot topic issues, still following the guide of the Church. You hear the Priest talk about how abortion is murder and how gay and trans people are ruining the sanctity of life. You quietly fume about one of these issues, but quickly move on, as the Priest has gone off on another tangent about veganism now. You continue going to confession only when Sunday School tells you to. You now have a better idea of what to confess but you can’t bring yourself to do it. Maybe if you keep it bottled up God will never see it. But speaking makes it real and you can’t even think about confessing to some of the things you’ve done even though you know you should. So you make something up and you know the Priest doesn’t believe you but you do your Hail Marys and Our Fathers as penance. Afterwards there is a pit in your stomach because you know God can still see what you didn’t confess.

You are 15 now, just starting high school and everyone seems so different now. You’ve known these kids since you were five, but you’ve always been the odd one out. You try and follow the Church’s teachings about living a holy life in example for others but it just makes you tired. So you stop caring during the week. You attend some youth groups to “keep the faith strong” but by now you know that you aren’t straight or cis and it just hurts. Every little comment just chips away at you until you feel complete apathy towards both Catholicism and Christianity in general. You still go to summer camp and winter retreats because you have lots of fun outside of the religious activities but prayer is tiring and the microaggressions leave you feeling empty and alone.

Sweet 16! You can drive now, and you’re still on the fence about the Church. You don’t miss Sunday Masses ever and it gives you structure to life. It is also the year you get confirmed. Your Church does Confirmation later than most. You are surrounded by 8th graders and your little group of High School Juniors. Even though you don’t have any bad feelings about having to go to Church on Sundays until now, the Bishop standing in front of you says that you should die for who you are. You are trans and queer and so deep in the closet you feel like you have to hide your phone screen from your parents all the time even if you aren’t looking at pride related posts. You heard your parents say once that gay marriage was ruining the country and decided never to come out, and now a Bishop, someone with a lot of local authority, says that trans people are freaks and gay people are irredeemable. You make a silent promise to yourself to dissociate with the Church. But for now, you sit, stoney faced, knowing that this man has to bless you into the Church. You feel that pit in your stomach again.

Welcome to adulthood, age 18! How exciting! You’ll be going to college soon and you need to decide if you want to keep going to Church. You know your parents and grandparents want you to go but after a few weeks you know they won’t know if you stop. They don’t ask about the Priest or his homilies or activities happening in the Church. You get away with it too, because the Church services on Campus overlap with the ones at home. You continue to go through the end of the semester, needing the time to think and walk before going back to class the next day. You hear the Priest here, too, tell you that abortion is murder but you know that people don’t go getting abortions willy-nilly and silently fume. You don’t socialize with anyone in the congregation so when you stop going in the Spring, you don’t think they notice you left.

You come home for break, now sure that you don’t want to be Catholic, but your parents still drag you to Church every Sunday. You’ve taken this time to think about other religions that have appeals to you, including paganism and Greek, Roman, and Egyptian deities. You’ve tried worshipping them all, but when things get rough, your mind drifts back to Mary, the Saints, Jesus, God. You still keep that little gold pin in your car to keep you safe while driving and you still call to Saint Anthony when you lose something, and sometimes you still think you feel a response as Saint Anthony draws your eyes to the one spot you missed and shows you what you were looking for.

Even in the dark of night, when you let your guard down and cry, you cry out to Mary for help. You feel a comforting presence there, and then you feel a pit in your stomach again because you want out of this religion but you can’t seem to let go no matter how hard you try. So you let Mary wrap her arms around you as you confess everything to her and then wake up and try again to forget everything you’ve grown up with. Your life until now has been so entrenched in the Church and it's hard to separate the good from the bad. You still want to go back but you know you will never be accepted for who you are.

So you just stop trying to get out quickly and start trying to undo the years of trauma and guilt instead, that you know will never go away entirely.

#ex catholic #excatholic #catholic guilt #religious trauma #shay speaks #shay writes #religion //#sorry for all the ex catholic posts I discovered the tag recently and haven't been able to stop thinking #anyway. this is what I felt growing up through the lense of religion #*lens #although these have been very cathartic to write I will say

11 notes · View notes

0rph1x · 2 years ago

Text

okay beau sent me this lets go thru it im excited

im gay <3

beau. space. space and beau. thats it.

no i just turned 18 and also that is nothing i will ever be interested

i would love to get my helix done, and a septum at some point but im not sure about that one too much

none as of rn

the apartment i have planned with beau, we're planning out the interior and stuff for whichever little apartment we choose

literally. anyone. i don't get outwardly jealous too easy but anyone who even slightly flirts with my boy is. hm.

i watched all of shameless us in like a month or so, it made me sad bc there were in person gay ppl but i recommend it!! there's a lot of tws tho

nah idk i just never found it appealing, it was a little awkward

i have this one, my main, and then an abandoned aesthetic blog that i just keep bc i like it

new zealand in a HEARTBEAT dude

i have so many bc i daydream like endlessly and i get lost in them, but i cant wait for the day that i get to sit on the counter of our kitchen and watch my boy bake and explain everything he's doing to me while i just admire how pretty he is when he's passionate abt something

NO HOLY SHIT THAT WOULD HURT especially once i do go thru with surgery idk how well id like that

id give half of it to my mom then work on spending the rest of it towards my perfect future

yup <3

no i block and report every one that follows me it makes me s o uncomfortable

not atm no! im chillin

good question i wanna get a shoulder/back piece of some point but idk what yet

i mean if i could change it legally it would be theo, since that's my name

space. space space space. oh and marvel

i have three best friends actually, and they're all just so sweet. we've been friends for almost eight years, and its just so fun to hang out with them bc they're genuinely like the funniest people i know

@genderfluid-faerie-bf

good question, dead poet society, hozier, mother mother, clem turner, and holden laurence

i wanna see new zealand even if we don't stay there, i wanna go to paris, andddddd i think germany

spending it on the phone for hours with my love, even if we don't talk about anything in particular

autumn even tho its freezing

being ignored/overlooked/talked over. it pisses me off so much, its genuinely something that gets me incredibly angry

myself :] i am hilarious kjhfkjlsdhlfh

PRIDE. AND. FUCKING. PREJUDICE. i am a pride and prejudice hater

there isn't really anyone, i think i talk to everyone i want to

paper books even tho i don't read too much, but specifically hardcovers

uhhhhhh there isn't many bc all the fictional worlds i know are awful

the same way i am now but w a y more over the top, id be so dramatic and ridiculous

i don't drink coffee so idk, whenever i go to starbucks i order like a lemonade tea

only on the prettiest and sweetest boy i have ever met, im smitten

no, i barely have contact with any of them rn for specific reasons that i will not disclose sjdhfjk

not atm, i have like pen drawings on me but no actual tattoos

no im underage so nope

yeah, i still haven't even had an in person date yet

yeah my bf <333

on my main i think its 60 and on my loving account its 70 if i remember correctly

he's so sweet and kind and sweet and i love him so dearly. his smile just makes my day, i love the way that when he smiles all wide his eyes squint up and there's a little scrunch in between his eyebrows. i love his nose and the way it has just a slight bump on the bridge. i love his confidence in himself and the way that he's so proud of just being with me. i love the way that he dresses, even if people around him don't support it, he still wears what he wants. i love him.

idk if there are any off the top of my head but i will edit if i can think of any

nah i used to in middle school which was a mistake but whatever

ive never been on a date before so i cant really answer sdkjfhksdjf

too many, its 133 which is more than i thought

i don't think id be with a celebrity tbh i cant think of anyone off the top of my head

the one i have <3333 he's perfect

beau, without a doubt

i like the warm rain, like when its rainy outside and its the perfect weather to watch movies inside but its not cold

ok there we go that took forever but @genderfluid-faerie-bf here u go <3

Be nosy

1. What’s your sexual orientation?

2. What are you obsessed with right now?

3. Ever done any drugs?

4. What piercings do you want?

5. How many people have you kissed?

6. Describe your dream home.

7. Who are you jealous of?

8. What’s your favorite show to binge?

9. Do you watch porn?

10. Do you have a secret sideblog?

11. If you could teleport anywhere in the world right now, where would you go?

12. What’s one of your fantasies?

13. Do you have/would you get your nipples pierced?

14. How would you spend a million dollars?

15. Are you in a relationship?

16. Do you follow porn blogs?

17. Are you angry with anyone right now?

18. What tattoos do you want?

19. If you could change your name, would you? What would you change it to?

20. What is something you’re obsessed with?

21. Describe your best friend.

22. Tag someone you think is hot.

23. Who are five of your favorite bands/musical artists?

24. What are three places you want to travel?

25. Describe your perfect Friday night.

26. What’s your favorite season?

27. What’s your pet peeve?

28. Who is the funniest person you know?

29. What’s the most overrated movie?

30. Tag someone you want to talk to but have been too shy to message.

31. Do you like paper books or ebooks better?

32. If you could live in a fictional world, what world would you pick?

33. If money was no object, what would your wardrobe be like?

34. What’s your coffee order?

35. Do you have a crush on anyone?

36. Do you still have feelings for any of your exes?

37. Have any tattoos?

38. Do you drink?

39. Are you a virgin?

40. Do you have a crush on any of your mutuals?

41. How many followers do you have?

42. Describe the hottest person you know.

43. What’s your guilty pleasure?

44. Do you read erotica?

45. What’s the worst date you’ve ever been on?

46. How many people do you follow?

47. If you could marry any celebrity, who would you pick?

48. Describe your ideal partner.

49. Who do you text the most?

50. What’s your favorite kind of weather?

#my beau #this took me so long im so sorry

61K notes · View notes

klsywccds · 5 years ago

Text

hello all! val back with another, jfc valerie revamp to Kelsey. a lot of her story is still the same && all of her connections are still in place! this is just a little more fleshed out to give her some more depth because i was having a hard time relating to her, rip. WARNING: this shit is long. val got carried away... again. what else is new? so here is kelsey’s new and improved bio !! sliding this in the ‘call’ tag as well bc my sunshine bb desperately needs more plots. did i mention that i love y’all? without further ado, read on!

[ alycia debnam-carey, twenty-five, cisfemale, she/her ] ━ hey, I just saw [ kelsey woods ] walking down the streets of crownsville. they’ve lived in town for [ 18 years ], and you can catch them around town working as a [ high school art teacher ]. I hear they’re known to be [ bubbly & creative ] and [ timid & sensitive ]. if asked, they would say their aesthetic would be [ service dogs, deaf culture, over-alls covered in paint, succulent plants, sunflowers, pride flags, cup of tea ]

Kelsey Noelle Woods (nee Williams) was born on February 24th, 1994 in Gold Coast, Australia. She has never had much information about either one of her biological parents aside from the fact that her mother was a teenager. Kelsey was abandoned on the steps of a fire department a mere few days after her birth. It was a gut wrenching decision for her mother. As much as she adored the little girl, she knew that she wasn’t equipped to provide for all of the child’s needs. Kelsey never really harbored any animosity towards her mother for this but it did cause her to grow up with a deep-rooted insecurity and fear of not being enough.

