#You're supposed to be “activists”?

[moonlayl]

Huge fan of the way everyone and their mom decided to comment on Netanyahu's threats towards Syria and what Israel's been trying to do in Syria, yet all these same people have nothing to say about Iran and hezbollah backing a sectarianism coup while helping pro assadist thugs target and attack 5 different Syrian hospitals and killing 10 people in a masjid after Maghreb during the month of Ramadan JUST last night. (Total number of martyrs is estimated to be over 60).

Interesting how Israel, which has always been a threat to the entire Middle East, is immediately discussed by everyone as it tries to stir up tensions in Syria to further its goals, but when Iran is on the same page with Israel regarding Syria, and does the exact same thing, only with more success, after it helped commit massacre 1 million Syrians and displace 14 million others, it's crickets.

ما لنا غيرك يا الله

[docmerlin]

queer activist page that blatantly uses AI pictures for their posts and deletes any comments criticizing it as part of their "social media boundaries" what

[gxlden-angels]

I don't know entirely how to explain this, but I think an important part of healing from religious trauma is learning about substance use disorders and shifting your views on drugs to neutral

[pumpkinpaix]

Very curious for your opinion- what do you think of it when people write modern au wwx as being very active in social justice movements? Personally, I can buy it but I don't think it should be a given?

maybe an unwise first question to pick out of my moldering askbox but whatever it's the first one that i felt like i had an answer prepared for off the cuff so yolo i guess!!

short answer: at this point, i don't buy it. It's a detail that I can and have put up with for fics i really like for other reasons, but i think it's pretty far off the mark in terms of how I understand wei wuxian's primary motivating forces.

ok now to get into the weeds! :D

there are several reasons why wei wuxian being heavily involved in social justice movements doesn't ring true to me--the easiest one to point to from outside the narrative is that the sort of activism wei wuxian is written to participate in is often modeled on how social justice circles look in the US. It feels really culturally alienated in a lot of ways. I can't really blame authors for this, though, because it's a very understandable approach to write what you're familiar with--but it does often take me out of the story because i find it kind of jarring, especially if the story in question is ostensibly supposed to be set in China where modern social activism necessarily looks very different than in the states.

but that kind of feels like metagaming the question, so: in terms of interpreting the text, i really just don't think wei wuxian would be inclined to that kind of work for two main reasons.

first: I think he'd be really bad at it lol. social activist movements are necessarily collaborative, and wei wuxian is kind of terrible at playing well with others, compromising, discussing, etc. he often favors action over diplomacy and has terrible impulse control, tending to act first, think later, often to pretty devastating consequences for the people he's ostensibly standing up for. See: antagonizing Wen Chao, which precipitates the chain of events that ultimately leads to the massacre at Lotus Pier; confronting the jins and basically threatening to kill everyone at jinlin tai if they opposed him, thus alienating all his potential allies and leaving the wen remnants essentially completely dependent on his individual power for survival etc. thus dooming them entirely when he died.

(also see: "can we stop talking and just start killing each other" at guanyin temple)

even really minor events in the past show the same kind of pattern, such as at the qishan conference when he throws his support behind wen ning as an archery competitor--wen ning panics in the spotlight and flubs his shots to public ridicule from being put on the spot. jiang cheng is the one who drags him away in mortification while wei wuxian simply doesn't give a shit about how it reflects upon him, not really considering how it might reflect on his sect.

i'm not saying that these were "wrong" actions to take in the moment: wei wuxian has an admirable righteous streak. he does not, however, always take other people into consideration when he makes his decisions. he basically ignores anyone who tries to change his behavior, sometimes carelessly, sometimes reacting with anger (Jiang Cheng, Lan Wangji, literally everyone post-sunshot frankly). that kind of individualist mentality is really ill-suited to activism, which requires an understanding that the individual has less power than the group and that you cannot bend the world around you. a lot of fandom comes down super hard on characters like jiang cheng and yu ziyuan for the things they say to wei wuxian, but i think they're honestly quite understandable, even if the way they express themselves is sometimes cruel or hurtful. the rationale isn't particularly surprising. It's one thing to act in a way that gets yourself hurt. It's another to do so when you know that your position will drag a whole lot of others down with you.

i feel that even if wei wuxian had the interest in joining a social activist group, he would probably eventually butt heads with the others until they either expelled him or he left himself. his thick skin would be a great tool in certain calculated actions (he would do very well as a symbol or a charismatic fall guy) but unfortunately, he's not very good at listening or adhering to a plan.

second: i just don't think wei wuxian thinks about systems of oppression very much. i summarized how i feel about his relationship to class already in this post from like 4.5 years ago (jeez.....) and I still stand by it! wei wuxian is not particularly class conscious because he is, in fact, relatively wealthy. he also like, pretty clearly doesn't think very hard about women's work or status either, except in personal terms--after all, he plays with A'Yuan frivolously, planting him in the dirt and does not think about the kind of work that goes into maintaining a standard of living, which is often women's work. (before anyone says anything, yes, i am aware he is not outright misogynist about women's work). throughout the text, wei wuxian just doesn't put a whole lot of thought into how a woman's gender might affect her status and power.

furthermore, this is kind of mentioned in the class meta, but again--wei wuxian's defense of the wen remnants isn't singularly motivated by the desire to uplift an oppressed class, because the wens are not an oppressed class. They are a sect, which is both familial and alliance-based, not an ethnic group or a class of people. Their treatment is still unconscionable, but it's not systemic oppression. the attempted killing of all the wens is not much different than xue yang's vendetta against the yueyang chang clan, except in scale. and until wen qing comes and personally begs him to help her find her brother, wei wuxian doesn't really have any thoughts to spare for the wen remnants and how they might be faring. he goes to help wen qing and wen ning because he owes them both a serious personal debt, which is something that he feels strongly about! and once he gets to the camps, he obviously isn't going to just ignore the other people suffering (esp because they are the wen sibs' immediate family). he is righteous, after all, but often fails to apply it in a big-picture way.

wei wuxian cares a lot about paying back those who have been kind to him or have helped him, which is pretty evident through his self-sacrificing streak throughout the narrative. he often forgets or deliberately does not take his own well-being into consideration--but, as established, he also forgets that he is not an isolated entity and that his well-being is tied to the well-being of others as well.

throwing himself in front of the brand to save mianmian, making sure everyone else gets out of the cave before he does, immediately coming to terms with having his right hand cut off, giving up his golden core, publicly distancing himself from yunmeng, personally defending the wen remnants, taking jin ling's curse mark onto himself, making himself into the yin flag at the second siege and so on--it's all one long extension of paying back debts, in some way.

personally, I think this is because he considers his entire life to be one that is owed--his life, his skills, his body etc. is all owed to others. I also think, however, that this tendency is often confused by fandom into characterizing wei wuxian as having low self-esteem, which he patently does not. wei wuxian thinks he's hot shit. he's arrogant, a show-off, and is so insistent in his own skills and abilities that he icaruses himself into literal bits. when he thinks he's about to lose his right hand he's like welp. guess i gotta learn how to do this with my left, without really any question about whether or not he can. of course he can! he's wei wuxian! can he bring wen ning back from the dead? for sure!! definitely!!!! can he totally do this night hunt blindfolded? hell yeah he can! and he's usually right. i think wei wuxian has very low self-worth, which is a different thing: he throws himself away at the drop of a hat for others that he cares about or feels indebted to because, whether consciously or unconsciously, he thinks that their well-being, survival, happiness etc. is something he should ensure at any cost, even himself because he owes it to them. he owes his whole existence!

