#also queer people in the 80s are the reason we even have the modern day piercing industry and i owe them my life

[hammity-hammer]

steve harrington realizing that he’s got no purpose if he’s not protecting the people he loves from outer-dimensional beings, and has a minor (read: major) spiral about it post-vecna & the party fixing everything. he’s just a regular ole 20 something with no purpose— his friends are all in school, except eddie, who managed to pick up an apprenticeship as an electrician; putting all of that wire knowledge to use (just not in cars, he hasn’t hotwired one since 1986 and he’d like to keep it that way si vous plais) and making the rich houses have even cooler guts than they deserve.

the kids end up graduating (their first tries) and heading as one little pack to the same school (don’t ask me which, i’m a college drop out) and steve, eddie, and rob end up staying just outside of indy. rob finished school early, because of course she did, and she found that she may have a knack for hanging around high schoolers, so why not teach them how to become polyglots like she is?

steve still doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing— he bartends at a little club in the gayborhood, because they went there so often that the bartenders just kind of pushed him into it, and don’t get him wrong— mixing drinks and flirting all night is super fun, but it also… is kind of depressing? even if he gets to be around people like him and see them happy— he knows that a lot of alcohol and drugs causes that happiness and he wants so badly for his people to be out and proud and not murdered for it. but he can’t do that,, so he does the next best thing.

he talks with one of the regulars, andy, who owns a little tattoo shop on the corner, and andy invites him to come check it out. so he does the next day he’s free, and holy fucking christ. tattoos aren’t his thing— at least not on himself, but on other people they’re gorgeous. and they’re painful, but you’re turning the pain into art and you get to live with it in your skin and look at it and think about the fact that you’re here and you made it and you fucking survived. and people purposefully put scars into their bodies? and not in the i-battled-literal-other-dimensional-beings-and-won kind of way, or the i-battled-my-personal-demons-and-won kind of way, which both are things he’s dealt with so fucking intimately— but in the i-will-decorate-this-flesh-prison-and-make-it-a-castle kind of way, and that’s fucking beautiful. queer people taking their bodies and making them into art with ink and hot metal and needles and the love that they have for each other and the passion and the fucking spite at the world that keeps them going and making their presences KNOWN.

and maybe he gets some piercings while he’s there— it’s fascinating and feels so weird and freeing when the needle punctures his flesh and the jewelry goes in— and now he’s got a shiny little ring hanging through his earlobe; his nostril; his lip.

he learns that piercings take time and effort and care and that he has to treat himself with love to be able to heal— and that he is deserving of that love and care and dedication, especially from himself.

he keeps going back, maybe not always to get stabbed, but to watch others have it done. to see how different people’s anatomy takes different piercings, how he can’t have a piercing through his cheeks because he bites them too much when he’s anxious, but the girl that just left got both of hers done and they looked good. they fit her face, like little shiny dimples.

eventually, the piercer, killie, asks steve when he’s going to help them with their needles and their piercings— and he doesn’t know how to react because he hadn’t even thought about it and yet… maybe he could help other people fall in love with themselves and their bodies and help turn them into art one day

maybe he could be a pretty boy with his scars and his metal and his missing chunks and his polos and his jeans and his sneakers.

[thecrazyalchemist]

I've recently seen a post on Tumblr that just, 'broke' something in me (for a lack of a better term).

So I just want to vent about it and another thing that's been bothering me.

(Disclaimer: this is a vent post. I am not an expert in the topics discussed. What I say is knowledge that I have learned from all kinds of places (school, history classes, researching for history projects, reading first hand written material from archives, and other places) and I don't have much the energy to compile everything source into a list (if I can even remember them). However, if you want to add, argue against, or argue in favor of something said here, correct me, you're welcome! Although, please act civil and cite your sources please. (I know I didn't and I'm sorry, but also please remember this is a vent post.) so anyways, here we start)

So, first of all:

Let's talk about Zionism. What does it mean?

To me, it seems that a lot of people think Zionism is something along the lines of 'racist bloodthirsty monstrous baby murderer and cold blooded killer and a rapist pedophile' since I keep seeing the word 'Zionist' in DNI lists next to 'nazis', 'pedophiles', 'minor attracted people', and other stuff like that.

I would love to hear what you think its definition is and I would love to hear where did you learn it, or perhaps any sources for such a definition.

Here's a brief recap of how Zionism was formed and what it is:

Zionism means the desire for Jewish self determination and self governing to exist/continue in the land/country of Israel.

It is an umbrella term, like the term queer, for example.

Zionism has deep roots in Judaism. A lot of practices and rituals in Judaism involve or are related to Israel. The name Israel comes from the name Jacob got from the angel he defeated, and after him the whole tribe of the Jewish people and the area are called Israel. The name Israel is in one of the most basic Jewish prayers - Shema Israel. Also, at the end of every pesach (Passover) Seder we say "Leshana habaa beyerushalaim habnuia" - next year in built Jerusalem. Jewish people have said so ever since the diaspora started.

Before the state of Israel existed, Zionism was about how to create and build Israel.

Three examples:

Political Zionism - create Israel by first getting a charter and international recognition and funding.

Practical Zionism - create Israel by first buying land, building settlements and developing the area.

Synthetic Zionism - a merge between the two movements above. Afaik most of the early political leaders of Israel were from that movement (for example, the first Israeli prime minister - David Ben Gurion).

Nowadays, Zionism is more vague. The reason for is that Israel already exits. The different movements on how to create Israel are kind of irrelevant now, because it exists now. The discussion on how to run Israel is perhaps what one may define as different movements within Zionism in modern time, however yet almost always when one says they are a Zionist, they mean they desire/want/believe that Israel should exist. That's it.

As such, Zionism alone doesn't say almost anything about the political view of the person who identifies as a Zionist.

Afaik basically 100% of Israeli Jews and around 80% of the Jews in America identify as Zionist. Under *this* definition.

Now because Israel exists, it's much harder to talk about different movements within Zionism which aren't basically political movements within Israel.

That leads me onto Kahanism.

Kahanism is an extremist far-right nationalist-racist religious Zionist movement (that I completely do not, I repeat: **do not** agree with). It was founded by the rabbi Meir Kahane, which believed that Jews should rule the whole area which was the kingdom of Israel in the days of the Tanach and should kill anyone who's an enemy of the Jewish people (which according to him, is basically everyone).

Here's an article that sums up some of my feelings about it in relation to the current events:

[https://archive.ph/2024.06.10-191347/https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-06-10/ty-article-opinion/.premium/forget-being-anti-zionists-lets-be-anti-kahanists/00000190-0228-d660-af95-6fbed3e60000]

Now on to the post that 'broke the camel's back', per say.

The post said “I think that all Israelis should go back to Europe” and that it would solve all the problems here.

Let's try to break down the sentence “all Israelis should go back to Europe”. That sentence implies that that's where *all* Israelis came from.

What's "Israeli"? Afaik, since Israel is a country, Israeli is anyone who has Israeli citizenship (and some may even add 'and/or everyone who was born here').

What's Israel's population demographic? According to official government surveys, Israel has around ~9.9 million citizens, out of which ~73% (~7.227 million) are Jewish, ~21% (2.079 million) are Arab and the rest ~6% (0.594 million or 594 thousand) are classified as else.

The Arab population of Israel (which has equal rights as the Jewish population in Israel) and the Arab population of Gaza and the West Bank originate from the same group of people. Some of them originate from Arab people who had been here for hundreds of years (since the empires age) and many originate from Arab immigration between the end of the WW1 and the establishment of Israel.

Even if you claim that the Arab population of Gaza and the West Bank are the actual indigenous population of this area (despite numerous archeological and historical evidence pointing otherwise, although they do have a long history here), you cannot claim that just because a person was born or even just lived on the other (wrong, in your eyes) side of a border they aren't indigenous to the area!

In Israel, there are also a lot of minorities who are persecuted in other parts of the middle east. Such as: Druze, Armenians, Circassians and more. They have to go to Europe too? No, just the Jews? Surely this isn't antisemitism!

And let's talk about the Jewish population in Israel. MOST JEWS DID NOT COME FROM EUROPE! There are Jews who came from diaspora in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Saudia, Ethiopia and a whole lot other countries through the middle east, south west Asia and north Africa. They have to go to Europe too?

And that's beside two other important facts: first of all, the Jews are indigenous to the levant. We are indigenous to the land of Israel.

And of course, do you now what happened to Jews all over the world, and especially Europe?

To name a few very notable examples: *The Spanish inquisition*, Kishinev pogrom, Jedwabne pogrom, *The Holocaust*, what that happened in the Soviet Union and many more pogroms, expulsions and massacares. (There were of course also pogroms in the MENA countries, however *I* haven't learned about them. Two examples I am told is notable is the farhood pogrom and the Holocaust in North Africa).

All throughout history, the Jews were expelled and massacred from almost every place. You then expectus to just come back to those places as if nothing has happened?

You want us to come so badly. Can you prove that we are safe to come? That we *have a place to come to*? Because so far you haven't shown that.

That when you and the people around you see a Jew, you won't immediately turn them into the scapegoat of every problom you have and then rape and/or expell and/or kill them.

And also, how would that solve more problems than it will create? Exchanging around ~2 million refugees for ~9.9 million refugees? How would that help? And even if you only mean the Jews (which I can't see how it isn't antisemitic) it's ok cause it's Jews? (which is even more antisemitic)

So no, it would not solve any problems. The country of Israel won't go anywhere, the Jews won't go anywhere, because we don't have anywhere to go - we were born here and we are staying.

However, yes, just as well, the Palestinians will probably not go anywhere (*not talking about Hamas and other similar groups here*). The only way to solve the situation is to unpack and deescalate those decades of conflict and escalation and hate, which will take a lot of work.

[starrclown]

☆Helluva Boss's human world I fear will cause problems in Hazbin☆

Matey's I feel like there is a issue we don't talk about. Helluva Boss's human world. Obviously the human world is supposed to resemble our world, it's Earth after all. This is the issue. What's the one thing about the people that could cause problems? The humans are insanely stupid.

(I wanna point out Random Game Critics video on Helluva Boss Season 2 episode 5. Bomb YouTube channel by the way, check him out he's funny. He points out that he believes that Helluva Boss's humans are so dumb to mimic Invader Zim. Incase you didn't know Moxxie's voice actor is Richard Horvitz, the voice actor who played Zim. Invader Zim is also Vivziepop's favorite cartoon. This is a theory I can absolutely believe.)

The humans on Earth are insanely stupid. The humans don't relize that demons are among them even though I.M.P does not disguise themselves. Martha was able to recognize I.M.P, the other humans cannot. The two inventors are also insanely goofy and cartoon like. The humans are insanely goofy and stupid. That's where I fear the problems could come in.

5 out of the 6 main casts in Hazbin Hotel were people. Alastor died in 1933, Angel Dust died in 1947, Nifty died in the 50's, Husk died in the 70's, and Vaggie died in 2014. I fear how goofy the human world is could affect the lives of the characters. And you could argue, "Oh, the humans are in OUR time period! 2020 to the modern day! We are pretty silly so it could be making fun of that!" Which yes, that could be it. Which is still a problem considering Vaggie died in 2014 and all the other sinners that died in the 2000's. While Helluva Boss could be making fun of modern day it's still a issue considering more modern day sinners. Also, some of the goofy humans are pretty old. Here, Lyle and Loopy. While we don't know how old they were when they accidentally aged themselves up but they looked to be in early to late 30's to 40's. That would mean they were born in 80's to 90's. That's pretty close to some of the sinners we know in the show died. (Velvette, Valentino, Husk.)

Another issue I have is the concept of what humans can do. If sinners are supposed to be mysterious that could possibly make deals with humans then the humans should be more realistic right? While we dont know if demons can communicate with humans but there always is a possibility. Mind you, Lyle and Loopy made a machine that could reverse your age. That's not realistic at all. And yes I know I know, it's a cartoon, and Helluva Boss and Hazbin won't reference each other but it's still a issue. The reason I have such a issue with this is because you have to remeber some of these characters lived through horrific events.

