#yes exactly that is why i love my problematic bisexual queen

[westerlieswitch]

YEEEEESSSSSS a fellow 12&Clara stan!!! I may never know how a misogynistic chud like Steven Moffat managed to create my favourite fictional QPR I've ever seen in anything anywhere, but that's absolutely what Twelve and Clara are to me and I adore them <3 <3

the other day at the boston show during Sugar In My Coffee (which holds a special place in my heart as a coffee disliker, autistic person with food sensory issues, and ace person) you went on a doctor who rant which. huge mood. but i was reminded and wanted to ask - who is your favorite companion? please specify why in as much detail as you would like. i am holding the microphone out to you. speak your truth

12&Clara is special to me, and Amy Pond trying very hard to plough the Doctor the night before her wedding knocked me into a second puberty

[luninosity]

Going through some older paperbacks, found my 1989 copy of Queen’s Gambit Declined by Melinda M. Snodgrass, decided to reread.

It inarguably reads like a slightly older fantasy - there’s that certain Epic Fantasy Style of the 1980s, definitely not contemporary - and I don’t know if I’d say it’s good exactly (entertaining, yes! OH GOD YES) but I would highly suggest you all find a copy, just because:

I had forgotten 1) how absolutely bonkers crazy this book and the entire plot is (like...what even. WHAT EVEN. Have you ever wanted a historical fantasy (or “anti-fantasy,” as the intro calls it) in which a young William of Orange (yes, the historical one) has magical powers and fights Cardinal Mazarin to save the world while flirting with basically everyone? also there’s sex-activated magic? and like...horse shapeshifter magic?? and a Sexy Northern Swordsman? and guest appearances from the King of France, the Duke of Buckingham, and Baruch Spinoza, to name only a few? all set to a backdrop of mysticism drawn straight from Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, which also provides all the chapter opening quotes? have you ever wanted all that? WELL HERE IT IS, PLUS MORE.)

and

2) how incredibly thirstily bisexual this book is. Like...every. single. main character. is the epitome of Disaster Bi. On pretty much every page. I’ll try to take a couple of pictures of some of the best moments, but just know that this book includes:

-a meet-cute in which Haakon (the previously mentioned Sexy Northern Swordsman) tries to cheat William (the Prince) at cards, William catches him in the act, and then they are so mutually impressed by each other that they save each other from a shipwreck while doing Cute Banter over who owes who more

-ONLY ONE BED AT THE INN. WHEN THEY’VE JUST ESCAPED THE SHIPWRECK. (bonus points for, in the words of the novel: “the prince was not having a restful night.”) (extra bonus points for: the innkeeper doesn’t know who they are, but clearly, CLEARLY assumes the pretty young man and the swordsman are here to hook up.)

-everyone constantly, repeatedly, notices a) how pretty William’s eyes are, and b) how attractive his personal pages/attendants are, especially “sweet Hans”

-”You’re not a prince, you’re a brat.” (paired with, “You are an uncouth northern barbarian!”) (also: “I’ve never taken orders well.”) (and also: “...perhaps it is of benefit to me that I’ve fallen in with a man of your experience.”)

-the whole chair thing! (paraphrasing: ”They didn‘t get you a nice chair befitting your prince’s rank at the fancy banquet table. That’s an insult.” “Don’t worry about it--” “I’m getting you a chair.” *Haakon walks off, comes back with the actual king’s chair* “You deserve this one.”)

-”You interrupted me for THAT?!” “You didn’t have to listen!”

-Father Armand: “so...William...was raised in a very...male household...and His Highness...enjoys a good deal of private time in the company of handsome soldiers...”

-to emphasize the bi, not just gay: William’s totally having sex with Sagitta (the woman who’s his magical tutor), but he’s SUPER-CONFLICTED about it, and so is she, because she’s not supposed to fall for him, and also she has Secret Motivations as far as serving the cause of magic (bonus points: he was a virgin before that) (extra bonus points: the moment when she’s all, “Haakon doesn’t need to be here for this one thing we’re doing, he can’t do magic!” and William straight-up says, “I think this has more to do with jealousy than sound magical advice.”)

