septemberjoon

[septemberjoon]

[septemberjoon]

today a football player came out as gay. We don't know who he is because he didn't feel comfortable in stating his identity, we just know that he plays in premier league. This is the letter that he wrote:

"As a kid, all I ever wanted to be was a footballer. I wasn’t interested in doing well at school. Instead of doing homework, every spare minute I had was spent with a ball. In the end it paid off. But even now I still have to pinch myself when I run out and get to play each week in front of tens of thousands of people. However there is something that sets me apart from most of the other players in the Premier League. I am gay. Even writing that down in this letter is a big step for me. But only my family members and a select group of friends are aware of my sexuality. I don’t feel ready to share it with my team or my manager. That’s hard. I spend most of my life with these guys and when we step out on the pitch we are a team. But still, something inside me makes it impossible for me to be open with them about how I feel. I dearly hope one day soon I will be able to. I’ve known since I was about 19 that I was gay. How does it feel having to live like this?Day-to-day, it can be an absolute nightmare. And it is affecting my mental health more and more. I feel trapped and my fear is that disclosing the truth about what I am will only make things worse. So, although my heart often tells me I need to do it my head always says the same thing: “Why risk it all?” I am lucky enough to earn a very good wage. I have a nice car, a wardrobe full of designer clothes and can afford to buy anything I want for my family and friends. But one thing I am missing is companionship. I am at an age where I would love to be in a relationship. But because of the job I do the level of trust in having a long-term partner has to be extremely high. So, at the moment, I avoid relationships at all. I dearly hope I will soon meet someone who I think I will be able to trust enough. The truth is I just don’t think football is ready yet for a player to come out. The game would need to make radical changes in order for me to feel able to make that step. The Professional Footballers Association say they are ready to help a player to come out. And they have said they will offer counselling and support to anyone who needs it. This is missing the point. If I need a counsellor I can go and book a session with one whenever I want. What those running the game need to do is educate fans, players, managers, agents, club owners — basically everyone involved in the game. If I was to make that step I’d want to know that I would be supported at each step of my journey. Right now, I don’t feel I would be. I wish I didn’t have to live my life in such a way. But the reality is there is still a huge amount of prejudice in football. There are countless times I’ve heard homophobic chants and comments from supporters directed at no one in particular. Strangely it doesn’t really bother me during the matches. I am too focused on playing. It’s when I get back on the plane or the coach and I have time to think that it gets to me. As things stand my plan is to carry on playing for as long as I feel able to and then come out when I have retired. It was great last month to see Thomas Beattie raise his hand and admit to being gay. But the fact he had to wait until retirement tells you all you need to know. Footballers are still too scared to make the step while they are playing. For the past year I have been getting support from the Justin Fashanu Foundation, not least to cope with the toll this is all having on my mental health. It is hard to put into words how much the Foundation has helped. It has made me feel supported and understood as well as giving me the confidence to be more open and honest with myself especially. Without that support I really don’t know where I’d be now. I know it might get to the point where I find it impossible to keep living a lie. If I do my plan is to retire early and come out. I might be throwing away years of a lucrative career. But you can’t put a price on your peace of mind. And I don’t want to live like this forever."

And that is why a show like Jamie Johnson is so important. Gay footballers live in fear. Fear of what their teammates will think, fear of what the fans will say and fear of ruining their dream. It's 2020, and football is probably one, if not the most homophobic enviroment in sports. Gay footballers should be able to be who they are and do what they love without fear of being insulted and discriminated. Like this footballer said, everyone involved in the game should be educated about this topic. Jamie Johnson is doing an amazing job portraying the fear of ruining your dreams just because you aren't straight, and that is why, people should watch this show.

edit: please, don't try to figure out who he is, he clearly wants to remain anonymous and I know for a fact that a lot of people are already looking for clues about who he is. Please respect his privacy.

Edit: I found the full letter, that's heartbreaking.

