#also queer is a fantastically inclusive and loving word

[enfyswanders]

London, Part 1: June 17-22, 2024

It's been a long time since I traveled alone without having work or family or a con or something to guide my agenda. I landed in London with tickets to a couple of shows, but otherwise just open-ended days I could spend as I like. This is my favorite way to travel, whether alone, with my partner, or with a friend. I love being able to sleep as late as I like and do whatever the mood strikes each day.

The day I arrived, I took it easy. I took a shower and a nap, then found a place with fantastic steak & ale pie for dinner and wandered to a local park that had a beautiful Japanese garden. I was surprised to find the sun rose at 5 a.m. and set around 10 p.m. each day - earlier and later than I'm accustomed to, even in the height of summer in Maryland.

Another happy surprise were the intersex-inclusive pride flags prominently displayed when I entered my hotel, the Premier Inn (London Kensington - Olympia).

Side note on Premier Inn: I stayed at several of them during my travels. They're a budget hotel chain in the UK that's very queer-friendly, clean, secure, comfortable, quiet, and I had very good experiences at every location.

Once I had a good night's rest, I asked myself: "What do I want to do today?" And the answer to that question was "Go shopping." I was keen to check out Camden Market, a sprawling collection of small, quirky shops and restaurants in London. One of my favorite clothing stores, Psylo, is there, and I wanted to buy myself a cool outfit. Which I did!

I also got an artsy photo taken of my eyeball to gift to my partner.

I had lunch at The Cheese Bar. It was fantastic.

There were some truly wild shops in Camden Market that were visually impressive:

I had a ball exploring the shops and little eateries (I even got a Pasteis de Nata, a kind of custard tart I fell in love with in Portugal a few years back), and I could've spent an entire day there, but I was restless and eager to see more stuff, so I ended up wandering to the nearby London Zoo. It was a pretty sweet zoo with lots of different animals and habitats represented. There was a free-roaming tamarind inside the rainforest building, which was cool to see up close. (I have a video, but Tumblr limits you to uploading only one video per post, boo.)

I wandered through Queen Mary's Rose Garden after that, and stopped by the gorgeous Daunt Books, which specializes in travel books.

London definitely has an amazing bookshop scene. The next day, I visited 10 more of them, focusing on occult bookshops. I found my books in stock at a few of them (squee!) and chatted with the owners as I signed them.

I was also delighted to see Pamela Colman Smith's fireplace at Treadwell's:

And Gerald Gardner's original meeting place at the Atlantis Bookshop:

I loved visiting these bookshops, especially if they carried my friends' books. It warmed my heart to see their books in another country.

I also teared up a bit visiting Gay's The Word, the UK's oldest LGBTQ+ bookshop, which was featured in the movie Pride (2014). I was thrilled to see they carried my friend Tamsin's book.

I also checked out the Vagina Museum. I'd followed them on social media for years, so it was really nice to visit and support them in person. It's small, and in kind of a rough location, but it's worth a visit.

That day, I had the best fish and chips of my entire life at The Crown & Anchor, which I mistakenly thought was the pub in Ted Lasso when I found it on Google Maps (turns out they renamed a different pub with that name for the show). Holy crap, I want to eat that specific fish and chips the rest of my life. Every other time I had fish and chips on the trip, it failed to live up to this one. I got spoiled early. It was so buttery and crisp and utterly perfect.

The next big trip highlight was seeing a production of Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. It's a reconstruction of the Globe from the Elizabethan era. I sprung for a seat with a cushion(!) on the second level, and I had a great view of the fantastic production. I'm so glad I got to see this specific play, because it's my favorite. The cast was amazing, and seeing it in that theatre was a deeply moving experience, like stepping back in time.

They also had one of the rare original folios of Shakespeare's plays on display:

As if that experience didn't give my brain enough happy chemicals, afterwards I went to Dopamine Land. Dopamine Land is a temporary exhibit/experience available all over the world, where you wander through about 10 different rooms that stimulate and soothe your senses in different ways, including a giant, adult-sized ball pit. I really liked the first room, which was all mirrors and color-changing dangling lights.

The next day, I visited Tate Britain with my friend Beckett, who has been an online friend for the past decade, and is both a fantastic musician in her own right and also a big supporter of my band, the Misbehavin' Maidens. She and her wife met me at the museum and we got to do one of the LGBTQIA+ tours. It was a super interesting tour focusing on a handful of pieces by queer artists, with queer themes expressed in the pieces. Apparently, each of the LGBTQIA+ tours is different, so I'd definitely go back and do it again.

Another highlight of Tate Britain was seeing The Lady of Shallott painting by John William Waterhouse, which I think was on the cover of one of my English Lit textbooks in college.

After the museum, we went to a pub and I had my first Sticky Toffee Pudding! It was delicious - served with salted caramel ice cream. (I developed a preference over the course of the trip, though, to have it served with custard.)

My first Tube ride made me giggle, incidentally:

[norelationtoatticus]

Hi, I have accidentally become a connoisseur of children's picture books, and here are some of our tried-and-tested faves!

Books my kid enjoyed straight out of the womb (and I would recommend all of these in their board book version):

Black Cat & White Cat, by Claire Garralon

High contrast black and white visuals for newborns

Baby Beluga, by Rafi

Classic, gorgeous art

Can read it or sing it

You could give the baby a Beluga stuffie to go with it, boom, perfect easy gift

Love In The Wild, by Katy Tanis

Super bold, simple colors on solid backgrounds, good for baby eyes

Inclusive, teaches that queerness is natural 🌈

References interesting science and nature stuff, so it grows with the kid

Hello, Hello, by Brendan Wenzel 

He has an amazing art style

Another one that is bold, vivid colors on white backgrounds, so good for baby's eyes

Introduces tons of different animals, and good for talking about body features (ex: noses, ears, wings, etc)

Kitten's First Full Moon, by Kevin Henkes

A little kitten thinks the moon is a bowl of milk... and she wants it

Black and white

More fun to read-aloud than a lot of books for this age range

The Night Is Deep And Wide, by Gillian Sze

Black and white for high contrast

Weird, rhythmic, great vibes, good bedtime book

Books my kid likes best now (she is 2.5, and all of these are ones that she and I enjoy reading together at bedtime):

Swashby and the Sea, by Beth Ferry

Grumpy old pirate makes friends with a little girl and her granny, with some help from the meddling sea

Funny, really fun to read aloud and do a pirate voice

Good, whimsical, well-paced story, very satisfying to read, even as an adult

The art is inclusive, as one of the 2 main characters is a little Black girl

Pretty Kitty, by Karen Beaumont

Old man accidentally adopts 10 cats

Funny and fun to read out loud

But also, oh my god this one makes me cry. Not my kid, though. She hasn't noticed the layers of it yet

I notice some new detail in the art of this one every time I read it

Perfect for a cat-loving family

There Are No Bears In This Bakery, by Julia Sarcone-Roach

There are, in fact, bears in the bakery

You have to read this one in a film noir detective voice, it's a requirement

Good story, very charming

Really well written, some very clever similies and descriptive language

My Friend Earth, by Patricia MacLachlan 

Mother earth guides you through seasons and eco scapes, showing reverence and care for all creatures

Lovely, rhythmic, flows nicely to read aloud

Gorgeous art, and each page has cut-outs, flaps, and layers

All The World, by Liz Garton Scanlon

I really don't know how to describe the plot of this one, but it's lovely and I want to live in it

Simple, soft, and easy to read out loud, great bedtime book

Together We Grow, by Susan Vaught

Farm animals won't let a fox family take shelter during a rain storm, but one brave little duckling changes everyone's minds/hearts and welcomes them

Adorable art and story

Not a lot of words, but lots of detail in the pictures, so it's a good one to talk about while reading

Nice message of inclusion and overcoming bias

I'll Meet You In Your Dreams, by Jessica Young

Makes me cry every time I read it lol

Lovely, whimsical, great bedtime book

A kid will read this one as a sweet, fantastical promise to have nice dreams together. A parent will read this one and think about their own mortality and how much they love their kid

Hope this helps, OP! Good luck!

(Also, just throwing this out there: if anyone else ever wants modern children's picture book recommendations, message me! We read a ton!)

My SIL has asked for books instead of cards for her baby shower, does anyone have some recommendations? I’m completely out of my depth lol.

[reyeslonestar]

Hey, so I've not-so-secretly been creeping on your blog for a while now (it's pretty rad) and just now noticed that your Ace. When and how did you know? Sorry if that's too personal. I think I might be, but I'm not sure.

hi there! thanks, glad you’ve been enjoying my chaos :)

that's not too personal for me, but thanks for checking. this got long though, so I'll put most of it under a cut.

I was about 14/15 when I really started thinking about my sexuality and I played with a few labels for a while - originally I used bisexual or pansexual cause I felt the same way about all genders - the same way being a general disinterest. I find that a lot of different people of different genders are very beautiful, I have certain tastes and types, and I feel appreciation for physical appearances and also for personalities, but sex just wasnt something that I thought about, or felt like I wanted.

(something I do find is that once I get to know someone I struggle to hold their appearance in my head - thinking about them incites more of an emotional/instinctive reaction of how I feel about them rather than their appearance, but I reckon thats more to do with how my brain works than my sexuality)

I had a friend in one of my classes when I was 15 who was really clued up on a wide spectrum of labels and what they meant and she shared them with me, and when she explained about asexuality and demisexuality I was like: huh. didn't know you could be that.

after that I used demisexual as a label for a while - I thought that because I still felt libido that meant I couldn't be ace, so I must be demi, and also I suspect that I felt a certain level of internalised aphobia that meant I was scared to (in my mind) be 'undateable' because I wasnt interested in sex, and if I labelled myself as asexual, then no one would be interested in me, whereas demisexual felt like I was still 'desirable' or something. idk.

internalised queerphobia. hell of a drug.

anyway, demisexual was the right term for me at the time, but the more thinking I did, the more reading/research I did, the more internalised bullshit I unlearnt, and also the more secure I became in myself not needing a partner to be 'whole', the more I felt comfortable using asexual to identify. I started using ace to identify from about 16 or 17, because that feels like the best match, and it's been the term that I've understood the experiences of the most. I also use queer a lot, because even now I sometimes still question myself, and if nothing else I know im queer, and it can save a lot of explaining that frankly I don't owe anyone. although I seem to give off incredibly queer vibes so I dont need to tell most people anyway.

I guess my point here is that labels exist to help you feel comfortable, but dont feel as though theyre set in stone. they can evolve as you understand yourself better, and it doesnt matter how long you've been using one label if you feel another may make you feel better.

[magpiefngrl]

Happy 10th HP anniversary, LQT!

This month my darling friend, @lqtraintracks, celebrates ten years in the HP fandom.

Ten years omg! 🎊🎊🎊🎊

Ten years of passion and enthusiasm and love for drarry and the HP world; ten years of spreading joy to other fans; ten years of astounding writing (gods, I envy her so!); ten years of invaluable contributions to the community.

