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tender-hearteddd · 22 days ago

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homecoming crush

platonic! bertholdt x annie, RBA, slight hitchannie but isn’t the main focus, bertholdt kinda has a romantic partner (you can imagine it as you 🤭) but it’s not the main focus

modern au, high school au, crackfic but not really, annie has comphet, bertholdt is jokingly using the phrase ‘ur so in there’ not seriously lol, also im not a lesbian so im sorry if this isn’t totally accurate to the experience for queer women 😭, i just feel that annie would have romantic feelings for women lol

a/n - i sent this idea to another blog before and just now writing it so if that blog sees this randomly, hi 👋🏽 im the anon who sent you this scenario heehee

The air feels so much more crisp after a school event.

Football games, school dances, morning of a field trip.

Annie can’t find the reason why she came here. She feels awkward in the dress she’s wearing and she’s not even wearing the right shoes. She didn’t even know there were designated shoes for certain outfits until Pieck told her she looked like the protagonist of an old Disney channel show from 2008. All jokes of course.

Annie never lets it get to her. But right now, she is a 16 years old girl in a dress too tight around her growing body and in her old dirtied tennis shoes she wears everyday. Never has it ever occurred to her that looking like an old Disney channel star was a bad thing. Annie has never felt ugly, or pretty for that matter, in her life until now. And it is the most excruciating thing she has ever experienced. Ugly doesn’t even begin to describe how she feels. The eyes of her peers she never cared about are all of a sudden all on her and suddenly she has every reason to care about them now. Her hair is in a low bun and the only makeup she has on is lip balm.

It is homecoming night. The gymnasium has been turned into a starry night in Paris. Armin Arlert had been stressed about it the weeks leading up to the dance. Complaining to Mikasa in their shared history class how it seems like no one apart of the leadership committee actually wants to stick to the theme this year. Annie just felt stressed out listening to him. Perhaps this is the reason why Annie said yes to him when he had asked her to be his date for homecoming, perhaps this is the reason why she’s even in the old sweaty gym anyways outside of school hours.

She wasn’t planning to go. School events weren’t really her scene. But Armin, sweet old Armin who is practically a parents wet dream, needed a date. He practically deserved this just for somehow turning the old sweaty, stinky gymnasium into a romantic Parisian night sky. Who was she to say no? Armin was already on his way to earning the class presidency and later in life, he’ll probably earn the real thing. Compared to herself, quiet, drawn into the background, made to be forgotten - Armin could possibly be the best thing for her. When he asked her out to be his homecoming date, she tried to imagine a life with him, that this date would go really well and they’ll be boyfriend-girlfriend, high school sweethearts. They’d go off to different colleges, maybe go through a weird separation, but eventually find their ways back to each other, get married, have a few kids, grow old together - the whole shindig. The key word is tried though, she tried to think about it working; something in her can’t bring herself to even muster an image of it.

Dread stirs inside her as she realizes she might’ve been stood up. Well, technically she wasn’t, as she did arrive to the event with Armin in hand. But he was nowhere to be found, as he was running around trying to prevent his perfect homecoming dance turning into a disaster. Not only does she feel ugly, but now she feels embarrassed by the fact that she came to this stupid dance for no real reason. She could’ve said no and it wouldn’t have made any difference. She should’ve realized it beforehand. Of course the head of leadership would be busy at a school dance he was in charge of. She wants to cry, she feels stupid about it. It’s so stupid how badly she wants to cry right now. This stupid insignificant dance has done emotional damage to her own being.

Annie’s never felt this alone in her life. Some stupid song is playing and people are moshing around the star football player Reiner Braun as they lift him into the air, or as she knows him, the guy who she used to beat up when they were kids. She watches from a distance, twinges of nostalgia tugging at her heart at the sight of her old friend being celebrated for once in his life. She knew how his home life was and he knew how hers was; they have virtually nothing in common except not liking their home lives. But hey, at least Reiner Braun is dancing tonight and Annie Leonhart is in the corner.

Hitch from her Math class is there too. She’s jumping and shouting with the rest of the crowd, celebrating her old friend. She has her heels in her right hand and she has this big smile on her face and doesn’t feel embarrassed about taking a high school dance this serious, probably from the booze or probably because she’s still in high school, or probably because she didn’t have a bad home life holding her back. I bet Hitch doesn’t feel ugly, Annie thinks.

She can’t feel ugly looking like how she looks right now, at this moment; under the fake starry lights in fake sweaty gym Paris, her gums are showing as she smiles this big toothy smile and her eyes are crinkled like crescent moons, and the baby pink of her dress just further extenuates her whole entire being; this is what beauty is, Annie thinks - a girl laughing and dancing.

Hitch catches Annie staring at her, and her smile just gets even wider as she keeps her eyes on the quiet girl from her math class. Annie returns her eyes and just continues to watch her dance, and she feels a little awkward about it but it sure does beat watching Armin and Jean trying to keep the cardboard Eiffel Tower upright.

Annie doesn’t know much about Hitch. All she knows about her are all the observations she’s made while sitting behind her in Math this school year. How she’s often scolded and told that this isn’t a beauty salon every time she reapplies her lip combo, and how she still continues to do whatever she pleases, how she always has ‘tea to spill’ as she calls it to Mina (Annie secretly listens), how she always plays games on her laptop instead of taking notes, and how she often smiles at Annie when she catches her glance in the hallway, and even if they never talked outside of math class, their conversations being limited to geometry, she still thinks to smile at her, pulling at Annie’s heart, and that’s gotta mean something.

Oh god.

Annie can feel her heart in her throat.

She runs to the nearest exit for a breath of fresh air but instead, runs into a slightly disheveled Bertholdt as he’s trying to hide the fact that he’s been doing nothing but smoke and wait for a drunk Reiner to be done so he can finally go home.

Bertholdt is a bit frightened by Annie’s abrupt appearance, hiding his cigarette in the process thinking Annie was going to be a staff member.

“You scared me!” Bertholdt sits back down against the hood of his dad’s car.

Annie calms down at the sight of her childhood friend. Bertholdt hiding outside makes her feel less bad about her hiding in the corner while their childhood friend gets all the glory. At least they’re both losers.

Annie doesn’t say anything to Bertholdt but goes and sits with him.

“Can I get a cigarette?”

Bertholdt looks at Annie a little surprised. He carefully takes out a cigarette for her, making sure to not mess up the formation, and gives it to her.

Annie puts the cigarette in between her lips, not taking her eyes off the double doors separating her and Hitch.

“Light.”

Bertholdt takes out a candle lighter out of his pocket to light Annie’s cigarette, Annie looks down at the enormous lighter and looks to Bertholdt for an explanation.

“Sorry,” he says while trying to fit the candle lighter into the pocket of his suit, “I’ve been outside this whole time and my lighter ran out of fluid.”

“I’m so fucked Bertholdt.” Annie says, her eyes solemnly closing for a moment. “I’m so insanely fucked.” her sad cerulean eyes open back up, looking at those dreadful double gym doors again.

Bertholdt’s eyebrows furrow in worry. This isn’t the Annie he knows, the Annie who he’s known since they were 7, the Annie who can only express herself through labored sighs and punching Reiner, the Annie who he hasn’t had a proper conversation with since the summer and has made it her lifeline mission to completely ignore the two boys who’s she somehow manages to create a meaningful friendship with. What could fuck up the Annie Leonhardt, who Bertholdt hasn’t even seen angry, let alone sad, let alone happy, this bad to the point where she is expressing her fucked up feelings to an old childhood friend?

Hitch, Hitch from math class is what fucks her up, Hitch and her stupid fucking moshing is what’s fucking Annie up, Hitch and her lip combo, Hitch and her stupid gossip, Hitch and her stupid smile.

“Uhhhh..” Bertholdt doesn’t really know what to say as he starts looking at anything else but Annie, “did Armin do something?” he asks, knowing she went to this dance with Armin in hand. He doesn’t know what else could fuck up her night like this, he hasn’t talked to her in months and he’s desperately looking for answers.

“No. I wish he did.”

“Well what didn’t he do?” Bertholdt still doesn’t know what to say or how to comfort his old friend. He’s literally searching up on his phone how to comfort an old friend and typing out Reddit right afterwards because he doesn’t have the time to read PsychologyToday.com’s whole ass article.

“He did nothing.”

“I’m sorr-“

“He literally did nothing. He was just running around trying to make sure that the fucking lights didn’t go out and the speakers wouldn’t malfunction. As soon as we came into the gym, he’s running right to Jean fucking Kierstein to lecture him about whatever the fuck those leadership nerds even worry about.” Annie is starting to shake and tear up a bit. Bertholdt awkwardly places his large hand on her shoulder, literally doesn’t even try to soothe her, just places his hand on her shoulder.

“I feel so fucking stupid. I don’t even know why I said yes to go to this dance with him just so he can run around doing whatever the fuck he’s doing. I don’t even know him like that.” Annie holds her head in her hands, knowing damn well it isn’t Armin turning her into a crying mess.

“All I did was stand in the fucking corner while the ‘star quarterback’ Reiner Braun was having the time of his life.” Annie is just now finding things to be mad at, trying her hardest to avoid these feelings she can’t possibly be having right now. She knows she’s not mad at Reiner or even Armin, but that foreign ache in heart is trying to find someone to blame.

“Is it Reiner you’re upset about?” Bertholdt softly asks.

Annie doesn’t respond as she quietly cries into her hands.

“I get how you feel. I know me, you and Reiner haven’t been close friends since freshmen year but I really did miss when we were all close. Now all I talk to is Reiner. Sometimes it feels like I don’t even know Reiner.” Bertholdt mindlessly says, his thoughts drifting back to when it was just them three, unburdened by the possibility of becoming strangers, old stories to tell their future children about. He starts to ponder about the old days, when the three of them were still kids and had all the time for each other. Now, Reiner is being celebrated for the star athlete he is and the pasts of his childhood is outside, smoking fakedeep cigarettes and talking about their feelings. It’s gayer than Annie.

“But honestly,” he starts to confess, “I don’t think Reiner really knows me either. And Annie,” his eyes flicker to her, “i don’t think I even know you, Annie. We haven’t talked in a while.” Bertholdt said without thinking, the words slipping out as if they’ve been waiting for the perfect moment. Deep inside he knows they’re outgrowing each other; he knows that the versions of Reiner and Annie who would spend weekly nights at his house whenever their parents became too much to deal with are long gone. The versions of themselves who knew each others deepest secrets and the most embarrassing, the versions of themselves that they’ve only given permission to each other to see; the versions of themselves they’re not sure other people would ever get the pleasure to witness.

And yet, Annie and Reiner weren’t the only ones who’ve changed over the years, meek and timid Bertholdt has changed as well. And he at least has the courage to try and keep this lifelong friendship lifelong. He owes it not to just himself but to them. He knows what they have is special, a bond that transcends lifetimes and he wants to keep it that way.

“I mean the new and growing and developed Annie! I’d love to get to know new Annie!” Bertholdt frantically explains just in case Annie understood what he said the wrong way.

“It’s not Reiner, or even Armin, it’s Hitch.” Annie admits, her voice heavy trying to move past her throat, leaving a guttural admission; Annie hasn’t fully comprehended what Bertholdt was trying to say but it made her feel comfortable enough to show Bertholdt who she really is, what she’s realized tonight.

“Dreyse?”

“Yeah.” Annie sighs.

“Well what about Hitch-”

“I like girls, Bertholdt.” Annie finally spits it out. These foreign feelings that slowly crept up to her just from seeing Hitch Dreyse dance has manifested into this very moment, where she’s quite literally sobbing into the palms of her hands because she thinks it’s the worse thing in the world - to love a woman and to be loved by a woman. Tears only rush out once more once she realizes it feels so right, that it’s something she could actually dream about, something that’s so natural to her.

Bertholdt doesn’t know what to say. He isn’t really equipped to deal with situations like this. Now he’s searching up on Reddit how to react when your former friend comes out to you. But school Wi-Fi always sucks, and Reddit isn’t loading. So he says the next the best thing.

“I mean, I like girls too.” Bertholdt admits like it’s wrong for him to like women. He’s a bit shy about it as he bashfully rubs the back of his head thinking about a certain girl he’s been texting back and forth for the whole entirety of the dance he’s been outside.

Annie looks up at him, a little sick from the cigarette smell in the palm of her hand and her light eyebrows furrowed while her eyes widened in awe of Bertholdt’s awkwardness.

“You’re so brave Bertholdt.” Annie says sarcastically and chuckles softly, a light smile gracing her lips.

Bertholdt returns her smile, his nerves relieved as he suspected his friend felt better.

“Me and Reiner were gonna go get some burgers after this. You wanna join us? We can talk about girls together?” Bertholdt places his large hand behind his even bigger head, rubbing the back of his head bashfully.

“Please,” Annie doesn’t mean for it to sound desperate, but she’s just now realizing how hungry she is and she misses her two only friends.

Bertholdt’s lips curl into a small smile, subtly changing the subject just so Annie won’t feel too bad, “Yeah, now we’ll have to wait on Reiner’s fat ass, you know how he is.”

Annie scoffs, “don’t get me started, he was crowd surfing when I was in there. I’m not sure how they could even hold his fat ass up.”

Bertholdt lets out a calming laugh.

For a moment, they sit in a comfortable silence. The night air feels cooler now, less suffocating, full of hope and wonder similar to the morning air of a field trip.

“Thanks, Bertl,” Annie says suddenly, her voice calmer than he’s ever heard it.

He looks at her, surprised, “For what?”

She wants to say some corny shit like ‘for accepting her,’ but Annie has expressed herself far too much than she would like too tonight.

“For being here,” she says like it’s second nature, her gaze still fixed on those damned double doors. “and for staying outside with me while Reiner gets all the glory.”

Bertholdt looks back at up, “Yeah, well he’s deserved it.” He praised his best friend, compensating for calling him a fat ass a few minutes prior.

“At least we’re losers together.”

“Holy shit, is it fucking hot in there!” Reiner comes rushing out like he’s escaped hellfire, huffing and puffing as he put his hands on his knees.

“Finally, it took you long enough,” Bertholdt stands up, going up to Reiner to pat him on the back. “Come on, we’re starving.”