-that time all THREE of them share a bed! ...at first just like...super-casually, like, sure, we’re all just going to flop into a cuddle-pile in William’s giant bed and talk strategy...and then Haakon gets up to go, because he’s perfectly aware that William and Sagitta have a weird sex-magic thing going on, and William says, “No, stay, I feel safer with you here,” and Haakon, with no hesitation, dives right back into bed and, to quote, “drew the prince into his arms”

-”I worked hard for this rain. Don’t be ungrateful.”

-the approximately five hundred times William does something reckless and magical and gets hurt and/or captured, and Haakon’s thought process goes something like, “dammit not AGAIN, why am I still taking care of you, OH HELL I CAN’T EVER ABANDON YOU, I SHALL RESCUE YOU AND CARRY YOU TO SAFETY”

-they RESCUE A BABY. William wants to be a father someday.

-William, to Haakon: ”Sagitta’s finding a bedroom for us. Meet us there.”

-at various points they ALL do the “Go, save yourself, leave me!” and “I’m not leaving you!” moment

-”Do you also, perhaps, like me just a little for my own sake?” (William’s answer to this is, “Oh, Haakon, can you doubt it? I love thee well.” to which Haakon says, “Just wanted to hear it.”)

-(I should point out that it doesn’t quite get to a happy polyamory ending because there’s a specific thing that happens to Sagitta that’s...let’s see, trying to avoid spoilers...a kind of punishment for some of her choices...but it’s fairly ambiguous, and William still has magic, so like...there’s totally room to come up with a new head-canon that brings her back to William and Haakon, who ARE both very much alive and together at the end and still doing Cute Banter)

-(some possibly problematic bits: William and Sagitta sleeping together could come across as a bit uncomfortable because she’s the one teaching him, er, magic that includes sex magic and he’s a virgin when they start, but they’re roughly the same age (as far as one can guess her age, since she’s magical, but she’s physically a young woman) and he does totally consent, like, he’s definitely up for it! and he’s twenty years old, so he can consent as far as being of age and all, but just fyi about weird power dynamics; also, some general period-typical Church-related homophobia - like, even someone raising the possibility that William likes handsome soldiers makes some Church Fathers etc shiver - and also that one super-weird moment when it feels a lot like...William deliberately sort of...flirts with his uncle??? to get his uncle to send a letter on their behalf? like, the text literally mentions his fluttering eyelashes over soft eyes and a gaze of admiration, and then his uncle Charles caresses William’s cheek, and says, “Flatterer, you look like your mother, and I loved her, you know,” and then agrees to send the letter? and then the plot moves on, but that’s...yep, that’s a thing that happens in this book.)

[thenotsosecretbits]

So, I finished watching A Frozen Flower a couple days ago and I have thoughts.  They’re behind a read more because this got long.  This movie....smh.

Am I the only one who finds it extremely wrong that the King hand picks Hong Lim as a child and raises him up to be his head bodyguard and personal sex toy?

The King is gay, no problem with that at all.  I do have a problem with grooming children (and later an adult who you have absolute power over and who cannot say no to you because you’re the King) for your future sexual benefit.  Because that is exactly what he did.  I don’t think he molested Hong Lim as a child (then again, till what age were you considered a child in the 14th century), but I’m sure he didn’t wait long after he was of an acceptable age (not appropriate) to start the sexual nature of their relationship.

So, let’s be clear, I am not Team King (and I’m judging you harshly if you are because you are ignoring way too much to support your very very problematic gay).  His relationship with Hong Lim is a power imbalance in a very Master-Slave kinda way.  

There is no way to gauge if Hong Lim’s feelings for the King are because of actual feelings or if it’s because his duty is to the King in all things, including the sexual ones, and he’s never been afforded other choices.  The first time he sleeps with the Queen is the first time he's ever been with anyone besides the King (and that wasn't his choice either).  We know this because the King made sure to congratulate him after having sex with the Queen made him a man (and I rolled my eyes so hard at that comment.)

I'm Team People Being Allowed to Make Their Own Choices.  

That means I’m Team Queen and Team Hong Lim separately and/or together if that is their choice.  If there was any indication that Hong Lim was with the King because it was a choice he actively made and if he no longer wanted to be in it he was free to pursue other relationships, I still would have thought it was shady (because of the grooming thing) but I would have accepted it.  But none of that was shown to us.

