#and like 90% of the people who i knew from there came out queer and neuro atypical

[lauraroselam]

So I wrote this weird book about queer dragons. It came out the same day as the other dragon book everyone talks about. It was a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK, though, which was incredible!

However, I'm not sure how to continue to promote this book--people either seem to really like it, or not quite get it. Or it just wasn't what they expected. Which is fine, no book can please everyone, and I knew I'd made some unusual craft choices that was going to make it more marmite. (Or, as my brain tells me at midnight, I'm just a bad writer). However, there's that librarian saying "every book its reader" and the people who love this book REALLY love it, and that makes me so happy. So I decided to write this post and explain its weirdness and lay out what you can expect if you do pick it up. Maybe you're my kind of odd, too. :-)

Short pitch: 800 years ago, dragons and humans were bonded, then humans were dicks, stole the dragons' magic, and banished them to a dying world. But humans have short memories, forgot, and now worship dragons as gods. The dragon "gods" remember, and they do not forgive.

Thief Arcady steals their grandsire's stone seal (which helps them funnel magic) from their tomb. Their grandsire supposedly released a magical plague that killed a proportion of society, and Arcady is locked out of society as a result. They perform a spell to rewrite the seal to have a new identity as they want to go to university at the Citadel and also clear their family's name. Problem? The spell also accidentally calls through Everen, the last male dragon, trapped in human form. Everen has been foretold to save his kind, and now he has a chance: he just has to convince one little human to trust him mind, body, and soul, and then kill them. Then he'll be able to steal the human's magic back, rip a hole in the Veil, and the dragons can return. Good news for dragons, less good news for humans. As you might expect: this does not go to plan. Because emotions.

Grab it now. (Note: there's still a contractual delay so it's not available in US audiobook yet, annoyingly. Hopefully soon). (If you are like "weird queer dragons?! Sign me up" but aren't interested in hearing why the author has made certain decisions and want to go into the text cold, stop here! Death of the author/birth of the reader, etc. Otherwise, carry on.)

You should pick up Dragonfall if:

You like experimental narrative positions! It's all collected by an unnamed archivist who has access to both first person narratives (Arcady, the genderfluid human thief, Everen the hot dragon) and can scry into the past and draw out third person narratives (Sorin, hot priest assassin. Cassia, Everen's sister, who is also hot. Spoiler: everyone in this book is hot). Then to make it even weirder, Everen's bits are technically in first person direct address, so he's writing it all to Arcady (the first chapter ends with: "For that human was, of course, you. And this is our story, Arcady.") I ended up writing it this way for a few reasons, even though it probably would have been simpler to just stick to straight up third throughout, like most epic fantasy does. The big one is that Arcady is genderfluid and uses any pronouns (I tend to default to they when I talk about them outside of the text), and constantly gendering them in the text felt wrong whether I used he, she, or they. This way bypasses that a lot in the first volume, so it's up to the reader to make up their own mind. I also just really love first person direct address as a narrative position. It can be a little confronting, and it makes Everen the dragon sound a bit more predatory at the start. But it's also quite intimate. Is he writing his sections as an apology, or a love letter? Both? You find out at the end. So if your green flag books are: The Fifth Season, The Raven Tower, or Harrow the Ninth, this might also be your jam.

You love classic 90s fantasy. This is in many ways an homage to all the stuff I read growing up: Robin Hobb and the Realm of the Elderlings (the book is dedicated to Hobb in particular), the Dragonriders of Pern, Tad Williams, Lynn Flewelling, Robert Jordan, Mercedes Lackey, Tamora Pierce, etc. But I wanted to give it a more modern twist. I'm NB and growing up I didn't see a lot of queerness in fantasy, and I clung to the examples I did find (Vanyel, the Fool). Also, not 90s fantasy, but I also freaking loved Seraphina by Rachel Hartman and Priory of the Orange Tree, so those were influences too.

You're not put off by Worldbuilding(TM) and a slower pace. Probably because I grew up on the likes of Tad Williams, I honestly love slow-paced fantasy. I love to luxuriate in a world and take my time getting to know a made up world. In Assassin's Quest it takes over 100 pages for Fitz to leave the forest. Love it. I have a more lyrical writing style, I guess, and I'm pretty descriptive. My stuff always tends to start off slower, set the stage, and then ramps up the pace as we get further along. So yes, my book starts out with some infodumping, depending on your tolerance level of that sort of thing. I worked with a linguist and they made a conlang for the dragon language (hi @seumasofur). There's a map by Deven Rue (cartographer for Critical Role). I got nerdy.

You love queernorm fantasy! This is set in a world where it's considered rude to assume a stranger's gender and so you tend to default to they/them. If you consider someone much higher in status than you, you'd capitalise it to the honorific, such as They/Them. Once you get to know someone, you tend to flash your pronouns to them with a hand signal, since a sign language called Trade is also a lingua franca in the world. 99.95% of all the dragons are also lesbians, BTW. Everen is the last male dragon.

You like frankly silly levels of slow burn. Everen and Arcady can't physically touch without it causing Everen pain while they're half-bonded. They may or may not find creative loopholes. But it's not mega mega spicy, if you're expecting that. I expect the spice levels will gradually go up as the series progresses.

Alright, I think that's more than enough to give you a sense of what you'd find in Dragonfall. If you're open to sharing this post so it reaches more people outside of my little corner of the internet, I'd really appreciate it. Whenever I do any bit of self-promo, I'm always so anxious and worry it'll get like, 2 eyeballs on it anyway or that I'm just annoying people by mentioning that my art even exists. And if you end up liking it, please tell a friend.

I'm loving the recent dragon renaissance! Long live dragons.

[iwanthermidnightz]

This was a very good article! I loved hearing Kristen’s (and Jodie Fosters) perspective as a queer trailblazer. Inserting some snippets below 🤍

To get to this point, Stewart’s weathered more than a decade of unrelenting media scrutiny, first about her straight relationships, then about her gay ones, as she figured out her own identity. She leveraged her global stardom from the “Twilight” franchise not to become a superhero or a lifestyle guru, but to fuel an astonishing run of acclaimed independent films, including “Clouds of Sils Maria,” “Still Alice,” “Certain Women,” “Personal Shopper” and the Princess Diana drama “Spencer,” for which she earned an Oscar nomination.

“Whenever I hear that she’s doing something new, I’m so curious to see what it is, because it’s going to be a movie that hasn’t been made before,” says Clea DuVall, who directed Stewart in one of her only Hollywood films during this period, Hulu’s 2020 release “Happiest Season,” the first lesbian Christmas rom-com backed by a major studio. “She really is so herself. And I think that’s why so many people respond to her the way they do — because she is so authentic.”

By the time Stewart stepped on the stage of “Saturday Night Live” in February 2017, she’d spent the previous two years trying to convince the press that it was OK to write about her relationships with women, rather than resort to the vexing practice of referring to her girlfriend as her “gal pal.”

“It wasn’t even like I was hiding,” she says. “I was so openly out with my girlfriend for years at that point. I’m like, ‘I’m a pretty knowable person.’”

But even with that posture, the media’s “gal pal” dog whistle triggered a deeper, more painful history of intrusive curiosity about Stewart’s sexual identity. “For so long, I was like, ‘Why are you trying to skewer me? Why are you trying to ruin my life? I’m a kid, and I don’t really know myself well enough yet,’” she says. “The idea of people going, ‘I knew that you were a little queer kid forever.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, you should honestly have seen me fuck my first boyfriend.’”

It’s worth dwelling on this point: For almost the entire history of Hollywood, queer actors dreaded the public discovering who they really were, and that fear kept the closet door firmly closed. “Because I was gay, I really retreated,” says DuVall, who came out publicly in 2016. “Even doing a teeny tiny movie like [the ’90s lesbian cult favorite] ‘But I’m a Cheerleader,’ people immediately were like, ‘She’s gay, how can we out her?’ I wanted to stay small.”

Stewart, though, went big, with a monologue on “SNL” about how President Donald Trump, in 2012, obsessively tweeted about her relationship with Pattinson. “Donald, if you didn’t like me then, you’re really probably not going to like me now, because I’m hosting ‘SNL’ — and I’m, like, so gay, dude,” she said to wild cheers from the audience.

“It was cool to frame it in a funny context because it could say everything without having to sit down and do an interview,” Stewart says before running through the kind of questions queer actors have had to consider before coming out publicly: “‘So what platform is that going to be on? And who’s going to make money on that? And who’s going to be the person that broke it?’ I broke it, alone.”

A few days later, I mention Stewart’s “SNL” monologue to Foster over the phone, and she lets out a big laugh. “I never knew that,” she says. “What a wonderful, funny, wry, modern way to be honest to the world. That’s just awesome.”

As Stewart talks about her “SNL” experience, I think about how no stars of her age and stature ever came out when I was growing up as a gay kid in the 1980s and ’90s. So to have her professional trajectory not skip a beat feels like real progress.

When I tell her as much, she takes the conversation in an unexpected direction. “Because I’m an actor, I want people to like me, and I want certain parts,” she says. “I have lots of different experiences that shape who I am that are very, very far from binary. But I did get good at the heteronormative quality. I play that role well. It comes from a somewhat real place — it’s not fake. But it’s fucked up that if I was gayer, it wouldn’t be the case.”

I try to clarify what she means: “So your career maybe would have suffered after coming out had you not affected a performative femininity …”

“… that I know works to my advantage,” she admits, nodding. “That’s why I’m fucking stoked about ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’”

Stewart didn’t let that scandal, as intense as it was in the moment, stifle her. Instead, she grew to fully embrace her queerness in her public life — like bringing her girlfriend, screenwriter Dylan Meyer, to the Oscars in 2022. “It’s not that I wasn’t scared,” Stewart says. “It was just that there was no other way to live.”

She’s even started to recognize that the most ostensibly heterosexual thing she’s done, “Twilight,” has its own queer sparkle. “I can only see it now,” she says. “I don’t think it necessarily started off that way, but I also think that the fact that I was there at all, it was percolating. It’s such a gay movie. I mean, Jesus Christ, Taylor [Lautner] and Rob and me, and it’s so hidden and not OK. I mean, a Mormon woman wrote this book. It’s all about oppression, about wanting what’s going to destroy you. That’s a very Gothic, gay inclination that I love.”

I ask Stewart if she understands how much her decision to come out has also made her a role model for LGBTQ people. She cackles. “Oh, you have no idea,” she says. “Every single woman that I’ve ever met in my whole life who ever kissed a girl in college is like, ‘Yeah, I mean, me too.’ I’m constantly joking with my girlfriend. I’ll be sitting there and be like” — she whispers — “‘She’s gay too. Everyone’s gay.’”

It can be easy to forget just how rare this still is, a giant movie star living such an openly queer life. “It feels like a generational thing, where I’m watching somebody make the leaps that I didn’t think I could ever do,” Foster says.

After fiercely guarding her privacy for decades, Foster came out publicly at the 2013 Golden Globes, and has just now played her first explicitly gay character in the 2023 biopic “Nyad.” Talking about Stewart has put Foster in a reflective mood. As our call is coming to an end, she offers this unprompted insight: “I get a lot of questions about who I was and what I represented in the industry, and was I — I don’t know …” She exhales. “Was I helpful in terms of representation? I’m sure there’s a 12- or 13- or 14-year-old when I was making movies as a young person who said that I had something to offer to them in their life as a queer person. I had to do it my way. I had pioneers to help the way, who I’m grateful for. And now people can be grateful for Kristen for being the pioneer. I’m just — I’m grateful to her.”

This sense of communion with the wider LGBTQ tribe is why Stewart has dedicated herself to embracing the fullness of who she is as a bro-y, butch-y queer woman in her work as an actor and, come hell or high water, a director.

“I was like, ‘I would like to be on that team because we need each other,’” Stewart says. “I didn’t want to be left out anymore. It was this whole world that I didn’t realize I could explore.”

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Bengiyo's Queer Media Syllabus

For those who are not aware, I have decided to run the gauntlet of @bengiyo’s Queer Cinema Syllabus and have officially started Unit 1: Coming of Age Post Moonlight. The films in Unit 1 are Pariah (2011), Get Real (1998), Edge of Seventeen (1998), My Own Private Idaho (1991), and Mysterious Skin (2004)

Today I will be writing about:

Edge of Seventeen (1998) dir. David Moreton

[Available on: Kanopy, Archive, Amazon, Run Time: 1:44]

Summary: A teenager copes with his sexuality on the last day of school in 1984. It shows him coping with being gay and being with friends. (from IMDB)

Cast: Chris Stafford as Eric, the main character  Tina Holmes as Maggie, Eric’s best friend/girlfriend-ish? Anderson Gabrych as Rod, Eric’s gay awakening Lea DeLaria as Angie, former work supervisor of Eric, Maggie, and Rod at their summer job. 