“We’re?” Reiner looks up to find the we’re in question and finds Annie awkwardly looking back at him, a little frightened from his sudden appearance and intrusion of her little moment of vulnerability. Reiner notices her eyes a little worn out, like she’s been crying. He doesn’t say anything. He’s just glad she was here with them.

“Oh hi Annie,” he cheeses at her, “you’re coming with us?” he questioned, hoping for a yes.

“Yup,” she gets off from the hood of Bertholdt’s dad’s car, and makes her way towards her designated seat she used to always sit in (behind the passenger seat). Reiner and Bertholdt follow her.

Bertholdt begins to play the static noise he calls music and Reiner tries to change it but Bertholdt keeps his foot down about how it’s his car, his music. Reiner offers to pay for gas and Bertholdt complies, but as soon as Reiner plays ‘Better Now’ by Post Malone, he immediately revokes his radio rights, even passing on free gas. Annie would rather listen to the static noise Bertholdt calls music than Top 40.

She casts one last look at the double doors from the back of her window, and she solemnly thinks about Hitch and her stupid smile, Hitch and her stupid lip combo, Hitch and her stupid dancing. Annie still doesn’t know what to do with all of her feelings. But for now, eating burgers with her two childhood best friends and talking about girls together will have to do.

And somehow, that’s more than enough.

“I don’t know man, I think I really have a shot with Historia. Even Ymir thinks so.” Reiner says to Bertholdt. He’s eating Annie’s leftover fries she never finishes as Bertholdt and Annie give each other a knowing look. A look that doesn’t know whether they should let Reiner know that Historia is a girl kisser.

Ymir and Bertholdt are a lot closer than some people think, and there’s only a few lesbians in this whole entire school for Annie to flock to so she keeps her options known.

“You’re so in there, dude.” Bertholdt chides Reiner, not wanting to out Historia while also attempting to encourage his best friend. He’ll ponder whether this is fucked up or not later when he’s about to go to sleep.

“What about you, with your little thing going on with that 53 year old man?”

Annie lets out an unexpected laugh that would originally be a huff through her nose in the last, not even letting Reiner know she thought he was funny at times. Reiner looks at her, a surprised smile on his face.

“Shut up,” Bertholdt retorts, “53 year old man or not, I’m still in it.” He jokes, looking down at the goodnight text from the girl he’s been talking to the whole night. His eyes glint in love, sending her a goodnight text back.

“Yeah, me too.” Annie says sheepishly, a bit embarrassed.

Reiner looks to her laughing a bit, smiling as this is the first time he’s ever seen Annie embarrassed. “Who’s the lucky boy?”he slightly laughed.

Bertholdt begins to laugh at the mention of a boy.

“Girl actually.” Annie admitted in an elated tone, contrasting her usual deadpan nature.

Bertholdt gave Annie a surprised look, a proud smile decorating his face as he was happy she was more comfortable about who she was.

“Oh? Then who’s the lucky girl?” Reiner has the same smile on his face, not even questioning Annie’s sexuality, like he knew this whole time.

Annie slightly laughs to herself, a big smile painted on her own face, her porcelain skin blushed and warm, “I…was lying, there is no girl,” Annie’s ears perk up at the sound of the door opening, Hitch Dreyse coming in with her own group of friends. That toothy grin is painted onto her face and her curls are starting to unravel out of her bun, her face is flushed from the bottle of booze someone had snuck in and from how much she danced tonight; “Yet.” she finished her sentence.

“Weirdo, weirdo, weirdo,” Reiner jokingly chants at Annie’s lie.

Annie flips him off and shakes her head unseriously, “Shut up dumbass.”

Bertholdt audibly laughs at Reiner and Annie’s bickering, shaking his head in disapproval.

“Oh god you’re so in there, Annie.” he joked, adding his own 2 cents to their banter, already knowing who she was talking about. Reiner and Annie laugh at Bertholdt’s comment.

He missed this; his childhood comes back to him in a burger joint after homecoming, he’s trying to make it poetic but all he can think is how much he’s missed this.

So he takes the long way home when he’s dropping off both Reiner and Annie. They’re in his dad’s old minivan and it smells like the time Reiner threw up in the back seat and all the windows are down. All 3 of them are sharing Reiner’s dying penjamin and Ribs by Lorde is playing. It’s one of those nights where summer creeps back into fall and it’s warm, and the wind feels good against her skin, and their old hometown of Liberio starts to look too good to leave. It’s the way everything starts to look like an oil painting when you’re looking out a car window; with the night sky being the canvas, emphasizing the street lights blending together in warm hues, and the familiar houses they’ve walked/drove past their whole entire lives combines into an array of colors that paints nostalgia. Annie can feel tears in her eyes and it makes her feel free and it’s pathetic but Hitch Dreyse would never feel pathetic and she looked so beautiful tonight and she loves her friends.

Her face begins to warm up as Bertholdt slowly pulled up to her house, driving slower than usual, not wanting this night to end.

“Thanks for the ride.” Annie smiled at both him and Reiner. She left the car, a bit awkward coming down from her high.

“Annie,” Bertholdt called out to her. She looks back, Bertholdt and Reiner’s eyes being red from the dying penjamin. She smiles, just knowing they’re gonna say the stupidest shit she’s ever heard.

“We’re proud of you, Annie.” Bertholdt told her. “Thank you for telling us that you’re gay.” Reiner puts his hands together and bows his head at her.

“Yeah, yeah.” She rolls her eyes at them. She began to walk away.

“Annie!” Bertholdt called out to her one more time, driving up so she can hear him.

Annie looks back once again.

“Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

Annie chuckles lightly, “Okay,” she waves him off, “now go home already freaks.”

Bertholdt and Reiner wave goodbye and Annie sees them drive off. She began to make her way towards her home, entering quietly. It’s close to 12 am and Annie’s glad she wore her dirtied sneakers instead of the “right shoes.” She’s a bit bloated from the burgers and the girl talk, her dress a bit tight and uncomfortable. She looks in the mirror as she got ready for bed, her eyes a bit red and a small smile still decorating her usual stoic features. She’s still a bit high off of Reiner’s pen and she takes in her features.

And for the first time, she feels pretty. Maybe it’s the way the light redness and slight hood in her eyes accentuates the blue in them, maybe it’s the way her aquiline nose hooks so elegantly, maybe it’s the way she feels tonight, maybe it’s the way Hitch smiles at her.

She feels like an old Disney movie protagonist and her arc of loving and accepting herself has come to an end. She’s in bed and she’s looking up at her ceiling, no longer feeling stuck, like she wants the ceiling to crash onto her, and she just thinks about going off to college, getting a job that would be enough, creating a life with Hitch, meeting new people and having weekly dinners with Reiner and Bertholdt. She thinks about adopting children, and loving them to the point where they’ll always feel like this and never have to feel shame.

And Annie takes the first step.

She pulls out her phone, enters the passcode, goes into the Instagram account she forgot about, and she goes to @/hitchdr3yse, the first account that popped up in her search history. She’ll feel embarrassed about it in the morning, but she quickly follows her, watches her story, pausing at a mirror selfie she took of her in her dress, and she almost swipes up to send this message but she decides against it, because than she’ll feel really embarrassed.

But she has no reason to be embarrassed. Because when she hastily sends Hitch a message: hey, I saw you at the dance and I wanted to say you looked really..” she wanted to say beautiful, gorgeous, the light of her life, but than she realizes it may be too creepy so she goes with “you looked really cool. I was wondering if you would wanna hangout sometime?” and when she hits send, she sits up quickly and puts her face warm with blush into her pillow, and screams.

But than she hears the joyful ping of Instagram, matching the smile on her lips when she reads hitch’s text message: ‘OMGGGG YESSSSS!!!!:D’

And Annie likes her message, and tells her she’ll see her in geometry on Monday. She takes a quick screenshot of her text with Hitch, and sends it to the group chat labeled, ‘zaaaa boyzzzzzzzz’ that hasn’t been active since the summer.

She sends the screenshot, and she feels a little shy when Reiner and Bertholdt read it. It instantly receives both hearts from both of them, and she breathes through her nose and lets out a chuckle from their responding text messages.

@/armoredbraun - YEAHHHHH GEDDIT ANNIE RAHHHH ‼️🤝

@/bhoover You’re so in there Annie 😭💪🏽💪🏽

hope you enjoyed!

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lil-gingerbread-queen · 5 months ago

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I'm so fucking pissed rn at usamericans, I need y'all to shut the fuck up forever. The queer artist Barbara Butch has received at ton of murder and rape threats because of the opening ceremony. The USAmericans on her social media, in response to a statement from her lawyer, are drowning her comments with "you deserve it for insulting christianity and the Gay Testament thing you pulled".

This is terrorist behavior. Someone did something about your religion you didn't like so you wish harm upon them, that's terrorism. When the terrorist attacks happened in France, my father, a christian, said to us that he feared the christian extremists more than anything. French people were killed for mocking muslim extremists, and my father told us to fear the christian extremists, who don't like not being the ones in the spotlight. And I knew he was not wrong. France is a country with a christian culture after all (a country being secular doesn't mean it erased centuries of influence), we know well how violent christianity can be.

You see, France is "the first daughter of the Church", because of its particular history with christianity. No other country has the same connection to christianity as France has. This is because catholicism and the Vatican were only capable to expand their power because of a deal made with Pepin Le Bref, the emperor Charlemagne's father. Long story short, the French monarchy was essential to the Church, the Church was essential to the French monarchy. And the French monarchy are oppressors, so the Church also is. So much blood was spilled in the name of the Church (the massacre of the Saint-Barthélemy). Missions, when the Church would send priests with knights to kill people who weren't christians "correctly" (missions aren't a modern thing, they existed before America. And that's why we hate them in France). If you criticize the Church, you would go to jail. We fought for the right to criticize and mock the Church, you cannot take that away from us.

Leonardo Da Vinci who painted La Cena was a gay man who used his queer lover as a model for religious figures.

Molière, famous french playwriter, mocked and criticized christianity.

French people beheaded statues of Christian figures during the Révolution of 1789.

Parisians executed Christian priests during the Commune of Paris. After killing civilians in masses, the French President build le Sacré-Coeur, a basilica to ask the christian god for forgiveness for the blood he spilled. Not the people, for who he had no mercy, but God. He was the last French President to speak about God in his speeches, because of how disgusted French people were.

The people are the right to criticize and mock religion, it's called the right to blaspheme. Especially the people who have suffered from it. But also, the people have the right to make reference to other artistic works. It's not "insulting" to do so.

It's our fucking country, our fucking culture, our fucking history, get the fuck out of it.

Especially when it was actually a reference to another painting, about the Greek gods.

#lgbtq+#queer #olympic games #paris olympic games #france #usa #usamericans shut the fuck up challenge (impossible)#also this is my opinion about every religion people have the right to mock it and criticize it or reference arts from it #there's a different between this and being hateful toward religious folks #decades of dealign with the ricains giving their unsolicited opinions about my country I'm losing it #I'm so mad like wtf wtf wtf how dare you speak to her like this how dare you tell us what to do about christianity #also for every fucking usamericans who criticized secularism in France: take care of your fucking extremists instead of being a bitch #if a French acts like this they should be ashamed I would personnaly fight them physically #CENTURIES OF OPPRESSION SHUT THE FUCK UP #Victor Hugo is rolling in his grave #François Ier didn't kiss Leonard Da Vinci on his forehead for y'all to act this intitled about his gay painting #it's literally the painting with a “trans” apostle made by a gay man wtf are you talking about #uncultured ignorant mf

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duckprintspress · 2 years ago

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“Aim For The Heart” Creator Spotlight: Author Nova Mason and Artist Amalia Zeichnerin

We are 2/3rds of the way through our crowdfunding campaign for Aim For The Heart: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s “The Three Musketeers” – only 10 days left (we end at 10 AM on July 15th!), and we’re still $600 away from our goal! This is a great opportunity to support a small, queer-owned business with its roots in fandom, as we write and art and publish completely legal fanworks! HOW COOL IS THAT?

If you want to learn more about Duck Prints Press, our owner @unforth, our staff, and our contributors, you should visit our webpage.

If you want to learn more about this book and the people involved in it, you should visit our Kickstarter campaign page.

And, if you want to learn about today’s two awesome, spotlighted contributors, Nova Mason and Amalia Zeichnerin, you should read on…

Three of Hearts by Amalia Zeichnerin

About the Artist: Amalia Zeichnerin (she/her) lives in Hamburg, Germany. She is a disabled queer woman with a chronic illness and lives in a polyam polycule. Amalia mostly writes original fiction (SFF, cosy Victorian mysteries, Queer Romance) in German and has also one English Star Wars fan fiction on AO3, with one of her favorite shippings, StormPilot. Amalia also likes to draw and paint, especially fantasy world maps, character portraits, and sometimes also fanart. Amalia’s hobbies include pen-and-paper RPG and LARPing; these also have inspired some of her writing and artworks.

Link: Linktree

Paris-ish by Nova Mason

About the Author: Nova Mason spent a significant portion of her childhood fantasizing about dragons, spaceships, and other worlds. She is now, allegedly, a grown-up, with two kids, and more varied interests. Dragons, spaceships, and other worlds are still pretty high in the list, though.

Story Teaser:

D’Artagnan stared at the agenda in his hands and shifted against the uncomfortable metal folding chair. Somehow, it didn’t matter when they showed up to the HOA meetings; he and his friends always missed out on the good chairs.

The treasurer, Richelieu, was at that moment scowling and preaching about the evils of outdoor pests. He implored the members of the Paris Neighborhood Homeowner’s Association to ensure that they kept their trash under lock and key until at least 8 p.m. the night before trash pickup, as per the bylaws. D’Artagnan had to stifle a chuckle every time Richelieu said the word “Paris,” halfway between the English pronunciation and a strange faux-French accent. There was nothing Parisian about the neighborhood other than its name and that the ladies’ garden club wore berets and scarves to the annual summer cookout.

Tags: alternate universe, anxiety, break-up, character has a different gender than in the source material, character has a physical disability, getting together, m/m, modern, past tense, politics, pov third person limited

#duck prints press #aim for the heart #nova mason #kickstarter #amalia zeichnerin

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my18thcenturysource · 4 years ago

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June is Pride month, so my best friend, her girlfriend and I will be watching LGBTQIA+ period films!