I get that the King loves Hong Lim (being gay has never been easy but I’m sure it was even worse back then). But the King is also the one who ordered the man he loved to fuck the Queen when he could have chosen anyone else (which would still be all sorts of wrong).

And people who have no sympathy for the Queen, how can you not?  The queen's only job is to produce an heir, but her king can't do that and when he orders some man to rape her (yes, rape, the Queen is forced to consent which is not consent at all, another reason I’m not on Team King), she has to literally lie there and take it, she has no choice. And she knows it's not Hong Lim's fault because he clearly doesn't want to do that to her, but he has no choice either. 

Watching them try that first time is heartbreaking because she’s lying there stiff as a board with tears running down her face trying to keep herself from falling apart and Hong Lim looks as if touching her when she is clearly not okay makes him the worst person in the world.  And then he has to apologize to the King for not forcing himself on the Queen as ordered, as if that makes him a bad person, only to be firmly warned to pull himself together and get it done.

Hong Lim and the Queen are two people who have lived their entire lives with their choices made for them. Their first time together in the library (going against the king's order that they not have sex again) is probably the first independent choice they've made for themselves in a very long time. And it all ends in tragedy.

To all the people who are mad at Hong Lim for choosing to have secret sex with the Queen in the library, bisexuality is a thing and if it’s okay for the King to be gay it is equally okay for Hong Lim to realize, when finally given the chance to experience other things, that he also wants to be with the Queen.  Choosing the Queen doesn’t make him “straight” just like choosing the King wouldn’t make him “gay”.  This is why bisexual people have such a hard time, because people are always trying to fit them into every role but the one they’ve actually told people they are.

To people who are mad at the Queen for having magical pussy that makes a man wanna kill a King, she did not ask for any of the shit that happened to her and her falling in love and being loved in return is something she deserved.  And she obviously loved Hong Lim as much as he loved her.  She wasn’t faking that shit.

The King’s love was selfish and vindictive and possessive.  He had Hong Lim castrated just because he said he loved the Queen.  Things would have ended differently if he just let them be together.  The Queen wasn’t demanding that Hong Lim not be with the King, she didn’t demand much of anything (except to not be ordered to fuck the entire Royal Guard so she could get pregnant).  Hong Lim could have been with both of them and things would have been fine.

One day someone’s gotta be brave enough to commit to the polyamory.

And honestly, when Hong Lim told the King he didn’t love him in the end, I was kinda glad he said it, even if it was a lie.  Which I don’t think it was, not really.  There are degrees of love and I do believe any love Hong Lim may have felt for the King was greatly diminished by the time they have their big fight (and his love for the Queen intensified by the very forbidden nature of it).  

Pretending to have killed the Queen when he knew Hong Lim loved her to make him return was always going to end with Hong Lim trying to kill him.  And he only had himself to blame.  Like Hong Lim said the King is the one that led him to that love and I’m sure he was grateful for it because it was a love he got to choose for himself.

This movie was a trip.

[forcri]

'They just wanted to silence her': the dark side of gay stan culture

For gay men, ‘stanning’ – being a super fan of – female pop stars can be a valuable part of your identity. But too often this fandom lapses into misogyny and body shaming

Ahead of Britney Spears’ record-breaking show at Brighton Pridethis year, Aaron Hussey noticed a fellow fan wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Spears’ nervous breakdown: the 2007 incident when, head shaved, she attacked a photographer’s car with an umbrella. “I think he thought he was being funny,” Hussey says. “He wasn’t.”

“Brightney Pride”, as it has affectionately been nicknamed, was one of the biggest events of the gay calendar – so big that 4,000 revellers were left stranded once the city’s heaving public transport system failed under the pressure. Surely only dedicated Spears “stans” – the most dedicated kind of fan, a portmanteau of “fan” and “stalker” taken from Eminem’s hit about a crazed follower – would have braved these conditions to glimpse their idol. So why the cruel taunt?

Gay male culture has always coalesced around female pop stars, from Judy Garland to Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande. Academics and critics have puzzled over the source of this connection, their often misplaced theories ranging from the outlandish to the oedipal. But gay men and the women they worship are usually happy to bask in the mutual affection. This year, Spears was honoured with an award by the US’s Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad) for promoting equality. She responded by saying the gay community had shown her “unconditional love”.