__

I had some firsts with this film. This was the first film in the syllabus that had identifiable tropes that carry through some of the BLs, which makes sense as this syllabus was designed as a progression in to BL. But most importantly, this was the first film in the syllabus that made me truly understand how important it was for me to work my way through these films, and that comes down to the surrounding conversation I had with @bengiyo and @shortpplfedup, when I expressed absolute shock and awe that a film from 1998 had two men shoving their tongues down each other’s throats, mouthing at penises through pants, massaging bare asses on screen, mentioning/simulating rimming, showing and actually using lube. 

I decided to work my way through this syllabus because growing up I a) didn’t know I was queer or at the very least b) did not admit to myself I was queer, c) did not have any out queer people in my family and d) did not have any our queer elders in my surrounding life. Therefore every single piece of queer cinema or television that I consumed was something that I just happened to stumble across, or that I had potentially seen someone post about on tumblr. Thus, there is a wealth of queer cinema that I never knew existed. 

In the past few years I have reflected a lot on how little history I know about my community. I have thought about lines in The Inheritance play where older gay men are discussing how baby gays just Simply Do Not Understand but also how they don’t know the names of important and influential people in the community, we may all know Stonewall, but honestly until a year or so ago I could not name a single other important moment in US queer history. I don’t like how much I am missing because I didn’t know myself and didn’t have anyone around to learn it from. 

All of this to say, I wanted to watch more queer cinema because I didn’t know what was out there, and in doing so I have realized how important it is to me to see these glimpses of history in what was allowed, acceptable, tolerated, made visible, and the level to which queer characters were humanized and treated with empathy and compassion. 

Anyway, I was watching this film and DMing Ben and Nini about it and when I expressed surprise that they were going this far in a film from over 20 years ago, they said the following (independent of each other): 

“I realize you came of age after 9/11, but you truly have no idea how hard this nation regressed” 

“Ah the halcyon days of the 90’s before the weird post-911 puritanical backlash” 

So, naturally a conversation begun around society, art, and culture and how it change between the 90s and 2000s (@shortpplfedup). How military service and gay marriage were compromises compared to what queer people were pushing for before 9-11 (@bengiyo). And that is when I was struck with the understanding that I needed to go through this syllabus. For the sake of understanding what art and culture and queerness was like before 9-11. For the sake of understanding just how far film and television have regressed in the US when it comes to queerness and how it is portrayed, how frequently, and in what contexts in film and television. 

And there are little moments in this film that I see nodding to queer history, the most visually striking one for me being the shot of the back of a record holder that had a pink triangle as its design. That feels extremely intentional to me. 

It is also the first film in the syllabus I’ve seen that contains trends/tropes utilized in BL. First being where a boy, left unattended, grabs the nearest article of his crush’s clothing and smells it. The way the enter the final sex scene in this film by focusing initially on the feet, which I have seen done a number of times in the BLs that I have watched (l just finished You’re My Sky today and they imply sex through foot position, you can see it in the trailer for Only Friends as well). But unlike most of the BLs, I’ve watched that utilize that imagery due to rating requirements or censorship, THE CAMERA KEEPS GOING and you’ve got bare, hairy asses, all the hip you could possibly want, and two men practically eating each other’s faces. I see so many echos of Teh and Tarn’s relationship to one another reflected in the dynamic between Eric and Maggie. 

I guess I don’t have much else say about the film itself except that it is very clearly created by people who are queer, who get it, who understand what Rod is saying when he says he likes Madonna, how you can immediately tell that Eric is going to a gay club when he pulls up to the parking lot of Universal Fruits and Nuts. The way the exterior of that building feels very different from what is inside, and made me think a bit about speakeasies. The shirt Eric wears when he comes out being a disassembled, abstracted face, his brother wearing a That’s The American Way t-shirt. You know what the film is trying to tell us about Eric’s identity based on which female musical artists he has on his wall. 

Like the other two films I have seen in Unit 1, the ending of the film is the most striking, lingering part for me. Eric comes out to his mother in the following exchange: 

Eric says “I’m gay” \\ in the quietest voice she has, his mother says “I know” Eric and his mother hug* and she asks him“What did I do wrong?” she lets go and moves to the other end of the living room \\ Eric looks devastated says* “I love you” \\ she turns to look at him and says “I don’t know how to handle this”. 

In that initial “I’m gay” \\ “I know” exchange be followed by a nice, warm hug, there was a spark of hope in me that this would be a coming out that his parent would handle gracefully (despite the other moments in the film where she starts to suspect and question him). I thought for the briefest of seconds that her question “What did I do wrong?” was her asking Eric how she had misstepped in ways that he was worried about coming out to her. But in about the same amount of time that it took for Eric to process the question, I realized a much deeper, more painful thread was being called to the surface: “What did I do wrong [to make you gay?]”

This feels like an admission a la Mol in 180 Degrees, telling Wang that she is, in fact, disappointed that he is gay. And you can see the way it impacts Eric. And silly me, I should never for a second thought that this coming out might go over flawlessly, because this story and parts of gay culture and gay sex that are included in this film indicate to me there are queer people behind the story. Which means the way that Eric’s mother handles the coming out is so much more likely to be realistic. Parent and child both confirming that they love each other, but their child still being hurt by their parent’s inability to understand and figure out how to handle new information like that spoke directly to how the conversation between me and my mother went when I came out. 

But even more important to me than that scene, than the complexity that comes from loving someone and not knowing how to reconcile love and homophobia, is that life goes on. Eric leaves the house, and ends up back at the gay club, surrounded by queer elders, seeing a boy he has a crush on, and smiling and enjoying himself with his community while he listens to his friend sing the words “nothing but blue skies from now on”. Which just feels…idk, so goddamn real? Carrying the pain of rejection with you but being determined to find joy in the people who accept you, despite how much the rejection may hurt. 

I place this film in the by, for, about category 

In general, I would have given this show an 8.5/10, but with the inclusion of poppers, blow jobs, rimming, use of condoms, and the first fucking inclusion of lube in any gay sex scenes I’ve ever seen on screen, I’m bumping it up to a 9. 

Favorite Moment:

The Redi-Whip can spraying in Eric's hand after Rod says something out of pocket.

Favorite Quote:

Eric: “I guess I thought if I came out, everything would get easier” 

Angie: *immediately bursts out laughing*

[honey-from-hell]

Red, White, & Royal Blue Movie Rant

Spoilers. All the spoilers. You've been warned.

I'm going to be talking pretty negatively about the movie, and if you don't want that, please, please scroll. I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade. I know how important this movie is to a lot of people and the last thing I want is to upset anyone with my opinions. I just need to get my thoughts down. I'm a list autistic (yes, ha, like Alex).

My ramblings about this are not in any way meant to take away the importance of this movie. It is sacred in a way to a lot of people, the same way Harry Potter was when it came out (fuck JKR). It makes people feel seen despite how good or bad it is and that is important. This is my opinion on this piece of media as just a movie, as a thing. NOT as a concept that is good and needed and unashamed. I really hope this is the beginning of more feel-good queer movies. As a queer person, as an American in a time of trans-bills who is dating a trans person, this movie is powerful. But like, also bad. And I have opinions on it. 

So, I didn't like the movie. The mixture of the promos, the R rating, and the 90% it had on Rotten Tomatoes before it came out definitely got my hopes up. And I love the book. But in the end, I don't like the movie. I wasn't expecting something worthy of awards and critical acclaim, but I was expecting something more.

I think the reason I can say I didn't like the movie and not something more along the lines of, "I enjoyed it despite its problems," is because of how many issues I have with it. If it was just pacing, or just the cheesiness, or just an actor I think I would have liked it. But I pretty constantly went, "Oh, I don't like that." And the issues just kept stacking.

Going into it, I knew the main differences from the book were the lack of June and the fact Ellen and Oscar weren't divorced. And I think those two huge elements that play a part in Alex's character are really apparent in the movie. I thought Alex was kind of flat. I thought a lot of the characters were kind of flat. And this one is going to piss a lot of people off, but I didn't like Nicholas Galitzine's acting at all. I think the moment the movie went from enjoyably bad to bad bad for me is the last third where it's from Henry's perspective. The scene where he started browsing the books in the red room like that was particularly awkward and stilted. A lot of his scenes felt like that, like he was acting for a play or something. It wasn’t realistic. Since he’s a main character, it really did affect my opinion of the movie as a whole. 

Amy and Zarah were amazing. And Stephen Fry as the King did a great job. Taylor Zakhar Perez’s acting was on point, most of the time. I think some of my favorite scenes were Alex interacting with his mom, Zarah, Amy, and Nora at the beginning of the movie. Also, I fucking loved Nora. I wish she had been in the movie more, and also explicitly bisexual. And Pez. I just really wanted Nora/June/Pez, but I digress, not having that is not what made the movie unenjoyable for me.

I tried not to compare it to the book as a way to determine how good or bad it was. Like, when I heard June wasn't a character, I didn't immediately go, "Well, that means it going to be bad." But one of the great things about the book is the way all the characters interact with each other, not just Alex and Henry. We get to see what kind of relationship Alex and June have with their mom as their mom and as the president. We get to see the White House Trio be goofy but genius young adults figuring themselves out. Those were the moments that flesh the characters out and make you care about them. And there just really wasn’t very much of that in the movie.

The R rating made me happy, for one, because Alex says “fuck” so much in the books. His potty mouth is commented on. It is part of his character. It’s such an easy way to portray this very genuine and good character as someone who is still brash and a bit of an asshole. I had also hoped that the rating would help it feel like the book (says the person desperately trying not to compare it to the book). It is supposed to be sexy and fun on top of being unapologetically queer. But on the flip side, that was such a PG-13 movie and I have a feeling whoever decides the rating of movies was being homophobic. Because a gay sex scene is more “inappropriate” than a straight one. I also associate a level of maturity with R-rated movies, not because of more mature content but because the people consuming the movie and the movie itself should appeal to a more mature audience. If that makes sense. But it felt like a Hallmark and Disney’s ever so slightly more raunchy lovechild. 

The pacing immediately took me out of the movie. It was like watching a movie on 2x speed. I totally get why so many people thought it should be a mini-series or something. And I know they couldn't fit all 400 pages into a movie, but there have been adaptations before that do a solid job. I don't think RWRB did. I feel like Alex’s character development was flat and a bit magical—unnatural and unearned. Like, Henry apologizes and suddenly they are BFFs.

AND THE EMAILS. That’s what the whole ending conflict and it felt very much forgotten. We got the text messages and stuff, but when it came to the emails, it was just voiceovers. I think, like in the book where Alex thinks about private email servers (which is like my favorite joke in the book, it’s so layered in so many ways), there needed to be the equivalent of that in the movie before to bring attention to it. But this catalyst just kind of gets overlooked until it’s relevant.

And motherfucking Miguel Ramos. He felt like just a juvenile addition by being into Alex and being big bad because he’s into Alex. It was kind of icky in a way the book avoided. In the book, it was about politics, and while icky, they didn’t use a queer character to achieve the big conflict. His character, and really the whole progression, reminded me a lot of fanfiction written by a new writer. Like, the concept is good but the execution is what holds it back. 

Okay, so, I for sure have more things I disliked than things I liked, but I did appreciate the humor. It was the one part that 100% felt like the book. It was stupid and inappropriate, but witty and compelling. The direct quotes had me fangirling. Zarah, Amy, and Nora. Just ugh. I’m gay. Shaan? I also miss his sweet ass. 

I didn’t expect this movie to be perfect but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. I’ll try watching it again when I’m not in hyperfixation mode. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

EDIT: Also, Alex confirmed their relationship in the speech BEFORE the talk with the king. Like, Sir King Stephen Fry, it's already out there, man. The speech was supposed to take place after their talk with Philip and the King.

[cinemaocd]

this is probably going to be long

OK, I lived through the AIDS crisis. I was a young person questioning my sexuality at arguably the worst possible time in American history. I discovered the word "bisexual" (hooray I have a label) only to read a few days later in mainstream news about how "bisexuals were responsible for spreading AIDS to the hetero community" which was a take that was tolerated on national news shows at the time. The only sex education I had in my entire public education was a film we were forced to watch about how you could get AIDS from french kissing (you can't) and heavy petting (which we didn't know what it was because it was outdated old people code for oral lol)...

