#this show is for queers idk how to explain it

[keebokuun]

Hello LGBTQ community

[stardustdiiving]

Everytime I tell people who know me pretty well I LOVED Pearl from Steven Universe as a child it’s so humiliating bc they’re always like oh of COURSE you did . I bet you loved her thing with rose quartz didn’t you and I have to admit Rosepearl was an integral part me building an understanding of queerness and they’re like that makes SO much sense. I cannot keep doing this

[ishouldreallybeelsewhere]

Episode one of Supernatural is so flawed that, had I watched it for the first time last night (instead of for the third), I would not have have watched the second. Ever. The flaws are things I simply didn't pick up on when I was thirteen, and memory glazed over with emotional attachment. I understand why these flaws are there, what the writers tried and failed to do through clumsy dialogue and strange character decisions. There's no subtlety. Everything Sam says is direct exposition, specifically the things that he would not have to say to his brother.

I do not do reviews so that's all I'm going to say.

[mmmmmmmmicrowave]

Watched the Barbie movie today… Allan is me, Ryan Gosling is hot in those bro ken outfits, and all of them are queer. also made for a great reminder of my sexuality (aro/ace spectrum, emotionally attracted to women but aesthetically more to men) also realized my ideal relationship may be more toxic than I initially realized (a friend who is in love with me but I am not in love with them. we go on dates and stuff maybe but they know not to expect me to return romantic affection they give me. tho in return I will be very grateful and love them platonically with all my heart 4ever bc mine <3)

[mariathechosen1]

Idk just sorta sucks how because of the centering of male characters in fandoms I (and other lesbians) feel isolated from queer media creating a culture where a lot of us prefer mlw ships to (cis) mlm ships because those have at least one female character present and because almost all wlw ships are ignored by non-lesbians

In other news, Sara is my favorite character in Young Royals and y’all are really ignoring how awesome she is

[macgregorhoughton]

So now with a new Disney film coming out with a "first gay" character, those lists are doing the rounds again and it makes me so irritated seeing McGregor on there. Like yeah, in Beauty & the Beast or Cruella or Onward they were not fleahed out, throw away gay characters, but MacGregor is a Main Character! Who is fleshed out and fully part of the story and he and his relationship with Lily drives it in many parts, and his being gay is actually part of his character rather than just hinted at and argh! People keep writing him off as "ooh, another 1st gay!" But he actually was! And you bet its mostly people whove never seen the film just reacting to the bad faith takes some people put online

A large reason I ended up making this blog (aside from I was hype for the movie even just based on the trailer) is because I knew this would happen and I wanted to create a space where people who actually saw themselves in the character could express how the character and movie as a whole make them happy and they could find positive posts and not be constantly reminded of all the bad faith takes. I don't talk about these bad faith takes a lot for this reason (I have some posts tagged #representation compilation where I discuss all of this) but I whole-heartedly agree with you anon.

a lot of people, me included, were really touched by MacGregor's coming out, saw themselves in his struggles, appreciated what a well-rounded character he is, and I suspect many more people would feel the same if they gave the movie a chance. But unfortunately "disney's 200th first gay character" jokes get more likes so they overshadowed any good feeling anyone might have been having. and I got messages from people who were absolutely crushed by this too. it feels like people are mocking them for seeing themselves in it, shaming them for liking a gay character that was arbitrarily deemed bad by people who never even saw the movie. (there is also a larger conversation to be had about the sense of moral superiority derived from deeming certain portrayals of a minority "bad" and shaming others for enjoying them in an attempt to appear more enlightened when in reality none of this really matters and personal enjoyment of media is not indicative of someone's morality or ability to treat people well and respectfully irl, whereas publicly shaming and mocking people constantly is kinda indicative of a failure on both accounts)

the opinions "we shouldn't have to beg for representation from huge media companies that only care about us when they can profit off us and instead support struggling queer artists' work more" and "a gay character from a huge media company can be someone queer people see themselves in and like watching" can coexist. feeling the second doesn't automatically make someone a bootlicker and thinking the first doesn't mean enjoying an enjoyable thing once in a while makes you a hypocrite.

