#been navigating that for longer than I knew I was queer

[cosmic--marmalade]

Was at a store. Complimented a girl on her nails, we got to talking a bit. My pronouns got brought up because of my They/Them pin.

She laughed in my face. Like gut busting laughter, can't speak or breathe, falling to the floor kind of laughing.

I know how lucky, and frankly privileged, I am to not get this kind of reaction on a regular basis. I know. It's been Years since something like this happened.

Doesn't make it sting any less.

Doesn't make walking out of the store crying any less embarrassing.

Bubble burst. Message received.

[eternalbuckley]

Undercover. — evan buckley

SUMMARY: You are an undercover detective and assigned to a Job with Lucy. Buck tried reaching out to you while you were still undercover because he missed you and after the job was done, you decided to have a talk with him. Which revealed unsaid feelings from Buck.

word count: 3,504

genre: angst and bit of fluff | gn!reader, queer!reader, bipoc!reader and plus-size!reader friendly

pairing: evan buckley x reader, lucy chen x platonic!reader, 911/the rookie crossover

warnings: talks about drugs, reader got physically hurt (broken rip and a few scratches), mention of a car crash, small descriptio of a physical fight, there is a bartender named marc (in case that's your name), Y/C/N used once (means your undercover characters name), very emotional buck, english is not my first language, slightly proofread — if I forgot something, please let me know!

disclaimer: please do not repost or try and take ownership of my work or post this anywhere without my consent. do not translate my work and post it anywhere — i give you no permission to do that. i only post my stories here, so if you find my work anywhere else please let me know! reblogs, likes and comments are appreciated and welcomed!

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Working as a detective in the LAPD came with its good and bad sides. The stress was not always easy to handle but working undercover came with many more downsides. Things like not being able to be with the people you care about whenever you have an undercover job. It would be too dangerous if anyone in your private life would be a part of the life you created to be undercover and get involved with any case you had. Everyone who was a part of your life knew that, especially your colleagues and your boyfriend Evan Buckley. A firefighter of the LAFD.

You always had to go away for a few days here and there to get done different jobs since you started being friends with him a few years ago. Some years into your friendship, both of you realized that you had feelings for each other and started dating. Now you’ve been with him in a happy relationship for one and a half years. And soon you’d finally move in with each other. Buck knew what he had to deal with, such as not being able to contact you in any imaginable way whenever you were undercover. It would be too risky for you, him, everyone else and the job. You didn’t have to go undercover for the past two months now, as a result of an injury you got from your last job. Since then, Buck got even more protective over you. Naturally, he already was the protective kind of guy but since then it got more.

Buck wasn’t okay with you going undercover again but you had to because it had something to you with one of your old jobs and it was much needed that you would get into it again. And despite Buck being against it, you decided to do it and promised him you‘d be okay and everything would be according to plan.

"You got hurt the last time you promised me that," he mumbled but you reassured him that you would look out for yourself this time. Especially because you weren’t alone and had one of your colleagues, Lucy Chen, with you. This helped him to calm down at least a little bit. You kissed him as a goodbye and left his apartment, shutting down your private life.

Since then, it had been three weeks and the job was taking longer than expected. It was unbearable for you and Buck but it needed to be like this. You knew you were close to being done with the job but you couldn’t risk anything yet. Lucy and you didn’t have all the evidence you needed to arrest the drug dealers and the whole gang you were infiltrating. She had to brew lots of different drugs and you helped her with that. Collecting all the evidence wasn’t as easy as you hoped it would be but there wasn’t anything else you could do. You had to wait and so did Buck.

Whenever he wasn’t on a call, he sat on the couch of the station and kept looking at his phone whenever it vibrated. He hoped it would be you, letting him know you were back but every time it wasn’t what he was hoping for. It was the first time you had been away for such an amount of time since you got together and he missed you. He needed to see you again. Eddie tried to cheer him up by spending time together with him and Chris but not even that helped Buck. He was thankful for the efforts but the only thing that could cheer him up would be seeing you. He knew he couldn’t but he had and needed to find a way.

So, despite everyone’s concerns and efforts to keep him away from doing what he wanted to do, he drove to a bar. Buck knew from your stories about your undercover jobs that this was the place where you usually hung out with a few drug dealers. It was a normal bar; everyone could enter it without automatically being associated with the gang or any criminal acts but it was a known place for this gang. He sat in his car, thinking about if he should do it. Buck knew it was wrong and the risks that could come with it but in that moment, he was too stubborn and got out of his jeep and walked over to the bar. He entered it and looked around, looking for you. And to his good luck or maybe later his bad luck he found you immediately. Your eyes met each other and for a second you thought your eyes were lying to you but they weren’t. You saw your beloved boyfriend walking over to the bartender and watched him as he ordered himself a drink while sitting down there. His back was turned to you but you knew what his aim was. Internally you cursed him.

"Hey, isn’t that your boyfriend?" Lucy nodded towards Buck and whispered to you. You nodded your head and sighed. He wasn’t supposed to be here.

You were currently sitting with her alone, luckily no one else in the gang you both were infiltrating was with you. Giving you a night just together. It was very unusual but you both took it as a chance to plan your next steps.

"I‘ll go and get us another drink, warn me if anyone gets too close," you told Lucy as you stood up. She hummed and nodded her head.

You walked over to the bartender and stood right next to Buck but kept a distance from him. You didn’t want to cause too much attention in case anyone in the gang was secretly watching you and Lucy.

"The same drinks twice again, Marc," you smiled at him. He nodded and started making your order. He was a few feet away from you now.

You didn’t look at Buck since you weren’t sure if you were being watched by anyone. "What the hell are you doing here?" You mumbled quietly but Buck was still able to hear you.

"I needed to see you," Buck took a sip from his drink, "I miss you." He noticed that you didn’t look at him which hurt him but he knew you couldn’t risk anything. It was already too risky for you to talk with him in the first place but he needed to risk it.

You sighed and looked down for a moment, "I miss you too,” you replied eventually in a soft whisper. “But you should go. You shouldn’t be here, it‘s too dangerous for you or us." You continued as you watched Marc while he made you the drinks. He shared a polite smile with you from the other side of the bar.

Buck nodded his head and finished his drink before he finally looked at you. You looked different. You had another haircut and hair colour, you even had a few fake tattoos on your body. You looked good in his eyes, different but good. But not as good as you usually look like.

"Here are your drinks Y/C/N," Marc gave you the two drinks and went back to serving other customers. You thanked him and took the two glasses.

You turned your body to Buck and gave him a small reassuring smile, "I‘m okay, don’t worry about me." You whispered once again.

Buck nodded his head again, "I love you." He whispered as you turned around to walk back to Lucy.

"I love you too," you replied quietly and eventually returned to Lucy without turning around again. Buck watched you go and gulped. He didn’t want to leave but he had to, and so he did.

As soon as you sat down again you looked out of the window and looked out for any people who possibly could follow him as he drove away but you weren’t able to see anyone following him. With a sigh and worry on your face, you looked back to Lucy, who already had her eyebrows raised. But before she could say anything you told her that you would talk with him about it once the job is done.

"I mean he knows that he shouldn’t do it but… It‘s Buck after all," you chuckled with her. You tried to hide your fear that someone might have followed Buck and that he could be hurt…. or worse.

After an hour Lucy and you decided to call it a night and drove back to your motel. The following days were quieter than usual. The gang you were working for didn’t contact you or Lucy, which was weird for the both of you but you decided to wait longer. After a few more days, three men came to your motel and took you with them. The conclusion was that the leader wanted to test you and Lucy. He wanted to see if he would be able to trust both of you any longer. Luckily you seemed to have passed his test because he involved both of you in the next steps of his plans.

Two weeks later the whole gang got arrested during a drug deal. The last days weren’t the easiest ones because one of the closer gang members started questioning the story about Lucy and you. Which resulted into the gang leader starting to question both of you as well but the deal was still being done. But you didn’t get out of it without any injuries. One of the gang members hit you in the side of your rips before he got arrested but that was everything that happened.

Your sergeant still made sure you‘d get a checkup in the hospital in case your injury caused any bigger inner injuries. You didn’t want to tell Buck anything about it because you knew he‘d be too worried but as soon as you entered the hospital with Lucy you met him. He and the 118 team just arrived there because Bobby got hurt on their latest call. You wished you could curse whoever was in charge of all the happening events because you didn’t want Buck to worry about you as well if he already was worried about his captain. Buck immediately stood up and rushed over to you, his face was slightly bruised.

"That‘s my cue to go," Lucy bit on her lower lip and held up her thumbs as she left you alone.

"Lucy!" You whisper yelled and held your rips because of your quick movements. Maybe it hurt you a bit more than you thought.

Your action didn’t go unnoticed by your boyfriend, "What… What are you doing here?" He asked you, clearly worried about you. He held you by your arms and sat down with you.

"I‘m just here for a checkup, nothing to worry about," you tried to smile but you knew he‘d see right through it.

He nodded and raised his hand to touch your slightly bruised face but his face turned into slight panic or shock for a moment, "W..wait am I," he looked around and stopped in his tracks, "Am I allowed to talk to you? Is your job over or.."

You chuckled but hissed because of the pain, "It‘s over, we got everything we needed." You looked at him and touched his face to check up on him, "What happened to you?"

"Don’t worry about me. It‘s just a few scratches, we‘re here for Bobby," he told you and explained what exactly happened that led his team to be here.

They tried to rescue a couple after a car crash but another car drove into the accident and the team got slightly hurt. Especially Bobby but nothing too serious, he‘ll be out again after the checkups are complete.

Buck smiled but it was quickly replaced with worry again, "I‘m gonna get you a doctor."

You nodded and Buck left you there. Lucy came back with two water bottles and sat down next to you. She let out a relieved sigh and was clearly happy that the job was finally done. She was tired of brewing all these drugs.

"I guess you won’t talk to him tonight, hm?" She asked you as she gave you one bottle.

You took the bottle and opened it, "About the thing that happened at the bar a few weeks ago?" You took a sip and looked over to Buck who was talking to a doctor. You shook your head and looked back to Lucy, "I don’t think so. He already had a rough day. Talking about this can wait."

Lucy nodded and squeezed your arm after she put her hand on it, "Just don’t wait too long. We or especially you cannot risk it again. The next time it might be too late and one of you might die, or even both of you."

"I know," you sighed as you whispered and pinched your nose bridge. You tried to think about different ways how you should approach him with this topic but you still didn’t find the correct one.

As soon as you were off to go, you went home with Buck. He insisted on staying by your side, especially because it was your first night alone back home in your apartment. Originally, he wanted to drive to his apartment but yours was nearer. Buck waited for you as you got checked and the worry on his face was clearly there. You knew he wanted to ask you so many questions but would he get all of them answered? He didn’t think so, nor did he expect it.  But he for sure knew, he would try to get answers out of you about your well-being and how you got hurt.

"Ugh I require so much sleep," you sighed dramatically as soon as you entered your apartment.

You dropped your backpack on the floor and took off your jacket. Buck immediately came over to you to help you. Any big movement hurt you too much, he knew and saw that in your face.

"What happened to you?" He asked you again and reached out to touch your cheek. You didn’t flinch and just looked at him, "I.. I know you can’t tell me explicitly but.. You got hurt. Again."

You took his hand and squeezed it, "I‘m fine, really. It’s just a few scratches and a broken rip." You watched his eyes scanning your face. He furrowed his eyebrows but relaxed them after a few seconds again. He must have been thinking about something but you weren’t sure if he was going to tell you what he had on his mind.

After a few more seconds Buck shook his head and decided that he wanted to know what happened, "Tell me how it happened." He whispered as you turned away from him to get yourself something to drink.

"Buck…" You exhaled after you took a sip from your glass. You didn’t want to tell him everything but you knew he wouldn’t stop asking you about it. That was something you loved about him. That he would never back down from something.

"Please,” he begged desperately, “Tell me everything you can.”

Your eyes found his pleading ones and you slowly nodded your head. "Okay," you sat down with him on your couch.

Buck held your hand the entire time and listened to each of your words. You told him everything you were able to tell him about the past few weeks. From the point where you two met at the bar until almost all the main people from the gang got arrested. You told him about the gang leader starting to question the story about you and Lucy. How everything almost went down and that they were almost outed as detectives but luckily to you, you and Lucy were good enough at convincing most of the gang members. Of course, some didn’t believe you and watched your steps very clearly. Up until early this evening when everyone got arrested. Before your colleagues stormed into the building one gang member confronted you and Lucy. Having evidence that you two were indeed detectives and he threatened you to tell everyone about your lies. Hoping you two would die. Soon you three got into a fight and you got hit by the gang member a few times. In your face and rips mainly. But right after that your colleagues came in and made sure everyone got arrested.

Buck gulped nervously, "You mean… You could have died?"

You slightly nodded your head but immediately squeezed his hands, "But I didn’t, okay? Everything is fine. Everyone got arrested and everything is done." You spoke softly.

"But you still could have died," his voice cracked. His lower lip trembled in fear of the possibility of losing you.

