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kissfaeries · 4 years ago

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Hi irene, I am the Christian bisexual woman who sent you an ask before. Thank you so much for responding to my ask and being so kind. So I am still not entirely convinced and the more I talk to my friends or watch Christian videos the more I feel like they are right. Someone showed me a study that showed that bi women and lesbians are more likely to develop breast cancer and that they are more likely to be dangerously overweight. And bi and gay men are more likely to have aids or HIVs +

+ so that mean that's gay sex is dangerous. Also, Lgbt people are more likely to be suicidal. Also some of my friends say that if we start accepting homosexuality we will also start accepting pedophilia and incest. (eventhough I think that's wrong because in the past homosexuality was condemned while pedophilia and incest were accepted, so it's actually that the more we develop the more we accept homosexuality and condemned pedophilia and incest). I feel like my beliefs are easily shaken +

+ like I could be coming to terms with my sexuality but then I come across a homophobic post or talk to a friend and I am back where I started. I am really scared I will waste my life hating myself but I am also scared that my church,family and friends are right. And that I am being brainwashed or whatever eventhough I know it's not true I am just really scared. +

I feel confused and no matter I always feel like it's the wrong choice. Anyhow, thank you so much for responding. I hope this was not overbearing or annoying.🧡🧡🧡

Thank you for coming to me, i hope i can help you! First, i would like to see the study that claims lesbians & bi women are more likely to develop breast cancer, bc it feels to me that it is a highly unscientific claim. There’s no correlation between sexual orientation and the probability of cancer development... it seems to me that it’s more of a homophobic conspiracy theory meant to scare young les/bi women like you. Same with being overweight, how does sexuality have anything to do with being dangerously overweight? When it’s either a genetic condition or something that occurs due to an unhealthy diet? Sexuality is not a factor here.

Secondly, it’s not true that gay/bi men are more likely to have AIDS. “Worldwide, more than 80 percent of all adult HIV infections have resulted from heterosexual intercourse.” Source: https://aidsinfo.nih.gov/news/168/hiv-aids-statistics

That’s something homophobes are obsessed about bc they think it proves homosexuality is deviant and evil, but it’s just a misconception that resulted from the high number of gay victims from the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. And the reason why so many gay/bi men died in that crisis was bc there was no information regarding protection in gay sex, AND the government refused to find a cure for AIDS at the beginning as it mostly affected gay men, so they saw it as “God punishing gay men and cleansing America of homosexuality”. When it started to affect straight people too, that’s when they got serious about it. Besides, gay & bi men having AIDS is not proof that “gay sex is more dangerous”. Gay sex is not more or less dangerous than straight sex, it simply depends on whether or not you’re using protection. If you don’t use it, you’re more likely to get sexually transmitted diseases.

Thirdly, it’s correct that LGB people are more likely to be suicidal than straight people: “LGB youth seriously contemplate suicide at almost 3 times the rate of heterosexual youth. LGB youth are almost 5 times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth.” Source: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/preventing-suicide/facts-about-suicide/ But how is this LGB people’s fault? How is this proof that being LGB is wrong? In any case, it proves that HOMOPHOBIA is wrong, as it pushes LGB people to kill themselves instead of accepting their true selves: “LGB youth who come from highly rejecting families are 8.4 times as likely to have attempted suicide as LGB peers who reported no or low levels of family rejection. Each episode of LGBT victimization, such as physical or verbal harassment or abuse, increases the likelihood of self-harming behavior by 2.5 times on average.” Source: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/preventing-suicide/facts-about-suicide/ so as you can see, it’s not the fact that they’re same-sex attracted that causes them to be more suicidal... Homophobia is the reason LGB ppl are more suicidal. Homophobia is what’s wrong.

Next, what you said about homosexuality vs. pedophilia/incest is completely correct! Back in the 1800s, it was very common for cousins to marry each other, for example. There was also a case with a king of Spain in the 1600s/1700s (i believe) who was so malformed due to being the result of extreme incest in his family. Pedophilia, was also not condemned, but in fact silenced and protected, especially if the predator was a rich, powerful man (which is the case today as well). There have been lots of cases where a family marries their young, teenage daughter to an older man bc of money, which is also pedophilia. And yet, while these two were not condemned, homosexuality was always demonized. In the 20th century, when pedophilia started to be condemned more, homosexuality was criticized bc they believed they were pedophiles, so that whole thing of “acceptance of homosexuality increases acceptance of pedophilia” is another homophobic argument, as well as also making no sense as you’ve pointed out.

I do believe you’re right, you are someone who doesn’t have strong convictions so your beliefs are easily shaken, and this is mostly bc you don’t have a lot of resources/information/statistics like i do! If you have actual, proven facts that back your arguments, you will realize you are not as easily convinced of homophobic arguments, and it will also be more difficult to manipulate you into hating yourself. Because this is what it’s all about. Regardless of how you feel about yourself, you will always be same-sex attracted. That is something you cannot change. You can spend your whole life hating it, and it still won’t change the fact that you’re bisexual. What i’m doing is not “brainwashing”. Brainwashing doesn’t look like “please accept yourself, love yourself, there’s nothing wrong with you”. I’m trying to make you realize that your friends, family and Church are trying to guilt-trip you & manipulate you into hating your sexuality, using conspiracy theories and old-dated homophobic arguments that are not based on fact, on logic.

I’m not saying you should drop your friends, and it’s certainly difficult to let go of your homophobic family. I’m also from a homophobic family, and it’s taken awhile to stop listening to their homophobic arguments. But it’s possible. And the first step is to surround yourself by people who will accept you for who you are. By being constantly surrounded by Christian homophobes, you will never take the first step to love yourself. You need to realize this. It’s no shocker that you’re here again asking for my advice to deal with your internalized homophobia: it is a logical consequence of spending so much time with homophobes & actually listening to what they have to say. By all means, listen to their arguments. I have listened to them all my life, I had no choice. But see through them: they’re not backed by facts, their only intention is to hurt you, to make it even harder to accept yourself.