Our first film was Colette.

Keira Knightley plays the iconic French writer, actress, journalist, and overall legend Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, the woman behind Gigi, Chéri, and the Claudine books.

Now, you can only love or hate Knightley in period films, I personally love her, but I understand the opinion that some period costumes look more spectacular on fuller women (like Scarlett Johansson in Girl With A Pearl Earring or The Other Boleyn Girl), but I think Keira looks as beautiful as always, and this is a reminder that in this blog we do not have opinions about people's bodies.

What is the film about? Gabrielle is a country girl that marries a Parisian writer (Willy) and eventually discovers that she's quite a writer. She starts writing novels for him and they kind-of work as a team, but he's pretty much shit and has other female lovers, and then so does she, but both of them are ok with that (such a very modern couple XD). Until he ruins it and she leaves him to start her life with her new love Missy, and a new career on the stage.

Where and when is it set? Late 19th century and early 20th century France.

Is it based in real life? Yes. You all should read about Colette because this eccentric woman did everything and had quite a life. You can read a little bit more about the real people pictured in the film here. Now, a few photos of her, Willy, Missy, and her dog Toby Chien (the best boy):

My favourite bit? Definitely the relationship between Colette and herself, learning what she wants, what she likes, and who she is. Along with that, we re shown the different kinds of love that she has for her partners. Also: the Claudine look with the curly bob hair. ✨ perfection ✨

What about the costumes? I LOVE the costumes in this film, and I think they are quite an inspiration for anyone in love with Edwardian/belle epoque fashion: from the "simple" dresses she wears in the countryside, to the shirtwaist and skirt combos, the suits with masculine nods, THE actual masculine suit, and of course the LEGENDARY Claudine schoolgirl black dress. For a more feminine aesthetic we have the costumes worn by Eleanor Tomlinson as Georgie, and on the other extreme we have Denisse Gough as Missy for inspiration for the masc presenting.

Final Thoughts: All characters left the three of us with something to think about: Colette made us want to enjoy what we like and whaat we wanna do (wanna go turn into a dancer? go do it! You go Glen Coco!), Willy reminds us of toxic masculinity and how it just sucks, and Missy made us think about who we are comfortable with and to be on the outside who we are in the inside.

Fun Fact: There are two trans actors in this film in roles that are not trans. Jake Graf plays playwright Gaston de Caillavet, and Rebecca Root plays Rachilde. You can read a little bit about both of them here.

Colette, 2018

Director: Wash Westmoreland

Main Cast: Keira Knightley, Dominic West, Denise Gough, Eleanor Tomlinson.

Cinematography: Giles Nuttgens

Art Direction: Renátó Cseh

Costume Design: Andrea Flesch

So, what other queer period films do you think we should watch? We might watch next El Baile de los 41, or Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu.

#june #pride #pride month #queer films #queer period drama #period film #edwardian #belle epoque #late 19th century #early 20th century #colette #keira knightley #dominic west #denise gough #eleanor tomlinson #costume design #andrea flesch

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qqueenofhades · 5 years ago

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I want to hear about gay knights. Please.

Ahaha. So this is me finally getting, post-holiday, to the subject that was immediately clamoured for, when I volunteered to discuss the historical accuracy of gay knights if someone requested it. It reminds me somewhat of when my venerable colleague @oldshrewsburyian volunteered to discuss lesbian nuns, and was immediately deluged by requests to do just that. In my opinion, gay knights and lesbian nuns are the mlm/wlw solidarity of the Middle Ages, even if the tedious constructionists would like to remind us that we can’t exactly use those terms for them. It also forces us to consider the construction of modern heterosexuality, our erroneous notions of it as hegemonically transhistorical, and the fact that behaviour we would consider “queer” (and therefore implicitly outside mainstream society) was not just mainstream, but central, valorized, and crucial to constructions of medieval manhood, if not without existential anxieties of its own. Because medieval societies were often organized around the chivalric class, i.e. the king and his knights, his ability to make war, and the cultural prestige and homosocial bonds of his retinue, if you were a knight, you were (increasingly as the medieval era went on) probably a person of some status. You had a consequential role to play in this world, and your identity was the subject of legal, literary, cultural, social, religious, and other influences. And a lot of that was also, let’s face it, what the 21st century would consider Kinda Gay.

The central bond in society, the glue that made it work, was the relationships between soldiers, battlefield brotherhoods, and the intense, self-sacrifical love for the other that is familiar to anyone who has ever watched a war movie, and dates back (in explicitly gay form, at least) to the Sacred Band of Thebes. Medieval society had a careful and contested interaction with this ideal and this kind of relationship between men. Because they needed it for the successful prosecution of military ventures, they held it up as the best kind of love, to which the love of a woman could never entirely aspire, but that also ran the risk of the possibility of it turning (homo)sexual. Same-sex sexual activity was well-known in the Middle Ages, the end, full stop. The use of penitentials, or confessors’ handbooks, as sources for views or practices of queer sexual behaviour has been criticised (you will swiftly find that almost EVERYTHING used as a source for queer history is criticised, shockingly), but there remains the fact that Burchard of Worms’ 11th-century Decretum, a vast compilation of canon law, mentions same-sex behaviour among its list of sins, but assigns it a comparatively light penance. (I don’t have the actual passage handy, but it’s a certain amount of days of fasting on bread and water.) It assigns much heavier penalties for Burchard’s main concern, which was sorcery and the practice of un-Christian beliefs, rituals, or other persistent holdovers from paganism. This is not to say that homosexuality was accepted, per se, but it was known about, it must have happened enough for priests to list in their handbooks of sins, and it wasn’t The End of The World. Frankly, I am tired of having to argue that queer people existed and engaged in queer activity in the Middle Ages (not directed at you, but in general). Of course they did. Obviously they did. Moving on!

Anyway. Returning to gay knights specifically, the fact remained that if you encouraged two dudes to love each other beyond all other bonds, they might, you know, actually bang. This was worrisome, especially in the twelfth century, as explored by Matthew Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’ and Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179-214 and 273-86. I have written a couple papers (in the ever-tedious process of one day being turned into journal articles) on the subject of the Extremely Queer Richard the Lionheart, some material of which can be found in my tag for him. Richard’s queerness has been argued over for a long time, we all throw rotten banana peels at John Gillingham who took it upon himself to deny, ignore, or minimize all the evidence, but anyway. Richard was a very masculine and powerful man and formidably talented soldier who could not be reduced to the stereotype of the effeminate, weak, or impotent sodomite, and the fact that he was a prince, a duke, and a king was probably why he was repeatedly able to get away with it. But he wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t the only one. He was very much part of his culture and time, even if he kept running into ecclesiastical reprisals for it. It happened. If you want a published discussion that covers some of my points (though not all of them), there is William E. Burgwinkle, ‘The Curious Case of Richard the Lionheart’, in Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 73–85. Also on the overall topic, Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Peter the Chanter, a Parisian cleric, also wrote De vitio sodomitico, a chapter of his Verbum abbreviatum, fulminating against “men with men, women with women [masculi cum masculis […] mulieres cum mulieribus]” which apparently happened far too often for his liking in twelfth-century Paris (along with cross-dressing and other genderqueer behaviour; the Latin version of this can be found in ‘Verbum Abbreviatum: De vitio sodomitico’ in Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: 1855), vol. 205, pp. 333–35). Moving into the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries, this bond only grew in importance, and involved a new kind of anxiety. Richard Zeikowitz’s book, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), explores this discourse in detail, and points out that the intensely homoerotic element of chivalry was deeply embedded in medieval culture – and that this was something that was not queer, i.e. unusual, to them. It is modern audiences who see this behaviour as somehow contravening our expected stereotypes of medieval knights as Ultra Manly No Homo Men. When we label this “medieval queerness,” we are also making a judgment about our own expectations, and the way in which we ourselves have normalized one narrow and rigid view of masculinity.

England then had two queer kings in the 14th century, Edward II and Richard II, both of whom ended up deposed. These were for other political reasons, but their queerness was not irrelevant to assessments of their character and the reactions of their contemporaries. Sylvia Federico (‘Queer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century England’, Medium Aevum 79 (2010), 25–46) has studied the corpus of queer-coded historical writing around Richard, and noted that while the Lancastrian propaganda postdating the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399 obviously had an intent to cast his predecessor in as unfit a light as possible, the accusations of queerness started during Richard’s reign, “well before any real practical design on the throne […] and well before the famous lapse into tyranny that characterized the reign’s last few years. In poems and chronicles produced from the mid-1380s to the early 1390s, and in language that is highly charged with homophobic references, Richard II is marked as unfit to rule”. E. Amanda McVitty (‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77) examined how the treason trials of high-status individuals centred on a symbolic deconstruction of his chivalric manhood, demoting and exiling him from the intricate homosocial networks that governed the creation and performance of medieval masculinity.

This appears to have been a fairly extensive phenomenon, and one not confined to the geopolitical space of England. Henric Bagerius and Christine Ekholst (‘Kings and Favourites: Politics and Sexuality in Late Medieval Europe’, Journal of Medieval History 43 (2017), 298–319) traced the use of ‘discursive sodomy’ as a rhetorical tool employed against five late medieval monarchs, including Richard II and his great-grandfather Edward II, John II and Henry IV of Castile, and Magnus Eriksson of Sweden. In all cases, the ruler in question was viewed as emotionally and possibly sexually dependent on another man, subject to his evil counsels and treacherous wiles, and this reflected a communal anxiety that the body of the king himself – and thus the body politic – had been unacceptably queered. Nonetheless, as a divinely anointed figure and the head of state, the accusations of gender displacement or suspected sodomy could not be placed directly on the king, and were instead deflected onto the favourites themselves, generally characterised as greedy, grasping men of ignoble birth, who subverted both social and sexual order by their domination of the supposedly passive king.

None of this polemic produced by hostile sources can be read as direct confirmation of the private and physical actions of the kings behind closed doors, but in a sense, this is immaterial. The intimate lives of presumably heterosexual individuals are constructed on the same standards of evidence and to much greater certainty. In other words, queerness and queer/gay favourites could not have functioned as a textual metaphor or charged accusation if there was not some understanding of it as a lived behaviour. After all, if the practice did not physically exist or was not considered as a potential reality, there could have been no anxieties around the possibility of its improper prosecution.

This leads us nicely into the deeply vexed question of adelphopoiesis, or the “brother-making” ceremony argued by some, including John Boswell, as a medieval form of gay marriage. (Boswell, who died of AIDS in 1994, published the landmark Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality in 1980, and among other things, controversially argued that the medieval Catholic church was a vehicle for social acceptance of gay people.) Boswell’s critics have fiercely attacked this stance, claiming that the ceremony was only intended to join two men together in a celibate sibling-like relationship. A Straight Historian who participated in a modern version of the ceremony in 1985 actually argued that since she had no sexual inclinations or motives in taking part, clearly it was never used for that purpose by medieval men either. (Pause for sighing.)

The problem is: we can’t argue intentions or private actions either way. We can understand what the idealized and legal designation for the ceremony was intended to be, but we cannot then outrageously claim that every historical individual who took part in it did so for the party line reason. Maybe medieval men who joined together in brother-making ceremonies did live a celibate and saintly life (this would not be surprising). It seems ludicrous to argue, however, that none of them were romantically in love with each other, or that they never ever ever had sex, because surprise, formulaic documents and institutional guidelines cannot tell us anything about the actions of real individuals making complex choices. Even if this was not always a homosexual institution (and once again with the dangerous practice of equivocating queerness with explicitly practiced and “provable” sexual behaviour), it was beyond all reasonable doubt a homoromantic one, and one sanctioned and organised according to well-known medieval conventions, desires (for two men to live together and love each other above all) and anxieties (that they might then have sex).

The medieval men who took a ‘brother’ would probably not have seen it as a marriage, or as the kind of household formation or social contract implied in a heterosexual union, but as we have also discussed, the definition of marriage in the Middle Ages was under constant contestation anyway. The church was constantly anxious about knights: their violence, their (oftentimes) lack of religiosity, their proclivity for tournaments, swearing, drinking, and other immoral behaviour, the possibility of them having sexual affairs with each other and/or with women (though Andreas Capellanus, in De amore, wrote an entire spectacularly misogynistic handbook about how to have the right kind of love affair with a woman and dismissed same-sex relationships in one sentence as gross and unworthy, so he was clearly the No Homo Bro Knight of his day). So, as this has gotten long: gay knights were basically one of the central social, religious, and cultural concerns of the entire Middle Ages, due to their position in society, their necessity in a warlike culture, the social influence of chivalry and their tendency to bad behaviour, their perceived influence over the king (who they may also have given their Gay Cooties), their disregard of the church’s teachings, and the ever-present possibility that their love wasn’t celibate. So yes. Gay knights: Hella Historically Accurate.

The end.

#history #medieval history #queer history #gay knights #long post #i have a lot more to say but yes #the old guard meta #for reference #though this post was originally written in december 2019 #anonymous #ask

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antoinecombeferre · 5 years ago

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I should be asleep and absolutely no one asked BUT

University AUs where th Amis are a school club started by The Boys(tm) makes infinatly more sense at a small or rural american university/community college than at a big college anywhere but EXSPCIALLY in Paris.

Every political group you could imagine them being exsists in Paris and probably at every Parisian university. Parisian universities but also Paris in hereal has a very long history of both liberal and leftist political groups.

The Amis are based off the Liberal groups in Paris at the time. Karl Max wrote The Communist Manifesto for a Parisian Group. Multiple Emigre's who would end up building the Soviet Union had fled Imperial Russia to Paris, Inessa Armand who would later become BFFs with Lenin was one of them. (I know the USSR wasnt actually a leftist government, but all the founders were very active in the leftist scene prior to 1917)

Most American Universities have a branch of the College Democrats there's no need for another Liberal club on campus.

More over every cause that The Boys might want to take on (homelessness, food shortages, reproductive rights, queerness, and issues regarding being a person of color) probably has a club already.

If they are a leftist group there's probably more room for them to start a group but depending on where they are there might not be a need for them.

