#nico u will always b famous
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i wish we got more of everyone teaching nico about the 21st century. teaching him stuff he wouldn’t have learned from the lotus casino or when he was by himself. i want percy to teach nico skateboarding. i want percy to show nico all his favorites movies and bands. i want annabeth to show nico all the new and weird inventions like pocket calculators and GPS . i want hazel and nico to learn all about how far space travel has come and how there’s machines on far away planets. i want piper to show nico all the long forgotten toys like etch-a-sketch and the easy bake oven. i want rachel to show nico all the art he’s missed out over the years. i want jason to show nico how holidays have transformed since the 1930’s and show him all the weird new food combinations people have come up with. i want nico to learn and enjoy normal teenager things. i want nico to be happy
#feeling. insane about nico on this fine day#percico#pjo#nico u will always b famous#sry abt any typos or whatever i wrote this at 5am
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percy saying we fucked up specifically. that plot point SPECIFICALLY is a fucking gold mine bc he's the golden boy that nico learns to half resent bc fake friends but not really bc they r foils in a few important ways bc percy started from the bottom + rejected immortality only 2 live in godhood among men + nico cleans up everyones shit + leave me alone but ur just a kid im gonna always feel responsible for you + percy jackson is too famous + too traumatized to care abt any of u anymore, are we no different than the gods, ur on ur own kid but nobody else gets it what it means to be alive and belong to a place entirely devoted to the dead, hades the god of justice the underworld is for show its never been abt that, i am my fathers ambadassor some deaths should not b prevented, omens have walked alongside me my entire life so is the gift and the curse of hades, the underworld is but a silent observer waiting to pass a judgement you bring upon urself, nico listen are u listening listen -- all i do is listen im listening!!... this BETTER not b they just fucked up by leaving Bob there bc imma kms!!!!
#needs to be DEEPER!!!!#actually. this needs to b written like ya. it wont b successful otherwise#sigh#kk im done now#tsats#k#pjo#hoo#toa#percy jackson
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u said self indulgent nico hcs?? 👀👀
ajkdsjkkj when I say self-indulgent, it’s Self-Indulgent and i pretty much ignore richard’s canon / haven't reread the books from either series in a long time nor have i read toa but if ur really interested... (long post ahead, sorry!)
nb nico is top tier
goes by he/they pronouns
touristcore aesthetic that’s slowly encroaching into e-person territory
he’s The Blueprint
likes thorn from the hex girls (even the reboot ver.) but digs dusk’s look more
how is this related u may ask?
yeah, i answer
idc abt canon so he and drew are bitchy friends and drew rags on his appearance constantly while brushing his hair but throws in self-care tips btwn loving insults
nico: you know im not a boy right
drew: doesnt change the fact you look like a wet rat, sweetie <3
i will forever stand by reynico being (platonic) soulmates and im gonna b extra self-indulgent and say they were friends in previous lives too and that’s why they vibed w each other so well <3
speaking of previous lives, well.... heh..
(no but really, this hc is kinda embarassing but , if u want elaboration uhhhhhhhhhh)
i know nico only has like. a 5th grade education but i like to think he would be a good student ... if anything i think hades would at least homeschool him with the ghosts of (famous) teachers ??? he seems to be naturally curious and he’s kind of a smart ass (not in a mean way) in canon idk
polyglot nico! polyglot nico! polyglot nico!!!! he becomes the go-to translator at camp ( like he isn't already sjkjskjdk)
yes he would know asl. why? bc i said so and rick needs to include include some hoh/deaf characters within the greek/roman pantheon <3 (if there is, not counting hearthstone from mcga)
leo finds out abt nico knowing spanish bc he once snorted at a joke he said and now leo won’t stop telling him shit like “¿cuál es la fruta que más se ríe? .... la naranja, ja, ja, ja --”
ironically has the best hair at chb (rick once said the di angelos had silky hair in the titan’s curse i think + reyna said something abt his hair too in boo ?? i'll have to check...) once he cleans up and the aphrodite kids are seething
nico’s hair starting to gray at a young age is also an interesting concept ! i think tumblr user fuocogo drew something ft that and it stuck with me
really self indulgent but he’s roman at heart (maybe even Literally. i read somewhere that an italian fan said the di angelos fit the desc. of modern day romans better than venicians ?? if i find it, i’ll link it >>>)
i like to think his family are legacies of victoria seeing as he’s always one of the key pieces / an important informant for winning both wars ... plus his grandpa was a diplomat and uhhh idk where I was going w this ngl
speaking of family, I need to know if the di angelo bloodline no longer exists assuming maria was an only child and there was no mention of any other di angelos aside from her parents ..? i like the idea of nico finding out that he has more family tho !!
also I would love it if rick cleared up where and when he met maria pls and thank u <3
I MISS BABY NICO’S PERSONALITY SM ... which is why i propose that whenever one of his friend’s see his eyes sparkling and arms waving while he babbles abt whatever topic, they think it’s really cute !!!! like !! keep talking !!