so circling back to the initial topic, I think this pattern of thinking is pretty at odds with social activism. he puts those he feels he owes above himself, but doesn't have a lot of attention to spare for people he considers irrelevant--which is most people. (never learning jin zixun's name, for example). I think that while he understands the nature of systems of oppression to a certain degree (like, he understands jin guangyao's motivations, but he's not particularly interested or sympathetic), it's not something he's really passionate about correcting. his reaction mostly seems to be like "well, that sucks". he only really goes out of his way to defend those that he has personal affairs with or those that happen to pique his notice

wei wuxian doesn't actually have big-picture ambitions. he didn't want to be a leader of anything or start his own sect or anything else. he doesn't spend much of his thoughts on making a better world so much as how he might be able to be content in the world that exists with the people that he cares about. that kind of self-focused drive leaves me unconvinced that he would get involved in social justice in any meaningful way in a modern au. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i think that makes him a really fun protagonist, tbh. the tension between his selfishness and his propensity for self-sacrifice makes for a very interesting dynamic.

.....

:'] i guess i never left the weeds.

(ko-fi)

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

So I just saw your post about different emergency contraceptives and you mentioned that they have weight limits for efficacy. Are there any emergency contraceptives for overweight people? Like if an overweight woman gets SA'd is she just supposed to hope she doesn't get pregnant?

hi anon,

so, before we get to actually answering this question, I need to get pedantic about terminology, because this is important to me:

just say "raped." we call things what they are here.

obviously women are not the only people who might find themselves experiencing a pregnancy risk and in need of solutions

I personally do not rock with the term "overweight" because, as many fat activists have pointed out, it centers the idea that there is a "normal" weight for humans to be that fat people are diverting from, which isn't the case.

anyway, actual answer:

in this answer that you're referring to, please note that I didn't say emergency contraceptives won't work at all for users who are over the designated weights; Plan B doesn't become useless the second you weight 166 pounds or more.

several studies have found that people over certain weights have a slightly higher instance of becoming pregnant in spite of using emergency contraceptives; 195 pounds and 165 pounds, respectively, are the current best estimates for ella and levonorgestrel-based emergency contraceptives (that's all the other ones) maintaining full efficiency. above those weights, the effectiveness has been found to drop between about 2-5%.

it should be noted that while emergency contraceptives are often treated as if they're a surefire way of preventing an unwanted pregnancy, this isn't true even for people with lower body weights. the effectiveness of emergency contraception pills at reducing the risk of pregnancy is variously estimated to be between about 65% and 95% if taken within the appropriate amount of time, meaning that users with a higher body weight are unlikely to experience a substantially higher risk of failure than their lighter counterparts.

this is an area that has been understudied, as many issues pertaining to fat patients are, and the link between weight and efficacy are not yet fully understood. as noted, the existing studies only indicate the possible existence of such a connection. being aware of the possibility is important for decision making, but I also worry about it discourages people from viable healthcare options.

while I agree that it's unsatisfying to be uncertain about the efficacy of incredibly important, lifesaving healthcare like emergency contraception for fatter individuals, all indications currently show that these pills are appropriate and safe for use by fat individuals. there is currently no medical guidance that recommends advising heavier individuals against using plan b, ella, or any other emergency contraceptive pills, since these products very much can and do work effectively for them.

pills also aren't the only form of emergency contraceptives available. someone concerned about experienced an unwanted pregnancy can get an IUD within 5 days of sexual activity to lower their chances of pregnancy by 99.9%, a higher success rate than any form of emergency contraceptive pills can currently offer. crucially, neither hormonal nor copper IUDs are impacted by the weight of the user.

[a-very-tired-jew]

Had a student try and get into politics with me (prior to going in for surgery) the other week and it has stayed with me. If you're unaware, Professors are not supposed to push, espouse, or support any particular political party or rhetoric. We have major policies about it with very considerable consequences. Even courses where things might have a political nature, that are not polisci because they're different, have to be touched upon very carefully lest there be some blowback (e.g. a professor at Texas A&M was talking about Texas's drug laws in a criminology course and how they were ineffective and got in trouble because someone who knew Paxton was a student and felt offended because their "uncle" couldn't be bad).

So of course I didn't say anything. My policy is just to go "yeah, I'm gonna vote" and leave it at that.

Said student went on a mini-tirade though about how Kamala is obviously the better choice, but that they might vote for Trump because Biden and Kamala have been "facilitating a genocide". Said student then had the self awareness to admit that a Trump presidency wouldn't be better, more people would suffer, and it wouldn't "stop the genocide", but they wanted to "punish the Democrats".

My TA and I looked at each other a little wide eyed and the student came out of their fugue state to realize what they'd just said in front of their Professor and TA, gathered their things, and then mumbled something before hurrying out the room.

It's clear they care about the I/P conflict, but also about domestic and foreign policies that would result from this presidency. But their behavior is so quintessential college age activist that I had to highlight it here.

Being passionate about something doesn't mean burning everything down because you don't have the perfect response, especially if you are fully aware that your burning everything would actually make it worse.

Why do that?

It's a completely juvenile and immature response that really shows the quality of the person in that moment, where they are in life, and their intellectual and emotional development.

At least they became cognizant of how unhinged they sounded by the time they were done.

[let-us-cultivate-our-garden]

Apropos of nothing (totally apropos of something), if you accuse a fan of being a racist, sexist, bigot for liking a fictional character then you just suck. Like objectively you suck.

You misuse real concepts and issues such as fandom racism because you can't stand how other people are having fun with their blorbo.

You post hate in the tags all because someone is interpreting a character differently than you.

You accuse fans of not analyzing a show properly when your own analysis has the depth of a slotted spoon.

Fandom is supposed to be a fun hobby in which a variety of people play with and engage with the text in different ways. We're not all going to agree or even like what the other does. And that's the point.

But if you can't handle that, then at least do the courtesy of not using fan specific tags and stay in your lane.

Stop spreading hate and malicious lies and recognize the harm you're causing.

(and remember: you're not a fucking activist just because you enjoy a show the "correct" way. Go out and do some canvassing if you really want to make change instead of being cringy on Tumblr Dot Com)

[thatbitchery]

& while networking remember to stay as far away as possible from the political social justice warrior fuck the system cancel king virtue signalling godess with paragraphs about a celebrity they've never met change the world paper straw for climate activist whatever. The second someone makes an external locus point their personality pack your bags and walk, that's a losers table you're being set up for failure.

Now I want you to be very careful, I'm not saying stay away from people that care about these things, anyone with a working brain cell knows most of these are noble, I'm saying acting like you care about the world will do nothing but bite you in the behind later. You're a woman. You're a woman in a man's world. You're a matriach in a patriarchy. How does this not click to women, every single thing you ever say and do will be used against you in the high court of life- and not just by men. By women, too. When your level up gurus says be mean she's on to everything, be mean. Be a carnivore and be materialistic and be an overconsumer- that will do you a billion times more favors than trying to identify with some good cause. You can never be good. The world will never let you, so be bad. Be shitty.