He didn’t want to imagine getting a call about your passing from your boss or any partners. Buck was afraid that you could die in a job. He knew his own job wasn’t the safest either and that you might feel the same way as he did about you and your job. But he couldn’t imagine a life without you, that’s something he was one hundred percent sure of.

"Buck,” you tried to calm him down but it was not possible. You took both of his hands and pulled them to your lips to kiss him on his knuckles. It usually helped him to calm down whenever you did it but this time it didn’t seem to help immediately. “I’m here, okay? Nothing bad happened. I’m-“

"I don’t know how dangerous undercover jobs can exactly be but I don’t want you to die. I can’t lose you,” he shook his head with tears in his eyes.

You didn’t know about his opinion about your job. Both of you haven’t really talked about it before. Sure, you knew he didn’t like your job because he was scared you could badly get hurt again but that he felt this exact way. That was something new. He never was near crying because of it, at least not in front of you.

"You won’t lose me," you reassured him and put one of your hands on his cheek. He leaned his head into your hand but his worries were still present.

You wanted to promise him that he won’t lose you but you didn’t want to make a promise about this. Not, if you weren’t one hundred percent sure if you could keep it. The only way you could keep it was by staying with him because you deeply cared about him and loved him. But regarding to your job, you couldn’t promise him that. Neither could Buck promise you the same thing and both of you knew that.

"But what if there’s a time you can’t help yourself and you get in danger and-," he started rambling but stopped himself to look at you, “I’m worried about you.”

You nodded your head and whispered a few ‘I knows’. "And that’s okay but if I ever get too close to something dangerous, I‘ll get out."

Buck tried to smile at you but it didn’t reach his eyes.

"But…" you started and scooted closer to him. His hand immediately found its way to your thigh. You were thinking about how you could approach another important topic in this whole situation. Because you still needed to talk with him about his appearance at the bar a few weeks ago. But right now, you decided this would be something you should discuss later.

Buck looked at you, waiting for you to continue. He turned his body completely to you and signalled you that he was listening. With your one hand, you wiped away his tears and shook your head. You cuddled into him and wrapped your arms around his torso and so did he.

"There’s something else I need to talk with you about but it can wait for now,” you whispered softly and closed your eyes. “Right now, I just want to sit here with my boyfriend and cuddle with him.”

He nodded his head with a chuckle and squeezed your arms, he tried to make sure he wasn’t accidentally hurting you. He finally had his angel back in his arms. You nuzzled more into his body and hummed, feeling calm and happy. You didn’t want to let go of him and neither did he want to. There was an underlying tension between you regarding you and being an undercover detective but Buck knew he couldn’t change your opinion. You loved being a detective and especially working undercover. After all, it wasn’t just him who was scared every time. Whenever Buck had a shift, you were scared you would get a phone call about his passing or that you’d see anything about it on the news. You deeply cared about each other and were scared for each other but the love between you was stronger than anything else. But little did you know what would come sooner or later.

[wen-kexing-apologist]

Bengiyo Queer Cinema Syllabus

Hello! After a holiday hiatus, I am returning to @bengiyo’s queer cinema syllabus. We will be ringing in the new year with Unit 4: Heartbreak Alley, the totally light-hearted, definitely not agonizing section of the syllabus where I get to watch countless acts of violence be committed against queer people. That fuck I have Lesbians waiting for me at the end of this unit. The films in Unit 4 are: Bent (1997), Strange Fruit (2004), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Parting Glances (1986), Philadelphia (1993), The Living End (1992), Holding the Man (2015), Jeffery (1995), and Boys on the SIde (1995)

Today I will be writing about 

Boy’s Don’t Cry (1999) dir. Kimberly Pierce

Content Warning: rape, murder, self harm

[Run Time- 1:58, Lang: English] [I was not able to find Strange Fruit anywhere online so will investigate my library to see if they have a copy]

Summary: A young man named Brandon Teena navigates love, life, and being transgender in rural Nebraska. 

Cast: *Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena *Chloe Sevigny as Lana Tisdel *Peter Sarsgaard as John Lotter *Brendan Sexton III as Tom Nissen *Alicia Goranson as Candace

Side note: Boys Don’t Cry is based on the true story, and real life rape and murder of Brandon Teena, who was 21 years old when he was killed in Fall River, Nebraska. 

__

To start, I’m glad that I looked this film up before I watched it so that I knew what to expect. I don’t know how often this will occur throughout the syllabus, but while the syllabus itself is a lead in to BLs it seems to be structured towards Baby Gays, which means that I am expanding my knowledge of famous trans people in history beyond Stonewall. I didn’t know who Brandon Teena was until I looked up this movie, I didn’t see his name printed in anything until I read Transgender History. 

I am having a delayed reaction to this movie. While I was watching it, I was able to bear witness to the violence, it was graphic, and brutal, but I knew it was coming, I had time to prepare myself, I could abstract the violence being done in to a fictional character, I could remind myself it was a movie when the cameras panned away from the dead bodies and I could see the supposed corpses breathing. And then it was over and I couldn’t escape it anymore. I couldn’t escape the knowledge that this was real, that this actually happened, that what I had just watched, what I was not spared from, was bearing witness to an actual crime, to actual violence, rape, murder of an actual, real human being, of Family. 

I said this in my last post from Heartbreak Alley that I went in to this section just expecting to be put through the wringer for almost the entire length of a film. I would say I went in to this unit expecting to feel my skin crawling the way it did with Mysterious Skin. Instead I have been gifted all sides of queerness: acceptance, homophobia, love, hatred, joy, pain, gentleness, violence. I want to talk for a bit about how grateful I was to see Brandon happy. His experience in this film does speak to truth, to trans experience, the complexity of being loved by a family member but not having your identity respected. Brandon’s cousin cuts his hair short for him, but can’t call him a man. Brandon gets in a bar fight and is beaming afterwards cause he got a shiner, cause random strangers didn’t clock him as trans. Brandon stays in Fall River for far longer than he should because he is riding the high of just getting to exist as himself. I know a number of friends who wanted to immediately get the hell out of dodge when they started their transition. Hell, I barely return home myself. 

Brandon does stupid boy things, he flirts with every pretty girl, he pushes his own boundaries because he wants to prove that he is a man. He smiles. He smiles often. He smiles widely. He smiles. I loved how much he smiled in this movie. I love that his life was not all suffering. This movie is kind to Brandon while still having to put him through the inevitable. 

This movie speaks to queer strength and queer fears, Brandon knew the people who raped and murdered him. They were his friends, he was their friend. They smoked together, drank beer together, and tried to dodge cops together.  John (the man who will go on to murder Brandon) was one of the first people we saw affirm Brandon’s gender identity (at least in the movie). And I think this movie is smart in how they set John and Tom up. They are friendly but they are wild, we learn that John has issues with impulse control, we see how quickly John and Tom can escalate their behavior towards aggression. 

Lana serves a reminder to trans people that we are worthy of being loved, and that there are people who will love us. I love what it says about Lana when she notices Brandon’s breasts during their first sexual encounter. When they finish she feels his lap, searching for a dick, she strokes his cheek and comments on how smooth his face is, she calls him handsome. For me this is where I think Lana figures it out, even if she isn’t told until later. 

Lana (and later on Candace) serve as reminders to me that rural doesn’t mean bigoted. It can. It absolutely can. But there are queer people everywhere, there are allies everywhere, queer people can have a life, find love, experience joy anywhere. When Brandon returns to Lincoln for his court date, his cousin Lonny asks him “Fall River? You know they hang faggots there,” and that could be true. Fall River had people like John and Tom, it also had people like Lana,  Candace, and the nurse. 

[CW: the next few paragraphs will discuss sexual assault] 

I loved that Lana was committed to Brandon as a person, she did not care what his body looked like. I loved that she refused to participate in Brandon’s humiliation. When John and Tom forcibly stripped him and tried to show Lana his vulva, she refused to look. It’s Brandon’s business, she loves Brandon, she doesn’t care, she will ease as much pain and humiliation as she possibly can. 

The rape scene was brutual and hard to watch, especially because they don’t start it right away. Brandon is being interrogated, you get the implication, and while I was writing notes to myself I was just about to write “i’m glad they spared us the scene” when they cut to Brandon’s rape sequence. I sometimes struggle with displayed assaulted scenes, especially when they are associated with real people, because I think it is important to really, fully understand the violence that was committed against Brandon. I think the brutality he was treated with is very much an important thing to sit with and understand, and I am not one to feel like people should turn away from observing acts of violence. But I also don’t know that I love watching the assault of a man who actually existed who was really beaten and gang raped, I don’t think we have any way of knowing if he’d want to show that. I don’t think we have any way of knowing if that honors his memory. 

Either way, I did find it absolutely fascinating from a characterization standpoint what happened after Brandon was raped. Because before they get confirmation that Brandon is trans, they are using Brandon’s name and pronouns, then they get the confirmation and partway through they switch to Brandon’s deadname and misgender him. When they rape him, they misgender him. When he’s raped we see him getting thrown around, slammed against the car, punched in the face, etc. he is treated with such violence, and then it is over and Tom and John and Brandon kinda go back to normal? They gently place his shirt over his torso, they call him buddy, they help him stand up, they help him get in to the car, they ask Brandon if he is okay. 

They take Brandon home, and immediately go back to affirming his identity. Like Brandon is in the bathroom, trying not to hold back or quiet down his breakdown, and John and Tom refer to him as ‘little dude’ when they start asking him if he is okay and if he will need any help. Like???? I feel like I will need to sit in that scene for a while trying to pick apart what John and Tom’s brains are doing there. Don’t get me wrong, the less I have to hear Brandon be deadnamed or misgendered the better, but it was truly a wild thing to see Brandon’s cousin deadname and misgender him all the time while still caring about and loving him, and to see Brandon’s assaulters and future murderers just slip so easily back in to masculine terminology for Brandon in this scene. 

[Assault conversation over]

We get a similar thing with Candace where she is the first person to figure out that Brandon is trans, and she is horrified. But when Brandon comes a-knocking on her door, at first Candance cannot even meet his eye but she still uses his name, and the second she picks up on the fact that something is wrong with the way his voice wavers, she faces him, she softens, she asks him what they did to him, and she lets him back in to her home, she tries to hide him to keep him safe long enough to get out of town. 

And Brandon gets another moment of peace, he and Lana have sex with Lana knowing everything about him. Knowing that he lied about his life, knowing that he has a vagina. They have another moment alone to dream, to talk about leaving Fall River, to plan to run away together. I don’t know if any of that happened in real life, but the movie at least grants Brandon one more moment of joy before his entire life is ripped away from him. 

And it happens so fast. Candace is shot and killed instantaneously. Branon is shot in the head and he dies instantaneously, and John stabs him to make sure he’s finished the job, but in an instant, with the pull of a trigger Brandon is just…gone. Twenty-one years old, a whole life ahead of him. I think movies too often grant its characters a dying monologue. They get to have a final moment before they finally, slowly succumb to their injuries. But not here. Brandon is alive one second, and dead the next. There is no moment for silence right after, there is no remorse with John or Tom, they turn against Lana, they turn against each other. They are firing bullets at random, John is stopping Tom from killing Lana or Candace’s toddler. 

I’ll tell you what though, sometimes the parallels parallel. Two days ago, my friend and I learned of the death of someone we cared about and loved, it’s a devastating loss for our household, and a devastating loss for the broader community. As far as I know, they did not die from any violent action, but they were a part of an incredibly stigmatized and disregarded community. The last few people who have passed away in my life died slowly, I was able to brace for it, but this was quick, unexpected and I say this only because seeing Brandon die so quickly, knowing he was real, knowing he had so much time taken from him, that knowledge just wrapped itself right around the rest of my grief for the week. I had a delayed emotional reaction to this movie, it took a couple minutes of silence afterwards to feel the blow, but I think having watched this when I did, Brandon Teena’s story will live in a different, deeper part of me than most of the films I’ve watched so far. 

Favorite Moment

There isn’t one scene that really stands out to me, cause everything was so strong. I feel like my favorite moment is maybe right at the beginning when Brandon looks in the mirror after his haircut and sees himself and you can just see the happiness take root in his body. 

Favorite Quote

“You’re so handsome” 

Lana says this after she and Brandon have sex for the first time. I talked about it a bit above, but I think she figured out that Brandon was trans here, and I see her calling him handsome as affirmation.

Final Score

9/10

This was a fantastic film with incredible acting.

[barbedwirechain]

hi!!! I've been questioning some uncertainty in my identity and you were the first person on t I saw when I looked into the "butch fag" tag, I'm really curious about what it means to be butch and on testosterone, or being butch and navigating the world passing almost as a cis man? for lack of better terminology, sorry if it's not right.