Lqt, the fandom is blessed to have you as a member and I feel honoured to call myself your friend. I thank my lucky stars I joined drarry when I did and got to meet you 💖

Here's a few things you should know about Lqt:

1. She's a phenomenal writer. No, I don't use this word lightly. If you haven't yet sampled her work, you're missing out. If I were you, I'd rectify this asap. Lqt's craft is a masterclass of its own: strong sentences, beautiful prose, thoughtful characterisations, scorching sex scenes, lots and lots of feels. Her writing sizzles. She's so quotable too. I can't think of another writer who has such a strong gift to write lines that the whole fandom imprints on and can remember years later. For instance: "I've fucked you in that shirt." I'm still losing my fkn mind over this line. Mention Blood and Fire, one of Lqt's masterpieces, to a reader and they'll immediately go "omg I've fucked you in that shirt!!!!!!"

2. She's a supporter of queer and trans rights in true Gryffindor spirit. Passionate and tireless, Lqt actively tries to make fandom a more inclusive, safe and welcoming space for everyone. She's an example to emulate.

3. She's a fierce, generous friend. I don't know what I've done to deserve her, but her generosity and kindness and support seem never ending. She's been there for me, esp during a tough period last year, and has listened to me vent when I felt like getting things off my chest; she's given me advice when I asked for it; and has been a relentless cheerleader when I needed a boost. She's the kind of friend who reads my fics even when they're in fandoms she's not familiar with. She might know nothing about wangxian but she will read my fics and she will comment with some lovely praise, and--I don't know if I ever told you, @lqtraintracks, but that floors me every single time. That you read and comment on my wangxian/hualian/non-HP fics. I'm a bit choked up about it, ngl

Right. *wipes tears* Recs!

My first LQT fic was Entropy to Ecstasy (drarry/ 4k/ E), a stellar example of second person POV and, er, rimming. Is this the most delicious combination or what? The longing in this fic is tangible; the UST through the roof. I adored it and still do; what a marvellous introduction to a great writer.

My latest LQT fic was Heart Like Neon (drarry/ 41k/ E) and it was one of the highlights of 2021. It's got enemies to lovers and hate sex and UST to-die-for but also excellent new magic (the Reaching! how amazing and such a Harry magic!), a large cast handled deftly, and a fantastic relationship progression. And again: so many wonderful quotes! "Being good… it’s not just one choice. It’s a thousand different choices. And that’s just one day." How do you do it, LQT????

But the fic that has carved itself in my heart is Blood and Fire (drarry/ 45k/ E). (The banner above is a realistic depiction of the state of my mind and body while reading the fic.) It's a story of second chances; of regret and mistakes; of making amends; of forgiveness. It's got agonising pining and excruciating longing; palpable tension and hot hot hot hot sex. It includes the most emotional hug of all times. It's a fic that makes me feel like "a bundle of kindling who invited fire over for dinner". (see what I told you about the quotes? She's fkn killing it!) It's a drarry classic (yes, I went there) and it's a fic that I will never, ever forget. For me, this story is up there with Donna Tartt and CS Pacat.

LQT, happy anniversary!!! May you enjoy another 10, 20, or more years in fandom! I'm so happy to know you 💖

[noa-nightingale]

Queer Watcher 2020

I am looking back on this weird, not-so-wonderful year - and on the ways @wearewatcher made my 2020 so much more wonderful. Originally, I wanted to list all the highlights I could think of, but one of the things I am most grateful for is Watcher’s inclusion and support of LGBTQ+ folks. I am just one queer person but I know there are many more in this fandom.

So, this ended up being a list of things I, as a queer person, appreciate and enjoy, and I am so so happy that I can write this. Buckle up, I have Things to say, and it is going to be emotional.

Ryan’s Pride shoes. I sometimes wonder how many sales Converse owes him. I love my own pair btw.

“Look, all I’m sayin’ is, y’know, hey, uh, love everybody.” - Shane Madej, Gangly Puppet Freak. A PSA from the Weird/Wonderful Shakespeare Theatre vid, regarding bisexuality - he is so awkward with it lmao. Whole video has really great vibes too.

Steve/Stephanos.

Various tweets, including wishing us a happy Non-Binary People’s Day and a happy Trans Awareness week.

Ryan and Shane including their pronouns in their twitter bio. (Little things like this don’t go unnoticed, and they are very appreciated.)

Gay Oars! Ugh, my heart. Their first appearance totally caught me off guard, and I haven’t recovered since. (I also causes me no small amount of joy that the most romantic and tragic song of all time is called “Gore on the Shore”.) I could yell about my love for these guys all day. It is a beautiful thing that these characters exist.

Gay Oars, again - I knew they would show up and I still was not prepared. The song made me cry. I haven’t recovered from that one either. I love the progression from the first, tragic song to the second, joyful and loving song. I have so many emotions about these oars, I probably could make an entire list just for them. (Little fun fact: Even though the song made me cry, my first reaction to that episode was to go on tumblr and yell about it excitedly. Like, I was emotional but in an enthusiastic kind of way. The more difficult emotions hit me about four days later, for some reason. And then I sat in my room and cried my eyes out. Like, as much as I like being queer, sometimes it is just damn hard and the pain seems too much and you have been hurt over and over and don’t know if you can ever recover from it. And it is just really good to know that someone cares about your wellbeing as a queer person. Even if you have never spoken to that someone and he does not even know of your existence. And to be honest, I don’t always know how to deal with that. The kindness? The genuine allyship? I have no idea how to handle that, and it simultaneously heals and breaks my heart.)

Every time the words “his boyfriend” were uttered; I am especially thinking of Are You Scared here.

All the fan art Watcher inspired and continues to encourage and to support. There are many great artists in the fandom! And Watcher’s content inspires me to draw and create more myself! How wonderful!

Toxic masculinity who? It is nowhere to be found.

This... special kind of gentle and kind weirdness? It honestly had such a positive impact on me and the way I interact with other people and let them interact with me.

All of the wonderful people Watcher brought in. I am sure they will work with more amazing folks and I am really looking forward to that. Personally, I am hoping to see Eugene Lee Yang at some point. (Would be really happy to see Thomas Sanders too.)

Here’s What You Do. Just the whole podcast. It was such a delight.

I was hesitant to include this because I believe many of us have negative memories attached to it, and it was not a fun time for anyone (including the lovely people at Watcher themselves). But, yes, I am mentioning it: That one HWYD episode and the follow-up. I can only speak for myself, but the follow-up has an incredibly special place in my heart. To me, it is one of the most important videos Watcher has created. I watched it several times, I journaled about it extensively and it made me a better ally. Hell, I even showed it to my mother and one of my siblings (like, the entire video). I know it was a difficult thing to talk about but at this point: A HUGE thank you to Steven, Ryan, Katie and Shane for handling this in an absolutely fantastic way. I feel welcome and seen and appreciated, and in the end all I want is this: For people to genuinely give a shit about me as a queer person.

On a more lighthearted note, I enjoy it way too much that Ryan is able to say “LGBTQ” without stumbling over the letters. It seems like such a tiny thing but it brings me an unholy amount of joy.

The Professor. I don’t want to call him LGBTQ+ because that has not been confirmed as canon but he IS comfortable wearing clothes that are typically seen as “women’s clothing”, and as a trans/non-binary person I am kind of obligated to mention it.

I think I had an out of body experience when Ryan said “Oh thank you baby” to Steven in Too Many Spirits. Then I had to pause the episode to finish laughing. And then they brought it back in the next episode. Bless them.

Every time they/them pronouns were said.

The entire Hatshepsut PH episode. What can I say, I like it when gender norms/expectations/roles are broken. And even if we can’t call Hatshepsut trans by today’s standards, declaring yourself another gender has such power.

Without giving too many details: I had my struggles and problems in the past with Christianity and ~certain~ Christian people, and it is really good (and I mean REALLY good) to see someone whose faith and integrity are so interwoven and who is inspired by his faith to do good things and to do right by people. I obviously only know the things about his belief that Steven decides to put on the internet but what I’ve seen is almost healing to me, in a way. I am very grateful and happy that he is willing to educate others and to keep working on himself. Warms my heart.

The certainty with which these beautiful people call themselves allies.

Just... the general kindness and compassion, and the willingness to listen and to grow. I promise you, we notice and we love you for it.

I could have expanded on all of these points but I tried to keep this short.

And look. I don’t want to put anyone on a pedestal; that would not be fair. I am just immensely grateful for kind people who genuinely care and who genuinely try to do right by others and to bring joy to others.

And I know we like to have fun here but Watcher’s content is just a lot more than entertaining, meme-able fun (although it is that too, of course).

I had a blast with it this year and I am very much looking forward to the next year. I feel like I can’t adequately put into words the myriad of little (and not so little) ways these people have made my life better this year. Thank you from the bottom of my aroace, non-binary heart.

[astramachina]

I subbed to Dipsea for a free trial and I have many a thought. None of them are safe for any kind of work environment so heads up.

Dipsea is an app designed by women for women (originally, anyways; someone on the internet said that "men are more inclined to visual porn while women enjoy auditory experiences because it's "more respectful" and I laugh at the idiocy of that statement), that is 95% audio erotica. (Playing it fast and loose with the math here.) The other 5% are sleep aid/meditation audios which is always nice considering that's what got me into the whole audio thing to begin with. This is the first time I've ever wandered into the professionally produced sea (heh) of audio po//rn and I am conflicted about it. Mostly for personal reasons but, y'know.

DISCLAIMER: I am not at all knocking on them. I think they're doing a fantastic job and honestly kudos to them for their continued efforts to bring diversity and positivity to sexual wellness!

The production value is amazing. The scripts are top tier, the acting is incredible, the SFX are subtle and definitely add to the experience, and, above all, there's a delightful philosophy of inclusion among its audio pieces. You can search by tags to refine kinks, accents, and even "diverse voices" (lots of BIPOC writers and actors)—but the selection of queerness is paltry. The lesbian selection is certainly more expansive, which makes sense due to the reason for its creation, but its male4male assortment is severely limited.

When you first sign up, the app takes you through the "select what you're here for" process, and as a queer nb transdude, I did just that. I don't recall the precise wording, but it was something along the lines of "upping my self-pleasure game", "M4M", "pick something you like" (I plaid it simple and chose the British Accent category), and one other option that had me shrugging because neither selection was relevant to my interests.

I had a whooping selection of 3 whole audios that matched the criteria.

While my erotica consumption doesn't always coincide with my real life gender identity and sexuality, i.e. I don't mind watching/listening to m/f encounters, I know a lot of trans/queer folks that cannot vibe (heh) to it. This is particularly relevant to the character x you categories that I was surprised to come across. I'm impressed and frankly delighted to see this kind of dynamic jump into the "mainstream", as it were. My curiosity led me to two characters, Jack and Quentin, that for the first time in a very long time left me blushing. Of course, the immersion is often broken because the listener is meant to be female, and for the first time ever I actually found myself frustrated by that fact.

Perhaps I'm spoiled by the indie voice actors doing the good lord's work over on YouTube, (I'd say Sound//gasm but since it has no search function it is practically unusable unless artists share it to their own sites which are also impossible to find) and their commitment to making sure everyone across the board is covered. In quite a few occasions I've tracked down these peoples' Pa//treons to drop a nice juicy tip for their continued services.