[septemberjoon]

curls in the wind

requested by anonymous

[septemberjoon]

thai bl is in such a weird place rn like somehow they’re making the world’s best media and the world’s worst media at the same time. frequently in the same show. sometimes in the same episode

[septemberjoon]

celebration for traditional chinese festival in yangshuo, guilin, guangxi 

[septemberjoon]

[septemberjoon]

highly highly recommend everyone to read this article, especially kpop stans could benefit from reading it

[septemberjoon]

I said it before but can we PLEASE take another moment to appreciate the fact that there is ~𝓬𝓸𝓷𝓼𝓮𝓷𝓽~  in every 👏🏻 single 👏🏻  intimate 👏🏻 scene on this show Like. your fave problematic bl could never. 😩

[septemberjoon]

Stepbrother Trope & the Nature of Taboo in BL

Taboo is an interesting thing. Anthropologists have a saying that goes something like this:

There are no cultural universals that cross time and space except one: every culture has taboos, and in every one of those cultures the taboos are broken. 

Taboos can revolve around consumption (from we don’t eat shellfish/dogs to we don’t eat humans), to death (don’t kill your parents), and of course sexuality (don’t have sex with a child or a family member). 

Generally speaking, you can identify taboo within your own psyche if you react viscerally to an idea - as in the very thought makes you physically ill, changes your heart rate, engages a fight or flight response, etc… 

Okay so. I hope you can also see how taboos would be culturally based, even apparently simple and universal ones like: 

Don’t have sex with a child. 

This prescription rests on how we culturally define child vrs adult. Do we assign an age to the transition point (e.g. 18), an achievement (e.g. education, killing your first big animal), a physical manifestation (e.g. period, voice cracking), an individual choice in attire/appearance (longer skirts, a shaved head). 

(The fact that in reading the above you probably got a little frightened and maybe sickened is taboo in action. I call it the “squick factor.” This post is at risk of being taken down simply because i mention this subject. That is cultural enforcement of taboo.) 

Some taboo nuances are achieved (like education) while some are ascribed (like age of consent). Same thing for family dynamics: ascribed = biological birth links, achieved = social links like marriage. And some taboos will change over time even within the same culture: like age of consent, acceptability of cousin marriage, and being queer (yes, sex between adult men, was/is in fact taboo in many cultures).

Taboos & Family Dynamics 

Family dynamics are similarly culturally flexible around incest taboos. The nuclear (Western concept) family dynamic is generally protected by the incest taboo in most cultures (that would be sex between direct biological lineage: grandparents, parents, children, siblings). Of course, there are exceptions, like marriages between brothers and sisters in Roman Egypt. 

However, there are cultures that linguistically include cousins in the filial (so cousins would be referred to as brother or sister there isn’t a separate word), in such places, cousins sleeping together is more likely to be taboo. Cultures where the term cousin exists as a separate linguistic concept are more likely to condone unions between cousins (e.g. Regency England), so, not taboo. Or not AS taboo. Although these kinds of things can, and usually do, change over time. 

Like with how we define what is means to be an “adult,” what it means to be a family member is also culturally defined, which brings us to… stepbrothers. 

The Stepbrother Trope in Origin Yaoi  

Taboos are often fetishized, which in romance means they can often become tropes. The stepbrother trope is pretty simple: 

stepbrothers fall in love with each other, often one of the two (usually the seme character) has a long held crush on the other, sometimes since childhood  

BL has a long tradition of using this trope. One of the most iconic examples of this is the yaoi manga Brother by Yuzuha Ougi (published in English by DramaQueen in 2005). It is INFAMOUS for being beautifully drawn, completely explicit, and one of the highest heat mangas every produced. But A LOT of other yaoi used this trope before and after Yuzuha Ougi. 

Why This Trope Wigs People Out 

Stepbrothers means objectively: 

the parents of two boys marry each other (these boys are not biological siblings or blood related), and because of the social and legal construct of that union, the society recognizes that the two boys are now siblings. 