I've been out as trans since I was a kid (almost 22 now.) and I've always went back and forth on my identity bc I don't relate with other trans men or cis men in general but I knew transitioning was what's right for me. detransition doesn't feel correct at all, I'm so happy being on testosterone. im uncertain in my sexuality but have always found comfort with lesbians and butches, and I've always felt the explanation of butch dysphoria sounded more clear to me than wanting to wake up with the body of a cis man. what I mean is I think I'm a butch fag but I don't know what that means, I don't know how or if I'm ready to come out with that. I'm afraid of my future with dating or navigating queer spaces if I claim to be butch or lesbian aligned while still presenting full beard and no desire to change that.

I don't know how to navigate exploring this at all, especially because lesbian spaces online kind of scare me since its so easy to end up following terfs if you don't know what to look for. I don't want to be harassed or make anyone else uncomfortable with my presence. I want to connect with other butches on T. do you know of anything I could do to reach this kind of understanding?

i’ll say if you already see uh butch fag in yourself or find whatever it is in me, in you you’ve already started to reach that understanding. exploring online spaces where you have unprecedented access to people with these more “complicated” identities (more accurately—identities that are generally less referenced than others or not recognized outside of the community for better and for worse) and hanging out in adult oriented city spaces helped extend my understanding of myself as butch.

the longer i understand myself as trans the more i’m comfortable frankensteining my identity (for uh lack of uh better term). i say this to explain why i call myself the most appropriate word for me “dykefag” but butch fag… or faggot butch (on T or not) has uh community precedent. there’s articles and quotes of people saying that term or uh form of it and they’re also transsexual and/or lesbian, although this was something i found only after seeing myself in the phrase.

i understood myself as uh dyke for most of my life and uh lesbian as the most neat version of my sexuality; dyke is something i’ve reclaimed being called that as uh child and call/ed myself that for over ten years now (aside from uh brief period of bisexuality). after being on T though for almost two years i noticed people are less likely to see me as uh dyke so that word begins to feel more personal and intimate for me. but butch?

butch is always exactly right. its not something i reclaimed or have complicated relationship to, i just am.

i am and i mean it with no irony or “meh”-ness; i am butch and i think i’ll die butch.

uh good two years after beginning to call myself butch and right after starting T I leaned into my lifelong attraction to butches, already holding an interest in “‘queer’ masculinities” via research in college. eventually i realized i wanted to be that. i wanted to be masculine ina way that never didnt hold uh layer of unspoken queerness. even in my current “mostly cis-man passing” form (i don’t take it as an insult, i present more masculine than androgynous like i used to for comfort and safety) i’m always butch. most people assume ima cis gay man or uh very hairy bulldyke and at some point i was like… these lines are so easily blurred because of how i decide to embody butchness, on purpose, and (what’s read as) faggotry through my attraction to other butch and queer masc people. i experienced the difference between dyke and fag fade away and began to tag my shit with dyke fag and butch fag to be in the same spaces as other gay trans people who had this line also fade away.

maintaining my attachment to being butch and loving butchness led me to follow “butch4butch” pages and explore butch4butch tags and see myself as a butch4butch gay more and more solidly. and the more i searched for butch4butch, the more i came across trans fags and nonbinary butch lesbians (and both!!). similar to going on tumblr in 2011 and finding out there were people who didn’t believe in the christian god, lex and tumblr specifically led me to uh set of trans people who embodied this faggot butchness, whether dyke (lesbian) or faggot (gay boy) identifying— not to mention all the gay boy dykes and the fagboy trannies. i found/find myself relating to their appreciation of masculinity and consideration of transness and gender noncomformity more than any other space, including ones that are for lesbians which, in my honest opinion, always end up catering to terf-bubbles or narcissist echo chambers that define themselves through gender essentialist ideas about masculinity/men of which i no longer see any viability in.

inside, exploring tags online or apps for Gay people who do Gay shit and have Sexy and Fucked up understandings of gender can help you understand yourself further by identifying and also dis-identifying with others without having to “conflict”. outside?… i rarely explain what i am. and for better or worse, i don’t try to. i let people think i’m whatever they think unless someone directly asks or when cis men try to approach me and to conceal my agab and also deny them i kinda just straight up lie and play cishet man. i recognize we exist under 20 million ___ or ___ binaries, both imaginary and tangible, new and old, outside and inside—shit even nonbinary and binary began to feel like another binary to me recently and the only thing that alleviates that is 1) going through butch(4butch) tags and seeing cis, trans, and who knows butches loving each other in coexisting without pretending they’re at war and 2) being in community with other dykesfags, or fagdykes, and butch faggots irl. and like, lesbians in person are also jus way more awesome. *whispers* like most people. i understand this is, unfortunately, only as easy as your access, space, transportation, and work and personal life allows. most of my adult queer experience is in non-sober spaces ina city that i lived around or in and that can't be disregarded or forgotten.

to wrap this up, i didnt look for em (us haha) til i felt i was one of them but We’re Everywhere. not uh majority but uh presence, and that’s enough. and if i’m being honest even if i never found any of these people, i felt so intensely about being uh butch faggot and uh dykefag i saw myself simply going with it—but going with it with the knowledge that it’s near impossible to make anything up at this point. someone has almost surely shared the idea or identity regardless of if they publicized it or let it be archived. and even as much of this response IS about that, i can’t overemphasize that even if it’s something you did made up, all alone, 200% you, the feeling is true, yea? the beauty of frankensteining your [trans] identity is seeing that you can kinda be whatever the shit you feel as long as it’s truly comfortable and honest to the time with reasonable respect to yourself and your community.

[britcision]

There’s been another round of the semi-constant “the kids these days don’t know their history” and 1) you know who you sound like

But also 2) the kids are being told that anyone over 19 who talks to them is a sicko and a pervert. How are they supposed to know when they don’t know what questions to ask?

And it’s being done so pervasively and so successfully that I gotta wonder if that isn’t the goal

Forcing a divide between queer kids and the queer adults who could support them and help them with the benefit of experience

The people who could teach them all this history and how we got to where we are

There’s a reason the US and Canadian governments have a long and ongoing history of stealing children from Indigenous families; if you want to remove a culture, you start with the kids

There’s this weird dual mindset now where young queers are acting like it’s both always been this safe to be out and queer, and that they’re the first ones doing anything for queer rights

They’re trying to reinvent the wheel and getting scolded by the older queers they’ve already been told are perverts because they’re no longer minors (and isn’t that a familiar rhetoric)

But what’s gonna happen to those teens on their nineteenth birthday, when they’re now the perverts if they keep hanging out with their same friend groups?

Are they gonna magically forget everything that told them older queers aren’t safe? Will they know how to navigate the world without the safety brand of “minor”?

(Fucking wild the first time I saw a baby queer use that in public, telling some creep they were a minor and to leave them alone. There were about 8 of us in the group and we just gently folded them back into the middle so creeper knew they weren’t out alone because holy shit that is dangerous.

The people who think harassing others on the street is fine and good really aren’t the people you should trust won’t be encouraged by finding out you’re a minor)

A good damn chunk of my queer friends are at least four years older than me and oh boy did they have a lot to put up with when I was 16-17

But they taught me our queer history, and things like why the leather daddies and kinksters will always have a place at Pride (we did not get this far without them and we’re not leaving anyone behind)

I learned a lot from having older friends, including things they weren’t trying to teach me just because I looked into stuff they casually talked about

And bear in mind, when I was that age queer rep was pretty much “oh and they’re brothers so no one ship them”, Brokeback Mountain, and Rocky Horror Picture Show

I’m over the moon that queer kids have so much more stuff to choose from now. We’re going to need more, because we always need more and there should never be a cap on the amount of rep any group needs

I’m just suspicious of the kind of discourse that tries to put lines down between members of the queer community

Again: we did not get here without every single group that fought and died under this umbrella. And we will lose everything we have if we start to leave people behind.

Being queer still isn’t safe for everyone, everywhere, and even where we’re relatively safe there are still people chomping at the bit to roll us all back and we don’t all fit in the closet anymore

Anyway, TL;DR: don’t trust anyone who tells you that they’re the only person you can trust and everyone else is dangerous, the only way to stop predators is to teach people about predatory behaviour, not “all predators are x”, and we all need to share our queer history in as open and approachable a manner as possible

[eva-reviews]

Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh by Rachel Lippincott -- a Review

Trigger Warnings: alcohol consumption, reference to mother's death, references to past child abuse, homophobic references, internalized homophobia, references to past gaslighting, emotional abuse, misogyny, classism and sexism

My Rating 

Honestly, I’d give this book an 8.7/10; I really enjoyed it. As soon as I read the back of the book, I was hooked. A time travel romance with miscommunication?? Umm.. yes sign me up!! I loved how it switched from Lucy and Audrey’s perspectives, especially because both of our main characters were experiencing something so new, in many different ways, not just time travel. I do wish that the miscommunication went on for a little longer, but I enjoy the hurt-comfort aspect of the book. 

Overview

Audrey Cameron is an artist who lost her inspiration after a breakup. She has been in an artistic standstill for a while now. She spends her time working at her parent's convenience store in Pittsburgh, when a regular customer, Mr. Montgomery comes in saying he can help her. What she didn’t know though, is he meant sending her back in time to 1812; becoming the main character in a Regency Romance. 

Lucy Sinclair is the daughter of a wealthy businessman, who is trying to secure her marriage to the most wealthy man in England. Locking her in a loveless marriage, and a boring life; that is, until a strange girl appears on the field of her family’s estate when her father left on a business trip. 

While the two girls are together, trying to navigate their new life together and understand what has happened, a spark is born. Both are trying desperately to fall in love with their suitors and live the life everyone wants them to. Until they fall for each other. 

My Thoughts 

I read this entire book in 9 hours, I could not put it down. It was so good! It did not take long for me to get into the plot, there was comedy, heartbreak, embarrassment and of course romance. The ending? Wow, that was stressful. Like on the edge of my seat, book gripping, can’t look away, kind of stressful. 

I did find it annoying how perfect the world was. I know it's a historical fantasy, however, Lucy comments how “this is not accepted here”, but there were so many people that they met in 1812 who were accepting or understanding. It was a little unrealistic, I mean, I know queer people find other queer people, like how a pig finds truffles. But it was a little too perfect. I wish they had to navigate their love life a little more or for Lucy to have a little more turmoil with realizing she is a lesbian. Other than that, amazing!

Growing up bisexual, I always knew I liked both men and women, but it wasn’t until the last few years I became comfortable with my sexuality. I realized I made myself prefer men and go on dates with men because of my internalized homophobia and heteronormativity. Growing up Christian aslo didn’t help this, although my immediate family is ok with me being queer, I always heard how it's a sin from people at church, or how my uncle was shamed from the family because he married a man. I can relate to both the main characters in this respect. Lucy was born in 1794, it was hardly a time when women went to school, let alone kiss another girl and get away with it. She has the confliction of, ‘I have to be with a man because that is what society says’ and ‘I’ve never felt anything for a man and I would like to kiss a girl’. Later this causes some internal turmoil later on when she becomes aware of her feelings for Audrey. And for Audrey, who is from 2023, where she had crushes on both boys and girls, she was not as ashamed or confused by her feelings. But it was easier to be with a guy rather than being with a girl. Because sure, queerness is accepted today, but not by everyone, which is scary. 

Audrey also falls into heteronormativity, it can be easier than really exploring your feelings and facing the world where you are no longer part of the accepted norm. Heteronormativity for those who don’t know is: The assumption that everyone is heterosexual and that heterosexuality is superior to all other sexualities. This includes the often implicitly held idea that heterosexuality is the norm and that other sexualities are “different” or “abnormal.”. It is easier to fall into the social norm, rather than challenge it. Rachel Lippincott explains it really well in Audrey's realization of her feelings, “I’ve never been with a girl before. I’ve had crushes, sure, … And then I was with Charlie, and I could almost… avoid it entirely if I wanted to. Tuck it away into a neat little box; convincing myself it wasn’t a part of myself I really needed to explore.”. Many people feel this way, this is why most queer women and/or transmen go through a period of hyperfeminity, where they try to convince themselves and others that they are straight and/or cis, they can conform to society and live how the world wants them to live, love who they should love. Hyperfeminity for those who don’t know is: the exaggeration of stereotypically female behaviour, based on so-called gender roles. This can be seen in the way they dress, behave or how they pursue relationships. 

I will be honest, I am someone who doesn’t believe in the whole idea of true love, nor do I really understand how love works. This probably has something to do with me being asexual and aromantic… anyway, I had been asking people around me what love is, and why people put effort into something that will most likely fall apart or only cause pain when it ends. I feel like the universe put this book in my way because I was instantly bitch-slapped with an answer to my questions. Which brings me to another reason why I enjoyed this book. It made me understand love a little more, without making me feel pessimistic about my own love life. As Mr. Montgomery told Audrey, who was becoming much like me after her failed relationship, he says “There’s just as much heartbreak in not putting yourself out there, because it guarantees you’re going to miss out. And I’m not just talking about love … Just because you got hurt once by the wrong person doesn’t mean it’ll happen again if you find the right one.” and later on James, a suitor turned friend, says “Sometimes I reckon, love — real love —doesn’t care about what’s proper or what other people think. It finds you when you least expect it, where you least expect it”. Even though love is confusing and you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean that you are any less deserving of it. Even if it ends in failure, and it can lead to pain, at least you loved. I feel this book has helped me grow and understand, that not everything has to be perfect, which is a lesson I have been trying to learn for years now and will continue to learn. Mr. Montgomery later says “But even true love doesn’t come without pain, without risk. And that doesn’t make it something to run from or leave behind. It can be scary, and unexpected… but when it is with the right person. It’s worth it.”.