After her surrender, Kelsey grew up in the foster care system in Australia. Kelsey hated every minute of it. Although some foster parents genuinely did have their hearts in the right place, most of the homes were overcrowded and the parents stretched too thin while also being weary of getting overly attached to the foster children. At worst, the homes were abusive. Kelsey always felt on edge and had an anxiety disorder from a young age. She had a hard time making friends with the other kids due to her never staying in one place for long. The little girl would go to bed and dream of finding a family of her own.

At the age of 7, Kelsey’s dreams came true and she was adopted by the Woods family. The move from Australia to Crownsville was rough for Kelsey. Even after the adoption was finalized, Kelsey was terrified that the smallest mistake would make her dads realize that they had made a huge mistake and send Kelsey back into the foster system. It wasn’t until she bonded with her adopted brother, Connor, that Kelsey started to realize that her new family wasn’t going anywhere. They actually wanted her around --- the first time in Kelsey’s life that someone had wanted her.

She was diagnosed hard of hearing shortly after she moved in with the Woods’. After a couple of surgeries as a child, her hearing was partially restored in her right ear. However, out of her left ear she can’t hear anything. Eventually, Kelsey will lose her hearing all together. She can speak aloud but prefers to use ASL and can hold her own with reading lips. Kelsey never really felt like this held her back in life. It was all that she had ever known. Her dads insisted that, since her other senses became stronger, Kelsey was the superhero of the family. This started a life-long obsession with superheroes. Figuring that it would help their daughter, Kelsey got her first service dog when she was eight. Her first service dog was named Jarvis (after Iron Man which is her favorite movie). The dog was trained not only to alert Kelsey to sounds but also to help with her anxiety.

School was a mixed bag for Kelsey. She was a naturally bright and gifted student, always at the top of her class academically and never daring to misbehave. She never wanted to draw unnecessary attention to herself. However, Kelsey was severely bullied by the other kids. She was bullied for everything from being adopted, to her thick Australian accent, to her disability, and finally for being gay after she came out in high school. She spent most of her time with the teachers. Her teachers always adored Kelsey and, ever since, Kelsey knew that one day she wanted to be a teacher so that she could help kids too.

Kelsey also fell in love with art at a young age. Although Kelsey is modest about her talent, anyone can see that she is a remarkable painter. She paints everything from completely abstract, to scenery, to almost scarily accurate portraits of people. When she got to college, Kelsey decided to combine her two interests and study to become an art teacher. She originally intended on staying in Georgia for college. However, after a lot of thought, Kelsey decided to take a leap of faith and go out of state for college. She accepted a full ride art scholarship at the University of Colorado. Since then, Kelsey never looked back.

Kelsey moved back home to Crownsville after finishing her undergraduate degree. She missed being around her family so she got her teaching certificate in Atlanta. With her latest service dog, Gamora, by her side, Kelsey is in her first year of teaching art at the high school. It’s funny to her to be back walking the same halls not long after she graduated and even funnier to be working alongside her former teachers. As well as teaching art, Kelsey also runs the high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. She is eager to prove herself and make her classroom a safe space for her students. She suspects her students are more interested in Gamora than anything else --- but hey, whatever works, right?

Kelsey is the ultimate sweetheart and would never dare to speak ill of anyone. Even though she’s had her fair share of heartbreak, Kelsey chooses to look on the bright side. She believes there’s beauty in the world and a good person inside of everyone.

WANTED CONNECTIONS

a page will be coming soon with more detailed descriptions! but off the top of my head: biological mother, biological siblings, foster siblings, college friends, teacher friends, artist friends, ex-girlfriend that she dated before leaving for college, neighbors, former bully in high school turned close friend. and as always, anything that your beautiful mind can think of!

TAKEN CONNECTIONS

adopted brother --- @conncrwoods --- kelsey’s #1 in life. she will forever consider him her best friend and he’s always the first one kelsey calls in a time of crisis. she’d do anything for him.

childhood friends --- @lvcybirch, @elirades, @will-blooms --- people that kelsey grew up with in crownsville and have stayed close over the years.

first love --- @tierneytaylcr --- tierney and kelsey met in college. they were each other’s roommate. right from the start, they hit it off and fell pretty quickly for each other. they dated for four years but broke up after graduation because kelsey wanted to return home while tierney wanted to travel the world and pursue her music career.

roommate --- @ellymunro --- honestly, kelsey believes they were destined to be each other’s roommate. elly is one of the only people who is just as nerdy as kelsey is. she can’t imagine living with anyone else.

current girlfriend --- @silver-sixx --- in true kelsey fashion, kelsey was crushing hard on silver ever since they met on the booze cruise. completely flustered, kelsey accidentally introduced herself as batman. kelsey was sure that she completely ruined her chances until a month later, when silver kissed her in a coffee shop. they’ve been together ever since.

close friend / lowkey bad influence --- @amara-lange --- whereas kelsey has always played it safe and never wanted any trouble, amara always presses kelsey to get out of her comfort zone. kelsey is always nervous but ends up loving it. almost all of her ‘wild’ stories happened with amara.

#crownsvilleintro #crownsvillecall #ableism tw #mental illness tw #abuse tw

7 notes · View notes

fightmeyeats · 5 years ago

Text

Wrath Month: Probably Not Gonna Calm Down

I feel very frustrated by @taylorswift’s “You Need to Calm Down” (currently “#3 On Trending” on youtube). This is not a particularly hot take.

Corporate pride tends to be highly contested in general: on the one hand, some argue that it's helpful to LGBT+ youth to see themselves represented in the hegemony and suggest that maybe it’s better that corporations are courting LGBT+ dollars over the money of homophobes; on the other, normalization (especially normalization through capitalist/corporate interests) has historically been complicit in the further marginalization of many queer folks--especially trans women of color. To some, “You Need to Calm Down” is simply one example of corporate pride, and therefore represents the same potential for an ambiguous reading. Personally, I have tried to imagine whether this song would have meant anything useful to me as a closeted queer teen; I remember looking desperately for queer themes in “straight” music, and I remember being slightly older (18, maybe?) watching Hayley Kiyoko’s “Girls like Girls” on a loop and how much my first exposure to actually queer music produced by actually queer artists meant to me, and I don’t think even that version of me would have felt connected to Taylor Swift’s attempt to reconcile her experience as a celebrity who has literally capitalized off of internet drama to the harassment queer folks experience daily for existing as themselves.

The Onion’s article “Taylor Swift Inspires Teen To Come Out As Straight Woman Needing To Be At Center Of Gay Rights Narrative” does a great job of simplifying why exactly this video and song is so exhausting to me and many other LGBTQ+ folks: the author argues that Taylor Swift uses “LGBTQ iconography to advance her career” and that, rather than letting people speak for themselves and control their own narratives, she’s making Pride Month about herself. The Atlantic and Vox both have run more in-depth articles breaking down the multitude of reasons why this song is deservedly coming under fire, which I highly recommend reading.

One counter argument I’ve seen here and there is that Taylor Swift is actually not a straight woman centering a gay rights narrative around herself--now that she’s said the word “gay” in a non-negative way in a song, its only a matter of time before she comes out! So one of the things I want to emphasize here is that while I personally don’t believe she’s queer (and per Swift’s own tumblr post explaining why she didn’t kiss Katy Perry in the music video where she says “To be an ally is to understand the difference between advocating and baiting. Anyone trying to twist this positivity into something it isn’t needs to calm down. It costs zero dollars to not step on our gowns.” she doesn’t seem to anticipate coming out either), regardless of whether or not she turns out not to be straight, this song and its lyrics are appropriating LGBTQ iconography to advance her career, and Swift is using queer folks as accessories to perform “wokeness” and draw parallels between herself and actual marginalized communities for her own gain. She may end the music video with directions to sign her petition for Senate support of the Equality Act, but the links in the song description are all promotion for her song, her merch, and her social media accounts. She does not even follow through on the optics of social justice.

The main way I want to trace this argument is through her fundamental misunderstanding and, more significantly, misrepresentation of what homophobia is.Throughout the song/music video Swift is consistently trying to render compatible her own supposed experiences with being bullied/criticized on the internet to the violence of homophobia which is, quite frankly, fucking wild. She sings: “Say it in the street, that's a knock-out / But you say it in a Tweet, that's a cop-out.” What seems to be the intended interpretation of this line is that negative interactions online are cowardly, because people are “hiding” behind usernames and icons, rather than being “brave” enough to offer direct criticism and publicly/visibly own their words; I am not going to go into the potentials of this line of conversation, because I do think in another context (and said by other people) real conversations about the potentials and pitfalls of online culture in regards to purity/call-out culture, social activism/organizing, and bullying can be and are already being had. What I want to point out here is the cognitive dissonance: who can say anything in the street to someone as rich, privileged, and insulated as Taylor Swift? If Swift only accepts criticism delivered in person, she doesn’t accept criticism and she might as well own up to that. And when she is trying to tie this into a commentary on homophobia, maybe she should have considered for two seconds the kind of actual danger queer folks (especially trans and gender non-conforming) are actually in on the streets every day while she’s in a mansion/penthouse apartment (and to that extent, the gentrified trailer park imagery didn’t sit to well with me either, but I’ll get into the discussion of class later on). Queer folks really are getting knocked-out in the streets (1, 2, 3). Furthermore, in her desperate attempt to center her psuedo-discourse on homophobia and queer liberation around herself, she sings the lines: “But I've learned a lesson that stressin' and obsessin' / 'bout somebody else is no fun / And snakes and stones never broke my bones”. I’m not really surprised that it doesn’t “break her bones,” given how successfully she has marketed and monetized her feuds and her own victimhood; this is just a newnother rebranding of said victimized persona, and even though she may not be bothered, there are real stakes to it beyond the “lack of fun”.