The entire LGBTQIA plus community was not attacked as a monolith, the focus of hate came on gay men, because they were the most obviously effected and also the most visible and prominent in the community. The rest of the community did their best to embrace and protect them. (For example lesbian groups that were on the front lines of caring for people who were sick when no one else would...).

And there were people like myself who identified as allies but were in a place where they didn't feel safe to come out themselves. I did not come out at that time because even though I was in accepting local community at University and working at a feminist journal I knew I would lose friends and family and possibly future work opportunities. Being Bi it was easier to blend in for me and I took advantage of that. Part of the reason I hesitated so long about coming out was I felt a lot of guilt that I didn't come out in the 90s during the AIDS crisis. I felt like a coward who wasn't worthy to stand with such brave people.

It took me a long time to let go of that self-hate to the point where I could come out. A big part of it was acknowledging how fucked up the climate for LGBTQIA folks in the 80s and 90s. We had two family friends (which is how I knew I would probably be rejected by a lot of my family) who died of AIDS. Yes, these were brilliant, creative men who worked in theater. One of them was the props coordinator for Late Night with David Letterman (responsible for building Dave's velcro suit etc.). I also have a peer who died of AIDS in the early 2000s, long after the disease had supposedly been "not a death sentence" who also happened to be an actor.

Despite their lack of political involvement, they were be seen as radical just because they lived openly as gay men in a society that hated them and wanted them dead, and only tolerated them if they were the "fun gays" who weren't actually threatening the status quo...

Being in theater or the arts was a survival tactic for a lot of people ya know because it was a more accepting environment and because it wasn't considered important like politics, medicine, science etc. (Miss me with the gays can't do math jokes. A gay man invented the fucking computer).

The gay men I knew in long-term monogamous relationships survived the worst of the crisis and they automatically became "respectability queers" for having not died and wanting jobs with health insurance etc. Because one dude follows his dream of working in theater and the other quits theater and goes to work at the phone company and buys a house with his partner, one is fun and the other boring? One is a creative genius creating culture and the other is a consumer of cultural pap? Wow. Great take.

FUCK. I'm just getting so angry thinking about this. You want to know why it took me till I was FIFTY fucking years old to come out: AIDS. That's it. ONE Fucking word.

Sorry I have no idea WHY I fucking started this other than I saw a shitty post that said, our culture became boring because all the fun gays died and left only the boring gays who only care about marriage or whatever.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Kevin Ray

Published: Jan 23, 2024

Prologue: Navigating Cultural Revolution

I’m days away from starting rehearsals for my third literary adaptation as a theater director; my heart is pounding with excitement and fear. There’s nothing more thrilling than the electricity of a vibrant rehearsal room full of talented, generous, creative actors and designers, collaborating with me to adapt literature into a play, but it’s also anxiety-producing because there are a million creative decisions to make. Nonetheless, the theater is booked and the curtain will rise in October 2024; the only thing to do is persist in the pursuit of making great theater.

The inspiration for this production—an adaptation of a 1924 dystopian novel by Russian heretic Yevgeny Zamyatin—arose from my experience, not in creative persistence, but persisting in the face of an ideology that endeavors to bar heretics like me from the arts.

A culture of the arts without heretics isn’t a healthy culture—it's a boring culture. Regrettably, a small but very loud group of activists in the theater have sidelined heretics by demanding artists conform to an identity-grievance fueled monoculture.

Fortunately, I found a way to make theater. I feared I’d be forced out of the field altogether. I lost work for refusing to promote concepts such as “White Supremacy Culture” and “Decolonization,” I infuriated some by refusing to adopt “gender-neutral pronouns,” and I faced disdain for being white, male, and even for identifying as gay and not “queer.”

Unfortunately, I was prepared to deal with identity-based discrimination—I’ve faced prejudice since the beginning of my career. 

Act I: The Wrath of Westboro

I was drawn to theater from a young age, partly because theater groups were welcoming to oddballs, weirdos and outcasts who didn’t fit in elsewhere. Even before it was clear to me, my classmates knew I was gay, and I silently endured daily bullying. Theater was an oasis where I could get away from demeaning comments and fit in with other kids. I relished using my imagination to stand in the shoes of a character who was not me; facing obstacles in a different time and place.

By the late 1990’s I was acting, singing and dancing in a professional production of a musical that toured small and mid-sized cities across the United States. Getting paid to tour in that musical was the epitome of a “dream come true.” 

I was lucky to be in that show for various reasons. First, the production held auditions in New York, a city overflowing with talented performers. Being cast in that show was, as they say, “a lucky break.” But this was not the first break I had had in my life. 

When I was eight years old, I had a break of a different kind: I broke my neck. The two vertebrae just below my skull were fractured. A neurosurgeon told my mother and me it was rare to see someone with this injury still alive, most people died instantly; the few who lived were permanently paralyzed. After the neurosurgeon explained the procedure he would perform, he looked directly into my eyes and said, “If there is anything you want to do in your life, you should do it before this surgery.” I said I wanted to have another birthday. 

I survived; and at twenty-six, I was dancing across stages around the country. More than lucky, that was miraculous. 

The last bit of luck I had was the date of my birth. If I had been born a few years earlier, I may not have lived to see my twenty-sixth year. The generation of gay men who came just before me were ravaged by HIV/AIDS. As reported, “by 1995 one American gay man in nine was diagnosed with AIDS.” The epidemic also spawned an anti-gay activist movement. 

Enter stage left: the Westboro Baptist Church. Founded by Fred Phelps in 1955, the church gained notoriety in the early 90’s for picketing a park frequented by gay men. As reported, they also “picketed at American soldiers’ funerals, thanking God for killing those who’d fought for a country that ‘institutionalized sin.’ They prayed God would kill Westboro’s enemies.” The musical I was in prominently featured gay male characters, making it a prime target for Westboro’s bigoted activism.

As our tour bus pulled into the parking lot of a Kansas theater, church members stood outside holding signs that read “God Hates Fags” and “Two Gay Rights: AIDS and Hell.” Many in the cast were gay, but to the Westboro protestors we were not three-dimensional human beings with the capacity to love, dream and hate, just like them. They didn’t care about the commitment we had to our craft, the challenges everyone overcame to be cast in the show, and that, at the end of the day, we were all performing in the musical because of our love for theater. The point of identity-grievance activism is to ignore our common humanity and weaponize identity.

The protesters were within their legal right to peacefully hold signs with heinous language. Considering the musical highlighted how difficult the lives of gay men can be because of the discrimination they face, I wonder if Westboro’s activism only deepened the meaning of our show: as they walked past the signs, that audience experienced, first-hand, the ignorant vitriol many gay men encounter.

I was afraid that night, but I did what I had to do: I went on with the show; Westboro didn’t stop me from living my dream.

Despite fringe groups like Westboro, the late 1990’s was a time of great advances for gay men. As the country headed toward a new century, society was becoming more welcoming to a wide variety of minority populations. How could any of us have predicted the identity-grievance nightmare that was to come, and the impact it would have on the theater?

Act II: A New Dream

When actors aren’t working in a show, they survive by holding down a “day job.” Around 2002, I stumbled into a day job as a Teaching Artist. Teaching Artists visit schools on behalf of cultural institutions (theaters, dance companies, orchestras etc.) delivering arts programming, often in under-funded districts that don’t have budgets to hire full-time arts teachers.

I didn’t think I would like teaching, but within a few months I was hooked. The students loved the opportunity to get out of their seats and participate in theater activities, and I was fascinated by the challenge of writing a lesson plan; it was like a magical chemistry experiment: two parts explaining directions, twenty parts playing games, one part classroom management. And it was a kind of performing, the curtain went up every time I entered a classroom. 

I remember the exact moment I decided to stop pursuing acting. When I arrived at an elementary school in Far Rockaway, Queens for my third or fourth visit, I opened the door to the classroom, and the students exclaimed, “HE’S HERE!” At that moment I thought, “Nobody is excited when you walk into an audition room, but these kids, their teacher, and you are excited to be together in this classroom – go where it’s warm.”

I worked hard to improve my skills. I read books about teaching, went to conferences, and studied pedagogical theories. But the best way to learn how to teach, is to teach. So I took as many jobs as I could get, working with every age group from pre-K to high school, with students diagnosed with “special needs”, students who predominantly spoke Spanish and Polish, jobs in low-income neighborhoods and jobs at high-profile theaters offering programming for youth from wealthy families. I worked in schools, summer camps, and church basements. I loved theater, and I now loved teaching, which led me to a new dream: to become a theater professor.

In 2008, I enrolled in a graduate program without understanding all master’s degrees are not considered “terminal.” When I completed the program, I was devastated to discover my degree had no value in the academic job market. I sank into a deep clinical depression and spent the next year and a half digging myself out with the help of a skilled therapist. But in 2016, I had another lucky break: I was chosen for a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Theater Directing. I earned my “terminal degree” in 2018. I was on my way to a successful career in academia, but a new kind of activism attempted to kill that dream.

Act III: Something Wicked This Way Comes

In the summer of 2018, I attended a national conference for theater professionals in higher education. A panelist with experience on hiring committees explained, “To teach theater and direct productions at a college or university, you have to have an MFA and you have to show the  committee you can get yourself directing work at regional theaters.”

I left the panel deflated. During my final stretch of graduate school, we practiced “elevator pitches” for potential interviews with artistic directors. Although the professor said my pitch was excellent, I wondered, “Who would I pitch to? My chances of meeting with an artistic director are less than my chances of a sit down with the Pope!” 

I knew this because an activist movement sometimes referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ) was deeply entrenched in the theater industry. In the same way Westboro Baptist Church demonized me based on an identity trait I could not change, CSJ activists in the theater were deciding who was a so-called “oppressor” based on identity. I was nearly everything they deemed “oppressive”: white, male, middle-aged and, probably worst of all, I identified as gay, not queer. For readers unfamiliar with the distinction, gay simply connotes same-sex sexual orientation while queer conjoins sexual orientation with a laundry list of radical leftist politics. Although many claim the word queer is “inclusive” of the variety of identities encapsulated in the ever-growing LGBTQIA+ acronym, as Andrew Sullivan explains, “queer” is “designed to trigger gay men, especially gay men who aren’t politically of the far left … to make us feel we aren’t part of the world or of the community.” Rather than function as a term of inclusivity, “queer” has been weaponized to identify and exclude traitors.

When I asked an aspiring playwright what she thought my chances were, she said white men had been directors “for so long” and it was time that they step aside. I didn’t think a person’s race or sex determined whether or not that person had the skills, talent or commitment to be a theater director.

Theater artists were the last people I suspected would attempt to bar anyone from participating in the arts based on identity. We were the oddballs, outcasts, and weirdos who accepted each other because our differences excluded us from mainstream culture. Now, my colleagues in the theater no longer saw me as a three-dimensional person with thoughts, feelings, and dreams untethered to my identity. Instead, I was nothing but an embodiment of identity characteristics they wanted to amputate.

I ran into a professor from my first stint in graduate school at a reception for theater directors in higher ed. Mid-conversation he said, “Look around this room! I’m the only person of color in here. I’m not feeling supported! Come with me.” Without telling me his intentions, he led me over to the event’s planner and told her the organization needed to do a better job getting “directors of color” into the room. I stood frozen, a dumbstruck pawn furthering someone else’s activist agenda.

I was used as a pawn again when I attended the second night of a festival of theater directors’ projects in development. The first two works came and went from the stage, but the third piece started on an odd note. A bald, middle-aged man stood center stage and a young female director sat far away from him on the stage’s edge. At first, I thought this was a curious experiment in hyper-realism, but I soon realized it was not a performance. The director apologized to the audience for the work presented the night before because, she said, she’d received several emails saying the piece “offended” and “harmed” some audience members. The man center stage chimed in, but was quickly cut off by the director who asserted, “I’m speaking now.” It was revealed the man was a former NYPD officer who asked the director to help adapt his experiences on the police force into a play. Suddenly, audience members who had been at the previous evening’s performance were standing and shouting at the retired officer. Each time he tried to defend himself, the director cut him off saying it was not his “time to speak.” The man’s wife stood up and pleaded, “My husband is a good man! He protected this city on 9/11!” But the ravenous audience continued to shred the retiree over the “offensive” and “harmful" words presented the night before, words we were now not allowed to hear. I never learned what the police officer said that caused this reaction. But from the way he was treated, it seemed his mere existence as a police officer was contrived as somehow “harmful" to these people—who wouldn’t even let him talk. After the “show” I approached the theater’s artistic director and said, “I didn't know I was going to be a participant in a public shaming before I bought a ticket to this event.” She said, “There were some things he needed to hear.” 