Conclusion

As the book progressed, it was so irritating seeing Audrey and Lucy misunderstand each other, and I loved every second of it. For most of the book they are pining for each other, it is very much a slow burn. When they finally get together, it is so good!!! There is the beginnings of a sex scene but it’s fade to black, and it doesn’t go into much detail. Remember this is still a YA book. I would have loved for it to have been written as an adult and be able to explore a more mature storyline and themes, but it still works very well as a YA. 

Genuinely, if you like miscommunication, historical, slow-burn lesbians, you will love this book. It's like if Bridgerton had time travel lesbians and a meddling old man turned matchmaker.  Read it!! 

[granvarones]

The first time I heard the euro-pop sensation Aqua’s Barbie Girl was in the summer of 1997, at a party We The People organized in Clementon Park, New Jersey. The DJ was mixing bona fide house hits with contemporary jams. I remember this so vividly because I watched someone do “hand performance” to the song that was a newly minted hit. This was also one of those moments that I definitely knew I was gay because I felt like Barbie Girl was composed for LGBTQ folks; not sure how I came to that conclusion, but it just felt gay. I was 13 years old, journeying through puberty and trying to understand myself, but I recognized the subtle ways queer culture could be found in pop music. And now, more than 25 years since I first heard Barbie Girl, it remains a song that resonates and reminds me of what is remembered, who has gone, and the richness of their lives.

We The People was an AIDS service organization in Philadelphia, serving the most vulnerable HIV positive community, and my mother Melody E. Beverly worked there. Most of the organization’s service population was Black and brown people, people who inject drugs, and housing-insecure people with an AIDS diagnosis. It had a brick-and-mortar building at the corner of Broad and Lombard Street. Now a Taqueria with its own controversial history, at the end of the 1990s, it held precious work of caring for the community, with housing units atop, with an industrial-style kitchen. I remember this because I loved volunteering with building residents, preparing and cooking meals. I also had a thing for the biscuits that were often there.

On a hot day in the summer of ‘97, my mother and I arrived to begin boarding a bus to head over to the party at Clementon Park, which also included barbeque. While waiting to board the bus, I overheard Curtis speaking to a Black man who seemed exhausted if he had been taking AZT. This was a year after HAART was established as a standard for HIV care, and people were taking what we now know to be toxic medicine to manage their HIV. The introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy, or combination therapy, would mean that people who had been living with HIV could live longer lives. I always think about that moment of Curtis checking in with a community member about his health when navigating my own care. I still appreciate the way it was normalized as a communal approach to medicine adherence. Curtis was my mother’s supervisor. He was a charismatic Black gay man with a bald head. Curtis was the sweetest and most sincere person. He was also a drag performer, I had seen him perform for a holiday party and was in awe of him.

Aqua, a Danish musical group, released their single Barbie Girl in April 1997, from their debut album Aquarium that was released in March of the same year. The track has a synth-pop-house vibe to it, with bubblegum vocals from lead singer Lene, who plays Barbie in the music video for the song. René, another band member, plays Ken, in a campy and hilarious capture of a Barbie world; it does a beautiful job of both bringing humanity to a plastic doll and making the cringey nature of American consumerism visible in a funny way. This is ironic, because during a 2017 interview for Nylon Lene disclaims its politics and sexist overtones by stating that “it was kind of making fun of the Pamela Anderson kind-of girl” and says the song is “super-innocent.” To me, Barbie Girl now appears to be making a statement about bodily autonomy and misogyny. With the incessant lyric, “I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world.” This song makes me think about people who lived with HIV, like Curtis, who were living full and flourishing lives at a tender and promising point in the ongoing AIDS crisis.

Barbie Girl topped global charts and was part of a musical era that included the resurgence of unapologetic bubblegum pop music, led in part by the Spice Girls’ Wannabe, a year earlier. Barbie Girl peaked at number 7 on the US Billboard Hot 100.

Now the song has a new life in the context of Barbie, the anticipated movie featuring Margot Robbie as the title character original Barbie. Barbie World, a rap track by Nicki Minaj & Ice Spice for the Barbie soundtrack, samples Barbie Girl in a perfect way. I’m most certain Barbie Girl will have a second life on TikTok and a new generation will be embraced by the gummy-gayness of late nineties music, and remember that there were people who existed then, plagued by an epidemic that rendered their stories untold. They too are Barbie Girls, even in their afterworlds, they paved the way for us to live fantastically in the skin we’re in.

Signed, a Barbie Girl from the nineties.

I’m always yours Xx

Abdul-Aily Muhammad ( @mxabdulaliy )

They/Them/Thiers

gran varones Mentor

Philadelphia, PA

[thewindsofsong]

I think loss is such an odd thing to have to come to terms with sometimes.

Yesterday evening i got news that a family friend that was like a surrogate grandmother to me passed away.

I hadn’t been close to her in years. She was a born and raised evangelical Christian, classic trump supporting republican, but I also know personally that she was so kind, so open with her home and love to me.

When I was a child, things we a lot simpler between us. I didn’t know much about politics, I didn’t know I was queer, and the separation between parties didn’t seem as wide as it is now. She’d bring pumpkin bread and so much warmth whenever she visited with so much open affection that my parents never seemed to really show.

The breakdown of our relationship is a thing that happened slowly, the erosion of a childhood of fondness inevitably worn away as I realized everything her religion stood for and represented mixed with my awareness of being queer, then later compounded by me working for a democrat in state government.

I stayed at her house one summer, the fear of what being stuck at home with my parents would do for me outweighing the discomfort having the navigate current news topics with her and was relieved when she let me.

It probably would have been fine too, if it wasn’t for the Pulse nightclub shooting. I remember just feeling numb, knowing that one of the communities I am part of had been attacked so violently, the need to feel the pain of that loss all while knowing that I couldn’t let it show too much, identifying to it too closely could be dangerous. I think that moment more than most was one where I made the internal shift of how close I could be to her.

Even so, the concrete knowledge that she’s gone sits weirdly for me. It’s not heavy in that it feels like it’s going to drag me down, but it is present in that I can feel it dragging in my chest when I move. There isn’t the feeling of loss the way there would have been if I was younger and my world was both smaller and simpler, but there’s something that might be regret.

Regret that I couldn’t be my authentic self with her, regret that I couldn’t trust her love in me to be unconditional, regret that the only way I knew to navigate the discomfort I felt talking with her was to avoid her. I regret that by the end of it all, there was no longer a real relationship to be mourned.

I think I’d been saying goodbye to Nanny in bits and pieces for almost a decade of my life. What I’m feeling right now is just an echo of that loss that’d already been something I’ve lived without.

And now I’m at work; still trying to process what I’m feeling and why I’m feeling it and everything in between. Life just kind of sucks like that sometimes.

[gwemmieee]

IME most trans people are also aware of all of this, and the only time we're saying "I identify as this and it's as simple as that so nyeh" is when we're dealing with bad faith assholes, who either don't listen to a longer explanation, or look for more holes to poke and ammo to gaslight with. So the first paragraph kind of annoys me 😅 Religion and spirituality don't have to be organized, infallible, or strict, or any specific thing, but they are very crucial components to how we navigate through such a cruel and random and impersonal world with our ability to be happy and hopeful intact.

Performance theory is a huge part of how I figured out I was trans, after a few years of unconscious social transition followed by several years of unconscious detransition. It was the missing piece. I needed it so badly that I came up with it almost entirely by myself, using only bits and pieces of occasional queer ramblings from a couple people I'd talked to and a lot of YouTube videos (that's how isolated I was from queer culture and femininity at the time). Once I understood performance theory on some level, I knew exactly what I had been doing, and how to own it and improve my life with it. And that was when I knew it made the most sense to Just Tell People That I'm A Girl. And to move somewhere better for girls.

But... faith and religion are also a huge part of how I'm getting along. A lot of identifying as queer is a religion. A lot of identifying as the class of Woman is a religion. There is a shared faith in how things work, in how we operate, in what that means and what our goals should be. There's a shared sense of community, of similar struggles and similar solutions to those struggles. There's a shared fundamental incompatibility with the ways the status quo operates as of now. There's a lot of value in all of these areas. We shouldn't be dismissing one for the other. Empiricism and religion are both important.

And a lot of this is stuff that we do truly know as fact, and oftentimes it's even been empirically proven, but everyday life requires simpler modes of thought and communication between two people of different worlds than "here's a dozen studies laying out a few core pieces of why I'm right about myself." We need to be respected BEFORE the empiric evidence is accepted by the wider world. Most of them aren't even going to try to look at all that evidence until they respect us FIRST. And... your own feelings about yourself shouldn't need such rigor to be accepted, either. We all deserve to be seen and loved before we're proven, even to ourselves.

Most of the ways in which we are overtly repressed by explicit policy or universal cultural practice completely mirrors the ways that Christian nationalists practice Islamophobia or anti-Semitism. We could literally establish these things as religions and get a lot more power out of existing systems that promote religious freedom.

I don't like the "identity" theory of gender, not just because it feels like the way it's generally understood feels like a misunderstanding of "Identity"

But because if gender is unobservable, then it's just metaphysics. And I don't fuck with religion. I don't want to enforce a new one as a social standard, I want religion to die. I wanna see a focus on intellectual integrity and empirical thought.

Performance theory is more concrete by contrast, because it can be questioned and interrogated. It's probably not as comforting as the weight of being able to say, "because I said so," and considering the state of queer discourse's mainstream right now... I feel it. But to me, that's just more reason to push for it.

Because-

Our personal feelings and view of ourselves and place in the world affect and determine how we present to others, and in a positive feedback loop; our presentation affects how people see and feel about us, influencing how they treat us, influencing the way we view and feel about ourselves. Ad infinitum

Performance or Identity theory, this is true. And because we all know this is true, I think a lot of transphobia- besides just being repackaged racism/featurism- is borne from an attempt to wrest control over what identities are considered shameful. Namely, obviously, ensuring the gendered portion of the social hierarchy remains intact.

A "guy" who everyone treats like "a girl," is supposed to be a negative thing. A source of shame, ridicule, and abuse. But if that "guy" says, "fuck it, what if I am a girl;" or more accurately, 'their internal perspective of themselves maps onto that of what traits we call "girly" more than they do "manly?" then the world suddenly lacks coherence. Likewise the inverse, but I realized I focus a little hard on trans masculine experiences here, so I want to be less heavy handed.

If the social position Woman, is no longer lesser; so much so, that a Man would become one. Then the gender/Patriarchy structure... Kind of collapses under its own weight. If these positions are no longer intrinsic, then it collapses seven fold. So the natural response, for anyone who either personally benefits form the structure, or at least feels threatened by the unknown social territory they've suddenly found themself in, is to say- "Wait, you can't do that!?" Like the schoolyard twat they are.

The fact that one's personal identity on this level is formed so early in one's development only exacerbates how ridiculous the petty cruelty of transphobia is. Someone who was assigned a gender in lipservice alone, based on the assumptions of a 30second once over, merely a minute after being born, is assailed with experiences that cause their psyche to form in opposition to it, is begrudged for wanting to escape harassment on the basis of them being the person that their environment's effects on their biology literally carved them into. Just because it differs from the assumptions and expectations that others have of the individual, but clearly haven't adequately impressed upon that human in such a way to make them stick.

Begrudged for wanting to perform their gender in a way closer to how they've been treated, because the people around them can't handle that this individual grew into a being based on how they experienced the world, instead of based on a vague and cruel idea of what a person should be.

I like Performance theory better than Identity theory, because gender is a thing you do, because social interactions are a thing you do. They are observable and dissect able. They can be checked, based on the way we use the concept of gender to communicate within a given culture. Because with performance theory, unless you count someone's physical body as part of a performance, someone with a beard and a frilly skirt on is probably a girl/fem-coding themselves.

Granted, I take issue with the concept of the genders boy/girl/(gender period) overall. So what do I know

[wolfpants]

Hello beaut! I'm a really big fan of your writing. I'm reading Pages of You for the second time and just loving it so much. Your fics are worlds I want to stay in and I find them really comforting and safe, especially during this unsettling time.

I know this is a bit of an annoying / tricky question for writers to answer, but I wondered if you could talk a bit about where you get your ideas from? Do they sort of fall into your head or do you work them out for a while? How do you know which idea is the one you want to go ahead with? Do you have lots of different fics on the go or do you just focus on one?

I've always wanted to have a go at writing but I get overwhelmed by all the ideas I have and I never know which one I should go with. If I do sit down to write one, I get really into it for a few days and then it sort of fizzles out, and I move on to something else so I never complete anything!

Hello sweet anon! What a lovely message to recieve, thank you so much for your kind words!