So let’s get into it. As I said before, Swift is dangerously misrepresenting what homophobia is and what it looks like, namely through the use of a progress “wrong side of history” narrative. The lines run “Why are you mad when you could be GLAAD?...Sunshine on the street at the parade / But you would rather be in the dark ages” and the music video shows what Kornhaber, writing for The Atlantic, aptly describes as “an unwashed-looking mob” holding childish signs with misspellings and the all-time classic “Adam + Eve Not Adam + Steve.” Korhnaber points out the more common use of “God Hates Fags” signs; personally, I’ve also seen a lot of the “HolyBible” “After Death, the Judgement” signs. In Swift’s narrative, homophobia looks like the obvious, regressive, primitive villain; the already defeated. Perhaps worse, it looks like the rural poor, against the backdrop of rich queer celebrities. This narrative works to render invisible the poor-and-queer, and it undermines the real dangers homophobic violence poses by imagining homophobia has already lost. Imagining homophobia as thirteen unwashed rural poor people who can’t spell the word “moron” obscures the reality that there are also the Mike Pences and the Philip Anschutzs and the laundry list of other rich and connected anti-LGBT politicians, activists, and donors who have very real effects on the lives of the disabled, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ folks, the poor, immigrants, and all the intersections thereof. This also ties into the way Swift puts forward the solution “You just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace / And control your urges to scream about all the people you hate.” As meaningless as these lines are overall, the insinuation that there is a “peace” that we can be “restored” to that would benefit the marginalized and oppressed is ridiculous and harmful, and again misrepresents the problem. Moreover, it suggests the problem could be understood as one of bodily discipline: if homophobes “controlled” themselves better, didn’t scream so much, there wouldn’t be a problem--this gets us back to the problematics of representing homophobia as exclusively the undisciplined poor, rather than the rich and connected. It also leaves room for the potential insinuation that everybody who is angry on the internet needs to calm down; I’ve seen a lot of jokes that this Pride Month, the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, we’re returning to our rebel roots and also celebrating Wrath. I certainly don’t plan to calm down, thanks anyway, Taylor.

In this same vein lets consider the much quoted line: “'Cause shade never made anybody less gay”. This was the first line I heard from the song, and my immediate problem with it was, as Korhnaber also points out, that throwing shade comes from queer communities of color, and “there are many ways to describe a parent who disowns a trans kid, or a lawmaker who tries to nullify same-sex marriages, or a church member who crashes a gay soldier’s funeral. Shady isn’t one.”

Swift hides from potential criticism/backlash behind a psuedo-feminist “female solidarity” with lines such as: “And we see you over there on the internet / Comparing all the girls who are killing it / But we figured you out / We all know now we all got crowns.” While there certainly are people who try to pit women against each other on the internet, again this is something which Taylor Swift has directly utilized multiple times to make herself money. I’m glad celebrities know they’ve all got crowns, but in what world does this benefit the non-rich and famous?

#taylor swift #queer theory #pride month #homonormativity #heteronormativity #homophobia #slurs cw #essay #maybe i can't say it in the street but taylor if you or your publicity team wanna respond heres an open invitation #bc FOR REAL they dont even put a link to the petition in the description which is WILD like if ur gonna go for the optics of wokeness #at least follow through that much lmao #anyways as always i wrote this in a 2 hour rant so ill fix typos as i catch them

12 notes · View notes

dead-night-harringrove · 6 years ago

Note

Modern au ghost Billy who was killed by Neil for being queer who lures Steve in and kills him so he won't be alone for all eternity

((this took a different direction and I’m SO SORRY KAI. Also to anyone else, I highly recommend reading the tags in case they don’t fit your blacklists))

Billy’s been alone for so long now, cursed to each day feel the pain of his own skull shattering beneath driving fists. Though there are days where he fades, where his essence splinters off and scatters through the eternal Void, mostly he simply…remains. Each day, like clockwork, his soul collapses in on itself in memorial pain. He is forced, endlessly, to repeat the cycle of his own death. He had not wanted to believe it at first, that he was dead. The first time he faded, however, was what had finally caused him to break.

The house was empty when he’d returned. Completely bare, with no furniture or signs of life. Thick layers of dust had covered everything, and he’d attempted to run out the door to see what the hell was going on. He’d been launched backwards into the house, blood pouring from his face as he screamed until no sound could come forth from his throat.

That was then. He’s since learned from the two other families who’ve lived in the house since he died, that it’s been over 30 years since his murder.

The first family had been nice enough, and he had tried to engage with them in an attempt to nullify the constant mind-numbing blandness of death. Really, it was the boredom that bothered him more than anything. He was always moving, driving forward in life. The family hadn’t appreciated his attempts at communication, however, growing unnerved enough to leave after three months of living there. The second family had stayed longer, but he could tell they weren’t going to last. It angered him, and he’d began lashing out in frustration. Couldn’t they see he wasn’t hurting anyone? He just didn’t want to be alone anymore!

They had fled the night he’d accidentally slung half of the kitchen into the living room all at once in a fit of rage.

Now, he waits for the next family to arrive, and prays they won’t leave him. He’ll make them stay if he has to. Billy’s wish is granted sooner than he had expected, in the year of 2018 the new patron’s calendar read. The newcomer was the only one who moved in, taking advantage of the cheap price of the supposedly “haunted” house. A college student, it looks like, studying complicated mathematics. His hair is long, almost to his shoulders and styled into a dramatic chestnut mane. He has a lithe frame, not incredibly thin but lean and all limb. The papers littered across the counter in the kitchen are addressed to Steven S. Harrington. Billy wonders what the S stands for only briefly, because otherwise he doesn’t care. He’s entranced by the boy’s, Steven’s, apparent grace and his beauty.

The memory of why he was murdered, 34 years prior, resurfaces suddenly. At the mercy of his own flesh and blood, his father, he’d been outed after getting caught with another boy’s lips against his own.

He’s suddenly overwhelmed with emotion as he realizes he can’t handle another person leaving him. Steve can never leave him, he can’t be alone forever for something he couldn’t help.

So he stays low, trying not to cause too much disturbance at first. Instead of acting out, he observes. He learns that Steve is bisexual, something that surprises him at how easily he says it and expresses himself. Billy is absolutely fascinated by the technology the living boy owns, things that when Billy was alive would have been considered nearly sci-fi in their advancements. Steve draws a lot, and he also runs a blog. Billy learns that Steve’s ex-girlfriend, Nancy, is also bisexual and is dating a girl named Kali who is an out and outspoken lesbian. Nancy’s other ex, Jonathan, is close friends with Steve as well and calls him one night freaking out over some big-name musician coming out as pansexual. That’s how Billy finds out Jonathan himself is pansexual, though he’s not sure what that means. If he wasn’t any smarter, he’d probably assume Jonathan was attracted to pans. That’s stupid though, so Billy dismisses the thought.

He learns that 2018 is nicknamed “20-gay-teen” and feels a bitter twang run through his chest at the fact that he doesn’t get to enjoy this. What they so freely embrace and enjoy in themselves and take pride in, he was killed for. If he’d made it to 18, if he could have just made it a little bit longer, he could be alive right now. He could be married, to a man he loved because queer people can get married now, apparently.

The night he learns the clever nickname is the first time Billy lashes out around Steve, knocking over a baseball trophy on his dresser. Steve abruptly shivers, the temperature in the room dropping albeit Billy can’t feel it.

It’s the first time Steve’s witnessed anything strange in the house, and it makes every hair stand on end as he remembers he did, in fact, decide to rent a supposedly haunted house. He’d scoffed at the notion at the time, but now he wasn’t so sure. As a rational person though, he couldn’t decide the house was haunted just by an isolated incident.

It escalates, steadily. Billy can’t stand it. He’s angry; why does Steve and his friends get to enjoy being themselves while Billy suffers, alone and doomed to die everyday? His father isn’t even around anymore, and yet he still relives his death. The pain, the shock, the emotions, they never fade as he slips into what he calls the False Sleep. His presence temporarily drops down, and he’s unable to do anything until the turn of 3AM. He’s not really sure why, probably something to do with stupid ghost logic. After all, Billy can walk through walls but he can’t go through the ceiling and he can’t sink through the ground. The most inaccurate thing anyone’s ever gotten in a ghost movie was the spirit being able to float or fly. Billy can confirm that he’s still a victim of gravity, unfortunately.

Billy throws things, sometimes at Steve. Steve can’t really leave, either. Being a college student and having to juggle all of his debts, he can’t afford to just up and walk away. So he suffers through it. He curses at the spirit, looks up the history of the house and learns that the kid who died in the house was named William, but everyone called him Billy. He tells Billy to fuck off in the most polite manner one can achieve when dealing with an asshole ghost. The activity in the house calms after that, and for a while Steve believes maybe Billy left.

Billy, however, has returned to observing. When Steve had addressed him by name, it had been nice. Billy hasn’t heard his name, hasn’t been addressed personally, since he was alive.

The first time Billy witnesses one of Steve’s panic attacks, he himself panics. He’d felt Steve’s anxiety and emotions rushing off of his form in waves, and had rushed in as soon as he could. Steve has scratches on his arms from where he’s digging his own nails into his skin, and Billy wants to reach other and pry his hands away from his arms. He impulsively tries to, and Steve feels goosebumps spread across his entire body. “Billy,” Steve says his voice so softly, tears dripping off his face so softly as he looks up directly at Billy but also through him. He’s looking in the right direction though, and Billy’s breath stutters in his chest. It’s the absolute worst time to be jerked out of Steve’s room into living room, feeling nonexistent punches landing on his body and his bones snapping and face crushing beneath long-gone pressure of hateful fists. He lets out a cry of pain and anguish, begging for mercy just this once… when three AM rolls around hours later, however, he curses fate for forcing him to suffer as he rushes to Steve’s room. He’s not asleep, staring down at his phone as he scrolls through Instagram mindlessly. Billy comes closer, and the signal of his phone degrades until nothing loads. Billy settles himself beside Steve on the bed, though nothing changes. It’s like he’s not even there, but Steve puts his phone down regardless and lays back on the bed. “You scared me earlier… you were there and then you were just gone. I felt you disappear. It was weird. I feel like I shouldn’t be this casual about living with a ghost but what can you do, right? I wish there was some way I could talk to you, but I’m not about to bring a Ouija board in this house. Fuck that shit. You know, Jonathan heard you one time when we were in a call. He said it sounded like you called me an asshole. You’re the asshole of the two of us though, you know? Always throwing my shit around the house and taking my things and hiding them from me… who does that? Is it really necessary?”

Billy giggles mindlessly, knowing Steve can’t hear him but he finds a lot of humor in the only thing that’s ever been transferred across their worlds was calling Steve an asshole. He sobers quickly, however, when Steve continues speaking. “Sometimes, I feel like dying. I want to, you know? I…I tried once. I know one of these days I’m going to end up trying again…life fucking sucks today. The world’s ending and no one’s doing shit about it and I’m just tired of it.”Steve sighs, and Billy feels his stomach pitch in sadness. He wishes he could do something to ease Steve’s pain, but nothing comes to mind. Billy settles for just being there, at the very least. Steve’s not alone now, even if Billy wants to do more than be a presence. Eventually, Steve falls asleep.

Time progresses, as it is prone to do. Steve is mostly okay, though Billy can feel the building waves of pain flowing out of the older boy’s body. He takes a moment to follow that train of thought, finding humor in the fact that Steve is older than him by societal norm, but by technicality Billy is 51 years old. He’s an old man now! He laughs to himself, and Steve shivers. “I hope you know every time I actually hear you, it’s like either a small child or a demon crawling up from the pits of hell. Your voice is not what it’s probably supposed to sound like,” he says idly. Billy snorts, knocking over a vase on the kitchen counter just to be a pain in the ass. Steve curses, looking over at the vase from where he’s sitting in the living room. Billy watches the debate play across his face before Steve decides he’ll sit it up later. Rolling his eyes, he props it back up himself.

