#i yearn for this one so much. i know my knowledge of queer history is not up to par enough to write it as intricate as i would like tho

[seluneclerics]

Omg just binge read the five existing chapters of more the fool me and brooooo

Like I just sat my self down and didn’t get up until I finished and I’m so desperate for more!!!

The way you write the characters feels so authentic, even though their relationships develop fairly quick - it doesn’t feel rushed and makes complete sense!

You write Miranda so well, I’ve always in my head saw her as almost adjacent to characters like Narcissa Malfoy, Regina from Ouat etc

They have a cold, detached air around them but they’re fuelled by this addictive passion and commitment to their loved ones that they’re practically clinical about, like they’re not here to play and you get that across so well with Miranda.

I don’t usually read x readers and if I do, I don’t read OC ones but I enjoyed this thoroughly. I might be a little bias because I look a bit like Fraser - brown skin, long, black curls barring the fact that she’s 5’9 and I’m 5’4 at the best of times - but it comes down to how universal you write her.

The name Fraser doesn’t feel like it carries too much connotations like a name like mf Amy or Charlotte which are wayyy to western for a non-white person to easily relate to and her personality is so relatable. And big plus she’s not super annoying so

But your writing is amazing - the way you write intimacy without it being sexual is divine, how the characters look at each other fondly or appreciate the others mind or oh! oh! How you slip in Fraser’s knowledge about them to emphasise how well she knows them! Like how she knew it was Alcina because of her height when she was passed out or how she’s aware that Miranda was coming to yell at her on the balcony! The way she holds Miranda’s face and how Alcina plays piano to her, how Fraser easily makes Mira, Alcina, and soon Donna I’m guessing feel less lonely.

I don’t know, I just live for good sapphic yearning and pining and it’s so nice to see that there’s still a plot - which omg I can’t wait to see where that goes - and it isn’t all easy. Fraser may feel some attachment to Alcina and Miranda but she’s still willing to go behind their backs to search for her father - like trying to sneak into that storage room. She gets close with them but not without her own agenda. The tender, heady back and forth with Fraser and the Lords/Mira is so perfectly countered by the far more gritty landscape and setting, the depictions of the violent, grotesque nature of the corpses and flesh, of the worms and the far less idealistic village and it’s history. You stay true to the grit of RE8 and I’m here for it, I hate when a wlw story or any queer story is all fluffy or all angsty like there needs to be balance and you got it.

Alcina has to hold herself back, she feels uncomfortable knowing about Miranda’s closeness with Fraser or vice versa, Miranda letting Fraser into her vulnerable parts despite how perturbed she is and Fraser not being a dick head that has no common sense but still makes mistakes.

The pacing is great, you have pretty neat prose and I am so interested! Keep up the really awesome work!

- from a dedicate fan now <3

holy shit, i’m???

thank you so much for taking time out of your day to read about the little evil gay women in my phone. thank you even more for making such a detailed comment, really it means the world to me—and also shocks me???

the representation of fraser being a black/mixed black woman was incredibly important to me. the RE community in general has a lack of rep for women of color, likely due to the games themselves not having too many woc in general.

i’m so glad you like my miranda characterization! in this fic, i wanted to lean heavily into what it’s like to be a grieving mother. outside of the vengeful, scornful side of miranda we see inside of RE8. of course, her rage and schemes are still very present in more the fool, but i wanted the aspect of dealing with the grief of losing someone to take center stage.

i think the beauty of miranda/fraser’s dynamic is that fraser exists within miranda’s grief, rather than trying to do away with it or fill the hole that’s left in her heart. she knows she can’t assuage her loneliness and she doesn’t want to. she simply wants to be with her through it all, and i think that’s the beautiful thing about them.

outside of the who-done-it nature of more the fool’s overarching story, i think it’s a story of what it’s like to go to the ends of the earth for a person, solely because you love them and would do anything to see you two reunited.

fun fact: fraser’s name means “of the forest men” and strawberry! the truth is, i got so attached to it when i was trying to come up with a name for her, but then realized it was a boy’s name. i thought it’d be funny for her lore to add in the fact that her father knew it was a boy’s name, but kept it anyway because he liked it so much. besides, i think we can all say it fits her better!

there’s so much more i want to say, but tumblr has deleted this on me like 4 other times already, so i’ll end it there. thank you again, and i look forward to giving you more to read soon!!