Not an annoying question at all. But hopefully my reply isn't too disappointing!

My ideas come from loads of places. Real life, films, books, history, songs... I tend to grasp on to little nuggets of ideas in fleeting moments, and when I do, what works for me is writing them down. Even if it's just a few words on a notes app, which I then add to my WIP trello board if I think the idea has legs (and yes, I usually have 2+ things on the go at once!).

For example, I've been thinking a lot about a Quidditch/mystery fic lately that came out of watching the TV show Yellowjackets earlier this year. Back then, I jotted it down and let it marinate for a while, because I knew I had a bunch of other things I needed to focus on - fests, gift fics, another long fic I've been planning for a while - so I only came back to it yesterday to flesh it out a little more after watching another film that got the little cogs in my brain whirring.

I think it's absolutely fine to jot down an initial idea then come back to it later - you might have more to add to it after an experience or a conversation, or after reading a good book or article or watching something inspiring, and this way you can watch it grow like a plant and evolve. That method works for me for my longer projects.

For my shorter things, I definitely start by thinking of all of the different 'ingredients' of a fic before I start baking it:

the simple outline or perhaps just the context of where the characters got to be where they are the moment the fic begins (as I tend to 'open' my stories with action),

the atmosphere (this is a huge thing for me in my writing - I like writing that evokes feeling, that incorporates the senses through setting and environment),

whose POV I want to focus on and how they are feeling and how they got to where they are feeling (you've probably noticed that I pull in a lot of memory in my writing, I like to layer memory with present action),

and then I usually think about the end point/conclusion to the story and work my way backwards from there.

I'm not a professional writer by any means, I don't read many, if at all, writing tips literature or use that many tools to help with my writing as sometimes I can feel they hold me back rather than help me (disclaimer: this is just my way of working, and won't work for everyone!). I just follow my emotions when I write and often that leads to, some amount of, success. I feel deep empathy with my characters and just let that run through me.

I think it's really important to also remember that you need to love something in order to get it done (or at least get it done to a standard that you're going to be satisfied with). Pages of You was hard for me in places to get through, don't get me wrong (100k is a lot of work), but I was very in Harry's head the entire time I wrote it and I was in love with his point of view of the world, of his way moving through and navigating the landscape I'd created for him (queer London in the 80s). Originally, I thought about a multiple POV story and was going to write Draco's POV too, but as I got started I realised I just didn't want to leave Harry. And I loved falling in love with Draco from Harry's POV too.

So if you're struggling to complete something, perhaps ask yourself if you should be coming at it from an angle that makes more sense to you, that you love: a POV change? A setting change? Maybe even a ship change? Even something like a tense change! Experiment! There's genuinely no rule book here.

Good luck with your writing, I think the main thing is to just start, to enjoy yourself, and to give yourself grace and a break when you struggle. You will get there. I believe in you.

[hellomynameisbisexual]

I’m 12 years old, sitting in the bathroom, watching my mother straighten her hair before work.

For once, the house is quiet. No little sister running around and agitating the neighbors below us. No stepfather chasing after, telling her to be quiet. Everything is white and fluorescent. We’ve lived in this apartment in Jersey for a year now.

My mother glides the metal plates down her hair, ringlet curls now tamed from years of constant heat damage. Then, she calmly says, “So, you think you’re bisexual?”

This catches me off guard. I, awkward in clothes that have yet to adjust to my changing frame, sputter, “What?”

“Tití Jessie overheard you talking to your cousin.” Which means she picked up the house phone to spy on our conversation. Great.

My mom puts the straightener down, turning from her reflection to look at me. “So you want to put your mouth on another girl’s vagina?”

Naturally, more panic ensues. “What? No!”

She turns back to the mirror. “Okay, then. That’s what I thought.”

And that was that.

My mom and I didn’t talk about my sexuality for another 12 years.

In that gap of time I was on my own, often riddled with doubt. Thinking, yes, she’s probably right.

I read all these romance novels about strong men pursuing strong girls who became soft for them. As a late bloomer of sorts, I didn’t have a significant other until I was 17. He and I explored entering adulthood together until I grew past him.

I went to college in Southern New Jersey, on a small campus known for its nursing and criminal justice programs. You can guess what my fellow classmates were like.

I was a commuter, so I’d drive through Atlantic City — predominately Black, overwhelmed with unemployment, watched over by the casinos jutting into the sky — and into the woodsy off-shore neighborhoods.

Thin Blue Line flags peppered the lawns of homes I passed, a constant reminder of where the people around me stood when it came to my humanity as a Black girl.

So obviously there wasn’t much space for an awkward, introverted Black girl who knew only how to make friends by attaching to the nearest extrovert.

I was still uncomfortable in my Blackness, and I think the other Black kids at my college could sense that.

So I found a home with the other literature majors. I became very used to attention from people who weren’t my type, while simultaneously never being the type of those who piqued my interest. This created a complex that led to a series of sexual encounters that displayed my need for attention and validation.

I was the “first Black girl” for so many cis white men. My quietness made me more approachable. More “acceptable.”

Many people kept telling me what I was or what I wanted. In sitting around common areas with my friends, we’d joke about our relationships.

As my friends watched me rack up body after body, all of them cis and male, they began to make jokes at the validity of my queerness.

A lot of internalized biphobia is questioning yourself because others get into your head.

Bisexual people make up a little over 50 percent of the LGBTQIA community, yet we’re often made to feel like we’re invisible or don’t belong. Like we’re confused, or we haven’t figured it out yet. I began to buy into that concept for myself.

When I finally did have a sexual encounter with a woman, it was during my first threesome. It was a lot. I was slightly drunk and confused, unsure of how to navigate two bodies at once, balancing the couple’s relationship and focused on paying equal amounts of attention to each party.

I left the interaction a little disoriented, wanting to tell my boyfriend about it, but unable to because of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell nature of our open relationship.

I would continue to have sex with women during group play and continue to feel “not queer enough.”

That first interaction, and many of the following, never felt perfect. It added to my internal struggle.

Was I really into other femmes? Was I only sexually attracted to women? I wasn’t allowing myself to understand that queer sex can be less than satisfying as well.

I had racked up so many underwhelming experiences with men, yet never doubted my attraction to them.

Without queer examples in my life, or in the media available to me, I had no idea what was right.

My environment shaped a lot of my self-perception. When I moved back home to NYC, I realized how much was available outside the blue collar, often-conservative district I’d grown up in.

I could be polyamorous. I could be sex-positive and kinky, and I could be queer as f*ck. Even while having relationships with men.

I realized when I began actually dating a woman, I had continuously boiled down my sexuality to sex — just as my mom had years ago.

In that initial conversation, she never asked me if I wanted to put my mouth on a boy’s genitals. I would’ve had the same reaction! I was too young to fathom sex as a whole, let alone the body parts involved.

My feelings for that girl were real and exciting and wonderful. I felt safer than I ever had in a romantic relationship, simply within the kinship of the same gender.

When it dissolved before it really started, I was devastated in losing what I almost had.

It took a long time to come around to the term bisexual

To me, it implied a 50-50 attraction to each sex. I questioned if it was inclusive of other gender identities, too — so I chose pansexual or queer in the beginning.

Although I still use those words to identify myself, I’ve become more comfortable accepting this more common term, understanding its definition is ever-evolving.

Sexuality for me has never been about who I am attracted to. It’s more so about who I’m open to.

And honestly, that’s everyone. I no longer feel the need to prove my queerness to anyone — not even to myself.

[panharmonium]

Hey, do you ship merthur? I have conflicted feelings about it because Merlin does love Arthur but also their relationship is kinda shitty.

short answer: i do not

longer answer: i might not be the right person to ask about this, because i don’t really “ship” anything?  it’s not how i engage with fandom.  (disclaimer: this is not a value judgment of folks who do engage with fandom that way.  just an explanation of how my own brain works.)

extra long answer: under the cut, because i suppose it was only a matter of time before someone asked me about merlin/arthur, and i might as well put my entire response in one place so that next time, i can just link to it.

questions like this are a little tough for me to answer, because i am completely uninterested in romance as a premise.  if it’s not there, i don’t care.  if it is there, i often wish it weren’t, because it’s almost never developed in a way that lives up to my standards.  i don’t always mind if something contains romantic relationships (provided they’re written well), but i don’t want them to be the point of a story.  i honestly cannot think of anything less interesting to me than a story that has as its main plotline “x character falls in love with y character.”  for me, in my brain, it’s like, “okay...that’s it?  do you have anything else to say?”  there is literally nothing about that that i care about.

this can be a little difficult to navigate in fandom, because one of the oft-heard commendations of “fandom” is ‘gosh, fandom is so wonderful, we can watch the same two characters fall in love again and again and again in a million different scenarios!’  which is true, for the people who care about that sort of thing, but that’s not actually ‘fandom.’  that’s shipping.  and there’s nothing wrong with shipping, but shipping and fandom are not the same thing, and they’ve become so conflated that it can be very difficult to engage in the latter without being absolutely swamped by the former.

many times, for me, fandom can feel synonymous with shipping.  there was a post i reblogged recently whose tags described shipping as often feeling like a prerequisite to engaging with fandom, and that is often what it feels like to me, particularly in fandoms where one ship is so ubiquitous that any and all other material is utterly dwarfed by it in scale.  (for me, my last two major fandoms have been merlin and teen wolf, so - i’m sure you see my dilemma, heh.)

all of that said, in terms of arthur and merlin specifically...

disclaimer: everything i say here is relevant to me only.  these are my own feelings.  i am making this post on my own blog, in my own space, in response to a question about my own thoughts.  i do not want, expect, or need anyone else to share these thoughts.  any commentary i make about fandom trends is not equivalent to condemnations of individual people’s opinions or shipping habits.  i do not mind or take issue with folks who ship these two characters.  i am glad you are having fun.  please do not @ me about something you disagree with.  i promise you it is not necessary.

okay.  with that out of the way.  

part of me is reluctant to expound further on this question, because my personal philosophy is that merlin and arthur as a ship have had more than enough time and space devoted to them in this fandom (way more than their share, frankly) and i generally prefer to focus on merlin and the other people in his life, as a deliberate counter to that.  but, since you asked, and because i have been experiencing the “i’m tired of romance” bug more strongly lately, here is the long-form version.

the number one reason why i don’t ship arthur and merlin is what i already outlined above: i don’t really “ship” anything.  i have never looked at two characters who were not already together/on an obvious potential path to being together and said “i want them to fall in love.”  that has just never happened to me.  (again - it’s not a BAD thing to have this happen, it’s just not something that’s ever happened to me.  i can’t relate to the experience.)

therefore, when i do appreciate a romantic relationship, it’s pretty much always because canon has shown me something romantic (or clearly pre-romantic) that i find to be well-written and compelling.  (it’s rare - as i outlined before, i would usually rather not deal with romance at all - but it happens.)  

arthur and merlin, then, never had that effect on me, because arthur and merlin, as depicted in the canon, are not in love.

[to anybody reading this who just snatched up their keyboard and started furiously typing, i beg you - please go back and re-read my disclaimer.]

they’re not in love.  the truth about these two is that if i had watched this show without having grown up in fandom as a culture (and without knowing exactly what kind of ships fandom immediately sees EVERYWHERE) the idea of anybody shipping these two together would never have even entered my mind.

(and like.  because i DID grow up in fandom, and i DO know exactly what kind of ships fandom sees everywhere, i knew before i even started this show that arthur/merlin was going to be an inescapable thing.  but that would not have been the case, if i had watched the series in a world where i didn’t know what fandom was.)

arthur and merlin, in canon, are not in love.  the show never does anything to give me an inkling that either of them are harboring romantic feelings for each other.  that is never what is happening onscreen.  literally the last thing on merlin’s agenda is romantic attachment, ever, and arthur is never, ever shown to be in love with anyone who isn’t gwen.  the show, onscreen, never tricks me, teases me, or leads me on.  i was never under the impression that merlin and arthur were in love with each other, because they weren’t.

but that DOES NOT MEAN their relationship matters less.  just because they aren’t IN love with each other doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, and one of those things is not bigger or better or more powerful than the other.

i struggle a lot in fandom (all fandom, not just merlin) with the persistent idea that romantic attachment is the peak, the natural endpoint on a scale of “how deep is your love?”  i am constantly running up against posts where the commonly accepted structure is to cite a moment of devotion or caring or some instance of basic connection between two characters, and then add a caption or tag saying ‘because they are JUST FRIENDS, right?’ or ‘^^totally platonic interaction between characters who are not at all in love, sure jan.’  

and honestly?  i hate that.  that is one of my least favorite things about fandom.  it makes me so tired.  

i am completely disconnected from this idea that there are like...things you can do that are too caring to count as friendship.  like - that there is too much devotion you can show, and if you go over the limit, then it’s laughable that you would do those things for “just” a friend.  that’s so unpleasant to me.