(Also let me get on record that I don't think that Vivziepop will make fun of horrific events. I'm stating this because if the humans are this goofy, I'm scared of how she'll treat the TIME PERIOD of the horrific event. Get it? Like seriously, Alastor, depending on how dark his skin was, would still go through segragation and racism considering his time period. Angel Dust could also be a person of color, so could Husk. Nifty and Vaggie were confirmed poc, Japanese and Salvadoran respectively. Like Angel and Husk, both are queer in different ways. Both would be HEAVILY discriminated against. Also, Angel's mafia background. Incase you guys don't know, homosexuality in the Italian mob is HEAVILY discriminated against and looked down apon. Recently Italian mobsters are allowed to be gay but they can still get beat up and killed for "flaunting" it. If Angel's family is as mean as Vivzie has described them then there is no way Angel would be able to be feminine in anyway, or show any "gay traits." Seriously this was the 1940's. Thats whne the bible had the bible changed to 'man shall not lay with boy' to 'man shall not lay with man' I hope Vivzie remembers the time period these characters came from because their backgrounds could affect the way they are and how OTHER people treated them.

Like here, Alastor, Angel, Nifty (depending on when she was born.), Husk, and Vox, lived through The Great Depression, 1929- 1939. Hell, Angel, Nifty, Vox, and . lived through World War 2. (There's also a theory that Angel could have been in the war. Same thing with Husk and Vietnam. If they choose to go down that route I hope they treat it with respect. It would also need EXTRA care considering if Angel was in the war he's ya know gay and World War 2 discriminated agaisnt ALOT of people. Jews, gays, trans, poc, disabled people.)

Seriously there is just alot of fucked up stuff that went on during these characters lives and I hope that the human world in Hazbin Hotel is more serious than Helluva Boss.

(Vivzie stans please don't attack me, I just wanted to state my worries. Also! Guess what's next? MY IMAGE of what Hazbin Hotel characters could have looked like as humans. I wanna just teach people alittle but about the time periods these characters feom and a few small headcannons. Look out for that!! Bye Matey's!!)

- ⭐️StarClown⭐️

[rivetgoth]

Man there is this weird historical revisionism that happens with terminally online “alt” posers where they like, assume that all the cool underground alt counterculture stuff of decades past were easily accessible within the mainstream and nowadays it’s been suppressed or hidden or is even entirely nonexistent in favor of the “lame” mainstream media. And like, I have said before and will say again and again that there is PLENTY to criticize regarding the entertainment industry and arts as a whole in the 21st century, it has not just been some forwards progression of positive change and improvement and I know that, but it also just frustrates me ENDLESSLY because the reality is the things y’all are idolizing were NOT mainstream. You were not guaranteed to walk down the street in the 80s and hear gothic rock and industrial or even more accessible synthpop that remains popular today, there was plenty of absolute shit music in the 80s lol. Movies were not just inherently better 20-30-40 years ago and in fact plentyyyy of major blockbuster hits absolutely sucked shit and there was an insane amount of garbage being manufactured by corrupt production companies. Fashion was not all cute GNC boys with long hair and eyeliner or whatever. It was not like some safehaven for queer gendernonconformity it was LITERALLY the AIDS crisis. And the stuff y’all are idolizing are now extremely popular in hindsight! Everybody knows Nine Inch Nails and The Cure and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hellraiser! This is household name media!

I just constantly see posts that are like “back then there was UNDERGROUND COUNTERCULTURE EVERYWHERE and now all we have is TikTok and Taylor Swift and Marvel 💔😡” and honestly it makes you sound like clowns. You are not finding the underground counterculture because it is fucking underground. The stuff you’re consuming from years ago withstood the tests of time. But there were not goth clubs lining every street corner and cool cult classics coming out every fucking week back in the day lol. This stuff was considered underground, alternative, cult, etc for a reason. You are comparing the most successful underground media from decades ago with mainstream media of today and honestly all it actually reveals is that you don’t really care about keeping underground art alive and uplifting the artists who are doing so now in modern time, or even have the knowledge of how to do so. You aren’t finding today’s “underground” subcultures because THEY ARE UNDERGROUND. It takes effort beyond looking at what’s trending on social media or what’s getting major theatrical releases. You have to engage with music that is not even on Spotify, film that at best may run the festival circuit. And, frankly, some of y’all have wildly rose tinted glasses about what good art is and are judgmental as fuck of anything that forces you to expand your horizons-- Alt music genres have a huge amount of fusion within them now. Deal with it. Lots of y’all sound genuinely racist with your aversion to alt music drawing more and more inspiration from rap and hip hop. CGI is a relatively accessible and still very experimental art form with tons of potential and many poor or indie artists are experimenting with it. Deal with it. CGI is not inherently evil or ugly. Genres evolve and sounds change. Back then plenty of the experimental stuff that we find cool now was made with dogshit quality because it was just people scraping together the few resources they could afford to make something. You only think it’s better because it’s older lol. You are the alt TikTok NIN fan Hot Topic equivalent of people who think they were born in the wrong generation because their idea of the 50s is poodle skirts and milkshakes at checkered diners.

I would be less of a cunt about this topic if the result was not a staggering amount of people calling themselves fucked up deranged alt punk gothic freaks only to turn around and quite literally say that there is no longer an alternative/underground subculture and that capitalism has destroyed any semblance of independent or experimental art because they are not fucking looking for it. Which in turn shits on so many struggling indie creators desperately trying to get their art out there within an increasingly tumultuous, hostile, anti-artist landscape of capitalist modern society. Engaging with underground work does actually require digging for it. The underground work you are engaging with from the past is literally no longer underground. If you exclusively enjoy alt music from the 70s or 80s or exclusively enjoy oldschool cult classics that is FINE but I better not see “back in the 80s we had Cronenberg and Carpenter and now we only have Marvel and Star Wars :( Why did they get Bauhaus and now we only get Billie Eilish? Why is there no more community, no more subculture, no more actual interesting art?” as if these are normal comparisons and actual reasonable observations rather than an admittance of your lack of understanding of the way that underground art actually evolves or even a desire to seek it out. Problems with modern industries aside, with social media and the internet and the improvement of technology like personal cameras and digital art programs both creating and finding independent art is EASIER now than EVER in many ways. You can discover enough music to last you your entire life from the comfort of your IPHONE.

[swirlingsand]

hello my friends i am here to give you reasons to vote for shura! i know this is a worthy green hair and pronouns opponent and there would be no hard feelings either way as we, saint seiya fans, didn't even know there were other saint seiya fans on the hellsite??? 😭 we mercilessly push him to fight more and more popular teenagers but the truth is we're really proud he made it this far. this poll has been instrumental in uncovering a new fandom (our own!!) we didn't know was present on tumblr and now, maybe we're letting even more people know about this manga from the 80s that is for some unfathomable reason a huge phenomenon in southern europe and latin america and completely obscure everywhere else in the west.

(caption: unrelated cat gif for the sake of grabbing attention)

alright, here goes nothing!

shura is originally your classic shonen antagonist: not much going for him besides being a bit scary, having a backstory of homoerotic crime, and fighting and losing to a 14 year old shonen protagonist.

so reason number 1 to vote for shura: please allow this man the chance to win against a pretty and popular 14 year old for the first time in his life. 😭

but then for some reason the fandom latched onto him. fandom loves his kind. fandom loves to take antagonists who lose against kids and turn them into special poor little meow meows and write endless homoerotic fanfiction about them. saint seiya doujinshi is actually how BL got popularised as a genre in the west.

reason 2 to vote for shura: i think old (perhaps initially unintentional?) queer coding in media that led directly to normalising queer rep deserves to be given a chance, especially when put against modern media where gender non-conformity and queer identity is more widely understood and accepted. That a character that was written 35+ years ago still manages to look so green haired and pronouned is something I think we all could respect, it was a much more radical statement in its time.

also, the sympathy garnered by shura was such that, aside from about ten thousand gay fanfiction where he miraculously isn't dead, he got to make several comebacks in canon and official spin-offs after his death through means ranging from resurrection to time travel to a literal chapter that happens in literal hell (where he obviously went after dying, who are we kidding 😔😂)

reason 3 to vote for shura: there are so many alternative shuras out there because canon needed him even after killing him off, that it would be actually far more accurate to use they pronouns. 🧐

and finally, look at us, reblogging this post and making propaganda and going utterly insane. do you think all (or even most) of us are over 35? we're here fighting to the death for a character that was written before we were even born! this is such a multi-generational fandom i have no idea how it came to happen but for some reason this poll has solved our generational divide and made us agree for once to support shura and rally behind quixo who's been tirelessly making propaganda since day 1! 😭😭😭

reason 4 to vote for shura: to save tumblr user @quixoticprince from insanity, they've been having a blorbo meltdown over their specialest littlest man and it'd break our heart if they're sad 🥺 (and also because, let's admit it, it would be very funny to see them go on even more blorbo meltdowns if shura qualifies)

this is not a request, or a suggestion. this is a plea. we're just begging here 🙏 if you love saint seiya, if you've heard of saint seiya, if you or a loved one's sign is capricorn, or if you don't care about any of this but want to make a cultishly dedicated obscure fandom very happy, please consider voting for our man, Capricorn Shura.

Thank you for anyone who's read this far, and best of luck for fans of either characters!

The Green Hair and Pronouns Tournament, Quarterfinals Match 4

ID in alt text

[tinyvampire]

how the ghosts would react to you coming out as trans

(bc i have bbc ghosts brain rot & i’m up late with good ol trans anxiety) enjoy!!

thomas

he would support the hell out of you, but would definitely be the kind of cis person to make a big dramatic show of it every time he accidentally misgendered or deadnamed you. listen - i love this man, but he is a drama queen. after telling him you’re trans, he would probably make it about him in some way - like maybe he once knew someone who was queer, or he always wanted to write a poem about one of those greek myths that involve trans people but he was too scared to, and etc etc etc. so yeah, he’s a bit of an attention whore, but he would go full ‘damn your eyes’ on anybody who was malicious towards you for your transness, 100%.

julian

with a crass, in poor taste joke, confusion, and then acceptance. basically how julian responds to any semi serious situation. he’d make some awful joke, maybe about cross-dressing, and then after learning more about what being trans actually means he’d come around. i don’t think he’d apologize (does he ever, like fr lol) (love him but 🤨), but he would probably say it makes sense that you’re a man/woman/nb, because of x y z behavior (which is stereotyping, but like at least he has the general idea & he’s trying) and then he’d make a conscious effort to never use your old name again.

fanny

similarly to the way she reacted when the lesbian couple was married at button house. she’d be aghast & outraged for like five minutes, ranting around the house about how true gentlemen/ladies don’t exist anymore in this modern age and etc etc but by the next day or so, she’d sheepishly apologize and ask you some questions about it. from then on she’d be quietly supportive in her own way, like automatically correcting when someone misgenders you & then never bringing up the incident; even when you thank her she’d be like ‘what on earth are you talking about, (chosen name)!’

pat

exactly how any ultra-supportive dad would react. pat would make it his personal mission to affirm your identity & make you feel comfortable and safe regarding your transness. he would also definitely throw you a surprise party in celebration of your coming out, complete with ‘it’s a boy/girl/baby (if you’re nb)’ banners courtesy of alison. he would be so touched that you trusted him with this information & more proud of you than he could ever say in words. (he’d also excitedly tell you facts about 80s queer icons that you already knew, but you’d pretend not to just to humor him.) (‘wow, freddie mercury was bi?! 😮’)

robin

honestly the best to come out to imo. robin’s been around a long time; this has made him incredibly kind & understanding. humanity’s stereotypes & societal pressures are born & die just as fast as people do, and he’d tell you as much (in his own robin way). humanity’s prejudices are much the same & robin has no time for that bullshit. he’d always be there if you needed a shoulder to cry on, and would passionately defend you and your identity should the occasion arise, no matter what.

the captain

instantly eager to assist you in any way possible. “it was very sharp of you to come to me with this. there’s so much to be done. we must change all of your legal documents at once, not to mention the wardrobe issue. hmm..patrick! assemble the troops!” he’d take charge immediately as though the only reason you came out to him was because you couldn’t handle transitioning by yourself & needed someone to be in charge. he accepts you right away too, though, so it’s no bother to you that he’s being his usual bossy, captain-y self. also he’d respond as though an actual crime had been committed if anyone gave you shit for being trans.

kitty

the definition of ‘little confused but got the spirit’. she’d probably think you mean you want to play dress up with her, and she’d be so excited she wouldn’t be able to focus on any explanations being offered by the other ghosts or alison. (& i know the ghosts couldn’t even play dress up if they wanted to, but do you think this fact would stop kitty from trying??? absolutely not) eventually, though, pat would gently explain it to her & she would support you whole-heartedly. (she’d still be totally confused though, bless her)

mary

literally would have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. “what be a transgender?!?” it would take the better part of a day to explain it all to her, but i do think she’d eventually understand, at least better than kitty. she’d probably be worried you’d be burned for it at first, and might even discourage your transition goals because of it, but once you reassured her that times have changed, she’d be happy to support you.

humphrey

i’m headcanoning this headless man as a trans man & no one can stop me. honestly, now that i think about it, humphrey gives off some serious t-boy swag vibes. i feel like you’d tell him you’re trans & he’d be like “ah so that’s what they’re callin it now” & boom, y’all are best friends. i can hear you in the replies now, ‘but they didn’t have access to hrt back then - !’ well pffpffpff, i don’t care. humphrey is trans now. you’re welcome.