It’s nice.

The first time Billy walks in on Steve with his pants off and his hand in his boxers, his brain backfires as it tries to catch up. His door was closed, dumb ass, he doesn’t usually close his door, runs through his mind as he tries to backtrack and leave the room but the image is going to be in his head for eternity. It overwhelms him enough to fade for a few days.

When he returns, it’s with a shout and the picture frames on the wall rattle all at once. Steve jolts, looking around in a panic. “Billy? You’re back! You just vanished, I was worried you were gone for good…”Steve looks worse for wear, and Billy sees scabs on his arms. Guilt rises up in his throat as he goes over to sit beside Steve on the couch, and the music that had been playing from his laptop slows to a stop as it enters an endless buffering cycle. Billy wishes he could explain the fades to Steve, the temporary gaps in time as he scatters across existence briefly. He wishes he could say anything to Steve at all, and restless anger spurs his soul into frantic energy. The television flips on, off, and then on again. Steve frowns, scrubbing a hand across his tired eyes. “I thought you were gone.”

When Billy comes back from his next fade, it’s to the overwhelming sense that something is terribly wrong. Turning around from where he stands in the living room, he sees Steve’s bedroom door down the hall is closed again. He feels a pull towards it and he phases across the house, brushing through the door as an intense suffering hits him like a wall. The calendar on Steve’s wall reads different, by a drastic amount, to when Billy had last looked at it. It’s been three months, which isn’t the longest he’s ever disappeared for but he’s also never had a reason to stick around. Steve is curled up in a fetal position on the floor beside his bed, drooling and shaking violently. He retches, but can’t move himself into a different position not to choke on his own saliva and throw-up. His breathing is shallow, and too slow. His skin is paler than usual, and Billy’s eyes scan the room when he spots the bottle that’s rolled beneath the bed. He jerks it out, and sees it’s empty. The top is further beneath the bed. Ativan, Steve’s anxiety medication. He overdosed on what’s supposed to help him. “Steve!” His voice is foreign to his own ears, desperate as he glitches directly beside him. Steve’s eyes, glassy and unfocused, immediately turn to him. He’s crying, and Billy brushes his fingers along his forehead. Steve shivers, and retches again. “Make it stop…Billy, make it stop…” There’s nothing Billy can do, he can’t call 911 and even if he manages to, they’ll never make it in time. Steve is too far gone, that much Billy can tell. He can feel it, Steve’s spirit is closer than Billy’s ever felt it. So, he thinks and he feels tears spring in his eyes as he reaches into Steve, grabs hold of him. It’s a foreign feeling, his hands are somewhere inside of Steve but not at the same time. He grabs on, and he tears him out. Steve is slung from his body and he screams as he’s suddenly overwhelmed by everything. His hands go to his chest, scratching at the phantom intrusion of cold hands gripping his heart and squeezing the last of life from it. His eyes lose their amber hue, fading into a blank white with a gentle gold back-light. Turning to look at where he’d been laying moments prior, life fading, he looks at his body in mute horror. That’s his body. He’s not in it. He’d actually done it, he’d lost control and… a sob tears out of his throat, followed by a series of aborted gasps as he feels cold tears wash down his cheeks. Suddenly, he’s jerked away from his lifeless corpse and turned around to face a solid chest and a tear-streaked face. In an instant he recognizes the face he’s looking into, he’s seen it so many times before in newspaper clippings and articles online. “B-Billy?” his voice is wispy, echoing in his ears. Softer than he’s ever heard himself. He sniffles, and Billy smiles wryly. “Yeah, it’s me. I, I’m so sorry… I didn’t realize, I didn’t know it’s been three months since I faded. I never should have left…” He says it, even though he can’t control the fade. Steve will learn that soon enough, he’ll fade too. Steve reaches up, takes his face in his hands and just looks at him. His eyes are wide, full of both fear and wonder. Billy’s pulse quickens in his veins, uselessly since he doesn’t have a heartbeat to pump blood through his body but- whatever. It is what it is.

Maybe it’s in an effort to distract him from what just happened, what they’ve both done, or maybe it’s Billy’s own desires finally being something he can act on, but he shifts just enough to press his lips to Steve’s. Steve gasps against his lips, but doesn’t move away. After a beat, he presses back against him. There’s nothing heated to it, nothing more, just a comfort they both take part in.

Billy leads him out of the room, out onto the back porch to watch the sunrise. While neither of them know what’s next, both are content to finally have someone to spend forever with. Neither are alone anymore, and for now that’s enough.

#harringrove #short fiction #tw: violence #tw: suicide #tw: overdose

55 notes · View notes

pride-vns-blog · 6 years ago

Text

LGBTQ VN Week: Day One! (6/18)

Welcome to the first day of my LGBTQ visual novel recommendation week, in honor of Pride Month 2018! Every day from today (June 18th) to Sunday (June 24th), I’ll be talking about four visual novels with LGBTQ themes, characters, and/or creators that have stood out to me and explaining a little bit about why I like them! I also reached out to a handful of those VNs’ developers and talked with them about their work, so you’ll be seeing a casual interview tagged onto the end of every post, too. ✨

To kick things off today, I’m highlighting four visual novels that are practically bursting at the seams with personality, all in their own ways — Saturn’s WORST DATING SIM, Obscurasoft’s Coming Out On Top, Brianna Lei’s Butterfly Soup, and Madeleine’s Inverness Nights!

Hit the jump to read about watching Animal Planet with punks, beta-testing hookup apps, Mario fire alarms, and why it is that so many visual novels seem to use character archetypes.

One note before we get started! This list isn't meant to be reflective of "the objectively best LGBTQ visual novels" or anything like that, which I want to be ultra-clear about upfront. It's not a list of all the ones I've ever played, either. There are plenty of visual novels with LGBTQ characters/themes that have been recommended to me frequently — while I was working on this list and over the past couple years — that didn't make it onto this list because I couldn't afford to buy them, or because they just weren't for me when I did buy them, or because of a million other reasons.

To give an example of this in action: I barely have any originally-Japanese language visual novels on here, because the number of M/M ones that get translated is already so low and already nearly 100% commercial, and I'm way more inclined to pay for M/M than anything else. (Reason: I'm gay and I like looking at hot guys.) For the purposes of this list specifically, I've also cut out a fair few BL-marketed VNs — from both Western and Eastern developers — that skirt around the issue of whether or not the protagonist is gay/bi/etc awkwardly.

I also tried to limit myself to one VN per team, picking the ones I thought were best representative of their output and leaving space to mention other works of theirs that I'd liked, with the aim of keeping this list from being totally dominated by studios who'd put out a lot over a long period of time. And then personal taste for other genre and content details comes into play, so it cuts out even more from what's left! In the originally-Japanese BL category alone, that left me with a single nominee, which was... Well, you'll see!

Basically, I went over a lot of different options to settle onto a list that's ultimately only supposed to be things that I, personally, would recommend! And I don't want to recommend things I didn't enjoy, one way or another. Nobody wants to sit through multiple paragraphs of a slog where I'm trying to talk about a game I didn't actually like (or, in plenty of cases, a game I couldn't afford) without acknowledging that I didn't like it. To be totally honest, that sounds like it would suck to try and write.

So if your favorite LGBTQ visual novels aren't on here, but you want to give people an excuse to play them, I'd love to read anyone else's personal recommendation lists! I'm not a journalist or a reviewer and this isn't anything close to a formalized games review blog that I'm planning to update ever again; I'm just a VN dev who felt like sitting down and making a list of other LGBTQ VNs I liked one day, so I went and I did it. And I felt like giving those other devs a platform if I was going to talk about their work, so I took my own Patreon earnings to pay for as many as I could, then I went and did some interviews, too.

Thanks for sitting through (or skimming, as the case may be) that wall of text! Without further ado, let's talk WORST DATING SIM!

WORST DATING SIM (SATURN)

Itchio Tagline: “MRGRGR.” Genre(s): Slice of life, shitpost. Release Date: January 22nd, 2018. Content Warnings: Brief depiction of blood; violence.

Out of all the visual novels I’ll be covering over the next week, WORST DATING SIM is the only one I haven’t seen nearly all the content for, and not for a lack of trying! Saturn’s debut visual novel, a challenging conversational simulator where a punk named Etsuji decides to follow you home and hang out with you purely because he can, features a grand total of 69 ways you can get a GAME OVER. By and large, these endings come at the hands of your newfound friend (?), who’s got a temper and a sensitive streak a mile wide. If Etsuji doesn’t like what you’re saying, he’ll knock your lights out, and you’ll get booted back to the title screen.

The way WORST DATING SIM doubles down on this challenge is by intentionally removing Ren’Py’s default save feature — if you piss Etsuji off, you’re back at square one, period. You have to either somehow retain the information yourself or turn to someone else’s successful run for help, because it’s deliberately designed to be done in a single playthrough without reloading. Even a fair few jokes in the script, like “I’m sure in several alternate universes he’s punched my lights out, but so far I’m safe,” are dropped in to acknowledge the fact that beating WORST DATING SIM is more akin to powering through a run of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. (But don’t worry, the Skip Text function is still there to help you out!)

As someone who does turn to guides frequently to find out what I’m missing on my third or fourth playthroughs of visual novels, I assumed from the start that at some point that I’d want to find a walkthrough in order to see any real endings. But the sheer charm of Etsuji’s responses and, to be completely frank, how much fun I was having just trying to scale Etsuji’s emotional mountain meant that I never really hit that point while playing. WORST DATING SIM’s distinct personality struck exactly the right chord in my brain that made me want to keep playing by myself, tunneling away at it persistently, and it made the ending(s!) feel all that much more rewarding.

WORST DATING SIM is available now for free on Itchio, and you can follow Saturn on his Itch.io or Twitter (NSFW) for updates on more potential WDS content or his other upcoming visual novels.

COMING OUT ON TOP (OBSCURASOFT)

Itchio Tagline: “The erotic comedy gay dating game that'll make [you] laugh, cry, and get a little boned up! Hot dudes included.” Genre(s): Comedy, romance. Release Date: December 10th, 2014. Content Warnings: Nudity; mentions of homophobia; sexual content; seriously there’s a lot of sex in this.

If you’ve played M/M dating sims in the English language sphere any time in the last five years, you’ve probably heard of Obscurasoft’s Coming Out On Top — drawing more from the Western tradition of porn by and for gay men than anything else, it tells the story of newly-out college senior Mark Matthews and his run-ins with hot guy after hot guy (after hot guy, after... you get the picture). With the help of his roommate Penny, he also takes on the hookup app scene and delves into a sea of bonus dates funded by Kickstarter backers, which were released steadily from January 2015 to December 2016.

