#where the fuck did i mention the celebrities who sided with israel
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congratulations! you've officially made the worst and most misinterpreted addition to this post! your prize is an all expenses paid trip to my blocked accounts tab
"Influencers don't have to say anything about gaza" "celebrities don't need to try to speak up about palestine" YES THEY DO!! YES THEY FUCKING DO!!! IF YOUR FELLOW HUMAN IS SUFFERING AND YOU HAVE A SURPLUS OF THE EXACT RESOURCE THEY NEED YOU HAVE TO FUCKING USE IT TO HELP THEM!!!! IF YOU HAVE MORE MONEY YOU WILL EVER USE IN YOUR LIFETIME AND YOUR POCKET CHANGE WOULD FUND SOMEONE BEING ABLE TO ESCAPE A FUCKING BLOODBATH WITH THEIR LIFE THEN YOU FUCKING HAVE TO USE YOUR FUNDS TO HELP THEM!!! IF YOU HAVE AN INFLUENCE OVER MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AND SOMEONE NEEDS TO GET ATTENTION BROUGHT TO THEIR CAMPAIGN TO ESCAPE BEING MASSACRED THEN YOU USE YOUR INFLUENCE TO HELP THEM!!! IF YOU HAVE A SURPLUS AND YOU SEE SOMEONE WHO IS IN DIRE NEED OF WHAT YOU HAVE A SURPLUS OF THEN YOU FUCKING HAVE USE IT TO HELP THEM!!! THAT IS PART OF BEING A SOMEWHAT FUCKING DECENT PERSON!!!! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU IF YOU DON'T THINK SO
#where the fuck did i mention the celebrities who sided with israel#i fucking said celebrities & influencers should use their wealth/reach to help people in need#how did you interpret this in such an inane and disgusting way#i expected a lot of 'it's their choice don't be jealous :///' but holy shit! this is so much worse! wow!
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Aw, man
Last night the district wide school board meeting turned into a debate about Israel. With some claiming the DOE is not doing "enough." Apparently enough means they haven't yet written a email condemning the kidnappings in Israel? With claims they would have already sent a letter if it was black people. I guess the district is waiting on a legal team to approve language. So it should go out today or tmrw. Not good enough for these people. I don't get it. The DOE did send a letter condemning racism and it doesn't do shit to protect my kids. We are still in the most segregated school system in the nation. I am 100% confident the man claiming they "would have already done it if it was black people." made sure his children were in the majority white schools. The anti-racism letter didn't change his desire to segregate his children so why would a anti-semitism letter help jewish students? Writing a letter condemning the kidnappings in Israel is not going to protect my kids one bit nor help the children who were kidnapped. Our district has migrant children pouring in every single week. Let's talk about how we can support them. Letter or no letter I do not care.
I left that meeting to go to our schools PTA meeting. We did spend a good amount of time talking about how we can help the new migrant children who started at our school last week. Apparently 1000 more children entered the district on Friday - set to start next week. My 2nd graders class got three more students last week. Rebel's 1st grade class got two more students. We've been working on our Spanish at home and making sure the girls include them. I'm so glad we are at a school where we teach the kids to welcome their new friends. I have no doubt the uniform, clothing, coat drive will be fully funded - even though we have a school full of low income parents who aren't exactly rolling in the dough.
This morning I'm talking to the Principal about the clothing/Halloween costume drive when she gets a text message and looks horrified. Apparently a lower grade kid told their teacher they can't be around them because they are Jewish and their Mom told them Jewish people are dangerous. So fucked up. Poor baby being taught that hate and poor teacher having to hear it from a student she pours her hard work into.