(and i do think [when it comes to non-canon queer ships, anyway - straight ships unfortunately have no excuse, sorry y’all] that part of this probably has its roots in pushback at the tendency of people who try to “gal pal” actual queer ships (or literal real life relationships), so this, at least, is something i can understand.  i’m queer myself; i get that.  and that is why i will never like - attach myself to someone’s post and start complaining.  people can vent however they want.)

it doesn’t change my own feelings, though.  i hate seeing every meaningful friendship i’ve ever been invested in talked about like it’s just a romance in disguise.

other things: i am uninterested in romance as a motivator.  

truly, from the bottom of my heart, i don’t care.

we are, at least in my corner of the world, oversaturated with romance, to the point where any piece of media that doesn’t include it in some fashion is shockingly bizarre.  it is EVERYWHERE.  it is in EVERYTHING.  i cannot pick up a book without running into a romantic plotline.  i cannot watch a movie or a tv show without being forced into multiple romances that i don’t care about.  (rare exceptions apply, as always, but i’m speaking generally.)

this oversaturation, for me, means that romance as a storyline no longer holds any meaning for me.  i see it EVERYWHERE.  it is in literally EVERYTHING.  making merlin into a “love story,” for me, makes the show so much less interesting, because there are billions of love stories out there.  love stories are practically the only kind of story our media remembers how to tell!  why would i take a story that is so unique in its exploration of deep friendship (that isn’t even quite friendship, because it’s not real, but merlin wants it to be real, but making it real would also destroy it) and loyalty (that isn’t necessarily deserved, but is still offered, but is damaging to the person offering it) and love (that exists in spite of arthur’s position as the oppressor, but still cannot erase merlin’s oppression, and is patently not a magical fix for the very real problems merlin is facing), and then want to water it down to “and then they fell in love”???

merlin bbc has so much to say about the transformative, redemptive power of love (not just romance), and the bonds we form with each other despite the fact that we don’t always deserve each other, and what we can do to make ourselves better, and how do we make amends for the ways in which we hurt the people we care about, and it is so complicated and there is so much beauty there and i adore it specifically because it is one of the rare pieces of media out there that doesn’t prop up romantic love as the most important and powerful force in the universe.  romantic love is not what moves the story.  merlin’s love for the people around him is based on compassion.  it’s bigger than the familiar and overused ‘i am desperately in love with this one individual person and that’s what drives my actions,” which is a premise all of us know has been done to death.  merlin’s love is not about romantic attachment.  it’s a deep, abiding love for humanity.  it’s based on hope, and faith, and the inherent belief that everybody matters, even in their worst moments.

condensing that kind of story into “and then they fell in love” erases its meaning for me.  it makes it trite.  uninteresting.  i have seen “and then they fell in love” fully sixty thousand times.  “and then they fell in love” has been done so often that it is utterly devoid of power for me.  boring.   i literally do not care.

other people might feel differently, and find a romantic love story compelling.  i don’t.  

i’m guessing the message that prompted this essay is asking me to evaluate how i feel about the “goodness” of the merlin/arthur ship, aka whether it’s worthwhile to ship it or not based on how healthy/unhealthy it is, which i definitely can’t answer, because i don’t think whether it’s “good” or not really matters.  i am definitely too old to be riding the newer wave of, uh...idk, purity culture type stuff that is so oft-debated on here, lately.

but you’re absolutely right, anon - merlin and arthur’s relationship IS kinda shitty!  it 100% is.  it doesn’t mean you can’t ship them, though, if you want; otherwise i wouldn’t be invested in any aspect of their friendship, either.  

the fact that merlin and arthur’s relationship is kinda shitty is an essential element of the show; it’s the microcosmic representation of the macrocosmic problem merlin is trying to solve, and even with that being the case, we can see clearly that this also doesn’t preclude them from having real moments of connection and care and love.  this is the contradiction i have to keep in mind whenever i engage with them in the friendship sense - merlin has been wronged by arthur in so many ways, and yet he still loves him and believes arthur can do better, and yet his dedication to arthur really does destroy his life piece by piece, and you really have to walk a line between those extremes and be thinking: in what ways was this a noble, honorable path for merlin to take and in what ways was this damaging, and was it all worth it in the end?

we probably wouldn’t still be watching this show if we didn’t ultimately think the answer to that last question was yes.  but there are also equally valid ways in which the answer is, truthfully, no, and i think really the only important thing when dealing with merlin and arthur’s relationship (in whatever capacity you prefer) is to keep that dissonance in mind.

so, to more directly address your question, when it comes to my interaction with the source material, i don’t ship merlin and arthur romantically because i don’t see romance when they interact in canon, and i don’t think their relationship could be improved or made more interesting/more meaningful by adding extra-canonical romance into the mix.  that’s really it.

but the other side of things is this: even if i were granted someone else’s ship-goggles to somehow see romance between these two (eg, once, in the distant past i read a harry potter fic that was so well-constructed it sold me on a relationship i didn’t [and still don’t] actually see in canon), i still wouldn’t choose to ship merlin and arthur, and it’s not because they’re a “bad” ship (no such thing, folks - tag your stuff and let people live their lives, thank you), it’s because this fandom has already been swallowed by them and i cannot bring myself to make that imbalance worse.

trying to be in the merlin fandom without shipping merlin and arthur is just...a little bit difficult sometimes.  i think probably even people who do ship merlin/arthur are aware of that.  sometimes it can feel like merlin/arthur is a given in this fandom, not one of many options - as if you’re not in the merlin fandom, but rather the merthur fandom, and you know you really, really do not belong there.

and it’s not even a canonical ship!  it’s not even real.  and yet if you like this show, and you want to engage in the fandom, your experience is, without exception, going to be chock full of merlin/arthur content by default.

essentially, my struggle with the merlin/arthur dynamic in fandom is two-fold:

1) the strikingly imbalanced content distribution

the merlin fandom, in terms of content distribution, is a pretty accurate mirror of merlin’s own existence, to be honest, in that pretty much every aspect of it is eventually taken over by arthur pendragon, and in that there’s a reasonable debate to be had about whether or not that’s a good thing.

(spoiler alert: it’s not.)

even so, it is what it is, and as i said before, me commenting on fandom trends is not meant as a condemnation of individual preferences.  people like what they like!  that’s just how things are.  shipping arthur and merlin isn’t a Bad thing to do, by any means, and the fact that so many people do is just, you know, bad luck for me, lol.  but at the same time, the wildly unbalanced distribution of content does make it more difficult for folks who don’t ship merlin/arthur to engage in fandom with quite the same level of ease, and even though it’s nobody’s fault, it is still perfectly reasonable for people who don’t ship merlin/arthur to be frustrated about that.

fanfic is a pretty good case study for how this plays out.  i saw a post a while back that was titled something like ‘merlin bbc gothic,’ and the first bullet point was “canon ships are rarepairs,” and HOO BOY, that is true.  stats-wise, merlin/arthur makes up ⅔ of the merlin fic on AO3.  ~25,000 fics.  the next most popular tag after merlin/arthur is arthur/gwen, but arthur/gwen have ~2,900 fics in their tag.  and when you remember to exclude any instance of merlin/arthur from the arthur/gwen tag, that number drops by another thousand, to ~1,940.

that’s buckwild.  come on.  merlin/arthur has twenty-three THOUSAND more fics than the next most popular (and CANONICAL, i might add) ship?  and every other ship’s numbers are even lower than that?*

and if you don’t want to read shippy stuff in the first place, like me - the merlin “gen” tag has less than 8000 fics in it, by comparison, and then you STILL have to filter merlin/arthur out of the gen fics, leaving you with about 6300 - which number has to be filtered down further to remove OTHER ships that still make it past the gen filter.

in comparison to 25,000.

like.  i’ve been in fandom long enough that i’m not surprised - mean, i came into merlin directly off a teen wolf phase, and boy, that’s a whole other bowl of noodles right there, with added squick factors that are irrelevant here - but i’m still just...man. 

it still makes my head spin.  and it is still frustrating, every time.

*(there is a lot more to be said about how gwen fits into all of this, and i know it has been discussed more thoroughly in other places, but yes, another reason i am leery of arthur/merlin as a thing is that i’m just...not super comfortable with what that implies for gwen and her position in the story.  even if i personally am slightly more compelled by gwen/lancelot, technically - i still don’t quite feel comfortable taking gwen out of her canonical place.  she belongs at the top.  she deserves to be the love interest and she deserves to be the queen.  and like - people can say that her relationship with arthur isn’t “developed” or “convincing” enough to warrant retaining in fic, and i get it, the show really did fail gwen in S5 - but i still don’t buy that argument.  people literally INVENTED a romantic relationship for themselves and put 25,000 fics worth of effort into building it up; there is no reason why an “underdeveloped” canon romance couldn’t have gotten the same treatment.  except, of course, for the fact that one [Black, female] character was being shoved aside to make way for yet another two white dudes.)

(and i’m not saying that everyone is doing this deliberately or maliciously.  but we all know this is a cross-fandom trend.  there is literally no reason for the gap in content to be THAT wide.  a canon relationship with twenty-three thousand fewer fics than an invented ship?  just...that is a stat that bears thinking about.  it doesn’t mean that merlin/arthur is a “bad” ship, or that you can’t prefer lancelot/gwen, but it IS still important to recognize these patterns where they occur, across fandoms, and to really think about what they mean.)

2) the arthur-goggles

my second struggle with merlin/arthur in fandom is the ubiquitousness of the arthur-goggles, aka: the tendency in fandom, as in canon, to make everything in merlin’s life about arthur, and everything in the show about merthur.

this one specifically really gets to me.  i am very committed to the idea that merlin is a complete individual, whether arthur is there or not.  i write a LOT of meta about merlin being a whole person, specifically pushing back on the idea that merlin was “born” for arthur’s benefit - my motto is basically that “merlin’s life does not revolve around arthur pendragon,” and the way his life begins to revolve around arthur pendragon in later seasons is not in fact touching or romantic or beautiful; it’s a tragedy.  merlin does not exist only in the context of his relationship with arthur; he possesses worth outside of his mission to save the prince of camelot, and he was already a complete person before he ever met the prince of camelot, and one of the many issues we have to think about when dealing with arthur and merlin in any capacity is how merlin is told from the get-go that he is supposed to devote his whole life to arthur, but arthur is never given any such reciprocal responsibility.  

merlin and arthur’s relationship, just like the distribution of content in this fandom, is wildly imbalanced.  merlin spends all of his spare time thinking about arthur’s life; he ties himself in knots trying to help arthur develop as a person.  he is constantly working to keep arthur safe and happy.  but arthur, at the end of a long day, doesn’t spend his nights agonizing over how he can improve merlin’s life.  he just goes home and goes to bed.  he never once thinks, ‘my purpose on this earth is to serve and support my friend merlin.’  he is never told his life isn’t his own, that he is supposed to be one half of some two-sided coin.  only merlin is told that his entire existence is earmarked for someone else, that his life’s purpose is to be someone else’s better half.  only merlin is expected to devote his entire being to someone else’s betterment.  only merlin is expected to say demeaning, self-abnegating things like “i was born to serve you.”  

arthur, by contrast, is allowed to have a life of his own.  he is allowed to exist on his own terms.  he is never told that his worth is dependent on how well he can prop someone else up.  and while fic might like to imagine merlin being the most important thing in arthur’s life, in canon that is just not the case.  

merlin exists on his own merits, and the idea that he does everything he does just because “he’s in love with arthur” will never sit right with me, because it’s simply not true.  merlin and arthur’s relationship is important to both of them, yes, and of course it is undergirded by deep love and care, but it is also way more complicated than that.  merlin’s investment in arthur’s life - and his grief at arthur’s death - are NOT solely driven by his love for arthur as an individual; they are inextricably bound up with a sense of obligation and duty and self-worth and, eventually, failure, because he’s been told that protecting arthur is a) the only thing that matters about his own life and b) the only way to free his people and save an entire kingdom.  and i think ignoring this very real complexity in favor of “merlin does what he does and feels what he feels because he’s in love with arthur” cheapens the depth of the story and flattens merlin’s character.

arthur-goggles automatically make everything about merlin/arthur, though.  so the difficulty, for me, with merlin/arthur as a ship, is that it can be hard to make/find things about merlin that people don’t instantly, always try to link back to arthur in some way.  merlin is not allowed to have things that are just his, and he can’t exist in a state where arthur doesn’t somehow factor in - no matter how unrelated to arthur something is, or how non-shippy it’s meant to be - there’s someone out there who’s going to loop it back to merthur in some way.

just like - scattered examples of things I’ve encountered:

all of merlin’s non-arthur love interests on AO3 having massive chunks of their ship tags actually being merthur fics, with the non-arthur ship serving solely as a stepping stone on the way to getting merlin and arthur together

readers, on fics that are specifically designated as focusing on merlin+someone else and in which arthur does not appear, leaving comments asking “so how long until arthur shows up,” “can’t wait to see arthur,” etc

meta about how ‘merlin’s time in camelot was actually really bad for him as a person’ being reblogged and modified by someone else with an addition like “but merlin doesn’t regret a second of it because he wouldn’t have known arthur if he were anywhere else,” and the OP having to reblog their own post and explain that this is literally the exact problem they were trying to critique

in fic, merlin’s friends being utilized only as vessels with whom he can have discussions about his developing relationship with arthur

etc etc

it’s not always huge egregious things, but wearing arthur-goggles means EVERYTHING comes back to merthur in some way, which for me is just...really insulting to other characters, and really limiting in terms of story analysis.  

so, for example - this is a VERY specific example that few will relate to, because i am probably the only person on here who has ever tried to search the tag for merlin’s friend will from ealdor (a niche fave of mine) - but with him, especially, it is very hard to avoid bumping into a lot of people wearing arthur-goggles, because everybody seems to imagine him as merlin’s ex, who is only upset about what’s going on in 1.10 because he’s jealous about arthur appearing alongside merlin, never mind that will and merlin have known each other since birth and have a relationship that LITERALLY predates arthur by two decades.

so with him, as an example - the other day, i saw some post in the tag that was like “will gets teary when arthur makes his inspirational speech in ealdor because he finally understands what merlin sees in arthur and he can’t be mad anymore”

and that is just patently untrue.  it is not even remotely close to a legitimate interpretation of what is happening in that scene.  will hasn’t come around to arthur’s way of thinking yet; he literally still packs his things and leaves after this happens, and he is - i mean, first of all, he’s not crying, lol, and he stalks out of that scene weary, angry, and fed up, because he thinks the village is delusional and all of his neighbors are going to get killed in the morning.  his arc - his dissatisfaction with what is going on, his anger at the ignorance arthur wields as a nobleman with all of that wealth and privilege, his resistance to the big “let’s fight kanen’s men with sticks” plan - that is about him and his history and who he is.  it is not about an (imaginary) merlin/arthur love story.  

but when the arthur-goggles are on, all roads lead to merthur.  even when the other characters in question (*coughWILLIAMcough*) would be beyond mortified to have merthur, of all things, assigned as their motivation.