First of all it's a fumbling of your bag- gravely so- to think you can fix the world. Unless the thing directly affects you and yours it makes absolutely no sense to loudly and publicly care about it unless you're a pickmeisha . I remember when the Palestine and Israel made news 24/7 for their whatever and I had this one socialite friend that decided it's her time to be humane. I'm not in social media so I'm always falling behind in the news. One day this other girl texts me asks do you see what (Lets call her Sara) has been posting on Instagram? Obviously no I haven't so I get screenshots. It's noble to support a cause but as a social media influencer whose entire brand is based on sponsorships by major brands its important you maintain political neutrality, this is just common sense. So I say yes it's stupid to have all your pinned posts highlighting a struggle that is not only not yours but you also benefit from but how is this my business? Why is this something you wanted me to know? They work at the same agency so she tells me Sara was supposed to do an ad for CocaCola and run a campaign for a sizeable amount of money but just lost it because Coca Cola is, according to the public, pro-Israel, and the agency as a whole has been disconsidered for any future brands that are pro-Israel (And we know these are the big billions) , can I talk to her about this because if she does it'll look like workplace competition? I wear my mother boots and alright, let us save a career. I see Sara over lunch and say hey so how's the going? I was lurking on your Instagram the other day, how come you didn't tell me you're Palestinian? She laughs because she's actually full European but it doesn't hurt to care, does it? I say yeah I get the point but you need to take all that shit down for the sake of your career and post positive quotes that focus on humanity if you're so concerned but we don't pick sides? She says well Bella Hadid is Pro Palestine- Okay but a) Are you Bella Hadid? and b) Are you Palestinian? It makes perfect sense for Bella Hadid to loudly be Pro Palestine she IS Palestinian and she's Bella Hadid, Versace will still want her on their runway even if she wrote a ten-billion-page anti Italy manifesto. SHE is the brand. You have 300k followers and most are bots, let's not. SO now you're costing your agency that pay YOUR bills brand deals while you walk around in Levi's and Bulgari how tone deaf are you? Obviously we fall out and her agency drops her, except agencies are a network so if A drops you B doesn't want you all the way to D, and they WILL withdraw the bot followers they used to bump you up it is in fact that serious. The way this industry works if you get blacklisted by A you're blacklisted by them all, and where are the Palestinians you fought so much for? The way upper society works if you fall out with A you've fallen out with them all- no one wants to shoulder the burden of you.

I remember watching this clip of this lady explaining how capitalism sucks and the comments was everyone calling her out on her iPhone and watch all the things capitalism has given her.

Being a social justice warrior will always backfire because

a) it's an outward locus point so it marks you as a lower-class person. Caring about things that do not directly affect you or you aren't getting paid to care about immediately marks you for someone to get bullied because you are a pickmeisha seeking approval outside yourself.

b) YOU benefit from injustice. Your phone was made by the exploitation of laborers in China. Your human hair wig comes from a ten year old Asian kid that had to sell it for 10$ to feed her family. Your favorite jeans are filling landfills and your gold watch exists because some kid almost died in a mine. Your favorite dessert- you benefit from injustice. You are quite literally biting the hand that feeds you.

So it's better to Kim Kardashian post your jet and walk in closet and say yes, I'm rich yes i took a five-minute flight that raised global warming to Europe to try a dessert than it is to Greta Whatshername campaign for the planet because no one cares. Donate to charities and care for what you care about but do not make it your personality- and given birds of the same feather flock together stay away from Knightess In Dumb Armor about to save the world through the power of a social media post and a hashtag. Unless you're JK Rowling so rich it can not affect you mind your business. Be strategic about what you publicly care about. As a feminist yes I care about survivors and victims and will donate give a platform but as someone navigating high society why would I tell Epstein Junior actually you'll go to hell for being a pedophile when he can just have me dropped off the streets tomorrow? Did that end pedophilia? Are the kids now safe? Is he in hell? Exactly what did I accomplish? Could've kept my mouth shut and scored a million dollar deal then donated and paid for what needs to be paid for and stayed alive?

BMAC

[scum-man-of-pesto]

Something that makes me nutty every time radblr has this het-partnering discourse (or really discourse surrounding how to treat het-partnered women) is that among some of the misogynistic comments made are ones about these women being "addicted" to males and like, no follow through on that thought.

Also, to jump topics for a second before coming back,

Throughout my radical feminist journey, I struggled a lot both with what the most 'feminist' choices to make in my personal life were, and also what I should expect/encourage in other women. I noted back then at some point that I saw many women who did things like wearing face-fulls of makeup actually doing more materially for women than others who just put on this weird costume of what they think radical feminism is, or just sticking to a list of behaviors that they think they are supposed to. Observing these sorts of things in real-life led me into researching the history of radical feminism in the second wave, and of note many activists retrospectively say the biggest thing of note that they think caused the movement to start to fall apart was when feminists broke into these strict subgroups (y'know ecofeminist, lesbian feminist, separatist, vegetarian feminists, etc etc) and stopped working together because they thought their way was the only way towards liberation, and saw any other way as a threat. The women who worked together in years previous and actually got us major reforms started focusing their energy on intercommunity issues instead of actually targeting the system they all were seeking to destroy, and now here we are with history we have to go out of our way to hunt for, Roe overturned, and our other rights on the line.

Anyway, these disjointed topics are both of massive relevance in this discussion. Firstly, I personally look at most patriarchal behaviors that women partake in similarly to how I look at things like addiction. Yes, if you're actually into feminism, you know that something like dating a man isn't wise, just like someone knows drinking alcohol isn't wise. Many are convinced that they are one of the ones that won't have to deal with the really bad stuff that comes with addiction, because it's so normalized and glamorized all around them. Alcohol is a net negative. It hurts far, far more than it helps anything. And yet, people still do it. Some drinkers don't start by choice, some have extenuating circumstances creating that reality for them, but it's never as simple as "just don't drink you fucking moron" for many. I think if you spend your whole life socialized to worship males, to crave a relationship with them, having it instilled into you that your ultimate goal in life is that relationship, it being so thoroughly normalized and even encouraged by those around you, sometimes needing some of the benefits, or being placed there by no choice of your own, etc, yeah, plenty of women who are very feminist minded are still going to end up with men. Most addicts are also well-educated on the dangers, but they still end up addicts anyway. This understanding can be applied to any patriarchal behavior imo. We need to discourage these behaviors and educate thoroughly, yes, but shaming and saying nasty and/or misogynistic things to someone trying to get by is genuinely never helpful.

Furthermore, even if you struggle to recognize how difficult it is for many women to leave relationships/stop all beauty rituals/whatever, there's still no good reason for lashing out or building more barriers. It does nothing to further the feminist cause, *especially* while using such vile and misogynistic language to do so. It has never helped us in the past to split up over differences like this, and we need solidarity among women more now than we have at any other point in my lifetime.

TLDR; there's a lot of nuance to these topics, and lashing out at women for making choices you see as harmful is at best unhelpful and at worst actively damaging, especially when the means of lashing out are incredibly sexist

[danaens]

SEX AND GOTHAM CITY

EPISODE 2

SILK DRESSES, OLD SCARS… and casual sex

I stumble back from another disorienting Saturday night, the kind where you wake up genuinely grateful you did. The evening was a blur of too many Cosmos and one charming guy named Henry, whose skin smelled like Dior Sauvage and who gave off strong I want to sleep with you energy.

And that’s when I start to wonder: is casual sex still a right… or, in Gotham, has it become a calculated risk, with a survival rate?