On a cold January weekend in 2019, I was alone in my Brooklyn apartment desperately trying to hatch a plan to change my prospects in an ecosystem increasingly intolerant of people and views that did not conform to CSJ. To get a college teaching job, I needed to direct something. I decided I could either whine and cry that the activists were preventing me from realizing my dream, or I could create my own opportunity. If I couldn't direct a play at an established non-profit theater, maybe I could independently direct and produce it myself.

ACT IV: Burning Down the House

As part of my Teaching Artist work, I had experience “devising” original plays with youth. Devising is a theater-making technique that means collaboratively creating a play originating from an idea rather than a playwright’s pen. “Devisors” start with source material such as newspaper articles, transcripts of court documents, old photographs, paintings, stories, anything that stimulates ideas a devising ensemble can transform into a play. On that frigid weekend in 2019, I decided to devise a play from ghost stories by Edith Wharton. Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton skillfully used fiction to criticize rigid social structures and her lesser-known ghost stories overflow with rich social commentary and wry humor. I pitched the project to some colleagues from my MFA program. Excited both by the stories and my collaborative approach, they all said, “Yes!” They didn't see my identity as a liability, but my employers did.

In the fall of 2019, at an annual “back to school” workshop, I was, for the first time, segregated into what’s called a “racial affinity group.” When asked why we were breaking into groups by race, our supervisor said, “Because we live in a systemically racist country.” I was asked prior to the meeting via a Google survey if I was willing to participate in racially segregated groups, and I responded, “No.” After I was put in the “white affinity group,” I asked the facilitator why I had been segregated at work against my will. She told me she would get back to me. She never did. 

At another arts organization, my supervisor called me into a private meeting to reprimand me for refusing to let my co-workers address me with “they/them” pronouns in emails. She said everyone was using “gender-neutral pronouns” in an organization-wide campaign to “dismantle patriarchal systems of oppression.” I let her know that I was a gay man, proud to be one, was not willing to let anyone else decide what my pronouns should be, and that applying pronouns to a person who doesn’t want them is the definition of “mis-gendering.” My supervisor bristled. I said, “Well then, we will have to agree to disagree.” In response, she slammed her hand on her desk, jumped out of her seat exclaiming, “NO!” and left the room. I wasn’t hired back.

I was also pressured to incorporate concepts from CSJ into my teaching. The idea was to “embed” theories such as Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Ibram X. Kendi’s “Anti-Racism,” Judith Butler’s “Queer Theory,” Frantz Fanon’s “Decolonization,” Kimberly Crenshaw’s “Intersectionality,” Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” and Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” into pre-K to 12 arts-instruction.

Instead of spreading the joy and excitement of theater, I was to use theater instruction as cover for indoctrinating children into a worldview that taught them to see themselves as victims or “oppressors” based on their race and sex. When I voiced concerns, I wasn’t offered further work.

Determined to “dismantle” so-called “harmful white-centered” practices in the theater, activists were inadvertently destroying collaboration. The most important ingredient in collaboration is trust. Trust enables collaborators to bravely take artistic risks as an ensemble. But the activists were sowing distrust by reducing everyone to identities “oppressing” each other; re-casting benign interactions as overt acts of prejudice or covert insults like “white women’s tears” and “microaggressions”—the latter is a doctrine that turns everyday interactions, like asking where someone is from, into a grave racial insult if a listener decides their subjective feelings are hurt. Where there are no real insults or real acts of aggression, “microaggressions” can be manufactured out of thin air. Rehearsal rooms became ticking time bombs where activist artists could hurl overblown accusations of supposed psychic harm at any moment.

Not satisfied with obliterating collaboration, the activists jettisoned their audience. As reported in Washingtonian, when a theater endeavored to revamp its programming to create “the most woke theater in Washington,” the journalist wondered, “Can they do this without alienating a crowd who, liberal as they may be, might also be slower to get with the times?” To which an executive board member replied, “It’s entirely likely that as we continue the work we’re doing, we’re going to lose more people, and I think we’re all okay with that.”

I attended one show that ended by pressuring “the folks who call themselves white” to leave their seats and stand on stage to understand that they don’t “own” their seats. At another show, “non-Black audience members were invited to leave” before the end because the play was “not for or about” them. Some productions held segregated “black out” performances. How do you reach hearts and minds when you’re kicking hearts and minds out of the space?

When the pandemic hit, and all our work meetings took place on Zoom, I repeatedly heard the phrase “burn it all down” from my Millennial and Gen Z colleagues. Their perspective seemed to be the theater that existed before the lockdown was a racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, capitalist (fill in whatever “-ists” and “-phobics” you could think of) oppressive system of “predominately white institutions” traumatizing artists through a “nonprofit industrial complex” (an oxymoron in any case) that needed to be vaporized. As reported in The Intercept, Millennial and Gen Z employees across the nonprofit sector were, in the words of one anonymous senior leader, “not doing well” and creating a “toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it - callout culture, cancel culture whatever - [that’s] creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one's able to talk about it, no one's able to say how bad it is.” It should have come as a surprise to no one that, during 2020’s summer of “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests, the atmosphere imploded.

First came the "Not Speaking Out” list, a Google spreadsheet listing the names of not-for-profit theaters that did not make a “sufficient” statement on social media about “systemic racism.” Then came “We See You White American Theater,” a twenty-nine page list of demands for reform that included race-based hiring quotas, ceasing “all contractual security agreements with police departments,” and requiring “creative teams to undergo Anti-Racism Workshops at the beginning of each rehearsal or tech process and ensure accountability with signed statements.” Finally came the targeted attacks on non-compliant individuals. One of the most heartbreaking incidents was the pressure campaign that preceded an executive director’s resignation. Her own staff circulated an online petition to the entire membership stating: 

We are here to tell you that, underneath your dress of respectability politics, your slip is showing… it looks like your predatory tokenism of BIPOC staff members, your opportunistic fundraising, and your calculated obstruction of anti-racist programming.

This executive director played a major role in sustaining not-for-profit theater in New York City through the aftermath of 9/11 and "The Great Recession” of 2007-08 and was an ardent advocate for promoting women as leaders in the field. But the petition painted her as a notorious racist who needed to be excommunicated. I was horrified to see the document populated with the names of people I’d known for years. I declined to sign. No one publicly came to this woman's defense because the activists’ tactic was clear: do what we say, or we will cull you from the field too.

Overt discrimination permeated every meeting I attended that summer. At an organization established to support theater directors, one member asked the group’s president, “Can we have a conversation at some point about the ethics of white directors?” When asked for clarification, the member said, “This is about the ethical responsibilities of white… members as we work to transform the American theater… and whether white directors should be directing.” The president responded, “We’ve already begun to put a task force together… to help particularly our white members work through setting up rehearsal halls and production processes that are anti-racist.” It was odd that only white directors were singled out as needing support understanding what is or isn't “anti-racist” because, from what I saw, there was a lot of racial discrimination aimed at white people. 

A prime example was American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter Keith Wann, who lost work solely based on his skin color. As New York Post reported, the director of ASL for Broadway’s The Lion King stated, “Keith Wann, though an amazing ASL performer, is not a black person and therefore should not be representing Lion King.” To be clear, and typical of the convoluted logic of this movement, the director was advancing the proposition that only black ASL performers should play the animal characters in The Lion King. Since when was it “anti-racist” to insist that only black people were uniquely fit to play animals? Citing race-based employment discrimination, Wann sued. According to court documents, the case settled in Wann’s favor with lightning speed. Perhaps this employer should have provided staff with “anti-racist” training that included Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John G. Roberts and his plurality opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, which states, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” 

Activists pressured artists to create theater aligned with their beliefs. As reported in The New York Times, the artistic director of a festival that once prided itself on being “uncensored” canceled a show because the playwright and performer dared to assert, “There are two sexes, male and female.” The artistic director explained, “I support free speech, I think all speech should be legally protected, but not all speech should be platformed.” Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, explains the motivation behind this type of behavior in his book Kindly Inquisitors, “In an orthodox community, the threat of social disintegration is never further away than the first dissenter. So the community joins together to stigmatize dissent.” Stigmatizing unorthodox views by canceling shows that express them is censorship, and theater artists used to know better: In 1992, Stephen Sondheim refused the National Medal of Arts award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), stating it would “be an act of the utmost hypocrisy” to accept the award because the NEA had become “a conduit and a symbol of censorship and repression rather than encouragement and support.”

Unlike film, television and recorded music, live theater has no rating system; it should not look for ways to self-censor. Not only should theater reject self-censorship, it should overflow with a wide variety of plays that explore uncharted, daring and dangerous topics. Why not unleash diverse perspectives on various stages and let audiences decide what they think? Instead, activists insist the theater should be comprised of people who, however much they all may look different superficially, must all share the same beliefs. That’s not diversity, it’s monoculture.

If some artists want to create shows that extol CSJ, they have every right to pursue their projects. However, they have no right to bar other artists from daring to critique CSJ’s inconsistencies and intolerance.

Westboro knew they could hold slanderous signs, but they understood attempting to stop the show was beyond their purview–it’s time CSJ activists in the arts learned that lesson.

A few voices of dissent have begun to document the devastation caused by this activism as Clayton Fox does in his essay “The Toxic Gentleness of the American Theater”, but a New York Times article titled “A Crisis in America’s Theaters Leaves Prestigious Stages Dark” hints insiders know some of this “crisis” was self-inflicted. As an executive director admits, “Some theaters have forgotten what audiences want — they want to laugh and to be joyful and to cry, but sometimes we push them too far.”

ACT V: Building New Institutions

At the risk of being the skunk at the garden party, I don't believe logic and reason can be used to persuade theater leaders to take an off-ramp from their misguided allegiance to CSJ. Their devotion is fundamentalist in nature, and that is nearly impossible to pierce by persuasion, even if someone could get them to listen in good faith.  

Look at the example of former Westboro member Megan Phelps-Roper: it took thirteen years of engaging with opposing views before she left the church. At fifty-one, I can’t wait for people to change their minds before I make art. The way to make art now is to build new institutions that state from inception a commitment to freedom of artistic expression, a recognition that ideological conformity is not a prerequisite for participation in the arts, and a pledge to refrain from making statements on social media about current events. If theaters want to tackle current events, do it on the stage.

Despite the storm around me, I pursued my ghost story project. I needed funding, so I looked for grant opportunities. One application asked, “Why this project, why now?” I wrote that a project based on ghost stories was relevant to the moment because they are about our relationship to transgressions in the past. Every ghost story features the living encountering an apparition who returns either to make the protagonist aware of a past injustice, or to punish the protagonist in the present. Considering Ibram X. Kendi declared in How to Be an Anti-Racist, “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” I thought it would be meaningful for audiences to experience what happens when people are punished for things in the past, whether they had anything to do with the earlier transgression or not.

It worked! In 2021 I received two small grants to produce and direct Unearthly Visitants. The project went so well that my collaborators and I decided to mount a second show, an adaptation of E.M. Forster's 1909 science fiction story "The Machine Stops." In a review, a critic wrote the play was "a Space Mountain roller coaster ride, an intellectual white water rafting expedition, a production that will have you talking about it for hours and days to come.”

Every moment putting those shows together was pure joy and fulfillment. I didn’t “embed” CSJ into the rehearsal room or the plays. I didn’t force the ensemble to declare preferred gender pronouns, no one was accused of “microaggressions,” and I didn’t impose my socio-political beliefs onto anyone else. The rehearsals were about the bliss of creating the best productions we could devise.

Identity is important. I don't deny that. My identity surely informs my views, but it is not the totality of who I am. Reducing everyone to the same person based on identities serves activists’ causes, but we are simply not all the same. 

Artists have choices: they can use identity to blame, shame and divide, or they can use identity to bring people together, helping us see what we have in common, despite our differences. Most new theater I've seen that wades into identity expresses a contradiction that linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter identifies in Woke Racism: “You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people,” while simultaneously insisting, “You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.” McWhorter discusses only race, but the contradiction he pinpoints has been applied to various “oppressed” identities in several plays. This fashion is wearing itself out, but I fear it will leave behind a long-lasting stain of resentment, assuming an audience remains in its aftermath. 