I'm not really worried about my girls hearing shitty things. As mentioned they are tough and can handle themselves. The toughness does mean they can be jerks but also means they wouldn't hesitate to fight back if someone says shit like that to them. People have said other shitty things to them and they returned with the 6yo version of "go fuck yourself" and were indignant more then hurt. *Obviously they didn't use the f word. They have a solid group of friends in their class who would know to defend them. Although we are going to have a talk about what to say if someone talks negatively about Juduism or if they hear someone say anything racist/prejudice/etc to themselves or any of their friends. We've had the general talk before but probably need to be more specific on the Jewish side of things. Every year my husband and I bring Hanukkah celebration stuff to their class. Everyone is always very receptive. Last year Bee's teacher was Jewish. They've generally had at least one jewish family in their class - although that dwindles in the older grades. We live two doors down from the JCC - so they go to classes there so do get to spend time around Jewish children regardless. This semester they are taking an art class there and we go to the shabbat dinners sometime.
Bee has a Ukrainian girl in her class - well her grandparents are from Ukraine. So Bee came home last year talking about how people are murdering babies "as soon as they come out" in the Ukrainian war. Now this year her little friend is from Israel - so she comes home with more horror stories he hears from home and interprets into six year old language. The world we are giving our children is not okay.
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I have officially lost all belief in human progress or that western civilization is anything other than a fraud
all these people are basically livetweeting their deaths and no one DOES anything
So much for the UN, the long arc of history or 'never again'.
videos of ppl outright mocking the victims like "we have water and you don't"
so much propaganda it puts the WWI meat factory thing to shame, no wonder no one knows what to believe
the constant shaming and actionism and guilt-tripping as if panicking helps anyone
How many babies to need to be killed till it's no longer "self defense"?
RIOTS ARE ALWAYS A FAILURE OF THE AUTHORITIES. It doesn't matter if anyone 'condones' killing (I don't), but, you mistreat people, some of them WILL riot. I'm not saying it's great, or they should, but they WILL. Human fucking nature. Israel had all the power there; They created conditions where ppl will riot.
Who is dumb enough to believe there's always conveniently a base under everything they bomb? Even if there was, I assume Hamas have legs & can walk away, whereas the civilian infrastructure STAYS destroyed.
And even if you get all the baddies, what then? In 5 seconds you'd have a new, worse group out for vengeance for their slaughtered family members, burning with the same "rightheous" fury as you
We can debate about labels all you want, but there's no way cutting off water to a large city isn't an attemt to kill-em-all. Same for bombing the place they were told to go
On the other hand... Ppl's tendency to shove everything into the currently popular framework... the colonization thing certainly applies in many respects and it was in some ways smart of the activists to frame it that way, but, you can send the British back to Britain, where are you gonna send the israelis? You realize you're not getting them moved anywhere without yet more atrocities? So big side eye when ppl go putting 'Israel' in quotation marks, I do wonder what course of action they're implying. I can't in good conscience tell ppl not to be triggered or scared over it.
I get that it's not just to expect anyone to 'be the bigger person'. But someone has to. They pulled it off in Rwanda. Do you want "justice" or peace? You can't have both. How about no more killing of anyone.
Biden was kinda coming near to saving himself with the union stuff he's been doing, but now he's shat the bed bigtime which is a problem cause there's no viable replacement. If only a competent person with a spine were in his place. I mean, China & Russia doing shit? Ok, they're nuclear powers, no one can stop them. But Israel? If the west threatened to close the money faucet they'd play ball. They're all just too gullible, too chicken, or perfectly happy with the outcome. Biden blew it; I think out of incompetence more than malice, but they're functionally indistinguishable at this point.
Europe doesn't believe in free speech apparently. Ashamed to live in Mitläufer-Land and the spineless peninsula union, apparently.
The spikes of islamophobia and antisemitism all over the world
ppl trying to use this to push antisemitic conspiracy theories or hindu-nationalism, (wasn't collective punishment and category brainrot exactly the problem? I guess some are just looking for any excse to terrorize ppl)
ppl too busy for-us-or-against-us-ing celebrities and making yet another orthodoxy discourse out of it, like that won't do the opposite of convince ppl
Did I mention DEAD BABIES GALORE?? That oughta dwarf everything else, really. It's bad enough on its fucking own. There shouldn't be anything left to say. They all look like my siblings to me. But those are all alive in a warm house with food in the fridge and I' gonna see them tomorrow.... and their families won't.
entire bloodlines wiped out. Not even people left to remember them
I lived in a small village with 10 thousand inhabitants once. When I see the death toll, I picture that entire village wiped out, or multiples or fractions of it. Everyone one would interact with every day, the teachers, the neighbor's kids, the croissant lady. 'cept ppl in Gaza were so piss poor they probably ain't seen a croissant in their lives.