Coming Out On Top’s steady stream of humor never goes so far as to be totally derailing from its focus on sexuality and Mark’s genuinely sincere approach to relationships, casual or otherwise; Obscurasoft manages to infuse the numerous sex scenes with enough awkwardness, humor, and personality that actually playing through them back-to-back feels less like a string of pinups and more like scenes Mark is actively involved in or growing from. As a character, especially one whose archetype has gotten a lot of mileage in gay porn since the dawn of mankind, it’d be narratively easy to let Mark remain a generally undefined slate for players to project themselves onto.

And while there is a degree of personalization, especially when it comes to how blatantly horned-up some of the dialogue is compared to other options the player can choose, Coming Out On Top is still very distinctly Mark’s story. His specific insecurities from years of being closeted don’t vanish as soon as he comes out, and hookups don’t always work out for him the way they might in ten minute long “first time” AVs. His grades still matter, and his friends still exist, and he’s still got his own sense of priorities the player can disregard (at their own fish-related peril) or see through on the slow climb to the end of his senior year.

Coming Out On Top is available now for $14.99 on Itch.io, and Obscurasoft’s website; to get early updates about what they’re working on next, you can follow their News & Updates blog or their Twitter.

BUTTERFLY SOUP (BRIANNA LEI)

Itchio Tagline: “Gay girls playing baseball and falling in love.” Genre(s): Comedy, slice of life. Release Date: September 16th, 2017. Content Warnings: Parental abuse; violence; racist language; homophobic language; ableist abuse and slurs.

The strength of Butterfly Soup’s personality, from beginning to end, is founded in its four point-of-view characters — kindhearted Diya, reckless Min, sharp Noelle, and carefree (?) Akarsha. As a group of ninth grade friends with different priorities and different reasons for joining their shared baseball team, which are as obvious as the hugely-varied color schemes of each girl’s clothes, they play off of one another easily. Lei uses her fair share of actual memes, but never ones that feel like the speaking character — usually Akarsha — wouldn’t say them, which holds true to the rest of Lei’s dialogue writing. It feels distinctly ninth grade without ever being mocking or trivializing the way everything is so extremely important all the time when you’re a ninth grader.

Part of that strength definitely comes from Lei’s willingness to lean on each character’s archetype and unpack it at the same time; Diya’s physical strength and sheer skill, combined with her reluctance to talk to strangers, could have easily seen her shoehorned into a much more detached character than she’s written as. Instead, she’s thoughtful, expressive, and deeply concerned with the people she cares about, even if she can’t always necessarily communicate that to them very well through her ever-present anxiety. Exactly how their own differences manifest and each of the three other girls’ reasons for being that way are slightly trending into spoiler territory, but I think Diya’s fellow main characters also each have their own similarly-smart tweaks on familiar archetypes that make their joke-filled banter all that much more personalized and memorable.

Although there’s a lot to love about the positive, hilarious moments in the protagonists’ everyday lives, one of the things that I think worked just as well narratively were the scenes that required all those content warnings up there. They're very much going to be a YMMV situation for different players, especially with my own caveat that my relationship to dysfunctional families is coming from white Irish ex-Catholicism rather than those two specific Asian cultures’ values — trying not to give any spoilers about which characters I’m referring to, here! — but in-text, they’re never situations without any future, because we can see that future where the group has each other, and they always have room in the moment to be angry, or upset, or hurt without the narrative itself punishing them for failing to be perfect. Instead, they get to play baseball and fall in love and set off fire alarms, and they do pretty okay.

Butterfly Soup is available now for free, and you can follow Brianna Lei on Itch.io, Twitter, or Tumblr to learn more about her upcoming work.

INVERNESS NIGHTS (MADELEINE)

Itchio Tagline: “Every relationship ends.” Genre(s): Historical fantasy, drama. Release Date: June 30th, 2017. Content Warnings: See Itch.io page.

There are a lot of things about Inverness Nights that worked for me in a way I don’t know that they would have in another visual novel — in particular, Tristram’s character is difficult in ways that pretty directly pertain to some of the content warnings linked above, and I was personally interested in seeing the text unpack that bit by bit. The eventual turn the story takes further on in your playtime, to try and phrase that in a way that isn’t super spoilery, was something I personally didn’t mind taking a little longer to get to.

Curious to hear what its developer Madeleine had to say about the story, their thoughts on character design, and what they’re up to next, I reached out to them for an interview!

IVAN: Thanks for having me, Madeleine! To get this conversation started, how would you sum up Inverness Nights to everyone reading this?

MADELEINE: Inverness Nights is a game about queer isolation and the importance of queer community outside of romantic relationships. Set in 18th c Scotland you play as Tristram Rose, an immortal gay man who has just broken up with his mortal boyfriend, and decide how he’ll cope with the loss as someone unable to tell the world around him that he’s magical and queer.

Sounds spot-on! And definitely a great summary of all the things that made it super appealing — to me, at least, haha. Before anything else, I want to note that it's been just about a year since you released Inverness Nights! Congratulations! How's the experience been, and what particular highlights or lowlights over the past year stand out to you?

It was good actually releasing a game, I enjoyed that part a lot! Aside from that, I really appreciated a couple of thoughtful reviews it got where people connected with it as a game where being queer is difficult, but not bleak. I think that because AAA games love tragic gay stories indie games can sometimes feel they need to be ultra-positive to balance that in the other direction, which is cool, but as someone who likes stories that’re more in-the-middle it was a gap I wanted to fill. There was a good reaction to that, albeit a quiet reaction. It’s a very ‘first game, niche game’ complaint but the lowlight would probably be that not many people played it — however, there are a lot of understandable reasons why it worked out that way so I’m not too hurt overall.

Haha, getting something finished and released is definitely a great feeling; I'm personally really glad you stepped in to fill that niche, as someone who likes things that are honest about their characters' pain without feeling exploitative or endlessly hopeless! In the fantastic (but spoiler-filled) Medium postmortem you wrote on your process, you say that "an important part of marketing visual novels is selling your characters"; the postmortem goes into that in fairly great detail, especially as it pertains to ensemble casts, but would you care to expand upon that observation in the scope of the visual novel genre (and how you're keeping it in mind for future projects) a little bit here?

People make fun of visual novels sometimes for their reliance on archetypes — you know, look up the average dating sim and you can probably tell in an instant who the bad boy is, who the smart girl is, so on — but when you’re selling a character driven game to people, you can’t give away the cast’s backstories and quirks up front or there’s nothing to play for, so you’ve got to find some sort of shorthand to suggest what an audience wants will be there, and that usually comes back to telling them which archetypes you’ve got. When I started Inverness Nights I kind of laughed at that reliance on archetypes and tried to do something different but I learnt the hard way why it’s important. At the moment I’m finishing a game called Catacomb Prince with my didn’t-quite-finish-it-for-a-jam group Skeleteam, and when our character artist Roxy was doing the designs I gave her very broad notes on who the cast were so they’d be more archetypical. Consequently we have a very recognisable cool girl/frat boy/petite NB slate of romance options that people’ve connected with waaay more easily and way faster than anyone did with the IN cast, which I think speaks to why it’s a sound approach.

I definitely agree in the importance of finding a good balance with archetypes; I've had people who've instantly bonded when I invoked "shy genius" or "lovestruck best friend", which ironically has given me a bit more of that freedom in telling their stories more uniquely! Could you shed a little light on what Catacomb Prince is, without too many spoilers, and what your storytelling influences for a visual novel like that have been?

Catacomb Prince is a Gothic comedy; you are Prince Vitali, trashy heir to a fantasy Renaissance kingdom, and you have woken up dead five years after a raging party. Your parents still expect you to inherit the throne despite your new skeletal appearance, but your kingdom’s laws require the King to be married. Find love, find your killer — or die again trying.

It’s mostly inspired by Animamundi: Dark Alchemist, which is an old kitschy BL VN about a guy named Georik taking up alchemy to make a new body for his decapitated (still living) sister while hiding his hobby from his friends. Animamundi has some very gloomy stuff happening but it’s so over-the-top about it that it loops around to being a very funny game, and I wanted more experiences like that in the world, so here we are. There’re also some aspects of other goofy Gothic stories in there, like Hammer Horror movies and EC Comics, though the romance aspect of it means it’s not all rib-ticklers all the time. We took care to make the love interests more than just fodder for jokes and/or horror. They’re complete, kissable people, with flesh and everything.

I am not doing a good job of easing up on the skeleton jokes but please believe me on that last point.

Glad to hear the love interests have skin! Not super fussed about that, personally, but I'm sure some players would have logistical concerns about things like skeleton-on-skeleton kissing. (I'd like to go on the record and say I'm pro-skeleton and extremely pro-skeleton puns, so I'm waiting with bated breath to get to play as your not-breathing protagonist.) Other than what we'll be seeing in Catacomb Prince, what kind of genres and themes are you interested in exploring more of in the future?

After Catacomb Prince I’m going to work on finishing an IF game I started last year called Captain Dracula, about being the last survivor on a submarine after your Captain reveals he’s Dracula. That’s also a comedy. I spent three years making Inverness Nights so taking a breather to make funny games for a while seemed like a good plan, and I’m really into classic horror, so I’ve gravitated in that direction with it. I’ve also got a regular no-pictures no-choices fantasy novel I’m several drafts through at the moment which I’ll hopefully be releasing later this year. Once those’re off my plate, I’m keen to try making either an 80 Days-style narrative travel game or a Clock Tower-style point-and-click horror for a change of pace. I want to do something that’s more about exploring a place; I do academic stuff as well as indie development and all my academic work has been on how we explore places in games, so it feels weird that I haven’t made anything that utilises my research.

It sounds like you've got a lot coming up! I'm looking forward to seeing how you can combine your academic studies with your fiction work, which already have such strong settings of place from the get-go. And last but not least, what LGBTQ visual novels from other developers would you like to recommend?

It's IF rather than a VN but I love Heart of the House by Nissa Campbell, which is a Gothic game about an exorcist trying to remove an evil presence from a Victorian manor house, and maybe also wooing some of its residents. It’s very atmospheric and you can be NB, two things I like a lot. With caveats I’m also really keen on Animamundi (like I mentioned earlier — fun, funny MLM but warning for violent horror elements and sexual abuse), and The House in Fata Morgana (a dark romance about a trans man trying to rescue his girlfriend from a cursed manor, there’s an extensive content warning list on its website). Lastly, on the lighter side, Butterfly Soup and The Duenkhy are both good VNs about queer people making friends :) probably play them when you need to smile after all the grimmer suggestions I’ve made.

Awesome — and thanks again for your time, Madeleine! It was a pleasure.

Inverness Nights is available now for $12 USD, and you can follow Madeleine on Twitter or Itch.io to keep up with all the skeleton romances and Dracula adventures they're setting their sights on next!