Thankfully, Dipsea's FAQ does state that they're in the process of growing their M4M library, and for that I applaud them. As lovely as it is to listen to Him + Him + Her 3somes, some Him + You in which the You = Him would be greatly appreciated and fantastically received. I wholly intend to keep my subscription once my free trial is up for many a reason, but especially in hopes of seeing some more queer friendly smut.

Also, please give Jack and Quentin's voice actors a raise. Pronto.

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

The Last Word: Shirley Manson on Fighting the Patriarchy and How Patti Smith Inspires Her

The Garbage singer also talks racial justice, living for now, and why legacy is an inherently masculine concern

Almost as soon as Garbage’s self-titled debut blew up overnight in 1995, their singer, Shirley Manson, became aware of the patriarchy running the music industry. Even though she was the group’s focal point — belting dusky electro-rock songs about making sense of depression (“Only Happy When It Rains”) and taking pride in nonconformity (“Queer”) — she was still a woman fronting a band of men, one of whom, Butch Vig, had produced Nirvana’s Nevermind. Almost immediately, she felt as though her role in the group was being devalued — not by the guys she worked with, but externally.

“There was a lot of stuff written about me in the music press, and that’s when I started to realize how I’m being diminished, how, in some cases, I’m being completely eradicated from the narrative because I’m female and not a man,” she says now. “I was talked over by lawyers; I was ignored by managers. The list goes on. It’s boring and tedious; there’s no point in me moaning about it now, but certainly, that was my awakening.”

That revelation emboldened her to speak out about equality and she quickly became a feminist icon, using her platform to bring attention to human rights, mental health, and the AIDS crisis. All the while, she wrote inclusive hit songs with Garbage about androgyny and reproductive rights (“Sex Is Not the Enemy”). On Garbage’s great new album, No Gods No Masters, she grapples with racial injustice, climate change, the patriarchy, and her own self-worth. But as weighty as the subject matter is, she approaches each song in her own uniquely uplifting way.

“I don’t think really the record is serious, per se,” the singer, 54, says, on an early May phone call. “I think it’s an indignant record. I think in indignance you can still carry humor with you, as well as softness, kindness, and love in your heart. I just felt it would be inauthentic to say anything other than what I was saying in my daily life across the dinner table from my friends and my family. I think as you get older as an artist, the challenge is, ‘How I can be my most authentic self?’ because that’s the most unique story I can tell. In an industry that’s just absolutely jam-packed to the rafters with ideas, opinions, melodies, and so on, you can’t afford to be anything other than your most authentic self. It won’t last.”

Authenticity and being true to herself are the qualities that have made Manson who she is. And those traits seem to guide her answers to Rolling Stone’s questions about philosophy, life lessons, and creature comforts for our Last Word interview.

What are the most important rules that you live by? I’m 54, which is ancient for the contemporary music industry. At this point, I feel like if it’s not fun, then I’m uninterested entirely. If somebody’s treating me poorly, I have to walk away. Life is so fricking short, and I’m three quarters of the way through mine already; I just want to have a good life, full of joy.

Who are your heroes and why? Patti Smith is a huge hero for me for a lot of different reasons. Most importantly, it’s because she’s a woman who has navigated her creative life so beautifully and so artfully, with such integrity and authenticity, and she has proven to me that a woman, an artist, does not have to subscribe to the rules of the contemporary music industry.

It’s very rare for other women to see examples of women actually working still in their seventies. That, to me, is really thrilling and really inspiring, and it fills me with hope. At times when you come up against the ageism, sexism, and misogyny that exists in our culture, I always try and picture Patti in my mind’s eye, and it always brings me back to center, like, “OK, adhere to your own rules. Design your own life. Be your own architect. You can continue to be an artist the rest of your life.” And to me, that’s life. That is a fully lived life.

You’re also a role model yourself. How do you handle that responsibility? I’m a bit speechless if the truth be told. I realize that I’ve now enjoyed a long career in music, and by default, I think people are inspired by that. I think whenever you see an artist, no matter who they are, when someone can endure, I think that’s exciting to everybody else, because it’s a message that says, “You too can get up when you think you’re done. You too can brush yourself off and try again.” By just continuing, you can help other people continue and fulfill themselves in ways that they thought they wouldn’t be able to.

I try to be a decent person. I make mistakes. I fuck people off. I say stupid shit. I’m not all-knowing; I am ignorant in so many ways. But I do try my best. I think that’s really all I can ask of myself.

How others perceive me is absolutely out of my control. There’s always going to be people who think I’m an arsehole, and that’s just part and parcel of being in the public eye. People are just going to hate on you, so I try not to take too much of it in; I don’t let it absorb me too much. I have gotten to that point in my life when I’m able to just go, “You know what? Fuck it. You can’t win them all.”

You once said that the idea of legacy was a masculine construct that you don’t believe in. Do you still feel that way? Yeah. I still very much believe in that. I know a lot of male artists who bang on about their legacy and their importance. Not to knock that if that’s what’s important to you but for me personally, what do I care? I’m going to be dead and gone and totally unconscious of any so-called legacy that I might leave behind. I want fun now. I want to have a good life now. I want to eat good food now and have great sex. It’s absolutely meaningless to me what happens after I’m gone. I want to use my time wisely, and that’s all that I really am concerned with, to be honest.

What is it about legacy that’s inherently masculine? This is armchair psychology, so please forgive me, but I’m sure it has something to do with how women have this uterus that can bear children. I think that’s profound. One of the few gifts that men have not been given is that ability to create with your body, and your blood, and your heat and all these nutrients from your body. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why you don’t hear as many women banging on about the great legacy they’re going to leave behind. I think for women it’s their kids.

You’re Scottish. What is the most Scottish thing about you these days? I’ve got a lot of grit, and it’s served me really well in my career. I think that is a really Scottish trait. The Scottish people are tough, and they also have a good sense of humor. So, grit with humor. I should say “gritted with humor,” in the same way we grit roads.

As you were saying “grit,” it occurred to me that a lot of your songs are about survival and moving forward, going back to “Stupid Girl” or “Only Happy When It Rains.” They’re about perseverance. [Pauses] I think it’s funny you should say that because I’m just sort of like, “Wow, he might be right.” I do think that a huge theme for me is, “How do you overcome? How do we all overcome?” Things can be great for a while; things will not be great forever. And to every single life, these challenges appear. We all have to reconfigure ourselves in order to try to hurl ourselves over obstacles in order to have the kind of life we hope for. So I do think you’ve shocked me a little by discovering a theme for me. Yay, I feel thrilled. I have a theme. It’s exciting.

“Waiting for God” is one of my favorite songs on the album because of the way you address racial justice. How can we, as a society, fight white indifference? You know, that’s a question right there. It’s interesting that you use the words “white indifference,” because one of the things that shocked me so greatly is the ambivalence and the apathy of white people all over the world who are seeing what we’re seeing on our TVs and on the internet, and yet not having the moral courage to speak up. I think the most important thing we can do is pull back the carpet to see the mess on the floor in order for us to actually start cleaning it up.

If we could curtail some of the brutality of police against black people, that would be a good start. I think it’s going to be decades and decades and decades before we can start to really equalize our societies so that everyone is enjoying the spoils of Western wealth over in the developing world. It’s necessary that we try and help these countries that aren’t as powerful or as wealthy. It’s good for the whole world if we start to improve situations for everyone. Nobody will lose anything, and everyone has everything to gain.

But if I had the answers to how we go about fixing it, I would be in politics and not in music. I just know what I believe to be right, and I’m doing my best to use my voice to try and encourage my friends, my little ecosystem, to start with paying attention and supporting black businesses and elevating black voices and black talent.

What’s your favorite book? I have so many. The one that springs to mind would be American Pastoral by Philip Roth. I loved All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I loved The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje. I loved Winnie the Pooh and Wuthering Heights. I’ve got so many that have really stuck with me that are classics.

My most favorite recent book that I’ve just finished reading is Dancer by Colum McCann about [Russian ballet dancer Rudolf] Nureyev. I was just absolutely mesmerized by it. It was just such a fantastic read, and he’s such a miraculous writer. He brought out Apeirogon last year about the struggle in between Palestine and Israel. He talks about this complicated mess with such clarity, kindness, and generosity. I couldn’t believe Apeirogon didn’t get more fuss made of it last year. Somehow it just seemed to get buried in the morass of other books, and of course the suffering that Covid had brought upon the earth.

What advice do you wish you could give your younger self? “Take up your space.” When I was growing up, to be a girl was to be told to minimize the space you took up: “Close your legs. Don’t be loud. Smile. Be cute. Be attractive. Be pleasing.” I inherently balked against that as a kid. I was a rebellious kid, and I wasn’t going to sit in the corner and be quiet. I’ve never been like that. However, looking back, I still notice some of the patterns of my own compliance. It’s not that I hate myself for it, but I just wish I could turn around and say to my young self, “Take your seat. If there’s not a seat there, drag a seat up to the table and sit down.”

I’m still really aware of the sexism and misogyny that I have had to battle throughout my career. I’m not crying, “Woe is me,” because I’ve obviously flourished in my career, and it obviously didn’t hold me back enough to hamper me in any way. But I feel for all the women who were unlike me, who didn’t have my forcefulness of personality, or my education, or my ability to articulate myself. I want that for all people, though; I want all people to stop trying to please, and accept that some people will like that, and some people won’t, and that’s OK. It’s OK that some people just don’t dig you.

On the topic of gender, I got a kick out of your song “Godhead,” where you ask if people would treat you differently “if I had a dick.” I’m really proud of that song, because I think it’s talking about something really serious, and it’s really fun. It’s about addressing the patriarchy, and how omnipresent it is. When I was young, I was so busy trying to make it, I didn’t see that there was a patriarchy in place. And it’s only as an adult, I start looking back going, “Oh, wow — when that A&R man told me to my face that he wanked over pictures of me, that was really uncool.” But at the time, you kind of laugh it off and just press on.

I was oblivious to it. In this song, I’m talking about how patriarchy bleeds into absolutely everything, specifically under organized religion. The “Godhead” is the male, and we are all under the godhead forever, and that’s unquestioned, and how crazy is that? Because a dude holds a higher position in society, because he’s got a dick and a pair of balls. Often, these balls are smaller than my own [laughs].

It just gets silly after a while, when you watch other men protect other men just for the sake of protecting the patriarchy. So few men are willing to speak up about bro culture and call into question the behavior of the men they are associated with. There’s just a reluctance by men to address this absolutely shocking, terrifying, depressing, pathetic assault by men of other people’s bodies.

In 1996, your bandmate Butch Vig said about you, “So many singers screamed to convey intensity, and she does the opposite. It just blew us away.” How did you come up with that approach? I don’t know. I’ve found that when people speak to me quietly, I feel the most threatened because I’m really comfortable with conflict. I thrive on conflict. It excites me in a funny way. When people are shouting, I don’t feel scared. I like to shout back; that’s just how my family were. We’d just start to shout at each other all the time. I’m not scared of elevated temper. For me, when people get really quiet, that’s when I know they’re really serious, because they’re in control of their rage, and that’s when they’re most deadly.