So this is what it's like, to see something like that happening
there are all those posts of one person after another being wiped out, families whittled down till there's nothing left
Yes, you could drag Netanyahu to the hague, and they should, but will that even matter? That won't un-kill those ppl or un-destroy the infrastructure.
Something irreversible has been done.
Something irreversible is done each time one of those lives is casually snuffed out
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On the latest round of Gal Gadiscourse
Normally, I scroll/unfollow/block and move on, but I’m so sick of this bullshit.
Since 2020 continues to be deeply committed to being the absolute worst, I now have to open my mouth about the latest round of Gal Gadiscourse. This is going to be my first and last statement about it. I’m not going to debate this. I’m not going to have a “civil discussion” about it. I’m drawing a boundary, and because of the context, I’m doing you the courtesy of explaining why. Fuck with that boundary by putting that shit in my space, and I'm just unfollowing and/or blocking without even bothering to engage.
So, about the whole “cheering for the deaths of Palestinian children” thing.
Now I’m going to commit one of Vizzini’s classic blunders and get involved in a land war in Asia in order to say...
Yes, I’d heard about that. Then I looked for myself and came to the conclusion that it's a grotesque misrepresentation of what she said. The context of her statement was very clear if you're not wearing Jews Are Bloodthirsty Demons goggles. Her disapproval was clearly directed Hamas for specific acts against Palestinian civilians with a dash of "Support the troops" thrown in. Whoop-dee-fucking doo.
(BTW, did y’all have this same energy for Adam Driver every time a new movie from the Star Wars sequel trilogy came out? Israel mandates service for able-bodied citizens when they turn 18. Driver volunteered to enlist in the Marines because of 9/11. *crickets*)
Honestly, I have a much bigger problem with the role the US military has in bankrolling big-budget films. But that’s a huge issue you just can’t yell at a celebrity on social media about in order to feel morally superior to them.
Regarding Gal Gadot herself, everything she has publicly stated about Israel and Palestine, since way back when she was mostly recognizable from playing Gisele in the Fast And The Furious franchise, has stressed coexistence. Just last year, she pretty much told Netanyahu—y'know, the Israeli Prime Minister, remember him?—to not use her name and image to make it look like she agrees with him about demonizing Palestinians. Some time before that, she posted on IG or FB about some Israelis who'd gathered and made signs saying hateful things about Palestinians, and she criticized them for saying such things about Israel's "neighbors" (her word).
But for some "mysterious" reason, y’all gentiles love to make shit up about this woman making her out to secretly monstrous in all the ways that tick all the boxes for antisemitic canards—I’ll never forget "kill notches on her rifle!"—yet y’all adamantly refuse to consider that mayyyyyyyybe antisemitism has something to do with it, and y'all might have blind spots and prejudices y'all need to work on.
What makes all this worse is that Benjamin Netanyahu (@IsraeliPM) and the IDF (@IDF), the people with actual decision-making power, are right there on Twitter. Blue checkmark and all. They're on that bird app all the time. And you can tell they’re not run by bots because they got jokes. Hating on Gal Gadot as a proxy for the individuals and organizations who are directly responsible for decisions made during the conflict is some Protocols of the Elders of Zion shit, and I’m not having it.
Don’t even get me started on that shitty Medium article that where Gal Gadot develops the superpower of being in Israel and on the other side of the world at the same time. Apparently, in addition to controlling the weather, Jews can teleport too. Not to mention, the description of events is described in a way that mirrors a scene from a movie she was in. I know because I saw the movie. And own the DVD.
This one was particularly insidious because it used “believe victims” as a way to make someone who didn’t do anything look evil. It's really aggravating because the women who came forward about men like Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, and Brett Kavanaugh got way more scrutiny than that Medium article did.