[creative-anchorage]

I was out for a walk recently, venting via text to a friend about something silly, and I couldn’t stop myself from bookending my rant with apologies for bothering them. Their response stopped me midstep: “I want to know what’s going on with you.” As someone who wants to be as ambitious about my friendships as I am my work, but who always worries about needing a little “too much” from the people I lean on, the word “want” caught my attention. Ultimately I think that’s what we all need in relationships: People who want to show up for us, and vice versa. This kind of care and intention feels like a form of ambition—that’s not a term I would have previously used in a sentence about friendship, but it is one that makes sense to me now. ... [...] While I knew how much my friends mattered to me, learning to be ambitious about friendships required not just that I show up, but that I practice letting other people in. It meant embracing the fact that I’m inherently needy, even when the faulty self-reliance of one kind of ambition tells me I should be able to do it alone, or that I’m overstaying my welcome by asking too much of my friends. ... Yearning for stronger, more substantial connections isn’t news: Loneliness is considered a public health threat. Though some research shows that people with strong friendships have better physical and mental health, other research indicates we tend to lose friendships as we age. Our reliance on each other never truly fades, but too often, it’s shoved underneath too many obligations and too little time and resources.

Rhaina Cohen, a journalist and author of the forthcoming book, The Other Significant Others, has focused years of research and reporting on friends who are so close, they rise to the level of partners. “This is a big question I’m trying to deal with: what does it mean to be partners?” Cohen said. What kept coming up for people, she explained, was “this mix of deep and profound knowledge of another person, but also a kind of everyday presence, and sense that that person is interested in all of the mundanities of your life, and will debrief with you at the end of the day.” In a piece for The Atlantic, Cohen noted that in LGBTQ+ communities, there’s a long history of high value being placed on friendships, including friends as “chosen family.” “I think, for a lot of reasons, in the queer community, it’s just much more understood that friends can play a variety of roles and not be peripheral,” she told me. There still remain few roadmaps for organizing one’s life around friends, Cohen said, but she said she thinks there is a “growing recognition that having a social world beyond the nuclear family setup is important.” One of the things Cohen was thinking about before we spoke via Zoom, she said, was “to the extent that there’s ambition involved in building new ties, it involves putting in a lot of work on the front end to make friendship easy on a day-to-day level.” She shared an example: She lives in a home with her husband, as well as two good friends and their two children. They are a five-minute walk from one of her other close friends, with about 20 other friends and acquaintances within a 15-minute walking radius. “When our cultural norms treat living with friends as a passing phase and our housing is designed for nuclear families, it takes imagination to dream up a life built around friends,” Cohen added. “And it takes ambition to make the idea a reality.” Meanwhile, others point to small ways to be ambitious about friendship. “When I think about ambition, I think about focus, I think about intention, I think about momentum toward a goal,” said Danielle Bayard Jackson, a friendship coach and educator, and author of an upcoming book on friendship. Jackson explained that much of this is about taking our intention and making it tangible. She suggested putting a post-it where you can see it, listing three to five people you want to prioritize connecting with, whether it’s a close friend or someone you just met. You can also develop what Jackson calls friendship rituals—standing dates to have a call, get coffee, watch a show, or whatever works for you—to ensure friends don’t get pushed to the scheduling back-burner. It takes effort, and it shows desire, something Jackson said we should normalize in our platonic relationships. “We all want to feel like somebody's thinking of you,” she added.

[starvels]

Is there a Steve/Tony AU you dream of but haven’t either found or would be to much to write yourself? We all got that one lol.

i mentioned a few for that ask meme a bit back but two that i am thinking of rn would be a stargate au (my first fandom i love and miss you) and a massive sweeping steve rogers 1940s historic bisexual meets tony stark 1980s historic queer.

this story is written in a choose your own narrative style methodology. one chapter allows you to read chronological steve's story all the way thru to tony's and the other chapter, nonlinear, tony's POV interspaced with steve's.

chronologically: the first scene opens with steve flitting through the gay scene of NY, the bone deep reality of a disabled guy trying to make ends meet and curling his long fingers around the bright points in life. then we go with him into the army where guys are just all over each other for comfort and then to paris' queer scene, mourning the remains of the german queer scene, and then the ice and then waking up and acclimating and meeting out of the block these wild avengers and reading the news and see how things have changed, how they haven't. and then there's tony. tony who is a queer gender flexible person living through the height of the AIDS crisis, has been a public figure, whose own sexuality and status have been the target of so much speculation and vitriol. tony however, who both as iron man and tony is so open with affection with steve.