Like you’ve said before, you could hate yourself your entire life, but you don’t HAVE to do it. You have a choice. You can start to let go of their homophobic beliefs & values, and realize there’s another path that you can take. One where you don’t have to second-guess yourself, one where you don’t have to cry bc of who you are, one where you don’t have to fear going to hell, one where you can be happy & comfortable in your own skin, and maybe one where you find an amazing woman who loves you for who you are! Is it possible that you can take breaks from seeing your homophobic friends? It is possible that you can go on an exchange trip, or sign up for a club in your city that’s not religious? You will realize this does wonders to your self-steem, and the less time you spend surrounded by people who preach hate & intolerance, the easier it will be to come to terms with your sexuality and start to love yourself.

I wish you all the best❤️

#their homophobic arguments can be easily debunked using logical facts so try to spend some time researching these facts #you will realize they aren’t backed by facts #[m]#homophobia #internalized homophobia #anti religion #religion #my thoughts

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cowboyjen68 · 6 years ago

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I’m fat and lesbian, on the masculine side don’t like being at butt of jokes. I want to lose weight to be healthier and since I’m young but I’m still caught up in wanting to lose weight be a more “acceptable” lesbian. I’m not as insecure with my body around LGBT people, only straights and I don’t want to lose weight for the wrong reasons but I can’t shake this internalized homophobia for daring not to be attracted/attractive to men

Hey.. many of us struggle with wanting to make sure our look is okay for men because we internally (thanks to outside influences) think that men’s standard of beauty also translate to what women find beautiful. OF course there are cross overs.. but for the most part lesbians and bi women see and appeciate so many things that are unique to us. I am not slamming men. Many men in my life appreciate the true and natural beauty of women, especially of one they love,.. but often what we see seems different.

I was around 200 lbs in 2016. I began to loose weight mostly because I just didn’t feel good. Not physically and not about myself. Oddly enough.. and you might be doing this.. I attached my larger size to my butchness. Some part of me (a large part) thought that the weight helped me take up more “space” to enhance my masculinity. I thought that it made me seem big and tough and strong. I realized that is was just not true. I am butch whether I wear size 40′s or 28′s. But I scared me as I got smaller.. I felt less Butch.. like I couldn’t be a smaller version of me and still be butch.

DO NOT loose weight for anyone but yourself. DO NOT buy into diets or spend money on supplements. IF I can drop drop 75 without spending a dime.. so can you. IT should be slow and subtle. NO big hurry.

After I went vegan about a year ago it helped me to start really thinking about what I cook and what I eat which helps maintain weight. I am now around 125 to 130 and I am able to stay consitent without any effort. I literally changed the way I eat and funciton.

If you feel good about you.. it shows and women will find you handsome and wonderfully butch. Embrace what makes you happy. Luckly weight is one thing we have the ability to change, and coming from personal experience... after 25 years of being fat..the weight loss has changed my life for the better. I can run again. I can get on my horse with out effort (and she doesn’t groan). I can keep up with Lori Lou and walk dogs all day long at a job I love

If you want weight loss ideas done the cowboyjen way I am happy to share. Bottom line.. you are butch and you are handsome and wonderful.. any other change..YOU make for YOU.

#butch #weight #fat

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reece-c-parker-blog · 6 years ago

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Gay Culture; A Blight Upon Itself

How this ethical quagmire has metastasised across the lives of our lost boys struggling to find their place as men.

Originally posted on Medium

I hate being gay. Statistically speaking there would have to be a few of us. The numbers, I’m sure you’ve noticed, are kept conspicuously quiet. No, there isn’t a vast conspiracy. It simply doesn’t fit narrative.

My pubescent years fell as the millennium turned, amidst the rise of the gay normalisation movement. This time saw the rise of Will & Grace, Queer As Folk, and Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. It was a great time to feel included. Just not for me. These programs were an entry-level concept of what it means to be gay for the metropolitan audiences of the east and west coasts of the United States. The AIDS crisis had drawn the eyes of mainstream western audiences to the existence of the gay community. There was no better time to finally address what could no longer be ignored.

I had tried to engage, during these years, with the material that was expected of me. They were telling my stories, after all. Painting the canvas of life with the experiences I should experience, and feelings I should feel. Expect they didn’t. They proselytized with tired stereotypes and the bigotry of low expectation. I soon found homosexuality a talking point in my social circles — as nothing more than a kitsch cliché pulled in for reference, then reshelved until needed. Gay men weren’t making the punchlines. They were the punchline.

This was a moment of the first of many disconnects. Where I, through failures of character and assimilation, couldn’t bond with my peers. As the industry grew, and the prevalence of gay characters onscreen continued to impress focus groups, so grew my dejection. But as the list gorged itself with new examples of progressivism, and the insertions became further tokenistic, the rise of groupthink assured this lens had become a prerequisite entry point to what it meant to be gay. Suddenly, so vanished the hardships of the few — gay culture was at the mercy of almighty corporate.

Now here we are; Expected to worship towards the cultural meccas of preselected gay figures championed not for their contributions to the realms of medicine, literature, or technology, but instead to their servile attitudes in representing the hedonism that bore their fame. Gay conversation has fast adopted an adaptation of Godwin’s Law, where as a conversation increases in duration, the probability one of the conversationalists mentioning RuPaul’s Drag Race approaches 1. Though, it’s more than this. It’s the exclusivity of language attached to those cultural expectations. While language has long been in flux, flitting to the verbal needs of its speakers, allowing our language to be shaped by corporate interests masquerading as representatives borders on Orwellian. Shade, Read, Sickening, Tea, Fish, Clock, and a series of disjointed ramblings have become the core exchanges of the gay communiqué. The expectation of this adherence, a cruel hand to play for young men seeking freedom from the limitations clasped to them during their formative years. To escape the shackles of their prison, to fall into the loving embrace of a new turnkey. Oh, but this time it’s different. This isn’t some hallway bully. This one wants you. But only if you be what it wants you to be. Only if you buy its products. Only if you wear its styles. Only if you speak with its voice. And only if you, in the innocence of your youth, surrender in your entirety.