One of the four Wharton ghost stories I chose to include in Unearthly Visitants, “The Eyes,” featured a main character Wharton strongly suggests is homosexual. The story shows the cost he pays for not accepting himself. Anyone can identify with struggling for self-acceptance. Wharton didn’t wield homosexuality as a weapon to berate and alienate, she used it as a window to let readers experience the price paid for refusing to accept oneself. Theater should offer audiences more windows, and fewer mirrors merely reflecting back every audience member's identity.

Being an independent producer and director is hard, but rewarding. I choose who I work with, what we work on, and how we collaborate. It’s a lot of responsibility, but when things go right it feels great. It’s not what I imagined I’d be doing in my fifties, yet here I am, putting together my third production: an adaptation of Russian dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 dystopian novel We. Zamyatin is a true hero: a Bolshevik who left the party when it declared “all art must be useful to the movement,” he spoke out against party orthodoxy when doing so had mortal consequences. In his 1921 essay “I Am Afraid,” Zamyatin wrote,

“True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.” The same could be said of “true theater.”

I owe both the Westboro Baptist Church and Critical Social Justice activists heartfelt gratitude because their efforts backfired: instead of culling a gay, white, middle-aged artist from the field, they created a resourceful, resilient and persistent artist, committed to freedom of expression, fairness, a belief in common humanity, and hellbent on finding joy and fulfillment as a theater director – isn’t that a great thing.

And I haven’t given up my dream of getting a college or university teaching job. As the saying goes, “Don’t quit before the miracle.”

Epilogue: Calls to Action

Essays like this can make readers feel overwhelmed because things aren’t changing fast enough. Fear not–there are things you can do to help:

Like and follow artists whose work you support on social media;

Subscribe to Substacks and alternative publishing outlets like this one;

Write a letter to your local theater. If you see a show you liked, let them know. If they put on lousy shows, write a letter telling them you didn’t like what you saw and why;

Don’t give money to theatrical institutions putting on shallow morality plays. Instead, give money to organizations you like. Send a letter explaining why you didn’t contribute to the former’s annual fundraiser and why you did to the latter;

Keep in mind the saying, “Politics is downstream of culture.” If you care about the future of our country, get involved in the arts.

==

“I didn't know I was going to be a participant in a public shaming before I bought a ticket to this event.”

This is literally what they did in China. It's called a struggle session.

[rejectedfables]

Do you mind if I ask your top 10 favorite characters (can be male or female) from all of the media that you loved (can be anime/manga, books, movies or tv series)? And why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before.....Thanks...

Character: Draco Malfoy (HP) Why I love them: I don't. I love the version of him I frankensteined together from fics I read/wrote as an undiagnosed autistic preteen who wished I knew how to be meaner, and was hopelessly demisexually gay for a brunette with glasses.

Character: Uzumaki Naruto (Naruto) Why I love them: Emotionally neglected ADHD powerhouse who thinks "what do 600 hot girls look like? Me with titties and pigtails 600 times obviously" followed by "what do 600 hot boys look like? All my male friends with bedroom eyes OBVIOUSLY" and somehow hasn't figured out he's into dudes and is probably genderfluid. The Haku and Zabuza arc came SO close to "child soldier figures out that making children into soldiers is bad, actually, and resolves to create a better society where fewer people needlessly suffer" but then I think the author got old and forgot his own trajectory in favor of endless spectacle creep and, idk, something about the moon crushing Konoha or whatever. I lost interest in the story, but not the BOY. Also his relentless fixation with that dark haired cool guy he kissed one time makes every other character feel awkward, and I relate to that.

Character: Urameshi Yusuke (Yu Yu Hakusho) Why I love them: LOVE me a guy who even HEAVEN writes off as an irredeemable asshole surprising everyone with an act of selflessness. Love me an asshole who dedicates his life to love and friendship. Yusuke's narrative is basically "Obviously all yokai are evil. Wait, some aren't (some of my best friends are yokai)? Wait, most aren't (I actually really enjoy the yokai world/community)? Wait, I'M a yokai? (THAT'S why I am the way I am, and actually that's not evil it's just different)??? So there's evil humans AND evil yokai but neither are inherently bad, MOST are just regular people on both sides, and both are worth protecting" and anyway this is a neurodivergent and queer allegory to me, which slaps severely.

Character: Shi Qingxuan (Heaven Official's Blessing) Why I love them: Gender

Character: Luke Fon Fabre (Tales of the Abyss) Why I love them: Nobody's doing character growth like this little shit. An icon. It takes like 30 hours of gameplay for him to become likable and when he does it's somehow genuinely worth it.

Character: Changheng (Love Between Fairy and Devil) Why I love them: (I'm picking only one character per story, which is the only reason Xiao Lanhua and Dongfang Qingcang aren't also on this list.) You're telling me the God of War's narrative is a "tragic princess, betrothed since childhood, can't escape her family's expectations, constantly has to put everyone else above herself, until finally she snaps" story blended with "man who has been forced to live in war, falls for the first person who acknowledges that he, too, needs protection, ultimately rejects the violence he's been forced to endure and enact in favor of pursuing peace" and I'm what? NOT supposed to go insane? Also his nose freckle gives me heart palpitations.

Character: Logan Echolls (Veronica Mars, specifically season 1) Why I love them: What an excellent example of a badly coping shithead jerk fuckup boy who would be SO soft in any context where he's not under constant threat. Something about his mouth-breathing under duress compels me.

Character: Kyo (Fruits Basket) Why I love them: Badly coping under duress, the entire system is stacked against him, anger management issues and the snatched waist of a 90's manga twink. What can I say, a feral cat finding stability and love gets me every time.

Character: Xue Yang (MDZS) Why I love them: Irredeemable asshole feral cat ass man, coping badly at all times with all things but holding it together with a winning personality (gratuitous violence and bad jokes). Falls SO hard for the first person to show him love and kindness, becomes SO soft when not under threat for the first time ever, and then fucks up SO badly he ruins his whole fucking life. Spends more time trying to get back what he lost than he actually HAD what he lost. He's irredeemable. He's irredeemable. He makes apple rabbits for A Qing because she's sad. He's irredeemable. He doesn't pull a weapon on Xingchen even when Xingchen has already stabbed him and he's renowned for violence and revenge. He's irredeemable. I starting writing a post in his defense and hit the character limit halfway through my 'notes to flesh out later' bullet pointed list. He's irredeemable?? Xiao Xingchen could, though, is all I'm saying. The deeper you look into his actions the more humanity there is to find. I'm rotating every single thing about him in my mind like a rotisserie chicken.

Character: Chu Wanning (ERHA) Why I love them: He's hopelessly demisexually gay for literally just one guy. His story is gratuitously tragic but with a happy ending. Autistic Yearning incarnate. He's a burnt out husk of a blushing virgin, and the horniest person alive. Would readily die for his convictions, but won't ask for help. Prettiest wife anyone could ever wish for, with a strong masculine jaw. Total knockout gorgeous with body dysmorphia. Hyper competent with zero emotional intelligence. Widely respected and beloved with intense self loathing. He's never not masking. He's an atticked wife, he's a bossy husband, he's a piece of wood. He's 45. He's 6. He's 20. He's 32. He is catnip for me.

[greatwyrmgold]

Last year, a childhood friend of mine ran for mayor. Tonight, she gave a presentation about the experience and how to get politically involved and stuff. But I'm not here to talk about her actual thesis. I'm here to talk about some details she mentioned in passing.

I knew there was some kind of drama between her campaign and the Democrats in our state, but I didn't know the details. My friend didn't talk much about that, but she mentioned some disparaging remarks various people had said to her over her campaign, and it sounded like some of them came from institution Democrats.

One point she mentioned was that basically nobody expected her to win. She was running against someone I'll call the Incumbent; he wasn't actually in office last year, but that's just because he took a term off after sixteen years in office. He's a Republican, but a pretty mild one; conservative, but not violently reactionary. The Incumbent was expected to win with over 90% of the vote if anyone ran to oppose him.

When my friend made her candidacy official, she started getting advice from institution Democrats. (I'm not sure exactly who, because my friend was trying to explain the challenges she faced without saying anything mean about the Democratic Party, but I don't know who else would say this kind of stuff.) They told her to stop making a big deal about LGBTQIA+ rights, abortion rights, etc etc.

The things they told her to stop focusing on weren't my friend's entire campaign (she didn't mention pushback about her "affordable housing" rhetoric), but they were some of the pillars, the things that made me and other people want her to win. It almost sounded like they were asking her to be a different version of the Incumbent—a few different policies, a blue tie instead of a red one, but basically the same moderate policy proposals.

My friend ignored them, doubling down on all the "controversial" topics that she cared about. She's far from the only person who cared; she got 42% of the votes, not the <10% expected. I have no doubt that she got that many votes because she was willing to make a stink about those controversial issues, because she was willing to be more than "Incumbent, but blue".

...

My friend is a big fan of Obama. Say what you will about the man, but he promised Change You Can Believe In. Obama ran with a similar strategy to my friend's—he made big promises about things people cared about. Some people hated it, but most of them wouldn't vote Democrat. By contrast, many moderates and the disaffected liberals found his promises compelling and turned out to vote for Obama.

Candidates who promise change earn votes. But the Democrats keep supporting candidates like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, saying it's to secure the moderate vote. They take it as a given that they don't need to appeal to left-liberal voters, because who else are they gonna vote for?

(And maybe, just maybe, the institution Democrats don't actually want the change their candidates promise.)

I don't think that's unique to the USA's Democratic party. I've seen liberal politicians across the Pond compromise on progressive issues, only to be defended by their constituents. They have to make those compromises, you see, or they won't get elected! Making a big deal about serious political issues will alienate moderate voters, after all, and they're the only ones we should worry about. Who else are progressives and leftists and queers gonna vote for?

Their strategy relies on a combination of overwhelming threat from conservative politicians and "vote blue no matter who" rhetoric. (Or "vote red if they're not dead," in countries where the liberal party is red. The US has to do everything its own way...) As long as they can safely assume the left wing of their population will vote for them out of desperation, they can shift as far to the right as they want. It's better than the nascent fascists in the other party, after all!

I don't have a solution. I understand the short-term strategic strategy of voting blue for damage control, but in the long term that just enables them to slip farther to the right.

[canonicallyanxious]

[huge disclaimer up top that I am incredibly lacking in knowledge as to queer/lgbtq+ history and culture in Thailand, especially outside the context of globalized queer identity, so this post should absolutely not be taken as any sort of authority or statement on the topic; i'm just in the very beginnings of doing my own research and wanted to sort through some thoughts as well as see if anyone else out there knew more or could point me toward other sources]

so one thing i was thinking about is that if Jim is in his mid-late thirties, this means he was probably born in the early-mid 80s, which means he came of age in the 90s. i must confess my ignorance of the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic [particularly social stigma against the lgbtq+ community] outside of a western context but even still i can't not find this timing significant. so i'm starting to do some research on the situation in Thailand during this time period and have come across some really interesting sources i wanted to share [under the cut, if you please!]

First is from Untold Stories originally published in 2002. The full video/transcript is super interesting and has a lot of information about Thailand's response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 90s. one thing i wanted to highlight [bolded emphasis is mine]:

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Viravaidya is confident Thailand’s infection rate can be contained once again. Awareness is high, as is literacy, as is the availability of condoms. The big problem is how to deal with the one million or so Thais already infected. Tens of thousands of previously symptom-free HIV patients are now in the visible, advanced, or terminal, stages of the disease. The campaigns may have raised awareness, curiosity, and even generous donations, but patients like Phra Choochart, one of about a dozen monks here, say that doesn’t translate to sympathy or compassion.

PRA CHOOCHART: I keep secret for many years. But finally, something happened in my skin. It beginning to appear. I cannot keep secret anymore. So, I come to be a monk because in society if you catch HIV, nobody want you; also your family.

Untold Stories also has a follow-up story from about 5 years later in 2007. again the full video/transcript is super interesting imo, but here are some personal highlights regarding the social stigma of hiv/aids in Thai society [bolded emphasis is mine]:

REV. MICHAEL BASSANO: He’s 50 years old, but his family just left him. They came over and dropped him off. And they left him here with us. [...]