[hornscorns]

wait aussie n sam get back together? ewww no

[pagesofkenna]

moment of silence for whatever the hell happened to Dragon Prince

[luesmainblog]

it will never cease to amaze me how a highly political show co-created by a jewish man routinely showed antisemetism, racism, and misogyny as annoying, shitty traits that only total pieces of shit nobody likes would agree with and rightfully gets your ass beat, that people who are Different from you should still be treated with kindness even when they, as individuals, are not great people and you don't totally agree with what they are, that activism should be Active and if you just talk a big game without actually doing anything you're part of the problem, that apathy is actively toxic to the world, and over time has shown over and over again that it is never too late to change your mind and progress with the rest of the world (and that there are legitimate consequences to not doing so).... and yet, SOMEHOW, the end result was a lot of viewers deciding it's Funny to be a piece of shit. that it's cool to not care; that you're actually stupid if you give too much of a shit. to the point where we have to warn teenagers to stay away from it because that's almost definitely what they'll take away from it. to the point that the show's reputation is essentially "That Antisemetic Show That Thinks Both Sides Suck". and no matter what the show does to try and tell its audience hey, you need to care about this, things are getting worse, YOU WILL NEVER ACHIEVE HAPPINESS IF YOU KEEP BEING A PIECE OF SHIT, that reputation never changes. somehow, the racist bastard is the most popular character amongst casual fans, and the most merchandisable one. somehow the gap between casual fans and Fandom is immense, and yet fandom is only ever acknowledged for the amount of gay fanart it produces.

and no matter how much you love it, you have to acknowledge that and act accordingly. it is fucking weird being a south park fan, man.

[midwesthorseherd]

INTROOO

yoooo, my names magnolia or magdeline, maggie/mags for short!! uh im 14, a lesbian, and getting into the punk scene. (Tips appreciated!!)

im also goth, scenemo, and i also am a riot grrrl(new gen, not the old transphobic racist mfs from the 80s-90s, reclaim the riot !!)

im learning how to sew(tips also appreciated), i do art, poetry, amature song writing, etc etc,

i need friends!! hmu!! just dont b a creep !!

i v much half zoomer typing humor btw use the 😭🙏🔥‼️💀 emojis to much tbh

also im a horse girl im sorry

[number-1-crush]

so. we win some we lose some

[genderkoolaid]

i saw in one of your posts from around a week ago you said "cishet/square masculinity". I haven't heard of square masculinity before and couldn't find another mention of it on your blog (tumblr search function is broken though so idk). could you explain what that term means?

its a term me and @gay-otlc made up as an opposite to "queer"!

Historically "straight" (slang for normal) was the opposite of queer (slang for weird), but that came from a time where the boundary between sexuality and gender wasn't as recognized & as a result, "straight" became synonymous with heterosexuality. Using "straight" to mean non-queer now can be alienating to folks like transhets, who may feel attached to the word straight while also being queer. Lots of people use "cishet" but that only addresses two aspects of non-queerness, and if you add in more it just gets clunkier to say.

In the same way that queer is an umbrella term that describes someone/something that deviates from the norm of gender/sex/sexuality, square is someone/something that is the norm. "Square" is another term that was used to mean normal, which is why it was chosen. S also wrote a cool post somewhere about how a square is made of four straight lines, which shows how being part of the norm comes from being cis+het+allo+perisex.

[portraitofadyke]

I think Our Flag Means Death is a very unique show in a way that they don't care to cater to mainstream media. And yes, by mainstream media I mean the general straight people.

I think it's very important that we have feel-good shows like Heartstopper. A few years back, a tv show about two queer boys in high school would be unthinkable. But its plot generally revolves around explaining queerness. Sure, it's nice. It's definitely the show I would watch with my family if I were a teenager and wanted to come out again (I had to watch glee with my mom to do that. not optimal). It's the show where teenagers find love and themselves, but sexuality is constantly discussed, explained, sanitized. It's the show straight people will watch. And that's good. We do need shows like that.

But Our Flag Means Death doesn't even bother trying. It's a show about mostly middle aged people, most of them not white, most of them queer in one way or the other. It's really a game of spot the hetero, like someone said. And the characters are not sublte about it. They have sex for fun, something most characters don't have in tv shows, definitely not queer characters. They make dick jokes. They are not all conventionally attractive and they know it, and the writing doesn't care. They are all people before they are queer representation.