he gets embarrassed when he sees his friends smiling at him but it kinda makes him a bit teary eyed bc it’s been so long since he was able to talk abt his interests without being shut down / forcing himself to keep quiet because he felt like he was being too childish/annoying
what im saying is that he should be able to act like a kid bc he is one !!!! he's 14 !!!!!
he either has the cutest laugh or the weirdest laugh and it strictly depends on who ur asking
i feel like he sneezes like a kitten...............he sneezes and everyone whips their head around to look at him and he’s never wanted to dig a hole and put himself in it more than now
i like the imagery of tinkling bells being associated with him so im gonna sayyy he would have a necklace with a little bell (something like this kinda ??) and yes, leo would’ve made it for him as a joke kinda but not really
valdangelo (either as a friendship or nah) is underrated
like ur telling me this kid has a metal dragon and builds the coolest things ever and nico doesn't even think it’s a little bit cool ?? nah. rr did them dirty.
the kids at camp love him and i won't take no for an answer
he brings out ye ol’ mythomagic figurines to explain/show them the monsters and gods of the greek pantheon
it’s a win-win situation bc he gets to babble abt his hyperfixation and the kids get to learn abt what they're gonna get into in a way that’s better than the camp orientation film (since nico’s literally the only one who’s seen it ((but i think the stolls wanted to check it out too ??)) )
they give him a “camp’s best counselor <3333” mug and he cries abt it to reyna and hazel
yes he’s wearing an unusual amount of friendship bracelets no he's not gonna take them off shut up
unfortunately im team short!nico bc i want 2 see him get engulfed by the hugs his sisters (yes this includes reyna) and friends give him !!!
he wears demonia platform sneakers / doc martens (and converse but that’s p much a given) thank you <3
piper/nico friendship ... I Need It
they borrow each other’s clothes constantly
leo and them clown on jason and jason is Suffering but he loves them all so it’s ok
piper could probably carry nico
nico stress bakes
yeah
he and clovis become good friends and hang out in the dream world and u know what, im gonna say they’re cuddle buddies too. clovis seems like he would give nice hugs !
im a sucker for nico having friends from different pantheons too !!! also becoming sort-of friends with gods/immortals of different pantheons !!
the underworld demigod discord gc is cursed; one moment they're all talking abt how they're pretty much fated to stay in the underworld while they're both living and after they die but the next moment someone says they want a hug and a chorus of “yeah...”’s follows.
nico was a momma’s boy most definitely
speaking of which, i like to think that while him and bianca looked like their dad and mom respectively, it would’ve switched when they got older ?? idk
autistic nico ..... rick make it canon and not btwn the lines......
idk how to explain this one bc it’s just Plain Weird but . i feel like . nico would like?? hang out under his bed ??? maybe i’ll draw a pic or something and edit this later sjjdjkddk
this is just me projecting but he hates looking at mirrors / seeing himself in photos bc the person he sees doesn't match the person he sees in his head ?? if that makes sense ??? like he doesn't look like the nico he used to be bc of how much his appearance changed ? idk
uhhh he sometimes hallucinates, esp when he was in tartarus and in the month after coming out of the jar
maybe i’ll elaborate on this later ..
i need more annabeth and nico friendship pls...... both of them like/liked percy and now he can't stop getting clowned
HOWEVER.... if I see one more “not his/my type” joke im going to delete my tumblr
speaking of which, i have a conspiracy theory abt Things, but i don't wanna get my ass sniped into next tuesday
introvert leo forcing himself to be the group comedian even though he’d much rather be with machines and extrovert nico who pushes ppl away so he doesn't get hurt but desiring the company of another type vibes. im not gonna elaborate.
his latest hyperfixation is pokemon and his favorite pokemon are gengar and skitty, but jirachi and mimikyuu are close seconds
has a crush on N Harmonia and a bunch of the male gym leaders no im not gonna elaborate
this isn't a hc but. rick u really gotta stop writing abt ppl automatically distrusting nico because of his appearance / godly parent (although some were kinda warranted based of their personal history even though nico still pulled through in the end) im getting tired of reading abt ppl wanting to like. hurt him or Actually hurting him for stuff he didn't have control of sjkjsjkdsjkdk (like wtf happened with frank when hazel got poisoned?? I thought frank actually liked nico ahjkjsjkf)
uhhhhh that’s p much it ?????? sorry for the long ass post .. maybe i’ll write abt him more if ppl really want me to...