Even an article like this risks defilement through the accusation of homophobia; for calling out the failures of a community through its inactivity of service and protection of all its members. For the suggestion we have a culture of ceaseless pandering to those most visible and easily pigeonholed would net me a gay excommunication. It simply cannot be said. It’s an inconvenience too burdensome to address, and so instead we commit to the monotonous busywork of feigning outrage by the perceived slights issued by positions of power. As if, by the consternation of the gay masses, the notion things aren’t too bad is too hefty a price to concede. Understandably so. Without a rallying struggle against the alabaster crowned, black suited boogeymen, all that would be left for the LGBT community would be to accept responsibility for the establishment of reasonable behavioural boundaries and the regulation of its members. A price too high, indeed.

In many ways it reminds me of the Arcadian Pan, whose submission to lust-filled tawdriness is emulated to a design by metropolitan hook-up culture. A youth swept away by the propagandistic idiom of ‘It Gets Better’, without the nuanced discussion of whether or not this is even true. After all, Grindr recently ranked top on the unhappiness scale, with a 77% respondents rate of user depression post usage. No surprises why. In the constricting nativity of my youth, I had dabbled, seeking conversation, which at the time was perceived to be a remedy to my loneliness, from the most populated aggregate. Within one working day I had been labelled as a faggot, by a member of my own community — for simply failing to supply him with what he wanted. The entitlement. As if I were nothing but a monkey tasked to perform by an organ grinder. Words carefully chosen, as his organ was the recipient of my expected performance. It is in this shadowy field where the ego is unleashed, freed from the shackles of civility. Where an otherwise unremarkable citizen may scale a hierarchy sheathed from the view of their heterosexual peers. Where the 1% isn’t measured by economic prosperity, but instead by the congregation of required physical traits and social capital to be granted worth. Note, ‘granted worth’. As worth within this community is not an immutable characteristic inherent to the individual, rather a bestowed upon status via the idolatry of its membership. But remember. It gets better. As if the exchange of the verbal assaults of your schooling for this is somehow, by definition, superior. Of course, it is. This time it’s a choice. An opt in.

But is it? Every year when the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras sweeps Sydney’s city streets, I can’t help feel it serves as a charming veneer — an underbelly surviving on the laundering scheme of ‘good intentions’. How respectful we are, in recognising the hard work and good character of our Australian Servicemen and women. And so we should be, their contributions are worthy of recognition. Though for some, and in numbers enough to escape the descriptor of a powerless minority, the parade and those in it are merely puppets. A necessary encumbrance to be endured before the night blooms, and the incubi feast. And feast they shall — while failing to recognise such a diet consisting of thin amoral gruel could provide anything other than little sustenance. This is not to say the Mardi Gras fails in its purpose. A brotherhood, and sisterhood, or similarly disenfranchised individuals finding solace amongst the mutual understandings of their peers is an integral cornerstone of any counter-cultural community. My query remains, why does the LGBT community repeatedly allow this message to be bastardised and accessorised by the overtly sexual?

And it is the same, hollow-toned degeneracy which snakes its way through all visual and auditory signposts, toxifying the channels of expression. The invention of preventative HIV measures has garnered responses from activist campaigns such as ‘You can fuck raw, PrEP works, no more HIV’. A delicately phrased example for a youth burgeoning into manhood. A wretched expectation of what is to come for both themselves, and their future. The normalisation of pharmaceutical dependence to enable sexual deviancy — have gay men fallen so low, they would prefer the assistance of big pharma to maintain their deviancy, rather than changing their behaviours? But of course, that is an opinion unheld. Unstated. Should that question be uttered, the tested formulaic response had already been embossed across social media. We get enough hatred from outside the community, we don’t need any hatred from within it. An interesting deflection. One that disarms all criticism. Even if it is legitimate.

One-night hook-up culture is leaving an alarming amount of young men feeling trapped. Yet, little in the way of option is offered for an alternative. Prudism is projected onto those non-participatory figures more inclined to other forms of connection. To the point, albeit most likely a problem on my behalf, I have felt rejected purely for my unwillingness to participate. The larger point is; no one should have to. The trading of bodies in a conceptualised marketplace as currency may serve the purposes of immediate pleasure, but the model itself has only been in operation for just over a decade. A time barely long enough to map the cognitive changes amongst habitual users. I often hear the espousal ‘It’s just a bit of fun’, when I vocalise even my least controversial concerns. A dismissal that I have oft found confusing. As if detachment and promiscuity held no hidden consequences. Though the citation of psychology holds little sway in this field, as it lacks the grounded and well secured architecture of reasonable discourse — instead, it’s an emotional beast. These members, with the impetus of their own desire, have decided it is fun. Thus, fun it is. Though I would argue, it takes a certain type of man to revel in such a state of emotional displacement, and not one I would imagine, many would go out of their way to willingly associate with.

For the first three years of my adulthood, bambi-like and with the same naive idealism consistent with those of that age, I was blessed with a boyfriend. Three years, you may have noted, came with an expiry date. When we, still growing, reshaped ourselves into markedly dissimilar people from who we were at the commencement of our relationship. Still, I have found these years to be the fondest of my life, and resultantly the greatest limitations to my understanding of the gay community. To be succinct for the first time in this passage — I loved him. And though this love found a place to rest, the memory of its impact remains too profound to sully with the pursuit of anything less.