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Many, like this man, are dropped off, their disease unattended, many with tuberculosis, a daunting infection they must survive before they are physically fit enough to go on the AIDS medicines.

[...]

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Thirty-two-year-old Nok Eng came to the temple when her skin showed rashes, a classic HIV symptom. She left when her health improved but came right back in a few months. Health care was hard to find for her and her HIV-positive husband. And it was especially tough at her factory job, where people knew she was HIV-positive.

NOK ENG (through translator): Every day at lunch, I could hear people whispering next to me, gossiping about me, being sarcastic. I just couldn’t take the criticism.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The most painful, her parents, who live in a rural community, wanted little to do with her.

NOK ENG: I told my parents that I wanted to come and visit, and they said, “Just stay where you are.” They said that I would humiliate them.

still trying to find sources for what the attitude/stigma is like in more recent years, as well as information about social stigma regarding the gay/queer community outside of this specific context [also worth noticing these sources don't really focus on HIV/AIDS stigma in the context of the gay/queer community specifically], but even still, considering the huge impact the HIV/AIDS epidemic had on social stigma against the lgbtq+ community as well as the generational trauma of living as a community through such a thing in western society, i would be really interested to know if that context had a significant impact on Jim's coming of age as a gay man - i don't think it's something that they would ever explicitly get into on this show but still, that social/historical context could help put some things into perspective, particularly the emphasis on family relationships being the most painful part of the social stigma

i mean idk. i just think about jim running away from home with his sister, and referring to himself and Jam as "two great survivors", even in the context of the homophobia he had to face from his own sister. and i think about his flashbacks with Beam, how even at the peak of their relationship there was hesitance on his part [like when Beam loudly declared their love in the temple for example], and how quickly and easily he accepted that Beam couldn't tell his family about them, and how the tension between being open about yourself in your personal life versus your family/public life is already a lot to deal with even outside of the context of Beam living a whole separate life with a woman his family set him up with. and i can see how even as an older gay man who has been out for some time now there's still a lot of fear and pain Jim carries with him, as someone who seems to value family quite a lot. i really hope we can see him get to the point where he can begin to accept and understand that even after all that he's been through he has created a loving and supporting family of his own, and that's not in spite of the person that he is but because of it.

[fangirleaconmigo]

Ok I just watched ep two of The Last of Us. For background, I’ve never played the game and am drunk.

SPOILERS

Ok. So I know 90% of non game people are watching it for mi Pedrito. Me too. But do you know how much Anna Torv is loved by queer women???! DO YOUUUU?? Bc WE LOVE HER so when I saw her I was like OKYES

And ok

Ep 1 and 2 I’m like…this is a cool fuckn relationship. It’s like two middle aged goddamned bruisers. They walk through the streets of that shitty town together and people clear out you know? Scary partners. She’s not the soft one he needs to protect. They are apocalypse partners. He is scary but with her he is the little spoon. He trusts her judgment. She always has the plan. She is badass. She is gangster. They are so similar. I loved it! Cool relationship.

SPOILERS WARNING AGAIN

I Knew she was gonna bite it bc the trailers are all Joel and Ellie. I knew at some point she must die. And then when the time came she was like Joel, help Ellie. And he didn’t want to. And you know what she said???

I NEVER ASK YOU FOR ANYTHING

like my good friends that line is lethal because if it is true in that relationship then you know he cannot deny her it is potent.

Then she’s like…I also don’t ask you to feel the way I do.

FUCK ME

Fuck ME

No. No. No.

Joel baby I’ll take her if you’re not sure.

But actually

You know if he isn’t opening up the problem isn’t her, he’s just so goddamn traumatized. Pobre he’s so traumatized.

But anyway.

Then she gives her speech trying to get him to help Ellie and have hope and she knew she was gonna die and I’m like KISS HER JOEL FUCKN KISS HER SHES ABOUT TO DIE TRYNG TO SAVE YOUR LIFE

Motherfckr doesn’t kiss her guess who kisses her???????????????????? MUSHROOM FUCKER

Gahhhhhhh it was terrifying!!

And CRUEL to see her not get a “you’re dying goodbye girl” kiss from the man she loves but then the mushroom kiss of disgusting death is forced on her WHAT THE FUCK THAT IS CRUEL

Anyway I’m sorry you had to go out like that Ms Tess you deserved better baby girl. Horrifying.

But RIP to a badass bitch.

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Bengiyo Queer Cinema Syllabus

For those who are not aware, I have decided to run the gauntlet of @bengiyo’s Queer Cinema Syllabus and have officially started Unit 3: Faith and Religion. The films in Unit 3 are: But I’m a Cheerleader (2000), Prayers for Bobby (2009), Latter Days (2003), Blackbird (2014), The Wise Kids (2011), Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015)

Today I will be writing about

Prayers for Bobby (2009) dir. Russel Mulcahy

[Run Time: 1:30  , Available on: Hulu or Lifetime with memberships (i thought I saw Hulu in a list of companies to boycott because #zionist but it is the internet and I tried to research and could not find anything…either way I watched it like someone who sails the high seas) , Language: English]

Content Warning: suicide 

ADDITIONAL WARNING, THIS IS BASED ON A TRUE STORY 

Summary: True story of Mary Griffith, gay rights crusader, whose teenage son committed suicide due to her religious intolerance. Based on the book of the same title by Leroy Aarons.

Cast: * Sigourney Weaver as Mary Griffith, religious homophobe turned gay rights activist after the death of her son * Ryan Kelley as Bobby Griffith (this actor was the voice of Ben Tennyson in Ben 10!) * Scott Bailey as David, Bobby’s boyfriend * Dan Butler as The Rev. Whitsell, reverend for a Methodist Church Bobby starting attending because the church was safe for gays. 

__

I have a feeling that this reflection may get more personal than usual. It was strange watching this movie and seeing Bobby’s experiences with his family and finding points of familiarity in my experience with my own, despite the fact that I did not grow up religious. 

And to be clear here, when I came out, I did not get sent to conversion therapy, I was not subjected to 90% of what Bobby went through in his household but, I recognize myself in him. Bobby’s sister calls him the family favorite, Bobby’s sister calls him perfect. Bobby knows the pressure and the isolation that comes from being seen that way and knowing you are anything but. It always feels strange to complain about being the known favorite, but the slight hint of bitterness from family that you love feels fucking terrible, especially because you have no say in how people see you. A fall from the pedestal is scary, the scrutiny you are under is intense. 

Bobby has The Knowing, I did not. I didn’t realize or at least admit that I was queer until I was 22, Bobby is still in high school, Bobby is hearing his grandmother say queers should be lined up and shot. I was hearing my uncle say the same. I was seeing my father literally recoil and cover his eyes the first time he saw gay sex on screen. I knew who his friends were, and what their beliefs are, and there was never room for me to ever entertain the question. 

Bobby’s family finds out, in ways Bobby has no control over. My mother forced a confession from me about my gender identity. Bobby’s father tells him he probably hasn’t met the right girl yet, when his father hears he’s gay. My mother told me I probably hadn’t found the right boy yet after she found out I was bi. 

Bobby’s family is desperate to save his soul from hell, they put him through so many things, when he moves to Portland, his mother hands him a new Bible. I knew someone who learned that I was queer, and came back with a copy of their holy book. 

At the beginning of the film, Bobby is established to have a good, strong, and loving bond with his mother. As a kid I did too. Bobby’s family tells him that they love him, they say it all the time, and then they learn he’s queer, and they still tell him that they love but they do not acknowledge or accept his identity, they do not listen to him when he tries to share his feelings, his parents never grow. My mom has not used the right pronouns for me once since she made me come out to her two years ago, despite several conversations with me, and with a friend of hers who has a nonbinary child. 

All of which to say I know what Bobby is feeling when his parents say they love him, but make no action to change it. I feel within my soul the resignation when his cousin tells him “you all seemed so close” and when he replies “well, that’s over with”.  Bobby’s mother told him she would not have a gay son, Bobby knew she meant it. My father told me once that he could live perfectly happily without me, and I knew he meant it.  I see echos in Bobby. 

But I was not raised religious, I do not believe in heaven or in hell, and as a result, I do not know what it is to be told, to grow up with The Knowing, hearing that no matter what, no matter who you are, or how much good you do, you are doomed to suffer for all eternity for something that you cannot change. I do not know what it is to have a fear of hellfire held over you for all your life. 

I do not know, and cannot understand what it must feel like to know that your mother believes so adamantly that she can ‘heal’ you, absolve you of this sin, and understand that all the harm she is doing to you, comes from a corrupted place of love. When Bobby dies, does he think his mother loves him?

“I know my mom means well, but I don’t know if she’ll ever accept me,” Bobby tells his boyfriend, and David replies “Just don’t stop trying”. I don’t know what David went through, I do not know what he relationship to his parents was like when he came out. But having to break yourself open time and time again, having to basically beg to be seen is fucking exhausting. I do not know if David knows that. 

I both love and hate these little hints that Bobby is approaching a suicide attempt, giving away his parachute pants to his brother, dissociating during work, reaching out to people who are supposed to be in his safety network, leaving his work keys on the table. The camera work itself, they switch from a steady cam to a shaky cam as he calls David. His world is unstable, he can’t find solid ground. I like that the movie warns you that this plot point is coming right at the beginning of the film, when we see Bobby stroll along the overpass. I think it is important that Bobby thinks of moments of joy mixed in with moments of sadness as he contemplates for just a little longer whether or not it is worth it to stop trying. And honestly, because I am petty and his mother was fucking cruel, I am kind glad that the last thing we see before he decides to fall is his mother telling him she will not have a gay son. No parent should ever had to suffer the loss of their child, Bobby should not have had to die for his mother to make these changes in her thinking, but for as much as the Reverend tells Mary she did not kill Bobby, the narrative does not absolve her of the role she played in hurting Bobby. 

Now, I famously had an extremely strong reaction to a moment in 180 Degrees Longitude Passes Through Us because it hit too close to home, so I was actually somewhat surprised that I was not having stronger emotional reactions to the first half of the film, watching Bobby be hurt. Maybe that’s because it was familiar, maybe it is because I knew to expect it, maybe it’s because I was shell shocked at hearing that Bobby’s therapy only cost $60 an hour). But hoo boy did I start having strong emotions after Bobby died. 

I was downright seething as I sat there, listening to this Reverand give a eulogy for Bobby, where he calls Bobby lost, says that he has strayed, says that he gave in to temptation. 

AT HIS FUNERAL 

AT THIS YOUNG MAN’S FUNERAL

And that anger just sat, it sat there in my chest as I heard Bobby’s mother ask Bobby’s grandma if she thought that Bobby was in heaven or in hell. Mary loves her son, Mary can not imagine a world where her son burns for all eternity, Mary needs to hear from someone that her son is at peace in heaven, where he is safe and where she can see him again. But no one will tell her that. Not her family, not her church. And it struck me too, that the way Bobby’s grandmother speaks about queer people, the way Bobby’s grandmother cannot find it within herself to say “Of course he is in heaven” is part of why I never came out to my grandmother. Now, I do not envision a world where my grandmother would have as intense a response to my queerness as Bobby’s grandmother did, but she was old southern, and my dad’s side of the family is fairly traditional. My grandmother passed away last month without me having shared my whole self with her. One of the last things she said to me before she died was that she was proud of me, I was never willing to risk losing that. I saw that fear in Bobby’s eyes when he heard his grandma say queers should be killed. I hated Bobby’s brother for not understanding how much Bobby was set to lose if he outed him. 

Initially I thought, because this movie was relatively short, that Mary would have a faster growth arc. I thought that what would make her question her faith, her belief that homosexuality is sinful, was the fact that David, a gay man, was the only person to praise her son, “he was an amazing young man”, without qualifiers. The reverend, his grandmother could not remember only the positive things about him, they had to focus on how much of a sinner he was. This dead boy. 

But I honestly much prefer that it takes Mary time to reckon with everything. That we think perhaps the needle is moving forward when she takes David’s hand, only to throw out the plate he touched and wash her hands the second he has left the house. I like that she goes to her church, and she does not find the answers she wants, I love that she goes to the church Bobby popped in to from time to time, the one that was accepting of gay people, and that she immediately picks a fight with the reverend while also needing him to calm her grief. 