[samwisethewitch]

Witchcraft and Activism

The word “witch” is a politically charged label. If we look at how the word was used historically, it referred to someone who existed outside of the normal social order. The people accused of witchcraft in the European and American witch trials were mostly — experts say between 75% and 80% — women. They were also overwhelmingly poor, single, or members of a minority ethnicity and/or religion. In other words, they were people who did not follow their society’s accepted model of womanhood (or, in the case of accused men, manhood).

If you choose to identify with the witch label, you are choosing to identify with subversion of gender norms, resistance to the dominant social order, and “outsider” status. If that makes you uncomfortable or uneasy, then you may want to use another label for your magical practice. Witchcraft always has been and always will be inherently political.

In her book Witches, Sluts, Feminists, Kristen J. Sollee argues that the “slut” label is in many ways a modern equivalent to the “witch” label. In both cases, the label is used to devalue people, most often women, and to enforce a patriarchal and misogynist social order.

Superstitions around witchcraft are connected to the modern stigma around abortion (and, to a lesser extent, contraception). Midwifery and abortion were directly linked to witchcraft in the European witch hunts. Today, women who seek abortions are condemned as sluts, whores, and murderers. The fight for reproductive freedom remains inextricably linked with the witch label.

During the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, the socialist feminist group Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.) used the image of the witch to campaign for women’s rights and other social issues. They were some of the first advocates for intersectional feminism (feminist activism that addresses other social issues that overlap with gendered issues). They performed acts such as hexing Wall Street capitalists and wearing black veils to protest bridal fairs. The W.I.T.C.H. Manifesto calls witches the “original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression.”

In her book Revolutionary Witchcraft, Sarah Lyons points out that both witchcraft and politics are about raising and directing power in the world. In a postmodern society, most of our reality is socially constructed — it works because we collectively believe it does. Money only has value because we believe it does. Politicians only have power because we believe they do. Our laws are only just because we believe they are. Like in magic, everything in society is a product of belief and a whole lot of willpower — and that makes witches the ideal social activists.

Lyons argues that witchcraft is inseparable from politics, because witches have always opposed dominant political power. She makes a connection between the witch trials and the rise of capitalism and classism. She connects the basic concepts of magic to historic activist groups like the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), who used ritual as an act of protest.

Not every witch is a hardcore activist, but every witch should have a basic awareness of political and social issues and be willing to do what they can to make a difference.

Ways to Combine Witchcraft and Activism

Perform a ritual to feel connected to the earth and her people. Activism should come from a place of love, not a place of hate. Make sure you’re fighting for the right reasons by frequently taking time to reconnect with the planet and the people who live here. This can be as simple as laying down on the ground outside and meditating on all the ways you are connected to other people, as well as to the ecosystem, animals, and the earth herself. If getting up close and personal with the grass and dirt isn’t your thing, try to find a beautiful place in nature where you can sit and journal about the interconnected nature of all things.

Unlearn your social programming. This is the most difficult and most important part of any activism. Before you can change the world outside yourself, you have to change your own psyche. Think about how you have been socialized to contribute to (or at least turn a blind eye to) the issues you want to fight against. For example, if you want to fight for racial justice, you need to understand how you have contributed to a racist system. You can do this in a variety of ways: through meditation, journaling, or divination, to name a few. Note that whatever method you choose, this will probably take weeks or months of repeated work. Rewriting your thought and behavior patterns is hard, and it can’t be done in a single day. Also note that if you are a victim of systemic oppression or prejudice, this work may bring up a lot of emotional baggage — you may want to involve a professional therapist or counselor.

Go to protests. Sending energy and doing healing rituals is great, but someone has to get out there and visibly fight for change. If you are able to do so, start going to protests and rallies for causes you care about. Don’t just show up, but be an active participant — make signs, yell and chant, and stand your ground if cops show up. Be safe and responsible, but be loud and assertive, too. If you want to go all out, you can don the black robes, pointed hats, and veils of W.I.T.C.H.es past, which has the added bonus of concealing your identity.

Turn your donations into a spell for change. When you donate to a cause you care about, charge your donation with a spell for positive change. You can do this by holding your cash, check, or debit card in both hands and focusing on your desire for change. Feel this desire flowing into the money, filling it with your determination. From here, make your donation, knowing that you’ll be sending an energy boost along with it.

Organize an activist coven. Do you have a handful of friends who are interested in witchcraft, passionate about activism, or both? Start a coven! Go to protests together, hold monthly rituals to raise energy for change, and collect money for donations. Being part of a group also means having a support system, which can help prevent burnout. Make a plan to check on each other regularly. You may even choose to do monthly group rituals for self care, which may be actual magic rituals or might be as simple as ordering takeout and watching a movie. Activism can be intensely draining work, so it’s important to take breaks when you need them!

Hold public rituals with an activist slant. Nothing gets people’s attention like a bunch of folks standing in a circle and chanting. Holding public rituals is one of the best ways to raise awareness for a cause. You might hold a vigil for victims of police brutality, a healing circle for the environment, or some other ritual that is relevant to the issue at hand. These rituals serve a double purpose, as they both bring people’s attention to the issue and give them an opportunity to work for change on a spiritual level. Use prayers, chants, and symbolism that is appropriate to the theme, and ask participants to make a small donation to a charity related to your cause.

Begin your public rituals with a territory acknowledgement. If you live in the United States, chances are you live on land that was taken from the native people by force. If you seek to have a relationship with the land, you need to first acknowledge the original inhabitants and the suffering they endured so you can be there. Use a website like native-land.ca to find out what your land was originally called and what indigenous groups originally lived there. Publicly acknowledge this legacy at your ritual, and publicly state your intention to support indigenous peoples. (Revolutionary Witchcraft has an excellent territory acknowledgement that you can customize for your area.)

Make an altar to your activist ancestors. If activism or membership in a marginalized group is a big part of your life, you may want to create a space for it in your home. Like an ancestor altar, this is a space to remember influential members of the community who have died. Choose a flat surface like a tabletop or shelf and decorate it with photos of your “ancestors,” as well as other appropriate items like flags, pins, stickers, etc. As a queer person, my altar to my LGBTQ+ ancestors might include images of figures like Sappho, Marsha P. Johnson, and Freddie Mercury, as well as items like a pink triangle patch, a small rainbow pride flag, and dried violets and green carnations. You may also choose to include a candle, an incense burner, and/or a small dish for offerings. Just remember to never place images of living people on an altar honoring the dead!

Do your research. Staying educated is an important part of activism — not only do your actions need to be informed, but you need to be able to speak intelligently about your issues. Read the news (on actual news websites, not just social media). Read lots of books; some I personally recommend are Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owens, and (as previously mentioned) Revolutionary Witchcraft by Sarah Lyons. If you can get access to them, read scholarly articles about theories that are influential among activists, like the Gaia Hypothesis or Deep Ecology. Read everything you can get your hands on.

VOTE! And I don’t just mean voting for the presidential candidate you like (or, as is often the case, voting against the one you don’t like). Vote for your representatives. Vote for city council. Vote for the county sheriff. Voting gives you a chance to make sure the people in office will be susceptible to your activism. Yes, your side might lose or your electoral college representative might choose to go against the popular vote. Even so, voting is a way to clearly communicate the will of the people, and it puts a lot of pressure on the people in charge. It’s important — don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.

In my experience, combining activism with my witchcraft is a deeply fulfilling spiritual experience. It strengthens my connection to the world around me, with helps grow both empathy and magical power. I truly can’t imagine my practice without the activist element.

Resources:

Witches, Sluts, Feminists by Kristen J. Sollee

Revolutionary Witchcraft by Sarah Lyons

The Study of Witchcraft by Deborah Lipp

The Way of Fire and Ice by Ryan Smith

[dgcatanisiri]

I cannot begin to verbalize how BULLSHIT it is that River is not a romance option for male V. Like... The dialogue is BLATANTLY flirtatious. This is NOT misreading signs, this is connecting the dots only for the end of the puzzle to be ripped away.

Like over on TV Tropes, there's a comment about "some have speculated this is a parody of the homoerotic subtext of buddy cop shows." I refuse to believe that a thought that nuanced went in to this. No, what this is, pretty plainly, is that a bunch of heterosexuals wrote out the questline WITHOUT REALIZING how gay they had written things to be.

It's not even that they didn't bother changing things up for a female V. It's that, legit, they did not realize that they were writing up the initial stages of a River/Male!V romance at the same time. Because these are a bunch of cishet dudes, who had NO problem figuring that Kerry would be a "perfect" gay romance, because he's a whole bunch of tired old tropes for queer men.

I said it back before release, Kerry screams a set of queer tropes that date back to the 80s and 90s, the idea that queer men all lean in to things like glam rock and the "live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse" lifestyle, the standards and stereotypes of a time where gay people were living under a constant specter of death because of the AIDS crisis. And while the modern day queer community certainly still carries that baggage, our desires more broadly have definitely shifted.

Like, I'm not discounting that entire lifestyle and mindset, I know there are plenty of queer people out there interested in that. BUT... The fact of the matter is, a lot of queer guys out there? They want the protector archetype we get in River - the guy who shows off his badass credentials while also being a clear protector and provider for his family. It's not even that hey, some diversity of body types (River being a muscle hunk while I'd probably lean towards a label more along the lines of twunk for Kerry, even acknowledging his age, and, if the game were capable of body hair, I'd probably classify him as an otter), though that is also there.

Just... The game's use of Kerry as the gay romance option (even before my usual complaint about how the guy is a poor fit as a romance for V, considering how much of his feelings are blatantly still wrapped up in Johnny) screams that this is heterosexual men responding to an image of the gay community that is a couple of decades behind the times. And it is blatant in the fact that they wrote a 100% viable romance in River, but then locked him as a heterosexual women only romance for no. good. reason.

[sineala]

The gay Invaders

Hi, internet! Today I'd like to talk about one of the chronologically-first canonically-gay couples in Marvel Comics history: Brian Falsworth (the second Union Jack) and Roger Aubrey (The Destroyer). (I mean "chronological" in terms of in-universe timeline rather than RL publication date; I'm pretty sure Northstar is still the first to publication as far as unambiguously-gay Marvel heroes go.)

If you are a fan of reading or writing about Captain America being queer, you should care about Brian and Roger, because they were two of Steve's fellow Invaders in the 1940s, meaning that they are two of the people on the list of Steve's Old Gay Friends And Teammates, because, yeah, Steve sure had a lot of canonically gay friends during the war. Probably more than you'd think he would have had in the forties! (The other two are Percival Pinkerton, who's part of Nick Fury's Howling Commandos, and of course Steve's childhood friend Arnie Roth. Pinky is gay by word of Stan Lee, IIRC; Arnie was as canonically gay as DeMatteis could make him in the early 1980s, so they didn't say the word "gay" but it's really, really not subtle. Steve compares what Arnie feels for his "roommate" Michael to what Steve feels for his girlfriend Bernie. Yeah.)

I previously made a Tumblr post about Brian and Roger, rounding up some of the canonical evidence of their relationship, but that post is six years old now, and in the intervening years, Marvel has thoughtfully put the rest of the 70s Invaders run on Unlimited as well as the two Citizen V miniseries that star Roger and retcon his relationship with Brian as romantic. So I've read them now, and I've got panels.

Okay. I should probably begin by saying that Brian and Roger are not canonically gay in their first significant appearance together, which is in Invaders vol 1 #19 and #20, published in 1977. Roy Thomas does not seem to have intended them to be a couple, and they aren't canonically one in any of the original Invaders run. However, if you enjoy gay subtext, it's very nice.