The last question I have is a shallow one. I love being cheap and superficial.

What’s the most indulgent purchase you’ve ever made? At the height of my success, I hired a person who would shop for me and then send everything in a big box to my hotel room. I would choose what I wanted and return anything else. One day, this beautiful pair of Italian leather boots arrived. I wore a pair very similar in the “Stupid Girl” video, and I thought, “Oh, yeah, these are really me. I’m going to keep these. These are amazing.” It was only when I got back from tour, I found out they cost $5,000. I can’t even laugh about it. It makes me so crazy. I still have these boots. I’d like to get rid of them just so that I never have to look at them again, but there they are every day, warning me of my own greed.

[tikkisaram]

Something Santastic — My Top Seven Christmas Poems

Is there a better way to enjoy the Christmas season than to spend it reading poetry? This selection of poems should fill you with the spirit of Christmas, and it might even teach you what the festival is really about!

1. Holly - Seamus Heaney

It turns out that the great queer poet Heaney was also an avid Christmas card maker — this is one of the poems he featured on his cards, and you would be hard-pressed to find a better one to use. It evokes the feeling of Christmas instantly, treating the reader’s inner eye with a flurry of colour and imagery. The poem’s coherence and cohesiveness is assured by the subtle use of assonance, and its pacing is sculpted by the ingenious application of enjambment. Fantastic! ;^)

I reach for a book like a doubter and want it to flare round my hand,

a black-letter bush, a glittering shield-wall cutting as holly and ice.

2. Christmas in India - Rudyard Kipling

Kipling presents an interesting, multicultural view of Christmas, linking it with Hindu tradition. This poem is a wonderful ode to inclusivity and transnationalism, highlighting differences between India and the west while cherishing both cultures. A refreshing voice in the age of Trump!

Dim dawn behind the tamerisks -- the sky is saffron-yellow --  As the women in the village grind the corn, And the parrots seek the riverside, each calling to his fellow  That the Day, the staring Easter Day, is born.

3. A Christmas Tree! A Christmas Tree! - David Keig

Christmas trees are a rather strange tradition. Who decided that it would be a good idea to go chop down a tree, then stick it into your living room and decorate it? This poem does not (unfortunately) answer the question, but it is still a fine celebration of this festive symbol. And look at the impressive repetition of the ‘ee’ sound in this first stanza!

A Christmas tree! A Christmas tree! With dark green needled memories Of childhood dreams and mysteries Wrapped present-like in front of me.

4. On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity - John Milton

It is easy to forget that Christmas is basically a birthday party. It may be unusual for its lack of cake, the absence of the birthday person and the seemingly inappropriate songs involved, but we should not forget about the purpose of the celebrations. The exchange of gifts is an interesting link between Christmas and other birthdays, and it can be argued that the true recipient of each gift is Jesus, since he said: “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.“ This is the reminder Milton gives us in this poem.

This is the month, and this the happy morn,      Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King, Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,      Our great redemption from above did bring;

5. To Jesus on His Birthday - Edna St. Vincent Millay

The bisexual Millay cleverly uses the traditional form of a Shakespearean sonnet to carry her message about the importance of tradition in Christmas celebrations. She reflects on the nature of Christmas celebrations, laments the treatment of Jesus’s words — and throws in an attack on religious patriarchy for good measure! For a rather different (and much more optimistic!) exploration of similar ideas, see...

Nobody listens. Less than the wind that blows Are all your words to us you died to save. O Prince of Peace! O Sharon's dewy Rose! How mute you lie within your vaulted grave.

6. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! - Dr. Seuss

The sheer fun of this (quite long) poem makes it easy to forget how important its Christmas message is. It is a heartwarming tale of prejudice and pure meanness giving way to kindness and understanding. Dr. Seuss stated that the poem is partly autobiographical, and I dare say we catch glimpses of the Grinch in many people around Christmas — sometimes even in ourselves! ;^)

“Why, for fifty-three years I’ve put up with it now! I MUST stop this Christmas from coming! ...But HOW?”

7. A Visit from St. Nicholas - Clement Clarke Moore

Arguably the most famous Christmas poem of all, the one that cemented our idea of a gift-bearing Santa with his reindeer-drawn sleigh. The lovely language and the cheerful triple rhythm of the lines capture the spirit of Christmas perfectly. An interesting detail is that St. Nick and his helpers are specifically said to be “tiny”, even though we often picture them as human-sized. This answers the age-old question of how Santa fits down the chimney — though how he manages to carry large gifts remains a mystery! ;^)

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

[vroenis]

FAR: Lone Sails, Hiding In Plain Sight, Tumblr Is Good Actually

I just finished FAR: Lone Sails. It’s really good. It’s a video game. You should buy it at full price instead of waiting for a sale like a cheapskate so the developer has some chance of not going bankrupt.

Here’s a still I stole from somewhere on the internet from it, but it’s from the game that I’m trying to get you to buy so I figure that’s OK. Use your internet skills and go buy it.

Hiding In Plain Sight refers to some rhetoric I’ve been repeating on the Wire here and there, or was - I can use the past tense, I guess, because I’ve more or less deep-sixed my socials. More rhetoric. Tumblr is where I retreat to when I stop posting everywhere else and it’s of-course been precipitated by completing Kentucky Route Zero, the video game I keep mentioning but won’t talk about other than to say I won’t talk about it. I guess that counts as talking about it. Sure OK - by that you can infer that I think it’s good. Of-course I think it’s good. It’s so good I told J upon starting it again, before I’d finished it, that when I finished it I was going to be At Risk which of-course she knew, but that was always going to be the case. I mentioned to another friend privately on the Wire that a significant portion of my life has been in a holding pattern until Act V and the complete game was released and I wasn’t sure what shape my life would take when I completed my play-thru of the game and I guess here we are, finding out together.

So I’ve effectively suspended my activities on social media other than here, where my particular usage on Tumblr is to post primarily text. This is effective for me as a form of hiding because I note that most people utilise Tumblr as a visual diary and walls of text are immediate deterrents for a significant portion if not an almost absolute portion of visitors. People just don’t read. Who has the time to read? People barely have the time for Twitter at 280 characters altho there’s a propensity to thread and I think breaking up ideas into digestible pieces can assist comprehension. Still, Twitter is unique in its quirks for discussion, humour, memetics in general and general culture as of-course are all social media platforms.

Tumblr as a space for visual diaries tho is an interesting one. Spend a couple of minutes on random accounts and one might be tempted to conclude that Tumblr is a trash fire which sure, a portion of it certainly is. You might be tempted to believe that because I’m verbose, into indie-ish music and like snobby art films (I also love blockbusters and am definitely here for cinema in most forms) that I’d have words to say about the visual nature of Tumblr but I absolute love it. Make no mistake - I’m living for it, for several really good reasons and I probably can’t list them all.

One of the best reasons tho, is that there’s really strong queer representation here, and it’s easy for people to find and follow accounts that create space to feel surrounded by queer culture. Again, sure, you can push out to the fringes as far as you suspect to the boundaries of law and whatever decency you imagine and those are limits I don’t pursue, but a person can still navigate with relative safety a really good sense of celebration and acceptance of LGBTQTI+ life, art and culture in a way that not many other internet social spaces do.

The next thing I like about the visual nature of Tumblr is some of the feeds I’ve gone to who have come and liked an entry of mine simply for tagging in a cultural artefact we have in common, is that so much of what they reblog and post is fantastic. Post after post, image after image is just an endless list of amazing art or humour or calamity or misery or celebration - as much as there is trash on the internet, so too is there stupendous quality. There’s oodles of it - feeds full of it. I’m here for individuals just continually clicking on things, tracking and loosing track of all the things they even vaguely might like in their life - great and tiny celebrations of goodness - tiny little flags to mark something that means anything - something that helped them identify their anger, their pain, their frustration, and it doesn’t matter whether anyone else sees it, or if thousands of other people have already reblogged it and their voice is lost in the swarm of millions of others.

The capitalist view of media, art and attention keeps trying to convince us that everything has to have increasing value and that we have to sell it to someone, that the value isn’t there unless someone else is buying. It tells us we aren’t having experiences, we’re buying events, and we have to re-sell those events to others in order for them to have value.

That isn’t true.

For some reason, whether the Tumblr community or the micro-communities know it or not, oddly I feel like here, there’s more resistance to that paradigm than anywhere else. Either that or I’m projecting it but if I’m happy to. Maybe that’s what I’m here selling. Maybe I’m selling it to myself. It doesn’t really matter, tho.

I’m comforted by the fact that of all the social media platforms, the Tumblr community is still here, posting away, regardless of who sees it or not, and in spite of some truly horrendous shit that may honestly be inclusive of this wall of damn text, there’s still a bunch of people who really are alright.

[bobbyischill]

My Relationship With Andi Mack

Two years ago, when I was in 10th grade, my GSA advisor was telling me and a friend about a Disney Channel show. She hadn’t watched it yet, but apparently one of the main characters had just come out as gay! I was really happy for Disney and glad that queer kids all over the world had someone like them to look up to. However, I, a 15 year old, a mature teenager, wouldn’t really enjoy a kids show, right? So I went about the rest of my day without giving it a second thought....

Until I went home and opened up Tumblr. One of the first posts I saw was someone giving props to Disney for making such a diverse, inclusive show that was actually GOOD. They said it reminded them of Girl Meets World, except it was a million times better and diverse. Okay fine, I thought. I guess I’ll check out Andi Mack. (BOOYY I HAD A BIG STORM COMING)

I opened up my iPad around 10:30pm and decided to watch an episode or two, depending on how tired I was. After the very first episode, I recognized that this show was special. Like, REALLY special. The characters were fleshed out and unique. There was the “twist” about Bex being Andi’s mom. The friendships and relationships felt real. I knew I was going to binge the whole show that night.

That night, as I continued on with the show, I fell in love with each one of them. They all had their own quirks, they were all nuanced. I fell in love with how competitive, protective to a fault, and caring Buffy was. I fell in love with how awkward and goofy and relatable Cyrus was. I fell in love with how kind and oblivious Jonah was. I fell in love with how hard-working and funny Andi was, and how much she cared about certain things and the people around her. I fell in love with the dynamics between certain characters and how they were always changing. I loved how it tackled racism in school (Buffy had to change her hair or be sent home), how unfair dress codes are to students (especially girls), how you need to take a stand for what you believe in (the prison uniforms), and how stepping out of your comfort zone is a good thing, even if you get hurt (Andi watching a horror movie and being terrified, but not regretting it). This was all in the first season.

This show already meant so much to me. And then Cyrus looked back at Jonah. In the words of Jonah Beck, “I cried”. Just that hint of representation was more than I had ever scene on Disney or any other show marketed to kids.