But this anecdote has painted me with the status of a malcontent. One, whose bitterness and internalised homophobia, governs my actions and sews hatred and salt into the faultless fields of the LGBT. A community which celebrates the union of an autistic child and a boastful killer while they bond in front of a portrait two letters shorts of spelling rohypnol. A community who cannot stand accountable without proclaiming their victimhood — ensuring the aberrant social victimisation perpetrated within their community is kept out of public sight. Should you ever have believed racism were a plague long extricated from your neighbourhood, feel free to log into your gay phone app to source the mantra, ‘No spice or rice’. I’m sorry Mr. Rogers, It isn’t a beautiful day in those neighbourhoods, nor is it a beautiful day for those neighbours.

What is to be done? A start, perhaps, is a discussion free of the tedious pejoratives usually held in reserve for ‘The Other’. For too long the gay community has projected bad intent onto its naysayers. Understandable. But know this, a concession isn’t a loss. It’s a sign of maturity. So in the invocation of this request, I wonder — will the change prove too arduous, or my brethren too stubborn?

#gay #gay culture #essay #opinion #medium

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judedoyle · 7 years ago

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It’s sort of a corny project, assembling songs by women and non-binary people at the end of every year. It’s a very dopey, dated, 1990s, Women Who Rock! version of feminism. I mean, I think there was a reason for that iteration of feminism — year-end lists are still dominated by men, and my favorite albums fall through the cracks just about every year for that very reason — but it begs the question of why you’d do it now, when it has been established fact for many decades that you do not have to be a man to make music.

The reason I do it is that it keeps me honest. This year’s list, for example, is all women; I don’t know of any albums by non-binary people that came out this year, though I’m sure there were some. But even within that narrower subset, I am blown away by how many kinds of songs by women there are — how wildly different women are in their voices and priorities and visions, how the word “woman” sums up so much but, somehow, doesn’t tell you anything at all. Making the list, I can start to feel like I’m assembling my own little pantheon, selecting a hall full of different archetypes or visions of what womanhood can be, so that listeners can wander through and pick the vision that best suits their needs or their own self-identification.

That task seemed particularly important this year. Trumpism insists so much on homogeneity — on the second-class status of all women, sure, but also, on the supremacy of whiteness, on heteronormativity, the importance of only admitting one specific Ivanka-esque type of woman to even exist as a person worthy of consideration. I wanted to select as many different versions of womanhood as I could, to show something about what “being a woman” could potentially mean.

Nor is this really a “best songs” list this year, if it ever was. I never agree with other writers’ year-end lists, and I can never put everything I love onto one cohesive mixtape; this started as twenty-four songs, and it could be thirty, or fifty, and still feel incomplete. There are songs I loved that are missing. What this is, I think, is a list of the songs that felt most like 2017; that reflected the mood and the predominant anxieties of the moment. They tend to fall into themes: Songs about fascism, about men, about grief, about God and magic. Putting them together is not just about lifting different women’s voices up, but about writing a kind of collective diary of one very strange year.

“2016,” Nadine Shah, Honeymoon Destination

Nadine Shah gets neglected, on the list of musicians I like, because she’s not showy. She just plugs away, making quietly excellent, sort-of-PJ-Harvey-ish songs for voice and guitar. This song starts out in that quiet, excellent mode, in an assortment of mundane details: She’s thirty, she’s depressed, she’s getting addicted to true crime TV, all her friends are on weird diets. Then history comes staggering into the frame — what is there left to inspire us with a fascist in the White House? — and suddenly, you’re aware that you’re hearing the voice of a biracial British Muslim woman living through Brexit and Trump, and that it is incredibly crucial. She pulls this trick a lot on Holiday Destination, angrily raking the state of the world through her songs, and though it’s sometimes incredibly on the nose, well, it deserves to be. This is that kind of year.

“Aryan Nation,” EMA, Exile In The Outer Ring

If Nadine Shah’s anger is elegant and British, EMA’s is scuzzy and loutish and American. I got to hear this album before its release, which makes me particularly fond of it, but I like to think I can still be objective. What stuns me about it is that it manages to pull off “populism,” as a stance, without ever overriding or ignoring identity. The narrator here is pulling away from the whiteness and ugliness of the United States under Trump — she’s “a refugee from the Aryan nation,” as she puts it — but she’s still located firmly among the 99%. “Tell me stories of famous men / I can’t see myself in them” is a demand that rings throughout the whole album, which mixes intimate songs about emotional abuse and misogynistic dude friends with big songs about downward mobility and class struggle, “identity” politics with politics-politics. In this song, the men standing outside the casino, the face of the elite, register as nearly demonic figures; they might be demons, I think, since “in their eyes are things that you and I will never know.” But their evil expands and takes on new facets, depending on who you are. There’s a double indictment: EMA’s Everyman can’t see herself in the nation’s “famous men” because they’re famous, but also because they’re male. Either way, she’s ready to burn it down.

“No Man Is Big Enough For My Arms,” Ibeyi, Ash

Oh, man. I love this song. I would probably love it for the title alone, to be honest. But I cannot escape the feeling that, were Leftist Asshole Twitter to get ahold of its existence, they would hate it more than seventeen Hamiltons combined. It’s an incredibly simple piece of music: Just the Diaz sisters singing the title phrase over clips of Michelle Obama’s speeches, and specifically her 2016 campaign speech about Trump’s history of assault and what our nation owes its girls. If the election had gone another way, or if the tone were valedictory, it absolutely wouldn’t work; it would probably represent the same corny, self-satisfied #centrism that I’m sure some podcast is accusing it of as we speak. But this isn’t a victory lap. As the mournfulness of the singing should make clear, it’s a funeral dirge: For a historic moment that passed into a historically racist backlash, for the vision of a better world that never came to pass, for a promise to our daughters that wasn’t kept. As much as Democrats loved the idea of “when they go low, we go high,” or Michelle Obama herself, that wasn’t the vision of women and girls that carried the day. We’ve all been brought low now.