Thanks to everyone who read this far! Keep an eye on the Twitter thread or this blog for tomorrow’s post, where I’ll be talking about four more visual novels that I think do some crafty things with their creative design!

28 notes · View notes

heyitslapis · 6 years ago

Text

Ok let's see... its been about 3 weeks since i posted last, give or take a few days. And I'll just say its been an interesting and exhausting few weeks.

Still trying to completely get over my dumbf*ck feelings for Alex. I'm not really doing a super great job at that, and still get random depressive moments that last a varying amount of time, but usually i just push my pity party to the side after about 2 minutes.

On the 3rd of June, Alex went up to see part of her family and join them on a cruise to Columbia. She said wont be back until maybe the 3rd or 4th of July at the earliest. I kinda miss her, but I feel like spending a month physically apart from her will do me some good. Her and i still snap back and fourth to save our streak and to day good morning. Whenever she cant find wifi, she turns on her dad's personal hotspot so she can send me at least one snap to keep our streak rolling (we are the longest streak we have with anyone on our snapchats, and it stands currently at 261 days.) The day after she left the streak sorta died for the day, but she was able to save it cause she was in a different time zone.

Since she's been gone, we've hired several new people at work, many if which being new hosts (thank God tbh, cause this means after theyre all done training and get a couple weeks to get used to everything i can train as a server and hopefully make a little more money). One of them is Giovanni's sister (Gio is a guy that works there. Mostly does dish, sometimes hosts.) And apparently she likes me? About a week before she started they came in to eat with their mom and after they left Gio was like "Dude, i think my sister likes you."

Hey, some random girl actually has a crush on me for the first time in my life? That's cool! Right? It would be, if she weren't 17. If i were still 18 or 19, i wouldnt really care. But now that im 20, even though we only have a 2 year and almost 6 month age difference, i still feel like its weird. I feel like im in a whole new age threshold now that ive hit that 2 decade mark, and she just seems to me like a kid. Anyway, Sammy (thats her) is bi with a preference for girls. She's very forward about asking the girls at work about their sexuality (she'll be mid convo and just be like "wait; you straight?") She makes a hobby of flirting with the straight girls, because as she says it, she can easily flirt with straight girls bc she knows she wont have a chance. As soon as she knows theyre bi or gay, she cant even really talk to them. Sammy flirts with me in excess, has asked me 3 times if im straight, or if im sure that i am (homegirl has only been here like two weeks), and the reason why is because she would happily let me break her heart, and has said thats its too bad im not gay bc if i was she would let me crush her. Also has told me that i remind her of her ex girlfriend, and when i said idk if thats supposed to be a compliment or not, she said "well i really liked her, so..." Oh and btw all 3 times shes asked, I've told her im straight (yknow, bc im not out to the irl general public) and I'll just say that having to lie outloud about my sexuality does not feel that great. Thats not something ive ever had to verbally do before, and now i understand. Tbh i dont really lie, or at least i very rarely do, bc i dont like it, and i want to be seen as trustworthy. i have told my share of lies in my day, but i feel like that was in the top 3 worst lies ive ever told. Simply because i know thats not who i am, yet im saying it anyway.

Besides that, in these last couple weeks ive:

Gotten my computer hacked and almost got scamed out of the piddly $120 dollars total that is in my bank account for me to try to live off of until next Fridays paycheck, and almost got my brother's bank account hacked (looong f*ckin story. Short version, im a gotdang fool, and people are absolute bastards), so now i cant use my computer until i get it looked at, which means no art (sucks bc i wanted to draw myself a bi pride icon)

Put in 103 hours at work in the last 2 weeks

Had our only available car break down twice

Got about half of our kitchen painted. Still need to find time to finish it

Purchased tickets for a convention, and bought almost everything i need to finish my cosplay.

Have a sore in the back of my mouth thats been plaguing me for over a week (finally starting to heal. Its been hurting to do so much as talk, much less eat or drink)

Had to deal with everyone's attitudes at work (some sh*ts going on with the moon and everyones been a pissy ass lately, and im so over it)

The pain in the ass girl at work that we've been trying to get rid of for over a year called in and quit 15 minutes before her literal last shift (Father's day) and our proprietary manager told her "its bullshit that you just found out that your other job scheduled you to work today 15 minutes before you had to come here" and "dont try to come back to this store again". Im ecstatic about it tbqh and feel a small sense of victory about the whole thing.

One of my favorite gays from work had his last shift Saturday night and im still sad about it.

It may not seem like much but its just all around every other day something else small happened to add to the weird and crazy smorgasbord that is my life.

Also bless Sammy bc yesterday was Father's Day, and because of that, i was in the building of my work at 9:45am, started working to get set up at 10, opened around 10:50, and didnt stop until about 8:50pm, 10 minutes before we closed. Our proprietary manager bought us tons of pizza and snacks in the middle of our shift so that we could all take turns having a 10 minute breather, but other than that it was non-stop work and dedication to the customer. At 9:50am my brother went to the Duncan Donuts down the road from us to get the handful of morning people either coffee or bagels or whatever they asked for. I told my brother to get me the english muffin with egg and cheese, and if they had the option, to add sausage to it. Also to tell Sammy i said hi (because she works at that Duncan also, and was there yesterday morning). My brother comes back with breakfast, hands me my food and said that Sammy made it especially for me. (At that time i was also in a bad mood bc i was tired from working four open doubles in a row, and was stressed, so that really lifted my spirits a bit. The food, and the thought that someone made it especially for me.) And i'll just say she just earned my love for the next week at least.

Anyway i think thats all for now loves. I dont have a very eventful life, but i sure do have a busy one.

#my life #avatarkorvira speaks #poor sammy thinks im quote ''really cute'' and ''f*cking adorable'' and im kinda glad she thinks im straight #like her second night training with me she asked how old i was and when i said 20 she said ''damn''#then later when i asked her age (even though i alreadu knew she was 17) she refused to tell me specifically #like shed tell anyone else (including my sister) but not me #and you see at work with certain people ill be like playfully flirty with them just as one of the many ways i show friendliness #like i do it to alex and heather and marissa and molly and several others. but theyre all adults #i know for a fact sammy is a minor. so i told her im not gonna make crude or flirty jokes with her and she doesnt like that #also i just realized that i only joke flirt with girls at work #mostly thats just because im more comfortable with the gals. that and every guy there is either annoying or nasty #and i wouldnt be able to interact with them that way without them making it really gross or thinking im actually hitting on them #and if i ever truely hitting on any of the guys at work someone smack me in the back of the head bc ew #alex #sammy

4 notes · View notes

weekegg2-blog · 5 years ago

Text

A ‘freaking fag revolutionary’ remembers the early years of gay liberation in Chicago

When the annual Pride Parade steps off from the intersection of Broadway and Montrose at noon on Sunday, June 30—with Lori Lightfoot, Chicago's first openly gay mayor, serving as honorary grand marshal—it will represent a very different mind-set from the event that launched the pride parade tradition. This year's parade is expected to draw more than a million participants and onlookers to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28 and 29, 1969. Thus the theme Stonewall 50: Millions of Moments of Pride.

I was a teenaged member of Chicago Gay Liberation, the loose-knit, short-lived group that organized the first pride parade on Saturday, June 27, 1970. Most of our group thought of ourselves, proudly if irreverently, as members of the "freaking fag revolution"—to borrow the phrase used by Thomas Aquinas Foran, the U.S. attorney who had prosecuted the so-called "Chicago Seven" anti-war activists charged with conspiracy and incitement to riot as a result of their protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

The first parade wasn't even a parade. It was a march, which meant we were allowed to walk on the sidewalks but not in the streets. There were no floats, no cars, no politicians, no crowds, no corporate sponsors pitching their brands to onlookers. The last thing on our minds was the possibility of any mayor, let alone an openly gay one, leading the way; we were happy the city's then-mayor, "Boss" Richard J. Daley, didn't set his cops on us.

The day began at noon with a rally in Washington Square Park across the street from the Newberry Library—known as "Bughouse Square" because of its storied history as a free-speech forum. From there we walked to the historic Water Tower at the intersection of Michigan and Chicago Avenues. Then, instead of dispersing as we had originally planned, we impulsively headed south on Michigan into the Loop, chanting "Out of the closets and into the streets!" as we wended our way through throngs of Mag Mile shoppers. The march ended with another rally in Civic Center Plaza (now Daley Plaza), where the event culminated in a joyous circle dance around the Picasso statue.

Between 150 and 300 people (depending on which account you read) showed up to celebrate what our flyer promoting the event declared (in all capital letters) was: "THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF GAY PEOPLE TELLING THE WARPED, SICK, MALADJUSTED, PURITAN AMERIKAN SOCIETY THAT THEY HAVE HAD ENOUGH SHIT."

That flyer is on display as part of "Out of the Closets & Into the Streets: Power, Pride & Resistance in Chicago's Gay Liberation Movement," a new exhibit at Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, the midwest's largest LGBTQ library and research center. Conceived by the library's director, Wil Brant, and curated by a team of young volunteers including professional librarians Chase Ollis and James Conley and designer Kurt Conley, the display is drawn from Gerber/Hart's extensive archival collection.

The march marked the first anniversary of a riot in New York City on June 28, 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay nightclub in Greenwich Village owned by the Genovese crime family, reacted violently to what had begun as a routine police raid. That event, and the events leading up to and following it, are well covered in a new book, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History by Marc Stein (NYU Press).

But that first Stonewall anniversary march wasn't the first activity of Chicago Gay Liberation, which started up in fall 1970 after University of Chicago grad student Henry Wiemhoff placed an ad in the Chicago Maroon student newspaper seeking a gay roommate. Not only did he get a roommate—a female taxicab driver named Michal Brody—he got a discussion group. We met in Wiemhoff and Brody's Hyde Park apartment and then, as our numbers grew, began to gather at the Blue Gargoyle, a community center and coffeehouse in the multicultural, nondenominational University Church on the University of Chicago campus.

Talking soon led to action. The first public Gay Lib event I participated in was a protest four months before the Stonewall march, on the snowy afternoon of Wednesday, February 25, 1970, outside the Loop headquarters of the Women's Bar Association of Illinois. The group was hosting a program on "Youthful Offenders" with a Chicago police officer, Sergeant John Manley, as guest speaker. But for us, the offender was Manley himself. The blond, muscular cop was notorious for entrapping gay men in Lincoln Park restrooms; wearing street clothes, he would pretend to solicit guys for sex and then arrest them if they responded to his invitation. Mattachine Midwest, an established "homophile" organization in town, published Manley's picture in its mimeographed monthly newsletter and mockingly suggested Manley himself was a closet case: "If I were gay and I didn't want anybody to know, and I felt very, very guilty, I think I might get a job where I could cruise in the public interest," wrote David Stienecker, the newsletter's editor. On February 7, 1970, Manley made an early morning appearance at Stienecker's third-floor apartment to arrest him for criminal defamation.