Basically what I am trying to say is, I love modern AUs but this rubs me the wrong way for the same reason Enjolras's fanon characterization often runs me the wrong way. Hes written as someone who comes in and fixes everyone's problems with out talking to him bc he knows best. And in this case he's often disregarding the fact that there is already an institution in place that cares about what hes doing.

Fanon Enjolras to me often displays the worst of both leftism and liberalism (okay all of liberalism is the worst but shhh) hes, usually, a white guy who comes in and starts doing things his way amd because he believes hes right he doesn't stop to ask anyone else. I hate it.

Even Canon Enjolras is guilty of this. How can he claim to represent what is best for Paris when all but one of the memebers of his group are students. More people in Paris at the time were not university students than they were and yet-

TL;DR stop having Enj and Ferre start up university clubs unless they're at like the University of Wyomimg or something. It turns Enjolras and Combeferre into annoying jackasses that think they know better than everyone else

#enjolras #combeferre #ooc

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anneesfollesrpg · 4 years ago

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「READ ALL ABOUT IT!」

Word on the street is Années Folles is about to welcome a swath of new skeletons - and here’s the scoop! Below the cut, you’ll find a shortlist of our top twelve notions for new muses, as narrowed down by our voters. It was close! Once you’ve taken a look-see, members and passers-by alike, send us your TOP FIVE! That’s right, we’d love to hear from you! Consider the wondrous possibilities, then drop an ask with your favourite five in our eager inbox.

We do hope you’ve all had a fabulous Friday, and if you have any questions at all, about our application, our masterlist, or whatever else comes to mind, please don’t hesitate to inquire!

Sincerely yours, avec nos meilleures salutations… Admins Amy & Gray

And without further ado - our shortlist!

✺ THE ACTOR-MANAGER. performer Since childhood, you’ve barely gone a day without being under a spotlight. Leading a company through six plays a week certainly isn’t everyone’s idea of a worthwhile living; you, though, couldn’t ask for anything better. You’ve found real success in the rep system. It isn’t all reverence and professionalism, however - everyone likes having their ego fed, you as much as anyone. But where’s the harm in that if the audiences come rushing back night after night? And they do, just to see you. You’re a star, and you’ll make sure everyone damn well knows it, or else.

✺ THE BOOKWORM. public Naive, sheltered, dull. To most people, your quiet upbringing seems absolutely dreadful. But you managed, chiefly with the help of stories. You dove into all kinds of fantastic tales in your youth, only surfacing to eat, drink, or sleep when absolutely necessary. It’s these two things - a devotion to words and sheer force of will, that have landed you at the top of your classes at the Sorbonne, and goodness, are you thrilled. The insularity of the ivory tower suits you perfectly, and you’re determined to climb to the top. But now that you’re in Paris, will you take the opportunity to see what other stunning places your brain could take you, or choose to stay in your lane?

✺ THE BRUISER. rogue You knew it wouldn’t be easy to make it to the top of your game, but you’ve always been so sure you have what it takes, and nobody will ever convince you otherwise. You just need your shot, that’s all. As quick as one of your near-legendary jabs, as spectacular as your almost-infamous haymakers. You’re so, so close. And if it takes a few unsavory friends, a couple dark deeds, to go all the way… you’re willing. Or, at least, you thought you were. Sometimes, as you wrap your swollen knuckles for the next round, you can’t help but wonder if you’re getting in too deep. But the only way out is through, you figure. As true in life as in the ring. Anyway, there’s no backing out now. Is there?

✺ THE CONSERVATOR. public Art might not have been your first love, but your adoration for creativity has turned out to be a lifelong, vibrant affair. You came to Paris to be a part of all that, smiling giddily through your academy classes and plein air projects. It was in the halls of the Louvre that you found your calling, though. Winding through the wings, you saw more than inspiration on the walls and plinths. Every neglected artifact left you aching, every faded painting cut you to the quick. These masterworks needed caring for, the way you cared. With heart and soul. You’ve been looking after the museum’s pieces ever since, trying to mend what you can, to create a collection that honours the fullness of human expression, as you understand it. As you love it. As you hope others will, for generations.

✺ THE DEBUTANTE. psociety New things are more normal to you than the heady combination of champagne and small-talk – oh, and the admiring gazes of others, of course. The jewel of the family, your light, almost dotty demeanor has left all who meet you intoxicated with your charisma. Underneath the giggles and sweetness, however, you possess a real head for human nature and a ferocious determination to get what you want. Despite your youth, you know you’re destined for great things –and you’re ready to charm, cajole, and manipulate whoever you have to in order to achieve those goals.

✺ THE DREAMER. public The night skies over gay Paris aren’t the only sight full of stars - so’s your bar! Every night, you mix drinks and swap gossip with the Bal’s fabulous patrons, pouring champagne for kings and queens, basking giddily in the glow of the only celebrities you much care to mind. They’re your family - and your inspiration. Ever since you discovered the city’s bright, queer corners, you’ve known your destiny. You’re meant to be under the stagelights, like your idols: perfectly poised as the curtain rises, ready to face your adoring fans. In the meantime, being close enough to pass their glasses and pick up their tricks is almost enough. You just have to work up the nerve to try. You’ll get there. Someday.

✺ THE EMCEE. performer By night, you conduct the revels of the Bal with scintillating style, a master of ceremonies non-pareil. By day, you manage a host of well-made investments with gracious aplomb and entrepreneurial acuity. You’ve built something, in Paris; under your sheltering wings, your community doesn’t merely survive, but thrives, joyful and growing. These days, you’re popular far beyond your milieu - a pillar of the city, patron and artist all at once. And you throw a hell of a party, of course.

✺ THE NEWSIE. public Stories are powerful things; few appreciate that fact so much as you, for stories are your passion, and your bread and butter besides. A staple of some of the finest magazines and papers in the city, you’re out at all hours - chasing leads, asking quick, clever questions, and taking in every tale the City of Lights has to offer, from the strange to the everyday, whispered in the salons of the spectacularly wealthy, laughed about on the humblest street corners, scrounged from every end of town. Meaning you’re never short of work, for sure!

✺ THE PRETENDER. rogue Mother Russia was never kind, and you weren’t at all confident that the so-called glorious revolution would change that. So you took what you could carry - and you chose well, picking gems from the ruins of the aristocracy you once served - and ran. Sure, maybe you’re a pessimist, but at least you’re alive to tell the tale. Or, a tale, anyway. It’s become such a spectacular story, growing ever grander with each recitation, thrilling your new, unlikely friends, here in the highest echelons of Parisian society. None of whom seem to have noticed the holes in your plot, the slip-ups you pass off as the lingering effects of shock and melancholy. The truth is, you stumbled into a new life, a sweet life - someone else’s life, paid for with their own prize jewels and your silver tongue. Can you keep the ruse going, or will your secrets cost you everything?

✺ THE PROFESSOR. society When people look at you, the images that most often spring to mind are those of steadiness and reliability. In your years within the walls of the Sorbonne, you’ve had a life that engenders envy. A life entirely dedicated to scholastic endeavour has been more than adequate for you, and now, you’re ready to reap some of the benefits. You have some time on your hands and need a new research project. Perhaps some of the colorful characters around the city that you hear whispered about could help you. They make your colleagues shiver, these bohemians, but something about that intrigues as well as terrifies you.

✺ THE RETAINER. public Unlike all the shining lights in Paris these days, your greatest skill isn’t your charm, or star quality, but the very opposite; for years now, you’ve blended expertly into the wallpaper at every society event, your razor-sharp attention to detail meaning that your employers’ dinner, or their perfect outfit, or much-needed glass of wine appear as if by magic , almost before they’ve even thought of any such needs, wants, and whims for themselves. Proud as you are of your professionalism, lately you’ve been feeling different. Antsy. Exasperated. Bitter. So many years of listening on the outside of the conversations of the rich and famous. You almost want to do something about it. But what?

✺ THE VISIONARY. artist More than half of the hottest houses in this town owe their beauty to your brilliance, if you do say so yourself. Angularity, glitz, and above all modernity are what wake you up in the morning. Lately, Paris seems like a wonderful place to be waking up to. Every week, there’s a new trend around the corner - some element of theatrical design transmitted into the home, or a new, clever convenience the public is desperate to have. It’s a little scary - you’d hate to fall even a little bit behind. But, God, is it intoxicating too. The world is looking more modern than ever, and the people are clamouring to embrace the mechanized, the sleek, and the new, in seemingly every form. Your job is simple. Keep dreaming, keep creating, and keep ahead of the curve.

Don't forget to toss your top five along! We can't wait to stack up the votes.

#skeleton rp #period rp #original rp #lsrp #new rp #af.admin

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waters-and-the-wilde · 5 years ago

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vivez (you have 1 life let it Be Gay)

woo okay Fools and Angels stalled out a bit because all the later stuff wants to happen but the in between stuff still won't get its shit together and the later stuff is relying on that for at least some semblance of coherence (also i went on a road trip and went to a wedding and ran away to a farm on the west coast so it was a busy month)

so i'm going to hash around my dumb gay fic headcanons to get back in the swing of things pls enjoy

first of all, i recognize that canon Percy and Marguerite are textbook dumb heteros who just need to talk to each other and fuck knows why i like them so much, but i also used to think queer people were just better at that sort of thing (bc you know I thought that the self-knowledge and courage and ability to see through dumb cisheteronormative expectations that came with the territory would give one an edge) and honestly it's been a bit of a trip to constantly discover the extent to which we're all complete disasters

anyway all this to say, Percy and Marguerite are a matched set of distinguished-disaster bisexuals and peak mlm/wlw solidarity. they both went to boarding school and Mrgt was in theatre so like. they Know what they're about.

(side note back in the day i wanted Scarlet Pimpernel but Lesbians nd it was gonna be Pimpernels and Violets w/ Gwendolyn Christie for Percy and Gugu Mbatha-Raw for Mrgt.)

but honestly while we're here with my old headcanons I rly want POC Mrgt and Armand especially knowing what I know now about Alex Dumas and how many multi-racial folks from Haiti were knocking around Parisian society being wealthy and fabulous

(whole other set of reasons to stand back and sip champagne while letting Crowley loose on Thomas Jefferson)

this adds some whole other considerations that I would need to research mostly because of England being weird and whether Percy and Mrgt could have gotten married in the first place. but like if you were black, France basically was the only promise for freedom. you didn't have other places to go. how much more weight does that lend to Mrgt's decision to condemn de St. Cyr? being willing to make that call because the idea of royalist invasion and having that first lick of freedom snatched away is intolerable? having to struggle with watching those real possibilities get corrupted and torn away but really truly knowing what it was worth to begin with and never quite knowing when to break away from it?

and Armand, who's all in for the same reason, Armand who's smart and passionate and idealistic who gets to help shape the new government only to realize it's becoming a monster and swallowing him up while he's stuck on the inside

whoops i made myself sad

anyway i can have trans guy Sir Percy, as a treat. he's gottn away with it bc he was like four years old and wanted to be a knight and his father needed an heir and he said 'well why can't I be a boy? I want to be a boy I want to be Sir Percival' and his mother was sick and old Algernon Blakeney thought bout it and he went and fudged some things and bribed some nurses and raised bby Percy with private tutors, and Percy managed to make it through boarding school by virtue of being six foot odd of gorgeousness and good at getting people to see what he wants them to see so i guess that makes him bisexual in both the archaic and the modern sense

due to Percy's charisma stats he became the center of the Eton queer penguin huddle, starting with Andrew Foulkes when he realized he wasn't terribly interested in women except that he just thinks they're neat (thought maybe he was gay before realizing men weren't really his thing either, aromantic, now platonically devoted to Percy and the league and Marguerite)

Tony Dewhurst had an entire blazing crush on Percy that eventually settled into a platonic devotion, (okay but have you seen 80s Tony Dewhurst and the way he looks at Percy? it’s like he was taking lessons in Gay Babey from Aziraphale) now in a close relationship with his 'valet' (actually a bf from France who they rescued nd is now in England disguised as Dewhurst's valet so they can be close w/o raising eyebrows)

half the league is their Eton queer penguin huddle tbh, hence the sense of discretion and willingness to risk danger bc life already be like that

fuck it they're all queer except Armand, i'm not sorry and i do make the rules

poor Chauvelin, repressed disaster bisexual, loses half his braincells in Sir Percy's presence because the man's so goddamn infuriatingly attractive and he doesn't know how to process it except as pure loathing and contempt for his enemy and rival, and while we're on the subject, Crowley's slinkiness and conflicting gender cues and background noise aura of temptation also make him feel an awful lot of things he doesn't want to look at too closely, and while we're on the subject, so does Mrgt in a soldier's uniform

(it doesn't help that like queerness was, if acknowledged, thought of as a vice of the aristos in France whereas England's molly community skewed more middle class, and Chauvelin was a marquis' son who's trying desperately to fit in and prove his loyalty to the Republic and Max Robespierre's purity culture so that's a whole extra layer, boy he and Aziraphale need to have a talk)

baby lesbian Suzanne de Tournay had an entire blazing crush on Mrgt but she was a few years older so it was more of a senpai notice me thing. genderfluid awakening from that time she got to go around in disguise as a soldier. marriage of convenience with Sir Andrew? that way Maman approves and isn't constantly overseeing her and they can both hang out with Mrgt on the regular who can introduce her to all the London debutantes. ya girl is french she doesn't give a heck she's gonna be mistress to half the unhappily-married women in London whose husbands have bad teeth

Armand is... straight. it happens. however instead of being the token dumb hetero, Armand is not only a good bro and ally but he's actually pretty emotionally astute, he's just not a schemes-and-layers thinker like literally all the others, and he's reasonably in touch wth his feelings and acts on them which just gets him in a lot of trouble with 'rational' society and furthermore he's the one who reminds people to actually talk instead of playing mind games and that friends is why Armand has the brain cell

the song Killer Queen is heavily based on Marguerite and Mme de Serpens bc of Freddie Mrc hearing Crowley ramble about his time in France thank u for coming to my ted talk

#fools and angels #good omens #scarlet pimpernel #fanfic #where the fuck are my gender tags #queer as in i love you

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naomisalman · 7 years ago

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So I went down into the Catacombs of Paris the other day

Ever heard of the catacombs? You know, that insane anthill-like network of galleries, five stories deep underneath Paris, wayyy under the subway and sewers, with absolutely zero phone coverage? The legal part that you can visit is a mile-long route.