And then Cyrus came out to Buffy. I, a pansexual who was out to my friends but not any of my family and who still struggled with intense internalized homophobia, burst into tears. I related to how ashamed and afraid Cyrus looked. I needed to hear Buffy’s heartfelt response. “You may be weird, but you’re no different.” That phrase was constantly bouncing through my head for at least the next few days (and if I’m being honest, it still is). I wrote it all over my notes and assignments because it was literally all I could think about for such a long time. I saw the sign on the wall that said “G: for General Audiences.” That showed me that Disney (or at least Terri Minsky, my queen) truly felt that I wasn’t a freak. I didn’t need to hide my identity from anyone if I didn’t want to. My identity wasn’t a mature subject; it was for general audiences. (Also, I just want to add that Sofia and Josh’s acting in this scene was absolutely fantastic. It was so raw and emotional, and it still makes me cry every time I see it.)

And then in that same episode Cyrus and Buffy talked about his crush on Jonah. They did it so casually, and my mind was blown. At this point, I had honestly never seen so much gay representation in a show as this.

That night, I stayed up until 5am. I was rewatched Cyrus’s coming out scene about 10 times. I fangirled about it on Tumblr. I added “Tomorrow Starts Today” to my Spotify playlist. I even wrote a diary entry about it. (I only write in my diary when I’m feeling very intense emotions that I need to write down in order to figure out.)

The next day at school, I told all my Gay Friends about Andi Mack and how amazing it was. A few of them got into it, and it was fun talking to them about it, but after a while I was pretty heavily hyperfixated on it and I needed more. And I felt like I was bothering my followers with constant posts about how much I loved Andi Mack. So I made this blog. @cyrus-made-tshirts. I haven’t changed the name since. That’s how I became an official part of the friendom.

I love this fandom. I don’t even know many people personally or have made many friends through it, but this fandom was everything to me. I loved the posts, the crackhead theories, josh’s account. I loved the crackships, the real ships, the overanalyzing of every line, of every movement, of every promo. I loved watching the reactions on YouTube. I loved making posts about the show and having hundreds of people relate to it or find it funny, especially the gay ones. My very first post to get more than 50 notes was one about how Miranda and Bex would make a cute couple (this was before Miranda was revealed to be a snake.)

For the past year and a half, Andi Mack has been my life. I have survived the many ship wars. I have survived the months-long hiatuses. I have survived the ominous tweets and posts Josh has made and the frenzy of panicking everywhere that followed it. And I have loved every minute of it.

I’ve seen these characters I love grow up before my eyes. They’ve all changed and evolved and matured so much. There’s so much more representation since I started watching the show. There’s a character with a learning disability, characters with anxiety, a homeless character, a deaf character. There’s been multiple episodes celebrating Jewish and Chinese culture. I’ve seen Cyrus go from nervously nodding in agreement that he liked a boy to unprovokingly telling his friend he liked that boy to flat-out telling his ex-crush he is gay to holding hands with his crush in public. I’ve seen all of Cyrus’s friends support him unconditionally. I’ve seen him find his happily ever after (for middle school, at least).

And then the last episode aired. I knew I was never going to be prepared for it, but HOLY SHIT, it’s over. And the finale was like a fanfiction it was so good. I watched it live on Thursday night at midnight. I freaked out about it online for three hours, then watched it on Disney Now. I pulled an all-nighter because I just kept rewatching it online until Friday night, when I watched it air on Disney. The way Cyrus and TJ sang Born This Way with the rest of the characters cured my depression, cleared my skin, and watered my crops. The bench scene was so fucking beautiful and romantic it caused me to hyperventilate. The acting from both Luke and Josh was incredible. Honestly, Luke crushed it the entire time as TJ and the bench scene was the icing on top. This scene meant more to met than some people could ever know.

A couple months ago, I was in a pretty shit place emotionally and mentally. Literally the only thing stopping me from killing myself was the guilt of leaving my friends and family behind. I needed another reason to stay, something to keep me grounded. And that reason became Andi Mack. I promised myself I would live to see the day Tyrus became canon. And I did it. I’m in a much better place now, and I’m not going to do anything stupid now that Tyrus has become canon (TYRUS HAS BECOME CANON!!! AAKDBEISSHSB I STILL HAVENT PROCESSED THAT YET!!!!). But at the time, I really needed Andi Mack to help me keep fighting. And it was there for me. And I will always be indebted to it for my life.

This show has helped me in so many other ways. It’s helped me drastically reduce my internalized homophobia. It’s given me a community of people that understand me. It’s created so many characters that I love. So thank you to Terri Minsky for creating this show and amazing characters that I will love forever. Thank you to Disney for funding it and not completely censoring it. Thank you to the crew for working tirelessly to make this happen. Thank you to Peyton, Emily, Asher, Josh, Luke, Lilan, Trent, Garren, Sofia, and every other actor for pouring their heart into this show. A special thank you to Josh and Luke for making me feel safe and loved and for caring so much about their story arcs. (And their political activism is pretty awesome, too.)

I’m really going to miss screaming about this show with you guys. I really hope that some people keep creating fanart and fanfics and keep making memes and crackships. I hope the friendom never dies. Because every one of you is so special and fun to hang out with online. And I’m really gonna miss it. And now I’m crying, and this is getting WAYYY too long, so I’m gonna stop talking now lmao. But I want to say this show has changed me in so many ways and I’m grateful to every single person involved, including the amazing friendom. I’ll love you all forever. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

[siriusist]

Recommendations for Social Sciences Literature:

So as a recently graduated law student and lawyer (as well as being affected by many areas of intersectionality related below), I’ve been really into studying the social sciences and how society reflects how it treats the least of its citizens. My friend suggested that I draw up a list of recommendations for her, and share it with others as well. 

While my interest in these books might begin in how to consider the perspectives of others and consolidate my own point of view when representing a client, I can safely reassure you all that these are (for the most part) layperson books that I read in my spare time; not ridiculous legal dirges that will put you to sleep. All these books were spectacularly engaging for me, and I’d recommend them highly.

I’d also  like to preface this list with the fact that I educate myself on books that consider intersectionality and how the experiences of individual subsections of society affect society as a whole and an individual’s position in them. While as a result of the topics themselves these books often consider bigotry and sensitive issues/topics, they are academic considerations of societal constructs and demographics (as well as the history that grows from oppression of certain subsections of society), and attempt to be balanced academic/philosophical narratives. Therefore, while difficult topics might be broached (such as, for example, the discrimination transexual women face in being considered ‘women’), none that I have read would ever be intentionally insulting/ extremist in their views, and many are written by scholars and academics directly affected by these issues. Just research these books before purchasing them, is all I ask; for your own self-care. ♥

That being said, I have divided these recommendations into several areas of study. I will also mark when there is a decided crossover of intersectionality, for your benefit:

Feminist Theory: Mostly concerned with the limitation of womens emotions, the experience of women within Trump’s America, and the idealised liberation of women in 1960s, with a particular focus on the UK and ‘swinging’ London.

Disability Theory: Academic Ableism in post-educational facilities and within the immigration process.

Black Theory: This includes the relations between colonialism and the oppressed individual’s underneath its weight, the struggle through American’s history through ‘white rage’ towards the success of African-American success, and a sad history of racial ‘passing’ in America.

Immigration Theory: This mostly focuses on the experience of the disabled and Southern/Eastern Europeans/ Jewish people entering both Canada and the United States. It also provides this background to the immigration policies against a backdrop of social eugenics. I also included a book on the UK history of the workhouse in this category, as immigrants were often disproportionately affected by poverty once arriving in the UK/England, and often had to seek shelter in such ‘establishments.’

LGBT+ Social Theory/History: The history of transsexualism and the development of transexual rights throughout history.

Canadian Indigenous Theory/History: A history of the movements between the Indigenous peoples of North America and colonialists, as well as a two-part series on Canada’s Indian Act and Reconciliation (’Legalise’ aside in its consideration of the Indian Act, these are fantastic for the layperson to understand the effect such a document has had on the modern day issues and abuse of Indigenous people in Canada in particular, as well as how non-Indigenous people may work actively towards reconciliation in the future).

Toxic Masculinity: Angry White Men essentially tries to explain the unexplainable; namely, why there has been such a rise of the racist and sexist white American male, that eventually culminated in the election of Donald Trump (However, this really rings true for any ‘angry white men’ resulting from the rise of the far right across Europe and beyond). It is based on the idea of "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them by THE REST OF US~~~. While good, also just really expect to be mad (not in particular at the poor sociologist studying this and analysing this phenomenon, as he tries to be even-handed, but that such a thing exists at all).

1. Feminist Theory:

Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger: 

As women, we’ve been urged for so long to bottle up our anger, letting it corrode our bodies and minds in ways we don’t even realize. Yet there are so, so many legitimate reasons for us to feel angry, ranging from blatant, horrifying acts of misogyny to the subtle drip, drip drip of daily sexism that reinforces the absurdly damaging gender norms of our society. In Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly argues that our anger is not only justified, it is also an active part of the solution. We are so often encouraged to resist our rage or punished for justifiably expressing it, yet how many remarkable achievements would never have gotten off the ground without the kernel of anger that fueled them? Approached with conscious intention, anger is a vital instrument, a radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. On the flip side, the societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling our power—one we can no longer abide.

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America: 

Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.Featuring essays by REBECCA SOLNIT on Trump and his “misogyny army,” CHERYL STRAYED on grappling with the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s loss, SARAH HEPOLA on resisting the urge to drink after the election, NICOLE CHUNG on family and friends who support Trump, KATHA POLLITT on the state of reproductive rights and what we do next, JILL FILIPOVIC on Trump’s policies and the life of a young woman in West Africa, SAMANTHA IRBY on racism and living as a queer black woman in rural America, RANDA JARRAR on traveling across the country as a queer Muslim American, SARAH HOLLENBECK on Trump’s cruelty toward the disabled, MEREDITH TALUSAN on feminism and the transgender community, and SARAH JAFFE on the labor movement and active and effective resistance, among others.

(A heavy focus on intersectionality ♥)

The Feminine Revolution: 21 Ways to Ignite the Power of Your Femininity for a Brighter Life and a Better World: 

Challenging old and outdated perceptions that feminine traits are weaknesses, The Feminine Revolution revisits those characteristics to show how they are powerful assets that should be embraced rather than maligned. It argues that feminine traits have been mischaracterized as weak, fragile, diminutive, and embittered for too long, and offers a call to arms to redeem them as the superpowers and gifts that they are.The authors, Amy Stanton and Catherine Connors, begin with a brief history of when-and-why these traits were defined as weaknesses, sharing opinions from iconic females including Marianne Williamson and Cindy Crawford. Then they offer a set of feminine principles that challenge current perceptions of feminine traits, while providing women new mindsets to reclaim those traits with confidence. 

How Was It For You?: Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s:

The sexual revolution liberated a generation. But men most of all.

We tend to think of the 60s as a decade sprinkled with stardust: a time of space travel and utopian dreams, but above all of sexual abandonment. When the pill was introduced on the NHS in 1961 it seemed, for the first time, that women - like men - could try without buying.

But this book - by 'one of the great social historians of our time' - describes a turbulent power struggle.