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Yeah! Thank you for the tag! (I start hating my url everytime these things came up... But the length also allows me to include more songs I like so I'm grateful at the same time)
M: Machine Gun (F**k The NRA) ~ YUNGBLUD
A: Anarchist~ YUNGBLUD
G: Ghost of Ohio ~ Andy Black
N: Not Gonna Die ~ Skillet
U: Unbreakable ~ New Years Day
S: Sarcasm ~ Get Scared
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T: The Cut That Always Bleeds ~ Conan Gray
H: Happy Pills ~ Wheathers
E: End in Tragedy ~ Set It Off
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F: Famous Last Words ~ My Chemical Romance
A: Army of Noise ~ Bullet for my Valentine
B: Broken ~ lovelytheband
U: Unbroken ~ Anna Blue
L: Last One Standing ~ Simple Plan
O: Ordinary Life ~ Simple Plan
U: Uma Thurman ~ Fall Out Boy
S: Silent Scream ~ Anna Blue
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E: Enter Sandman ~ Metallica
N: No Good in Goodbye ~ The Script
T: thoughts&prayers ~ Grandson
P: Put The Gun Down ~ Andy Black
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B: Be somebody ~ Thousand Foot Krutch
A: All the Angels ~ My Chemical Romance
N: Nico and the Niners ~ Twenty One Pilots
E: Early Sunsets Over Monrover ~ My Chemical Romance
Tagging:
@thepoorgroomsbrideisahorse @mark-blackthorn-bi-guy @emo-bi-mess @fistupheaddownhailhailtotheking @strugglingpansexual @petewentzfrommychem @enchantedpendant @kerplunk-mp3 @wildhvney @theshortgothicpunk @emogayrat666 @melonberry21 @pink-punk-metal @rebelromance @rebelwhodoesntknow @three-cheers-for-pretty-odd @chemicalgee @gerardbutnotgerardway @beebo-at-the-church @blastercat @bi-disaster-kit @boy-howdy-i-am-gay @joeymarahart @ti-bae-rius @matthewwfairchildd
Tagged by @lovelyplaton
Rules: spell out your url using song titles. Then, tag as many people as there are letters in your url.
M - My way home is through you by mcr
I - Is it wrong? by Lana del Rey
S - Streets of love by The Rolling Stones
S - Sweet Things by The Pretty Reckless
D - Doing it to death by The Kills
E - Everyobody wants something from me by The Pretty Reckless
V - Vampire Money by mcr
I - In Bloom by Nirvana
L - Letter to God by Hole
Tagging: @a-freakishly-mutual-fad-rat @magnus-the-fabulous-entp-bane @crystal-cloudy @desufnoc @galien-pastatute @cosmicvotary @pitchcraft @archlyfzombies @forever-intuitive if any of you want to do it. If not that's fine but I love everything involving new music
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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)
Should I be married to a woman? If today were yesterday, if all this sexual fluidity were in the discourse when I was coming of age in the ‘90s, would I have been with a woman instead of a man? It is a question that “The Bisexual” creator Desiree Akhavan also poses in the second episode of her Hulu series, co-produced with Channel 4 because no U.S. network wanted it. Akhavan directed, co-wrote, and stars in the show in which her character, Leila, splits with her girlfriend of 10 years, Sadie (Maxine Peake), and starts having sex with men for the first time. So, Leila asks, if the opposite had happened to her — as it did to me — and a guy had swept her off her feet instead of a woman, would things have turned out differently? “Maybe I would’ve gone the path of least resistance,” Leila says. Maybe I did.
This is a conundrum that marks a previous generation — one that had to “fight for it,” as Akhavan’s heroine puts it, and is all the more self-conscious for being juxtaposed with the next one, the one populated by the fluid youth of social media idolizing the likes of pansexual Janelle Monáe, polyamorous Ezra Miller, undecided Lucas Hedges. Call it a queer generation gap (what’s one more label?). “I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with the Internet,” 32-year-old Akhavan explains to a younger self-described “queer woman” in her show. “I just get the sense that it’s changing your relationship to gender and to sexuality in a really good way, but in a way I can’t relate to.”
***
This Playboy bunny is chest out, lips open, legs wide. This Playboy bunny is every other Playboy bunny except for the flat hairy chest because this Playboy bunny is Ezra Miller. The star of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald calls himself “queer” but it’s hard to take him seriously. What was it Susan Sontag said: it’s not camp if it’s trying to be camp? And for the past few months, while promoting the Potterverse prequel no one asked for, this 26-year-old fashionisto has been trying his damndest, styling himself as a sort of latter day Ziggy Stardust — the monastic Moncler puffer cape, the glittering Givenchy feathers — minus the depth. Six months ago, Miller looked like every other guy on the red carpet and now, per his own request, models bunny ears, fishnets, and heels as a gender-fluid rabbit for a randy Playboy interview. Okay, I guess, but it reads disingenuous to someone who grew up surrounded by closets to see them plundered so flagrantly for publicity. Described as “attracted to men and women,” Miller is nevertheless quoted mostly on the subject of guys, the ones he jerked off and fell in love with. He claims his lack of romantic success has lead him to be a polycule: a “polyamorous molecule” involving multiple “queer beings who understand me as a queer being.”
The article hit two weeks after i-D published a feature in which heartthrob Harry Styles interviewed heartthrob Timothée Chalamet with — despite their supposed reframing of masculinity — the upshot, as always, being female genuflection. “I want to say you can be whatever you want to be,” Chalamet explains, styled as a sensitive greaser for the cover. “There isn’t a specific notion, or jean size, or muscle shirt, or affectation, or eyebrow raise, or dissolution, or drug use that you have to take part in to be masculine.” Styles, on brand, pushes it further. “I think there’s so much masculinity in being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be feminine,” the 24-year-old musician says, “and I’m very comfortable with that.” (Of course you are comfortable, white guy…did I say that out loud?) As part of the boy band One Direction, Styles was marketed as a female fantasy and became a kind of latter-day Mick Jagger, the playboy who gets all the girls. His subsequent refusal to label himself, the rumors about his close relationship with band mate Louis Tomlinson, and the elevation of his song “Medicine” to “bisexual anthem”– “The boys and the girls are in/I mess around with them/And I’m OK with it” — all build on a solid foundation of cis white male heterosexuality.