But “unconditional” is often precisely what this love is not. Scratch lightly at the surface and what flakes off is, yes, reciprocity and genuine affection, but also callous misogyny.

One theory of the gay fan-diva link is that of shared oppression – gay men and women are both ground under the wheel of hetero-patriarchy. Perhaps in that model, the Spears T-shirt could be read as a show of solidarity, a knowing acknowledgment of her pain and our understanding? But there was nothing knowing in the way another gay fan photoshopped an umbrella into his meet and greet photo with the unwitting star and later circulated it online. These actions have a distinct edge of mockery, the air of a joke that their subject is not in on.

Dr Michael Bronski, a Harvard University professor and the author of books on queer history and gay culture says “There is a long history of gay male fan culture latching onto famous women and then turning on them. Queens would come to a Judy Garland concert and then scream at her when she was too drunk to finish it. The women have changed – it’s no longer Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland. But the dynamic remains in western culture.”

The love-hate dynamic of gay stan culture that Bronski describes is now largely mediated through social media. Heckling in smoky nightclubs has been replaced by “hate memes”, when stans circulate unflattering edited pictures or examples of a star’s least-becoming behaviour, while the cheering has morphed into a lexicon of superlatives and put-downs that may seem impenetrable to the uninitiated: “we stan” favoured female pop stars, they’re “iconic”, a “kween”, an “unproblematic fave”. “She outsold” describes both someone’s commercial successes and a general sense of their superiority. Anyone who fails to meet those standards? “Fat”, “flop”, “failure”.

This online community relies on a dense matrix of references and neologisms informed by everything from drag culture to reality TV. Sami Baker is 21 and a self-professed gay stan – his favourites are Grande, Beyoncé and Charli XCX. He explains that the culture reaches further than many beyond the community might realise, citing the example of the recent avalanche of memes of reality star Gemma Collins. “They originated from gay stan Twitter. The language used within this culture is taken from the same place that Drag Race gets its lexicon, namely the underground subculture where LGBT people compete in various drag and performance categories, documented in the film Paris is Burning, and an inspiration for Madonna and Beyoncé.

For many gay men, Baker and myself included, gay pop stan culture is the distillation of everything meaningful in life. That statement reeks of camp melodrama, but it’s true. To my teenage self, women like Lady Gaga were the only light in a world where my queerness left me feeling like an outsider. As I grew up, the process of connecting my love for them with a wider culture of fandom enhanced my realisation that I was not alone as a queer person. “As I learned more about pop culture and references, that’s when I found people with the same interest,” says Baker. “These same people became my friends, my support network.”

It is hard to overestimate how meaningful the fan-diva relationship is for gay men. What is so perplexing is why this pseudo-religious devotion has always been laced with spite. Earlier this year, pop singer Hayley Kiyoko criticised Rita Ora, Cardi B, Bebe Rexha, and Charli XCX for their single Girls, a song about bisexuality that she, as a lesbian, thought was appropriative. Within hours, stan Twitter had unearthed and circulated incriminating tweets by Kiyoko from nine years ago (when she was 18) in an attempt to “cancel” her – excluding a person entirely from online discourse, except as the target of hate memes – for daring to critique a song they liked.

For Adam Byrne, a 23-year-old gay stan, this was a prime example of gay misogyny: “They didn’t care what she had to say. They just wanted to silence her.”

For him, this behaviour typifies gay stan culture: female artists must obey the rules or suffer the consequences. “A sinister side emerges when their ‘fave’ isn’t giving them exactly what they want,” Byrne explains. “Often jokes made at their expense are said in fun but it’s grim to see the joy [the community] sometimes takes in seeing these women fail: ‘She’s over!’, ‘Flop!’ ‘This era is dead!’ Look at the smug tweets about Nadine Coyle cancelling her tour; the way Katy Perry became gay Twitter’s punching bag.”

Baker says: “I’ve seen stan Twitter make jokes about the Manchester attacks, Demi Lovato’s recent overdose, Beyoncé’s skin tone, Noah Cyrus’s appearance.”

