Okay, buckle up buckaroos, because today I met an honest-to-goodness cryptid.
I was out running errands and I made a stop at Intimate Books (…for a friend), and on my way out I realized that the bookshop next door was open.
This bookshop has existed for more than a hundred years, and in all my life it has NEVER BEEN OPEN. I mean, I assume it has to be open sometimes, but never at any normal, reasonable hour. Everyone says it’s a front for the mob or something.
So what do you do when the weird mafia bookshop is open? You go the fuck inside.
The first thing I noticed was the smell. You know that smell when you accidentally leave your towel on the bathroom floor all day and you come back to that mildew funk? The shop smelled like that times a thousand. I expected to see stuff growing on the walls, but the books were pristine. We’re talking first editions, rare editions, weird Bibles and books inscribed to really famous dead people. Librarians would weep for the chance to accession this place. In the first two minutes I found a signed copy of The Crucible and what I think was a first edition of Blake’s Book of Thel.
Then a clerk showed up out of nowhere—honestly nowhere. He looked EXACTLY like a bookseller should look, kind of fluffy and bewildered and really, really gay.
“Are you lost?” was the first thing he said to me.
“Nope. Just browsing, thanks.”
“Browsing, I see. Erm. How do you feel about snakes?” he asked. And without waiting for me to answer, he just walked away and vanished around a shelf.
I figured it was a metaphor, or a code phrase for the mafia. Until I turned a corner like ten minutes later and found a little reading nook. It was really pretty, although I feel like that particular window should have been on an interior wall? Anyway, curled up in an armchair in a patch of sunlight was the biggest fuck-off black snake I have ever seen.
Like, I don’t mind snakes in general. But in their normal context, right? Outside. On the ground. Not six feet long and sitting on a threadbare velvet armchair like it owns the place.
I was about to turn around and leave, but I saw a gorgeous first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass on a shelf, a little too close to the snake for comfort. But I had never needed anything so badly in my life.
So I went back to the counter to buy it, but the clerk was nowhere to be found.
While I was waiting, I noticed a collection of pictures hanging on the wall behind the counter, dating back to the very dawn of photography. A couple were of this rock-star looking guy from the 70s that I should probably have recognized, but there were authors and landscapes and stuff, too. There was even an old tintype portrait of Oscar freaking Wilde, sitting in this very shop with a guy that I would ACTUALLY SWEAR was the clerk from before. Like, I know my family all has the same nose, but this guy had the same everything.
After approximately one year of waiting, the clerk came back out to the desk. By now I’ve realized that he’s too bad at his job to be anything but the owner of the shop.
“I saw your snake,” I told him.
“Did you? Was he behaving himself?”
“He was sleeping.”
“Yes, he enjoys that.”
“Does he just stay out in the open like that? What if he gets out?”
He shrugged and smiled. “He always comes home again, the dear boy.”
Right, a homing snake. That’s totally normal.
Then he cleared his throat and asked, in a weirdly reluctant voice, if I was going to buy the Whitman.
“Yes, please,” I told him. “I saw it on a shelf by the snake, and it was just too tempting.”
He sighed. “Oh, yes, I expect it was.”
When I started to hand him my card, he went all fluttery and said that they didn’t take cards.
All right, fine. I had some cash on me, but I told him that he’d sell a lot more books if he got a Square or something.
He got this scandalized look on his face and went, “Why would I want to do that?”
Oookay. I handed over the cash and he popped open the ancient till and started making change.
In shillings. Shillings! I swear to god I saw Queen Anne’s face on one of them. The silver value of the coins was probably as much as I paid for the book.
But I had to have proof that this happened—at that point, all I had was a book in a plain brown wrapper, not appreciably different from what I bought next door. So I asked him for a receipt.
He looked delighted and wrote one up for me.
By hand.
With a fountain pen.
And that’s the story of how I met a bookseller cryptid and his pet snake.
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“I can’t be a trans man on the internet” go the fuck outside then dude. Signed a trans woman who has had enough of your bullshit posts
I’m gonna use this ask to make a point.
Trans guys if you get an anon claiming to be a trans women that says rude/bigoted shit, don’t believe them. Transphobes have admitted to pretending to be trans women and sending bigoted asks to trans men.
If you get an anon ask saying weird shit claiming to be from a trans women - always remember anons can lie about who they are! 9 times out of 10 it’s just some cis person lying to paint trans women as evil bigots.
And everytime I see a trans man fall for the bait and start saying transmisogynistic shit I just sigh.
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There have undoubtedly been (and continue to be) many historians who have preserved and protected queer history, often at their own detriment. There is room to be grateful for them, as well as critical of the structures that impede and hide their work. Sharing uncritical praise of academia is just as bad as throwing it all under the bus, reality is nuanced and deserves to be represented as such.
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I really do love Lucien Vaudrey and Stephen Day so much. I mean they are both a) total disasters, b) very very dangerous, c) and yet utterly superb? (Also desperately hot and moving together I mean *damn*.)
I love that consistently the most potentially scary of all the good or good-ish characters in KJ Charles' work is a 5'0", underweight, grumpy, impoverished-middle-class sub who most people don't look twice at and is so very decent and so very (appallingly) conscientious and heroic and will absolutely destroy you with a thought if he thinks that's the right thing to do and sees no other alternative.
(With a muscular, 6'4" or so dom and beloved who's wealthy and aristocratic and a former smuggler and gun-runner and an impressive fighter in a number of ways and who unless there's iron involved Stephen can totally throw across the room with his brain if he wants to.)
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Story time! a few years ago my grandma found out that my sibling is nonbinary. Sibling was nervous at first bc it was an accident, and even tho our grandma fully accepted me as a trans guy, she presumably had no idea what being nb or genderfluid meant. and to an extent the sib was right—she was totally unaware that those concepts existed when we agreed to meet for lunch that day
but. but. she brought a full on PACKET of printed research and a pen. and asked questions. she took honest to god notes.
so anyway. thank you Grammy for loving your grandkids unconditionally. the feeling is mutual 💕
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