SO.  now that i’ve gone over both the canon and fandom aspects of my reasoning, the succinct summary in response to your question is just that no, i don’t personally ship merlin/arthur.  because:

a) i don’t see it b) the fandom is already trying to drown me with it and i choose to center other characters out of spite c) i just think merlin deserves better lol

however, as i said in my disclaimer - that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t ship and enjoy it!   merlin/arthur is very much not my cup of tea, but that’s no reason why other folks can’t have fun with it.  i think the best portrayals of it, probably, will be those that keep in mind exactly what you said - that merlin and arthur’s relationship is “kinda shitty” - but this is fandom, so if what folks really want to write is just lots of happy AU’s with no issues, then they should go for it!  the point of fandom is to have fun connecting with people over a shared love of something, so i am happy to let others have fun doing their thing, and i will just be over here doing mine. 🙂

[lokigodofaces]

thoughts on loki ep 3: lamentis

under cut for your convenience

my first thought when i saw C-20 at the beginning was the Framework...i might be a bit too obsessed with an aos/Loki crossover...

C-20 was sorta able to find out something was wrong. from what Sylvie said, that's pretty impressive.

i wonder if Sylvie uses magic similar to Wanda's. like if Wanda just uses it on a bigger scale. the mind illusions thing checks out. and i saw on youtube that another patron looks like Evan Peters, so maybe they're connected? but most likely they just hired a dude that happens to look like Evan Peters.

going back to that, the glitch in C-20's illusion was like the glitches in WandaVision

if this really is similar to Wanda in canon, that means Sylvie and other Lokis might be nexus beings (y'know, the very thing i shout about in tags because i want)

Okay, so Sylvie tried to enchant a minuteman, which means she must have assumed the TVA operates on the same physics as the timeline. So neither Lokis thought magic could possibly be impeded.

good action sequence with Sylvie and minutemen and Sylvie and Loki

dudes...Renslayer can't fight. she literally did a horrible job.

Sylvie really thought the TVA valued Loki and that they really wanted/needed him to stop her. so she threatened to kill him, just for Renslayer to give the go ahead. shows how little the TVA cares and it echoes Odin.

Lamentis 1 sounded cool because that is a very sci-fi-ey name. It means the star the planet orbits is called Lamentis and the planet is the closest planet. That's how we name lots of planets outside the solar system. so i appreciated that.

okay, lamentis is literally just the bi flag. but still lots of purple so i will claim it as ace as well.

teleportation! and actual magic! yay!

okay, are they setting up a Loki/Sylvie romance? the way they framed the two when Sylvie tried to enchant Loki was how it's often done with kisses

Sylvie said with strong minds she has to do what she did to C-20 to enchant them, but she couldn't even do that with Loki. Which shows how powerful Loki is and how powerful the mind stone is.

i will die for more of Loki and Sylvie being chaotic together

Sylvie she said is an alias. Does this mean she is genderfluid but is female more often than male? i'm told some genderfluids are one gender more than the other, and i've considered Hiddleston's Loki to be predominantly male. Could Sylvie be the other way around? & born Loki but haven't changed her name? or have different names for different genders? and doesn't want to be called Loki when she's female because that's not her name as a woman?

literally i can't tell if they're setting up romance or sibling stuff.

i never thought i'd hear the word "savvy" from Loki. but, hey, if Jack Sparrow can say it, i'll allow it.

the effects for the gun that woman used look similar to Daisy Johnson's quakes. for a second i hoped for an aos crossover, but then i remembered that marvel hates it's non-Disney+ series.

i like the differences between Loki and Sylvie. Loki is less confrontational and more likely to mischief his way when Sylvie is more likely to rip the bandaid off and get it over with, if that makes sense. i think that Sylvie might just be so tired from living on the run, only going to apocalypses that she just wants to get it over with.

love is a serious theme throughout this episode. again, are they setting up a Loki/Sylvie romance? or will it be platonic or familial or something else?

Loki is very clearly not okay with the fact that so many people are being left to die, and i'm here for it

so the whole thing to get on the train i think is setting those two up to be a good duo. between illusions and enchantments, they can do a lot. and Loki was able to get them part of the way, and Sylvie the rest. i think it could be foreshadowing both of them needing to use their skills to work together.

never have your back to a door, i guess

Sylvie's reaction to Loki saying he wasn't told he was adopted. man, she was worried. she knows that that is messed up and i think she feels bad for Loki. she's probably imagining how her life would be different if she didn't know she was adopted.

sounds like Odin and Frigga weren't the adopters of Sylvie. Maybe the Lushtons? i don't know anything about them, just that Lushton is Sylvie's last name in the comics. so, yay for her for not having trash parents. unless they were, then sorry for Sylvie. at least they told her she was adopted. but if the Lushtons adopted her, how did they fall across a frost giant? especially the daughter of Laufey?

i've seen suggestions that the post man Sylvie is with could be Stan Lee since a couple cameos were of him as a post man. Maybe a younger post man, but he has less of a lifespan (if he is actually human in universe. i still like to think of him as the One Above All who just really likes to see the drama of things) than Sylvie, so she could be with him for a long time. maybe that's why Stan is always cameoing. he's just trying different things to try to find his love. and maybe he has a longer lifespan (he was in First Avenger) but not as long as Sylvie's so she still was there for most his life but he's dying soon. I actually like this headcanon a lot, i think it's sweet.

YAS BISEXUAL LOKI YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HAPPY I AM! but i'm also scared my parents will find out. they're anti-queer. my siblings saw it, & they aren't supportive either but they operate on an "ignore it" policy, so they don't really care as long as it isn't a big deal.

also it is heavily hinted Sylvie is bi as well.

yes, i will continue to headcanon Loki as greyromantic and asexual. deal with it. i will change my language from panromantic to biromantic since the director specifically said he was bi.

also, it sounded like the director might be bi as well. good for her, taking a character she saw as bi and literally making it canon.

i knew Tom could sing, he was on Broadway. but i had never heard him sing i don't think. he has a good voice. petition to make a musical with Loki. watch the episode "Duet" of The Flash. i want something similar to that. can Sophia sing? throw her in too if she can!

translation of the norwegian suggests romance between Loki and Sylvie

was i expecting an "ANOTHER" reference? no. am i glad we got it? yeah, that was a nice touch.

turns out "full" means drunk in Norwegian according to a youtuber? but don't quote that. Loki says he's full, not drunk at one point.

what were they serving on that train? Thor couldn't get drunk on Earth. heck, Steve couldn't. so it must've been a heck of a drink they were serving

ok, the dagger metaphor i actually really liked. could be a shakespeare reference?

the fireworks thing with Frigga was cute

okay, i don't like Frigga much, but this has confirmed that Frigga was, maybe possibly, better than Odin. Frigga at least believed in Loki. but then her betrayal was so much worse.

wait, i just realized. Loki gets a fight scene on a train. a superhero genre staple is a fight on a moving vehicle (bonus if it's a train). yay! Loki hasn't had this trope yet in any of his appearances. off screen before Infinity War, and i don't count his attempt to murder Thanos on the Statesman. but we can add that to his list of superhero tropes.

i feel like the TVA needs to make stronger tempads...

okay, Loki threw the dagger horribly because he was drunk, right?they aren't saying he has horrible aim, are they?

falling out of a moving vehicle is also a superhero trope...at least it went better for them than it did Bucky

i relate to Sylvie screaming in the middle of nowhere

Loki being gentle with Sylvie and letting her talk to him. gosh. i love it. was not expecting to see Loki from my fics make an appearance.

Sylvie explained the enchantment to Loki, which i think was a poor decision for her.

she said C-20's mind was hard to navigate to her original memories. maybe the TVA does something to the TVA agents that join them. maybe if Loki proved useful, they'd do it to Loki.

or maybe variants lose memory over time. Sylvie says something about her memory being like blips of a dream, but I don't remember the context. maybe over time variants lose their memories and only retain a few things. Sylvie is well down that process, Loki has had hardly any change, and those working for the TVA only have a few things to remind them.

Mobius absolutely was a jet ski enthusiast in the '90's when he was arrested, and he loved Josta.

Casey liked Boku juice, a sign he was from the '90's.

whoever makes the uniforms is from whatever period that style of suit was popular ('80's?).

if anyone isn't a variant, it's Renslayer. she knows more than she should, i'm sure of it.

C-20 likes margaritas now, i'm sure of it.

Mobius has an interesting relationship with Renslayer. I wasn't sure if it was romantic or what. Maybe Renslayer looks like his lover from the '90's so he is flirty with her because of the faint memories he has.

Loki immediately catches on to the TVA agents not knowing they're variants. they think the Time Keepers created them. he knows that, Sylvie didn't. this immediately tells Loki that the Time Keepers are messed up.

possible redemptions for Mobius? B-15? C-20? when they find out they're variants?

so does C-20 know now? she kept saying "it was real" when Mobius found her in Roxxcart. maybe she had dreams of her life before, and Sylvie showed her that they were real?

the whole scene in the city was wild. so much color, lights, people, action, it was wild

Loki being protective of Sylvie, helping her up and wrapping his arm around her, i'm here for it.

loved the bit where Loki used telekinesis to stop the tower from falling on them.

there was a bit where Loki and Sylvie fought & their moves mirrored each other and gosh that was a nice touch.

Loki's reaction to the Ark's destruction. standing there in defeat while Sylvie walks away. wow. Tom. you are amazing.

and what the heck why did the episode end there?

can't wait for the next episode

more of TVA being evil being shown, loving it.

really, is Loki/Sylvie a thing? i have a hard time seeing romance some times, so let me know.

can we please get a Kang tease?

great lighting & cinematography. beautiful. lovely. also good action. shout out to the stunt doubles since they don't get enough credit.

okay let Loki & Sylvie be friends (or lovers, i'm fine with that) and let them burn the TVA down together.

aaaaaaaaaaa how are we half way through?

also, have the TVA fixed all the messed up timelines yet?

oh wait i gotta talk about this. the minutemen don't remember their names. i doubt Mobius's name was Mobius Mobius Mobius. Casey is probably not his real name. The Clone Wars fan in me was already screaming, but now it is even more.

[thelanguageoflovers]

let’s talk about andi mack.

this is gonna be kind of long in comparison to what i usually post and basically just a look into what goes on in my mind (as someone who definitely represents a solid chunk of the target audience) when i think/ talk about andi mack. it’s separated into three sections, and its all around kind of aggressively academic. let’s go, yall

( @secretly-of-course it was gonna be longer but my brain said ‘you’ve spoken enough,, that will be all.’)

first of all, let’s talk format

Andi Mack is a TV show, and a children’s TV show, at that. This format offers a lot of pros and cons, which is to be expected from any form of media. A lot of adults/older teenagers in the fandom have talked about wishing AM was a young adult show, but there are definitely some complexities to this whole debate.

To begin with, there is great value in showing that kind of diversity in children’s television. We all kind of knew that, and it’s part of what makes the show so special. Children need to see this kind of representation and often because it helps them to feel normal and accepted.

However, there is also value in being unrestricted by what’s ‘appropriate’ for children. If AM were a novel or series of novels, or even if it were produced on a channel like Freeform, there would be much more space to create difficult and distinct storylines. Doing that, though, undermines the very point of the show - teaching kids important lessons.