Timothée Chalamet’s sexuality, meanwhile, flows freely between fiction and fact. While the 22-year-old actor is “straight-identifying,” he acquires a queer veneer by virtue of his signature role as Call Me by Your Name’s Elio, a bisexual teen (or, at least, a boy who has had sex with both women and men). Yet off screen, as Timothée, he embodies a robust heterosexuality. On social media, the thirst for him skews overwhelmingly female, while reports about his romantic partners — Madonna’s daughter, Johnny Depp’s daughter — not only paint him straight but enviably so. Lucas Hedges, another straight-identified actor who plays gay in the conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, somewhat disrupts this narrative, returning fluidity to the ambiguous space it came from. The 21-year-old admitted in an interview with Vulture that he found it difficult to pin himself down, having been “infatuated with” close male friends but more often women. “I recognize myself as existing on that spectrum,” he says. “Not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual.” That he felt “ashamed” for not being binary despite having a sixth-grade health teacher who introduced him to the range of sexuality suggests how married our culture is to it.
As a woman familiar with the shame associated with female sexuality, it’s difficult to ignore the difference in tenor of the response to famous young white males like Miller, Styles, and Chalamet and famous black women like Janelle Monáe and Tessa Thompson not only discussing it, but making even more radical statements. Appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in May, Monáe said straight up (so to speak): “Being a queer black woman in America — someone who has been in relationships with both men and women — I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” The same age as Desiree Akhavan, 32, Monáe identified as bisexual until she read about pansexuality. She initially came out through her music; her album, Dirty Computer, contains a song called “Q.U.E.E.N.” which was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.,” while the music video accompanying “Pynk” has actress Tessa Thompson emerging from Monáe’s Georgia O’Keeffe-esque pants. While neither one of them has discussed their relationship in detail, Thompson, who in Porter magazine’s July issue revealed she is attracted to men and women, said, “If people want to speculate about what we are, that’s okay.”
The mainstream press and what appeared to be a number of non-queer social media acolytes credited Chalamet and Styles with redefining their gender and trouncing toxic masculinity. “[H]arry styles, ezra miller, and timothee chalamet are going to save the world,” tweeted one woman, while The Guardian dubbed Miller the “hero we need right now.” Monáe, meanwhile, was predominantly championed by queer fans (“can we please talk about how our absolute monarch Janelle Monáe has been telegraphing her truth to the queers thru her art and fashion for YEARS and now this Rolling Stone interview is a delicious cherry on top + a ‘told u so’ to all the h*teros”) and eclipsed by questions about what pansexual actually means. While white male fluidity was held up as heroic, female fluidity, particularly black female fluidity, was somehow unremarkable. Why? Part of the answer was recently, eloquently, provided by “Younger” star Nico Tortorella, who identifies as gender-fluid, bisexual, and polyamorous. “I get to share my story,” he told The Daily Beast. “That’s a privilege that I have because of what I look like, the color of my skin, what I have between my legs, my straight passing-ness, everything.”
***
When I was growing up sex was not fun, it was fraught. Sex was AIDS, disease, death. The Supreme Court of Canada protected sexual orientation under the Charter when I was 15 but I went to school in Alberta, Canada’s version of Texas — my gym teacher was the face of Alberta beef. In my high school, no one was gay even if they were. All gender was binary. Sex was a penis in a vagina. Popular culture was as straight, and even Prince and David Bowie seemed to use their glam sparkle to sleep with more women rather than fewer. Bisexual women on film were murderers (Basic Instinct) or sluts (Chasing Amy) and in the end were united by their desire for “some serious deep dicking.” I saw no bisexual women on television (I didn’t watch “Buffy”) and LGBTQ characters were limited (“My So-Called Life”). Alanis Morissette was considered pop music’s feminist icon, but even she was singing about Dave Coulier. And the female celebrities who seemed to swing both ways — Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Bijou Phillips — were the kind who were already acting out, their sexuality a hallmark of their lack of control.
“I think unrealistic depictions of sex and relationships are harmful,” Akhavan told The New York Times. “I was raised on them and the first time I had sex, I had learned everything from film and television and I was like ‘Oh, this isn’t at all like I saw on the screen.’” Bisexuality has historically been passed over on screen for a more accessible binary depiction of relationships. In her 2013 book The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television, Maria San Filippo describes what has become known as “bisexual erasure” in pop culture: “Outside of the erotically transgressive realms of art cinema and pornography, screen as well as ‘real life’ bisexuality is effaced not only by what I’ve named compulsory monosexuality but also by compulsory monogamy,” she writes, adding, “the assumption remains that the gender of one’s current object choice indicates one’s sexuality.” So even high-profile films that include leads having sex with both genders — Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Carol, Call Me By Your Name — are coded “gay” rather than “bi.”
