#mary forster

[tenth-sentence]

And, in 1659, in a petition composed by Mary Forster, more than 7,000 Quakers lobbied against paying tithes to the Church of England, and Margaret Fell would go on to petition Charles II for the release of 700 Quakers, including the founder George Fox after he had been imprisoned.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[iivari-ii]

eueeuugegegghh finally got around to making some more of these, please enjoy 🤲🤲

[monti-moth]

I only make memes about mildly obscure queer fiction written prior to 1970, thanks

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

More Penguin Classics covers for old gay novels.

(Part 1)

[lenaswritingandstuff]

When you realize Simon's song is just him showing Jesus his powerpoint on "how to conquer the country in three steps" and Jesus being like "the fuck is wrong with u"

[queeringclassiclit]

please send me submissions!

[impishtubist]

Y'all CANNOT take a picture of a light-haired man and a dark-haired man and say "this is so Wolfstar coded" I'm losing my mind 😭

[tragedies-and-dreams]

(not so) subtle gays

[dzgrizzle]

As I get older, more removed from the King James Bible and the fundamentalism of my youth, I find myself with other scriptures. Now my sacred texts are:

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman Maurice by E M Forster The poetry of Mary Oliver The short stories of Flannery O’Connor The epic fantasies of J R R Tolkien and Katherine Kurtz The way the sunlight shines on rhododendron The way the water feels on my feet in a cool mountain stream The waves of the ocean The purring of a cat The smile of a beloved friend

[cuttysarkmag]

It's officially PRIDE! We here at Cutty Sark have a lot to celebrate this month. Like a normal 19th century sailing vessel, there's lots of gay people at our helm.

Anyways, we wanted to take a moment to honor the queer writers who not only made it possible for us to be here in the writing world, but continue to reinstate a fact which should seem antiquated by this point: queer people belong in this world, today, tomorrow, and yesterday. Although there's still lots to be done in ways of gaining rights for the LGBTQIA+ community in the United States and internationally, we are able to be stronger when we can remember how far we've come. If you are a queer writer, we encourage you to submit to Cutty Sark (cuttysarkmag.com). It doesn't matter whether or not your pieces directly relate to queer activism. Your existence is power.

Now, on with the list of our favorite books by queer writers:

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (fiction) Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara (poetry) Crush by Richard Siken (poetry) On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (fiction) Howl by Allen Ginsberg (poetry) Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (poetry) Dog Songs by Mary Oliver (poetry) Hunger by Roxane Gay (nonfiction) Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (nonfiction) Exit Pastoral by Aidan Forster (poetry) Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (poetry) Indigo by Ellen Bass (poetry)

[sisterdivinium]

I always find it amusing how some people seem to be earnestly shocked by how not every viewer falls in love with Ava from the get go or how some don't really like her at all.

Disliking a main character is not a moral flaw, nor is it a novelty in the history of humans reacting to stories. There are no rules pertaining to how an audience must be fond of a protagonist. Different people like different things, as the saying goes, and, regardless of whether the title of the show is "goofy" or not (it was Forbes' Paul Tassi that deemed it so, if memory serves right), some of us were reeled in by it and expected what it says on the tin rather than following a reluctant hero for a handful of episodes while she avoids precisely that same narrative we might have initially signed up for.

It's both a matter of expectations and values; I've said somewhere before that JC's gang is unbearable to me also because I find no common ground with characters who embody a lifestyle I have seen up close and strongly rejected. They remind me of people I loathed and who certainly loathed me back. Subjective? Entirely, even though I also object to them as characters given how mind-numbingly dull and superficial they appear to me, as they are presented in the show (flat characters instead of round, if you want to E.M. Forster it, but so flat, so thin, that they might be ripped apart any moment). JC's speech on institutions is all pretty and commendable, but it sounds empty when the big middle finger he and his companions are giving to a higher social class is... The remarkable "cause" of crashing at their places so kids can get high on drugs in raves around Europe, apparently. His professed idealism doesn't really go beyond words -- and it's hard to sympathise with that.

Of course anyone could say the OCS also boasts of void discourses, ultimately meaningless words that deform reality, obscure it, manipulate it (the halo bearer, the gift, worth, God, grace, faith...) and they would be justified in their protestation seeing as the church's words are proven to be hollow as the story progresses. I won't argue with you there.