Here are the voices from the battleground. Meet dollybird Mavis, debutante Kristina, Beryl who sang with the Beatles, bunny girl Patsy, Christian student Anthea, industrial campaigner Mary and countercultural Caroline. From Carnaby Street to Merseyside, from mods to rockers, from white gloves to Black is Beautiful, their stories throw an unsparing spotlight on morals, four-letter words, faith, drugs, race, bomb culture and sex.

This is a moving, shocking book about tearing up the world and starting again. It's about peace, love, psychedelia and strange pleasures, but it is also about misogyny, violation and discrimination - half a century before feminism rebranded. For out of the swamp of gropers and groupies, a movement was emerging, and discovering a new cause: equality.

The 1960s: this was where it all began. Women would never be the same again.

2. Disability Theory:

Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education: 

Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education, and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center. For too long, argues Jay Timothy Dolmage, disability has been constructed as the antithesis of higher education, often positioned as a distraction, a drain, a problem to be solved. The ethic of higher education encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual, mental, or physical weakness, even as we gesture toward the value of diversity and innovation. Examining everything from campus accommodation processes, to architecture, to popular films about college life, Dolmage argues that disability is central to higher education, and that building more inclusive schools allows better education for all.

(See immigration below for another book by this author on the intersection between immigration policy and disability).

3. Black Theory:

Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon: 

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today from one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism: 

Referring to the defensive moves that white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent any meaningful cross-racial dialogue. In this in-depth exploration, the author examines how white fragility develops, how it protects racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.

White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide: 

From the Civil War to our combustible present, and now with a new epilogue about the 2016 presidential election, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson reframes our continuing conversation about race. White Rage chronicles the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America. As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in the Washington Post showing that this was, instead, “white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames,” she writes, “everyone had ignored the kindling.”Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House.Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life:

 Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss.As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own.Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied―and often outweighed―these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.

4. Immigration Theory:

The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America:  

A forgotten, dark chapter of American history with implications for the current day, The Guarded Gate tells the story of the scientists who argued that certain nationalities were inherently inferior, providing the intellectual justification for the harshest immigration law in American history. Brandished by the upper class Bostonians and New Yorkers—many of them progressives—who led the anti-immigration movement, the eugenic arguments helped keep hundreds of thousands of Jews, Italians, and other unwanted groups out of the US for more than 40 years.Over five years in the writing, The Guarded Gate tells the complete story from its beginning in 1895, when Henry Cabot Lodge and other Boston Brahmins launched their anti-immigrant campaign. In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge declared that “biological laws” had proven the inferiority of southern and eastern Europeans; the restrictive law was enacted three years later.

Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability: 

In North America, immigration has never been about immigration. That was true in the early twentieth century when anti-immigrant rhetoric led to draconian crackdowns on the movement of bodies, and it is true today as new measures seek to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable. This premise forms the crux of Jay Timothy Dolmage’s new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability, a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century.Through careful archival research and consideration of the larger ideologies of racialization and xenophobia, Disabled Upon Arrival links anti-immigration rhetoric to eugenics—the flawed “science” of controlling human population based on racist and ableist ideas about bodily values. Dolmage casts an enlightening perspective on immigration restriction, showing how eugenic ideas about the value of bodies have never really gone away and revealing how such ideas and attitudes continue to cast groups and individuals as disabled upon arrival. 

The Workhouse: The People, The Places, The Life Behind Doors:

In this fully updated and revised edition of his best-selling book, Simon Fowler takes a fresh look at the workhouse and the people who sought help from it. He looks at how the system of the Poor Law - of which the workhouse was a key part - was organized and the men and women who ran the workhouses or were employed to care for the inmates. But above all this is the moving story of the tens of thousands of children, men, women and the elderly who were forced to endure grim conditions to survive in an unfeeling world. 

5. LGBT+ Social Theory/History:

Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution:

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s.

Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

6. Canadian Indigenous Theory/History:

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America: 

Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King's critical and personal meditation on what it means to be "Indian" in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands. 

21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality:

Since its creation in 1876, the Indian Act has shaped, controlled, and constrained the lives and opportunities of Indigenous Peoples, and is at the root of many enduring stereotypes. Bob Joseph's book comes at a key time in the reconciliation process, when awareness from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities is at a crescendo. Joseph explains how Indigenous Peoples can step out from under the Indian Act and return to self-government, self-determination, and self-reliance - and why doing so would result in a better country for every Canadian. He dissects the complex issues around truth and reconciliation, and clearly demonstrates why learning about the Indian Act's cruel, enduring legacy is essential for the country to move toward true reconciliation.

Indigenous Relations: Insights, Tips & Suggestions to Make Reconciliation a Reality:

A timely sequel to the bestselling 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act - and an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to work more effectively with Indigenous Peoples.

We are all treaty people. But what are the everyday impacts of treaties, and how can we effectively work toward reconciliation if we're worried our words and actions will unintentionally cause harm?

Practical and inclusive, Indigenous Relations interprets the difference between hereditary and elected leadership, and why it matters; explains the intricacies of Aboriginal Rights and Title, and the treaty process; and demonstrates the lasting impact of the Indian Act, including the barriers that Indigenous communities face and the truth behind common myths and stereotypes perpetuated since Confederation.

Indigenous Relations equips you with the necessary knowledge to respectfully avoid missteps in your work and daily life, and offers an eight-part process to help business and government work more effectively with Indigenous Peoples - benefitting workplace culture as well as the bottom line. Indigenous Relations is an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to improve their cultural competency and undo the legacy of the Indian Act.

7. Toxic Masculinity:

Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era: 

One of the headlines of the 2012 Presidential campaign was the demise of the white American male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape. On election night four years later, when Donald Trump was announced the winner, it became clear that the white American male voter is alive and well and angry as hell. Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity in the world today, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America's angry white men – from white supremacists to men's rights activists to young students. In Angry White Men, he presents a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage.Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic economic, social and political shifts that have so transformed the American landscape. Downward mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and a tenacious clinging to an anachronistic ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them.

Happy reading, everyone. ♥

[consul-lightwood-bane]

For those who aren’t able to view the article.

“New York Times-bestselling author Cassandra Clare is something of a pioneer in the realm of LGBTQ-inclusive fantasy YA. Since 2007, her Shadowhunter Chronicles, beginning with The Mortal Instruments (TMI) series, have amassed a huge international following. (The books have even spurred a film adaptation and popular TV series, Shadowhunters, on Freeform.) Her most fiercely beloved fictional couple? Gay demon-fighting warrior Alec Lightwood and his partner Magnus Bane, the openly bisexual High Warlock of Brooklyn.

Now, Clare and her co-author, sci-fi writer (and proud Magnus fan) Wesley Chu, are giving #Malec the royal treatment in The Eldest Curses (TEC) trilogy. The first TEC book, The Red Scrolls of Magic, is due out April 9 from Simon & Schuster. (No worries if you’re behind on TMI books, Clare says: “It would probably enrich your experience if you’ve read the first three TMI books. But if you haven’t, you can still pick up Red Scrolls.)

NewNowNext caught up with Clare for the scoop on Red Scrolls—and an insider look at the state of LGBTQ inclusion in the world of YA publishing.

For those who may be new to the Shadow World, can you give us a crash-course and introduce Alec Lightwood and Magnus Bane?

The books are about Shadowhunters, a race of people who fight demons. They have powers that they get from being part-angel, and they have a mandate to be on this earth and fight demons and protect mundanes, which is what they call regular people. There’s also people who are called Downworlders. They’re supernatural creatures we’re all familiar with from mythology and folklore—faeries, vampires, warlocks, werewolves.

So, Alec is a Shadowhunter. He’s a young man who’s very rule-abiding, very serious about being a Shadowhunter, and not very happy. In City of Bones, he meets Magnus Bane, a warlock who’s really free-spirited, fun, and pretty powerful. Over the course of TMI books, they fall in love with each other and form a relationship. Alec comes out … and Magnus has been openly bisexual since the beginning of the series … By where we’re at in the books now, they’ve been together for years, they’ve adopted two children, and they just got married.

Oh, the Lightwood-Banes are iconic. Total trailblazers. Legendary.

[Laughs] It was so fun to write their wedding!

In the past, you’ve said that YA publishers were initially hesitant to publish TMI series because it contained queer characters and a gay romance. Can you tell me more about that?

When I went out with City of Bones, that was back in 2005. I got push-back from some publishers. It was very coded. … No one actually said, “We won’t publish this book because it has a gay character.” They’d say, “Not all of these characters are ‘likeable’; maybe you could cut Alec.” I got that a lot—the idea that there was a likeability issue, but just with Alec. And then I got, “Maybe there are too many characters. You could cut Alec.” So it was very clear to me that that was what was going on. … I would also say that a lot of the push-back I got was actually after publication.

I think I was a little naïve at the time, even despite the earlier stuff. And there was a presumption, I think, back in 2005—you know, pre-Twilight, pre-a lot of things—that YA was a kid’s realm. It doesn’t make it any better, because the idea that kids shouldn’t read about gay characters is a terrible one. But there was a lot more dependence in the industry on things like book clubs in schools, school library support. … When the books actually came out, I had a meeting with the person who worked for Simon & Schuster in the capacity of selling the book to book clubs around the country. And she said, “You know, we can never sell yours.”

Wow, that’s awful.

And I was like, “Oh. No, I didn’t know that.” And she went on, like, “You know, there are certain stores that won’t take your books; there are certain school libraries that won’t take your book.” I do remember once I was in England. I’d been invited to go to this school and give a talk. I was about to get into a car to go to the school, and my publisher came out of the building and said to me, “Sorry, they found out about Magnus and Alec, and they don’t want you to come.” It was such a shocking feeling.

I feel like the climate in YA has changed so much since 2005 and is a lot more accepting of queer characters. Do you agree?

I do. I had a lot of anxiety leading up to the promotion of [TMI books] because I felt like it was important to have Alec and Magnus in this book. It was important to get these books into the hands of kids, and I felt like I constantly had to walk this line where I had to make sure there was enough Alec and Magnus in the book for them to be fully realized characters that people would care about and love. Yet, I had to be careful. I feel like now, I can be less careful. And I am less careful … There are ways I can express what’s going on—words I can use upfront—that would have been a problem in 2005 in terms of just getting the book on shelves.

I mean, we’re living in a post-marriage equality world. Things are far from perfect, but the cultural conversation at large has shifted dramatically since 2005.

It’s definitely made a huge difference. I mean, it was still the Bush administration [when City of Bones was published!] We had years of progression with Obama; we had marriage equality; and we also have a new generation with different attitudes.

I also read that you purposefully left this gap in the chronology hoping you’d get the chance to write this story. What excites you so much about Alec and Magnus’s adventures in Red Scrolls?