In a city where turning the corner might get you killed, the bed of a stranger becomes either a grave… or a cradle of protection from the world outside.

And let’s be honest: here, danger doesn’t discriminate. You could fall into the arms of a sex-addicted maniac, or a nymphomaniac with a taste for bondage and taxidermy.

In doubt, I sacrifice myself, for research purposes, obviously, and end up tangled in the sheets with Mister Henry. Sheets that, fittingly, smell of odd fantasies.

He’s a political activist. Forty something. A fellow journalist who fills columns ranting about how Batman is a fascist and the enemy of democracy. God… maybe being tied up and sodomized would’ve been more fun.

Between one moan and the next… between his gasps of "Justice belongs to the people, not just one tyrant!"…I survive. Unfortunately.

⭒⋆🍸⭒⋆

Henry Fontana, 43, Journalist and Activist, Gotham Gazette: "I don’t do casual sex that often. I don’t just go with anyone. I like interesting women... the ones who can hold a conversation."

(Which doesn’t matter, because he does all the talking)

Cecilia Burleigh, 23, Architecture Student, AUG: "Casual sex scares me. I mean, it excites me too, the idea of sleeping with someone who only wants you for that, but also terrifies me. My friends have all ended up in… weird situations."

Lydia Child, 23, Architecture Student, AUG (Cecilia’s friend): "I had a friend-with-benefits thing. Then he fell in love with me, and that was the end of it. With strangers though? One guy once took me to his basement and said he had a kidnapping fetish. He was supposed to be the one kidnapped..."

Dr. Ralph Farnham, 36, Physician at Blackgate: "I have sex every day... sometimes I don’t even pay attention to the face."

Silver St. Cloud: "For me, casual sex is the only kind I have with men. That’s how they should be taken, on top, or when you’re bent over. If there are feelings involved, taking it from behind stops being pleasure and starts being pain."

⭒⋆🍸⭒⋆

As I write this all down, I feel a strange sense of contradiction bubbling up.

I’ve spent years working the streets, met more men than I care to count, and now that it's not work but pleasure, I’m… afraid?

Tonight, the Wayne Foundation is hosting one of those classic “charity” events, where the only charity is the open bar. For my friends and me, it’s Christmas in heels: silk gowns, bad botox, and unlimited Pinot Grigio. Silver is, of course, front and center, clipboard in hand, like the prom queen she never stopped being.

But this year’s invite includes a chilling clause: "Guests are requested to attend with a companion.”

Translated from Gothamesque: if you're single, stay home.

Apparently, Gotham’s elite isn’t ready for “single empowerment.”

Sunday morning. The only mass I attend religiously is brunch at Vesper’s. Her apartment is peak minimalist-chic: cream-colored walls, nude female art, and black fig candles that scream expensive.

Silver dives into the scrambled eggs. "They only write that for show" she says between sips of mimosa, in that voice that sounds like she knows everything and judges nothing. "You don’t have to bring a man."

"Well, I’m tired of the formality" I reply. "Why assume I need a plus-one just to walk through the door? This isn’t a gala, it’s a secret society initiation."

Barbara, naturally sarcastic, chimes in with a smirk: "It’s all a ploy. They’re scouting who’s got the genes for fashionable heirs."

I burst out laughing. So hard I spill coffee on my new blouse. Goodbye, vintage Armani-from-a-street-market.

"Bianca!" Vesper gasps, like I’ve just cursed in church. "I actually think it’s cute" she continues, dreamy-eyed. "Assuming everyone has a ‘someone’... it’s kind of romantic."

Silver looks at her like she just suggested reviving the corset. "Honey, half the women those men bring are escorts picked up between Crime Alley and Park Row." She glances at me."And no offense to the escorts. But there’s nothing romantic going on here."

"I met a lawyer the other day" Vesper says, all conspiratorial. "His name is Harvey."

Barbara raises an eyebrow. "Harvey Dent? He’s fifteen years older than you and has double the personalities."

"So what?" Vesper replies. "He invited me to the gala. He’s sweet."

"Again with the dynasty concept..." I mutter, dabbing coffee off my blouse, wondering if baking soda can fix regret.

The day I decide to write about casual sex, I realize that in Gotham, it’s not just a fear, it’s a taboo. At least for the upper crust, who still want you fake, married, and smiling.

⭒⋆🍸⭒⋆

For the gala, I choose a white satin dress and my trusty Afghan jacket. I feel like Penny Lane in a sea of fake James Bonds and bleached-blonde Vesper Lynds.

Cosmo number three. My girls are scattered across the social jungle, probably flirting with predators in tailored tuxedos. I look around. Silver’s right: the escorts are everywhere. And yes, I recognize a few. Gotham is a handkerchief, small, sparkly, and full of gunpowder.

"So drinking’s a vice now?" A voice behind me. Male, familiar..I turn around. It’s him, the guy I ran into the other day.

"I wasn’t drunk" I say, which isn’t a total lie. "I was... dazed. Nothing’s a vice if you do it with awareness."

He laughs. Dangerous smile. This time, in a black suit that looks guilty on purpose. "So you’re Bianca. The girl who writes about sex. Didn’t recognize you last time." He smirks. "Read your article. The one about vigilantes. It's funny."

"You think vigilantes are funny?"

"No. But you are."

"You should be complimenting my looks, not making me feel like a stand-up clown."

He laughs again. He has a cut on his lip, and that smile,it’s honest. Like it’s the first one in years. "Making someone laugh is a gift. Clowns don’t have it. They just piss me off."

I smile back. It’s somewhere between hard and soft. But only his eyes seem soft. The rest? It’s all armor. He doesn’t smell like Dior or Versace. He smells like tobacco and masculinity, heavy, gritty, real.

"I’m Jason, by the way. Jason Todd" he says, not warmly, but definitely with intent.

"And I’m Bianca Bradshaw. But you already knew that. You look out of place." (It’s the classic line we all say at these parties.)

"I’m family. But still out of place. You? You seem comfortable."

"Comfortable, but not family." I answer honestly. I’ve adapted here, but this world? It’s not like where i came from.

"What are you writing about now?" he asks, bold as ever.

"Casual sex. And how dangerous it is. You know, for a woman, the idea of wanting to sleep with someone but being terrified he’s a psycho..."

He sips his bourbon. "Gotham’s dangerous for everyone."

And there it is,the awkward pause. I’m probably being too shallow. I am charismatic, but I say stupid things. And for once, I don’t know why I’m second-guessing myself. Jason’s interesting. He could be another test subject for my article. But he’s not easy. Getting under his covers seems harder than getting in his head.

Another guy calls out to him, slightly shorter, friendlier, but with those same Gotham-tough eyes.

And just like that… Jason disappears.

⭒⋆🍸⭒⋆

Maybe unlike other women, I'm not afraid of casual sex, I'm afraid of feelings. Whether they are positive or not. I'm afraid of when I'm not the one putting the cards on the table, but there's someone else who mixes them.

So I ask myself

In Gotham is more dangerous casual sex or having feelings for someone?

I hope you like this episode, let me know <3 In the next ones I'll try to delve into the other girls too!! I really enjoy writing, I hope you also read.