Yet this is thematically relevant considering the show's title. That is what I had hoped to see when I first hit play on the initial episode some time in 2021 (I'm neither of the "original" fans who watched WN as soon as it came out nor of the post-s2 crowd). So when Ava momentarily chooses that other lot, that other nucleus over this one, it almost led me to choose another show (and I have friends who did, despite my guarantees that it would pick up the pace quickly enough).

Now, none of this is meant to point fingers or judge people who loved Ava from the start or even those who might have a soft spot for JC's gang. The only thing this little text aims to accomplish is to explain how we all watch the same thing but wearing different pairs of lenses -- and that is a quality rather than a disadvantage. It means Warrior Nun can speak to all sorts of different people with different interests, values and sympathies, and it once more demonstrates how foolish Netflix's decision to cancel a show with so much potential reach was.

And, if you must know, I came round on Ava later on thanks to the powerhouse that is Alba Baptista's portrayal of her, allied with the clever writing I was treated to in season two.

If the power to change a viewer's opinion and feelings over a character she had disliked doesn't speak to the sheer talent of the people involved in a project, on and off-screen, I really do not know what else could serve as a higher compliment to everyone that brought it to life.

[internatlvelvet]

Clive Bell and his mistress Mary Hutchison (seated), with Duncan Grant and E. M. Forster in the walled garden at Charleston, Firle in Sussex.

1923

[iivari-ii]

Some Ben Forster version text posts because he’s my favourite Jesus 🫶

eat up 🙏

[mademoiselle-red]

Maurice and The Charioteer, a dialogue on Platonic love and its discontents:

“It had struck him with religious awe to find Phaedrus leading Socrates almost, it might have been, to the very spot.”

“Never could he forget his emotion at first reading the Phaedrus. He saw there his malady described exquisitely, calmly, as a passion which we can direct, like any other, towards good or bad. Here was no invitation to licence.”

“I know what I am and I’ve got to think what to do with it.”

“The temperate pagan really did comprehend him, and, slipping past the Bible rather than opposing it, was offering a new guide for life. “To make the most of what I have.” Not to crush it down, not vainly to wish that it was something else, but to cultivate it in such ways as will not vex either God or Man.”

“Once you’re really in, you never get away. You get swept along the road with the refugees, till you find you’ve been carried through the gates without noticing, and you’re behind the wire for the duration. The closed shop. Nous autres. It would never be like that with Andrew, he thought. Talking in the hospital kitchen at night, they had felt special only in their happiness, and separate only in their human identities.”

“Their happiness was to be together; they radiated something of their calm amongst others, and could take their place in society. The love that Socrates bore Phaedo now lay within his reach, love passionate but temperate, such as only finer natures can understand, and he found in Maurice a nature that was not indeed fine, but charmingly willing. He led the beloved up a narrow and beautiful path, high above either abyss.”

“Laurie realized that if he had persuaded Andrew to stay on, they could have spent most of it together. But it was better like this. The first lap of the race was over, not without victory.”

“The less you had the more it was supposed to be—that was Clive’s teaching.”

“He felt absolute, filled; he could have died then content, empty-handed and free. All gifts he had ever wished for seemed only traps, now, to dim him and make him less. This, he thought with perfect certainty, this after all is to be young, it is for this.”

““I say, will you kiss me?” asked Maurice. Clive shook his head, and smiling they parted, having established perfection in their lives, at all events for a time.”

“It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this was what you wanted. Laurie stood casting his long shadow on the room behind him, silent in a grief and wonder too deep for tears, that life was so divided and irreconcilable, and the good so implacably the enemy of the best.”

“Surely— the sole excuse for any relationship between men is that it remain purely platonic.”

“I’d been trying to work up what I was into a kind of religion. I thought I could make out that way.”

“The stories of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, of Phaedrus, of the Theban Band were well enough for those whose hearts were empty, but no substitute for life. That Clive should occasionally prefer them puzzled him.”

“He would be like a man who without interference allows his wife to practice some obscure religion he doesn’t believe in, because they were married on that understanding.”

[gayest-classiclit]

ROUND 2 of gay classic author deathmatch

[lenaswritingandstuff]

Judas watching Mary kiss Jesus and stroke his hair like: