This blog may inflict psychic damage, roll 1d4. Alisa. sad adult / happy parent. multi-shipper. d&d. musicals. Grey's anatomy. dogs. Supergirl. ps4: slytherinperidot she/themhttps://archiveofourown.org/users/a_dot_burr_ell/profile
it would be cool if websites let you be an adult on them. the advertisers and payment processors need everything to be Family Friendly though and their definitions of family and friendly are absolutely fucked. but since they're in charge of the Internet now, no one is allowed to be an adult. tiktokers say things like "unalive" and "seggs" because they know death and sex are too adult for online. online is for idiot babies only now because they're easier to market to
I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.
The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”
1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.
Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.
It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.
there’s this interesting tendency that especially young ppl have when it comes to art where they want to “consume” art by women, lgbt ppl, poc, to make themselves more feminist, anti-racist, etc, and then when they discover these artists have flaws too, that they aren’t perfect representatives of the social movement that’s being projected onto them, they don’t know what to do with that so instead of engaging with these new perspectives they return to art by straight white men who avoid saying something wrong on these topics by simply not speaking of them at all
no words for how much I adore these two characters and the ways their journeys parallel one another's... take this as part character study (what if they helped each other heal!) and part ship content (they were made for each other...) anyways. the shadowzel illness never stops
throwback to when zoro found an infamously cursed sword and was like “well. only one of us can win (his luck or a curse)” and threw it up in the air to see if it would chop his arm off or not