[sickofthis666]

Growing up a girl and a woman and experiencing misogyny, learning history and the misogyny generations of women that came before you, all across the world, had to endure, there's something incredibly insulting and disdainful about the trans activists' posts showing up and telling you "misogyny isn’t a fatality, you silly billy! You don't like being a woman? Just change your gender! You're making such a big deal out of nothing jeez"

Like, how am I supposed to not be insulted by that?

Or "trans women appreciate womanhood more than you, they fought for it and show their appreciation! While your ungrateful ass wallow in self-pity 🙄"

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

What are the things that need fixing the most in the LGBT community/culture?

One, kick out the T. I feel bad for people with actual gender dysphoria, it seems like a horrible condition to have, but the trans activists and the trenders are mega toxic and they need to be marginalized as much as possible.

Two, stop pretending sexuality is an identity. It's not. It's just who you're attracted to. No different than someone who likes blondes or big tits.

Three, drop the hypersexuality and promiscuity. The gay community treats itself like a sex club and it's honestly gross. Have some respect for yourselves. Get in real relationships. Be normal.

Four, stop tying your sexuality to far left politics. There is nothing "radical" about being "queer". Things like "queers for Paslestine" should elicit nothing but mockery from gay people if we're supposed to be taken seriously.

There's more, but I think this is a good start.

[kuruk]

Genuinely if you don't love men as much as you love women something is wrong with you <- sounds a bit misogynistic doesn't it. is adding a trans in front of that supposed to make it sound like you're not a men's rights activist who makes posts about misandry on subreddits for teenage incels and divorced bald men

[scuba-divers]

Kind of horrible and terrible that so many queer activists, I daresay even most of them, completely ignore or put down people who are sex-repulsed and will never NOT be sex-replused. Like, it is actually disgusting. I hear lots of 'kink belongs at pride' and 'pride includes love AND sex', but I never, EVER hear people saying that pride involves people who refrain from sex just because they do not want it and not because they have any trauma or medical related reasons. I only see people saying shit like 'if you can't handle sex then you do not deserve to be at pride.. And also you are a horrible person by the way :) and you are immature :3'. It actually grosses me out so much. Being sex positive means you also have to support people who are not at all interested in anything sexual with no exceptions, or you are just as bad as people who are sex negative. Being sex repulsed does not mean sex negative. I daresay people who idolize queer people that have sex or participate in sexual things and ignore, put down or do not believe in people who will never want anything sexual are actively contributing to sex negativity. People will accept you if you are asexual until they realize that you are asexual AND fully repulsed to sex, and most of the time, pride is not fully accessible for these people. It is gross. It is 2024. Learn that not everyone needs to do sexual shit and learn that just because someone doesn't want sex or anything of the type and never will doesn't mean you're better than them. Plus, I have seen people force sexual things onto sex repulsed individuals, and somehow people do not see that as sexual assault, regardless of if it's actual rape or shaming someone for not liking sex and telling them they either are faking it or that they need to like sex. Of course they are different degrees of sexual assault, but they both are to some degree. It is horrifying. Even at pride events, I have seen people who were made uncomfortable by people around them discussing sexual topics and then getting teased for wanting to go somewhere without any discussion of sex. Are you serious? Really? In the year 2024? Where everybody is supposed to be accepted regardless of sexual or romantic orientation? Do people not realize that 'accepting everybody regardless of their sexual orientation' means accepting people whose sexual orientation is not only not experiencing sexual attracting but ALSO not WANTING sex by their own choice, even when close with someone or even when and if they get a partner. I am not sex negative, but if someone who participates in sexual activities thinks they are better or more mature than someone who doesn't, I am going to get mad. We will support your sexual orientation so long as you support our sexual orientation. Everybody in the LGBT+ community has to support each other, or there will be no pride and there will be no unity.

[captainjonnitkessler]

i'm old and i got a theory that i've had for many years that the anti islamic backlash in the us post 9/11 was so bad that it made leftists default to being pro islam to an extent just because we had to keep pointing out the bigotry, and of course you could already never criticize judaism as a leftist and between the two of them they kind of have made people on the left think that it's ok to be religious, to the point that self described leftists on this website are defending catholicism with their whole chests, as if it's not fundamentally incompatible with leftism and civil rights and secular government in general

of course i don't really have any solution to this because there are legitimately a lot of bigoted idiots that do believe that jews and muslims are specifically wicked and bad people which is something that needs to be opposed, but i do kind of remember fondly the good old days when we were godless communists

The amount of officially-endorsed religion in leftist activist spaces is mind-boggling to me. I think you're right about the reasoning, and you're right that it's a fine balancing act between rightfully criticizing religion and not providing cover for actual bigots. But I've been to multiple protests where Christian and Jewish speakers speak at length about their interpretation of their religion before asking the protestors to sing along with religious hymns and prayers. I remember a couple years ago the DSA caught heat for opening a convention with a "non-denominational prayer".

Why the FUCK would you open a political convention or rally with any kind of prayer? WHY is that something that you think needs religion in it at all? How could you POSSIBLY think that wasn't going to alienate anyone? In spaces that are supposed to be about solidarity and inclusion, why on earth would you officially endorse any kind of religion?

Of course, we're on a website full of people cosplaying as communists who will freak the fuck out about you being a genocidal eugenicist if you paraphrase Karl Marx's views on religion. I still remember the time one of the most popular blogs on this website confidently stated that "religion is the opiate of the masses" *only* referred to Christianity, because Marx knew that Christianity was the only problematic religion. So like . . . our baseline is fucking DIRE. We need to bring New Atheism back and I'm not joking.

[rallamajoop]

Queer lit of the 1800s: Two gay Victorian vampire stories you've probably never heard of

So, I have this post in the works tackling that all-important question: just why are there so many gay vampire stories? But in writing it, what was supposed to be a brief tangent about a couple of little-known m/m vampire stories from all the way back in the late 1800s era… started expanding into something not-so-brief, as such tangents are prone to do.

But what the hell, the internet tells me it's queer history month: clearly the only solution is to give those stories their own post, where my tangent can spin out as far as it likes!

Now, if you know anything about Victorian vampire literature or the lesbian vampire genre, you’ve probably already heard about Carmilla, by Sheridan le Fanu (1872), the world’s very first (known) lesbian vampire story. To this day, it's easily the second best-known and widely adapted tale in all the Victorian vampire canon (after Dracula, obviously) – and it probably deserves to be too.

But this is not a post about Carmilla, because Carmilla is not the only gay-vampire-story written way back in the Victorian era. It's not even the least subtle gay-vampire-tale.

There are (at least) two others, both featuring male/male vampire/human pairings. And whether or not they ‘deserve’ to be remembered in the same breath as Carmilla, they’re both fascinating works in their own rights: Manor, by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1884) – one of the world’s first gay activists – and A True Story of a Vampire, by Count Eric Stenbock (1894).

You can read both online. A True Story of a Vampire is long out of copyright and can be found on Gutenberg (Carmilla is too, if you're interested), and many other places. Manor has been translated into English only much more recently, but you can still get hold of it in pdf form, or buy it in ebook format. But if what you really want are some summaries, and/or whole lot of extra context and analysis to go with the stories themselves, I've got you covered below.

Manor (1884), Sailor Stories, and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

We’ll start with Manor, since it was published ten years before our other example, and because I’m not quite cruel enough to leave you going "wait, did you really just tell me there was a legit gay activist writing vampire slashfic in his free time way back in the 1880s?" while I ramble on about the other story first. We'll start with the author himself, because his own story is at least as interesting as any fiction he ever published.