Despite the rise in bisexual women on the small screen like Annalise in “How to Get Away with Murder,” Syd in “Transparent,” and Ilana in “Broad City,” GLAAD’s latest report on inclusion cited continued underrepresentation. While 28 percent of LGBTQ characters on television are bisexual, the majority are women (75 versus 18) and they are often associated with harmful tropes — sex is used to move the plot forward and the characters scan amoral and manipulative. This despite an increase in the U.S.’s queer population to 4.5 percent in 2017 from 3.5 percent in 2012 (when Gallup started tracking it). A notable detail is the extreme generational divide in identification: “The percentage of millennials who identify as LGBT expanded from 7.3% to 8.1% from 2016 to 2017, and is up from 5.8% in 2012,” reported Gallup. “By contrast, the LGBT percentage in Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1979) was up only .2% from 2016 to 2017.”
Here’s the embarrassing part. While I am technically a millennial, I align more with Generation X (that’s not the embarrassing bit). I am attracted more to men, but I am attracted to women as well yet don’t identify as LGBTQ. How best to describe this? I remember a relative being relieved when I acquired my first boyfriend (it was late). “Oh good, I thought you were gay,” they said. I was angry at them for suggesting that being gay was a bad thing, but also relieved that I had dodged a bullet. This isn’t exactly the internalized homophobia that Hannah Gadsby talked about, but it isn’t exactly not. My parents and my brother would have been fine with me being gay. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the standard I grew up with — in the culture, in the world around me — was not homosexuality, it was heterosexuality. I don’t judge non-heterosexual relationships, but having one myself somehow falls short of ideal. For the same reason, I can’t shake the false belief that lesbian sex is less legitimate than gay sex between men. The ideal is penetration. “That’s some Chasing Amy shit,” my boyfriend, eight years younger, said. And, yeah, unfortunately, it is. I have company though.
In a survey released in June, billed as “the most comprehensive of its kind,” Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News polled 880 LGBTQ Americans, almost half of whom were between the ages of 18 and 29, and found that the majority, 46 percent, identified as bisexual. While women self-described as bi four times as often as men (79 to 19 percent), the report did not offer a single clear reason for the discrepancy. It did, however, suggest “phallocentrism,” the notion that the penis is the organizing principle for the world, the standard. In other words, sex is a penis in a vagina. “While bisexual women are often stereotyped as sleeping with women for male attention, or just going through a phase en route to permanent heterosexuality,” the report reads, “the opposite is presumed of bisexual men: that they are simply confused or semi-closeted gay men.” This explains why women who come out, like Monáe and Thompson, are considered less iconoclastic in the popular culture than men who even just make vague gestures towards fluidity — the stakes are considered higher for the guys. In truth, few feel comfortable being bi. Though the Pew Research Center’s survey of queer Americans in 2013 revealed that 40 percent of respondents identified as bisexual, this population was less likely to come out and more likely to be with a partner of the opposite sex. Famous women like Maria Bello, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristen Stewart have all come out, yet none of them really use the label.
“Not feeling gay enough, that’s something I felt a lot of guilt over,” Akhavan told the Times. It is guilt like this and the aforementioned shame which makes it all the more frustrating to watch the ease with which the younger generation publicly owns their fluidity. It is doubly hard to watch young white men being praised for wearing bunny ears in a magazine that has so long objectified women, simply because the expectations are so much lower for them. “I’m not looking down on the younger experience of being queer,” Akhavan said, “but I do think that there’s a resentment there that we gloss over.” In response, many of us react conservatively, with the feeling that they haven’t worked for it, that it is somehow less earned because of that. This is an acknowledgment of that resentment, of the eye rolling and the snickering with which we respond to the youth (ah, youth!). In the end we are not judging you for being empowered. We are judging ourselves for not being empowered enough.
* * *
Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.
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La Masia: Nico González
The pressure of being the son of a footballer is oftentimes too much for a youngster. It's even harder for the children when their fathers were club legends. Such is the case with 16-year-old Nicolás González, son of Deportivo La Coruña legend Fran González. Fran made 380 official appearances for the team that would become Súper Dépor, winning two Copa del Rey trophies, three Super Cups and a La Liga title as the left midfielder of the famous side. The elder González may not have been a Ballon d'Or contender, scoring just 35 official goals for the club, but he was a good enough player to make the Spain squad for Euro 2000 after scoring two goals in qualifying.
Three years before Fran concluded his playing career at Deportivo, his son Nicolás was born on January 3, 2002. Nico soon took up his father's game, sometimes accompanying his father to training and joining local A Coruña side Montañeros before moving on to La Masia. It was a slow integration to life in Catalonia at the request of his parents, appearing for Barcelona in four tournaments as a nine-year-old before moving to La Masia with complete commitment as a ten-year-old. Just as he did with Montañeros, where he actually played and scored a brace against Barcelona in the Arousa youth tournament, Nico has always played up an age level; a theme among La Masia's brightest players.