“When the World Was At War We Kept Dancing,” Lana Del Rey, Lust for Life

If you told me, back in 2014, that I would be relying on Lana Del Rey for insights into the national psyche, I would have either laughed you out of the room or thrown myself out of a window to defeat your grim prophecy. Yet here we are, with a song by Lana Del Rey about American politics and the rise of fascism, and I kind of like it. Granted, her proposed solutions — they are, in order, “youth,” “truth,” and “dancing” — are all (intentionally?) vapid and Lana Del Rey-like. But the core question — is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America? — is one that’s haunted me all year. Welcome to 2017: Things are so bizarre and depressing that Lana Del Rey sounds normal.

“Let’s Generalize About Men,” Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Here’s the thing, guys: I fucking loved Al Franken.

I loved him early on. I had every crappy Al Franken book of “political humor” in high school. I listened to his radio show on Air America, even as Air America collapsed into a smoldering pile of debt and garbage. I was so thrilled to share a room with him at Netroots Nation that I texted my parents, and they texted back that they were proud of me, like it had taken some feat of exceptional skill and intelligence to be in the same room as the keynote speaker at an event. I teared up watching him talk about sexual assault in the military, how we were failing those women. And I know women who worked on his first Senate campaign. They loved Al Franken. I loved Al Franken. Al Franken could have been President, on the back of all the women who loved him.

Al Franken can roast in the pits of Hell.

The creators of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” almost certainly did not intend for this song to air the same week as the Weinstein allegations and the Shitty Media Men list. They had no control over how its lyrics — right now we’re angry and sad! It’s our right to get righteously mad at every member of the opposite sex! — would land in an environment where seemingly every famous man was publicly accused of sexual atrocity. Nevertheless, in a few short weeks, this song has become my chief emotional release valve for dealing with an endless wave of sexual trauma, and the one thing that can reliably make me laugh. This is probably the one song I’ve listened to most in 2017, and it’s not even from a “real” pop album.

I don’t know why this makes me laugh as hard as it does. I think it’s the deranged cheerfulness of the music, and how triumphant they all sound. They’re just listing lazy ’90s sitcom tropes about gender, but Gabrielle Ruiz puts so much mustard on the phrase “all men only want to have sex,” my God. And, in an age, when #notallmen routinely swing by to remind you of all the stuff they’re not doing, you have to admire the magnificent troll job of lyrics like “there are no exceptions / all three billion men are like this!”

Of course, you’re not meant to agree with them; there’s a whole trip through straight ladies’ condescending homophobia, just in case you missed the point. But when they finally get to the verse about all the other stuff that all men do — all three point six billion men, and also, Al Franken — well. It is a song that is of its moment. That kicker would no doubt be less brutal, in a pre-Weinstein universe. But it’s funnier when you believe it could be true.

“Boyfriend,” Marika Hackman, I’m Not Your Man

The concept of this song — Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” from the girl’s point of view — is so simple, I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before. And maybe it has! But it’s hard to believe it’s been done better, because this is, moment-for-moment, my favorite song of the year. It’s really just four jaunty minutes of Marika Hackman telling some poor schmuck about how excellently she fucked his girlfriend last night: “It’s fine ‘cause I am just a girl / it doesn’t count,” she sings, and it’s one of the most coolly vicious moments in any song this year. In another year, it might not even strike you as all that political. But in a year especially full of male sexual aggression and cluelessness, of Robert in “Cat Person” and the vanguard of the Left scoffing about “pats on the backside,” frogs using cuckolding metaphors and seemingly every single Hillary-hating talking head getting exposed for rubbing his penis on coworkers, “Boyfriend” feels like the snarl of rage that’s been bubbling under every conversation. I mean: Among other things, she is literally cucking this dude. It could be pretty gross. But I’ll allow it.

“Green Light,” Lorde, Melodrama

Sometimes you do need a fun, blockbuster pop song. Despite Lorde’s much-vaunted writing skills, several lyrics in this are just plain goofy: “We order different drinks at the same bars,” for example, is what everybody does at bars, including people who are on a date with each other. Later, she snarls that her ex is a “damn liar” for claiming to love the beach, a line which summons up a long history of passionate and incredibly specific anti-beach sentiments, and raises the serious possibility that she’s singing about Anakin Skywalker. But if you can get past the mental image of Lorde swinging through the club with Darth Vader, each of them taking sips from a single shared gin and tonic, there is a sense of propulsive longing to this song, a sense of being so excited you’re almost sad, like the twinge you feel on Christmas morning when you realize there’s nothing left to wait for. That sense of pre-emptive nostalgia defines many of the great moments on Melodrama; Lorde is both vibrating with joy over how new and full of potential her world seems to be, and sad that it won’t always feel like this. That feeling defines a lot of youth, too. Many songs aim for that epic sweep; Jack Antonoff has a retirement fund because of it, “Tonight, Tonight” and “1979” were the ones people played when I was young enough to actually feel it, but this year, that big, hopefully hopeless, Gatsby-invoking chorus was the closest to the real thing.

“Say You Do,” Tei Shi, Crawl Space

This is another record that got under-rated as the result of being simple, pretty and specific in its ambitions when the context demanded Big Statements. There’s nothing wrong with big statements, and this list is full of them. But this is four perfect minutes, no wasted space, no false steps, and it makes me happy every time I listen to it. Granted, it’s aiming for that same cheesy ‘90s mom-jams vibe that a lot of people aim for these days; viewed through a certain lens, this is basically a HAIM song. But HAIM actually released an album this year, and none of the songs were as good as this one. The whole album is like this; intentionally lovely, boundary-pushing without being self-indulgent, excellently crafted. It’s skated just under the radar, maybe precisely because of those qualities. But crises pass, and craft keeps standing.