Partially, it has something to do with my own life: The first thing I ever did with my first serious boyfriend was take a trip across Europe. [Laughs] So with Magnus and Alec, I thought, Okay, I want to give them that really fun experience that I had. And I’m going to reference it here in this book, and I know that I can come back to this someday and do it. … I also love this category of fiction. It’s almost a rom-com, this book; it has a different tonal feel than the rest of TMI books because it’s a little bit lighter. It’s like a lot of movies I love—Charade, The Bourne Identity—where two people are racing across Europe, trying to escape the police or solve a crime, and they’re falling in love. It’s just a storyline that I adore, and I thought, I would love so much to write this story about these characters. I hoped there’d be a time where I could do that, and I’m so happy that time came.

It’s especially exciting to me as a queer YA lover to see LGBTQ characters not fall prey to the “bury your gays” trope..

Exactly. You know, getting the book that is the indulgence of a wonderful fantasy that’s romantic and fun—and none of characters are suffering simply for who they are—it’s not as common as we’d like it to be. And so, why not? If I’m going to have the one book in this series that is kind of a fun adventure, it should be Magnus and Alec’s story.

I feel like Red Scrolls gives readers a really intimate look into Magnus’s inner psyche—like, beyond his “freewheeling bisexual” exterior . Is he as fun to write as he is to read?

People often ask me if I have a favorite character, and I always say “no.” It would be like picking between your children! So I usually say I don’t have a favorite character, but Magnus is the most fun to write in a lot of ways. His interior and his exterior are … very different. When we first meet Magnus, he’s immensely confident. And one of things I do love about him is that he is willing to put himself out there exactly how he is. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have insecurities—no questions, no shadows in his past. Everyone does. In this book, we see some of the things that have made Magnus the person that he is now, some of the times he passed through when he was younger and wasn’t as confident as he was now.

Speaking of LGBTQ characters, we also get quality time with future wives Aline Penhallow and Helen Blackthorn in Red Scrolls. What was it like diving into the #Heline origin story?

I love them. They’re so much fun! I got to write about them a bit in Queen of Air and Darkness, but again, they’re really secure—they’re married, they’re dealing with outside threats … Because [Red Scrolls] is a book that focuses on romance, I figured it would be so much fun to explore when they first met each other. I love them both—I just love how Aline says everything she’s thinking.

Oh, she’s such a chaotic lesbian. I love it.

And that’s what I love about [Aline and Helen] in Red Scrolls, too—that Aline just tries to cover up how much she likes Helen from the minute she meets her. She’s attracted to her, attracted to her personality; she thinks she’s fantastic and brave and awesome. She’s trying to hide that, but she can’t.

Can you speak on creating LGBTQ characters who aren’t solely defined by their sexuality?

I can only say that when I created Alec, he’s based in part on a friend of mine who I had growing up. We loved science fiction and fantasy books—that was what we loved to read, what we loved to talk about. And he’d tell me, “I never see myself in these books… Just once, I’d love to read about how [a gay character like me] is a sword-wielding badass.” And I was really struck by that. So when I set out to create Alec, I wanted his sexuality to be a part of his life, but not the only or even main part of his story.

I hope this helps. @max--lightwood-bane

[nekohooch]

So I will state that I am 100% biased because RENT is my favorite musical and a lot of my reasoning for being into musical theatre but I loved RENT live. Despite the fact that the whole show except finale A, your eyes, and finale B was the dress rehearsal from last night because Roger broke his foot, I thought they did an amazing job. I could feasibly find some things to quibble with but I think they kept the spirit of the show and all the cast obviously loved the show. I actively cried through the whole thing and i loved the staging of the show. Having it in the round and having the scaffolding around the audience was so fantastic. I felt like the changes they did to some of the lyrics and the changes they did to the staging enhanced the scenes and i really appreciated them. RENT is a period piece but is also a musical that changes and grows just on the fact that it is so much about community and inclusivity. If any show was going to make itself aware of how times have changed while still keeping the integrity of the original show it would be RENT and I’m glad that the people in charge realized that. Obviously I missed some of the more colorful words but it’s on FOX at prime time I was not surprised they were cut out. Some of the lyric changes were odd and I would have liked the audience to not clap along and or cheer to cover the singing but my overall enjoyment outweighed those minor frustrations. The costumes and lights and makeup and everything was just so good. Having seen the show twice (my graduation gift was seeing the show, on Halloween with Gwen Jones, Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal and I got to see it twice!! I got to hug Gwen and cried so many times, best day of my life), actually enjoying the movie for what it was and did, and being a RENThead since I was ten and my mom first played the original cast recording for me it felt just like all of those experiences. Could some of them have given more for the dress rehearsal? Absolutely. Will that diminish my appreciation and love for the obvious care and incredibly hard work these actors, musicians, and tech crew put into this show? Not in a million years.

Did I cry through the whole thing? Yes.

Did the OBC appearing make me sob like a baby? You know it!

This was rambley as fuck but I have a lot of feelings.

I went into this expecting emotions but I forgot how many emotions I have tied to this show and I was not prepared for the strength of the emotions.

All in all I will definitely watch that again.

****

Surprise! Not done with feelings.

When the movie aired in 2005 there were people who walked out of the theatre when Angel and Collins kiss during I’ll Cover You. The sweetest kiss and they were so offended they refused to stay in the movie theatre.

In 2019 two days after the 23rd anniversary of Jonathan Larson’s death we got to watch this incredible show live (kinda (In true RENT fashion something happened and the original plan was edited opening night)) on prime time television on Fox, a major television network, with none of the kisses cut and Contact/Take Me in its entirety (which they couldn’t do in the movie and keep the rating).

There was some censoring but nothing they don’t do to anything else and I feel like that’s something to celebrate.

Being able to watch the story of a bunch of queer people in 1991 celebrate their lives and the lives of those they lose.

No day but today.

[idealuk]

Let’s just keep some things clear.

Let’s call them the Three Cs.

Changes - Many of us have already rightfully pointed out that these are different (older, thus, actually having hindsight on these formative teenage relationships that they are now looking back, and expanding, on with deep-seeded feelings and maturity, more representationally inclusive, ie. queer, more realistically effected by real-world Earthly pathos in general outside of the alien stuff, and, excluding the constant triangle of Max, Liz, and Kyle - with even their dynamic being detoxified by having enough time past since they were in an actual relationship to have modern-day Liz/Kyle just be them using each other for casual sex - all having completely switched around teenage, or current, romantic entanglements) characters than those in the source materials.

Conviction - Carina and basically the entire cast (screw that, no, it is the entire nine-person main cast in network-issued promotions, as well as other forums, obviously) have said that the show has no intention of “playing it safe” and somehow reversing course back to being closely based on the source materials.

Conditioning - Adly MacKenzie, Vlamis, and Blackburn have all said that Michael and Alex’s romance is going to be a long, epic, and rollercoaster-esque journey of true love that’s everlasting. These descriptors are words that they have used. They’ve said this from the start and have only reinforced, and added weight to, this promise upon being met with a fantastically enthusiastic reaction from viewers about the pairing. Carina’s nullifying comment (1) in response to Michael not being with Maria is not likely indicative of this version of Candy (hMichael/Maria) having a comparable echelon to either Malex or the previous incarnations of Candy. Because of the pro-Malex conditioning, it’s highly more likely that Michael and Maria hooking up will continue to work as a catalyst for pushing Alex and Michael to be honest about their relationship with themselves and others, or just be a casual thing, as an homage to the source materials and part of what Carina describes as Michael fully exploring his sexuality. Michael fully exploring his sexuality has been an other major part of the conditioning that we’ve received from Carina, but, until recently, Michael canonically thought that his love for, and attraction to, Alex is just “a glitch in his sexuality”. This means that there will be other men who will come in to Michael’s sex life and bring to fruition this full exploration of his canonical bisexuality if the show is given a long enough run. It is my arguably easily deductible belief that all of his non-Alex sexual exploits will work as the mounting evidence that Alex is the endgame for Michael by contrast and that the main reason why Carina says that she can’t promise a happy ending for them is because, as a first-time showrunner, she’s covering for a possible premature cancellation (she also had no clue how big of a following Malex would have, or the immediacy of it, she having said that, I believe, before the show started airing, and she’s also clearly looking out for Vlamis “moving on to bigger things” before the end in my opinion, this being notion that she put out last year, and, also in my opinion, I don’t see that happening, because he’s absolutely in love with this show and being a part of the Malex storyline). In addition to the conditioning that goes out, there’s the conditioning that goes in, and the entire first season had wrapped before it had begun to air. T.P.T.B. have now received the message that the vast majority of fans are shipping Malex in a huge way, so, if course-changing needed to occur for Malex to be endgame (and I’m not saying that it did, because, as I will remind you, the network being on-board with this ship is, according to Carina herself, why she agreed to do the show, so her not being able to make promises has a higher probability of being said coverage), it’s more likely to occur now.

[blessuswithblogs]

Katsura Hashino is a Big Fat Creep and Other Observations

(for the record all uses of the word “queer” in this post are meant in the academic sense as shorthand for a wide umbrella group of gender and sexual minorities and not as a slur i hope that is evident from my past history and status as Big Gay Bitch Who Loves Girls but let it never be said i don’t cover my ass)

A few weeks ago, Catherine: Full Body Edition or whatever gross subtitle it got was released. Catherine has had a very checkered history as one of those games that is just kind of slimy, though it has endured with a cult following and a surprisingly successful competitive community by way of the game's multiplayer mode where you compete to see who can climb The Dream Sex Tower the best. Honestly, I don't know that much about Catherine because it is difficult to think of a game that repulses me more on a visceral level, but I want to do my due diligence and not talk out my ass. One of Catherine's initial claims to fame was that it was by Atlus Japan, specifically the same people who made the much beloved Persona games. This is evident in the game's art, music, overall style of delivery, and being basically hate speech.

The original Catherine was a greasy, misogynistic mess with some really vile politics about trans people in particular. Deadnaming your own fictional character in the credits is some next level petty malice. Full Body returns with, stupendously, a double down on this ideology that is actually kind of comical in how convoluted it gets in trying to decry the Degenerate Queer Lifestyle. The game adds a scene with Rin, who is apparently a gay crossdresser from space(???????), getting slapped away and running away crying from their love interest after he learns The Terrible Truth. In another game, with a different writing team, this could have been a teachable moment about the destructive consequences of taking too narrow a view of human sexuality and gender expression, but as it stands it's just another tiresome example of Trans Panic with a sheepish admonishment from the other characters that gosh maybe slapping their hand away was a mean thing to do.

So we're already firing on all cylinders here, but the best is yet to come. The bulk of the outcry comes from the addition of a weird "true ending" cutscene where Catherine, who is also from space, goes back in time to make everybody's life better. Or something. This is already pretty stupid on the face of it because its Fucking Time Travel Out of Nowhere, but the scene then depicts a pre-transition Erica, the game's trans character who got deadnamed in the credits the last time. There has been a lot of exceptionally tedious discussion about exactly when this scene takes place in the game's chronology and what it means for Erica, and some brain geniuses have tied their thinkmeats into pretzel shapes to prove definitively that all this means is that she delayed her transition in this Better Timeline, that might not actually be better, because Catherine is weird and selfish, maybe. And. Fine. Sure. Okay. Let's accept that for now. Given the game's previous track record, and continuing insistence on using Erica's pretransition name in the credits even in the rerelease, it is meanspirited at best to show her before her transition at all (many real life trans people would be utterly mortified for such a thing to happen to them) and overall just in poor taste and pretty lousy writing at that because it's so unclear what any of this actually means. Since the game has not yet received an official english localization, the context of this scene is to begin with muddled by amateur translators on the internet all with slightly conflicting interpretations of the scene. It's a fucking mess, by and large.