maybe steve's got a steady assurance in his own sexuality, has had good experiences with people of all genders, has done drag alongside soldiers, has whistled a tune. maybe tony, for all his knowledge of the gay club scene, is a complex mix of terrified of the ongoing crisis around them, (is that part of the reason stark ind got involved in medical research and tech?) and fervently, defiantly fuck-you-queer.

maybe there's a charity gala. maybe there's an interview. maybe there's an identity reveal. maybe there's a heated kiss in battle.

the story weaves around the reality of superheroing, the reality of trying to do the right thing as a flawed human being, the way even people that they love & that love them have some fucked up views sometimes. sometimes, steve&tony themselves have them. the news runs in the backdrop like static, and the story conducts a swaying compare and contrast of their lived experiences, the way that they get to talking to each other - behind masks but open about things much deeper than codenames - and how inter-generational convos about queer history are VITAL, are so enlightening and open up the world to a whole new side of your community that you never considered before.

i would like to see how they look at each other when its not just tony showing steve the future, it's not just steve giving tony hope; it's both of them echoing across time and identity and love and saying gently into the night, we have always been here (in so many different ways).

the story will end on them having breakfast in bed, looking at the sunrise.

[leslie-lyman]

1) one of my fave looks is tfrom the 2019 Met Gala (even though as a virulent queer that look was not CAMP and on GOD I never cared about celebrity fashion before that night! CAMP is loud! It’s ostentatious! If you aren’t leaving a trail of glitter and pho feathers in your wake you’re doing it wrong—! Anyway…)

2) in that same interview he admitted to looking at fan accounts when he was feeling down (implies to be insecure) and I both laugh, and shrivel in fear at the knowledge

I have no knowledge about fashion history so I can’t comment on what does or doesn’t count as camp, but one thing I do appreciate about this look is that he didn’t just go for a boring regular tux or suit. So many of the men who go to the Met Gala don’t even TRY to do anything on theme, or even anything that dares go outside of the standard dark suit. But Pedro isn’t afraid to wear different colors or patterns and take some risks fashion-wise and have some fun with it, and I really like that about him. The recent pink suit he wore on James Corden for example makes me FERALLLLLLL. I also love his Met Gala glasses.

As for the Vanity Fair interview, I find his admitting he looks at fan accounts when he’s feeling down endlessly delightful. The laugh he lets out when he admits that gives me dopamine for days. And also he’s just so human. To me, Pedro is a celebrity, yes, technically, but really he’s just A Guy who became a celebrity, and there’s a difference. He got famous in his late 30s after trying for 20 years to Make It, and so he’s so much more established in who he is as a person before the toxicity of fame had a chance to work its claws into him (he’s talked about this in interviews before). And what this means is that yeah, he looks at fan accounts, but also, he’ll admit to it. Don’t put me up on some far-removed pedestal of celebrity, this says to me, because I sure wouldn’t. At the end of the day he has his weaknesses, and his vanity, and his curiosity. And sometimes, he’ll willingly offer us a glimpse of that.

Does he know about the Pedro tumblr fandom? I’d absolutely bet he does. Does he spend any time here the way he does on Instagram? Does he have a burner account? Does he read fanfic? Who knows. If he wants to tell us one day, he will. In the meantime, speculation is useless. I find the possibility of Pedro reading any of the things I’ve said about him - or written about his characters - both exhilarating and cringe beyond all belief. I think I’d mostly just hope he judged my writing to be of good quality. I’d love to have a conversation with him about writing. But otherwise, I’d rather he not ever know I exist. I’m good with (respectfully, I hope) yearning from afar.

[if-only-angels-could-prevail]

“American Things” by Tony Kushner

Summer is the season for celebrating freedom, summer is the time when we can almost believe it is possible to be free. American education conditions us for this expectation; school's out! The climate shift seductively whispers emancipation. Warmth opens up the body and envelops it. The body in summer is most easily at home in the world. This is true even when the summer is torrid. I have lived half my life in Louisiana and half in New York City. I know from torrid summers.