It’s particularly disgusting in light of how rampant harassment, abuse, and rape are in the entertainment industry and how many women, including some very famous women, experience such things throughout their careers. In one interview following Brett Ratner getting fired, Gadot mentions that the things the #MeToo movement brings attention to is very common in the film and modeling industries, and she herself was lucky to not have experienced it. It’s really sick to start a rumor like that about someone who’s much more likely to have been a victim or survivor than a perpetrator.
Fortunately for her, she’s rich and famous, so she can fight things like this if she wants or needs to. Others who don’t have such privileges are in prison right now for who knows how long.
Granted, it’s not unusual for people involved with politics or entertainment to be full of shit. It’s not unusual for famous people to be bigots or assholes. But the things people have accused her of that have been uncritically accepted as fact go way above and beyond anything she’s publicly said or done. I can’t chalk it up to basic misogyny because TERFs and Karens have been coming out of the woodwork like termites. It’s as though her real “sin” is existing in public as an Israeli Jew who doesn’t flagellate herself over it.
So, I’m gonna be absolutely, abundantly clear. Portraying Gal Gadot as evil or monstrous is antisemitic as fuck, and motherfuckers need to knock it off. I don’t give a shit if you like her or not. I don’t give a shit if you agree with her or not. But this thing where you do where disagreeing with or disliking a Jewish person means you get to demonize or dehumanize them? Nah, not in my space.
Tip your waitress.
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Riots, demonstration in Kikar Zion, siren 12.5.2021
Netanyahu is no fool….he is very very clever and many of us had a suspicion of what he was leading up to. I would not be surprised if he calls a state of emergency and continues with his vicious policy of not caring for the county but doing his best to keep himself, his mentally ill wife and son out of jail. Sara Netanyahu once said she did not care if the country burned…and they have succeeded in bringing us to that pass. The first picture is a quote of hers from 2002…… “We will go overseas and the country can burn” and the second a cartoon saying “I said we would leave for overseas and then the country can burn….NOT BEFORE”
This is a horrible morning. I am trying to put my thoughts into place. The whole country is burning. Tel Aviv. Suddenly after all the years of the south suffering and as they say, they were invisible it has become serious. I doubt that in Jerusalem there will be many more rockets. Maybe because of the holy places, Christian and Moslem, maybe because of the large Palestinian community. I feel guilty as I sit here quietly writing.
Netanyahu has done a good job of seeing the Israel on fire. Closing the steps at the Damascus gate …so obvious it would lead to troubles. He knew that he only had to give a small push and with his friend the minister of police everything would develop as it suited him. The news media has also been given its instructions and except for Ha’aretz no other paper mentions what is happening on the other side. Today a comment was passed which many people probably did not hear or take in. That the army would target high rise buildings……in which many families live. The army gave messages for people to evacuate……where were they supposed to go and how many of them actually got the message as we have taken care to destroy much of their communication.
Sunday I did not feel well and it was a furnace outside. Since the episode where I had memory loss and then straight after that had a cold ….many people here dafke in summer are also sick with colds….I feel a lack of desire to do anything. So I only went to the shiva for Cecelia in the evening. My Spanish teacher. I doubt I will go on trying to learn Spanish. I feel as if something has gone out of me. I had a special relationship with her and she was also my friend. I cannot imagine another teacher or a group. And at the shiva it seems that many of her other students felt the same. And every day I hear from someone else who had studied with her.
Monday I went out with Tag Maier to distribute flowers in the Old City to Palestinians. It was a difficult today because seldom do Ramadan and Jerusalem Day coincide.
But this is no united city. So divided, Right and left, Palestians, Jews, Hareidi Jews, …united? And yesterday the schism was even clearer. The religious youth took over the city and their arrogance was unbearable. Some of our members gave flowers to them and when I asked one why she had done so, she said she had many interesting exchanges with some of them who did not even know what we were doing or why. But I saw some of them throwing the flowers into the rubbish bins. No Palestinian refused us and accepted with a smile.