This whole arc is the one that introduces Roger in modern canon. He's been brainwashed by the Nazis and the Invaders rescue him and get him back to his normal self. But in #19 we get his backstory in flashback, as related by Montgomery, Lord Falsworth (Brian's father; yes, MCU fans, the name should look familiar) and it turns out that Roger and Brian were basically best friends since childhood:

They were the dearest of friends!

Anyway, they both ended up captured by Nazis, they presumably changed their minds about appeasement as a policy, Brian got out and joined the Invaders, then they had to rescue the brainwashed Roger, and it's a fair amount of fun in a two-issue arc.

The subtext is even more prominent in Invaders #34, in which they find out that someone going by the Destroyer (which is Roger's codename) has been doing villainous deeds, and the Invaders worry that Roger's gotten himself brainwashed again. Brian immediately insists that it can't really be Roger because he knows Roger and Roger Would Never:

Unsurprisingly, Brian is right. It's not really Roger; Master Man is impersonating the Destroyer, and the villains have taken Roger captive, and the Invaders break him out and there is an extremely significant moment where it just so happens that Roger has to catch Brian, saving his life for a change, and they stare deeply into each other's eyes and Brian seems to be having difficulty finishing his sentences:

Some people who read this therefore concluded that Brian and Roger were extremely gay for each other. While ordinarily this sort of shipping is mostly confined to fandom, in this particular instance, one of the people who started shipping Brian/Roger was Fabian Nicieza, and Fabian Nicieza, as you probably know, writes comics for Marvel. I think you see where this is going.

However, first I must inform you that, sadly, Brian has been canonically dead for years. Captain America vol 1 #253-254 -- the two-parter about Baron Blood in the Stern/Byrne Cap run in the 80s -- establishes that Brian died in a car accident in 1953. (This is also the run where Joseph Chapman -- a friend of Jacqueline Falsworth's son Kenneth -- becomes the third (and current) Union Jack.)

(Roger then appears in a bunch of T-Bolts issues; I assume there's nothing interesting there on the gay front because I feel like someone would have told me. I should probably read more than three T-Bolts issues someday.)

So, anyway, in 2001, Fabian Nicieza wrote a miniseries called Citizen V and the V-Battalion. Roger, who is still superheroing as the Destroyer despite being pretty old by this point, is part of the titular V-Battalion, and he has a very prominent role in this miniseries. And in #1, we have the usual splash page of character backstory, and there's a very, um, interesting line there:

Regarding Brian and Roger's relationship, the narration informs us: "It sounds much gayer than it probably was."

This is interesting, obviously for a couple of reasons. One is that, up to this point in canon, as far as I can tell, literally nobody thought any of this sounded the slightest bit gay at all. (Other than, I guess, Fabian Nicieza.) The other reason is that, as we soon find out, it actually was as gay as it sounds. Thanks, Fabian!

In 2002, Nicieza wrote a second miniseries, Citizen V and the V-Battalion: The Everlasting. Issue #1 opens with a flashback set in 1953; specifically, we see Brian's funeral:

Roger is extremely sad, and when Lord Falsworth expresses his sympathy about the death of Roger's "friend" and saying that he knows how much this hurts him, Roger mutters under his breath that he doesn't have the slightest clue:

All is revealed on the next page, when one of the other characters tries to ask Roger about superhero business and Roger snaps at him because, as he says, "I just watched my friend die in my arms."

Except "friend" isn't the word he starts to say:

Yep. That would be "lover." So Roger nearly outs himself. So, yes, now it's absolutely canon. Hooray.

Later on in the issue, which is set in the present day, we have a couple pages of Roger staring at pictures of the two of them and continuing to be sad:

Yeah. They were a couple.

So the question you -- being a Captain America fan -- might ask yourself is, okay, did/does Steve know about any of this? (The reason I started looking all this up was because I wanted to know if Steve knew.) I don't know if we have a panel of Roger specifically admitting any of this to Steve (and if we do, I would like to know about it), but I would be comfortable saying that Steve probably knew back then -- because, well, he seems like the kind of guy who would actually have been fine with it in the 40s, what with all his gay friends -- and also that I can't think of a reason why he wouldn't know now. Because he's definitely worked with Roger again in fairly recent comics, and also Roger is very much out, these days.

In fact, New Invaders #4 (2004) opens with Roger attending Pride:

So, yeah, he's out.

(Then he has to fight, as far as I can tell, homophobic Nazi vampires. They're yelling slurs in German. Great.)

In All-New Invaders #10, which is from 2014 (and which is not the same series as New Invaders), Roger shows up to help out the Invaders, and in passing, he just happens to mention to another character (Joseph Chapman, the current Union Jack), that he is in fact gay:

He and Joseph don't really like each other much; as far as I can tell, their acquaintance in New Invaders consists of Joseph being vaguely homophobic and Roger being bitter about him being Union Jack because he actually wanted to be Union Jack himself to honor Brian's memory -- you know, that thing superheroes sometimes like to do to honor their dead superhero significant others, viz. Hank when Jan was dead after Secret Invasion -- and now Union Jack is this annoying kid and not, y'know, the love of his life. This exchange from New Invaders #4 seems pretty representative of their relationship:

Anyway, yeah, he's pretty obviously out.

Steve isn't actually present for this conversation in All-New Invaders, but he mentions in a later issue of this run that he knows what Roger and his pals have been up to, plot-wise, so I feel comfortable assuming that he's talked to Roger at some point in the previous ten years or so, and therefore, since Roger is completely out at this point in canon, there's no reason Steve shouldn't know now.

On an unrelated note, it's also a fun issue if you're a Steve/Tony fan because this is clearly running in parallel with Hickman's Avengers run, which means that he spends half a page telling Namor that he's mad at him and the rest of the Illuminati (but mostly mad at Tony because... he's just obsessed with Tony in this run, I guess?) about the mindwipe:

This is the sum total of my knowledge about Brian and Roger. No, wait, I know one more thing, which is that Brian was a character in the late, lamented mobile game Avengers Academy, in which he was also actually gay; Roger does not seem to have been there. There's a CBR article that you can read about the whole thing, which mentions some of these details from the comics in passing. (I have no idea why it says that their relationship was alluded to in the Stern/Byrne run; unless I missed something big, the only thing those issues do is establish Brian's death. As far as I can tell, no one is gay in them.)

So, yeah, that's Brian Falsworth and Roger Aubrey, the two gay Invaders. Steve sure has a lot of gay friends.

[itsfunorwhateva]

Sweet Creature

Hi! I’m back with some more of an analysis type post! I hope this helps with a deeper understanding. I’ve provided sources where I got my information. I really tried to set this up and write this in a very informational/analysis way so it isn’t strictly an opinion. Also I want to say I haven’t read the entirety of Othello, but I have read some scenes and read complete analysis of the play to write this. Without further ado... Sweet Creature. 

While it seems that some people have a general understanding that Sweet Creature by Harry Styles references the tragedy, Othello written by William Shakespeare, most people don’t get why that is huge, not only in terms of Harry making this decision, but also in support of Sweet Creature being about Louis Tomlinson. 

So I’m going to break this into three parts to help make this make the most sense. 

1. The reference Harry Styles makes in his song, to the play Othello

2. Why an Othello reference is huge; more on the play

3. William Shakespeare and his sexuality/coding in other works

These will make more sense with further explanation(duh), but I’m hoping this will connect the dots. Also, a quick disclaimer before we begin, this information is coming off of google searches, and analysis that I’m reading, and some from information I researched for a research paper on William Shakespeare. I am in no way an expert on song analysis, literature analysis, or on William Shakespeare and his personal life. I really just hope to give people a base to start themselves on more research, and understanding of the topic. Happy reading!

1. The reference Harry Styles makes in his song, to the play Othello

Now there is not much to dig up or uncover here as the reference is actually pretty obvious. The term Sweet Creature, in which the song is titled, is said to have originated from the play Othello. Act 3, Scene 3, specifically is where the term of endearment (this is important to note, Sweet Creature is used as a term of loving, endearment) is first seen. 

“In sleep I heard him say ‘Sweet Desdemona, Let us be wary, let us hide our loves.’ And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand, Cry ‘O sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard“ (Othello III, iii ,428-432). 

Some context for these lines of dialogue Act 3, Scene 3 is Iago telling Othello about his wife cheating on him. The scene has multiple instances of Iago expressing love for Othello, basically saying how Iago would not be telling Othello this if he didn’t love him so much. More on that for our next section. This first appearance of the term “sweet creature” is Iago telling Othello what he heard a man speak to Othello’s wife while the two were in bed together, all in a dream. Now the idea of cheating is not something to be too hung up on, but this is the context in which sweet creature first appears. While the term, Sweet Creature, is said form man to women - it is revealed to the husband from another man. Iago in which it is said may have homosexual desires/feeling towards Othello in this play. Personally I believe that Iago almost uses the term as a way to convince Othello that his wife is being loved by someone else, and maybe Othello should leave her to be with someone, like Iago, that could love him better. 

Sources for this section!

Harry Styles References Othello in new Single, Sweet Creature

https://genius.com/a/harry-styles-references-shakespeare-s-othello-on-new-single-sweet-creature#:~:text=The%20song's%20title%2C%20%E2%80%9CSweet%20Creature,originate%20in%20William%20Shakespeare's%20Othello.

Othello play

https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/othello/page_166/

2. Why an Othello reference is huge; more on the play

Deeper meanings behind the characters and the play obviously take a bit more time and effort to really understand. Depending on what angle and the kind of understanding you have about the characters and situation in Othello you’ll think one way or another. Othello is partially about homosexuality (in a way that it is not the whole plot, but it does play a major part if you understand the context/characters). Not everyone thinks this and it’s normally not brought in class discussion/normal educational settings, but the fact remains. 

There are a few things throughout the plays that hint towards the characters sexualities. When looked at in the right light and context it can help make sense of not only Harry Styles’ reference, and way choosing Othello to reference is kind of a big deal, but also a better understanding of the play. One article writes, “In William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice Shakespeare leaves the character of Iago’s sexuality to be questioned. Although Iago has a wife, he drops slight hints throughout the play that he has homosexual thoughts or feelings toward other characters, but he uses his position in the military and his fear to suppress these feelings. These “hints” are shown through his wildly questionable story about Michael Cassio, his word choice when describing Othello, and his discourse with Rodrigo” (Homosexuality in Othello). 

The character Iago is a military officer, and it shouldn’t take a genius to understand that being in the military and being homosexual only equal no good. The American policy in the military of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was/is a more modern day policy but still shows how military personal were/are expected and required to act in regards to being homosexual. Simply speaking, don’t. Now thinking even more to Shakespearean time, an even greater restriction was likely in place for homosexuality and the military. This part of the character, Iago, is likely a huge reason people overlook any thought of the character having homosexual desires/thoughts. 

Even if you remove the circumstances surrounding Iago, and him being a military officer there are some others things throughout the play that hint towards possible homosexual desire/feelings. Iago is constantly informing Othello of his love for the other man, claiming to always be Othello���s, should he want him. Some of this can be chalked up to the language of the time, in being, love was used for both friend, and lover, but the extent in which Iago professes may hint towards something deeper. Others things include, Iago claiming to have “lay with” Cassio, another male character, and while some say this is simply in the barracks as fellow soldiers, others think this could have been to hint at being lovers. 

One other thing that isn’t necessarily the play at face value, but still supports the idea of Iago being homosexual, is that actors throughout history have chosen to play him either as a straight or gay characters. While, this could simply be a creative decision based on an actor individually, it still seems a bit huge. If nothing in the text supported Iago being gay, there would not be actors playing him this way. 

Sources for this section!

Homosexuality in Othello

https://www.cram.com/essay/Homosexuality-In-Othello/P3Z2W7LCX5Q

Is Iago Gay in Othello?

https://www.arogundade.com/homosexuality-in-shakespeare-is-iago-gay-in-othello.html

3. William Shakespeare and his sexuality/coding in other works

Final section is really just me helping you understand the feasibility of William Shakespeare writing his characters this way. There’s essentially two parts to understanding this and I’m going to try and help this make the most sense without going too overboard. One part is going to be how William Shakespeare has written other works. I’m going to focus more on his sonnets because I’ve already researched them for a paper in school, but they still stand with this point. The second part is going to be William Shakespeare’s own sexuality and why this is going to affect his written work.

Ok, so the sonnets. 