On my seventh birthday, midsummer 1968, my mother decorated my cake with sparklers she'd saved from the Fourth of July. This, I thought, was extraordinary, fantastic, sparklers spitting and smoking, dangerous and beautiful atop my birthday cake. In one indelible, ecstatic instant my mother completed a circuit of identification for me, melding two iconographies, of self and of liberty: of birthday cake, delicious confectionery emblem of maternal enthusiasm about my existence, which enthusiasm I shared; and of the nighttime fireworks of pyro-romantic Americana, fireworks-liberty-light which slashed across the evening sky, light which thrilled the heart, light which exclaimed loudly in the thick summer air, light which occasionally tore off fingers and burned houses, the fiery fierce explosive risky light of Independence, of Freedom.

Stonewall, the festival day of lesbian and gay liberation, is followed closely by the Fourth of July; they are exactly one summer week apart. The contiguity of these two festivals of freedom is important, at least to me. Each adds piquancy and meaning to the other. In the years following my 7th birthday I had lost some of my enthusiasm for my own existence, as most queer kids growing up in a hostile world will do. I'd certainly begun to realize how unenthusiastic others, even my parents, would be if they knew I was gay. Such joy in being alive as I can now lay claim to has been returned to me largely because of the successes of the political movement which began, more or less officially, 25 years ago on that June night in the Village. I've learned how absolutely essential to life freedom is.

Lesbian and gay freedom is the same freedom celebrated annually on the Fourth of July. Of this I have no doubt; my mother told me so, back in 1963, by putting sparklers on that cake. She couldn't have made her point more powerfully if she'd planted them on my head. Hers was a gesture we both understood, though at the time neither could have articulated it; "This fantastic fire is yours." Mothers and fathers should do that for their kids: give them fire, and link them proudly and durably to the world in which they live.

One of the paths down which my political instruction came was our family seder. Passover, too, is a celebration of Freedom in sultry, intoxicating heat (Passover actually comes in the spring but in Louisiana the distinction between spring and summer was never clear). Our family read from Haggadahs written by a New Deal Reform rabbinate which was unafraid to draw connections between Pharaonic and modern capitalist exploitations; between the exodus of Jews from Goshen and the journey toward civil rights for African-Americans; unafraid to make the yearning which Jews have repeated for thousands of years a democratic dream of freedom for all peoples. It was impressed upon us, as we sang "America the Beautiful" at the seder's conclusion, that the dream of millennia was due to find its ultimate realization not in Jerusalem but in this country.

The American political tradition to which my parents made me an heir is mostly an immigrant appropriation of certain features and promises of our Constitution, and of the idea of democracy and federalism. This appropriation marries morally and ideologically indeterminate freedom to the more strenuous specific mandates of justice. It is the aggressive, unapologetic, progressive liberalism of the 30s and 40s, a liberalism strongly spiced with socialism, trade unionism and the ethos of internationalism and solidarity.

This liberalism at its best held that citizenship was bestowable on everyone, and sooner or later it would be bestowed. Based first and foremost on reason, and then secondarily on protecting certain articles of faith such as the Bill of Rights, democratic process would eventually shift power from the mighty to the many, in whose hands, democratically and morally speaking, it belongs. Over the course of 200 years, brave, visionary activists and ordinary, moral people had carved out a space, a large sheltering room from which many were now excluded, but which was clearly intended to be capable of multitudes. Within the space of American Freedom there was room for any possibility. American Freedom would become the birthplace of social and economic Justice.

Jews who came to America had gained entrance into this grand salon, as had other immigrant groups: Italians, Irish. Black people, Chicanos and Latinos, Asian-Americans would soon make their own ways, I was told, as would women, as would the working class and the poor -- it could only be a matter of time and struggle.

People who desired sex with people of their own gender, trans-gender people, drag kings and drag queens, deviants from heterosexual normality were not discussed. There was identity, and then there was illness.

I am nearly 38, and anyone who's lived 38 years should have made generational improvements on the politics of his or her parents. For any gay man or lesbian since Stonewall, the politics of homosexual enfranchisement is part of what is to be added to the fund of human experience and understanding that we pass on to the next generation-upon which we hope improvements will be made.