Born in Germany in 1825, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs knew from a young age that he was attracted to men. He trained in law, but wisely resigned before he could be fired in 1854 when his proclivities came to the attention of his superiors. Most in his position would've redoubled their efforts to hide; Ulrichs spent the next several years joining societies dedicated to science and literature and developing his own theories about non-hetero orientations, before officially coming out to his family in 1862.

He was just getting started. By 1867, he was ready to come out to the whole world.

Ulrichs is far from the first gay man to recognise his attraction without shame and find society in like-minded individuals ‒ but he may well be the very first to come out voluntarily and publicly, and advocate for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. And when I say "publicly" what I mean of course is, "in a formal address to the Congress of German Jurists." He was shouted down, but it was still a staggering act of bravery for a man of his time. It would still be a staggering act of bravery in many parts of the world today.

Undaunted by his reception, Ulrichs would also publish a dozen booklets advocating for rights for his community between 1864 and 1879, framing their sexuality as natural, inborn and wholly benign. In 1880, after multiple arrests for his political advocacy, he left Germany for self-imposed exile in Italy, where he would remain until his death in 1895. But it's during this period that he published some poetry, as well as Sailor Stories, a collection of four short stories inspired primarily by Norse mythology, including Manor (which we’ll get to, don’t worry).

Though Ulrichs saw little legal success in his lifetime, through modern eyes, his greatest failure might be only that he was so far ahead of his time. When he began writing and advocating, the word 'homosexuality' didn't even exist yet ‒ he himself used the term 'Urnings' for gay men, eventually coining terms for variations like 'Mannling' and 'Weibling' (gay male equivalent of 'butch' and 'femme') as well. He also came to recognise bisexuality, lesbian attraction, and even intersex conditions, theorising that all resulted from some combination of male and female characteristics developing in the same individual, as the available knowledge on embryonic development suggested might be possible. For a guy with only Victorian era science to work from, that's still remarkably close to the modern consensus today.

Nor did Ulrichs' work die with him. His writings would go on to inspire and be republished by gay rights movements that followed him ‒ including the work and advocacy of Magnus Hirschfeld, who created what may be the world's first trans-affirming clinic. Even in his own time, responses from his own readers show much his work meant to them, reassured at last that they weren't alone.

So how does a German activist from the 1880s find himself publishing gay vampire fiction based on Norse mythology while living in exile in Italy? I only wish I knew. My sources suggest his main goal with Sailor Stories was to publish something that would sell. Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter it seems to have sold very little. Manor is the third of four short tales, and by far the gayest of them all. It's also (IMHO) by far the best, and the most interesting.

Set in a Norwegian fishing village, Manor tells the story of the romance between a 15-year-old boy called Har, and the titular Manor, a sailor 4 years his senior, who rescues Har from the wreck which killed his father. In the days that follow, the pair become close, and Manor takes to swimming across the bay on summer evenings to visit Har at his home. And so they meet whenever they can, until tragedy strikes again, and Manor is killed in a shipwreck near the coast, leaving Har inconsolable with grief.

But this being a vampire story, in the nights after Manor’s death, something is seen swimming across the bay to Har’s home, just as Manor used to do. Har is visited night after night by the spectre of his beloved, who lies beside him in bed, strokes his cheek with cold hands, and kisses him with icy lips, draining his blood from his heart, "like an infant at its mother’s breast." Har himself awaits each night with mixed joy and fear, longing to see Manor again, even in such a form.

As Har weakens, the villagers attempt to trap Manor in his grave by hammering a stake through his body, but he continues to visit Har nonetheless, now sporting a gaping wound in his chest. The villagers return with a new stake, widened at the base like a giant nail, and finally, Manor is restrained in his grave. But it’s too late for Har: weakened and heartsick, he dies, begging only that he should be buried beside his beloved at last. Neither rise again. 

Though I can’t speak to how it reads in the original German, in translation, Manor is relayed in largely workmanlike prose. Its tale is short, simple, and sad – but so much about it fascinates me all the same.

(Draugen, Theodor Kittelsen, 1891)

There’s the incorporation of elements you might better recognise from Norse draugr folklore – revenants more typically associated with deaths at sea, or charged with guarding their own graves ‒ but still far more closely related to the vampires of Slavic mythology than most people probably realise. Manor is also one of painfully few stories which clearly recognises what is surely the original purpose of hammering a stake through a vampire’s body: not to kill it, but to hold the creature down and prevent it from leaving its grave. As a hopeless vampire-nerd (I've presented panels at conventions about this stuff, it's dangerous to get me started), I can’t tell you how much I love those aspects of this story.

But above all, Ulrichs’ tale captures what might be one of the oldest and most traditional versions of the folkloric vampire: the spectre of a lost loved one, and the potent mixture of fear and twisted longing thus inspired, that the weight of their loss might drag you down into death to join them. Many ‘real’ tales of vampirism have been inspired by outbreaks of wasting diseases like consumption, working their way through a family, one member at a time. But in Har’s case, it is clearly grief as much as Manor’s physical visits that claims him. He loves Manor so much that he welcomes his lover back, even as a revenant. In his own way, Har too is cursed by Manor’s death to wander the world like the walking dead, until finally reunited with his lover once more.

Nowadays, tragic love stories like this tend to get an eye roll from a lot of the queer community. The old ‘bury your gays’ trope has been done to death, and we’re largely sick of being told that noble suffering is the best we can hope for. But it’s notable nonetheless that Manor’s sexuality has no bearing on his death, and little about the story would change were Har female. It's far from clear if the rest of the village even recognises Har and Manor's love for what it is, let alone whether they'd disapprove ‒ after all, vampires will often go after friends and acquaintances when lovers and family members are exhausted. As such, it’s hard to read the village’s attempts to keep Manor in his grave as a simple matter of prejudice. They're also genuinely trying to save Har's life.

And yet, the way Har keeps the undead Manor’s visits a secret, even begging for the stake to be removed so they can resume, echoes the real experiences of so many gay and lesbian couples far too clearly to be accidental. And however disturbing to a contemporary audience, Har’s willingness to follow his lover to the grave leaves little doubt of the depths of his feelings. To an audience in the 1800s, even the most cliched example of bury-your-gays would be revolutionary.

Did I mention that this story fascinates me? There are layers to this thing.

For completeness, I’ve also read the rest of Sailor Stories (and you can too at the same link). Only one of the other three tales contains any queer romance: the first, Sulitelma, where a boy called Erich falls for a handsome sailor called Harald he meets aboard a spectral storm ship. But there's no happy ending: his sister falls for the same handsome sailor, and shoves Erich overboard to his death to eliminate her competition.

Atlantis, the second story in the collection, is a direct sequel to Sulitelma, but it's even more bizarre. Erich is barely mentioned, and instead we find ourselves reading a tale which I can only summarise as like something I might have found on fanfiction.net back in the early aughts, written by some 14yo trying to straightwash the original material. Here, Harald and some of his fellows go on shore leave to the land of the phoenix, populated by Greek nymphs and Cupid, and mildly comedic hijinx ensue. It is fascinatingly bizarre, but not exactly satisfying as a read (or a sequel).