Much has been written about the “queer art of failure” – how queer people are always viewed as failures by heteronormative society, and thus must make a success of their own non-conformity. Perhaps, in this context, it’s unsurprising that gay men seem to revel in the perceived setbacks and shortcomings of their stanned subjects. But the sympathy one might expect to accompany this identification seems absent. The behaviour is less like a playful poke in the ribs, and more like a slap in the face.

Just last week, singer Marina Diamandis – an idol of the gay community – tweeted back to a fan who is part of the gay stan community after he sent her an abusive tweet. “There is a fan culture of degrading people online that I’m really not into. I haven’t been on social media a lot the past 3 months because I suffer from depression and the negative comments really affect me,” Diamandis posted. “Marina omg please don’t take it the wrong way I’m a stan and this was just intended as a harmless joke,” the fan protested. As Diamandis herself pointed out, stan culture can fail to grant humanity to the subjects of their worship.

I think they are real fans. But there is a fan culture of degrading people online that I'm really not into. I haven't been on social media a lot the past 3 months because I suffer from depression and the negative comments really affect me.

Even when gay men aren’t raining outright abuse on these women, their praise can sometimes reveal different forms of misogyny. One recent trend is to laud women by hailing them as “skinny” or a “skinny legend” – a trope that took off with a meme about Mariah Carey. Though it is used figuratively to imply flawlessness, it is revealing that a word historically used to police female physicality has naturally evolved in the gay male vernacular. Can it be anything other than chauvinist body-shaming?

Indeed, “skinniness” is just one of many hyper-feminine traits that gay men seem to prize in our stanned women. Helen Moynihan, 23, is a self-identifying queer woman who says the stanning of Ariana Grandeexemplifies precisely what is problematic about gay male idolatry. “Often I think gay men only see beauty in hyper-feminine, not butch, women,” she says. “It made me laugh when Grande was called a queer icon because she is the least queer person to me: someone who’s always trying to escape hyper-femininity.”

Grande’s blinding highlighter, swinging ponytail and heels are ubiquitous hallmarks of the gay stan hall of fame. Buzzcuts and Doc Martens are few and far between. It’s conditional love again – do we only stan the “right” type of women? Other forms of gay culture are similarly plagued by this insidious heteronormativity – men on dating apps like Grindr use refrains like “masc4masc” to praise masculinity and shun femininity in other men.

It’s important to remember that gay male culture exists at the confluence of many social currents, including wider male misogyny and societal homophobia. It is easy to apportion blame to gay men who are merely trying to find escapism and belonging, and to scapegoat behaviour that is universal. “In our culture of binary, heterosexual dysfunction, men hate women,” says Bronski. “It just so happens that some of them are gay.”

This is an important qualifier. Stanning itself is not exclusively homosexual territory – Eminem, the originator of “stan”, is hardly a queer icon. Dr Lynn Zubernis is a professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and an expert in fandom. She says the bullying behaviours found in gay stan culture are common to all fandoms.

“Because the object of a fan’s adoration becomes very important to the fan’s happiness, when there is some sort of disappointment, that brings a strong – and sometimes problematic – response. That is the dynamic behind the ‘mood swings’ you see in fandom, where fans love something one day and turn on it the next. It’s not about misogyny. It cuts across gender, sexuality, type of fandom, even time. Sports fans sometimes turn on star players in the same way. I don’t think it’s a male-female thing or a gay-straight thing. I think it’s a human thing.”

However, not all fandoms operate with the same power dynamics. In football, the vitriol Dr Zubernis uses for comparison takes on a new dimension when it intersects with racism. In gay stan culture, gender does not just occasionally intersect with online hatred – it defines the landscape. The abuse and objectification of these women is distinctly gendered – any man, gay or straight, tweeting “fat!” at a woman is unarguably misogynistic.

Gay men and pop’s women alike benefit from the mutuality of their “special relationship”. Spears is unlikely to have noticed one nasty T-shirt through the love heaped on her that day. But with gay male misogyny being discussed more widely than ever, in terms of our nightlife, queer spaces, and social movements, what does it say when this relationship is often so heartless? What kind of permissiveness are we helping to cultivate around misogyny? Deep down, do we really know what it means to love these women?