In the evening I went to my Arabic lesson. I get a lift with Gershon and Edna Baskin and we had just sat down when we heard a siren. It was faint at first and we looked at one another in bewilderment. Then we heard three loud bangs and realized it was serious. I wondered what was happening in Nofim. I wondered how all these people here, many of whom are less mobile and quick than I am even on the sticks would get down to a shelter. Later I saw the post that one should look for a safe place in your flat as there is very little time between the siren and the fall. So that question is where. My bedroom ….the glass door is next to the bed. The lounge….the windows again. The bathroom….the mirror and the tiles. The corridor is maybe the safest but there are all the painting and photographs in glass. I think the best place for me is next to my door and to put a blanket over myself. I am just sorry for the really old and incapacitated with their carers. We spent the lesson learning all the words necessary for such an occasion. We came home to a quiet night and then all hell broke through. Later: My cleaning lady said I should go and sit on the steps between one floor and another.
Coming back there was an amusing incident. As I got out of the car I saw two girls putting coke tins next to the rubbish and I told them to give them to me. I explained to them what it was for and then the one girl said to me, “Are you from Balfour? Were you at Sheik Jarrar.” And again I know you have all been writing to me to stay home but when two teenagers tell me that they look up to me and for them it is important to see me at these places what can I say? Truly I don’t think I am in any danger. I keep to the sides or anything going on and I doubt that even our violent police would attack an old woman. But whom I am scared of is groups like Lahava or those yesterday on the march of the religious. I feel the hatred around us as I did last night with people calling us haters of Israel and traitors and bitches who fuck Arabs.
Yesterday I went to the doctor as the time has come to deal with a hearing problem I have and then to the DCO which was very quiet. There is a young soldier there who has been very sympathetic towards us and is now being transferred. He brought his replacement out and this I do not put in my report. Nadav says that when he leave the army he will join Breaking the Silence. He said that his replacement is a good fellow so we are hoping that we will have the same relationship with him.
I came home and then went to a play. “The Comedians.” It was very funny but I laughed looking at the audience as it was so appropriate for many of us. From a play by Neil Simon about two once famous comedians who are now uber bottled. When I went out I asked three people to tell the organizer of the transport that I would not be joining them. Later she phoned in anger to ask why I was not on the bus!!! It was so appropriate. I had sat down to phone a friend and when I got up to leave the theatre which was by then pretty deserted I saw a really old lady with her carer sitting outside looking desperate. It turned out that the theatre had ordered a taxi for them and another couple had jumped in and taken it. Being the celebration of Id Il Fitir there were few Arab taxis and they are a large part of the taxis in Jerusalem. In the end I stayed with them until I managed to stop a taxi and put them on the way home. I gave them the number of Gett taxi which is more reliable.
I walked down to the city and stopped at Balfour where some of the stalwarts were sitting. The demonstration at Kikar Zion started off with few people but soon grew. There was no talk of a march but then people did start walking down the main street and also on the tracks of the light train. I did not think that that was a good idea and walked along with them but on the pavement. The police arrived but did nothing. Then we came to Kikar Zion, to the square, where we gathered and in no way were we disturbing pedestrians, the train or anything else. Then the police decided to attack. I think because where we were walking before there were passers by and wanted it to be where they had us to themselves. First of all they started pushing people back but then we saw that they had brought in the dogs and what dogs. Their trainers could hardly control them and the dogs also started fighting amongst themselves. You can understand how dangerous they were. They were real killers. I have no photographs as everything was very volatile there and I did not want to put my sticks down. They also tried to sic them on to some people. Then they came with the horses….enormous . You have no idea. My question is why when we were obstructing traffic did they do nothing but attack us when we were not bothering anyone else.
In the meantime Lahava and the other young fascists had started screaming at us…the police kept us separated but when the police managed to drive us off they left them celebrating in the square.
I always stand to the back at such times but Eitemar who has stood with us at our demonstrations at Nofim refused to leave me and when one of the policemen seemed to be heading straight for us called to him and said that he was standing with me. He is one of those who is very watchful for me but I tell them to go and do their own thing as I do not want to be a drag on anyone. Last night I yelled at them and said that for 81 years I had been looking out for myself and I could still do so. But when the shunk came we were all away.