That’s roughly 0,5% of the total surface.

Here is a fraction of the actual map! Don’t get lost!

People often think of bones and skulls when it comes to the catacombs, and while the galleries were originally dug to get rid of the six million bodies piling up in the Parisian cemeteries, most of them are actually remnants of quarries that got consolidated as the city expanded. (Y’know, to avoid such unpleasantries as buildings outright sinking into the ground.) So now we’re left with thousands and thousand of unsupervised square miles. People do weird stuff down there. You’ll see.

To descend into the catacombs, you need 1) equipment and supplies, 2) a guide, and 3) your ID. Why that last one, you ask? Because going down is ILLEGAL, CHANTELLE. Parisian cops will fine everything that moves. Also, if you die down there, it’ll make it easier to put a name on your corpse. Fun times!

My friend Latex was our guide this time around. She and her gf Red had recently gotten engaged, so they were super giddy and cute. As for me, I was giddy and sorta nervous. I was wearing a sports bra, some very ugly hiking shorts, and my shittiest sneakers. My backpack was crammed full of water bottles, energy bars, and various light sources. I was ready.

Part 1: Getting There

There are many, many illegal entrances to the catacombs, but some of them are easier to access than others. To get to Latex’ entrance of choice, we first had to get down onto some abandoned train tracks.

We followed them for quite some time. You can see some modern buildings up there, where people live, which means they can totally see people trekking down the old steam train tracks. That’s illegal too, but not very, so it’s not like anybody cares. (Except for the Parisian cops, who will, again, fine everything that moves.)

After a while, it all got very Spirited Away-y.

It was a super hot day. We were actually looking forward to some nice cold entombed air. Fun fact about the catacombs: it’s always the same temperature down there. Nothing moves much - there are no rats, no mold, very little bacterial life. Almost everything is dead. So it feels fresh in summer, and warm in winter.

After another bit of walking, we finally arrived at a tunnel.

Yeah. It was a super long tunnel. We had to turn on our headlamps not ten meters in - that’s how dark it was. It was full of graffiti and garbage, and already much colder than the proper outside.

I didn’t take a pic of the actual entrance because I don’t wanna give away all of Latex’ secrets. Just know that it was somewhere in there, and very narrow. As in, shove-your-backpack-inside-and-then-army-crawl-into-the-hole narrow. Your belly touched the ground while your back scraped the ceiling. That kind of narrow.

The Parisian ground is mostly limestone and clay, so I popped out on the other side with nice streaks of clear dust all over me. Red handed me my bag, Latex dropped in, and there! Just three gal pals, queering it up on a death hike! A recipe for a very gay time! We were in.

Part 1 • Part 2 • Part 3

#salman speaks #salman in the deep #underground culture #underground culture part 1 #catacombs #paris

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thelastlesbean · 7 years ago

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Max’s (Super Gay) Comic Rec

Cause we all need a lil more gay in our lives lets be real.

(R stands for Rating. What do u mean this is not a legit rating system? You’re not a legit rating system)

(AL stands for Angst Level 1 being (almost) no angst, 5 being very fucking angsty)

LGBT+

Les Normaux by JJ & AI ( @lesnormaux ) | R: 12.5/10 | AL: 1.5 Follow the lives of a bunch of supernatural beings living in Paris Read for: INCREDIBLE ART INCREDIBLE CHARACTERS INCREDIBLE STORIES INCREDIBLE EVERYTHING basically read this if you’re having a bad day u will not regret

Griefer Belt by Kales ( @grieferbeltcomic ) | R: 12.5/10 | AL: 3 A bunch of queer contract killers… what could go wrong? Read for: A+ art, A+ artist, A+ story, A+ characters, A+ anything

Green & Gold by Lisadorina | R: 13/10 | AL: 2 A story about teenagers at a German boarding school. Read for: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ART I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE IN A COMIC OKAY & also the story is just really really really great

Sharp Zero by Robotsharks ( @robotsharks ) | R: 13/10 | AL: 3.5 A superhero action comedy. The main character dies but it doesn’t end there... Read for: *grabs ur face* okay listen LISTEN THIS Story IS SO GooD OKAY JUST Read AND WeEP + The Art??? THE ATR IS BEAUTIFUL

Countdown to Countdown by Vel ( @velocesmells ) | R: 10/10 | AL: 4.5 Iris' life takes a turn for the worse five year into an apocalyptic outbreak Read for: ridiculously incredible art, unique art style and a great story that keeps you on the edge of your seat

Falconhyrste by mcapriglioneart ( @falconhyrste ) | R: 10/10 | AL: 2 A story about a bunch of kids at a mysterious boarding school Read for: OCTAVIA AND HER AMAZINGNESS, quirky characters, really really great artwork & a story that pulls you in

Artistic Progress by Red-vaporeon ( @red-vaporeon-draws ) | R: 10/10 | AL: 2 A bunch of kids tackling everything that happens when you grow up Read for: really incredible characters, beautiful and very unique art style

Lochbank cryptic society by Cryptid society ( @cryptidsociety ) | R: 10/10 | AL: 2 Three teenagers start an after school club dedicated to hunting cryptids and legends of their small town, only to discover a conspiracy bigger than anything they set out for. Read for: smart and intriguing story and characters

More under the cut!!

Aspera by rrroux | R: 9/10 | AL: 1 Amongst Parisian cobblestones, paint stains and empty coffee cups we find nine different young adults who somehow ended up in each other's lives. Read for: really unique and lovely art style, lovely story and well thought out characters

Aversion by Hayden Marie ( @aversioncomic ) | R: 8/10 | AL: 3.5 A story about a human unwillingly caught in the middle of the Endless War of Heaven and Hell, and the angel Nadhirrah, assigned to protect him. Read for: very interesting story full of plot twists & crazy good colouring

Chasing little stars by Eleviken | R: 9/10 | AL: 2 The world is dangerously polluted. As if that's not bad enough already, four kids also have to deal with their own issues at an elite high school in Shanghai. Read for: Beautifully created characters, setting and art

Forget me by Bai ( @leello ) | R: 7.5/10 | AL: 2 A story about the exciting, complicated life of a college student. Read for: Really great characters and the story they tell

Rock & Riot by Chelsey Furedi ( @rockandriotcomic ) | R: 9/10 | AL: 2 Opposing gangs, cool outfits, swooning humans all around and people falling in love. Read for: Funny story, lovey art work & great representation all over Also check out: Project Nought

Acquainted with strangers by Crumbsicle ( @crumbsicle ) | R: 7.5/10 | AL: 1 Keenan decides to start designing the town’s first arcade with the help of the rich pretty-boy he just met. Read for: Really unique artstyle, intriguing story

Monster crowd, creatures call by Void ( @monsterscrowdcreaturescall ) | R: 8/10 | AL: 2.5 A coming of age comic about monster teenagers in the 1980’s. Read for: interesting take on the monster genre and very unique but cool style

Piercings by MacAngell | R: 7.5/10 | AL: 2A Drama about a slew of college kids from across the sexuality spectrum that are terrible at relationships and understanding what they want out of life. Read for: gorgeous story with interesting characters

Danse orbitale by Princedesoies ( @princedesoies ) | R: 7.5/10 | AL: 1.5 A comic about two friends who enjoy dancing ballet together and can't be bothered about gender Read for: cool style and great exploration of what it means to be yourself

WLW

Elvis & Jules by Bibinella ( @bibinella ) | R: 10/10 | AL: 1 The moment they met they immediately hit it off, what will happen next? Read for: beautiful artstyle, interesting story that’s still developing

Preheat by Bilvy | R: 9/10 | AL: 2 A young and ambitious baker loses her cafe in a disastrous fire, but sees none of the insurance payout. Read for: super super great art and promising story

Short by Dani Bolim ( @bolinhopodre ) | R: 8/10 | AL: 1.5 Short story about lesbians Read for: Fun short stories that don’t take too long to read & cute art to boot!

Honey & Venom by Kurzz ( @honeyandvenomcomic ) | R: 7.5/10 | AL: 2 A webcomic about ancient Roman/modern California lesbians. Read for: Interesting story & great art

Long Hair Hotel by Momcarda | R: 7.5/10 | AL: 2 A story about letting go of your history and getting to know yourself Read for: a story that’s just beginning, unique and interesting art style

Meriel’s law by Illuia | R: 8/10 | AL: 1 A very persistent saleswoman charming the heck out of a very grumpy witch Read for: MAGIC, WLW, CUTE ART

Our story begins with by Shihho | R: 7/10 | AL: 1.5 A story through a relationship Read for: cute art

GRRRLS by 025GERU ( @025geru ) | R: 8/10 | AL: 2 Short stories about girls Read for: unique artstyle, interesting narratives and bite sized stories

MLM

Heartstopper by Alice Oseman ( @heartstoppercomic ) | R: 12/10 | AL: 2.5 A really wonderful and cute story about figuring yourself out and falling in love as a teenager Read for: ridiculously amazing story, great representation on what it really is like figuring out you’re lgbt (without it being all about that) & super cute art style

Autophobia by G.H.S.T ( @autophobiacomic ) | R: 13/10 | AL: 3 A story about Louis, an eleventh grader with anxiety trying to juggle school, his fathers expectations and later his budding feelings for a boy. Read for: the ridiculously amazing storytelling, best depiction of an anxiety attack I have ever seen in media and seeing the growth of an artist (this comic is my number one fave)

Long Exposure by Mars ( @longexposurecomic ) | R: 12.5/10 | AL: 3.5 Nerds, bullies, superpowers, government conspiracies, secret labs… This story has it all Read for: Incredibly well thought out story, incredible art, incredibly amazing characters just !!!!! READ THIS !!!!

Eerie Crests by Bell ( @eeriecrests ) | R: 12/10 | AL: 4 They say Malek is dead… Dallas isn’t so sure Read for: A-FUCKING-MAZING ART by an absolutely fabulous artist and a very very intriguing story

Dear Boy by Blauerozen ( @blauerozen ) | R: 11/10 | AL: 2.5 Follow a group of not-so-human college boys as they whine about their tangled love lives. Read for: cute art, cute story, cute everything lets be real

Cupid by XUIO | R: 8.5/10 | AL: 3 Tony is a troublesome and carefree kid who has trouble falling in love, he then meets a forgiving and levelheaded Cupid named Koji, who helps him out, ironically. Read for: very interesting story and pretty art

MondoMango by The Kao ( @thekao ) | R: 9.5/10 | AL: 1 Follow the day to day life of Kao as he goes on adventures or thinks stuff about things. Read for: funny little stand alone comics with great line art

Breaks by Emma Vieceli | R: 8/10 | AL: 3.5 A love story… but a little broken Read for: Very interesting story and great characters

Cupido by Skatuya ( @skatuya ) | R: 8/10 | AL: 2 Alec has the ability to see soulmate marks of people and likes to play cupid (with some great help!) Read for: lovely story, awesome characters, interesting idea

Fluxa by Kukkiia ( @fluxa ) | R: 8/10 | AL: 3 Callipus is on the run from the government when he meets a boy part of a rebellion Read for: In-cre-dible art, really cool story

BSandL by Nilukka ( @drawthen ) | R: 9/10 | AL: 2.5 An alien crash lands on earth with a bang Read for: Original story and way of storytelling and multi dimensional characters

Brian & Ditya by Bakanoapit ( @apitnobaka ) | R: 9/10 | AL: 1 Way more than friendship, not (yet) a relationship - told as bits and pieces of words. Read for: REALLY CUTE AND FLUFFY + GREAT A R T OKAY

Geoff & Rupert by Olive Guy | R: 8.5/10 | AL: 1 Plants and soul reapers Read for: Cute af art and cute af plants

Jamie by NDGO ( @jamie-comic ) | R: 7.5/10 | AL: 2.5 Jamie falls for Aiden, Aiden isn’t so sure… Read for: interesting story & lovely art style

This took me over 3 hours to put together jfc but yes read all of these they’re absolutely amazing

Also @ the comic artists: if I put your comic in the wrong category pls let me know u guys are amazing and I love all your art so much

#comics #webcomic #web comics #comic #comic books #comic things #art #idk man things #just read all of this its worth ur time

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kentonramsey · 4 years ago

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How Queer People Wear Colour To Celebrate, Communicate & Thrive

LGBTQIA+ people throughout history have fought battles for equality, shown solidarity with other oppressed groups and struggled for the right to live proudly. To survive in oppressively heteronormative societies, especially before homosexuality was legalised in the West, we’ve used fashion symbols to interact safely and show pride without endangering ourselves.

Prior to the rise of Christianity, queer people played key roles in society but the religion, and later the British Empire’s enforcement of homophobic laws, pushed us underground. Despite losing our openness, we endured by forming our own subculture as the antithesis to the mainstream. Our symbols shone through and, particularly in fashion, became a method of communication.

While specific fashions and symbols gained popularity later on, colours became an important – and, crucially, subtle – method of communication. In Victorian Britain, homosexual men wore green carnations in their lapels as an understated form of identification. Dr Shaun Cole, associate professor in fashion at Winchester School of Art, explains: “[Oscar] Wilde and his circle wore green carnations and the colour green weirdly continued to be associated with queer people throughout the 21st century.” Later, before World War II, gay men wore red neckties and other accessories to identify one another.

Lesbians inspired by the ancient Greek poet Sappho’s poem describing a female lover wore violet to symbolise their sexuality – a reference to the line “all the violet tiaras, braided rosebuds, dill and crocus twined around your young neck”. The colour’s popularity exploded after a 1926 French play was censored for using a bouquet of violets to signify lesbian love. In response, Parisian lesbians wore and gifted violets to one another in solidarity. Dr Cole adds: “Pinkie rings were also worn by gay men and lesbians. While not completely a signifier, it was one of those things that hinted at it, which is discussed in a lot of oral histories.”