“The sonnets have a contrasting set of subjects - one set chronicles the poet's lust for a married woman with a dark complexion, known as The Dark Lady, while the other describes a conflicted or confused love for a young man, known as the "fair youth."‘ (William Shakespeare, his Life, Works, and Influence). 

So the sonnets were pretty revolutionary, exploring concepts such as love, lust, and even same sex relationships. This is observed in Shakespeare’s use of gender neutral terms and male pronouns, depending on the sonnet. This is pretty huge. When I did a sonnet analysis I chose two sonnets, which I’ll provide (Sonnet 18 and 29 - both are pretty well known and brought up in regarded to hidden messages/meanings). Both used pronouns that were either male or neutral, something that has been used forever to queer code in works, so do with that information what you will. A common analysis, is that William Shakespeare often wrote from personal experience, more so in his poems and sonnets, then in his plays, but nonetheless. 

Second part, Shakespeare’s own sexuality. William Shakespeare was married to a women, but that doesn’t exactly say much. Men were known to get married because it is the thing to do, without necessarily having any feelings or desires towards said women. 

When Shakespeare’s sexuality comes into question there a few things that are addressed. I definitely recommend reading the first source for this section, “Was Shakespeare Gay?”, it gives you a really good analysis and explores so many faucets of the question. I’m going to sum up the article and you can either read more or just take what I’ll explain. 

The article explains that when looking at Shakespeare’s works he is really good at getting into the minds of his characters, without necessarily having the experience to match the character, i.e. writing from Cleopatra’s perspective, or from a gay man’s perspective. However on the flip side of that, when Shakespeare writes of same sex experiences, he seems to have a wide variety of knowledge of very specific references and experiences, maybe leaning towards him having these experiences. People point out that Shakespeare’s sonnets are his most personal works, and imagine that, they are also the ones that reference same sex attraction and love. Now of course there is way more in the source, but here’s what I think are the most important/key points. It’s important to remember that sexuality is only able to be labeled by the person, but from different works, and cultural ideals, there are certain things to be said about Shakespeare himself. 

Sources for this section!

Was Shakespeare Gay?

https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/lets-talk-shakespeare/was-shakespeare-gay/

William Shakespeare, his Life, Works, and Influence

https://www.williamshakespeare.net/

Sonnet 18

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day

Sonnet 29

https://www.williamshakespeare.net/sonnet-29.js

Finally

Thank you for reading and I hope this made you think a bit. I want to repeat that I am in no way an expert, nor am I claiming to be. You are more than welcome to think whichever way you want about this information and I invite you to do your own further research. I hope this helped explain the reference and the importance of said reference in Harry Styles’, “Sweet Creature”. Thank you for reading, let me know what you think, and as always TPWK. xx

[pondermoniums]

A Rant Nobody Asked for About Stranger Things season 3.

feat. my personal pet peeves.

Disclaimer: when I first watched Stranger Things 3, I massively enjoyed it. I thought it finally captured the 80s aesthetic and vibe with the colors, the neon, and music. I even enjoyed it the SECOND time I watched it, although I was officially aware of some major flaws by that point.

1. The Coca Cola flex.

CocaCola has been all over this show ever since Tommy handed Steve one as a makeshift ice pack after his fight with Jonathan in s1. And then by season 3 it’s just....obnoxious???? And so unnecessary??? Karen Wheeler’s drinking one by the pool in episode one. Billy knocks into someone during his first day being flayed, and a coke rolls over the concrete.

LUCAS DOES AN ENTIRE MONOLOGUE ABOUT NEW COKE.

I mean, Jesus, we get it. CocaCola basically owns Georgia, where a lot of American TV shows are filmed.....but......you’re literally CocaCola. This kind of flex is entirely unnecessary and therefore pathetic.

2. Karen and Billy

Okay, listen. I thought their interaction in season 2 was H I L A R I O U S.  But I’m someone who has looked 21 since I was 14, thanks to being an early bloomer. I get it. The cocky prowess of looking older than your peers. Getting to look adults in the eye and get that tiny bit of respect with nothing more than just looking like they do. And, as a writer, the contrast between thirsty, older Karen with young and equally thirsty Billy is an odd pair of puzzle pieces that fit really hilariously - largely because it’s so unexpected, maybe. And frankly, I think it’s one of the first scenes where Dacre’s acting really made my eyes fall out of my head, he did so well.

But it should have ended there.

I’ve been to a LOT of public pools in my day (I’m 26 but hush), and I have NEVER seen older women thirsting over the lifeguards. Ever. It’s predatory - an attribute most women understand all too well - unprofessional, and just downright gross. Their whole interaction in s3 is for “the male lens,” which Hollywood really needs to figure out by now is outdated, predatory, disgusting, and not good writing.

3. Glossing over Billy Chugging Chemicals

Bouncing off of #2, is Karen’s total negligence of Billy’s condition. Many people have pointed it out before, but a row of mothers being completely ???? about Billy’s condition is a raging red flag of bad writing.

(Also that it was written by men, because women are hard-wired to be super aware of other women - a tactic of living on guard in a man’s world all the damn time. So you can always count on a mother, grandmother, or a brave teen/20-something to be the one to walk up to a person who doesn’t look well in order to check on them, even if you’re complete strangers. It’s happened to me, and I’ve done this for other people.)

These women literally stare at him for every shift of work he has, and they.....don’t do anything????

Karen WALKS IN ON HIM DRINKING CHLORINE. It actually took me the second watch-through to realize what he was doing in that storage room, and god, my heart just broke. It’s the only time we actually see a glimpse of Billy making himself flayed like the others. It’s so fleeting (maybe because we already get so much pain from his plot, and we do see what happens with the other flayed people) but it’s also one of the reasons, I think, that we have a whole fanbase ready and eager for his return.

We didn’t get a good glimpse of him poisoning himself to the point that he has to rely on the MindFlayer to stay alive. I’m not saying any of us want that, no way, but that’s my personal headcanon: in s2, Will was super protected and therefore capable of being separated from the Flayer. All of the Flayed IMMEDIATELY low-key drowned themselves in ice water to lower their temperature, and then chugged chemicals. They all die twice.

4. Billy. Just......Billy.

This poor boy’s plot was so pointless. It’s a special thing: creating such a good character and then doing fuck-all with him. The moment you realize his only purpose in season 2 was an introduction is....the beginning of a lot of disappointment. And no, he DIDN’T serve as an antagonist for Steve, because what happened? He slowed Steve down.

That’s it.

He doesn’t keep Steve from helping the kids in the tunnels. He doesn’t break him and Nancy up. He doesn’t gloriously out Steve’s bisexuality to the town by being his shameless lover.

He literally does nothing except just......be there? Looking gorgeous and providing a juxtaposing characterization for Max. That’s all. Billy’s treated like an accessory.

Then we arrive to season 3 and....I guess the only justification for his plot is sort of classic Greek tragic hero. He’s the new Keg King whose hubris makes him stand too long outside the warehouse, and thus, his downfall.

But here’s what’s wrong with that: Steve Harrington.

We were so spoiled with good writing for Steve. Steve had an incredibly refreshing and valid character AND redemption arc. Frankly, all the good writing goes to Steve in this show, so we expected the same writing to go to the other douche bag king of the show.

And we didn’t get it.

5. 80s Bullshit vs. Modern Audience

You can tell they’re trying to straddle the line between, “this is how people talked back then,” and, “this pertains to a modern audience.”

Example: Mike saying to Will, “It’s not my fault you don’t like girls.”

I know they did multiple takes of this scene with different variations of this line, and that’s the one the editors settled with. Regardless, I know I am not the only person who screeched with rainbow pride for Will’s sake. And it’s not the first time they’ve touched on very hot modern topics. Hopper touches on homophobia in season 1 - a fact I completely missed until I read an interview where the actor, David Harbor, mentions it, himself. Then I rewatched season 1 and realized, sure enough, he reacts poorly when Joyce tells him that Lonnie calls Will a f*g. It’s not even fatherly, “that should be my son, how dare he.��� It’s straight up, “this kid might not be worth finding if he’s gay.”

Of course there’s the more obvious occasions where Steve calls Jonathan a queer and Neil Hargrove should come with his own neon trigger sign. Slut is a term that’s carelessly thrown around (as high schoolers are wont to do, sure).

But the thing that’s bothered me the most is Steve saying to Billy, “Were you dropped too much on your head as a child, or what?”

Maybe it’s just me being extremely sensitive to mental health stuff (also, WHY does Steve ironically get all the triggering lines? lol), plus he says it very soon after we finally know why Billy behaves the way he does. Just.....*long sigh*. I hurt, okay. Some parts of this show really hurt, and I don’t like “it was the 80s” as an excuse.

6. Lucas and Kali or, the Diversity Check Marks

One black kid. One. Then they gave him a sister. Cool. Somebody give these people BLM awards.

*eyes roll so hard my cat chases them across the floor*

You know what this reminds me of? The East Asian actor who trended in movies like The Goonies and Indiana Jones.

The only thing that even remotely makes this small drop of diversity okay, is that they made Lucas a major player in The Party, and cast a dope actress to be Erica Sinclair, and likewise made her a linchpin in the Scoops Troop plot.

But touching back to #5, you can’t use “it’s the 80s” as an excuse, nor can you say, “it’s white bread Indiana.”

BUT but but but Kali!!!!

You mean the character in one episode? Two, if you count the opening of season 2.

Listen. For all the bipoc folks who wonder, “Do white people realize how.....WHITE everything is?” as a white person, I can absolutely say: 

Yes. We. Do. Fucking. Notice.

• • • • •

Well. That’s all lol If you made it this far, I’m sorry and thanks lol 

Tip your artists and comment on fics because lord knows that where my seratonin comes from.

[passionate-reply]

This week on Great Albums: one of my favourite “hidden gems” of the mid-1980s, Blancmange’s *Mange Tout* is about as extra and in-your-face as it gets, full of dense arrangements, gender-bending bombast, and musical instruments from Southern Asia.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! This time around, I’ll be taking a look at one of my favourite hidden gems from the mid-1980s, the sophomore LP of Blancmange, entitled Mange Tout.

Despite their relative obscurity today, particularly in comparison to many of their contemporaries, Blancmange weren’t total strangers to the pop charts. Their first full-length LP, 1982’s Happy Families, would yield the biggest hit of their career: “Living on the Ceiling,” which peaked at #7.

Music: “Living on the Ceiling”

While it never got to be a chart-topper, “Living on the Ceiling” is still an unforgettable track in its own ways. Perhaps its most distinctive feature is its use of the traditional Indian instruments, the sitar and tabla. While 80s synth-pop is certainly full of Orientalism, most of the references you’ll find are pointing to the Far East, and the perceived aesthetic sophistication and techno-utopian futurism of China and Japan. Aside from certain works of Bill Nelson, Blancmange were pretty much the only ones engaging with South Asian musical themes. Blancmange’s instrumentalist, Stephen Luscombe, grew up in London’s Southall neighbourhood, which had a high population of immigrants from Southern Asia, which led him to a lifelong interest in Indian music. Combined with electronics, it makes for a totally unique sound, which ends up sounding better in practice than it might in theory.

While any time White European musicians turn to alternative cultures as artistic tools, there’s a valid cause for some degree of criticism and concern, there’s also an artsy, left-field un-hipness about Blancmange, who seemingly drew from Indian music not only alone, but purely for sonic enjoyment. Unlike the exotic fantasies spun by groups like Japan, none of Blancmange’s songs seem propelled by any specific idea or ideology about India, but rather seem to tackle common pop themes of love and heartbreak against a seemingly *non sequitur* musical backdrop. While we, as listeners, might have strong associations with particular sounds, this is ultimately more cultural than innate, and there’s really no reason why a composition with Indian instruments must revolve around some theme of “Indian-ness”; it isn’t like people in India don’t also fall in love. However you feel about these influences, the role of Indian instruments is only increased on Mange Tout, where they appear on multiple tracks, including the album’s most successful single, “Don’t Tel Me.”

Music: “Don’t Tell Me”

On Mange Tout tracks like “Don’t Tell Me,” not only do the instruments return, but so do the session musicians who had performed on “Living on the Ceiling”: Deepak Khazanchi, on sitar, and Pandit Dinesh, on the percussion instruments tabla and madal. “Don’t Tell Me” is a track with a lot of pop appeal, lightweight and singable, which makes it a bit surprising that it was actually the final single released from the album. It certainly impresses me that Blancmange managed to create such bubbly and finely tuned pop, given that neither of their core members came from any formal or technical background: Luscombe had had a history in avant-garde music ensembles, and vocalist Neil Arthur became interested in music via the DIY culture of punk. Their first-ever release, the 1980 EP Irene & Mavis, sounds more like Throbbing Gristle than Culture Club, but they somehow managed to arrive at something quite sweet and palatable in the end. That said, it’s also possible for sweet to eventually become too sweet--and this line is provoked on the album’s divisive second single, “That’s Love, That It Is.”