"After I unsuccessfully attempted to make a phone call, Manley called for a police van and I was escorted from my apartment in handcuffs," Stienecker now recalls. "Upon arriving at the precinct house, Manley suggested that if I just pleaded guilty the judge would only give me a slap on the wrist." But Stienecker, represented by the diligent and fierce lesbian attorney Renee Hanover, fought the charges. After several court appearances, most of which Manley missed, the case was thrown out of court, but Stienecker lost his job as an editor at World Book Encyclopedia due to the ensuing publicity—there then being no legal protection against employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Manley later rose to the rank of captain in the police force, but his career crashed and burned in the mid-1990s when he was fired for sexually harassing female officers under his supervision. Some 20 years later, his name popped up in the news again when he was ticketed for, of all things, impersonating a government official after he posed as a U.S. Maritime Service "special agent" to avoid a parking ticket. Stienecker, who went on to a successful career writing educational books for children, is credited as a program supporter of Gerber/Hart's "Out of the Closets" exhibit.

In March 1970, we responded to the release of The Boys in the Band, the film version of the 1968 off-Broadway stage hit. Our aim was not to boycott the movie—which used waspish humor to illustrate the pathological, self-hating behavior of a group of gay New York men—but to use it as a teaching opportunity. We handed out flyers on the street outside the Carnegie Theatre on Rush Street (where Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse is now), which read in part: "The pain and cruelty typified by The Boys in the Band should be understood as the expression of human lives damaged by an environment of condemnation, suspicion, job discrimination, and legal harrassment [sic]."

Gay Liberation also organized dances, which drew large crowds from around the city. Though same-sex dancing wasn't illegal, it was forbidden in the mob-owned gay bars in Boss Daley's Chicago, where periodic police raids were a given. The first two Gay Lib dances were held in the protected environs of the University of Chicago campus. (It inspired other LGBTQ student groups to hold their own dances at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle—now UIC—and Northwestern University. At the latter, music was provided by the Siegel-Schwall Band, then one of Chicago's hottest blues-rock bands. )

When the U. of C. demanded that CGL move its dances off campus because the crowds were getting too big, we booked the Coliseum, located on South Wabash between 14th and 16th Streets, a huge venue that had hosted several Republican presidential conventions, sports events, rock concerts, and, a few weeks previously, a congress of Black Muslims. As historian Timothy Stewart-Winter, author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press), recounts in a Slate article titled "Beyond Stonewall: How Gay History Looks Different From Chicago":

"[T]here was a problem: The venue required an insurance policy, and every insurance agent the organizers approached said the risk was too great that the police would raid the dance, cart the attendees off to jail, and levy fines. Only on the day before the dance did the activists find a broker who'd sell them a policy—a black man whose company had insured the Nation of Islam's annual convention at the same venue."

About 2,000 people showed up at the Coliseum to dance for liberation on April 18, 1970. So did the police. But when the cops entered the hall and came face to face with a phalanx of attorneys—including the formidable Renee Hanover—primed to document any civil liberties violations, they shrugged and went away.

The Gerber/Hart exhibit includes copies of the mimeographed newsletters that Gay Lib used to spread its message in those long-ago pre-Internet days. Also on display is a copy of the Chicago Seed, the city's hippie/radical underground paper, which published an eight-page Gay Liberation supplement in one issue. There's also a well-deserved tribute to the late Frank Robinson, who gave Chicago's LGBTQ community the first professional- quality publications we could call our own. Robinson was a closeted middle-aged editor for Playboy magazine; unable to come out for our demonstrations, he devoted himself to behind-the-scenes messaging. After publishing a one time "Gay Pride" paper to promote the 1971 Pride Parade (which by then had been relocated to the Lincoln Park/Lakeview area on the north side), Robinson put out two editions of The Paper, a 1972 tabloid that covered local LGBTQ arts and politics. The Paper ran interviews with local counterculture celebrities such as painter Ed Paschke, lesbian singer-songwriter Linda Shear, female impersonators Roby Landers and Wanda Lust, and stage director Gary Tucker, aka "Eleven," whose gender-bending Godzilla Rainbow Troupe was then running its hit production of Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr's outrageous Turds in Hell. A copy of The Paper on display at Gerber/Hart shows a photo from another landmark of Chicago's fledgling off-Loop theater movement, the Organic Theater's sci-fi epic Warp!, featuring André De Shields (who just won a Tony for his performance in the Broadway hit Hadestown) as Xander the Unconquerable. In 1973, Robinson had relocated to San Francisco, where he became the speechwriter for a camera store owner and activist with aspirations to a political career—Harvey Milk. But by then the city had its first (more or less) regularly published newspaper, the Chicago Gay Crusader, edited by activist Michael Bergeron with copy editing supervision by his lover Bill Kelley.

The success of the June 1970 Stonewall anniversary march (no one got arrested!) encouraged members of Gay Liberation to start developing a larger agenda. Inevitably, there were conflicts. Some wanted to merge Gay Lib into a broader leftist coalition; others preferred to keep the focus on LGBTQ issues. GL's women's and Black caucuses went off in their own directions; the Black caucus turned into Third World Gay Revolutionaries, led by Ortez Alderson, who went to prison for destroying draft records in downstate Pontiac. And in September 1970, as reported in a CGL newsletter displayed in the Gerber/Hart exhibit, "Tensions that had been brewing for some weeks finally came to a head . . . with the result that the group suffered a schism and a large number of members announced they were forming a new group—not a new caucus—to be called 'The Chicago Gay Alliance.' . . . Though there . . . were moments of acrimony, the parting was amicable. . . . All present expressed a desire to avoid the infighting of competitive groups in other cities"—a reference to the internecine turf wars that tore at the fabric of New York's gay community around the same time.

The debut issue of the CGA newsletter in November 1970 explained: "The Chicago Gay Alliance is actively interested in alleviating the ghetto (whether spiritual or physical) conditions of homosexuals, in dispelling the psychological and sociological mythology that has grown up about the subject of homosexuality, in providing referral services to homosexuals, in helping homosexuals 'coming out' develop a sense of pride in who they are and courage in facing the generally hostile outside world, to provide additional social outlets so that homosexuals can meet each other as human beings, to change repressive laws and end police and political harassment, and to improve communications between the homosexual and the heterosexual communities."

In 1971 CGA gave Chicago its first LGBTQ community center, a ramshackle red-brick two-story rented house on an Old Town side street at 171 W. Elm. By 1973 the center had closed for lack of financial support, and CGA ceased operations. But the activism continued. A July 1973 issue of the Chicago Gay Crusader reported that 20th Ward alderman Cliff Kelley, working with a group called Illinois Gays for Legislative Action, had introduced legislation in the Chicago City Council to prohibit discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodations based on sexual orientation. It took 15 years for the City Council to finally vote an LGBTQ-inclusive Chicago Human Rights Ordinance into law on December 21, 1988.

The Old Town community center paved the way for today's gleaming Center on Halsted. The Gay Crusader was succeeded by the weekly newspaper GayLife, founded in 1975 by the late Grant Ford, and then by Windy City Times, cofounded in 1985 by Tracy Baim, now publisher of the Reader, and still publishing in print and online 34 years later. (I served as editor of both GayLife and WCT in the '80s.)

The Gerber/Hart exhibit's narrative arc climaxes with a major event from 1977, chronicled in an issue of GayLife on display. On June 14 of that year, singer, orange-juice industry spokeswoman, and former Miss America Anita Bryant arrived in Chicago for a concert at the historic Medinah Temple at Wabash and Ohio (it's now a Bloomingdale's home furniture store). The concert had been booked before Bryant achieved national notoriety as leader of an anti-LGBTQ initiative in Dade County, Florida. LGBTQ activists, including me, picketed the Bryant concert in Chicago, despite being cautioned by gay establishment leaders that our action would be an embarrassing failure. By then, it was thought, the activist energy of the early 1970s had waned, and the only time queers turned out en masse was for the Pride Parade. But a spontaneous, unexpected turnout of 3,000 to 5,000 (depending on whom you ask) proved the naysayers wrong.

Chicago Gay Liberation, the Chicago Gay Alliance, and the other groups that sprang up in the wake of Stonewall ran out of steam by the end of the decade, but the sense of empowerment they gave the community—and the lessons we learned from their successes and setbacks—guided us into the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic and the struggle for civil rights at the city, county, and state level drove a new activist spirit. "The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long," notes Gerber/Hart's James Conley. "As transformative as those groups were, they were temporary. But the impact they had in their short span of existence was monumental and lasting." v

Special thanks to Amber Lewis at Columbia College Chicago

Correction: This article has been revised to reflect that the Siegel-Schwall Band played at a dance held on the campus of Northwestern University, not that of the University of Chicago.

Source: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/gerber-hart-gay-pride-history/Content?oid=70924510

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

0 notes

yuna-dan · 8 years ago

Text

Ghost AU (or HautedSanders)

Ghosts AU because

Im tagging @obviouslyelementary because she’s my Prince <3

I just, I have been thinking about this too much but I don’t know how to write it, so I’ll rather share it. (And also, because I don’t know how to draw xD)

Okay, so I have the idea that somehow all of them die and in different times, also even though they share the sanders surname, they are not related.

Prince Roman Sander, was an actual Prince and just a few weeks before his coronation one of his closest friends (Probably a duke or something) killed him, because he wanted the power. The duke managed to get to the power and pretend that Prince Roman actually run away with a young man (because you know, homosexuality back then was forbidden) instead of him being murder. He abandoned the body of the Prince in a far far place from the kingdom. (He was poisoned) (This happened around 1600)

Dr. Logan Sander, was a scientist. He worked near the outskirts of the city in supposed haunted house. He was investigating the existence of beings besides humans (aka ghosts, aliens, fairies). He worked with a close friend, who he was secretly in love but never say anything. Once the investigation attracted a lot of important people his named was suddenly really known. He was about to published the investigation when all of a sudden he disappeared, rumor has it he ran away because he wanted the knowledge for himself. (What really happened: His friend found out of him being gay and freak out so much, he pushed him of the stairs, and Logan broke his neck. He hid the body in the basement of the house) (This happened 1890 or something)

Mario Sanders, was a dedicated father (I’m going to make him with Latino roots because Im trash and because I wanted to do something with it). He married really young to a 19 girl because he got her pregnant. He loved his kids with all his heart. However, he was in an abusive relationship with his wife. She was really abusive and aggressive towards him until one day his friends and kids convinced him to divorce her and he did. He had been living happily in a house near the outskirts of the city, he worked really hard on the garden. He loved that house even if it had the rumors of being haunted. Just a few months after he won the custody of his kids, he was shot by his ex-wife inside his house. The kids started living with their aunt because obviously, they hated their mom. He was buried in the garden of the house. Every November 2, the kids go to that house and make him a little altar for the day of death (See, that’s why I make him Latino). (This happened around 1990 or something)

Alexander Sanders, was a bullied kid, because he was gay. He had depression issues and anxiety. He told his parents a lot of times he was bullied but because he was a gay they didn’t do anything (pretty much his parents were assholes and also abusive). One day the bullying got too much, like really intense, so he ran away to the outskirts of the city and found a house. He got in there and that became suddenly his safe place. He went there almost every day, because school was horrible and house was worse. One day, when his dad decided to beat him up and it school he found that his locker, once again, had the word “FAG” written again, he was fed up. He went directly to that house and killed himself. (He hung). He was found two weeks later by policemen and he was buried in the house. (This happened in 2010-15)

Thomas Sanders, is just a youtuber and medium. Once he decided to made a special video for Halloween and noticed the four ghosts living there, and they became friends. He goes there and share music with Alexander and show him gay parades and how his school was shut down or stuff. He shows Logan new technology and bonds also over pride parades, he keeps him up with aware of news. He showed Mario photos of his kids and cooked together. He shows Roman just how beautiful his kingdom turned out and how he’s I some history books. They just bond a lot.