The true motion of freedom is to expand outward. To say that lesbian and gay freedom is the same freedom celebrated annually on the Fourth of July is simply to say that queer and other American freedoms have changed historically, generally in a healthy direction (with allowances for some costly periods of faltering, including recently), and must continue to change if they are to remain meaningful. No freedom that fails to grow will last.

Lesbians and gay men of this generation have added homophobia to the consensus list of social evils: poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation, the ravaging of the environment, censorship, imperialism, war. To be a progressive person is to believe that there are ways to actively intervene against these evils. To be a progressive person is to resist Balkanization, tribalism, separatism; to be progressive is to seek out connection. I am homosexual, and this ought to make me consider how my experience of the world, as someone who is not always welcome, resembles that of others, however unlike me, who have had similar experiences. I demand to be accorded my rights by others; and so I must be prepared to accord to others their rights. The truest characteristic of freedom is generosity, the basic gesture of freedom is to include, not to exclude.

That there would be a reasonably successful movement for lesbian and gay civil rights was scarcely conceivable a generation ago. In spite of these gains, much of the social progress which to my parents seemed a foregone conclusion has not yet been made, and much ground has been lost. Will racism prove to be more intractable, finally, than homophobia? Will the hatred of women, gay and straight, continue to find new and more violent forms of expression, and will gay men and women of color remain doubly, or triply oppressed, while white gay men find greater measures of acceptance, simply because they are white men?

The tensions which have defined American history and American political consciousness have most often been those existing between the margin and the center, the many and the few, the individual and society, the dispossessed and the possessors. It is a peculiar feature of our political life that some of these tensions are frequently discussed and easily grasped, such as those existing between the states and the federal government, or between the rights of individuals and society's claims upon them; while others' tensions, especially those which are occasioned by the claims of marginalized peoples, are regarded with suspicion and fear. Listing the full catalog of these claims is sure to raise howls decrying "political correctness" from those who need desperately to believe that democracy is a simple thing.

Democracy isn't simple and it doesn't mean that majorities tyrannize minorities. We learned this a long time ago, from, among others, the Moses of that Jewish American Book of Exodus, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, or, in more recent times, from Thurgood Marshall. In these days of demographic shifts, when majorities are disappearing, this knowledge is particularly useful, and it needs to be expanded. There are in this country political traditions congenial to the idea that democracy is multicolored and multicultural and also multigendered, that democracy is about returning to individuals the fullest range of their freedoms, but also about the sharing of power, about the rediscovery of collective responsibility. There are in this country political traditions, from organized labor, from the civil-rights and black-power movements, from feminist and homosexual liberation movements, from movements for economic reform, which postulate democracy as a dynamic process. These traditions exist in opposition to those which make fixed fetishes of democracy and freedom, talismans for reaction.

These traditions, which constitute the history of progressive and radical America, have been shunted to the side in an attempt at revisionism that began during the McCarthy era. Over the course of American history since World War II, the terms of the national debate have subtly, insidiously shifted. What used to be called liberal is now called radical, what used to be called radical is now called insane. What used to be called reactionary is now called moderate, and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking.

The recovery of antecedents is immensely important work. Historians are reconstructing the lost history of homosexual America, along with all the other lost histories. Freedom, I think, is finally being at home in the world, it is a returning -- to the best particulars of the home you came from, or the arrival, after a lengthy and arduous journey, at the home you never had, which your dreams and desires have described for you.

I have a guilty confession to make. When I am depressed, when nerve or inspiration or energy flag, I put on Dvorak's Ninth Symphony, "From the New World"; I get teary listening to the Largo. It's become one of the alltime most shopworn musical cliches, which is regrettable. My father, who is a symphony conductor, told me that Dvorak wrote it in America and then contributed all the money from the New World Symphony's premiere to a school that accepted former slaves. But as the story goes, his daughter fell in love with a Native American and Dvorak took the whole family back to Bohemia.

Like many Americans I'm looking for home. Home is an absence, it is a loss that impels us. I want this home to be like the Largo from the New World Symphony. But life most frequently resembles something by Schoenberg, the last quartet, the one he wrote after his first heart attack. Life these days is played out to the tune of that soundtrack. Or something atonal, anyway, something derivative of Schoenberg, some piece written by one of his less talented pupils.

The only politics that can survive an encounter with this world, and still speak convincingly of freedom and justice and democracy, is a politics that can encompass both the harmonics and the dissonance. The frazzle, the rubbed-raw, the unresolved, the fragile and the fiery and the dangerous: these are American things. This jangle is our movement forward, if we are to move forward; it is our survival, if we are to survive.

[itsalasallianlifeforme]

The Pain and Beauty Within My Community, and Why I Love and Hate Sharing It.

At my service site, we do an array of activities during our time with students while they’re here on retreats. One of the activities that we do is something called “The Night Walk.” Unlike many of our activities, we don’t really do too much preparation with them or tell them about the activity beforehand. We just tell them that we are going to take them to a different part of the city and that it is going to look very different from the other parts of Chicago that they have already visited on the south and or west side. We ask them to observe what is around them and to keep a few questions in mind as we do a walking meditation. 

What would you do if:

You didn’t have anywhere to go/sleep for the evening?

You didn’t have anything to do?

You didn’t have any money to spend?

And to observe their surroundings to look for signs of who may or may not be welcome in the areas we enter on the Night Walk. 

We start off at a very swanky, nice looking part of the city next to Wrigley Stadium. It’s got far too many bars and stores for people to wander in and out of, to celebrate a win or drink away a loss after a Cubs game. Throughout the walk, I point out different things that help them delve into the questions that we asked them to consider. For example on one bar, there is a dress code that prohibits people from wearing many things if they want to enter such as: Du rags, “excessively” baggy clothing, work boots, “gang attire”, matching colors, shorts that are no longer than one inch past the knee, camouflage, Hawaiian designs, tie dye, overalls, cargo pants of an “odd color”, shirts with skull designs on them, dirty clothes, ripped clothes, frayed clothes etc… clearly many people are not welcome in this establishment. Carefully read over the list again, I’ll let you sit with that and think about who they are not welcoming on your own. You’re smart, I’m sure you’ll come to the correct conclusion and your answer may be different than mine, but I think we will both agree that it is not pretty. It really astounds me that people have the balls to exclude people in such a way, and to do it through the guise of a dress code. I wouldn’t give this bar my money if they were the last place in Chicago that had McKenzie's Black Cherry Cider, which is always my drink of choice.

Anyway… after this bar, we continue to walk to head into Boystown, an area that is highly populated by members of the LGBTQ+ community. Boystown has many centers/organizations and ministries that offer services that are more frequently needed by the queer community. This includes anything from stores that sell rainbow flags to health centers and small mini rainbow statues that have names of figures who have had an active part in advancing LGBTQ+ rights.

I first took this walk with staff and I found that this area was very special to me. This was where a lot of my LGBTQ+ community members lived, and I’ve felt pretty separated from that community since I’ve moved here. It’s about an hour away from where I live now and I plan to go there more often but it’s not somewhere I can go to regularly. 

I relish the opportunity to bring students here. As to be expected, there are groups who were not as appreciative of its existence and what it offers and groups that are. Sometimes (in groups who do appreciate it) as students look around and say how wonderful Boystown is, I see a flash of pain and yearning because they don’t have a space like this in their communities. In that moment that I see, the all of that emotion run rampant in their eyes and I sympathize with it all. I was them at some point. I remember all of the ways in which I as a person who had a supportive mother, did my best to be a micro version of this space for my friends who didn’t have that. I did that with the hope of being that space for someone who needed it, at a point in their life where I didn’t have it. I remember what that loneliness felt like, how I felt as one of the 5 people who were out of the closet in the many high schools I attended and unwanted in those spaces. The pain from that is easily recognizable by others who have experienced it, it’s like a marking that appears and disappears on your face. When I see it, I go back to high school when my mom and I had to provide a safe haven for a friend who had been kicked out of their home after their parents found out they were gay. All of the fear of what was going to happen when they had to face that family member again, the uncertainty that sat like a rock in my stomach as I thought about whether or not they would have a safe place to sleep later that night. I remember how helpless I felt as the principal of our school had asked what happened. I remember the anger I felt, that my mom, myself, (and I’m sure) my friend, and the principal (who was also part of the LGBTQ+ community) seemed to be the only people who really cared because we understood that gravity of the situation. I think back to the anger that I felt when I found out that my friend’s mother had called the principle to try and separate us, and switch me out of classes that we had together because I had helped them. I still feel the despair when I think about the fact that someone felt it necessary to do that because they didn’t understand something, and wanted to go out of their way to sever what help someone needed in that situation. Rehashing all of that trauma is something that I hope is worth it as we walk through Boystown. To me, the all too familiar vulnerability I feel whenever we take students there is worth the strength and broadened perspective I hope to give them as we walk. All of the trauma I’ve experienced as an LGBTQ+ community member is secondary to a greater purpose -their learning- for the hour that we walk together.