Music: “That’s Love, That It Is”

In contrast to the lighter “Don’t Tell Me,” “That’s Love, That It Is” is utterly bombastic, with a vicious intensity. The instrumentation and production style is dense to the point of being borderline overwhelming. By this point in his life, Stephen Luscombe had recently discovered that he was gay, and his time spent in nightclubs that catered to the gay community provided another pillar of Blancmange’s signature sound: the influence of the queer disco tradition, which is almost certainly the source of this tightly-packed instrumental arrangement style. Blancmange never seem to be mentioned in the same breath as other stars of queer synth-pop like Bronski Beat, Soft Cell, and the Pet Shop Boys, presumably due to the combination of their overall obscurity and the fact that Luscombe was never the face of their band, but I see no reason not to include them in the same pantheon of camp. Speaking of queerness, it’s also worth noting how Blancmange played with gender, particularly on their cover of “The Day Before You Came.”

Music: “The Day Before You Came”

A solid eight years before Erasure’s iconic Abba-Esque, Blancmange offered their own interpretation of an ABBA classic with “The Day Before You Came.” In their hands, it’s a languid dirge, and a meditation on quotidian miseries for which the titular event seems to offer little respite. The unchanged lyrics, portraying the narrator working in an office and watching soap operas at night, are subtly feminine-coded, but the deep and unmistakably masculine voice of vocalist Neil Arthur seems to muddle those connotations. While it is a cover, I’m tempted to sort it into the same tradition as Soft Cell’s “Bedsitter” and the Pet Shop Boys’ “Left To My Own Devices,” as a work which musically elevates the everyday life of a campily self-obsessed character to the sort of melodrama the narrator perceives it to have.

I’ve spent a lot of time praising the instrumental side of their music so far, but it’s also true that Blancmange wouldn’t be Blancmange without Arthur’s contributions. The presence of his rough and untrained voice, with the added gruffness of a Northern accent, draws a line between these tracks and a typical pop production, and he sells us quite successfully on the gloomy, ominous feeling of tracks like “The Day Before You Came” and the album’s lead single, “Blind Vision.”

Music: “Blind Vision”

On the cover of Mange Tout, we find an assortment of seemingly unrelated items, which form a sort of graphic wunderkammer against a pale beige backdrop. Perhaps the best theme that could be assigned to them is that of travel--we see several means of transportation, such as a boat, a motorbike, and an airplane flying above a map, as well as items that can be taken as symbols of exotic locales, such as a North American cactus, and an elephant and Zulu nguni shield from Africa. Only the harp is clearly evocative of music itself--and this instrument won’t even be found on the album! The album’s title, “Mange Tout,” suggests that we are getting “full” Blancmange, or “all of” Blancmange. Taken together, the cover and title seem to imply that this album is stuffed to the brim, and contains a whole world of musical ideas. I would definitely agree that that’s a major motif of the album: it’s audacious, explosive, and free-wheeling. It very much feels like an album that was put together on the back of a first initial success, with a pumped-up budget and bold creative vision, and hence pulls no punches. Perhaps the most compelling feature of Mange Tout, and the primary reason I recommend this album so highly, is its unbridled enthusiasm for what it’s doing. Even in its ostensibly experimental moments, Mange Tout feels not like an album that is “trying” something, but rather one that boldly and assuredly proclaims the things it does, and embraces a kind of “more is more” maximalism.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see Mange Tout as the creative as well as commercial peak of Blancmange’s career. Their follow-up release, 1985’s Believe You Me, is far from the worst album I’ve ever heard, but it definitely doesn’t feel quite the same as the “classic” Blancmange works, adopting a more middle-of-the-road, radio-friendly synth-pop direction, with less of the South Asian influences and experimentation that really set them apart in the saturated synth-pop landscape. While not a work devoid of merit, Believe You Me was a relative commercial dud, and the duo would split soon after, chiefly citing personal and creative differences--though they did have a brief reunion in the early 2010s.

Music: “Lose Your Love”

My favourite track on Mange Tout is “All Things Are Nice,” which, alongside the neo-doo-wop “See the Train,” would be classed as one of the more experimental tracks on the album. Full of tension, “All Things Are Nice” alternates between eerily whispering vocals from Arthur, and a variety of samples from other media--which was still a relatively cutting-edge technique for the time. “All Things Are Nice” is almost certainly the most conceptual track on the album: as samples discuss world war, and Arthur whispers that “we can’t keep up with it,” the song is probably to be interpreted as a commentary on the runaway nature of technology and so-called “progress” in the modern age. The titular assertion that “all things are nice” seems to be ironic--or perhaps it embodies a sheer love of chaos and unpredictability, for their own sake, which would certainly fit the album’s mood. It also feels like it might be a sort of defense of the album itself: like I said, *Mange Tout* is serving us “all of Blancmange,” and isn’t it fun to get to have all of something? That’s everything for today--as always, thanks for listening!

Music: “All Things Are Nice”

[quasi-derivative]

Rainbow Capitalism

A Short Analysis

[here's an essay explaining the reason that rainbow capitalism is bad and harmful to Pride, hope you enjoy]

One of Capital's greatest abilities is to metabolise and corrupt everything it touches, in order to perpetually grow and spread. This is epitomised by its appropriation of Pride and the LGBTQ+ community. It's easy to picture what I'm talking about. As soon as the 1st of June comes around, corporations don their rainbow flags and buzzword slogans, in order to show the world that they too support LGBTQ+ rights. These changes vary in scale — Skittles completely changed its packaging (to black and white, since "only one rainbow matters during pride") while Instagram colours the pride related hashtags as a rainbow. However, whether these changes are big or small, they represent corporate pandering and appropriation of a complex movement and community. The weight of capital effectively crushes any complex emotional or historical cause into something one-dimensional from which it can extract profit.

A few years ago, I went to a pride festival with friends. Looking back, I'm only just realising how corporatised it was. While there were stalls from charities, there were also some from local businesses and political parties. Although I did not fully realise it at the time, it is obvious now that behind the pro-LGBTQ+ gesturing there lurks the powerful force of the profit motive. Now, some may hold the corporate inclusion of LGBTQ+ symbols as a good thing that spreads awareness of the movement — to an extent, this is true. However, upon closer analysis, this falls apart.

The appearance of rainbow capitalism correlates precisely with the acceptance of LGBTQ+ people in wider society. That is to say: companies only started showing support once it became socially acceptable for them to do so. This began in the 1990s, when being queer was slowly becoming more accepted, but became common after gay marriage had been legalised in the early 2000s.

This is a two-fold phenomenon. First, it exemplifies the pandering of companies to the LGBTQ+ community. The show of support (a show, it is not legitimate support) is done in order to convince queer folk to buy their products. Since queer people could now hold higher paying jobs (employment protections, etc.), their purchasing power increased — the so called 'pink dollar'. And so, by capitalistic design, the corporations jumped at the opportunity to make money.

Second, it shows that companies have no real intention of supporting LGBTQ+ rights. As always, it is important to remember that profit is the motive. In the 70s or 80s, such a show of support would have been awful for business, since the majority of people did not support queer folk. However, in the modern day, companies can adopt Pride related messaging freely, since the profit lost from angry conservatives is outweighed by the influx of money from liberals and progressives. In fact, some companies even donated money to anti-LGBTQ+ politicians, a practice that goes unnoticed since they put up the facade of progressivism in order to placate any suspicion and resistance.

Corporations (and the rich people who run them) have the power to create huge change — if they wanted to. They have incredible amounts of money, which could be used to fund non-profits and other organisations that materially affect the lives of LGBTQ+ people and youth (Trevor Project, Mermaids UK, etc.), as well as protect the civil rights of the community (most notably the ACLU). If they wanted to, corporations could contribute vastly to these causes and create real good in the lives of countless people. However, they won't. Instead, they are content with espousing rhetoric without tangible support. This does nothing but maintain the status quo: the companies make money, and the LGBTQ+ community continues to face rampant discrimination, both individual and systemic. The pride flag logos and other rainbow capitalist tropes serve only to hide this.

Above all this, however, hangs the issue of cultural erasure. The dilution of Pride into an amorphous commodity without nuance harms the very culture of the queer community, and gradually dissolves its history into a set of tokens and images. We know this commodification perfectly well, it exists as I have laid out above and, conversely, as the adoption of commodities to represent pride (drinking iced coffee = being queer, etc).

As Pride increasingly becomes an event, it is easy to forget the real, dangerous, life-and-death struggle for equal rights under the law that brought us to this point. Struggle and protest and rioting against a discriminatory system is what Pride commemorates. Not consuming product. It should be about the revolutionary fight against oppression in our past, present, and future, and not an event co-opted by the capitalist system.

While the portrait I have painted above seems bleak and hopeless, we are not completely powerless. Although the final way of countering and removing this practice is the overthrow of our capitalist system in favour of socialism or communism, in the present we can still create change. This is best done through with-holding our money from large anti-LGBTQ+ corporations where possible, while educating ourselves on anti-capitalist thought and practice, and pressuring companies and politicians to create substantial change.

[togglesbloggle]

We Needed a Place to Bury Our Dead

When I came out of the closet for the first time, around the age of twenty or so, one of the first things I did was to start going to church.  Not out of a rediscovered faith or anything.  It’s just that I lived in a rural town, and churches were the cultural centers- student churches, retiree churches, black churches, you name it.  That was as true for the gay community as it was for anyone else; there was a United Church of Christ outpost on the south end of town that acted as the center of gravity for all the queer folks in the area.  There was also a proper gay bar, the only one within a hundred miles (I measured).  But it wasn’t actually a good place to find people, and was sort of drowning under the weight of tourists.  So if I wanted to actually meet guys in person, it was church or nothing.

I felt a little bad about it, so I talked to the pastor first to put my cards on the table and make sure that he didn’t mind a heathen showing up just for the dating scene.  He was a pretty good sport about it, told me that he didn’t have a problem with my attendance as long as I made a sincere attempt to pray every now and then, and kept an open mind about waiting for an answer.  I held up my end of the bargain, for what it’s worth.  I never did hear back from God in unambiguous terms, but the plan worked- I found my way in to a nice circle of early-twenties gay guys.  Dated some of them, although it didn’t really work out long term, and the principal benefit was just having a nice queer group of peers who kept quoting Mean Girls no matter how much I begged them to stop.

One of the more memorable days in that chapter of my life was an overnight trip to Dallas, to visit the Cathedral of Hope, possibly the largest specifically LGBT church in the world.  The architecture is interesting enough; they call it a cathedral, but of course the construction is quite modern, and I was surprised by how well it worked as a synthesis of very different sensibilities.  One stand-out feature of the service was that they took communion in groups of three- two parishioners and the pastor together.  It’s a tradition that dates back well before the advent of legal gay marriage.  Where gay or otherwise nontraditional couples lacked the full protection of law, the Cathedral of Hope made a point of incorporating a community-wide recognition of those relationships by other means.  It was a beautiful thing to see.

That evening, I was wandering on my own around the grounds outside the cathedral proper, and happened to run across a graveyard of sorts.  Semi-outdoors, several large walls with many slots for cremated remains.  I spent some time alone with it, though I didn’t have any particular reason.  Just killing time, so to speak, but in retrospect it was probably the disproportionately high volume that caught my attention, given the size of the congregation and the relative youth of the church itself.

The AIDS crisis, obviously- all those deaths in the 80s.  But sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake, and I didn’t really understand what I was looking at until the local pastor sat down beside me.  This was Jo Hudson, who I think has since retired.  We talked at length, but the fragment of the conversation that really etched its way into my brain was when she asked- 

“So, do you know why we built the cathedral?”

I, baby gay that I was, just sort of shrugged.  “Why?”

“We needed a place to bury our dead.”

Like I said, I’m slow on the uptake sometimes, but by this point I’d gotten caught up to the conversation.  For Jo, this place was as much the center of the Cathedral of Hope as any of the more impressive bits of architecture.  An altar, of sorts-  I was standing in the heart of the thing.  Fully understanding that, fully digesting what that sentence meant to her, was an important part of my coming of age, and Jo wanted to make sure I understood.

