#i mean he's a Jamesian protagonist for one thing....

[mariocki]

Lalla Ward makes a brief appearance as Lady Augusta, intended bride to an ill-fated aristocrat, in A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Ash Tree (BBC, 1975)

[antoine-roquentin]

Reflections on the state of South Korea take a somewhat different form in Burning. Written and directed by Chang-dong Lee, a successful literary fiction writer who pivoted to filmmaking, the film is Lee’s most bookish production to date, adapting Haruki Murakami’s 1983 short story “Barn Burning,” which itself refers back to Faulkner’s 1939 story of the same title. Burning is essentially a translation, the most advanced form of close reading, and its narrative is one that firmly underscores translation’s ethics. It is impossible to view the film without sensing the responsibility attached to what one chooses to emphasize and overlook, play up and play down.

Asked what he does for a living, Ben simply responds, “I play.” No further details being provided then or later in the film, it’s unclear what he’s playing at: Steven Yeun’s unflappable performance, whose layers of ambiguity approach Jamesian degrees of concentration, renders Ben perhaps the hardest character to read in all of recent cinema. The only thing about him that is clear is his status in the world. Like Dantes’s Sid, Ben is one of the supreme winners that liberal market society was bound to produce: rich, young, male, and handsome, his relation to the world can’t not be condescending. His Korean elocution gleaming with an unreal polish, Ben resembles a literary character: it’s something his foil Lee Jong-su (Ah-in Yoo) is quick to realize. An unpublished fiction writer fresh from college and army service, Jong-su likens Ben to the Great Gatsby, another playboy with a mysterious occupation and lots of money.“Korea’s full of Gatsbys,” he notes as he smokes on the balcony of Ben’s luxurious Seoul apartment, his tone striking a balance between bemused and resentful.

His audience on the balcony isn’t Ben, but Ben’s girlfriend. Shin Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jeon) has a hometown and a class background in common with Jong-su. Raised by working-class parents in Paju, a countryside city on the border with North Korea, the two shared Hae-mi’s bed in Seoul, briefly. Picking her up at the airport on her return from a trip to Africa, Jong-su found her accompanied by Ben, whom she had befriended along the way. Still living on his father’s farm in Paju and driving a beat-up mini-truck, Jong-su cedes Hae-mi to hot, cool, Porsche-driving Ben without a contest. Yet as his presence on the balcony attests, Jong-su can’t part ways completely. Tagging along with the couple and Ben’s set of stylish, well-off friends, he’s seeing things he wouldn’t otherwise: the world and attitude that money buys in the developed world.

Jong-su’s favorite author is Faulkner, a detail entirely absent from the original Japanese story. Instead of Murakami’s slick and prosperous narrator, director Lee presents a protagonist relating to Faulkner’s battered rural characters, stiff with unvoiced bitterness and rage. Jong-su is educated and trained to kill, yet excluded from further development; as a television broadcast highlighting South Korea’s soaring rate of youth employment implies, he’s far from the only one. In Ben’s liaison with Hae-mi and Jong-su’s orbit around it, the outlines of an imbalanced class structure present themselves, with its twinned potential for acquiescence or revolt from the have-nots. If Jong-su gives little away until the end, part of the reason is because he feels how little he owns.

Once Hae-mi vanishes shortly after dancing gloriously, high, and topless (the South Korean flag conspicuously included in the shot) one evening at the farm with Ben and Jong-su, Jong-su becomes obsessed with her absence. He focuses on Ben as the potential cause. Stalking Ben in Seoul, Jong-su finds that Ben, exuding an assurance as complete as it is unnatural, seems to stand—like capital—at a right angle to everything in society while still belonging firmly to it. Unlike Jong-su, Ben has a mother, money, status, membership at an expensive church and expensive gym. (We see him managing a treadmill on the upper floors of a skyscraper, looking down at Jong-su looking up at him.) While Jong-su runs after Hae-mi, Ben runs for himself alone. What did Ben mean, on the night he last saw her, when he confessed to a habit for burning down abandoned greenhouses in secret? In Hae-mi’s absence Jong-su discovers how little he was there for her when she was around.