After captaining the Cadet A squad, Nico leapfrogged the Juvenil B level altogether and finds himself on a similar trajectory as Abel Ruiz from the last few seasons. The trust the club has in the player in catapulting him up the ranks comes after he showed trust in the club by putting pen to paper in September on a contract until 2021. The recent exodus of talent in his age group including Robert Navarro, Pablo Moreno and Adrián Bernabé to Monaco, Juventus and Manchester City respectively, had the club nervous that he would join the parade out of Catalonia. The player was reportedly close to leaving two seasons prior while his father was a coach for City before Fran had his contract terminated and made his return to Spain.
Instead, with heavy pressure from both Manchester United and Man City that included much greater financial incentives than Barcelona could offer, the player chose Barcelona as the place for him to continue his development. On paper, the plan was for the player to grow in the Juvenil A side this season while playing in the UEFA Youth League, become the focal point of the Juvenil A side next season and finish the three-year plan with a promotion to Barcelona B.
That might be the hypothetical plan, but Nico's early returns to start the 2018-19 season indicate that Barcelona's plan may need to be accelerated. His call-up to the Spain U-17s hasn't stalled his progress at all, rather it seems to have galvanized the central midfielder with a flair for the attack. He has appeared in three UEFA Youth League games already this season, scoring the winner against PSV in twelve minutes off the bench, picking up 31 additional minutes in the match against Tottenham and putting the icing on the cake of a 2-0 win over Inter Milan with a goal in 19 minutes of action.
His work in the Youth League and with the Juvenil A squad, both under Denis Silva, has gotten him an extended look from Barcelona B manager Francisco Javier García Pimienta. Just days after scoring against Inter, he made his unofficial Barca B debut as a 16-year-old in the Copa Catalunya against Sant Andreu, playing the entire second half. His week of four matches in eight days was book-ended by two appearances for the Juvenil A side, going 90 minutes against Espanyol to start the week and finishing off with 40 minutes against Mallorca the following Sunday.
It is a wonderful sight to see the club pushing the player against challengers a few years his senior, and it will be interesting to see how he continues his gradual transition through the last few levels of Barcelona's ladder; albeit the hardest of them all. With a few more years of grooming under the watchful eyes of Silva and Pimienta and the guidance of a footballing legend as a father, Nico González could soon be proving why Barcelona were so desperate to keep him when so many others packed up and left.
via Blogger http://www.barcablog.com/2018/11/la-masia-nico-gonzalez.html
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The Queer Generation Gap
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)
Should I be married to a woman? If today were yesterday, if all this sexual fluidity were in the discourse when I was coming of age in the ‘90s, would I have been with a woman instead of a man? It is a question that “The Bisexual” creator Desiree Akhavan also poses in the second episode of her Hulu series, co-produced with Channel 4 because no U.S. network wanted it. Akhavan directed, co-wrote, and stars in the show in which her character, Leila, splits with her girlfriend of 10 years, Sadie (Maxine Peake), and starts having sex with men for the first time. So, Leila asks, if the opposite had happened to her — as it did to me — and a guy had swept her off her feet instead of a woman, would things have turned out differently? “Maybe I would’ve gone the path of least resistance,” Leila says. Maybe I did.
This is a conundrum that marks a previous generation — one that had to “fight for it,” as Akhavan’s heroine puts it, and is all the more self-conscious for being juxtaposed with the next one, the one populated by the fluid youth of social media idolizing the likes of pansexual Janelle Monáe, polyamorous Ezra Miller, undecided Lucas Hedges. Call it a queer generation gap (what’s one more label?). “I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with the Internet,” 32-year-old Akhavan explains to a younger self-described “queer woman” in her show. “I just get the sense that it’s changing your relationship to gender and to sexuality in a really good way, but in a way I can’t relate to.”
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This Playboy bunny is chest out, lips open, legs wide. This Playboy bunny is every other Playboy bunny except for the flat hairy chest because this Playboy bunny is Ezra Miller. The star of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald calls himself “queer” but it’s hard to take him seriously. What was it Susan Sontag said: it’s not camp if it’s trying to be camp? And for the past few months, while promoting the Potterverse prequel no one asked for, this 26-year-old fashionisto has been trying his damndest, styling himself as a sort of latter day Ziggy Stardust — the monastic Moncler puffer cape, the glittering Givenchy feathers — minus the depth. Six months ago, Miller looked like every other guy on the red carpet and now, per his own request, models bunny ears, fishnets, and heels as a gender-fluid rabbit for a randy Playboy interview. Okay, I guess, but it reads disingenuous to someone who grew up surrounded by closets to see them plundered so flagrantly for publicity. Described as “attracted to men and women,” Miller is nevertheless quoted mostly on the subject of guys, the ones he jerked off and fell in love with. He claims his lack of romantic success has lead him to be a polycule: a “polyamorous molecule” involving multiple “queer beings who understand me as a queer being.”