Once we’re back at the center, we later try and point out and talk about systemic issues that cause the need for centers and places that provide specific services for marginalized communities like the LGBTQ+ community. And to answer the questions we had prompted to them before the walk started. Places that are very unwelcoming to others touch elbows with places like Boystown. Boystown and other neighborhoods are special and necessary.They offer places to go when you have nowhere to go, or nowhere to sleep at night. They offer things to do when you don’t have any money to spend. They make you feel welcome and part of the community when you may not feel that you are, elsewhere. It’s not just gay bars. We also point out the fact that LGBTQ+ youth make up a large portion of youth who experience homelessness, and why that is the case is also something we get to talk about later. It often takes every fiber of my being not to just blurt all of the information out, because they need to take some steps to figure somethings out on their own. Sometimes I worry about what will happen when I am with a group that will be very unsympathetic during a Night Walk. I haven’t experienced a group like that before, but my co-workers have. There is a lot of trauma that can come with being part of any marginalized community, and if there’s one thing that really pisses me off it’s when people are dismissive of that. 

There is one spot at the end of the walk that we always stop at that moves me (and sometimes other students) a little more than the others, and that is the Center on Halstead. It’s a strange moment of hope and despair sometimes. I’ve found that it’s literally one of the most painful things I have seen and experienced in reference to my service.

This building and its history is an interesting one, it’s beautiful, inspiring and heartbreaking. At the moment, this building is yet another center in Boystown that offers various services to those who seek them within the LGBTQ+ community. Part of the Center on Halstead is a retirement home. However, it was not always a retirement home or a safe place for people in the queer community to go. It used to be a police station. People who currently live there remember being in the gay bars that are just a few blocks from this building, and being arrested or booked in that very building after police would raid the bars. They live in the same space, in a community that now widely accepts them where they once felt pain and betrayal. If that isn’t the most disheartening, inspiring and amazing things that I’ve ever seen and heard…I don’t know what is. That building (for me) is a great source of pain and beauty due to the struggles people went through in the past and where they and the community stand now. It’s a landmark of progress for my community. For those of you who are not familiar with me on a personal level, LGBTQ+ rights are something that is very important to me. Through my service and future work, I hope to help further LGBTQ+ rights for our community so the future members of the community won’t have to experience something like this again.

If you’re ever in Chicago and want to see Boystown I highly suggest it. And if you have a town that is inclusive of marginalized communities like the LGBTQ+ communities, minorities etc, I would ask that you support them and their work. Places like Boystown are more than just a place for some good nightlife. It’s a place that understands the needs of their community, and a place that recognizes their struggles and does their best to provide help for those issues when it can’t be found as easily or at all in society.

Despite how much I really love doing Night Walks with students, something I am really sitting with is the fact that we are going through this community (and others) to help students on retreat gain a better understanding of a number of things… while somewhat exploiting the life of others without or with their knowledge. We do our best to split the groups up so that way it doesn’t seem that obvious that, that is what we are doing. However, the question wages in my head… is the possible exploitation of people that live in these communities a necessary insensitivity to help spread awareness for others within the LGBTQ+ communities when the students take this experience and knowledge home with them? 

Many of the groups that come are unaware or not as aware of the complexities or existence of the social justice issues that we talk about. I personally would rather someone see and ask, rather than assume wrong information but I can’t speak on behalf of others. That observation of respite from the vulnerability oppression creates, is something that I feel conflicted about showing, despite the intentions of the activity. So really it boils down to, intentions versus impact on the communities we walk through, and the students entrusted to our care for the time being. Sometimes, more often than not, it takes time to get to a respite from that vulnerability. In a few ways, I feel like I may be violating that by bringing groups there. But then again, is any marginalized community and the people who are part of it ever free from that vulnerability? Perhaps we don’t escape it, but just learn how to grow around it or take steps farther away from it to truly live as we are. In Boystown, and other marginalized communities there is undeniable beauty, community, acceptance, and love- but there’s also undeniable pain and hardships…who in the hell am I to reveal that? Am I doing this as a retreat facilitator who wants people to broaden their perspective? Am I doing this as a member of the LGBTQ+ community who wants people to sympathize and understand the struggles of our community?