The primary function of the Cathedral of Hope, and the reason it grew so large when it did, was that it provided a venue for the mourning and burial of those who were killed by HIV.  Nobody else would do the job, because the plague and the politics and the moral judgment created a perfect storm of social exile that afflicted the dead as well as the living.  I was too young to really see the AIDS epidemic firsthand, but only barely, and Jo absolutely wanted me to come into adulthood with that awareness, knowing what the gay community was really, actually for.

“We needed a place to bury our dead.”  Meaning: They’re going to hate you so much that when you die, they will go on hating your corpse.

Like I said, I didn’t actually experience the AIDS epidemic directly, and I’m sure it was complicated and multivalent even in its horrors.  Stories simplify the world, and simplicity is dangerous if you use it unwisely.  But Jo was a preacher.  Stories were her business, and the story of that memorial was one about how bottomless the hatred of crowds can be, and of the necessity of community in the face of that hatred.  For her, that story was part of my heritage, insofar as being born different can entitle one to a heritage.

There’s a deep trauma that comes with this history as an inheritance, an awareness of how bad things can get and how tenuous the victories really are.  One fact that gets under your skin is: it’s hard to mourn the dead, sometimes.  It’s much too easy for us to end up the villains of this kind of story, cheering on the deaths of our enemies, convincing ourselves to feel like those deaths are a kind of justice.  There’s always going to be this seductive allure in taking satisfaction in the mortality of our opponents, in bending those deaths into a kind of self-serving fable.  And when we give in to that impulse, the last and most important barrier has been removed between us and true atrocity.

Political violence in the US has claimed at least three lives this week, in Oregon and Wisconsin.  It’s been a clusterfuck, and it seems like things might get worse before they get better.  Lots of people are bringing their own stories to those deaths, trying to make sense of them with different simplifying frameworks; it’s the only way we know how to understand things like this.  But here’s what I’ll beg you for: try to mourn the dead.  Try hard, as hard as you possibly can, to remember that death is an outrage and a tragedy, that the extinction of a human soul may have causes but it can never have reasons.  If you fail in this, and your actions are informed by the kind of hatred or contempt that outlasts even death, then you’re going to cause wounds deeper than you can possibly imagine.

[lucidpantone]

Druck is objectively better than all remakes at making a pointed effort to do better with their pic reps. They actually take in the feedback of their audience and try to execute a better product. There are problems with druck and 80% of it is the fandom. Ofc all remakes have issues tho, so ppl should chill. Druck fans unapologetically shit on other remakes while, wtfock fans and skam fr fans have the courtesy of slyly getting their digs in there. It's quite amusing to watch from the sidelines

this is super long but for you anon.

So I think we need to look at these three remakes as what I call the og period and the original period because they do change alot once they get more freedom some for the absolute worse. Ok so lets talk first about the OG periods. To be perfectly honest s1 in all these remakes are just ok. Jana & Jens are a bit unbearable but Jana as a whole is fine and am happy she doesnt end up with Jens. Same with Hanna and Jonas they aren’t unbearable per-say but I am also not gushing over them but I do like Jonas being a heart throb music man sometimes but once again they dont burn into my core but am happy they reunite. Love Emma and love Yann just not together its that simple. S2 is where we really start to see the difference. Charles is the devil so I hate skamfr s2 and like really Manon stays with him??? ughh why?? Daphne is right at almost bursting into laughter when he talks about doing philanthropy. Ok bruh....sure. Winterberg is fine I dont hate them and I dont love them they are just okay to me. S2 happens to be wtfock best season so its kinda hard to stack them up because this is the best they ever looked. All of the s3 for all these remakes are good. To say they aren’t would just be nonsense some are better then others but all are above average. Now S4....... well well well. What can we say the elusive goldstar Sana season is yet to be made (I will say the script for Italia s4 is fantastic, THE SCRIPT).

Skamfr s4 was a mess and ridiculous and Druck’s s4 was lazy and harbored accents of prejudice all over it.Both seasons undercut their woc and both miss the opportunity to write deep meaningful stories that explored the societal struggles of muslim women. Skamfr s4 just happened to really just shows us their colors but honestly am not shocked this is skam the micro racist decisions are all over the verse. TBD on yasmina season.

 NOW......this all changes when we talk about the original seasons because this is when we see the shows on their own and also we get to see if they have been listening and absorbing the fan commentary or not. So let’s get the obvious out of the way wtFOCK was an absolute mess and maybe the worse season ever created in the skamverse the only thing that made that season even slightly bearable was the Moyo arc which I hear it actually continues in s5 so in a weird way s4 is actually about Moyo since his story continues but we already know thats only because if the fans saw Kato on the screen for a matters of seconds the volcano of hate would explode. I despise how Noa has become the pseudo main of s4 but didnt get the credit. It kills me they did this to him. Maining Romi is the worse mistake ever made by any remake and thats just fact. Now do I want to see a newgen out of wtfock? hmmmm ask me after s5 but am leaning towards probably not but am on the fence. Now skamfr .....let me say this one thing skam fr is nothing without their cast. Talk about fucking talent. Those kids can act their ass off but their writing is atrocious. s5 could have been good they had all the ingredients but the writers bomb it. S6 once again flavie amazing the writing a shit show. S7 lucie was amazing the writing was better but still needs work I think it pretty obvious skam fr is going to step into the thunderdome and finally do what no skam has done before and main bilal but should I really applaud it taking 8 seasons and 35 plus skamverse seasons to get here??? Probably not, but since no one else is gonna pull the trigger I wish them well and at least skamfr listen and lamifex is super rich in diversity and they are honestly a fabulous newgen. They are such a ridiculous squad but god I love them and Jo is an angel. Please please skamfr please write a good story for a brown boy I beg of you!!! Now druck s5 all I can say is Bravo!! If skamfr is their cast then Druck is their writers. That s5 season is a fucking beast. Thats how you write an original skam season. They also listen the cast is super diverse. The girl squad feels natural and their age I actually like that the insta squad are problematic as fuck and happen to be queer. Like just cause your a gay baby doesnt mean you arent an ass. s6 for me personally was ok maybe its unfair of me but I expect amazing writing out of druck and s6 to me was not their best. It could have been amazing they touched so many topics but never deeply explored them and I wanted more for fatou. Also def got the vibes at the end they were panicking on who to main next season so everyone got a little plot thread but that also distracted me from fatou but I love the Mailin plot it was really smart and done well. I didnt hate her but boy did she bug the shit out me.That how you write modern day racism and white privilege. I just wish Ava’s plot was spread more onto fatou they were moments but i wanted more. So I guess I do think out of the original seasons druck s5 is the best. Nora being white didnt matter because she was written well but i do think Tiff being the main out of skamfr wasnt the best choice but then seeing Lucie act am like ok i get it but honestly I expect that from that cast they can all kill it so why not let someone else be the main and not tiff. BTW druck’s cast is good too I just dont think they are as good as the skamfr cast on the acting front but they are some members that are very very good. Like you said because Druck does listen I hope they listen to the honest criticism of s6. I know some people are like its the best ever but like its not....am sorry s5 was way better then s6 and that makes me sad because i want my black girl magic.... I do expect s7 to be good because when the writers for druck have the room to take their time they always kill it but I also feel like they are about to pull a Tiff on us and main Ismail(plus constantine as the side plot) but if I trust anyone with not fucking it up its them. Concerning the fandoms I live off tag and I do that for a reason. The fandom tags are alot but the druck one is almost hostile and honestly you would love the show more if you didnt interact with it. The skamfr tag is hilarious because they are no anti’s its just a bunch of arm chair critics making memes at how ridiculous the frenchies are but in away it makes the remake super fun because no one cares anymore. The wtfock tag has really high highs and really insane lows. When its low its really low so I have decided to live off tag. For those who haven’t..... god speed. Your brave souls!!

[charlottemadison42]

On Good Omens and Faith

Here follow personal thoughts on what Good Omens has meant to me as an Exvangelical. There’s a lot of healing & hope here, but it gets a bit dark first, as worthy stories do.

CW: I wasn’t badly spiritually abused in church, but I’ll be discussing things that are spiritually abusive: purity culture, sexphobia, queerphobia, abortion, mild self-harm, failure to treat mental health appropriately, ableism -- plus the special ways church authority makes all of these especially hard.

I’m personally an atheist but this message is not an argument against faith itself, rather against the specific subculture I grew up in. If you are a person of faith you’re welcome here.

I grew up in the American Evangelical subculture of the 80′s and 90′s, in the Keith Green/DC Talk/Left Behind/Veggie Tales era. I got saved at a Carman concert in sixth grade, and re-pledged my faith just to be extra sure every year at summer camp and youth group retreats.

This upbringing is not unusual. Doesn’t make me special. But its effects were real.

I’m finally engaged in a reckoning with it, in the “I should maybe talk this over with a support group or therapist” sense. I was a worship leader and youth leader at a Vineyard church when I left my faith abruptly in 2007*. It took me ten years to tell my family and friends that I was an atheist. For that decade I didn’t think about it -- but when I confessed to my loved ones two years ago, the processing began in earnest.

If you came up Evangelical, you already know how literal our belief in angels and demons can be in certain strains of the church. Until I was 26, I believed they were real entities genuinely and invisibly at war all around me. The End Times were real and we were in them. The Antichrist was whatever high profile democrat could be weaponized at the moment, the Rapture was nigh, and Armageddon was imminent (which explained why tension kept building in the Middle East).

My church community regularly discussed friends and neighbors’ problems in the language of  demon possession or harrassment: depression was a demon, addiction was a demon, promiscuity was a demon. I was part of casual and formal exorcisms and the occasional healing. No holy water, but there were hours of fervent prayers and tears, speaking in tongues and anointing with oil. It’s like a fever dream looking back at it now.**

Shout out to my other teens and tweens of the Frank Peretti era, forbidden from reading books of fantasy any later than Lewis or Tolkein -- Xanth was forbidden, Hogwarts was demonic. We were given instead (retrospectively) horrifying books about spiritual warfare, Christian takes on historical fiction, and end times fantasies. But they weren’t sold as fantasy to us, it was all real. Adults in positions of power confirmed it over and over. Narnia might be allegory but This Present Darkness supposedly illustrated spiritual truths.

I remember telling a trusted church teacher at age 10 or 11 that sometimes I would get scared at night, in the dark, and feel a palpable terror that kept me awake. They told me with no hint of comfort, “That means a demon is visiting you and sitting on your chest, trying to oppress you with fear so you will sin. Don’t wake your parents or read a book, instead you should pray or read only the Bible until the demon is compelled to leave, either by an angel or the presence of God.” This adult was affirmed by amens and mm-hmms.

I took this teaching to heart. I also understood, by implication, that if the bad feeling stayed with me then I was praying wrong -- that no angel would rescue me that night. I knew that my fear as it compounded in the dark was itself a sin that made God harder for me to reach.

These are not things that should be told to children.

Then there were the prophecies. (read more if this resonates with you, if not I’ll clip it here so I don’t take up your whole screen)

Anyone could prophesy in most churches I attended. Dreams were prophecies, visions were prophecies, vague feelings were prophecies. (That gave nightmares / being hormonal / being really hungry an awful lot of sway at Bible study.)

I had a woman prophesy over me weeping, with her hands buried in my hair, that she felt overwhelming grief for my future child. I was 23.

I have no child, and I harbored the secret at the time was that I didn’t want one -- a rebellion for me as a married woman. I feared she was prophesying an abortion in my future, and I was inconsolable for months at the damning choice that would visit me someday. (As of this writing at age 38 I’ve never been pregnant, for which I give all thanks to modern birth control.) I still wonder what happened to that woman’s child, or pregnancy, or perhaps her desire for a child, that this was her prophecy for me.

I heard much darker things prophesied over other people. I remember career changes (ill-advised) and marriages staying together (they shouldn’t have) and mission trips undertaken (that assuredly should not have been) because of prophesies.

Last, of course, I didn’t know it yet but I had many queer friends at the time. Some of them didn’t know it. We had no context in our small town -- and no corners of the internet to hide in and learn context, because the internet didn’t do much more than access our local library catalog at the time. I was told that demons sat on my chest to oppress me as a child, but I was shielded from understanding what a lesbian actually was until I was sixteen.