“Frontline,” Kelela, Take Me Apart

Even simple, blockbuster pop songs are not always as simple as they seem. It was only when putting this list together that I realized all the songs I’d classified as “just fun” were about the same thing. They’re all about women contesting men’s narratives. You don’t know me like you say you do, Tei Shi insists; you’ll always deny that we’re going in circles, Kelela says here; even Lorde, God bless her, is incredibly clear on the fact that her ex does not like the beach, despite recent statements to the contrary. (Is systemic corruption at play? Is Lorde’s ex in the pocket of the powerful beach lobby? Only time will tell!) I don’t think I got the appeal of ‘90s R&B nostalgia before now; here, especially in the pre-chorus, it’s simultaneously sexy and meticulous, propulsive but airbrushed at the same time. But within that is Kelela herself, who has been gradually moving to the forefront of her own songs for years now, becoming a persona rather than just another instrument: Coming up with the Sun around me… now I’m up and I won’t be taken down, she sings. The fact that the defiance is intimate makes it no less political. I believe her.

“Deadly Valentine,” Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rest

It’s hard to come up with an elevator pitch for this one. It’s the Stranger Things soundtrack, but also a French disco, but also Charlotte Gainsbourg singing about her sister’s suicide. Any one of those elements could undermine the other, but somehow, they don’t. This year has been full of albums about grief — reasonable, given that it feels like most of us are grieving something — but the opulence of Gainsbourg’s, the way it calls on the musical history of the family to dramatize the loss of one of its members, stands out. I get so caught up in the catchiness of this one, so blinded by all the disco lights, that I can almost miss Gainsbourg mourning in the background (“I’m my own shadow / you are my little hurricane”). Which, I think, is the point.

“Los Ageless,” Saint Vincent, MASSEDUCTION

Annie Clark is a very cool musician. One of the last great cool musicians, maybe. Cool has been on the way out, though, in this century; what you find sexy and mysterious, I might just see as repressed and withholding. Clark does not like it when her audience gets too close. She doesn’t do “raw.” The emotion in her songs gets refracted through intellect, through reference, through character, through irony; often, and especially on her last album, she seems to be playing a parody of herself, as if she can only be a pop star by putting scare quotes around her own personality. This is often very appealing; it’s why people point to her as an heir to David Bowie or David Byrne (or, presumably, other celebrity Davids). It can also be frustrating, when you want to make a direct connection and she doesn’t let you. I don’t know why MASSEDUCTION is different; maybe the breakups Clark has been through have worn down her defenses, maybe working with living schmaltz factory Jack Antonoff has thawed the ice a bit. But this chorus is huge: Big, melodramatic, honest, painful. It’s not something I knew she could do.

“Jukai,” Jhene Aiko, Trip

I TOLD YOU PEOPLE ABOUT JHENE AIKO AND YOU WOULDN’T LISTEN.

Sorry! I was super into Jhene Aiko in 2014, the first year I made this list. I talked about her all the time and people looked at me like I was an idiot. Back then, she just sort of floated around, appearing on dudes’ songs. It took a while for her own aesthetic to take shape. She had vague, New-Agey ideas about spirituality; she talked a lot about weed; she made regrettable puns. (How regrettable? Her first album is called Souled Out, featuring a song called “Lyin’ King,” so, you tell me.) Even when her aesthetic finally did take hold, her label kept making incredibly cash-grabby statements about how there’d never been a Frank Ocean for the female demographic. So that was how people saw her, I think — just a stoner riding a trendy vibe. Someone you could write off.

If I told you, in 2014, that Jhene Aiko would be turning in a 22-song conceptual exploration of her brother’s death and her own substance abuse, and that it would begin with a song about Aiko entering the “Sea of Trees,” which is a common place for Japanese people to commit suicide, and that you would be hearing Jhene Aiko seriously sing lines like “I envy the dead,” and that critics would love it, I do not think you would have believed me. But here we are, with the harrowing, serious Jhene Aiko statement about death and grief that the world didn’t know it needed. Women shouldn’t have to bring themselves to their knees to be taken seriously. So the best thing to know, about Jhene Aiko, is that this was always there.

“Wildwood,” Tori Amos, Native Invader

The Tori Amos “return to form,” if you ask me, occurred way back in 2011, with Night of Hunters. But, at least since the 2014 critical re-evaluation that accompanied Unrepentant Geraldines, it’s widely agreed that she’s all the way back on her game. So if I tell you that Native Invader is great, that several songs are as good as anything she’s ever done, that’s not surprising. If I tell you that she’s still doing concept albums, but that it’s started working— this album is, in no particular order, about climate change, the Dakota access pipeline, her mother falling severely ill, and the Native American ancestors on her mother’s side of the family; in typical Tori Amos fashion, the endangered bodies of the planet and her mother and her ancestors get all tangled up together, until, by the final song, they seem like the same being — maybe that doesn’t surprise you, either. But this might: I finally get what she’s doing with the ‘70s soft-rock thing.

In plenty of Amos’ late-00s work, maybe all the way back to “Crazy” on Scarlet’s Walk, she’s tried to signify “sexiness” with what sounds like smooth tunes for dudes with heavy mustaches and ladies with feathered hair. Given that Amos gained her initial fan base by running on wild, primal intensity (this is either a song or a scene from The Exorcist; I’m honestly still not sure) her fixation on suddenly sounding mellow was bizarre and frustrating. “Crazy” worked fine, but “Sleeps With Butterflies” almost derailed her whole fucking career.

Yet here we are, with another sexy-’70s Tori Amos song. It’s mellow; it’s smooth. There are bongos on it. And yet, I know what it’s doing now. This is an album about aging and death; the death of wild nature, the all-too-possible death of her mother, the impending adulthood of her now-17-year-old daughter, and the fact that Amos, within the foreseeable future, will become part of her family’s oldest living generation. The point of the ’70s sounds, I think, isn’t that Amos believes they’re current; it’s that they are part of Amos’ youth, echoes of the songs she fell in love with as a teenager. These songs are to Tori Amos as Tori Amos records are to me — something precious from a world that has ended, a little bit of being young that she gets to carry around. “Wildwood” summons up a wild, healing, erotic relationship with Nature (don’t @ me) but also sounds as if it’s mourning that communion, and the woods, which may not be there for her own grandchildren; it sounds, like the Lorde song, as if it is about both happiness and the inevitable end of happiness, nostalgic for something that is happening right now.