Natalie
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my first month in Berlin was really fucking lonely and pathetic. I had surely by then been tending to a few friendship-seedlings, a few of which ended up as fully realized friendships that I still do not know how I managed to cultivate. these people I would hang out with periodically throughout my first weeks, but I’ve always been one of those people who can’t understand why anyone would want to hang out with me, so when people actually did want to hang out with me I was clunky and awkward and navigated meeting their friends and then their friends-of-friends as if a there’d been whole trading-card set of Berlin scenesters laid out in front of me and someone was just chucking cards at my forehead frisbee-style. most of them I missed, they bounced off my forehead and spun off into the abyss of some Neukölln bar or weird fetish club and I never spoke to them again. there was a lot of that, just these one-off conversations of intense interest followed by a mutual agreement of continued contact followed by nothing. then I’d see them again months later at some event that drew the whole scene, from the bullseye (see: Peaches) on outward to the fringes, the acknowledgment would be nonexistent and if it happened it was weird, the next thing I knew they were a suggested friend on Facebook with fourteen mutual friends. was there anyone who didn’t know everyone else already? did some of these people charge you fifteen Euro for revealing that they recognize you in public?
some of these people, I took entirely too long to realize, had never been interested in being my friend at all. I was apparently stupid enough to forget, or to never know in the first place, that some people only talked to you if they wanted to sleep with you or if they thought you might have connections they could take advantage of. I had nothing to offer in either department. I spent the latter half of my teenage years putting so much effort into being unattractive, never making eye contact, and deflecting That Kind Of Attention that I hadn’t even considered the possibility that no one would know or care about any of that in a new environment. when people watched or smiled at me, I glared. when people asked me questions about my clothes or hair or what I was doing in the city, I gave monosyllabic answers in a flat voice. when people moved close to me, I got up and walked away. when they touched me, I hit them or otherwise raised cain before disappearing. that’s always easy to do when you’re tiny and wear dark clothes. being pursued as an object of sexual interest was not something I planned for because I didn’t pursue other people as objects of sexual interest. I considered myself outside of the dating and sex game and for whatever reason assumed everyone could figure that out immediately.
but they couldn’t, and that produced some awkward-ass situations. via social media I met a filmmaker, American by way of Israel, who made a documentary on William S. Burroughs that I had probably illegally downloaded and watched at least five times. we talked about Burroughs briefly, but ultimately he did not seem interested in talking about Burroughs. see, I was interested in talking about Burroughs. I wanted to know what interviewing Iggy Pop was like. I wanted to know what it was like to talk with John Waters for more than thirty seconds at a book-signing. by chance, we met two days later at a Drag Race viewing party in a bar I never set foot in anymore for different reasons. we recognized each other and he seemed genuinely interested in meeting me – we shook hands, he was drunk, I was probably running off of fruit and quark and an U-Bahn platform vending-machine diet coke. my handshake probably felt like a wet towel and I apologized for that, made some self-deprecating comment about how creepy my hands probably were. within five seconds the conversation was over. the next time I saw him, he was surrounded by an entourage at another club with no shirt on, perfectly sober. by then I knew better than to say hello, but he saw me and said nothing (which I can’t be salty about because I did the exact same thing). it wasn’t until then that I mentioned the earlier encounter to a friend, who said quite simply that he probably was just looking for sex and had lost interest.
I had not thought of this, obviously. what gave him the impression that I was interested in sex to begin with? I wanted to talk Burroughs, and interviewing Patti Smith. I was expressly not interested in what it was like to meet Peter Weller because when Weller brought up Pier Paolo Pasolini in one of his interview segments I think my hairline receded a little bit. at any rate, I was baffled. then I got angry even though I knew that sex would not have been a thing that ever would have happened anyway. what was the problem with me? my giant head and stick body? did my face look more or less cadaverous than in pictures and was that a deal-breaker? was I short, bad-postured, sickly, monotone, behaving strangely, shy, and not an established cosmopolite and freelance artist raising the rents in Kreuzkölln? yes to all of the above. this was one of a few lessons I had on the value of both sexual capital and artistic clout in the Berlin scenester circle. who were you fucking and what kind of art were you making? well, I wasn’t fucking anybody and I wasn’t making any art. luckily I was to make friends who also weren’t fucking anybody and ended up making art with them. they’re the reason I still go back.