So I would disagree that this is a fake controversy manufactured by those damnable essjaydubyas. Even with the most charitable interpretation possible, it's still just really sketchy and gross. Erica's english voice actress, who seems to be very fond of the character, has been vocal about her dissatisfaction with the new scenes on twitter and has recently come out to say that the localization team is going to try and take some steps to make things less blatantly hateful. Between this and Jennifer Hale's recent tweet about it being time to grab our pitchforks in response to Activision-Blizzard's mass layoffs, I'm starting to think that voice actresses are pretty cool. I mean honestly I always thought that but we're getting off topic. One of the top competitive Catherine players, who was by all accounts really hyped for the release of Full Body, just straight up said on twitter that he was quitting the game because he couldn't support something like that in good conscience. I don't know if he's remained consistent on this position since, but it was a bold statement, to say the least.

Now, whenever an incident like this happens, the inevitable string of More-Progressive-Than-Thou white boys who watched an anime once and thought the bouncing titties were a little much appears to start pontificating about the cause of such untoward elements in media. And it's basically all just a bunch of Orientalist bullshit. Every time. For whatever reason, people still really love to be racist towards Japanese people because it's still sort of socially acceptable when couched in the language of "oh japan!!! ecks dee" and so the neverending procession of softboi neckbeards declared with confidence that Atlus's continual inclusion of Actual Hate Speech towards LGBTQ+ people was the result of the inscrutable Japanese Mind and its Mysterious, Antiquated Culture. Many mentions of the philosophy of Wa, wherein the nail that stands out gets pounded down, and lots of very lovely psuedointellectual claptrap. Evidently, people just seem to think that queer people don't live in Japan, or that they don't fight just as hard as we do for equal rights and protections under the law. They do live there, and they do fight as hard as we do. Obviously. You fucking imbeciles.

In their quest to clearly illustrate their moral and intellectual superiority to the backward, collectivist Asiatic Peoples, these highly reasonable and enlightened manboys forsook a very important logical principle: Occam's Razor. Sure, you could blame jApAnEsE cUlTuRe for Atlus's impropieties and just conveniently ignore all of the fantastic queer media it has produced in recent years like My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, Horou Muskou, Nier Automata, etc. Or you could go for the simpler and more logically consistent option: Katsura Hashino is a big fat creep. Who is Hashino, you ask? He is the director of every Persona game since 3, as well as Catherine, and all of these games' gross shit and self-contradictory themes of self-acceptance and rebellion against an unust society (unless you're gay, ew) can probably be traced to him and his gaggle of accomplices. In addition to the fact that Atlus games not by Hashino's team tend to just. not have these problems to nearly as large a degree or even at all, Hashino himself has gone on record saying some really kind of hilariously backwards shit. Most infamously, when asked why in Persona 3 literally all of your social links with girls ended up with Hot Makeout Sessions regardless of like. Previously Committed to Relationships. Hashino simply said he couldn't imagine friendships between boys and girls. So that's where his brain is at. Since subsequent games in the series graciously allowed the player the option to not be a Huge Cheating Bastard, one can assume either his moral development has progressed past early puberty or somebody on the team convinced him this wasn't actually a normal thing to think. Given the man's output, I would say it's probably the latter.

It is because of this man's decisions and behavior that so many people are simply unwilling to give Full Body the benefit of the doubt. The game's director is, quite simply, a well known louse, and not in the endearing, Roger Smith way. Once again, it requires far fewer leaps in logic to assume that Hashino is just being a bigoted creep again than to go through some fuckin galaxy brain Kingdom Hearts-esque dot-connecting to justify it as just a LITTLE BIT bigoted not REALLY SUPER bigoted, or simply blaming the whole ordeal on some strange ineffable property of the Japanese Character. He's a gremlin! An overgrown manchild with a warped view of human interaction and society put in charge of games about exploring those concepts for.... reasons. My bet is that his dad knew somebody and then Persona 3 was successful enough for the rest of Atlus to just go "alright fine let him do it while we do mainline games". Unfortunately, Persona became so popular that the mainline games sort of switched places and became side-projects, at least in the eyes of the Western consumer base (which let's be real is the only perspective that any of these Serious Online Commentators even pretend to care about).

So I would once again caution everyone against just assuming that Japan is some sort of quaint anachronistic country of weird gameshows and backwards social mores. This is both a gross oversimplification of an entire culture and the struggles of their own subgroups and minorities and simply a grand display of lacking self-awareness. Like have you fucking seen the guys in the White House? The preposterous media that gets routinely greenlit on prime time TV, theaters, and digitally? Don't make me laugh. The West has no claim to any sort of progressive superiority to anybody else. The white cishet bubble of comfortable middle class affluence might distort what you see of the rest of the world, but believe me: we got problems too. Big ones. Even the presupposed bastions of Demsoc Virtue like Sweden have an awful track record of discrimination and eugenics. But Dazzlyn that's different, you cry! All of these groups and forces don't represent the entirety of Western culture! Yes. Exactly. Oppression is not culturally bound like cuisine or art. It is a nasty, universal thing that worms its way into everything, and it will use any excuse it can find to murder and exploit. It's against Christian values! It represents a genetic defect that must be purged! It's ostentatious and immature! The list goes on. And every time you giggle and go "oh those silly japanese" you're just being another expression of the same vile ideas.

I'm going to relate some of my own personal experiences, because as a noted Big Gay Bitch Who Loves Girls, I feel like maybe I have some authority on the matter? Just a little? Enough that if I make a well reasoned argument it can't be dismissed out of hand? Let's hope. So, what's the gayest game I've ever played? Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn. Look yeah I know I'm talking about it again but come back this is important. Final Fantasy is a series that has had a lot of LGBTQ+ undertones pretty much since forever, and while they have largely been in keeping with the times in terms of tact and representation (the Crossdressing Cloud debacle is a deeply bizarre, uncomfortable sequence in a lot of ways but there's also some genuine Good Gay Shit in 7 like Cloud's surprisingly cute and genuine date with Barret. I think. It's... it's been a while.), by God, it was at least there, and 13 had honest to god Lesbians, Harold in Fang and Vanille. I don't want to say it has pedigree, but the series has dabbled. XIV continues on the tradition with a vibrant world that's actually got a lot of characters and NPCs that are just incidentally there and kind of gay. The adventurer couple that befriended the Tonberries in Wanderer's Palace, a vendor that appeared in the Rising cosplaying as Minfilia at her wife's behest, a miqote lady bathing in the oasis that lets on she wouldn't mind having cute girls stare at her instead of grabby boys, every horny Elezen in Ishgard, Samson and Guydelot (shoutouts to Lulumi Lumi), and probably more that I've missed. More than that, though, is that because FFXIV is an MMO, it is by necessity a social space, and in my experience it has been one that has gone out of its way to be inclusive to everybody, from the GMs handling reports of abusive behavior right up to the top decision makers who made same sex player marriages a thing just immediately on its implementation and letting boys wear the gold saucer bunny costume too (albeit after quite a bit of pleading). The game's got a huge queer community of which I am kind of part of sort of. It's one of the reasons I keep coming back to it. Hell, they've recently partnered with a pride group in Australia to have an FFXIV float in a parade. I usually turn my nose up at such things as meaningless corporate grandstanding, but it does seem to be more meaningful than two boy pastas getting married or rainbow colored oreos because like. Cheesy as it sounds, it's more than just a brand to a lot of people, it's a place, sometimes the only place, they can go to feel safe and accepted in a community. Having official, vocal support from the dev team means genuinely a lot, I think.

Now, there is one quality about this game of which I am speaking that might strike you as noteworthy: it is Japanese. It's made by Japanese people, in Japan, under a Japanese company. A middle aged Japanese man goes up on stage in Gunbreaker cosplay to speak in Japanese about the upcoming expansion, while a meme obsessed gremlin translates for him. It's not perfect, there are problems, etcetera, why do I even need to qualify that in 2019, when everything sucks, god. But it's better than most things. I hope that it serves as an example to people that even in the supposedly regressive countries of the world, queer communities are still living, fighting, and sometimes even being heard, and that the only thing you're enriching by dismissing them wholesale as socially backwards is your own internet penis. And nobody fucking cares about that you simpleton. I expect 5.0 to be gayer than ever before because they're taming up with Yoko Taro to do a Nier themed raid and by the 12 Warrior of Light Dazzyn Reed is going to kiss 2B or an equivalent model right on the robot lips.

[shiroallura]

I feel cheated... this literally came out of thin air just for attention. It makes no sense to me. Why drop shallura hints through out the series and do this? I s2g they are just doing this for views. They’re going to ruin voltron just like they ruined legend of Korra. I’m just... angry

anon, i’m not saying that your feelings aren’t valid, but i am also… going to 100% disagree with you. 

did shiro being mlm not have any buildup? yes. but so did keith joining the blades, and oriande, and shiro wanting keith to pilot black in the first place. introducing plotlines or character points with no buildup is, unfortunately, a staple of voltron’s writing style. and something i’m not fond of, but let’s not pretend that shiro’s relationship with adam is the only thing that voltron has ever pulled out of thin air. and i don’t think him being mlm needed buildup, anyway. i’ve seen him as bi since s2, and characters don’t need buildup to be queer. they can just be.

as for views… voltron is letting it drop that shiro was engaged, or going to be engaged, to another man, before the season hits. before the final season drops. this isn’t “let’s reveal in the last episode bc it’s the only thing we can get away with” like even LOK did. people can see this news and choose not to watch, or to drop the show, because of it. that in of itself is a risk, and one i’m very glad voltron has taken. and if people get into voltron because it finally has confirmed lgbtq+ rep, then that’s fantastic. shows should get views for being as inclusive and diverse as the audiences they’re showcasing to.

third, i’m not quite sure i like the implication behind the word ‘ruin’. at the time of korra/asami becoming canon, i was quite the mak0rra shipper. i still am, and i still love them. i also love korrasami (and korra/kuvira, and mako/asami post book 4, but that’s a ramble for another day) even if it’s not my preferred ship for korra (korvira is, actually). i still think it’s fun and i know how much it means to people, hell, myself included.

the hints dropped about shallura are there - and we’re not out of the race yet (which i will elaborate on in another post, maybe later tonight) but… show creators don’t owe us anything. we can be unhappy about their choices and writing decisions (and you know i got a lot of salt) but at the end of the day, they don’t owe us anything. 

so be angry. feel cheated. that’s okay. but also recognize the bigger picture, that shiro gets to be loved and cherished and have the happy ending he deserves, whether that’s with adam or allura or both, or what have you, and if this ‘ruins’ voltron for you, you probably need to take a step back and re-examine your priorities.

happy scrolling.