“Om Rama,” Alice Coltrane, World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane

When you talk about Tori Amos, you’re always talking about God. Her worldview is deeply pagan, not in the New-Age sense, but in an earned way; when she sings to the woods as a living creature, asking it to heal her, you know she’s serious.

That was my second-favorite album of 2017. This is my favorite. I don’t know how I found it; I think it just got introduced into my Spotify feed through some algorithm. And I’m not even sure if it qualifies; sure, it was released this year, but all the actual music was recorded decades ago. It wasn’t even intended for mass release. This is Alice Coltrane’s attempt at writing devotional music for her ashram; it was meant to be heard by the ashram, and no-one else.

Yet I am hard-pressed to think of anything else like it: A female composer, from the 20th century, wrestling to communicate her own experience of God. There’s so much going on in here; traditional chanting, gospel music, ’90s synths that sound like the Twin Peaks soundtrack, what we used to call “soundscapes.” You float from one texture to another, one worldview to another, linked only by Coltrane’s own sense of the divine. It’s incredibly intimate; maybe too intimate, since you’re very aware that the state of Alice Coltrane’s soul was not intended for people outside her own religious community to pass comment on. But it’s also incredibly beautiful, a synthesis that somehow goes beyond what “God” sounds like in Western music (choirs, mostly) or Eastern appropriation, and becomes its own, new sublime.

“Tabula Rasa,” Bjork, Utopia

Here is an unexpected thing about having a baby: Bjork makes me cry now. I’d always listened to her, given that she belonged to that sacred constellation of ‘90s “alternative” ladies that makes up about 80% of my personal value system. But I tended to view her with respect, rather than love; she struck me as a cerebral artist, technically brilliant but not too intimate. Then I found myself breastfeeding at 3 AM, listening to “All is Full of Love” and crying, or singing “Hyperballad” to the baby in the bath, and I realized the emotion had always been in there. I just hadn’t felt it yet.

Utopia adds a few entries to the list of “improbable words Bjork has trilled on a record,” including “Kafkaesque” and “patriarchy.” But she’s serious about the patriarchy thing. This record is, like the title says, her utopia — her matriarchal island, where nature can still hold sway, where mothers are never defeated in their ability to protect their daughters, where, after all the dirt and awfulness of the year, we might be able to get clean. She’s less singing than she is invoking it into being.

Some of the details on this song are small, petty, specific: A bad divorce, a father who led two lives. But the whole thing centers, as stories of matriarchy always do, around a mother and her daughter. When Bjork finally starts witching out, singing her preferred solution into being — “Tabula rasa for my children / not repeating the fuck-ups of the fathers” — it’s hard to imagine a better hope to take into the new year.

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fencesandfrogs · 4 years ago

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gay media: why we still need gay romance (an essay)

this is almost two thousand words long and there’s no good place to put a read more break so i put it fairly early on so that people don’t have to scroll through this whole thing on mobile but right underneath there’s a really good quote from david leviathan’s two boys kissing that u should read if ur gay even if u don’t wanna read the whole essay

so it’s a little over done ik but i was talking to my mom abt gay/straight media and she said the classic “why can’t we just have christmas movies instead of gay/straight movies?” and

you know the thing is gay/straight romance has a very different set of tropes. there’s rarely gay love triangles, etc., because we have “closeted” or “homophobic parents.”

uhh david leviathan’s two boys kissing (2013). there’s this section that’s always stuck with me.

Neil has two DVDs, two bottles of Diet Dr Pepper, cookie dough, and a book of poems in his backpack. This—and Peter—is all it takes for him to feel profoundly lucky. But luck, we’ve learned, is actually part of an invisible equation. Two blocks away from Peter’s house, Neil gets a glimpse of this, and is struck by a feeling of deep, unnamed gratitude. He realizes that part of his good fortune is his place in history, and he thinks fleetingly of us, the ones who came before. We are not names or faces to him; we are an abstraction, a force. His gratitude is a rare thing—it is much more likely for a boy to feel thankful for the Diet Dr Pepper than he is to feel thankful for being healthy and alive, for being able to walk to his boyfriend’s house at age fifteen without any doubt that this is the right thing to do.

He has no idea how beautiful he is as he walks up that path and rings that doorbell. He has no idea how beautiful the ordinary becomes once it disappears.

If you are a teenager now, it is unlikely that you knew us well. We are your shadow uncles, your angel godfathers, your mother’s or your grandmother’s best friend from college, the author of that book you found in the g*y section of the library. We are characters in a Tony Kushner play, or names on a quilt that rarely gets taken out anymore. We are the ghosts of the remaining older generation. You know some of our songs.

We do not want to haunt you too somberly. We don’t want our legacy to be gravitas. You wouldn’t want to live your life like that, and you won’t want to be remembered like that, either. Your mistake would be to find our commonality in our dying. The living part mattered more.

so this whole book is fantastic mind but this is from the very beginning and i think it really hits on why it’s so hard to just have “romance movies.” like putting aside representation issues: it is impossible to tell a good gay romance like a straight romance. because even if its not about being gay, it fundamentally changes the experience. even if they just go on a basic dinner and movies first date, that is surrounded in this sense of, “they did that!” if you fail to think about how they must be nervous to make it obvious they’re on a date, even if they’re out and proud, you’ve missed something common to the Gay Experience.

i.e., even women in safe areas, secure in their personal defense, are usually nervous about walking home at night alone. because that’s a fear they’re taught to have. gay people are taught to be afraid of homophobia. because it can be violent and get us hurt.

lets look at the notebook:

The novel is framed by the titular notebook. The story that the reader engages with is the same one that an elderly Noah reads to Allie in the Creekside Assistance Living Facility when they are in their eighties. Allie does not know who Noah is, only that he comes to her room every day and reads to her. Each night, she forgets who he is and what he has read to her. Noah loves her and enjoys his time with her but also holds out hope that the story will restore her memories and bring her back to him.