You know what I love? Visible and intentional acts of empathy from someone who is very much having to put in some effort. One of my absolute favorite scenes in this entire film was the second conversation Mary has with Reverand Whitsell. He’s setting up for a rummage sale at the church, and this random, homophobic lady comes walking in to essentially debate him about his interpretation of the Bible compared to hers. And you can tell from his voice, from the stiffness of his movements, from the way he interacts with Mary that he is annoyed. I don’t think it is explicitly stated that Rev. Whitsell is queer, but he reads that way to me, because the way he handles Mary very much feels like a gay person having to explain for the 20th time why they deserve to have rights. But he is a holy man, he view’s God as compassion, and so despite the fact that he is clearly not wanting to have this conversation, he has it anyway. Because he knows that Mary is lost, and confused, and that she has no life line. And it would not be very Godly of him to turn her away. 

For/By/About 

This movie was made as a learning tool for homophobic Christians. It provides debate around the book of Leviticus a la West Wing. It feels very preachy, and I think that is because it is supposed to be.

So I would say this is a By and About piece at most, because this movie is adapted from the book, and Bobby makes the story. The director is queer as well.

Favorite Moment 

My favorite moment of the film is a tragic one, Mary is at work when the Griffith’s family gets the news that Bobby has passed. I like the build up to that scene for Mary, who is told by her coworker that her husband wants to speak with her, and that she should bring her purse. The audience at this point knows Bobby is dead, and so we know that the purpose of the visit is to break the news, and that she needs her purse because they are going to have to go recover the body. But Mary does not know this, and so, it is another average boring day at work, and one of her kids is probably here because they need money. There is no hint of anxiety or concern around this divergence from her typical work day. And she is literally in the process of pulling money out of her wallet when she sees her husband. 

My favorite moment in this movie is when Mary learns that Bobby is dead, and she cannot get out of work. Like, obviously, she is not going back to work, but physically she works behind metal gate with a mechanical locking mechanism that has to be unlocked by someone in a different location. And so she is trying to get out, she is screaming “help me, let me out, let me out, my son is dead, let me out” and all we see is Mary’s face desperate, her hands clutching at the door handle desperately trying to leave…

…and all you can see is that she’s caged. She is stuck, she is trapped. And this is a motif from Bobby’s voice overs. Bobby talks multiple times in this film about feeling alone, about wanting to be free. And here his mother is, alone, and wanting to be free. I think it is a really beautiful visual metaphor for this harmful belief Mary is stuck in, one that she needs to break out of. 

We end with Mary attending P-FLAG events, speaking at council meetings to argue for a pride day to be recognized by their town, and marching in the San Francisco Pride Parade, and it feels earned, because they didn’t rush her growth. She had to go to the Reverend so many times, she had to talk to so many people, she had to listen to so many people, before she was able to wholly change her views on homosexuality. 

Favorite Quote 

“She smiled at something I said, and I saw in her eyes that for a second she forgot what she really thinks of me. The anger never erupts. My timid nature would never allow a full fledged thunderstorm to occur. But it’s there, on the horizon…”

Like I said, there are experiences Bobby has that feel familiar to me, that ignite these little sparks of recognition, and there was no place in the film I saw myself reflected back as strongly as when I heard Bobby talk about his anger. 

Bobby holds anger, it sits around his edges, he holds his anger in. And that is me. I grew up in a household with a father who never capped his anger, he erupted all the time, he left shrapnel in his wake. I have my father’s anger, I hate that, over the years I have dedicated a large amount of energy towards tending to that horizon. 

I have never been more angry in my entire life, than the first time I came home after talking with my mother about my gender identity, and having her misgender me for weeks straight. I have never wanted to erupt more, to blow up more, to scream, cry, or die more than when she asked me to do things for her, for the household, for my grandparents, every single day, while refusing to acknowledge my identity (and not expecting any labor from my brother, but that’s beside the point here).

I am not suicidal, I have never been suicidal, but the way the anger that festered when so much work, hours of manual and emotional labor were asked of me in my disabled, burnt out body, while my family could not be fucked to fix a pronoun, fucking scared me. 

I will never know how Bobby truly felt, I will never know how much Bobby truly suffered, but I can guess, I know what emotions I carried in my body when I was being told some of the same things Bobby was, I know the toll it took on my mental health to hear my mother, two years after I told her I was bi, say that she doubted that was the case, because I just hadn’t found the right man yet. And it fucking sucked.

And I love being queer, there was a part of me that felt hollow for so long that was filled when I realized who I was. Bobby had to deal with figuring out self-acceptance and self-love from a very different starting point than me. Bobby did not want to be gay, Bobby was willing to try to be “healed”, so I cannot imagine how deep his anger, loneliness, and hopeless ran. 

Score

10/10 for how much it made me reflect on my own experiences with family and queerness. Bobby seemed like a wonderful person, and it is nothing but a tragedy that he is not with us today, just like all the other people we have lost far too soon.

[livvywritesworld]

A Fist in the Mouth | Overview & Analysis

For those who don’t know, I am a creative writing student in my first year of university. In my introduction to creative writing class this semester, I wrote a short story called ‘A Fist in the Mouth’ for our fiction unit. After a couple rounds of editing, I submitted this piece to my university’s literary magazine and was later accepted for publication.

This is my first ever publication acceptance so of course this story holds such a special place in my heart now, and I thought I might make a post about it just kind of sharing a couple of snippets and some of the inspiration and thought I put behind the story as a whole.

(please let it be known that I retain all rights to my original work and no plagiarism will be tolerated)

excerpts and analysis under the cut

‘A Fist in the Mouth’ began as a way for me to kind of reintroduce myself to short fiction after a period of not having written anything at all due to some health issues. I had all of these ideas for the short fiction piece that I needed to write for class and none of them were working out how I wanted them to while still fitting within the word limit. So, I decided to discovery write something while listening to one of my many Spotify playlists just to kind of get in the groove of writing once more and really just see what would happen.

As I was writing, the song “Modern Girl” by Sleater-Kinney came on shuffle and for those of you who have never heard the song, there’s a repeating lyric, “hunger makes me a modern girl.” This really sparked some inspiration in me and all of a sudden I was writing about a teenage runaway come riot grrrl serial concert goer experiencing the horrors of girlhood and ambition. 

‘A Fist in the Mouth’ begins like this:

There’s a difference between running from and running to. When I left home, I thought I was running towards. I didn’t think of it as me leaving my parents’ oppressive religious household, though that was a fact that I readily acknowledged as a girl. I only ever thought of it as me, freshly eighteen, running full speed at a future I thought I deserved. A future I knew never would have found me if I’d stayed in that town, in that house, with those people, spending my days on my knees praying to a god that didn’t see me as deserving of anything more than I’d already been given.

Now, I think all I was doing was running away from every facet of my life. I didn’t feel the same way about God as the rest of my family, was scared to death of them looking at me one day and suddenly seeing all of me. Back then, I felt like I didn’t have any other choice. And I probably didn’t.

The narrator is kind of inspired by the character Maxine in the film ‘X,’ which I had watched a couple of weeks before writing the story, as well as Ethel Cain’s discography. I really wanted to write from the perspective of a teenage girl fleeing a very religious household (religious trauma for the win) because she wants more out of life than what her parents have laid out for her.

As we move through the story and see how the narrator interacts with the 90s Seattle grunge & punk scene, we are introduced to the narrator’s insatiable hunger (her ambition, queerness, and dedicated yearning). I use a lot of motifs throughout the beginning and middle of the text to try and recreate this feeling for the reader.

I was nineteen and my presence felt both excessive and non-existent. I wasn’t eating as much as I should’ve been, couldn’t really afford three meals a day. Most of my money went towards rent and bills, any real food I got would be leftovers from the diner. The cook was a bit sweet on me, so he’d make me a sandwich every day, free of charge, whatever kind I wanted.

The thing was though, even if I did get enough to eat, I still never felt full. I’d look in the mirror and my mouth would be this gaping cavern, something that didn’t fit on my face. It didn’t matter how old I was, how much life I did or didn’t experience— in the mirror smiling back at me was a gape-toothed girl looking to swallow the whole world if given the chance.

Then, we meet the character of Magdalene Williams, who is the only character in the story that I’ve named. The inspiration for Magdalene was definitely Mary Magdalene— I kind of wanted this holy-like figure to come into the narrator’s life and really give her a taste of the life that she craves for herself.

Magdalene invites the narrator to an all non-men punk show on the edge of Seattle and the narrator feels her hunger clawing up out of her stomach and demanding to go. She is inherently drawn to Magdalene and has no idea why. So she accepts the invitation. 

The story kind of unravels from there, and we end with Magdalene coming onstage with her band and giving The Performance of a Lifetime and generally really disturbing the narrator. The narrator knows that something Is Not Right here, she’s been very active in the scene for the last year and has never heard of Magdalene yet the entire crowd is going wild over her, and once Magdalene starts singing she immediately knows that something is wrong. And yet. She just can’t look away.

In Magdalene, the narrator sees everything that she wants, everything that she is so hungry for, and it terrifies her. She’s also a little jealous, and a little horny but very much in a prophet/faithhealer x devotee kind of way. 

I wrote the entire story in past tense because I really wanted it to have a sort of confessional vibe, to really keep in tone with the religious themes and imagery. My professor suggested after workshop that I might try it in present tense but it just was not working. During our class workshop however, everyone said that they liked the choice of past tense because it was almost like the narrator was telling us, the reader, that she experienced such an intense period of wanting in her life and still made it out in the end.

I don’t know if it’s too much to share on here like word count-wise, but the last few paragraphs of the story are my absolute favorites and I’m so proud of them. They’ve remained mostly unchanged in my various rounds of edits and I’m so impressed with myself for being able to write like this after having literally not written anything substantial in around six months.

Before I left home, my whole life was like a sepia photograph of a sunny day. Over-exposed, parents with smiling faces and sons with square jaws, daughters with ribbons in their hair. Wooden crosses on the walls, simple and unornate because God doesn’t need to be loved in gold foil. Grass stains on white tights, Sunday kitten heels scuffed from being worn so often, deodorant powder refusing to wash off the baby pink dress Mama thought looked so nice with my brown eyes.

There’s a difference between running from and running to. At eighteen, I was running towards something. I’msure of that. I don’t think I ever had an idea of what that something was, or what I even wanted it to be, but I did know that I didn’t want to be some televangelist’s golden daughter proffered up to God like Icarus was to the sun.

I noticed things about myself the way my family noticed things about God and religion and theology. Studied myself in mirrors, in the dark, in the depths of my own mind. I noticed everything and remembered nothing. Blood never started to fill my mouth until I surrounded myself with idolatry of a different kind, the screams sounded too much like mine.

At nineteen, I was running from. That night, hunger attacked every fiber of my being, ate away at my organs, left behind teeth marks and blood. I saw that hunger reflected in Magdalene, her mouth an open wound as she screamed out her lyrics. I wasn’t scared, though. There’s nothing scary about hunger, what’s scary is the response hunger elicits from other people.

This, I noticed. All in real time. Learned it of myself.

I watched the crowd feed Magdalene, and consequently devour her whole. Sanctify her living and alive, right before my eyes. And I never wanted anything more than I did then. I craved it, would’ve let hordes of women and girls crucify me where I stood just to be in Magdalene’s position. She never could’ve been full, not with the way she sang, but at least she was well fed. Oh how I wanted to be kept in excess.

Have learned to become my own number one fan lol

[froggyrights]

Hello! Happy June! It's Pride and I have another question (8/30)

HiHi, today we are again diving into the evolution of another word: queer!

The word queer entered the English language around the 16th century, and initially meant "strange", "odd" or "eccentric". (This is a slightly unrelated sidenote; as someone whose dialect of English is Hiberno-English, the word queer is still very commonly used to still mean this, and has also evolved to the word "quare" which can be used in place of "really" or "very" to provide adverbial emphasis <- like if someone is "quare tall" they're so tall that you're kinda in a little disbelief about it. Anyway just thought this was a fun side note because I really had not realised this word was controversial for people until I was on the internet)

Anyway, onto the late 19th century, the word queer began to have the connotation of "sexual deviance", before then starting to be used specifically about the "sexual deviance" of "feminine men".

The first, or at least one of the first, recorded time that the word queer was used as a pejorative for gay was in a letter written by John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquis of Queensberry, about his son's relationship with Oscar Wilde. This letter was read out in Wilde's trial in April 1895 (in which he was being tried for "gross indecency" or "homosexuality"), and in it Douglas refers to Wilde and other gay men at the time as "Snob Queers". It is believed that American newspapers picked up this phrase and began using it themselves, thus spreading the pejorative to the US's vocabulary.