Colour can denote everything from mood to music taste and for queer people, coded colours help show pride loudly or subtly, depending on how safe they feel. These cues are still present today, especially for those of us who feel safer presenting our sexuality in a subtle way to lessen the threat of harassment and abuse. Student Kate Rice, who often wears the pink and purple colours of the bisexual pride flag, says: “I haven’t had super successful experiences coming out in certain aspects of my life – it’s a nice way for me to still feel happy within myself, so I can still wear these [symbols] around people that maybe didn’t accept it.”

Androgynous model and activist Somriddho Dasgupta loves wearing colours that represent androgyny, including pink, purple and blue. He says: “When you let yourself be free, in a way, you also let others experience that freedom through identification. It is powerful.”

These signals can also be a cheat method for finding dates. Bisexual student Kendal explains: “When I’m out in a club or something and I see a really hot girl and I see a bracelet or badge on a jacket with the pride flag, I’m like, ‘Okay, I might have a shot here!'”

In the modern day, our symbols help identify allies too. Cosmetic doctor Vincent Wong explains: “When I first started going to the gym, I felt really uncomfortable with having a male personal trainer. I thought I’d be judged and one day, I noticed that he had a rainbow flag as his screen cover. I immediately felt more at ease and it turns out he’s an ally!”

“There have been numerous cases in the past where people in power haven’t been able to understand a person’s problem because they don’t share their background,” Somriddho elaborates. “I really like that places such as hospital have their queer staff wearing pride badges because it allows queer patients to trust staff and feel safe.”

Beginning as a subtle way to find one another, or profess love, these symbols became more political following the persecution of homosexual people in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. While in the camps, homosexual men were forced to wear an upside-down pink triangle as a means of identification.

In 1972, the memoir of gay concentration camp survivor Josef Kohout, written by Heinz Heger, was published, raising awareness of the pink triangle’s use. In response, in 1973 a German gay liberation group called Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin called for queer people to wear the triangle for the dual purpose of memorialising those who died in the camps and protesting the continued discrimination of LGBTQIA+ people.

The symbol even pops up on one of Frank N. Furter’s costumes in the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show and, in 1987, it was inverted and used by the organisation ACT UP to draw attention to the unequal impact of AIDS on gay and bisexual men by placing it above the slogan “SILENCE = DEATH“.

The triangle still crops up today and, like the word ‘queer’, it has been reclaimed to protest its origins. Kate paid homage to it as a teenager by trying to wear pink every day. She says: “Pink was considered a masculine colour until WWII and then Hitler used it to identify gay men, so it was associated with being feminine. So, [wearing pink] was also an acknowledgement of how stupid gender roles were. I really liked the symbol of solidarity it became after the war.”

In 1978, after the Stonewall Riots of 1969 kicked off a reinvigorated fight for equality, artist Gilbert Baker created the rainbow flag, each colour representing a different aspect of queer community, including red for life, violet for spirit and green for nature.

The flag is continually reimagined in fashion but one of the most powerful ways is as a pin worn by allies and queer people alike. Blogger and activist Eva Echo often wears a rainbow flag pin: “Rather than specifically going for a trans flag, I opt for something more inclusive. I don’t want to say to everyone, ‘I’m trans, look at my pin’, I want to say, ‘We’re diverse’.”

Although I love flying the flag by wearing rainbow dungarees, the yellow stripe, which symbolises sunlight, resonates with me the most. I have an array of bright yellow outfits for days when I want to celebrate my queerness in a safe way.

Bee, personal stylist and founder of the brand QueerYorker, is “cautious” about incorporating queer symbols into her clients’ style. “It’s important to note that we still live in a time where queer people’s safety is always in jeopardy. Hate crimes towards queer presenting people are still going on, especially for queer people of colour.”

To help her clients feel proud and safe, she picks flag colours to incorporate into their wardrobes. “I do it in subtle ways such as getting a sweater that is a colour within the flag, like the colour orange – which means healing. That way it’s personal to the client and they know the meaning behind that particular orange.”

Although we are able to exist legally in the UK, being LGBTQIA+ is still criminalised in 72 countries and is potentially punishable by death in 11. When it’s unsafe to wear an out-and-proud pride flag on your clothes, queer people adapt.

Wong, who is originally from Malaysia where homosexuality remains illegal, loves accessorising with a pride flag brooch and wearing the flag colours in the UK. He has to adapt, though, when visiting family in Malaysia: “As using colours from the flag has become a habit now, I do the same when I go home for the holidays but I choose more ‘conservative’ colours, such as dark green and darker shades of blue rather than bright pink.”

For Snigdha, a student who identifies as bisexual and ace, the rainbow flag “symbolises how queer people are confident in their identity” and is a sign of a safe space. Even though homosexuality was decriminalised in India in 2018, “That doesn’t mean the lives of queer, trans and non-binary people has improved in any way. By wearing this symbol that invites hate with pride, we can reclaim our identity.”

Today, LGBTQIA+ symbols are sold by fashion giants – who have been repeatedly accused of labour exploitation – during Pride Month. While mainstream representation is important, these pandering campaigns feel disingenuous when the same companies ignore queer interests for the rest of the year. Snigdha says: “Simply pasting a rainbow or a pun about queer people on a shirt doesn’t make you an ally. I’d rather buy from transgender and non-binary artists than a fast fashion brand mass-producing clothes and exploiting many marginalised communities in the process.”

Many in the community avoid purchasing from fast fashion brands which have adopted our symbols for profit. Kate elaborates: “It feels so hypocritical, especially as a white, queer person. It feels like I would be conveniently forgetting my own privilege if I participated.”

Speaking of privilege, Eva reminds us that for trans people, clothing is an armour to remind the world of their gender. She explains: “You’re saying ‘I’m feminine’ or ‘masculine’ in a very visual way. For example, your face, you can’t really get away from certain features of your face that let people know that you were assigned male or female at birth, but you have control over your clothing. It’s your way of saying, ‘I am feminine, please treat me as such’.”

Considering we’ve all been sequestered in our homes this year, it would be easy to assume that the importance of queer fashion symbolism has lessened. Yet as Bee explains, it is more crucial than ever. “Colours and queer symbols are imperative methods of communication between LGBTQIA+ [people]. With COVID and lockdowns, there are no safe queer spaces for us to get together so the next best thing is to communicate with other members of the community while out by wearing items that have the pride flag.”

Dr Cole says: “With lots of these symbols, through the 20th century they were the kind of symbols where you had to have the cultural capital and language to be able to read them.” These days, our most iconic symbol, the rainbow flag – redesigned in 2018 by Daniel Quasar to better represent BIPOC and transgender folk – is easily recognisable so we have adapted to show pride in more nuanced ways.

To a heterosexual world, wearing a colourful gender-conforming outfit contains no hidden messages but for a queer person who knows the meaning behind their chosen colours, it is a coded message of empowerment. Society works hard to pin us to earth with strict expectations of what femininity, masculinity and androgyny are supposed to look like; these seemingly immaterial colours give us wings to fly above oppression.

After centuries of (continuing) persecution, these loud symbols, radiant flags and subtle signifiers are our fashion-forward way of finding each other, memorialising our ancestors and their sacrifices, showing solidarity with other marginalised groups and, above all, portraying defiant pride. As Kate says: “It’s about pride, community and celebration.”

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

Butch Fashion Is Anything But Stereotypical

How Makeup Helps Me Explore My Gender Identity

The Radiant Beauty Of Queer Parenthood

How Queer People Wear Colour To Celebrate, Communicate & Thrive published first on https://mariakistler.tumblr.com/

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Why Anna and the French Kiss Should Be Netflix’s Next YA Romance Adaptation

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With the To All the Boys series set to wrap up this week, it’s time to talk about what the next big Netflix young adult romance adaptation could be—because we now know it’s not going to be The Summer I Turned Pretty. The streamer has been leaning much more heavily into the teen romance genre in recent years, which means some iconic YA romance getting screen adaptations. On that note, it’s recently come to my attention that Anna and the French Kiss, the debut novel from author Stephanie Perkins that follows an American teen to Paris for her senior year of high school, is 20 years old. It’s a foundational text of the genre, and it’s long past time it gets the screen treatment. Now that mainstream content creators are recognizing the power of romance as a genre, where is the Anna and the French Kiss adaptation we’ve all been waiting for?

Anna and the French Kiss follows Atlantan teenager Anna who is unexpectedly informed by her father that she will be attending her senior year abroad at a boarding school in Paris. (The horror!) Anna is pissed. She has a good job at the local movie theater, an excellent best friend, and a swoon-worthy crush—all of which she’ll have to leave behind to attend school in a country where she doesn’t even speak the language. But Anna doesn’t have a choice and, before she knows it, she’s in the City of Light. Of course, during her time in Paris, Anna falls in love with city and its appreciation of cinema, as well as with fellow boarding school attendee Étienne St. Clair. It’s wasn’t a very relatable premise in 2010, when the book first hit shelves, and it’s an even less relatable premise in 2021, when income inequality continues to grow and COVID-19 has kept most people firmly within the borders of their home country, but who wants realism in 2021? We want a romantic, Paris-set fantasy to escape into, one where money flows free, COVID-19 doesn’t exist, and international boarding schools are not only accessible but made for falling in love.

In addition to the built-in fanbase, Anna and the French Kiss has quite a bit in common with recent Netflix success Emily in Paris, which proves there is an audience for this kind of content—i.e. romantic fantasy that isn’t traditionally good so much as luxuriously easy. Ideally, I’d like an Anna and the French Kiss adaptation to aim for the stars, but I also want to recognize the value of having dumb, beautiful fantasy for women to escape into. (Notably, in the case of Emily in Paris, a very white fantasy for a very multicultural city and world.) Although I think much of the criticism directed at Emily in Paris has been warranted, I would argue that the vicious intensity of it is rooted in our culture’s knee-jerk misogyny that devalues and dislikes products made for women. If I had a nickel for every mediocre TV series about a white dude nominated for a Golden Globe, I would still not be able to afford a Parisian boarding school, but I would have a lot more nickels.

Books

How Queer Romance Red, White, and Royal Blue Hopes For a Kinder America

By Kayti Burt

Will Bridgerton Become the Next Game of Thrones?

By Kayti Burt

That being said, one of the perks of an Anna and the French Kiss adaptation would be the opportunity to update the source material: Race and gender bend characters. Make Anna a little more self-aware and culturally sensitive. And, perhaps most importantly, remove the plot mechanics that pit Anna against Étienne’s girlfriend, Ellie. I have a nostalgic love for this book and genuinely think it could make a great adaptation, but it was written two decades ago in a completely different world and culture—embrace the power of adaptation, and show us a Paris that reflects the Paris of today and a teenage experience that reflects the teens of today.

This all may seem like a somewhat random recommendation to make, given the fact that Anna and the French Kiss is a teen romance novel written 20 years ago, but Netflix is currently hard at work adapting another novel from Perkins, There’s Someone Inside Your House, which is set to drop on the streaming service any day now. In a recent interview with Buzzfeed, Perkins said: “I always joke that There’s Someone Inside Your House is like Anna [and the French Kiss] — but with murder. It’s definitely still my voice, and it even contains a love story. The Netflix movie has been thrilling. I’m so far removed from the process of making it, which means that I get to just enjoy it as an audience member.” If There’s Someone Inside Your House does well for Netflix, they could be looking to adapt more from the novelist, and Anna and the French Kiss is right there.

Past its narrative connection to past and potential future Netflix hits, Anna and the French Kiss boasts what most content-creators look for in an adaptation: franchise potential. I’m not saying Anna and the French Kiss is the next Star Wars, but the series continues with two other teen-centric love stories set in the same world. We get cameos from Anna in both books, but they are largely their own stories, encouraging an anthology-like screen adaptation that could go on well past the source material, if it were successful. Pair a city with a teen romance and you’re good to go. For now, I’ll just continue wishing for an Anna and the French Kiss adaptation that pays homage to the classic YA romance novel while also improving it for our modern world.

Which teen romance would you like to see Netflix adapt next? Let us know in the comments below!

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2dizzle · 7 years ago

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gay?

Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term was originally used to mean “carefree”, “happy”, or “bright and showy”.

The term’s use as a reference to homosexuality may date as early as the late 19th century, but its use gradually increased in the 20th century.[1] In modern English, gay has come to be used as an adjective, and as a noun, referring to the people, especially to gay males, and the practices and cultures associated with homosexuality. By the end of the 20th century, the word gay was recommended by major LGBT groups and style guides to describe people attracted to members of the same sex.[2][3]

At about the same time, a new, pejorative use became prevalent in some parts of the world. Among younger speakers, the word has a meaning ranging from derision (e.g., equivalent to rubbish or stupid) to a light-hearted mockery or ridicule (e.g., equivalent to weak, unmanly, or lame). In this use, the word rarely means “homosexual”, as it is often used, for example, to refer to an inanimate object or abstract concept of which one disapproves. The extent to which these usages still retain connotations of homosexuality has been debated and harshly criticized.[4][5]

The word gay arrived in English during the 12th century from Old French gai, most likely deriving ultimately from a Germanicsource.[1] In English, the word’s primary meaning was “joyful”, “carefree”, “bright and showy”, and the word was very commonly used with this meaning in speech and literature. For example, the optimistic 1890s are still often referred to as the Gay Nineties. The title of the 1938 French ballet Gaîté Parisienne (“Parisian Gaiety”), which became the 1941 Warner Brothers movie, The Gay Parisian,[7] also illustrates this connotation. It was apparently not until the 20th century that the word began to be used to mean specifically “homosexual”, although it had earlier acquired sexual connotations.[1]

The derived abstract noun gaiety remains largely free of sexual connotations and has, in the past, been used in the names of places of entertainment; for example W.B. Yeats heard Oscar Wilde lecture at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin.[8]

Sexualization

The word may have started to acquire associations of immorality as early as the 14th century, but had certainly acquired them by the 17th.[1] By the late 17th century it had acquired the specific meaning of “addicted to pleasures and dissipations”,[9] an extension of its primary meaning of “carefree” implying “uninhibited by moral constraints”. A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer, and a gay house a brothel.[1] The use of gay to mean “homosexual” was often an extension of its application to prostitution: a gay boy was a young man or boy serving male clients.[10] Similarly, a gay cat was a young male apprenticed to an older hobo, commonly exchanging sex and other services for protection and tutelage.[1] The application to homosexuality was also an extension of the word’s sexualized connotation of “carefree and uninhibited”, which implied a willingness to disregard conventional or respectable sexual mores. Such usage, documented as early as the 1920s, was likely present before the 20th century,[1] although it was initially more commonly used to imply heterosexually unconstrained lifestyles, as in the once-common phrase “gay Lothario”,[11] or in the title of the book and film The Gay Falcon (1941), which concerns a womanizing detective whose first name is “Gay”. Similarly, Fred Gilbert and G. H. MacDermott’s music hall song of the 1880s, “Charlie Dilke Upset the Milk” – “Master Dilke upset the milk/When taking it home to Chelsea;/ The papers say that Charlie’s gay/Rather a wilful wag!” – referred to Sir Charles Dilke’s alleged heterosexual impropriety.[12] Giving testimony in court in 1889, the rentboy John Saul stated: “I occasionally do odd-jobs for different gay people.”[13] Well into the mid 20th century a middle-aged bachelor could be described as “gay”, indicating that he was unattached and therefore free, without any implication of homosexuality. This usage could apply to women too. The British comic strip Jane, first published in the 1930s, described the adventures of Jane Gay. Far from implying homosexuality, it referred to her free-wheeling lifestyle with plenty of boyfriends (while also punning on Lady Jane Grey).