Random stuff.

• Roman knows now how to speak normal English, but until Mario appears he spoke in ancient English. • Logan loves to read, but now he can hold books so Mario told him stories. (Thomas read to all of them). • All of the Day of Dead, they cuddle with Mario because he just missed his kids so much and wished he could hug them again. (I broke my own heart) • Alex is the only one who likes being dead, he used to fight a lot with Roman for that until one day Mario, as a good dad, make them talk. • There’s a legend in Mexico that said that the first of November, ghosts can materialize. Roman loves videogames, so Thomas go that day and let him played in his PSP and he gives Alex his phone. He brings books for Logan and flowers and photos to Mario. • They all can play instruments, and apparently, they can touch them. • Roman loves to watched TV and things that were created all the time. • Never called Alex Alexander, unless you want the rage of a teen ghost towards you. (Alexander is the name of his father, and as you can imagine, he hates his father) • Alex was 18 when he killed himself. Mario and Logan were 25 and Roman 20. • I can picture Mario and Logan developing feelings for each other and that would be amazing! A ghost discovering his own sexuality after years of being dead. • When Alex first notice he’s a ghost he was so freaked out, that he almost destroyed the house. • In the anniversary of Roman’s dead, Logan help him. He tells Roman historical facts and about how horrible was the dead of the Duke that ended up as a king. • In the anniversary of Logan’s dead, Alex help him. He talks about how better is for the LGBTQI+ community lately and how he’s actually a well-known scientist. • In the anniversary of Mario’s dead, all of the help him. They all agree he’s the one that probably suffered the most, so they spend all they cuddle in the floor and let him talks about his kids and they even watched TV together. • In the anniversary of Alex’s dead, Mario helps him. He just assured him no one else would be bullied and that, even if he had to killed himself, he’s love in that house. • No, but imagine one day while watching tv (because they can’t do a lot) a Disney movie popped out and Roman is so so so in love. • Alex telling Roman about Disney movies.

So, yeah that’s my AU. *runs away because im shy*

If you want to do something about this, that i doubt it but whatever, go ahead! But tag me pls!!

135 notes · View notes

hotspotsmagazine · 7 years ago

Text

Mark Silver Talks Marco Designer Jeweler

Most of us know Mark Silver from either buying jewelry from him over the years or his generous work with local charities. On a personal level he has been involved with the Hotspots Holiday celebration since day one and donated around 30 pieces of jewelry for the silent auction, which raises money for the Pride Center at Equality Park. With the launch of a new jewelry company, Marco Designer Jewelry, we thought it was a good time to sit down with Mark to find out about how he got started in the jewelry business and more about his exciting new company geared toward gay men.

At what age did you realize you loved designing jewelry?

I always had a passion for the design of fine jewelry. I was blessed to have traveled to Europe quite often at a young age in my career. After walking through the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy and looking at the creativeness, I became captivated by gold and silver jewelry design. I was also fortunate to live in Milan, Italy for a time, which opened my eyes to the beauty of fine jewelry.

What made you take the leap from the fashion world to open your own jewelry store?

I was working as an apparel designer/merchandiser on 7th Ave in the garment center of New York City from 1977 to 1986. I worked for European import companies to increase their business dealings in the USA. My work consisted of traveling extensively to Italy, France and England for product development of fabrics and trends for the U.S. market. I continued to manufacture the clothing collections and work in Japan, India, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong. I was very fortunate that my talent in merchandising the fashion trends sold in major department stores, specialty boutiques and national chain stores. In 1986 I decided to leave the clothing industry taking the marketing knowledge I learned and the vision I naturally had to challenge the fine jewelry industry. My goal was to create designs that are classic, timeless and innovative, but most of all unique. I want all my pieces to reflect jewelry that are works of art.

What made you move from New York to South Florida?

In 1986 I opened my first showroom retail store in Greenwich Village and started selling my exclusive jewelry collection “Argenti” Designer Jewelers. It was in a great location with heavy foot traffic and I also had the opportunity to do custom work for Barneys New York. This all worked to help make my custom jewelry design a destination for unique one of kind affordable pieces.

In 1991 the Argenti NYC business was sold and I left New York City to find a better and healthier way of life. I opened Argenti in Plantation, Florida, Las Olas Riverfront and now in Lauderdale by the Sea—one of the most beautiful towns in Broward County.

You are now in Lauderdale by the Sea. How has that area been for Argenti?

In 2009, I opened the fourth Argenti showroom in Lauderdale by the Sea and it turned out to be an amazing town with a very diverse mix of locals and visitors. This flourishing location helped build the popularity of my LGBT product line.

I joined different business organizations networking my specialty in custom design jewelry and two years after I opened I had the good fortune (2011 to 2014) to become the President of the Lauderdale by the Sea Chamber of Commerce.

#td_uid_1_5a60cc881c01e .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item1 { background: url(https://hotspotsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2BT-HANDMADE-WAX-MODEL-160x120.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #td_uid_1_5a60cc881c01e .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item2 { background: url(https://hotspotsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/3ZT-_-FINISED-BLUE-DIAMOND-14K-two-tone-rings-160x120.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #td_uid_1_5a60cc881c01e .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item3 { background: url(https://hotspotsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/M548-160x120.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #td_uid_1_5a60cc881c01e .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item4 { background: url(https://hotspotsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/RS3-Finished-One-of-a-Kind-Diamond-14K-Two-Tone-ring-160x120.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #td_uid_1_5a60cc881c01e .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item5 { background: url(https://hotspotsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/S1039-160x120.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; } #td_uid_1_5a60cc881c01e .td-doubleSlider-2 .td-item6 { background: url(https://hotspotsmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/S1043-160x120.jpg) 0 0 no-repeat; }

1 of 6

Do you repair jewelry?

Yes, absolutely. I repair all fine jewelry whether it’s gold, platinum or silver. I do it affordably with great care. It’s important for me to be courteous and respectful that someone entrusted me with a piece of jewelry to work on that may have been handed down from generation to generation. I am proud to say that I can make anything that is broken look like new again and have been successfully doing that for 32 years. I believe that client relationships in any business are very important and I make it a point to be nurturing and embracing with everyone that I have the opportunity to work with.

Why did you create Marco?

As a local business in Fort Lauderdale, I meet many men and women from around the world that have me design their wedding rings and personal jewelry. When gay marriage was legalized, I realized there was a demand for gay couples to have custom wedding rings. Men wanted me to design their rings according to personal specifications ranging from birthstones to heirloom family jewelry infused into the new designs. I realized how important this is and how gratifying it became for me. I focused on men’s wedding rings which I make with pride. It’s been several months that I have been working with Matt Myers, an extremely talented web designer who created the vision I had for MARCODesignerJeweler.com. I plan to advertise this web site nationally as a leading gay men’s custom jewelry designer.

MARCO was created on the platform to be very personal while using the internet as a vehicle to target the gay men’s custom wedding ring market. I will personally use skype as a tool to engage gay couples to have their involvement selecting their custom wedding rings. Two men that are to be wed should have a happy, memorable and loving experience when looking for their wedding rings. Many times clients ask me to integrate the inherited gold, gemstones and diamonds from the jewelry of their mom, dad or other relatives in their new rings. When completed these jewelry designs carry a dignity and emotional power like no other piece they own.

I have created an atmosphere that allows the process of designing custom rings to be a joyful experience. I am elated that the finished jewelry that I create is more than what my clients expected and all the Video Testimonials on MARCODesignerJeweler.com prove that. Now my intention is set to take this personal, relaxed and pleasurable experience and blend it with technology to expand it nationally.

Do I have to be rich to buy Marco Wedding Bands?

I have no price barriers with the jewelry I create for MARCODesignerJeweler.com. I adore when a client appreciates my exclusive design work. Every custom design comes with a very detailed free estimate of what it will cost to build that specific design. I spend a great deal of time and care on my free estimates so the consumer understands every component needed at a cost effective price from me. I treat the buyer the same way I would want to be treated keeping in mind what their specific budget is for the work to be done…and I make it happen. The bottom line is making my guest very happy and I am the man to design it affordably with long lasting quality.

Do you have payment plans?

My custom design jewelry that I create from a drawing will take between four to six weeks. There will be fittings during the interim build process. Clients initially would leave a good faith deposit when I begin the handmade wax model. Thereafter they can pay the balance at their convenience in segments or upon completion. I never installed a payment plan because I wouldn’t want anyone to be obligated to make payments at designated times. I like it better with “pay as you go” on your time and the balance to be paid when finished.

How does it work when you start a new design with a customer?

MARCO was created to focus on custom design jewelry and making the client very involved in the conceptual stages. I begin asking a lot of questions to get a feel for their ideas. What is your concept and do you have any vision in your mind of what you may like? My exclusive design book has hundreds of pictures to study and I leave them to review that. Typically after that there begins a sense of knowing what they want. Once we narrow the details and the pieces fit together I start drawing on paper the new jewelry design until it’s perfect and then once approved the process begins. Anything can be made, in any precious metal with any gemstone. If you have old jewelry that you just don’t wear anymore, I can use that old gold to make new modern designs and change your yellow gold into white gold. If a person doesn’t want a completely new piece of jewelry I will repair and modify all kinds of jewelry.

What does the future hold for Marco?

I am grateful to work with clients who come to my showroom location from around the world when visiting Fort Lauderdale. They trust me, the quality of my designs, honesty, affordable and reasonable pricing. The very best advertising I receive is steadily having been referred from my work. The future for MARCO will be to take my work out of the local arena. I will be able to collaborate on new ideas and concepts for one of kind unique pieces of jewelry for people that aren’t planning to visit Fort Lauderdale.

Showroom: 218 Commercial Blvd #103 Lauderdale by the Sea, Florida 33308

from Hotspots! Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2018/01/18/mark-silver-talks-marco-designer-jeweler/

0 notes