(as a side note, this past April I met John Waters again at a book-signing – I was somewhat far back in the line and Waters had been pounding some brown liquor to get him through the evening. much to my and my friends’ delight, this meant that by the time we got to the table he was so in the mood to chat that the event organizers had to move him along. I brought up this filmmaker and said that I had met him and found him shallow and that the new feature film he had made was distasteful in a number of ways. Waters barely remembered the guy, and when I tried to jog his memory by saying that he’d directed a Burroughs documentary that largely featured Waters’s commentary, Waters responded: ‘oh, god, which one? there’s, like, five of those.’)
I also did some bold shit during my first month in Berlin, before I had people to necessarily call friends and before I realized that many of the people I was corresponding with existed on a plane very different from mine. my usual routine was to wear the same outfit and sit in the corner of a bar drinking a club mate until somebody talked to me, inevitably making a really fatuous comparison to David Bowie or, like, Gary Numan. or Kraftwerk. I moved from bar to bar that way, inciting some interest in people and then eventually leaving the bar and leaving them with no contact information because I wanted to go to bed and my throat was sore from secondhand smoke. this isn’t to say that I didn’t also take interest in people I saw, because I certainly did, but I guess I was prepared to make no attempts at talking to them and had resigned myself to the idea that any friends I would make would come to me. I apparently would have rather existed in complete isolation and misery for seven months than start conversations with strangers.
but sometimes I didn’t just sit in the corners of establishments hoping for friendships to strike up. sometimes I went to the parts of bars and clubs where I had no business being, as a trans person, as a person who looked feminine, as a person existing outside of the sexual market. I would take my drink and plop myself down in the middle of a fuckdungeon or a darkroom and just watch people. I was simultaneously interested in what drove cis gay men to seek out anonymous sex and horrified at the way the floor squelched under my shoes. I lit cigarettes and just held them so I looked more like I had my own purpose there, thinking that somehow let everyone else know that I was exempt from participating in the generally-expected activity but nevertheless allowed to be there. in my head I called this “taking up space” and sometimes accomplished just that. sometimes I sat, I fake-smoked, I drank a coke, I watched a man get spit-roasted in the corner like someone watches Animal Planet. then I would get up and walk out. other times I sat, I fake-smoked, I drank a coke, a fifty-year-old man would walk up to me mouth-breathing and rubbing his junk and I would get up and haul ass out. other times a young man would approach me and say loudly in English that this was a space for gay men to have sex and that I should go back upstairs to the main dance floor and bar instead of staring at everyone and “ruining the vibe,” and I would loudly tell him he was ruining his own vibe by bothering me instead of servicing the glory hole, and I would get up and get brow-beaten out.
my first month living in Berlin was, much like Isherwood’s descriptors of his early Berlin experiences – Bradshaw’s first Silvester celebration during which he walks in on Mr. Norris being flogged between two women while polishing one’s boots, or his brief glimpse of a shitfaced Baron von Pregnitz having a beer dumped down his throat while pinned on a couch by a “powerful youth in a boxer’s sweater” – the beginning of a series of dreamlike impressions that have been rewritten in my head numerous times. the places I frequent reorient themselves in my mind as soon as I leave Berlin again and I describe them slightly differently to people each time I retell a story. of course, there were times that were not necessarily dreamlike; buying rolls and water at an aldi is not that different in Berlin except that you really have to make sure the bottles are on their sides or they’ll topple over on the conveyor belt. in a way the aldi was a non-space all its own, though, as was the ausländerbehörde, the bürgeramt, the endless stretch of S-Bahn between Nikolassee and Grünewald that was so long and godforsaken that I was convinced all manner of time and molecular structure at its most fundamental had been suspended and no one was breathing. buying a Kinder bar for dinner from a spätkauf at 3AM alone at Görlitzer Bahnhof: did that actually happen? was I ever actually there?
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