The article hit two weeks after i-D published a feature in which heartthrob Harry Styles interviewed heartthrob Timothée Chalamet with — despite their supposed reframing of masculinity — the upshot, as always, being female genuflection. “I want to say you can be whatever you want to be,” Chalamet explains, styled as a sensitive greaser for the cover. “There isn’t a specific notion, or jean size, or muscle shirt, or affectation, or eyebrow raise, or dissolution, or drug use that you have to take part in to be masculine.” Styles, on brand, pushes it further. “I think there’s so much masculinity in being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be feminine,” the 24-year-old musician says, “and I’m very comfortable with that.” (Of course you are comfortable, white guy…did I say that out loud?) As part of the boy band One Direction, Styles was marketed as a female fantasy and became a kind of latter-day Mick Jagger, the playboy who gets all the girls. His subsequent refusal to label himself, the rumors about his close relationship with band mate Louis Tomlinson, and the elevation of his song “Medicine” to “bisexual anthem”– “The boys and the girls are in/I mess around with them/And I’m OK with it” — all build on a solid foundation of cis white male heterosexuality.
Timothée Chalamet’s sexuality, meanwhile, flows freely between fiction and fact. While the 22-year-old actor is “straight-identifying,” he acquires a queer veneer by virtue of his signature role as Call Me by Your Name’s Elio, a bisexual teen (or, at least, a boy who has had sex with both women and men). Yet off screen, as Timothée, he embodies a robust heterosexuality. On social media, the thirst for him skews overwhelmingly female, while reports about his romantic partners — Madonna’s daughter, Johnny Depp’s daughter — not only paint him straight but enviably so. Lucas Hedges, another straight-identified actor who plays gay in the conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, somewhat disrupts this narrative, returning fluidity to the ambiguous space it came from. The 21-year-old admitted in an interview with Vulture that he found it difficult to pin himself down, having been “infatuated with” close male friends but more often women. “I recognize myself as existing on that spectrum,” he says. “Not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual.” That he felt “ashamed” for not being binary despite having a sixth-grade health teacher who introduced him to the range of sexuality suggests how married our culture is to it.
As a woman familiar with the shame associated with female sexuality, it’s difficult to ignore the difference in tenor of the response to famous young white males like Miller, Styles, and Chalamet and famous black women like Janelle Monáe and Tessa Thompson not only discussing it, but making even more radical statements. Appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in May, Monáe said straight up (so to speak): “Being a queer black woman in America — someone who has been in relationships with both men and women — I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” The same age as Desiree Akhavan, 32, Monáe identified as bisexual until she read about pansexuality. She initially came out through her music; her album, Dirty Computer, contains a song called “Q.U.E.E.N.” which was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.,” while the music video accompanying “Pynk” has actress Tessa Thompson emerging from Monáe’s Georgia O’Keeffe-esque pants. While neither one of them has discussed their relationship in detail, Thompson, who in Porter magazine’s July issue revealed she is attracted to men and women, said, “If people want to speculate about what we are, that’s okay.”
The mainstream press and what appeared to be a number of non-queer social media acolytes credited Chalamet and Styles with redefining their gender and trouncing toxic masculinity. “[H]arry styles, ezra miller, and timothee chalamet are going to save the world,” tweeted one woman, while The Guardian dubbed Miller the “hero we need right now.” Monáe, meanwhile, was predominantly championed by queer fans (“can we please talk about how our absolute monarch Janelle Monáe has been telegraphing her truth to the queers thru her art and fashion for YEARS and now this Rolling Stone interview is a delicious cherry on top + a ‘told u so’ to all the h*teros”) and eclipsed by questions about what pansexual actually means. While white male fluidity was held up as heroic, female fluidity, particularly black female fluidity, was somehow unremarkable. Why? Part of the answer was recently, eloquently, provided by “Younger” star Nico Tortorella, who identifies as gender-fluid, bisexual, and polyamorous. “I get to share my story,” he told The Daily Beast. “That’s a privilege that I have because of what I look like, the color of my skin, what I have between my legs, my straight passing-ness, everything.”
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When I was growing up sex was not fun, it was fraught. Sex was AIDS, disease, death. The Supreme Court of Canada protected sexual orientation under the Charter when I was 15 but I went to school in Alberta, Canada’s version of Texas — my gym teacher was the face of Alberta beef. In my high school, no one was gay even if they were. All gender was binary. Sex was a penis in a vagina. Popular culture was as straight, and even Prince and David Bowie seemed to use their glam sparkle to sleep with more women rather than fewer. Bisexual women on film were murderers (Basic Instinct) or sluts (Chasing Amy) and in the end were united by their desire for “some serious deep dicking.” I saw no bisexual women on television (I didn’t watch “Buffy”) and LGBTQ characters were limited (“My So-Called Life”). Alanis Morissette was considered pop music’s feminist icon, but even she was singing about Dave Coulier. And the female celebrities who seemed to swing both ways — Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Bijou Phillips — were the kind who were already acting out, their sexuality a hallmark of their lack of control.