I remember feeling vaguely guilty when we prayed over this or that person in youth group, entreating God that they could resist their base urges. We prayed that they could choose a life of abstinence if they had to, rather than enter sexual sin and be cast out. I felt guilty but I still joined the circle to pray.

I’m sorry. I was wrong. Part of me knew it at the time. I wish I had listened to that part of me because that it was correct. There are fragments of my former faith I still treasure, but those prayers were rotten to the core.

Sidebar: Luckily that feeling of guilt bloomed quickly into rejecting queerphobic doctrine. By age 20 I decided I could only attend churches that did not preach homophobic takes on scripture from the pulpit, and that did not advocate/imply advocacy for any particular political party. The reason I mention this: if YOU are currently a person of faith in this position, uncomfortable with what you hear from your leadership, go find a church that’s queer-affirming, gives to the poor, and advocates for immigrants. Live in a conservative area? Create or join a home church. That’s what the early church looked like anyway. Don’t shrug off this responsibility. Shine a light.

Anyway. Several years later, I fell.

I had to step down from multiple church leadership positions in one day. My entire life changed in two months; marriage, job, home, friends, everything uprooted when I could no longer pretend to believe. I didn’t tell my family why everything fell apart, even as they let me crash their couches.

I had wanted to be a good believer. I read apologetics, the mystics, eschatology, theophostics. I taught and attended study groups, I took troubled teens out to coffee, I served the homeless, I waited til marriage. I was in church as many as thirty hours weekly. When I first felt my faith slipping I said “not yet,” and I read the entire Bible straight through twice, in different translations, while journaling through “My Utmost for His Highest.” Then, unsatisfied, I read and annotated the New Testament in interlinear Greek. I gave it my everything.

What could replace all that?

Time, it turns out. And freedom.

Freedom to not think about it was perhaps the kindest freedom. The constant labor of self-evaluation and thought policing that goes into Evangelical Christianity is exhausting. Letting it go of it felt like getting my mind back. Or owning it for the first time, since I never knew this freedom before. I had even been seeking counseling because I was hearing multiple voices in my head at once, all mine, often arguing. That problem vanished the hour I deconverted. I heard only one voice anymore, and it was my own.

For ten years I was free to just not think about it.

When I decided to remarry I realized that I didn’t want to explain to anyone why my ceremony would not include prayers or communion. So I told my loved ones at last that I was an atheist, a decade late. They received it graciously, and I’m sure they had known-but-not-acknowledged it for a long time. I hope they don’t worry about me or pray behind my back for my salvation. But if they do I can’t accept responsibility for it anymore.

Since that confession I’ve finally felt compelled to back at what all actually happened in church. It seemed so normal to me at the time. But wait, it wasn’t:

I exorcised people. I laid on hands for healings. I encouraged episodes of religious rapture, falling out, and speaking in tongues, and as a worship leader I knew the music cues to bring them about (yes, there are certain chord and tempo changes for that). I was present for prophecies that changed people’s lives and might have issued some myself, I don’t remember. I alienated people who didn’t fit in, whether because they were queer or just because they didn’t conform to church culture. I witnessed abuse and had no language to report it or even comprehend it. I hurt people. I was hurt.

I was told there were real demons in my room and I had to pray them away all by myself.

The work of undoing this mindf*ck (sorry friends of faith, that’s how it felt) suddenly turned urgent after being ignored for a decade. I can’t afford therapy, but thankfully Twitter chats and message boards and podcasts exist (thank you, @goodchristianfun​ and @exvangelical​).

And then -- out of the blue -- along came my own personal angel and demon, along with Frances McDormand herself. I watched it on a whim. (Actually no, David Tennant’s hair made me.)

Apparently Good Omens had a few things to say directly to my mindf*cked subconscious:

1) Are you scared of demons in a pathological childhood trauma way? Here, have a helping of this amalgam of your favorite Doctor and scariest ever Marvel villain tearing it up as the demon Crowley.

2) Does your mild bookish personality and respect for the culture you grew up in keep you reflexively deferential to authority, even as it gaslights you and hurts others? Enjoy some Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale.

3) Are you stuck still mentally assigning a male gender to the god you always claimed was beyond gender? Boom, meet Her in all Her ineffable wisdom.

4) Are you terrified of the End Times, both as a Biblical horror of childhood and as an adult who reads the f*cking news? Let’s fantasize awhile about a solvable apocalypse (because what would that even look like, yo).

5) Do you keep reflexively binarizing good and evil? Still giving in to the temptation to characterize humans as righteous or fallen, especially celebrities and political prospects? Spend some time on Our Side with Adam, the utterly human Antichrist, as he makes choices that matter -- some goodish, some baddish, all with mixed consequences, because that’s what humans do.

6) Do you need more queer love stories in your life? Yes you do. Yes. YES. Here it is. The good stuff. Whether it’s gay, trans, genderfluid, asexual, agender, metaphysical, whatever (I’m enjoying reading all these takes and more on AO3) it’s a hell of a love story.

Good Omens was a f*cking revelation.

I’m not sure why the show hit me as hard as it did in the Exvangelical feels. It’s not that it’s a perfect show, but it was the right thing at the right time for me, and it brought a truck full of dynamite to the excavation I was just beginning with a trowel and a makeup brush. I finished watching ep 6 and thought “why do I feel like I’ll be thinking about this every single day for years?”

And then I looked down, and lo and behold I had an open chest wound -- inside of which I found the banished memory of a child trembling and praying in terror in a dark room.

There was a lot that I forgot about in the ten years it took me to hike away from Evangelical life. It all came rushing back.

I had forgotten the sweat and cries during exorcisms and the heat of laying on of hands. I had forgotten fits of ecstatic tears of self-hatred and self-denial so strong they were almost blissful, as I sang and chanted mantras like “I am nothing, You are everything.” I had forgotten giving away ten percent of my income until I was 26. I had forgotten the constant mental effort of Being A Proverbs 31 Woman, about submission and complementarianism and feeling responsible to guard the virtue of men by never tempting them. I had forgotten the pressure to not even masturbate before marriage and to become a sexual athlete the night after.

I had forgotten the hours and hours of daily prayers. Every phrase was carefully carved in language my superego ran by my doctrine, to make sure no hint of rebellion ever bled through. I washed words of need and doubt and frustration from my mind so they could never slip between me and my Heavenly Father. I didn’t just want to hide thoughts God wouldn’t like, I would have cut them out with violence if I knew how. As a result I picked and ticced and cut and exhibited symptoms of OCD.

It hurt to remember all of this at once during a BBC Amazon Prime miniseries. It confused me. It confused my spouse. I looked at all these feelings, exposed and piled in a massive dirty heap -- and I spotted the straps I used to haul it around with me for decades. Who knew I could carry all that? The weight of faith?

But I don’t have to pick it up again. I had a new story to help me frame my story. I felt equipped with a flaming sword to face my past and a new syntax to describe the old ideas I'm ready to let go of.

I got to recast Heaven and Hell. I was invited to ask myself whether a cozy cluttered bookshop doesn’t beat them both hands down.

I got to reimagine angels and demons, good and bad, intentions and consequences. I was invited to live in the reality that we’re all of us humans in between, and that I’m probably still overinvested in the value of Good and Bad as yardsticks.

I got to reimagine western history. The show’s perspective of history is very limited and Eurocentric, but it’s also the version of history I was taught at an early age, which made the story a useful lens to deconstruct what I learned before I knew much about critical thinking.

The opening of Episode 3 in particular f*cked me up. First Aziraphale lies to God and She vanishes, then Crowley starts poking holes in the story of the Flood, then at the Crucifixion -- I started breathing hard on my first viewing, experiencing a real physiological threat response. I was loving it, of course, but distressed panicky love.

The second time I watched it I realized what was happening: I was going back to Sunday School to revisit ideas I absorbed before I was fully sentient, and examining them in the light of fully formed adult secular morality. They look different from here.

When God withdraws Her presence from Aziraphale in the first few moments of Ep 3 as he prevaricates (well, lies) I remembered the one great fear of my faithful life: that I could sin a particular sin and as punishment I would be cut off from God’s presence. As a believer in the End Times, that meant the Rapture could occur at any moment and I might be rejected, be left behind to experience the Tribulation.

Now, from some remove, I realize that I always had one fear larger. It’s a thought I never allowed myself to entertain consciously. Good Omens unearthed it like a vein of flowing lava:

If the Apocalypse as my church describes it is real, how could God want it to happen? And if God does, is this a God I want to worship? If I don’t, but I’ll be damned for that, is my faith freely chosen?

Whose side could I really be on, in the End Times, if not Heaven’s or Hell’s?

These are not small questions.

I’m relieved that I answered them a long time ago for myself.

But even after the answering, there’s fallout; a million little knots to untie and ideas to unlearn. We all get to spend our lives doing this sort of archaeological dig through our childhood baggage, I suppose. My Stuff is certainly not unique. It’s just a lot. Same as everyone’s.

But once in awhile a story comes along and helps us with the process. A sharper spade, a better tool for the work. In my case, through Good Omens I received demolition-grade explosives. It gave me a framework, characters, and a personal shorthand to speed my own digging and contextualize what I find.

If your history is kinda like mine -- whether you’re still in the faith or not -- be sure to talk to someone about church stuff from your past. The weird stuff, the dark stuff, the things you did/people did to you that now seem “off.” Even if you’ve grown past the point of “mental illness requires an exorcism” there are still dangerous ideas buried like land mines in our moral matrices. Self-hatred, intolerance, fear of abandonment, fear that failure is damnation, presumption that “we’re” on the “right side” of everything and “they’re” not, fear that we the apocalypse Is Written by powers above and so we can’t change it.

I’m so happy I know a story with an Our Side now.

I’m so happy I know a story in which the true test of devotion to God’s Ineffable Plan is turning away from the dictates of Heaven and turning toward the World.

I’m so glad I met Aziraphale -- so like me, still seeking Heaven’s approval far too late in the game. I’m so grateful he found the courage to walk away, and I’m so glad I did too. I love that I know Crowley now, self-pwning lovelorn disaster demon of minor inconveniences and imagination and free will. I’m so happy Crowley was there to tempt his friend with questions from the start, and to receive him when he was finally ready to break away.

I’m so proud to know Adam and the Them and Anathema and Newt, inept humans trying their hardest against unstoppable cosmic forces, getting it right not just despite their flaws but through and because of them.

I’m so grateful I’ve finally managed to completely swap to female pronouns for God (thanks, Frances). I still love stories about Her, I still enjoy talking theology and religion. And after 20+ years of insisting God is above gender but masculinizing him, it’s about time I switch to thinking of God as Her for a spell to even things out.***

I’m so thankful for the nicest fandom I’ve known in ages and all the glorious queer beautiful amazing body-positive art and writing growing in this fabulous garden.

Confession accomplished.

CM

P.S. I might not have the time/resources you need to chat with you if you’ve had similar experiences or want to discuss. If you need help be sure to reach somewhere healthy to get it. If you witness abuse, online or in church or otherwise -- report it, block it, mute it, shut it down, whatever is in your power.

P.P.S. If you have words of rebuke for me from a churchy place, and/or critiques about gender or politics, sorry, don’t give a f*ck. This is my story to tell and I am secure in my spiritual status. I am free indeed.

++++++++++++++

*Re. Deconversion: Or rather, I had my faith zapped out of me in what turned out to be the truest rapturous religious experience of my life. It happened in a church service; I almost fell out and spoke in tongues with the tingling power of understanding that I was truly and finally faithless. It’s an interesting deconversion story if you're familiar with charismatic church stuff, ask me sometime over tea. It felt like this.

**Re. Exorcisms: Most disturbing was the regular practice of exorcising people who clearly needed professional help for their mental health. I was present when prayers against demons happened over cases of depression, manic depression, epilepsy and other seizures, addiction, schizophrenia, and psychotic episodes. My particular church did acknowledge the role of modern medicine, but felt that the true core of these issues was spiritual and that medication ultimately could not solve a problem of demonic infestation. Looking back now I shudder and weep to think that this happened, that I was part of it once, and that it still happens daily at churches everywhere. It can be unspeakably damaging to the people being prayed over. If this practice happens in your church, leave. If it happens at a church where you’re in leadership, end it.

***Re. God as She/Her:  I encourage you to find your own appropriate pronouns for God, whether you believe in Them or not. For me personally, still reeling from the Proverbs 31 upbringing, She/Her is very healing for now. But gender is a construct etc. etc.