Realistically, in a system that implements restrictions upon diversity, there’s no good way to make the most important messages available to everyone.

Much like there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, there is no unequivocal truth under censorship.

and then, of course, there’s the storyline(s)

Andi Mack is known for its gay representation - Cyrus Goodman, and later TJ Kippen, was the first confirmed queer character on US Disney Channel. Goodman was also the first to say the word ‘gay’ on Disney.

While the LGBTQ+ representation on Andi Mack is a greatly imperative, (and, as a young lesbian, my favorite storyline on the show) it’s not the only thing that sets AM miles ahead of the crowd.

The show tackles teen pregnancy, mental health, racism, complex family dynamics, and much more. However, I’ve always thought that they didn’t tackle these issues in very much depth. That’s understandable, seeing as they only had so much time to cover so many topics, but it’s still a little disappointing.

Each character seems to have one or two main points of struggle throughout the series, in the interest of efficiency. Andi deals with her very interesting family dynamic and stereotypes. Buffy combats racism and sexism. Cyrus is coming to terms with his sexuality, while navigating four over-analyzing parents. Jonah has anxiety and paints a smile on over it, Amber’s the ex-popular girl whose dad lost his job, TJ has dyscalculia and never quite feels good enough.

Again, there was very limited time to work with in the show, but I feel that their individual struggles deserved more complex storytelling, as opposed to focusing on very surface-level problems.

In short, I wish that more screen time was dedicated to the long-term plights of singular characters than group squabbles.

with that being said, let’s talk about bex mack

BEX MACK DESERVED A BETTER DEVELOPMENT TRACK.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely adore Bex and the way her story penned out for her. Even so, I think she deserved a lot better than what she got. Bex started the series as a very independent woman with a bad relationship with her parents and a slight lack of life skills. 

I wish we could have seen her fight to stay as independent as she was when we were introduced to her. Bex deserved to have a development track in which she learns a lot and matures, but doesn’t necessarily change as a person. 

Instead, I feel like she changed a lot to better fit her idea of what a ‘good mom’ looked like. 

In my opinion, Bex’s ending would have been so much better if she had retained her personality a little more, showing a bit more resistance to what was expected of her.

[peachdoxie]

It’s always an experience to look back at myself as an adolescent and realize how much of my behavior was influenced by the fact that I am asexual and aromantic but didn’t yet know that.

In elementary school, I mostly wore t-shirts and pants of some sort. They were vaguely feminine, but not very much. To be honest, I don’t think I paid that much attention to what I wore in elementary school, though I was obviously influenced by external factors. But in the fifth grade (age 10-11) is I think when I started to actively reject femininity. It definitely happened once I started middle school (11-14). I opted more for a gender neutral look rather than a masculine look, though I didn’t think of it that way - just “not girly”. This trend followed me into high school (14-18), though around age 15 or so I got over my “not like other girls” mentality, which was never super strong but definitely present.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to dress more femininely. There were times when I wished I could wear a blouse instead of a t-shirt and get a hair cut or something. I didn’t want to be super feminine and wear makeup or jewelry or whatnot, but the t-shirt look is hard to pull off and still be seen as mature and have people take me seriously as I grew older. I actually enjoyed the chances to look rather feminine when the circumstances allowed it – namely, dances at high school (until I stopped going to them entirely) and prom.

The problem was that I didn’t like the attention I got whenever I made a change. If I wore a nicer shirt one day, people would comment on it. If I got a hair cut, people would comment on it. If I did anything out of the ordinary, people would comment on it. And save for social situations that were intended for fancier clothing, such as school dances, I did not like the attention. At all. It was mostly from teachers and other female friends who were genuinely nice about it, not even unwanted attention from boys or men. It didn’t help that I went to a small K-12 school, meaning I was with the same 100-odd classmates every year and regularly encountered my old teachers. There were no good transition moments to make any changes besides summer, and even then I didn’t.

I used to wear my hair in a ponytail all the time – initially just to keep it out of my face, but then because I did that constantly, any time I would wear it down on a normal day, someone would comment on it. It got to the point where I would keep it in the ponytail all the time. It was somewhere past my shoulder most of the time. One day when I was 15, during my regularly scheduled hair cut, I decided to cut off enough inches to donate the hair and my stylist straightened my hair for it. It was cut to a bit above my shoulders. I wore it down the next day at school and got a lot of compliments about it. It made me so uncomfortable that I put it back in a ponytail the next day.

(I eventually got so sick of the ponytail and the way it made me look too gender neutral that I forced myself to get it cut short enough that I couldn’t put it in a ponytail and I just dealt with the discomfort until my shorter hair was normalized.)

It did vex me, back then, why I didn’t like any attention that focused on how pretty I looked whenever I made some change to my physical appearance. I didn’t think that it was because I didn’t think I wasn’t pretty and that’s why I didn’t like the attention – I was fairly aware of how body image problems in teenagers worked, and to my recollection, that never played a big role in my dislike of attention. I knew I had good skin and pretty eyes and did think my face was pleasing when I looked in the mirror. And rejecting femininity a bit helped me find solace in not conforming to beauty standards. I also must give credit to my mother, who was nothing but supportive and never pressured me to perform femininity, and neither really did any of the other adult figures that had a significant influence on me, which certainly helped.

As an adult who has studied queer theory and feminist theory, and who has reflected on my experience as a young acearo woman, I’ve come to realize how much my sexual and romantic orientations impacted me in this regard. It resolves the paradox of wanting to be more feminine-presenting to look more mature while simultaneously dreading any attention I’d get for making a change towards femininity.

To a younger me, any attention to my appearance when I presented even a tiny bit femininely meant that it increased the chances that a boy might ask me out. Not hit on me, but ask me out. It was one of the interpersonal things I dreaded the most during high school. I did not want a boy to ask me out because I knew I would say no because I wasn’t interested in dating. I was desperately afraid of making things awkward between me and whoever it was, because the boys that were most likely to ask me out (in my mind) were the boys I was close friends with. In my mind, knowing that a friend of mine in high school had a crush on me was a terrifying prospect – knowing that I had rejected them while they were still “in love” with me. The influence of media was definitely there, as I’d seen way too many Disney Channel TV shows and movies where the guy was rejected by the girl and it made things awkward. I didn’t want to lose any of my friends that way. (I won’t go into details, but my reluctance to date anyone did end up backfiring on me and I did lose a friend, though that was largely due to my own awkwardness on not understanding why I was so reluctant to date anyone.)

The romance part would have been okay-ish, but at that point I didn’t yet have a split-attraction model to go on and so, to me, any act of dating would necessarily involve holding hands, cuddling, and kissing, and possibly sexual activity, all of which I knew as early as age 11 that I did not want. And because I was repulsed by the idea of physical and sexual intimacy, dating was out of the question. I knew it was okay to not want to date anyone and to not want to have sex with anyone, during high school or ever, because my mother had raised me to think those are valid options (thanks Mom), but at the time, I didn’t have a concept of what being sex-repulsed was.

I think that made it difficult and uncomfortable for me to process the idea that someone could be sexually attracted to me. I wasn’t so ignorant to believe that other people were also repulsed by sex and I knew other people enjoyed sex, especially teenagers. But the mere idea that someone could view me in a way related to sex – even if they didn’t want to act on it – was so unsettling to me that I couldn’t stand it. I don’t think it was about being seen as a sexual object by boys, since those were easy to turn down (and I did have a few male classmates ask me out), but rather seen as being sexually attractive to boys I already had a good friendship with.

Also, while I was aware of homosexuality from a young age and had no problems with it, there were no girls out as wlw while all of this was going on, so it didn’t occur to me to be wary of their attraction. I knew as well that I wasn’t interested in girls, so – because my framework was “straight or gay” without a concept of asexuality – by default I must be interested in boys, and them with me. There’s also the gendered stereotypes of girls sharing everything with their girl friends, but not sharing emotional intimacy with boys. But most of my good friends were boys, and so if I were to be emotionally intimate with any of them, I’d have to date them.

Of course, I lacked the knowledge and self-awareness to figure all of this out until much later, and it took longer to come to terms with the relationship I had between femininity, others’ sexual attraction, and my own self-image (though none of that is static, nor should it be). I also lacked the awareness that the boys I was friends with who might be interested in asking me out might also not be interested in a physical and sexual relationship. I didn’t have the concept that an emotionally intimate relationship in high school could be anything but physical or sexual. I think a lot of it came down to the fact that I didn’t know how to process any potential awkwardness, but I wasn’t fully aware of my inability to process it, so I just avoided it as much as I possibly could. Looking back, there were definitely some contradictions in how I thought and behaved, but hey, I was a young and socially awkward teenager navigating an uncharted territory that I didn’t know was uncharted.

Besides being fairly vocal to my friends about the fact I wasn’t interested in dating (which I explained away by saying “I don’t want to be distracted by dating during high school”, such a typical excuse of non-straight folk) the best weapon I had against people finding me attractive was to downplay my appearance. And so I desexualized my appearance – or, rather, maintained the neutral appearance I’d had from elementary school and made it even less attractive to boys (at least, in the opinion of my adolescent self.) Any act of femininity that was noticed by a teacher or female classmate was something that could be noticed by a boy in my high school, which meant that they may be inspired to ask me out, which meant sexual attraction, which was repulsive and uncomfortable to me.

I hold no ill will towards myself for not understanding this when I was a teenager, and I don’t blame any of the authority figures or educators in my life for not helping me understand this. It’s likely they didn’t understand any of this themselves, and it’s not like I was fully aware of why I felt certain ways and did certain things either, nor was I very open about all of this either because I can be a rather private person at times. It’s also not like asexuality, aromanticism, and sex-repulsion are well-known things, let alone discussed frequently in books about childrearing and queer adolescents. It’s just another sign of how the hyper focus on heterosexual monogamy (also known as amatonormativity) in Western culture and society actively hurts queer people, especially when they’re young and aren’t aware that they’re not straight, or are but are struggling to come to terms with that (it also applies to non-cis folk, but that’s not relevant to my experience.)

Ultimately, I see my struggles with gender presentation and interpersonal relationships, and the stress they caused me, during middle and high school as a symptom of our culture and society’s failure in general to represent a wide variety of queer experiences – particularly outside of lesbian, gay, and trans identities – to young people so that people like me can better understand themselves. I can’t deny the fact that the social norms about dating and relationships in high school that I found in the media I consumed had a major impact on me, to the point where they sometimes contradicted how my mother tried to raise me. This post is in part a reflection on myself that struck me recently, but also yet another piece of evidence about how the lack of representation for ace and aro people actively damages our lives.

[thebodegakat]

01. thoughts on my sexual identity and relationships

it only took me 30 something years to realize that the reason I don’t want to get married is not because I don’t want to be married, it’s because I don’t want to be married to a man. 

of course it’s a little more nuanced than that, for me at least, but there it is. lately I’ve been struggling with if I really am bisexual or if I am lesbian, who is experiencing compulsory heterosexuality. it took me a while to proudly and openly identify as bisexual (to the myself as well as publicly), and I’ve unpacked (some of) my internalized biphobia and shame around that. 

my “coming out stage” continues to be interesting as I navigate bisexuality and identifying as polyamorous -- it’s like coming out on top of coming out and doing that all the time. 

It’s really a part of the queer experience that I never knew until I had to go through it myself, which was a good lesson for me between being in the community and being on the outside of it. 

I just want to be without having to explain myself in the context of straight, cis, whiteness. Or be influenced by it to the point where I am constantly questioning myself instead of just experiencing my life.

anyway, back  to my musing about my future wife. 

being in a relationship with a male bodied/presenting person allows me some sort of passing that I don’t always feel comfortable with -- like a part of me is not visible, well, because duh society built it that way. people assume things when I say “boyfriend”, if I say we live together, if I say how long we’ve been together. Maybe they would assume the same things if I said “girlfriend” instead, but it doesn’t bring out the same irritation in me. 

I actually get excited thinking about calling someone my wife, our wedding, having a home with her, our marriage. In a way, I think I see nuggets of this from earlier stages in my life when I was still in the closet but getting “girl crushes” on women and literally saying “I want her to be my wife”. How could I have been so oblivious! So repressed! 

apart of it could just be ignorance -- honestly, I could actually just not be a person for a marriage set up, as I have found is the case with men. the gender or identity of the person on the other side could just be one variable that doesn’t actually change the outcome. 

either way, the thought feels different, so that’s what I am going with. right now I am navigating these feelings and trying to figure out what it means, and if action needs to be taken because of it. 

update on my feelings: I drafted this original post a few weeks ago and have chewed on my thoughts a bit more. There’s more to process and unpack here, but right now I am feeling comfortable identifying as a bisexual/queer woman and a polyamorous person. Even though I came out specifically with those labels about three years ago, I still find myself challenging and reaffirming them. I really don’t like labels for that reason (sometimes they no longer fit and then you have to explain to people why). I have many more thoughts but I will leave that for a part 2.