She worked at an unsteady job where she danced in public. She pretended absent things were there by forgetting that they weren’t. She had a lot of credit card debt and openly expressed a wish to disappear. Recounting an African ceremony that she witnessed to Jong-su and Ben, Hae-mi explained the Bushmen’s distinction between “little hunger” and “great hunger”—between material and spiritual longings. Director Lee’s implication, there and throughout his narrative, is that even if capitalism can satisfy the former, the void of the latter remains and engulfs. Where does the reality of a poor woman end? How far can a poor man see beyond his own experience? What can’t a rich man do without suffering consequences? Answering these questions takes subjective action; the viewer’s own participation in constructing meaning is required. Be careful, Burning seems to say: the life projected through abandoned greenhouses in an Asian country, freshly turning underneath the flame of violent acquisition, might just be your own.

[sapphicscholar]

hi so I didn't know who to ask but in my psych class we're learning about adolescent psychology, & there was this unit on developing interest in relationships. It went way into detail on how the brain changes during that time, which was interesting, but ofc my gay ass couldn't relate. at the end all it said was 'it's different for homosexuals.' I guess I'm wondering if you know of any way to learn about psychology relating to LGBT people? srsly im thirsty for anything in academia I can relate to

(same psych anon) that was a pretty specific question so I guess like do you have any info or know of any links/ websites/places to learn about lgbt history and lives and stuff like that in an academic way? bc I love school & learning but I’ve always wanted to learn more about myself and people like me, but they never teach that in schools.

Oh my gosh SO MANY THINGS! Okay, so, the psych stuff is pretty outside of my knowledge but I asked my gf (she does the science in this relationship while my gay ass just reads a whole lot of books), and she recommends Helen Fisher and looking at the researchers at the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality or the Kinsey Institute, as well as The Sage Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies (it’s an online resource a lot of universities subscribe to). But I’d also say that as far as thinking about developmental narratives, LGBTQ memoirs are a great place to start, especially since so many of them go through their own experiences of having to confront this heteronormative, cis-centric narrative that just doesn’t fit them and their lives. 

So some good queer history authors are: John D’Emilio (comprehensive, if a bit male-centric), Lillian Faderman (writing all about lesbian history, including more recent history; very well-respected; she’s got some issues in her scholarship that by no means discount it as a whole, but I’m happy to talk more about if you want), Michael Bronski (his Queer History of the United States is really accessible), George Chauncey (it’s just of NYC, but still fun), Estelle B. Freedman, Foucault (though it’s not quite “history,” it’s a kind of history meets theory of regimes of power and how sexuality got tied up in that), Martha Vicinus (I adore her), Valerie Traub (goes all the way back to the early modern period), and so many others who really focus more on niche history, so I won’t list them here. There are some web resources, but I know a lot of them are databases that are subscription-based. I’ll see what I can’t dig up in the next couple of days as far as free websites. I know they exist; it’s just a matter of having the time to look…

Okay, you didn’t specifically say you were interested in literature but bc I taught literature and think it’s a great way to learn about the history of a group, I’m gonna list some anyway and you can feel free to disregard!

Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (or Carol, depends on the year it was printed) – you can also check out the movie! I find the two to be complementary (the book gives you Therese’s POV almost exclusively, whereas the movie shows much more of Carol’s story) 

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home is her graphic novel/memoir that’s really excellent, but the comic strip that sort of launched her as a public persona (at least within the lesbian community) was Dykes to Watch Out For, quite a bit of which is available for free online

Henry James, The Bostonians – one of the first recognizable depictions of a queer female character in literature (not really…I’d trouble that as a professor, but that’s how it gets taught in general, and it was one of the first books where even contemporary reviewers were quick to note that there was something “wrong” or “morbid,” which was 19th C. code for what would come to be understood as lesbian sexuality, about Olive Chancellor) – free online, though it’s James at his most….Jamesian, which means it’s not that accessible

The poetry of Emily Dickinson! It’s all free online. There’s a ton of it, though much of it isn’t obviously queer

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room – gets into bisexual identity in a way a lot of works don’t do; on the sadder side…fair warning 

Virginia Woolf! Especially Orlando or Mrs. Dalloway – the former has been called “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature” (to Woolf’s longtime friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West) and deals with the fluidity of gender and time; the latter has quite a few flashbacks to the brief childhood romance of the protagonist and her friend. Both of them are great, but Woolf, as a modernist, can have a writing style that’s difficult to get into at first (for instance, time really isn’t stable or linear, which is something I adore about her, but definitely takes some getting used to). They’re both available free online through Project Gutenberg

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness – it’s a classic, in the sense that it’s one of those books people sort of expect you to have read if you do lesbian literature. It’s certainly an interesting story and told well, but it’s not even close to a happy ending and is rather conciliatory to prevailing norms (though even still it was taken to the courts under the  obscenity laws) - free online, though!