The final story, The Monk of Sumboe, tells of how two close friends destroy their relationship and themselves with their fixation on the tale of an alluring siren. There's a solid concept in there somewhere, but it's far too short and abrupt to do much with it, and all the characters remain strictly heterosexual. But if there's one thematic detail that ties it to the rest of the collection (beside the many Norse elements), it's that hopeless longing for something others would warn you away from �� whether that be a phantom ship, a visit from a vampire lover, or an elusive siren. None of these tales end well for their protagonists, but we're drawn to sympathise with them nonetheless.

I cannot guess what reception Karl Ulrichs expected in publishing this book. Sailor Stories is neither a work that could expect good reception from mainstream audiences or a defiantly-radical queer masterpiece. What did people make of it in its own time? Was it read and cherished by at least a few boys or men like Har and Manor? I’d hope so, but I’ll probably never know.

If you'd like to read more about Karl Ulrichs, I can recommend (among my sources) this New York Times article for a quick overview of his work, or the various work of Michael Lombardi-Nash and Hubert Kennedy (link 2). You can also read the first chapter of his published correspondence online for free.

A True Story of a Vampire (1894), and Count Eric Stenbock

Our second Victorian vampire tale was first published in English, though it was written by a Swedish Count. Like Carmilla in its own day (and quite unlike Karl Ulrichs), both story and author seem to have flown largely under the radar until many years after publication, the queer subtext little noted or commented upon (if at all).

If nothing else though, A True Story of a Vampire aptly demonstrates that at least someone of that era spotted what Carmilla was really about – because he wrote his own version, only about men. Stenbock’s tale is effectively a much shorter, gender-swapped version of Carmilla – but with a larger age gap between vampire and victim lending the story uncomfortable pederastic overtones.

"Vampire stories are generally located in Styria; mine is also," it begins – though I couldn’t name you any vampire story from the era besides Carmilla set there. The narrator, the surviving sister of the vampire’s victim, is called ‘Carmela’, if you needed further proof.

Much like in Carmilla herself, the vampire, Count Vardalek (a Slavic term for vampire) arrives at their house after being forced to seek local hospitality when some convenient ‘accident’ interrupts his travels. There, he bewitches and slowly drains the life from her brother, Gabriel – a boy described in terms variously angelic and fey, a wild thing who befriends wild animals and would rather climb a tree to a window than take the stairs to his own room, but who cleans up beautifully for church – a sublime, cinnamon roll of a creature, far too good for this sinful earth, too pure. Gabriel is a true male equivalent of the likes of Dracula’s Lucy, feminised further still by his youth and innocence. Had a vampire not got him, one can only imagine he’d have eventually have been spirited away by the fairies.

Gabriel and the mysterious Count are drawn to one another immediately. Even as Gabriel wastes slowly away, he greets Vardalek eagerly each time he returns by throwing his arms around his neck and kissing him on the lips. Count Vardalek himself seems to be a vampire of the psychic variety, gaining in health and vitality while Gabriel wilts, merely after spending time in one another’s presence. Vardalek himself seems to genuinely regret Gabriel’s inevitable death, but unlike in Carmilla, there’s no rescue at our conclusion. Gabriel dies, and we’re given no reason to assume he’ll rise again.

To the modern reader, the true horror of this tale lies not with the vampires or even the homoeroticism, but with those uncomfortably pederastic implications. Gabriel can’t be more than twelve years old, his youth and innocence emphasised in his every description. Pains are taken to suggest that Gabriel’s own attraction to Vardalek is as much responsible for his fate as the vampire himself. Gabriel’s father is similarly bewitched by this charming stranger, and never recognises the danger, or the reason for his son’s tragic death. Even the narrator, his loving sister, cannot truly hate Vardalek for taking her brother from her – even when her father dies of grief soon after. Gabriel’s fate seems sealed from the moment the Count enters their home.

But knowing how often real child molesters get away with it, their actions excused or downplayed by their family, their victims accused of ‘seducing’ their abusers and made complicit in their own misery… I can only say that, for my money, A True Story of a Vampire is a very effective horror story in ways the author probably never intended, once you start to question the reliability of its narrator.

It won’t surprise you to learn that the author, Count Eric Stanislaus Stenbock, was a (very) gay man, deeply involved with the gothic and decadent artistic movements of his day. Born to a Swedish Count and an English heiress, Stenbock seems to be remembered less for his writing than for his character. In The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, W.B. Yeats describes him as a "scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men" ‒ naming Stenbock as an exemplar of the poetic zeitgeist of the age. Notably however, none of Stenbock’s actual poetry is featured in the volume.

Stories about Stenbock are so bizarre that it’s hard to know how much should be believed. Eric Stenbock supposedly travelled with a multitude of exotic pets and a life-sized doll he referred to as his 'son', dabbled in religions ranging from Roman Catholicism to Buddhism, and decorated his dwelling with peacock feathers, oriental shawls, a bronze statue of Eros and a hanging pentagram. One acquaintance once compared him to a 'magnified child': "very fair hair beautifully curled, and a blond, round, blue-eyed face," who paused at the door and "took a little phial out of his pocket, from which he anointed his fingers, before passing them through his locks." But by his thirties, he was already dying of liver disease after years of alcoholism. He passed away at only 35.

Stenbock’s surviving artistic legacy consists of three volumes of poetry and one of prose, with some of those poems including explicit references to Ganymede or male lovers. So how did he escape the same controversy that dogged similar works by other queer creatives of his day, like Oscar Wilde or Walt Whitman – let alone Karl Ulrichs? Well, simple: his work never attracted enough attention to generate real controversy. Stenbock may have been just as much a character as figures like Wilde, but he hadn't nearly the same talent or success.

One last minor biographic detail that may be worthy of note (discovered courtesy of some very poor-quality scans of his one proper biography) is that the youthful Gabriel of A True Story of a Vampire may owe his name to a real Gabriele ‒ a female cousin ten years Stenbock’s junior, whom he would've spent time with in his teens, and seems to have been especially fond of. Whatever the true significance of that name, he'd use it more than once in his fiction: another short story, The Other Side: A Breton Legend, also stars an angelic little boy called Gabriel, with a similar dangerous attraction to the strange. It features some lovely mood and imagery as it sets the scene, but (perhaps as a result of the lack of a suitable model story like Carmilla) it is, in my opinion, a much weaker story overall.

But again, the most disturbing aspect of Stenbock's biography are the hints about his own relationships with much younger men. His second book of poetry, Myrtle, Rue and Cypress, is dedicated to three people: Simeon Solomon (a gay painter of the pre-Raphaelite movement, whom he met at Oxford), Arvid Stenbock, Eric's cousin, and to "the memory of Charles Fowler" ‒ the son of a Clergyman, who died of consumption at only 16.

This enigmatic dedication is all we know about Stenbock's relationship with Fowler. We don't even know how the they met (Fowler seems to have had a relative at Oxford at the same time as Stenbock, but even this is speculation). But that dedication, in a book which will go on to feature poems about the beauty of Ganymede, or explicitly addressed 'To A Boy' (Tis ever a delight, dear, To gaze upon thy face, To love the life within thee, Fair fashioned, full of grace) makes it hard to read Stenbock's feelings as remotely platonic.