The teenage Allie and Noah meet one summer in the 1930s, in the small town of New Bern, North Carolina. They fall in love and promise that they will always be together. But at the end of the summer, Allie leaves with her family, and Noah does not hear from her again for fourteen years. He writes to her every month, but his letters receive no reply. Allie will later learn that Noah wrote to her but that her mother intercepted the letters and hid them. Allie’s family is part of the southern aristocracy, and her parents do not believe that the lower-class Noah deserves their daughter.

After fourteen years, Allie returns to New Bern to tell Noah that she is engaged to a good, charming, handsome attorney named Lon Hammond. But she and Lon do not have a passionate relationship. Allie and Noah quickly fall in love again. Allie’s mother figures out why her daughter is in New Bern and visits them at Noah’s house. She gives Allie the letters she hid and tells her to make whatever decision is best for her. That is where Noah ends his written account of their story and the novel returns to present day.

In the final chapter, Noah reveals the circumstances of Allie’s diagnosis and relates a summary of their life together after she left Lon and came to New Bern to be with him. She has since become a famous painter, and they traveled the world and had five children together, with four surviving.

Allie remembers who Noah is after he finishes reading, and understands that they are the characters in the story from the notebook. But her dementia quickly returns, and she forgets, shouting for help and sending Noah out of her room. Days later, Noah has a stroke that puts him in the hospital for two weeks and paralyses the right side of his body. When he returns to Creekside, he visits Allie on the night of their forty-ninth anniversary. She opens her eyes and calls him by name, then kisses him. As the novel ends, Noah says that they are going to heaven together, at the same moment.

(plot summary from super summary)

lets just imagine that noah is nora real fast, and lets pretend it isn’t set in a homophobic era. right just move it up to 2017 or something. the gays have marriage. things are generally pretty good. just so that’s not even a point of comparison.

okay so beginning part works fine. still adorable.

but now they’re teenagers. in ~1970. but ignoring that, because again, i’m trying to ignore homophobia as much as possible. so first off, like, actually the sheer happenstance of two lesbians finding each other? i’m a Gay but if my situation is similar i imagine that’s pretty low.

now the summer romance part is fine. still very cute. no complaints there. mm i love me some happy romance. will they won’t they is for nerds. but. i mean what works better as a story beat? allie’s mom destroys the letters because nora is lower class or because her daughter is a lesbian.

yeah.

even now, if allie’s mom is part of the southern aristocracy, there’s some absolutely insane cognitive dissonance to her ignoring her daughter’s gayness because nora is lower class. that’s. argh.

and even if she’s super progressive, tolerant southerners exist, so like yeah that’s a chance, i’m still unconvinced she would overlook the gay part because of class differences. i haven’t read this & i’m skimming spark notes but it just. it feels wrong to me that that would happen. that someone concerned with relative social standing wouldn’t be concerned with gayness.

moving on, allie and uhhhh lets go w laura instead of lon? yeah allie and laura.

okay so first of all, i’ve established allie’s mom kind of needs to be homophobic, but if they get around that, then this is mostly okay. i see no glaring, “this would not happen like this if they were gay.” maybe its slightly less likely? but it’s a minor thing.

okay so allie’s mom is destroying all these letters from nora. case 1: allie’s mom is homophobic.

did nora not know? because usually it’s pretty damn obvious. in that case, why is she sending letters? that’s just poor form allie go date laura she seems to be treating you right.

case 2: allie’s mom is really classist.

but the thing is: gay people are good at doing forbidden romance. it’s in our genetics. u know. for survival. if you’re telling me two strapping young lesbians can’t figure out how to pose as best friends? i mean lord there’s a new hulu movie coming out based _entirely around that premise. _i just. like. there’s them choosing to break up because hiding a relationship is hard. there’s them being found out, i suppose (but again, what sensible gay person is that bad at hiding a relationship? they’re lesbians, it should b reasonably easy for them. people b erasing wlw like that), but i just.

why would you? let on u were dating?

so at this point the premise of the rest of the movie is pretty much broken. because case 2B: nothing changes; doesn’t make a lot of sense.

so. allie, a young lesbian, probably aware of homophobia at this point, doesn’t say, “hey yeah my parents suck & don’t approve so we have to keep this on the dl is that a dealbreaker?” nora, also a young lesbian, also probably aware of homophobia, doesn’t say like “yo r ur parents cool w me?” doesn’t pick up that “hm ur parents seem to not respect me so i do not want to interact” and then say “look, allie, bb, u gotta figure this out bc this isn’t gonna work”?

nora just…sends letters to allie? that’s what happens?

and i mean like the ending itself is mostly okay. some questionable holes but like i’ve made my point by now.

because being gay, even in accepting circumstances, is surrounded by a history of homophobia. our actions our colored by it. our perceptions of normal and our methods to solve problems are shaped by it. what we think of when we say romance is formed by what we know about society.

there’s a lot of unrelatable stuff in any romance movie. they’re a form of fantasy. but the reasons for why are really different depending on the context you’re looking at them under.

and don’t get me wrong, i want the same love stories we get in straight media in gay media. i don’t want to be thinking about homophobia. i want to be focused on the two cute gays who _won’t kiss dammit, can’t you see you feel the same way? _because who doesn’t?

but if the reasons they won’t kiss is because they’re not sure if they’re reading the signals corectly?

i mean that’s a meme i made obviously but my point is, that’s the dilemna.

okay i’m exhausted and tired and spent like 10 minutes getting that screenshot so uh:

tldr: gay and straight romance is fundamentally different even ignoring homophobia because gay experiences are shaped by homophobia.

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