"The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang" (1937) defined the word queer as "Homosexual. Derogatory from the outside, not from within. US, 1914", which tells us both that by 1914 it was a common pejorative or insult for gay people, but also, that queer people were using the word to refer to themselves as well. Around this time, queer, fairy, trade and gay all signified distinct "categories" of homosexual men. Historian George Chauncey notes in his book ("Gay New York") that queer would've been the self-identifier of ""masculine"" gay men.

We can also assume that this is what was happening in the U.K. as well, as a letter held in the National Archives shows us (you can look up the letter in full, search the full name of the person and "My Dear Billy"). This letter was written by a man named Cyril Coeur de Leon to ‘My Dear Billy’ in 1934. Billy was the owner of "The Caravan Club", a ""disorderly house"" of ""male prostitutes"", and in it he writes "Just a note to say that I am very disappointed about you. I honestly thought you were queer, but different from the others, and I liked you very much […] I have only been queer since I came to London about two years ago, before then I knew nothing about it." This use of queer is arguably ahead of it's time, given that at this point queer was exclusively about gay men, whereas de Leon mentions he "still likes girls occasionally".

Over the years though, queer has evolved from the narrow definition of "gay man" to "gay men and lesbians" to "anyone not heterosexual" to "not heterosexual and/or not cisgender". And despite the fact that for the majority of the time that it has meant "gay" it has been used by the community, some people are still of the opinion that the word is "too offensive" to be used, but thankfully, this argument isn't as common as it was in the 90s and 00s, though still annoying persistent.

And as for my question, today I want to know firstly, if you use the word queer yourself? and secondly, what is your favourite word/way to refer to the queer community? (for example, "friend of dorothy" is funny to drop into conversation, and today I spoke to some who said they were "looking forward to meeting other *limp hand movement* at [pub name] tonight!")

Happy Pride 🌈 🎉

I LOVE the word queer me and the queer are married and in love holding hands into the sunset forever 😍🥰

it's by far my favorite word to use to refer to the community but some other more specific words I like are dyke and in dutch the word 'pot' which has been (and still is) used as a derogatory term for lesbians but started being reclaimed in the 70s. I think it's so awesome I love it

[dteamain]

Hello! Happy June! It's Pride and I have another question (8/30)

HiHi, today we are again diving into the evolution of another word: queer!

The word queer entered the English language around the 16th century, and initially meant "strange", "odd" or "eccentric". (This is a slightly unrelated sidenote; as someone whose dialect of English is Hiberno-English, the word queer is still very commonly used to still mean this, and has also evolved to the word "quare" which can be used in place of "really" or "very" to provide adverbial emphasis <- like if someone is "quare tall" they're so tall that you're kinda in a little disbelief about it. Anyway just thought this was a fun side note because I really had not realised this word was controversial for people until I was on the internet)

Anyway, onto the late 19th century, the word queer began to have the connotation of "sexual deviance", before then starting to be used specifically about the "sexual deviance" of "feminine men".

The first, or at least one of the first, recorded time that the word queer was used as a pejorative for gay was in a letter written by John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquis of Queensberry, about his son's relationship with Oscar Wilde. This letter was read out in Wilde's trial in April 1895 (in which he was being tried for "gross indecency" or "homosexuality"), and in it Douglas refers to Wilde and other gay men at the time as "Snob Queers". It is believed that American newspapers picked up this phrase and began using it themselves, thus spreading the pejorative to the US's vocabulary.

"The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang" (1937) defined the word queer as "Homosexual. Derogatory from the outside, not from within. US, 1914", which tells us both that by 1914 it was a common pejorative or insult for gay people, but also, that queer people were using the word to refer to themselves as well. Around this time, queer, fairy, trade and gay all signified distinct "categories" of homosexual men. Historian George Chauncey notes in his book ("Gay New York") that queer would've been the self-identifier of ""masculine"" gay men.

We can also assume that this is what was happening in the U.K. as well, as a letter held in the National Archives shows us (you can look up the letter in full, search the full name of the person and "My Dear Billy"). This letter was written by a man named Cyril Coeur de Leon to ‘My Dear Billy’ in 1934. Billy was the owner of "The Caravan Club", a ""disorderly house"" of ""male prostitutes"", and in it he writes "Just a note to say that I am very disappointed about you. I honestly thought you were queer, but different from the others, and I liked you very much […] I have only been queer since I came to London about two years ago, before then I knew nothing about it." This use of queer is arguably ahead of it's time, given that at this point queer was exclusively about gay men, whereas de Leon mentions he "still likes girls occasionally".

Over the years though, queer has evolved from the narrow definition of "gay man" to "gay men and lesbians" to "anyone not heterosexual" to "not heterosexual and/or not cisgender". And despite the fact that for the majority of the time that it has meant "gay" it has been used by the community, some people are still of the opinion that the word is "too offensive" to be used, but thankfully, this argument isn't as common as it was in the 90s and 00s, though still annoying persistent.

And as for my question, today I want to know firstly, if you use the word queer yourself? and secondly, what is your favourite word/way to refer to the queer community? (for example, "friend of dorothy" is funny to drop into conversation, and today I spoke to some who said they were "looking forward to meeting other *limp hand movement* at [pub name] tonight!")

Happy Pride 🌈 🎉

i do use queer on myself it is probably the most comfortable term for me 🫶

[mcalhenwrites]

We're still not ready for the "there are plenty of queer creations out there, and if you supported them, you'd see even more" conversation, are we? Seems like we're not. This extends to f/f content as well. It would involve supporting indie creators more, and the goals are more often "I want my queer or f/f ship to be canon and have lots of fanart" or "I want people to really like the work I make and for everything to center around my ideas of what should exist" and not so much about celebrating queer creations we might enjoy. (And let's face it, we won't always enjoy some of it.) But let's paint it as other people having moral failings or being hateful in some way, right? /sarcasm

I favor m/m in my writing (both original and fic). I'm a trans man and have been out since before I dipped my toes in fandom. I came out as trans in late 2003. I didn't know what yaoi was. I barely had any access to representation, and I latched onto the scraps I could find. Sunday nights, I huddled in front of a muted 13" television screen in a corner of my room, closed captioning on so I knew what was being said, using a blanket hanging from my bunk bed to hide it in case my mom decided to walk in. What was I watching? Queer as Folk. (US version.) It honestly changed my life. Getting online more and more later on introduced me to fandom, and that introduced me to a whole world of queer works. I was thrilled! It didn't matter if I didn't like some of it. I would sift through yaoi and yuri until I found the stuff I did like. But guess which one I spent more time on? I write a lot of BL. It's not really anyone's business, though. It shouldn't be the sole indicator that there's a moral failing here or that I hate f/f. I write too much f/f for that to be true, but I'll go into why saying that doesn't actually matter in a little bit. I have a hard time listening to people who make up excuses for why they never read books or even sometimes other people's fanfiction, but oh hey, here's my writing and it's actual representation, and I wish more fanart of my ships existed! And then they cry that there's nothing out there. And claim the love of BL as the true enemy.

...So fun fact, I own a lot of queer books. A lot of books in general. But lots are queer.

This is a haul of like 90% of the books I got last year:

It'll be tough to see a lot of the titles in this giant pile, but... There are a lot of queer relationships depicted in these books. This is barely a chip in my wishlist of queer books I'd like to read! (Most of these were gifts or secondhand, because I'm pretty broke.) And out of them, wow, some f/f happens to be there! Either as main characters or side characters. As canon ships. (But even if there wasn't any f/f there, you don't know who I've kissed in my life, the people I've loved, the people I wish I could've been with. You don't know my personal values, the improvements I want for the world. You don't know shit about me by finding out I like to read, write, and watch BL. And I don't owe you any of the reasons.) The point of this post and that image, however, is to say that queer creations fucking exist in large numbers. There's hardly a shortage. I'm crying at how little I can keep up with it these days, especially in a scary world with book bannings and little shits wanting the Hays code back. And here's the deal: creators get shafted. Sometimes, they have to quit creating (as much or at all) just to make a living. Some post on AO3 (cough) because fandom is wonderfully transformative and we have some itches to scratch. Being supportive is always better than tearing them down. And when you start uplifting the work you like, instead of yelling about the stuff you don't, suddenly there are publishers and film makers taking note. They're recognizing what's in demand. In many ways, they've already started to. (Although you should probably keep supporting artists and be wary of companies, but sometimes companies uplift important artists and that's cool too.) Your friends and online circles are seeing these titles and characters and ships and might even find themselves intrigued. But when you just yell about stuff that's not going the way you want it to, it's actually satisfactory to deny it to you. I'm not big on giving entitled people the content they crave. I do what I want, and I have been known to keep my work to myself because of demands and complaints. I don't stop creating, but it's not yours to have, it's mine. Some people just get tired of the harassment and sweeping generalizations about the kind of person they are, because innocuous creations are blown out of proportion by people with their own agendas. Some people create more of what you might hate out of spite. Others give up sharing, because while everyone is focusing on all the things they hate, that person's creations that might've been up your alley gets fucking buried. Ignored. And then they don't really see the point in sharing. In a world that is brimming with hate, where some people do using writing to profit on hate (jerkoffrolling), maybe your enemy isn't... people (queer or not, none of your business btw) creating queer art!

[asiogie]

Hello! Happy June! It's Pride and I have another question (8/30)

HiHi, today we are again diving into the evolution of another word: queer!

The word queer entered the English language around the 16th century, and initially meant "strange", "odd" or "eccentric". (This is a slightly unrelated sidenote; as someone whose dialect of English is Hiberno-English, the word queer is still very commonly used to still mean this, and has also evolved to the word "quare" which can be used in place of "really" or "very" to provide adverbial emphasis <- like if someone is "quare tall" they're so tall that you're kinda in a little disbelief about it. Anyway just thought this was a fun side note because I really had not realised this word was controversial for people until I was on the internet)

Anyway, onto the late 19th century, the word queer began to have the connotation of "sexual deviance", before then starting to be used specifically about the "sexual deviance" of "feminine men".

The first, or at least one of the first, recorded time that the word queer was used as a pejorative for gay was in a letter written by John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquis of Queensberry, about his son's relationship with Oscar Wilde. This letter was read out in Wilde's trial in April 1895 (in which he was being tried for "gross indecency" or "homosexuality"), and in it Douglas refers to Wilde and other gay men at the time as "Snob Queers". It is believed that American newspapers picked up this phrase and began using it themselves, thus spreading the pejorative to the US's vocabulary.

"The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang" (1937) defined the word queer as "Homosexual. Derogatory from the outside, not from within. US, 1914", which tells us both that by 1914 it was a common pejorative or insult for gay people, but also, that queer people were using the word to refer to themselves as well. Around this time, queer, fairy, trade and gay all signified distinct "categories" of homosexual men. Historian George Chauncey notes in his book ("Gay New York") that queer would've been the self-identifier of ""masculine"" gay men.

We can also assume that this is what was happening in the U.K. as well, as a letter held in the National Archives shows us (you can look up the letter in full, search the full name of the person and "My Dear Billy"). This letter was written by a man named Cyril Coeur de Leon to ‘My Dear Billy’ in 1934. Billy was the owner of "The Caravan Club", a ""disorderly house"" of ""male prostitutes"", and in it he writes "Just a note to say that I am very disappointed about you. I honestly thought you were queer, but different from the others, and I liked you very much […] I have only been queer since I came to London about two years ago, before then I knew nothing about it." This use of queer is arguably ahead of it's time, given that at this point queer was exclusively about gay men, whereas de Leon mentions he "still likes girls occasionally".

Over the years though, queer has evolved from the narrow definition of "gay man" to "gay men and lesbians" to "anyone not heterosexual" to "not heterosexual and/or not cisgender". And despite the fact that for the majority of the time that it has meant "gay" it has been used by the community, some people are still of the opinion that the word is "too offensive" to be used, but thankfully, this argument isn't as common as it was in the 90s and 00s, though still annoying persistent.

And as for my question, today I want to know firstly, if you use the word queer yourself? and secondly, what is your favourite word/way to refer to the queer community? (for example, "friend of dorothy" is funny to drop into conversation, and today I spoke to some who said they were "looking forward to meeting other *limp hand movement* at [pub name] tonight!")

Happy Pride 🌈 🎉

ok i have been neglecting pride anon i am so sorry lets speedrun these

i use the word queer! in fact its my favourite way to refer to myself

and i love a good limp wrist movement as well