Sarah Waters – a contemporary novelist who writes almost all historical fiction about queer women! Some of her stories are better known (e.g. Tipping the Velvet), but they’re pretty much all great. Varying degrees of angst, but definitely an accessible read

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts – sort of experimental in form (it’s fiction with footnotes!); it deals with a lesbian woman coming to terms with her partner’s transition and her own identity during the process 

E.M. Forster, Maurice – even though it was first drafted in the 1910s, Forster edited it throughout his life, and, given the subject matter, which was also autobiographical, and the prevailing attitudes at the time, the book was only published posthumously in the 70s

Colette’s Claudine series – it’s long (multi-volume) but sort of a classic – they’re all old enough to be free online, though the English translation is harder to come by 

Eileen Myles – lesbian poet and novelist – I’d recommend Inferno but some of her poetry is free online 

Rita Mae Brown – Rubyfruit Jungle and Oranges Are not the Only Fruit are both quite good, though, especially the latter deals with religiously-motivated homophobia, so I know at least my girlfriend, who dealt with a lot of that from her family, opted not to read it for her own mental health. 

Tony Kushner, Angels in America – this two-part play deals with the AIDS crisis in America – it’s been turned into a TV miniseries, a Broadway play, and a movie, some of which are available online

Really anything by David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs – both are gay authors who deal a lot with short stories (a ton of memoir/autobiographical stuff) – the former is a bit funnier, but they both have enough sarcasm and dry wit even in dark situations to make them fast reads 

Alan Ginsburg’s poetry 

Walt Whitman’s poetry (though it can be really fucking racist) 

Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place – does deal with issues of sexual abuse as a warning 

Anything by Amber Hollibaugh (she writes a lot about class and butch/femme dynamics – quite a bit of her stuff has been scanned and uploaded online) 

Michelle Tea – was a slam poet; recovering alcoholic; fantastically funny and talented author and delightful human being if you ever get the chance to meet her or go to one of her readings

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On – more a work of investigative journalism than anything, the work is a stunning indictment of the indifference of the US government during some of the worst years of the AIDS crisis, but it also provides a good bit of gay history 

Terry Galloway Mean Little Deaf Queer – deals with one woman’s experience of losing her hearing and navigating the world and the Deaf and deaf communities as a once-hearing person – she’s sort of acerbic and always funny;

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex – grapples with intersex identity in a way that’s still far too rare in literature 

Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreem – just rediscovered about two years ago, this is one of the few pretty happy gay novels from the nineteenth century! Free online!

Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues – pretty clear from the title, but deals with a butch character’s struggles with gender identity (takes T to pass for a while, but then gets alienated from the lesbian community; eventually stops taking T, but still struggles with what that means for her) – Feinberg’s wife made it free online for everyone after Feinberg’s death (the book had a limited print run, which made finding copies both hard and expensive) 

Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilogy – trilogy later adapted for film about an effeminate gay man (who also performs as a drag queen) and his life and family   

Oscar Wilde – his novels aren’t explicitly gay, but they often dance around it thematically, at least; his heartbreaking letter, De Profundis, which he wrote to his lover while imprisoned for “gross indecency,” is available online 

Anything by Dorothy Alison 

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - great as a memoir and a cultural history  

There’s so many more but this is so my jam I suspect I’ve already rambled too long

If you’re interested in film, here are a few: 

Paris Is Burning (a film about drag ball culture in NYC) 

Fire – Deepa Mehta (it’s on YouTube in the US) 

Boys Don’t Cry – there is a lot of homophobia and transphobia in the film, so it’s definitely one you’ll want to be in the right mindset to watch (I, for one, have only watched it once) 

But I’m a Cheerleader – over-the-top mockumentary-esque film that satirizes conversion therapy and the Christian “documentaries” that claimed to showcase their successes (RuPaul is in it as well) 

Desert Hearts – one of the earliest films to leave open the possibility of a happy ending for the lesbian couple 

Hedwig and the Angry Itch – deals with gender identity and feelings of not belonging (also a fabulous musical) 

Philadelphia – about one man’s experience of discrimination while dying of AIDS 

There are plenty of lighter films, but I figure these tend to also talk more seriously about some issues as well

I don’t know if anyone but me made it to the end of this post, but there’s also so much fun queer theory out there that I won’t get into here, but I’m always up for giving more recommendations!