Any thoughts? What do you think?

[montpahrnah]

Hi! I know this might come out as a strange question, but do you think that gay marriage exist in the hp universe? And what are your thoughts on gay wizarding culture (is that even a word? Pardon me for my absolutely horrible english)? Anyway, I hope you're having a good day

beatrice you are the loveliest and i hope everything is bright and beautiful for you

so, as far as canon/word of jkr goes, i know she’s said something similar to what a lot fantasy/sci-fi writers do whenever this comes up, which is that ~wix~ are more tolerant than muggles and being queer just doesn’t matter, or no one cares, etc, which is an incredibly cheap cop-out for all the obvious reasons (and like, “it just doesn’t matter!!” et al is just… such a clueless, straight thing to say. of course it matters). the thing is, blood purity just doesn’t work as a catchall or replacement for real-world oppressions–as in, within canon, it doesn’t even work that way:  we have plenty of examples of sexism and misogyny throughout the series, very few explicitly non-white characters play significant roles, and the single canonically gay character is a chaste old man who has learned the error of his ways via a bad romance* and remains closeted for the entire series. THUS, i think blood purity is best (and most interestingly) viewed as another layer of oppression in addition to racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia etc rather than a one-size-fits-all exchange for those things.

because of that, i tend to think wizarding society would progress along similar routes as muggle society re:  gay rights, liberation, marriage etc. especially because i think queer wizards would necessarily have to have a knowledge of both worlds/learn to exist in both–given how small and insular wizarding society is, the muggle world definitely has more going for it! there are absolutely gay wizard bars/clubs/groups/resources etc, but they’d be far fewer/possibly feel a bit claustrophobic given the relatively tiny population of magical folks in general (on the other hand, it would foster an intimate, invaluable sense of community), so i feel like straddling that border between muggle/wizard is inevitable! as a result they bring muggle ideas back with them/bring wizard ideas to the muggle world, and as they got involved in muggle movements, they’d come back and start their own concurrently in magical society.

as far as modern-day magical society is concerned, i see no reason why gay marriage wouldn’t exist! i do think it’d take a bit longer for them than for muggles, and let’s be real, strict pureblood families are never going to go for it (tbh purebloods in general probably don’t take well to it), though i’ve always had a headcanon that queer witches and wizards from those families typically try to seek each other out for sham marriages lol, though that obviously wouldn’t work every time. given that muggle-magical duality i think they’d probably opt for a joint ceremony to make everything official in both places, or maybe just have two separate weddings for both since that might make things a little less complicated… i was trying to think of co-magical/muggle spaces for this where that might have a lot of symbolic meaning but atm i can’t come up with much. also this is kind of tangential, but something i’ve always been interested in is thinking about non- and part-human populations that function mostly outside of both magical and muggle societies, i.e. kelpies, veela, even werewolf packs, because there’s no way they would conform to mainstream muggle or magical ideas about gender and sexuality and i’d kill for a fic that explores any of that someday!!

other than that, i think at hogwarts and even after, a whole lot of queer content both magical and non-magical would get passed around like contraband. certain of auden’s poems, rimbaud’s letters to verlaine, orlando, some of nin’s better short stories, illustrated magical copies of things akin to the joy of gay sex and various zines, mixtapes ft. queer artists/obsessive queer yearning, sleater-kinney’s music later on, my beautiful laundrette, g.l.o.s.s.’s demo, new bloods’ lone album passed around like a sacred heirloom… i like to think they sometimes come to muggle stuff years or decades later and are so extremely enthusiastic about it their muggle buds can’t even bring themselves to tell them they’ve already read it fifteen times. (though part of our shared history, i think, has that ageless quality:  given the scarcity of art about and for us, and given how close we hold those things that are ours, there’s something about them that always feels relevant–and such joy in seeing other people discover them.)

AGAIN, i’m always desperate to hear what people think about queer magical culture–tell me your headcanons!!!!! we don’t talk about this nearly enough as a fandom, u know?

*as i wrote this i remembered that i don’t think we actually have confirmation that grindlewald reciprocated dumbledore’s feelings, so maybe “romance” is a strong word? idk