Stede's storyline in s1 is in a part about discovering himself and his sexuality, but it's not obnoxiously repeated. Instead, it's played in a natural way. Stede's storyline is ALL about finding himself, yet it's not just about that. Just like Ed's storyline, it's about toxic masculinity and allowing himself to have fine things and self-hatred and finding his place in a world, something most of us can relate to. Hell, none of us were even sure the main characters were going to kiss and end up together, we were all so sure it's a queerbait. But this show doesn't bait its audience. It's not afraid of weirdness. It embraces it instead. There is a nonbinary character. No, they are not a mermaid. Call them jim. That's it. Yes, Lucius and Pete got engaged. Everyone there knows what mateolage is, congrats. Olu and Jim never break up and then Archie shows up, then Zheng, and we all know. We all know.

Two men nearing fifty have a deep, romantic moment where one of them appears as a mermaid, and it's treated as the profound scene it is without ridiculing it. This would never fly in a 'mainstream' media. It would have to be downplayed. Here, it saves Ed's life.

The show tells you racists suck, but it doesn't tell you in a condescending, finger-waving way catered to the white people. Instead, it sets your ship aflame and burns you alive, runs a knife through your hand, puts poison in your drink and kills you.

This is a show for adults, for queer people of all kinds, and it does not give a fuck if anyone else gets it. It's so rare to find a tv show that caters to us, yet alone a tv show that's genuinely good and caring and so well loved.

This is a show that basically straightbaited its audience in the first season, that's how much they don't care.

Idk, I just feel that it will take ages for another show like OFMD to exist in a world full of MCU and media that tries so hard to be liked by everyone it loses its personality and charm. Rant over

[blackbeardsemophase]

one of the things i love most about ofmd season 2 is how loudly, openly, and joyously queer it is. it's not that last season wasn't extremely validating - it just feels like this season the creatives and writers and cast involved made this with such intentional thought and care that it makes me so emotional. there's something to be said about how much dimension these characters have and that they are allowed to be flawed or naive or scared but also brave and resilient. idk i'm not good at explaining exactly how it makes me feel but i guess it just feels so good to watch this show and feel like i'm a part of it - even just sitting in my living room as a viewer.

we've said that it's for us and it really is and that feeling is euphoric to me.

[brian-kinney-apologist]

random qaf thought i wanted to share

brian kinney was always a very special character for me personally and one particular thing about his writing still feels very dear to me to this day. brian was an openly gay man who always knew who he was, he didn't feel shame about his sexuality, and basically was living his best life as an out and proud queer man (no excuses, no apologies, no regrets etc etc). AND YET he wasn't out to his parents. it was never his intention to come out to them because he knew the exact reaction they would have. brian wasn't scared of their reaction though, he never needed their approval or waited for them to understand him (at least when we meet him in the show (young!brian is a a topic for another discussion though)). brian knew that his coming out would only resolve in useless drama. he didn't owe his parents anything just because they were related by blood. they didn't deserve to have an explanation or to know his truth. that's the point that the show makes with his character: you don't owe people your coming out. (yes, brian did come out to his parents at some point but with his mother it was purely coincidental and imo he wouldn't have came out to his father if debbie hadn't pressured him into doing so)

usually in tv/films we only see closeted queer people (usually teenagers) whos whole story revolves around them being ashamed of their sexuality, being scared about other people finding out their secret, and they also often behave like bullies themselves (chris hobbs moment). they also often outed by someone/forced to come out and end up having to deal with the consequences of them being gay. and yes, storylines like this have a right to exist and there're probably enough people who resonate with these types of stories. but there're other life scenarios too. and brian imo is a great example for people who had/still have to survive in our homophobic world but who know exactly who they are, who don't really struggle with their identity and who are at peace with their sexuality. off the top of my head i can name a number of characters that fit the first description but brian kinney is the only one who fits the second one. (maybe you know other characters with the same attitude but I doubt that anyone has ever openly said the actual words on tv/in films. brian was the blueprint for sure)

to be honest, it was a revelation for a 16 year old me when I first watched the show that you may be confident, out and proud and at the same time you not explaining your sexuality (or gender identity) to random (or not so random) people (proving to cishet people that you are a normal queer™️ OR on the contrary visibly queer enough) doesn't make you any less valid or a liar or a coward. brian being allowed to chose who to share his identity with not out of fear or shame but out of his own free will was and still a very important message to send to queer people everywhere. so many things that were illustrated through brian's character were so true and were ahead of their time imo. there is no one yet to match his level of queer wisdom on tv (and i doubt ther ever will)