“I think unrealistic depictions of sex and relationships are harmful,” Akhavan told The New York Times. “I was raised on them and the first time I had sex, I had learned everything from film and television and I was like ‘Oh, this isn’t at all like I saw on the screen.’” Bisexuality has historically been passed over on screen for a more accessible binary depiction of relationships. In her 2013 book The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television, Maria San Filippo describes what has become known as “bisexual erasure” in pop culture: “Outside of the erotically transgressive realms of art cinema and pornography, screen as well as ‘real life’ bisexuality is effaced not only by what I’ve named compulsory monosexuality but also by compulsory monogamy,” she writes, adding, “the assumption remains that the gender of one’s current object choice indicates one’s sexuality.” So even high-profile films that include leads having sex with both genders — Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Carol, Call Me By Your Name — are coded “gay” rather than “bi.”
Despite the rise in bisexual women on the small screen like Annalise in “How to Get Away with Murder,” Syd in “Transparent,” and Ilana in “Broad City,” GLAAD’s latest report on inclusion cited continued underrepresentation. While 28 percent of LGBTQ characters on television are bisexual, the majority are women (75 versus 18) and they are often associated with harmful tropes — sex is used to move the plot forward and the characters scan amoral and manipulative. This despite an increase in the U.S.’s queer population to 4.5 percent in 2017 from 3.5 percent in 2012 (when Gallup started tracking it). A notable detail is the extreme generational divide in identification: “The percentage of millennials who identify as LGBT expanded from 7.3% to 8.1% from 2016 to 2017, and is up from 5.8% in 2012,” reported Gallup. “By contrast, the LGBT percentage in Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1979) was up only .2% from 2016 to 2017.”
Here’s the embarrassing part. While I am technically a millennial, I align more with Generation X (that’s not the embarrassing bit). I am attracted more to men, but I am attracted to women as well yet don’t identify as LGBTQ. How best to describe this? I remember a relative being relieved when I acquired my first boyfriend (it was late). “Oh good, I thought you were gay,” they said. I was angry at them for suggesting that being gay was a bad thing, but also relieved that I had dodged a bullet. This isn’t exactly the internalized homophobia that Hannah Gadsby talked about, but it isn’t exactly not. My parents and my brother would have been fine with me being gay. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the standard I grew up with — in the culture, in the world around me — was not homosexuality, it was heterosexuality. I don’t judge non-heterosexual relationships, but having one myself somehow falls short of ideal. For the same reason, I can’t shake the false belief that lesbian sex is less legitimate than gay sex between men. The ideal is penetration. “That’s some Chasing Amy shit,” my boyfriend, eight years younger, said. And, yeah, unfortunately, it is. I have company though.
In a survey released in June, billed as “the most comprehensive of its kind,” Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News polled 880 LGBTQ Americans, almost half of whom were between the ages of 18 and 29, and found that the majority, 46 percent, identified as bisexual. While women self-described as bi four times as often as men (79 to 19 percent), the report did not offer a single clear reason for the discrepancy. It did, however, suggest “phallocentrism,” the notion that the penis is the organizing principle for the world, the standard. In other words, sex is a penis in a vagina. “While bisexual women are often stereotyped as sleeping with women for male attention, or just going through a phase en route to permanent heterosexuality,” the report reads, “the opposite is presumed of bisexual men: that they are simply confused or semi-closeted gay men.” This explains why women who come out, like Monáe and Thompson, are considered less iconoclastic in the popular culture than men who even just make vague gestures towards fluidity — the stakes are considered higher for the guys. In truth, few feel comfortable being bi. Though the Pew Research Center’s survey of queer Americans in 2013 revealed that 40 percent of respondents identified as bisexual, this population was less likely to come out and more likely to be with a partner of the opposite sex. Famous women like Maria Bello, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristen Stewart have all come out, yet none of them really use the label.
“Not feeling gay enough, that’s something I felt a lot of guilt over,” Akhavan told the Times. It is guilt like this and the aforementioned shame which makes it all the more frustrating to watch the ease with which the younger generation publicly owns their fluidity. It is doubly hard to watch young white men being praised for wearing bunny ears in a magazine that has so long objectified women, simply because the expectations are so much lower for them. “I’m not looking down on the younger experience of being queer,” Akhavan said, “but I do think that there’s a resentment there that we gloss over.” In response, many of us react conservatively, with the feeling that they haven’t worked for it, that it is somehow less earned because of that. This is an acknowledgment of that resentment, of the eye rolling and the snickering with which we respond to the youth (ah, youth!). In the end we are not judging you for being empowered. We are judging ourselves for not being empowered enough.
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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.
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I want this to be a whole book
i wish we got more of everyone teaching nico about the 21st century. teaching him stuff he wouldn’t have learned from the lotus casino or when he was by himself. i want percy to teach nico skateboarding. i want percy to show nico all his favorites movies and bands. i want annabeth to show nico all the new and weird inventions like pocket calculators and GPS . i want hazel and nico to learn all about how far space travel has come and how there’s machines on far away planets. i want piper to show nico all the long forgotten toys like etch-a-sketch and the easy bake oven. i want rachel to show nico all the art he’s missed out over the years. i want jason to show nico how holidays have transformed since the 1930’s and show him all the weird new food combinations people have come up with. i want nico to learn and enjoy normal teenager things. i want nico to be happy
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