#like ive seen it a lot with old movies making jokes about feminine men or masculine women and how people respond now with like FUCK YEAH

[thecommunityoftrustworthysinks]

my last post about white christmas has me thinking about older queer media, or potentially queer and queerphobic parts of older media. how so many of them had to be like that to exist at all, how queer people have always sought ourselves and each other in even the smallest of places.

like. that movie where patrick swayze played a trans woman (haven’t seen it, though i want to, and i forget the name). that’s not how we would do that today, but that doesn’t mean that the fact a trans woman was a major and serious part of a film’s character cast at all isn’t important. or like people lamenting that brokeback mountain was a tragedy, and how many other tragic stories of queer people existed before happy ones, because so many times that was the only way we were allowed to exist. i remember trying to placate my parents towards gay people in tv shows and movies by saying they died in the end, as if that justified their existing (no i didn’t believe this, i was a closeted kid in a violently homophobic household.)

and originally, what prompted this post, how the drag(ish) scene in white christmas certainly wasn’t the most mockery-free scene, but that danny kaye, a bisexual man, put his all into making it something genuinely fun instead of entirely a joke on embarrassment of men in women’s dresses. (now, of course, i don’t know if that’s what was on his mind or not when filming that scene, and im not assuming that either. i don’t know how involved in queer communities of the time danny kaye was. it’s just something i notice in a scene that could’ve been a lot worse than it was)

we’ve always been here. even when the only place we’re allowed to carve out for ourselves is in tragedy or otherwise tiny and unideal, you can’t ever erase us entirely. queer history is so important, don’t ever neglect it because it’s not up to the standards we would want today. it’s good that we’re doing better. value that!