I hope this makes sense because idk how to put it more eloquently. I've been thinking about all of this for some time now and wanted to put it somewhere so here you go

[itsclydebitches]

I need more time to put my thoughts in order about tonight's episode, but my initial reaction is that I'm surprised by others' disappointment? I mean, I'm actually not that surprised because coming out stories are intensely personal with viewers all looking for/needing vastly different things from their media, but it just feels like a lot of what (I thought) Ted Lasso was trying to do has gotten lost under specific expectations.

Ted goes off on a long, ridiculous, borderline disgusting story at the worst possible moment? Yes, that's the point. For all my fun TedTrent theories, Ted is (currently) serving the role of the well-meaning, but often ignorant straight man. His function is to both provide the insight and warmth that he's known for - "Actually it does matter to us" - while simultaneously showing how this intensely heteronormative culture would react to a player coming out. AKA messily. If we got a perfect scenario where everyone was accepting and said exactly the right thing, that would undermine the problems the show is trying to acknowledge in the first place. The focus on Isaac's complicated anger and Ted's foot-in-mouth syndrome is just as important to this whole scenario as the club's overall acceptance and the fact that Ted immediately realizes that he fucked up: "I regret that." Ted Lasso is a feel-good comedy, so it's all couched in over-the-top humor, but I thought that was an important acknowledgement: your allies - straight or not, out or not - are likely going to react in cringe-worthy, imperfect ways and the important takeaway there is not that they're irredeemable people who don't love you, but that they're trying and you should gently correct them (as Colin does) and allow them to grow (as Ted does). Despite being an absurd fiction, Ted Lasso is working to write about this in a semi-realistic sense. Instead of a Perfect Coming Out Moment that makes all the queer fans (myself included!) squeal at how ~wonderful~ our beloved cast is for being oh so perfect, we get that realistic awkwardness, misplaced anger, and regret.

We cut away from Colin coming out? Yes, because he's already come out to us. I understand why fans would be disappointed in that, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the show as not allowing Colin to come out at all. That was the entirety of "Sunflowers." Rather than trying to fit Colin's big moment into a locker room halftime, the writers crafted a whole episode where he could grapple with that fear of being outed, be reassured, have a heart-to-heart with Trent, sit together on the monument, go out later in celebration... Ted Lasso made space for all that and, understandably to my mind, didn't want to rehash many of those same beats three episodes later, especially not when we need time to work through the intersection of Colin's story with everyone else. (Because despite this being a queer story-line about a queer man, the show is about the team. Colin's conflict was always going to expand into the rest of the cast.) No, we don't get to see Colin come out specifically to the others, but we did see him come out - both narratively by kissing a man and to Trent - and we see the team's reaction immediately after the fact. Making space for Issac didn't feel like it was cheating Colin to me, or focusing too much on the straight characters, because Colin's story has been a season in the making (plus some details earlier on). To say nothing of the fact that his hesitance about coming out is specifically because he fears the team's reaction... so why wouldn't we grapple with Isaac's negative reaction? We already know Colin's worries, we know what he wants, we see him seeking advice from Trent, we see him reaching out to Issac, we see that failing, and after all that his queer story-line is functionally at a stand-still until something else gives. Issac's explosion is what finally tips the scales.

Idk I don't think I'm explaining this very well because it's late and I only just watched, but I'm of the opinion that Ted Lasso did a lot of work in previous episodes so that they'd have space in this episode to do different work, which is smart. From a narrative perspective, Ted doesn't need to be the perfect ally because Colin already has a supportive queer mentor. "La Locker Room Aux Folles" doesn't need to try to balance Colin's emotional coming out with Isaac's internalized homophobia because "Sunflowers" already gave the audience so, so much, allowing the writers to both keep things on screen for our benefit and then later cut away for the sake of time. As said, stories like these are always going to be a hit-or-miss depending on what each individual fan wants and needs, but I think it's worth keeping in mind that Colin's story is not this single episode; it's all of them combined. Has Ted Lasso really not treated his journey respectfully... or did it just not try to check every queer story-line box in a single episode?