#i did not think about that

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

okay so as suggested by @fromkenari (big thank btw), ive decided to make a post about one of my idols who happens to be a part of queer history i dont hear people talk about much.

and said icon is james whale.

he was an english director working in early hollywood, as well directing theatre and acting. his most well known films are probably the invisible man (1933), frankenstein (1931) and bride of frankenstein (1935).

(you might also know him from the road back (1937) if films about ww1 are your thing)

and while part of why i idolise him is those films and making horror art, i bring up the dates specifically because james whale was openly queer throughout his entire hollywood career.

said career began in the 1920s and continued up to 1950. he was pressured to step into the closet but he never did, and its likely a big factor as to why his career ended.

a lot of his films are packed with queer subtext, particularly bride of frankenstein. that film has so much camp packed into it and pretorius is so damn queer coded. theres a lot of queer readings of it you can explore, its fucking incredible.

and mind you, the hays code went into effect in 1934.

the hays code also happened to massively effect frankenstein in retrospect due to scene-cuts in re-releases, and bear with me on this one:

see the original cut had a scene where the monster meets a young girl named maria who asks him to play a game with her. in the game, they sit together and throw flowers onto a lake where they float. when the monster runs out of flowers, he throws his new friend, maria, in, assuming that she would float like the flowers. she doesnt; rather she drowns.

and this scene was specifically created by james whale in reaction to a then moral panic in america basically about the creepy man in the shadows who lures your child away and molests them. this deviant shadowy figure was essentially synonymised with gay men, who were falsely arrested on sodomy charges or died at the hands of mob "justice".

the flower scene challenges that idea because the monster isnt, well, a monster. in 1931, the monster was almost unilaterally perceived as this perverted evil thing that would steal your children; he was practically the same as these "predatory gay men", and then the monster wasnt a monster.

he was misjudged, he wasnt inherently evil, and he was unjustly punished. and if that applies to the monster, surely it applies to whale and all the other openly queer men.

as a scene in 1930s hollywood , it was so divisive because it portrayed the "villain" in a more morally grey area, and essentially said "hey, maybe this queer witch hunt is misguided"

unsurprisingly, producers at universal wanted to end the scene before the drowning. ending the scene there would leave it to the imagination as to what the monster did to maria, and given the sex offender moral panic sweeping the nation, the implication would be that he raped her.

but james whale fought for the scene to be kept and he won. specific states still forced the studios to censor parts of the film, but his film was intact.

BUT when this film was re-released in 1938, they entirely cut out this scene. and this fundamentally changed the character of the monster and the film itself.

by some fucking miracle, the scene was found in the british national film atchive in the 1980s, and modern cuts of the film now include. unfortunately, whale himself would not live to see that as he committed suicide in 1957.

what james whale did with frankenstein in 1931 was revolutionary in the same way that tod brownings freaks (1932) was. both men created films that portrayed the people society called monsters as real, complex beings who are not pure evil, and both faced censorship hell for it.

(go watch freaks btw, its so good)

and, you know, i get emotional talking about james whale. both because i have so much admiration for him as a queer person who refused to lock his queerness away, and because his name is never one i hear in discussions of queer history, and also because hes from the same area as me.

(im yet to find any clips of him speaking so i dont know if he has our accent or not. i like to think he did. he was the sixth out of a seven child working class family and first worked as a cobbler so its as likely as it could be.)

i would like for more queer folks to know about him because i think he deserves more of a legacy.

ian mckellen plays him in gods and monster (1998), and if youre ever in england with spare time, he does have a memorial sculpture. its in dudley which is where he was born, and if you know it, its right at castlegate.

but yeah no, this is my ramble post about a lesser known queer icon. originally i wrote an abridged version in the tags of a different post but @fromkenari was right, it deserves its own post.

[dunktape]

i think dunktape might be better esp if youre trying to seperate from being compared to chocoperrito or accused of copying!

oh my gosh you're right i forgot chocoperrito literally starts with choco as well

not beating the copycat allegations with chocomug am i

[koobiie]

shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[mejkosmos]

whichever madman pointed out that the new rift on bill's body in the theraprism is meant to parallel ford's cracked glasses after he emerges out of the portal,,,, MY SOUL IS YOURS TO TAKE ANYDAY MY GOSH

--------------------------------------------------

bonus !!

ford about bill:

bill about ford:

[cronchy-baguette]

double posting this comic bc tbh it deserves its own post.... thinking about how elphie was definitely crying after she runs off to hide somewhere following popular... what do the two of them think about afterwards....

[humming-fly]

I love how Gerald was trying to keep Shadow from spoiling anything about the future meanwhile literally everything Shadow says and does around Maria is the biggest death flag ever

[ciderjacks]

contracts written in blood

+

[justanartistiguess]

Kingerrrrrrrrr 😭😭😭

[captainjonnitkessler]

You know I used to think "tumblr's absolute refusal to actually engage with the Trolley Problem in favor of insisting that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is just a short-sighted idiot is really fucking annoying, but I guess it's not actually doing any harm".

Anyway that was before we asked tumblr at large to decide between "guy aiding a genocide but making progress elsewhere" and "guy who would actively and enthusiastically participate in a genocide and would also make everything else much, much worse for everyone elsewhere" and the response was that there must be a third, morally pure option that doesn't require them to make a hard decision and that anyone who asks them to make a binary choice is a short-sighted idiot.

[hinamie]

morning glory

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Hey now, Let her cook!

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

The stewards of the old world are always keen to give you a glimpse of their might... According to legend, the ancients built specialized chambers to seal away false prophets.

The Arcane is waking up.

[andstuffsketches]

girl who lives in a cave

[demaparbat-hp]

He truly did.

[nothingbizzare]

You have a good heart