A passage from Gertrude Stein’s Miss Furr & Miss Skeene (1922) is possibly the first traceable published use of the word to refer to a homosexual relationship. According to Linda Wagner-Martin (Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and her Family (1995)) the portrait “featured the sly repetition of the word gay, used with sexual intent for one of the first times in linguistic history,” and Edmund Wilson (1951, quoted by James Mellow in Charmed Circle (1974)) agreed.[14] For example:

They were … gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, … they were quite regularly gay.

The word continued to be used with the dominant meaning of “carefree”, as evidenced by the title of The Gay Divorcee (1934), a musical film about a heterosexual couple.

Bringing Up Baby (1938) was the first film to use the word gay in apparent reference to homosexuality. In a scene in which the Cary Grant character’s clothes have been sent to the cleaners, he is forced to wear a woman’s feather-trimmed robe. When another character asks about his robe, he responds, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden!” Since this was a mainstream film at a time when the use of the word to refer to cross-dressing (and, by extension, homosexuality) would still be unfamiliar to most film-goers, the line can also be interpreted to mean, “I just decided to do something frivolous.”[15]

In 1950, the earliest reference found to date for the word gay as a self-described name for homosexuals comes from Alfred A. Gross, executive secretary for the George W. Henry Foundation, who said in the June 1950 issue of SIR magazine: “I have yet to meet a happy homosexual. They have a way of describing themselves as gay but the term is a misnomer. Those who are habitues of the bars frequented by others of the kind, are about the saddest people I’ve ever seen.”[16]

Shift to specifically homosexual

By the mid-20th century, gay was well established in reference to hedonistic and uninhibited lifestyles[9] and its antonym straight, which had long had connotations of seriousness, respectability, and conventionality, had now acquired specific connotations of heterosexuality.[17] In the case of gay, other connotations of frivolousness and showiness in dress (“gay apparel”) led to association with camp and effeminacy. This association no doubt helped the gradual narrowing in scope of the term towards its current dominant meaning, which was at first confined to subcultures. Gay was the preferred term since other terms, such as queer, were felt to be derogatory.[18]Homosexual is perceived as excessively clinical,[19][20][21] since the sexual orientation now commonly referred to as “homosexuality” was at that time a mental illness diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

In mid-20th century Britain, where male homosexuality was illegal until the Sexual Offences Act 1967, to openly identify someone as homosexual was considered very offensive and an accusation of serious criminal activity. Additionally, none of the words describing any aspect of homosexuality were considered suitable for polite society. Consequently, a number of euphemisms were used to hint at suspected homosexuality. Examples include “sporty” girls and “artistic” boys,[22] all with the stress deliberately on the otherwise completely innocent adjective.

The sixties marked the transition in the predominant meaning of the word gay from that of “carefree” to the current “homosexual”.

In the British comedy-drama film Light Up the Sky! (1960), directed by Lewis Gilbert, about the antics of a British Army searchlight squad during World War II, there is a scene in the mess hut where the character played by Benny Hill proposes an after-dinner toast. He begins, “I’d like to propose…” at which point a fellow diner, played by Sidney Tafler, interjects “Who to?”, suggesting a proposal of marriage. The Benny Hill character responds, “Not to you for start, you ain’t my type”. He then adds in mock doubt, “Oh, I don’t know, you’re rather gay on the quiet.”

By 1963, a new sense of the word gay was known well enough to be used by Albert Ellis in his book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Man-Hunting. Similarly, Hubert Selby, Jr. in his 1964 novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, could write that a character “took pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who weren’t gay….”[23] Later examples of the original meaning of the word being used in popular culture include the theme song to the 1960–1966 animated TV series The Flintstones, whereby viewers are assured that they will “have a gay old time.” Similarly, the 1966 Herman’s Hermits song “No Milk Today”, which became a Top 10 hit in the UK and a Top 40 hit in the U.S., included the lyric “No milk today, it was not always so / The company was gay, we’d turn night into day.”[24] In June 1967, the headline of the review of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album in the British daily newspaper The Times stated, “The Beatles revive hopes of progress in pop music with their gay new LP”.[25] Yet in the same year, The Kinks recorded “David Watts”.[26] Ostensibly about schoolboy envy, the song also operated as an in-joke, as related in Jon Savage’s “The Kinks: The Official Biography”, because the song took its name from a homosexual promoter they’d encountered who’d had romantic designs on songwriter Ray Davies’ teenage brother; and the lines “he is so gay and fancy free” attest to the ambiguity of the word’s meaning at that time, with the second meaning evident only for those in the know.[27] As late as 1970, the first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show has the demonstrably straight Mary Richards’ downstairs neighbor, Phyllis, breezily declaiming that Mary is, at age 30, still “young and gay.”

There is little doubt that the homosexual sense is a development of the word’s traditional meaning, as described above. It has nevertheless been claimed that gay stands for “Good As You”, but there is no evidence for this: it is a backronym created as popular etymology.[28]

Sexual orientation, identity, behaviour

The American Psychological Association defines sexual orientation as “an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes,” ranging “along a continuum, from exclusive attraction to the other sex to exclusive attraction to the same sex.”[29] Sexual orientation can also be “discussed in terms of three categories: heterosexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of the other sex), gay/lesbian (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of one’s own sex), and bisexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to both men and women).”[29]

According to Rosario, Schrimshaw, Hunter, Braun (2006), “the development of a lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) sexual identity is a complex and often difficult process. Unlike members of other minority groups (e.g., ethnic and racial minorities), most LGB individuals are not raised in a community of similar others from whom they learn about their identity and who reinforce and support that identity. Rather, LGB individuals are often raised in communities that are either ignorant of or openly hostile toward homosexuality.”[30]

The British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell has argued that the term gay is merely a cultural expression which reflects the current status of homosexuality within a given society, and claiming that “Queer, gay, homosexual … in the long view, they are all just temporary identities. One day, we will not need them at all.”[31]

If a person engages in sexual activity with a partner of the same sex but does not self-identify as gay, terms such as ’closeted’, ‘discreet’, or ’bi-curious’ may apply. Conversely, a person may identify as gay without having had sex with a same-sex partner. Possible choices include identifying as gay socially while choosing to be celibate or while anticipating a first homosexual experience. Further, a bisexual person might also identify as “gay” but others may consider gay and bisexual to be mutually exclusive. There are some who are drawn to the same sex but neither engage in sexual activity nor identify as gay; these could have the term asexual applied, even though asexual generally can mean no attraction or involve heterosexual attraction but no sexual activity.

TerminologyMain article:

Terminology of homosexuality

Some reject the term homosexual as an identity-label because they find it too clinical-sounding;[20][21][32] they believe it is too focused on physical acts rather than romance or attraction, or too reminiscent of the era when homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Conversely, some reject term gay as an identity-label because they perceive the cultural connotations to be undesirable or because of the negative connotations of the slang usage of the word.

Style guides, like the following from the Associated Press, call for gay over homosexual:

Gay: Used to describe men and women attracted to the same sex, though lesbian is the more common term for women. Preferred over homosexual except in clinical contexts or references to sexual activity.[33]

There are those who reject the gay label for reasons other than shame or negative connotations. Writer Alan Bennett[34] and fashion icon André Leon Talley[35] are like others in such as fashion and the arts, out and open gay men who yet reject being labeled gay, finding it too limiting, slotting them into label boxes.

Gay community vs. LGBT communityMain article:

LGBT community

Starting in the mid-1980s in the United States, a conscious effort was under way within what was then only called the gay community, to add the term lesbianto the name of all gay organizations that catered to both male and female homosexuals, and to use the terminology of gay and lesbian, or lesbian/gay when referring to that community. So, organizations like the National Gay Task Force became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. For many ardent feminist lesbians, it was also important that the L come first, lest an L following a G become another symbol of male dominance over women,[36] although other women prefer the usage gay woman. In the 1990s, this was followed by another equally concerted push to include the terminology specifically pointing out the inclusion of bisexual, transgender, intersex, and other people, reflecting the intra-community debate as to whether these other sexual minorities were part of the same human rights movement. Most news organizations have formally adopted variations of this use, following the example and preference of the organizations, as reflected in their press releases and public communications.

#hope that helps to clear up any questions!

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babettepress · 7 years ago

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Radical Reinvention – The Making of Edwige Belmore

History is kind to those who leave behind a tangible body of work. It is less so to those exuberant personalities that lived with great flair, but channelled their creative energy into more ephemeral modes of expression. Babette is fascinated with oral histories of these more fringe personalities in the history of art, design and pop culture. One of them is Edwige Belmore (1957–2015). A subcultural icon who criss-crossed between Paris and New York, Edwige played in several punk and new wave bands in the ‘70s and ‘80s (most memorably Mathématiques Modernes), starred in a spate of experimental films, was photographed by Helmut Newton and walked the runway for Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler. And yet, no one of these things quite encapsulates (or contains) her legacy.

When Edwige worked as the Maitresse de Maison for French fashion house Agnès b’s New York store, she was told by a ‘friend’ “that it must be pretty cool to be paid for doing nothing”.“I’m not doing nothing,” she retorted, “I’ve been something for my whole entire life,”[1] and its that intangible ‘something’ that burns most brightly of Edwige’s legacy. Her essence. Her attitude. The way she presented herself to the world.

It is deemed shallow to suggest that someone be remembered for their ‘look’, but Edwige was no fashion plate. Rather, she used her body as her primary means of expression. With her cropped, peroxide blonde hair and a razor blade hanging from one earring, Edwige radicalised the Paris fashion world in the 1970s. She walked the tightrope between a DIY, street-punk aesthetic and high fashion: “She was punk with total elegance,” reflects videographer Clayton Patterson.[2] When top French fashion houses would gift her free items, Edwige would style them with her wardrobe of battered hand-me-downs. “I did a concert with Matématiques Modernes wearing jeans that were completely destroyed, a Chanel jacket and a push-up bra,” she told Italian Vogue before her death. “I didn’t want to be like every punk in Paris, or every punk around that dresses exactly the same.”[3]

Edwige also pioneered a new aesthetic for queer women. She was openly bisexual, romantically linked to Sade and Grace Jones, and sported a playful combination of butch and femme aesthetics, teaming mannish suits with bright red lipstick. “She was the legendary lipstick lesbian,” photographer Marcus Leatherdale told New York Magazine.[4] When she spent six months in Japan in 1982, Edwige would sneak into the male-only sex clubs of Shinjuku, pretending to be a boy.[5] It’s hard not to imagine that the 1982 science fiction film Liquid Sky, with its androgynous lead Margaret (Anne Carlisle), a queer club kid with cropped, peroxide hair, is not at least partially inspired by Edwige.

This subversive aesthetic was not limited to clothing. Edwige took a diaristic, even confessional, approach to tattooing that was quite unique among her generation: “My tattoos are stepping stones in my life – moments, loves, fears, messages”.[6] Patterson reflects, “It was highly unusual for someone to have words and sentences on their body in the mid-’80s”[7] and in a eulogy published on the punk blog Please Kill Me, Sandra Schulman (a former lover of Edwige’s) recalls that Edwige’s tattoos “lined her thin arms and up her neck, scripted across her collar bone and trailed down her legs”. Many were part of a project in which “she asked all her friends and lovers to mail her a note in their handwriting and she would ink it onto her body.”[8]

Edwige clearly saw her flesh as a canvas, but what is more provocative by today’s standards was not her tattoos, but the self-harm scars she wore unapologetically alongside them. Schulman describes bringing Edwige swimming at a New York health club: “In the women’s room she stripped down, strode around, and had the Village gym bunny ladies gasping at her scars, tattoos and boy/girl manner. Six feet tall barefoot.”[9] Patterson also remembers the scars: “She was such a beautiful woman, a Paris runway model, and to have her body modified like that was also very unusual.”[10]

Though self-harm was as taboo in the ‘70s and ‘80s as it is now, Edwige abided by an approach of candid honesty. “She told me that ‘everyone has a past’,” reflects model agent Kendall Werts, “but that the past will never define your future.”[11] In New York Magazine’s eulogy, friends and colleagues remark that Edwige’s acceptance of her flaws and contradictions was part of her powerful appeal. “She was a super-glamorous femme-butch dyke who was honest about her struggles with pain, with depression — but she never dumped that on anyone. In fact, she cheered other people up without lying about her own struggles,” says writer and artist Penny Arcade.[12]

Edwige was candid about a great many things, and that includes her own ‘creation story’. In the few interviews with her available online, she recalls with earnest detail how she simply decided one day to reinvent herself and ‘become Edwige’. Abandoned by her parents at a young age (“They gave me $20 to have a life. They moved into the country side and I stayed in Paris,” she told Moco Loco in 2014),[13] Edwige was raised in a convent with little access to the music or subcultural movements of the early-1970s. That changed in 1976 when, aged 19, she saw the Sex Pistols perform live. It would prove to be a life-altering event: “No one at the time had SEEN anything like that! NEVER! It was the first MIND BLOWING new thing.”[14]

This brief exposure to the punk movement would inspire Edwige to reinvent herself with a remarkable degree of precision. “It was November 6 of 1976, I decided that in exactly a month from then that on December 6th: Edwige Will Die, and Edwige Will Be Born”.[15] True to her word, on December 6, she burned all of her clothing, bar one hand-me-down vintage leather jacket. “I decided to embrace that new movement … I wanted to be part of something. That was my family … I shaved my head, I burned all my clothes.”[16] She bought a pair of riding pants, a white shirt and a tie and took to wearing the same outfit day in, day out, like a uniform. “The real Edwige was born. The one before was shy, was ugly, was insecure, was scared.”[17]

There is something remarkable about the agency Edwige took in her reinvention, or self-creation as it were. She is by no means alone among her generation in creating a new persona for herself, but unlike most ‘invented’ stars, she candidly acknowledges the constructed nature of this act, detailing the steps taken to become who she wanted to be. Much as Edwige’s flaws only added to her strength of character, revealing the constructed nature of her identity seems, to me, to add conviction to the act.