It doesn’t help that the same volume includes a poem about an actual vampire, published ten years before A True Story of a Vampire would ever be penned, but with very comparable subject matter:

With slow soft sensual sips Draw the life from the tender spray, And brush from thy soft lithe lips The bloom of thy boyhood away

It's worth keeping in mind that Stenbock himself would've been only 21 at the time of Fowler's death, and that we don't know whether he ever acted on his attraction (whatever form it may have taken). He may well, as I've seen suggested, have kept his admiration private, idealising the image of the beautiful, dying boy in his final days, in that classic Victorian-gothic way. But it doesn't help that Stenbock's cousin Arvid, from that other dedication in the same book, was 8 years his junior, and that their family apparently disapproved of their relationship as "unnaturally close." Or that another famous Stenbock-associate was Norman O'Neil, a composer whom he met on a London omnibus in 1891, when O'Neil too was only 16. Stenbock was apparently taken by his intelligence and beauty, and would go on to leave him a considerable sum of money in his will. By 1891, Stenbock would've been 31, but his fixations hadn't aged with him.

So how are we to take all this? This was an age where a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a suitor of Stenbock's age would scarcely have raised eyebrows. Uncomfortable as it may sound today, for many queer youths of the era, a romance with someone older and experienced enough to play mentor may genuinely have represented the safest real option available. There are layers of complicated subtext, meanwhile, in the idea of any gay man of the Victorian era casting himself as a vampiric monster, doomed to ruin the object of their attraction with their very touch. There may be layers more in Stenbock framing his tale as "A true story" before telling us of the misery a foreign Count brought to an innocent family, with his helpless fixation on their youngest child.

It's worth noting also that even in Manor, by Legit Gay Activist Karl Ulrichs, our love story is between a boy of 15 and a man of 19 ‒ an age gap of only 4 years, but large enough at 15 to raise some serious eyebrows. His first story too, Sulitelma, involves attraction between a man and a boy (exact ages unknown). Though Ulrichs explicitly viewed relationships with prepubescent children as reprehensible, he seems to have had no problem with relationships between young teens and much older adults ‒ even printing a story sent in by a reader (details in this article), joyfully recounting how he (the reader) was initiated into the world of male/male love as a 14-year-old by his brother's riding master. Ulrichs saw no reason to disapprove.

To confuse things for anyone looking this up today, google Ulrichs, and you'll find a number of online articles claiming that his own first experience involved being sexually assaulted by a riding instructor when he was only 14. This is wrong on multiple fronts: not only is the story related by Ulrichs as a positive experience, it wasn't even Ulrichs it happened to. No, shit like this would not be okay if it happened today (and frequently wasn't then), but we don't help ourselves by distorting the stories told by our queer forebears to fit modern expectations.

But none of that surrounding context makes the youth of the day any less vulnerable to predation, or Stenbock's fixation on youthful beauty less creepy. Today, no evidence remains to help us guess whether idealising the beauty and innocence of youth was the greatest of Stenbock's actual crimes, or the least of them. Anything is possible.

In brief: welcome to the joy of trying to reconcile the complicated place of pederasty in queer history! I'm afraid you can look forward to seeing a lot of it from here on back.

A True Story of a Vampire is not a bad work of fiction by any means. There are some lovely descriptions and entertaining turns of phrase, and the horror is certainly effective. It may even be considerably more readable than Carmilla to many, simply for being so much shorter. But how you feel about it is really going to be up to you.

One last digression about Carmilla and Christabel

There’s one additional work that I’ve once or twice seen listed as an even earlier queer vampire tale: Samuel Coleridge’s unfinished poem Christabel (1800) – the only problem being there’s no vampire in the story (and how queer it is may be questionable too).

Like Carmilla, Christabel tells of a Baron’s daughter (the titular Christabel) who comes upon a mysterious stranger in apparent distress (Geraldine) and invites her into her home. We never learn what kind of being Geraldine truly is (three further parts were planned in addition to the two that were completed), but when she undresses, Christabel spies something that horrifies her, remembering it later with the words "Again she saw that bosom old / Again she felt that bosom cold." But under Geraldine’s spell, Christabel’s recollection of this incident comes and goes, and Geraldine has soon bewitched her father too.

All ‘evidence’ that Geraldine was intended to be a vampire rests on such details as Geraldine having to be carried past an iron gate into the house, much as vampires have to be invited in – but that particular vampire trope wasn’t actually codified until a solid century later (like most vampire-tropes, we have Stoker's Dracula to blame). The idea that Geraldine has the cold, shrivelled body of the undead and revives herself on Christabel’s blood is a perfectly valid reading, but the more obvious interpretation would be that she’s some manner of shapeshifting fairy creature, weakened by the iron of the gateway, not the entrance to Christabel’s home. The aristocratic literary vampire had existed for over 40 years and appeared in numerous works of fiction by Carmilla's day; but Christabel predates the origins of the genre a solid two decades. For Coleridge to have come up with the idea independently seems vanishingly unlikely.

I mention Christabel here partly for completeness, but mostly to bring us back around to the greater family of Carmilla, which is still legitimately the first known queer vampire story. Though far better known than any other story discussed here today, how it came about is perhaps the most mysterious.

Sheridan le Fanu was a prolific writer, but I don’t know of any other story he’s penned with subtext like Carmilla's (and I’m not quite invested enough to read all of the rest to check, though someone totally should so I don't have to). Le Fanu was married, and had children, and that's all I can discover about his personal life. Was he some shade of queer himself? Did he have connections to anyone who was? Did he even realise what he was writing with Carmilla? Nothing I’ve read about him provides any answers. Nor can I tell you how many readers spotted the subtext it the story was first published. In its own time, it caused no great scandal, nor even seems to have garnered much attention (by contrast, Byron & Polidori's The Vampyre caused an uproar when it was published in 1819, mostly thanks to Byron's established fame and debates over its true authorship). It took until well into the 20th Century for it to obtain the reputation it has today.

But I’m sure it’s no coincidence that it was Carmilla that spoke to Stenbock enough that he chose to retell it. And while A True Story of a Vampire is still the only other vampire story of the era set in Styria, there was almost another one: Dracula, at least Stoker’s early plans for the novel. Styria also remains part of the unused prequel chapter later published as Dracula’s Guest. The setting isn’t the only detail Stoker nearly-borrowed from Carmilla either, my favourite example being the weird schedule by which both she and Dracula seem to have to be in bed in their coffins at dawn each day, both apparently helpless and immobile in sleep, though both are also repeatedly seen up and about later in the day. Neither tale offers any real explanation.

Have I mentioned lately that Stoker, too, was almost certainly some shade of gay?

Now, the fact that two different queer writers both found Carmilla so very inspiring – and would even both publish their own works of vampire literature within five years of one another – isn’t much to go on, in trying to establish what a story like Carmilla might’ve meant to England’s queer population some twenty years after it was written. Maybe Carmilla was being eagerly passed around London’s own Uranian gothic societies at the time. Or maybe two different men happened upon it by chance in wholly different circumstances, and took very different things from reading it. Maybe Stoker didn’t even notice the queer subtext himself. But I can’t help but wonder if just maybe, there's something more than coincidence at work here.

Carmilla the vampire is an explicitly villainous character, her victim confused and unwilling. But she remains one of the most complex and sympathetic vampires of her era. And perhaps, to a community who had never seen Ulrichs’ writing published in their own language, and might never see themselves represented in fiction except as monsters buried in layers of protective subtext, that still meant something to readers like Stenbock, and Stocker, and who knows how many others.

In short, maybe old, gay vampire stories like these really are worth remembering. I'll leave that one up to you.