With ‘the new Edwige’ established, the next logical step was to join a punk band. It happened organically. “I was in a club and these two girls approached me and said, ‘Wow you look great! Want to be part of our band?’. I said ‘OK!’.”[18] The band was called L.U.V. (which could stand for either ‘Ladies United Violently’ or ‘Lipsticks Used Viciously’, as you please), and true to the ethos of punk, Edwige played no instruments. She did not let such a detail get in the way of her enthusiasm. Again, what endures of the band was their aesthetic: “We were a mythical band… We were FIERCE looking.”[19]

That fierce look was enough to attract press attention, with French Vogue and Elle clamouring for interviews, and Edwige quickly emerged as the poster girl of the Parisian punk movement. In 1977, the publishers of French avant-garde magazine Façade (inspired by Andy Warhol’s Interview) invited her to grace its cover – starring alongside no other than Andy Warhol. In the magazines wrap-around cover and inside spread, the peroxide-blonde Edwige leans in and kisses an unperturbed Andy, who dons a pin-badge of her image on his lapel. The headline? The Pope of Pop meets the Queen of Punk.

With Andy Warhol for Façade, Paris, 1977

Edwige recalls of the shoot that she spoke very little English at the time – and Andy no French – but the pair managed to strike up a rapport via instinctive, non-verbal communication. When she travelled to New York later that year, she gave Andy a call, and he brought her along to Studio 54. “Approaching the illustrious nightclub of all nightclubs, swathes of partiers parted like the red sea as she entered the club for her very first time, arm-in-arm with her regal rebel counterpart,” reports Autre Magazine.[20]

This ultimate outsider quickly found acceptance from the ultimate insiders of New York and Paris. Brought to a party by Paloma Picasso, she was spotted by Helmut Newton who, rumour has it, persisted to follow her around the party, begging to photograph her. She relented, but insisted she was photographed “not as a model, but as a personality.”[21] She also sat for Francesco Clemente, who painted her with “eyes half closed and completely blue … I was nodding out or on drugs. Blue, blue, blue, blue!”[22]

With Helmut Newton, 1986

Upon her return to Paris, Edwige was appointed front-of-house at Le Palace, the city’s answer to Studio 54, where the staff wore crimson and gold tunics designed by Thierry Mugler and Grace Jones performed atop a pink Harley Davidson on the opening night. Everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Roland Barthes came there to party, and Edwige’s job was essentially to decide who would be permitted entrance. She took the same, seemingly contradictory, approach to the door policy as she did her fashion choices, creating a mix of elite and punk, gay and straight, black and white, rich and poor. “Karl Lagerfeld mentioned in his book that I once refused the King of Sweden because obviously, he must have been an asshole.”[23]

Its perhaps in this role – the high/low gatekeeper of Parisian nightlife – in which Edwige is most fondly remembered. When she died in 2015, tributes came flooding in on social media. One of the most substantial homages to Edwige to date has been Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2016 couture show, which was both inspired by and devoted to his late muse. Gaultier’s collection was a 70s-inspired romp of butch tailoring, femme sequin jumpsuits and sassy models. “Red lips, fishnet tights, lamé; gold leggings, white gloves it was all about attitude, attitude, attitude,” read the review by British Vogue.[24]

Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2016 couture show, a tribute to Edwige, complete with mock Le Palace façade, an Edwige-inspired ‘bouncer’ and lesbian trysts with runway models

The show opens with a lesbian tryst between a runway girl and an androgynous pixie-cropped model who starts manning the door of a club, a replica of ‘Le Palace’. The parade of models who sashay up and down the runway includes Anna Cleveland, daughter of legendary model Pat, who Edwige surely must have rubbed shoulders with at Studio 54. The girls bring their cigarettes and glasses of champagne along for the walk, stopping to air-kiss one another (or catfight) en route. For the finale, the our queer heroine pulls door-girl ‘Edwige’ inside ‘The Palace’. The curtains descend and reveal the full crew of models, accompanied by Mr Gaultier, dancing, laughing and drinking champagne to the sound of Amanda Lear’s ‘Fashion Pack’.

If heaven looks like this, I do hope they let me in.

Babette, 25.08.17

FOOTNOTES

[1] Edwige Belmore, quoted in Eepmon, ‘In Conversation with Edwige Belmore, The Queen of Punk Pt.2′, Moco Loco, 31 December 2014, accessed online at http://mocoloco.com/in-conversation-with-eepmon-edwige-belmore-the-queen-of-punk-pt2/ on 19 August 2017

[2] Clayton Patterson, quoted in Walter Armstrong, ‘The Life of Punk Queen Edwige Belmore and the Death of the Old Downtown’, New York Magazine, 25 September 2015, accessed online at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/edwige-belmore-death-of-a-punk-queen.html on 19 August 2017

[3] Edwige Belmore, quoted in a video interview with Barbara Frigerio, ‘Focus on: Edwige Belmore’, Vogue Italia, 4 July 2011, accessed online at http://www.vogue.it/en/people-are-talking-about/focus-on/2011/07/edwige-belmore#ad-image102614 on 19 August 2017

[4] Marcus Leatherdale, quoted in New York Magazine, ibid.

[5] Moco Loco, ibid.

[6] ibid.

[7] Patterson, ibid.

[8] Sandra Schulman, ‘Death of a Glamazon. A Tattooed Love Letter to Edwige’, Please Kill Me, 26 September 2015, accessed online at http://pleasekillme.com/death-of-a-glamazon-a-tattooed-love-letter-to-edwige/ on 19 August 2017

[9] ibid.

[10] Patterson, ibid.

[11] Kendall Werts, quoted in New York Magazine, ibid.

[12] Penny Arcade, quoted in New York Magazine, ibid.

[13] Edwige Belmore, quoted in Eepmon, ‘In Conversation with Edwige Belmore, The Queen of Punk Pt.1′, Moco Loco, 31 December 2014, accessed online at http://mocoloco.com/in-conversation-with-eepmon-edwige-belmore-the-queen-of-punk-pt1/ on 19 August 2017

[14] ibid.

[15] ibid.

[16] Vogue Italia, ibid.

[17] ibid.

[18] ibid.

[19] Pt.1, Moco Loco, ibid.

[20] Summer Bowie, ‘Beautiful Vagabond: 10 Things You Need to Know About the Late Edwige Belmore’, Autre Magazine, 24 September 2015, accessed online at http://autre.love/this-and-that-main/2015/9/24/beautiful-vagabond-10-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-late-edwige-belmore on 19 August 2017

[21] Pt.1, Moco Loco, ibid.

[22] Pt.2, Moco Loco, ibid.

[23] Nick Vogelson, ‘In Memory: Edwige Belmore, Our Lady of Punk’, Document Journal, 22 September 2015, accessed online at http://www.documentjournal.com/article/in-memory-our-lady-of-punk on 19 August 2017

[24] Ellie Pithers, ‘Spring/Summer 2016 Couture: Jean Paul Gaultier’, Vogue, 27 January 2016, accessed online at http://www.vogue.co.uk/shows/spring-summer-2016-couture/jean-paul-gaultier on 19 August 2017

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katiewattsart · 5 years ago

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15/10/19 : EVER TRIED. EVER FAILED

Overview of lecture

To examine the notion of ‘Failure’ within Contexts of Practice

To explore the theoretical writings of Lisa le Feuvre and Abigail- Solomon Godeau

To think about the idea of trying and failing within our own art practice with a particular focus on the West Coast artist John Baldessari

‘The struggle itself…is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ (Albert Camus)

Jancovics Marcell (1974)

youtube

Lets pose some questions

What makes a good artist/designer/creative?

own style

True to their work

Message behind their work/strong narrative

Understandable art

How do we measure success in our own and others artwork?

success comes in different forms

Individual to the person

What is success?

personal goals

What is failure?

personal to the individual

What is good art?

subjective

Rodin. The Thinker.

‘The Master Piece’ - Emile Zola

Negatives

I’M NOT AN ARTIST - I’M A PHONY

I HAVE NOTHING WORTH SAYING

I’M NOT SURE WHAT I’M DOING

OTHER PEOPLE ARE BETTER THAN I AM

I’M ONLY A STUDENT

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS MY WORK

NO ONE LIKES MY WORK

I’M NO GOOD

Can we reframe this?

There are gaps between intention and realisation ... must they be so torturous?

Doris Salcedo. Tate Modern.

Art and its Currencies

‘In the realm of art, failure has a different currency.’ (Lisa le Feuvre)

The Parisian Salon des Refuses of 1863

Manet to Claude Monet about Renoir:

‘He has no talent at all that boy! You who are his friend tell him please to give up painting!’

‘Ever tries. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better.’ Samuel Becket

Contextualising Failure

Provides a historical context for the notion of failure within art practices is an enduring and influential myth of artistic creation

Examines the impossibility of achieving artistic perfection ‘...emerges the idea that artistic activity is often tainted by anxiety and doubt, and by the INEVITABLE SPACE SEPARATING INTENTION AND CONCRETISATION’

Lisa Le Feuvre ‘Strive to Fail’

WHAT DOES SHE SAY?

“This very condition of art-making makes failure central to the complexities of artistic practice and its resonance with the surrounding world”.

The currency of failure in the realm of art

It can take us beyond our ASSUMPTIONS

Artists have long challenged the notion of PERFECTION

Art can utilise themes such as DISSATISFACTION or ERROR as a tool to RETHINK ‘our place in the world’(p12)

It can help us ‘STUMBLE ON THE UNEXPECTED’

Art practice can be PROCESS ORIENTED rather than GOAL FOCUSED

‘In this uncertain and beguiling space, between two subjective poles

of SUCCESS AND FAILURE, where PARADOX rules, where transgressive

activities can refuse DOGMA AND SURETY, it is here, surely, that failure can be celebrated.’ (LeFeuvre. p19)

Bruce Nauman. White Anger. Red Danger. Yellow Peril. Black Death. 1984

Abigail Solomon-Godeau on John Baldessari

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

‘The Rightness of Wrong’ 1997

Baldessari’s National City paintings encountered in ‘Wrong’ have gained ‘art-historical’ importance

His work ‘transform(ed) the outrageous into the canonical’

Expels decades of aesthetic rules

John Baldessari. National City (W),1996/2009

youtube

“Art comes out of failure. You have to try things out. You can’t sit around,

terrified of being incorrect, saying “I won’t do anything until I do a

masterpiece.” John Baldessari

What Rules? What Canons? What Assumptions?

The belief that the art object occupy ‘ a special and rarefied domain’

The integral belief that Art is linked to the notion of ‘Beauty’

These belief linger in our current cultural discourse (Solomon-Godeau) “It’s historical eclipse has been demonstrably the precondition for all that has been most VITAL, DYNAMIC AND CULTURALLY SIGNIFICANT in modern and contemporary art”.(Solomon-Godeau)

The queer art of failure

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

Contaxtualising Creativity

THE CAPTIVE MUSE: ON CREATIVOITY AND ITS INHIBITION, SUSAN KOLODNY

‘This book succeeds in the very difficult task of making lucid, meaningful statements about the states of mind that are involved in making art’ (Thomas Ogden)

‘Idealism, with its travelling companion doubt, is driven by a misplaced belief in perfection - a concept setting an in accurate route to what-might-have-been, to the past, and even to perfection itself. Is there a method more pertinent that perfection to the ways we understand our place in the world, and in which art can complicate what we think we know?’

(Lisa le Feuvre. Strive to Fail. Failure. Documents of contemporary art.)

TASK: your ‘self-nominated failure’

Choose one of your own discarded ideas that you have decided in the past is of no consequence

Dare to bring it to life, if only for one day

Allow yourself no self criticism, no self judgment and just observe what happens

Make one small piece of work from this idea and take it with you to your own programmes as your ‘Self Nominated Failure’ and listen to how others respond

Examine your own responses, not only to making a piece of work outside of your preconceived comfort zone but on what evolves from this activity

References:

https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/the-thinker-bronze-sculpture-auguste-rodin-legion-of-honor-san-francisco-california-1-kathy-anselmo.jpg

https://www.allyoucanbooks.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/book_cover_medium/ebook-cover/His%20Masterpiece_Zola.jpg

https://secure.i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01192/arts-graphics-slid_1192498a.jpg

https://whatshotlondon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Francois-Joseph_Heim_001b-500x322.jpg

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/10/7/1444223380357/629735d7-3d59-4b22-9e21-b15accf6168a-2060x1236.jpeg?width=300&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=c524b6a55812fb4c303ed0876161ceca

http://www.moma.org/media/W1siZiIsIjQ0NzEwMyJdLFsicCIsImNvbnZlcnQiLCItcmVzaXplIDIwMDB4MjAwMFx1MDAzZSJdXQ.jpg?sha=7a6dcbc8c868dd2c

https://t1.daumcdn.net/cfile/tistory/2531D54E523FF3FB3D

https://d5wt70d4gnm1t.cloudfront.net/media/a-s/artworks/john-baldessari/17893-490897824166/john-baldessari-natinoal-city-w-800x800.jpg

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71FMVxVx1OL.jpg

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347508093i/5972417._UY400_SS400_.jpg

#gcop200

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