What’s interesting about stepbrothers and taboo is that the original act of the parents marrying means there is (by default) no blood-relation taboo in place (they could not marry if they were blood related). So if the parents had not married and the two main characters met = no taboo. It was the act of someone else’s marriage that rendered the two characters somewhat arbitrarily taboo (they are, after all, not blood related, and yet now they have been assigned sibling status by someone else’s action). 

So what actually renders this taboo aside from ascribed status? 

What squicks people out about this trope? Here’s what many people would say: 

1. Childhood Exposure 

It’s sickening if the step-brothers grow up together and thus they were children together. 

How much time and how much of the childhood spent together renders this taboo? If the characters are already adult when the parents get together, does that make the trope okay? 

2. Proximity 

It’s cohabitation that makes it disgusting. 

What about best friends who grow up as next door neighbors then fall in love? Is that taboo? Does living under the same roof together make all the difference? How about a defacto adopted son, who seeks shelter in the neighbor’s home and ends up living there, then falls in love? Is that taboo too? 

3. Legal Standing in the Eyes of Society 

The social legality of the relationship renders it unpleasant. The mere fact of the parents being married has redefined the relationship of the children to such an extent that any sexual contact is verboten. 

What if the boys were in a relationship first, their parents met after they had already been together as lovers for years? Then the parents got married. Is the boys previous relationship rendered null and void? 

What about an adopted brother, same rules apply? 

4. Power Dynamic 

The stepbrother trope in BL often includes an age difference as well (one of them is older, sometimes a great deal older). This casts the older brother in a parental role, which many find repugnant. 

In BL and yaoi, one way they circumvent the inherent disgust of this power dynamic (especially if the characters grew up together) is to make it so that the older bother is the innocent ignorant uke character. It’s the younger one who has the crush. And it is the younger one who confesses first and acts on that crush. 

(And it’s one of the reasons we see the stepbrother trope so often in gay romance and so rarely in het romance - although it does exist - because het would require the female character to be the aggressor in order to subvert this power dynamic and the companion squick factor, but in het romance a woman with agency is kinda taboo. *joke*) 

Why this post?

All of this messiness makes the stepbrother trope and it’s interrelationship with taboo fascinating to me. Sometimes, when I encounter it, I find myself utterly unbothered by it, other times it squiks me out. 

For me, this largely has to do with the nature and intent of the characters involved. 

What HIStory 4: Close to You has given us is an older character who genuinely believes he is in a brother-only relationship. Who loves and acts and has always done so as an older brother. Contrast this to an obsessed younger adopted stepbrother who has never believed in them being actual brothers, who has refused even to change his name because he so desperately wants never to be perceived as brothers. His obsessive desperation drives him to commit predatory acts of stalker-ism, physical violence, and ultimately statutory rape. 

It is particularly hard to watch because it’s pitting a pining seme character against a lonely uke character, but the ideology that ultimately separates them is how each character is defining taboo and family. Their world views are entirely different. It’s difficult to imagine how this can be reconciled by the story. Even if they manage to somehow condone the seme’s actions, even if the actors have really great chemistry, we are in troubled waters here and the natural inclination on a storyteller’s part would be to end this tragically. 

I don’t have a pithy conclusion for this essay, I just wanted to unpack the trope a bit. Especailly as it’s rearing it’s ugly head in two dramas right now (Brothers & H4). 

BL Using the Stepbrother Trope

Addicted Heroin - China 

Brothers - Thailand 

HIStory: Stay Away From Me - Taiwan  

HIStory 2: Crossing the Line (subplot) - Taiwan 

HIStory 4: Close to You (subplot) - Taiwan 

Love By Chance, Love By Chance 2, TharnType (subplot) - Thailand  

My Bromance (movie, series, series 2) - Thailand 

GL

Transit Girls  

Alternate Versions of the Stepbrother Trope

Servant who grows up in the household, kind of like a brother but much lower class. 

Because of You (subplot) - Taiwan 

Irresistible Love - China 

Love By Chance 2: A Chance at Love (subplot) - Thailand 

Love Stage! (subplot) - Japan

Maybe brothers but it all turns out to be a scam or mistaken identity.

Because of You - Taiwan 

Precise Shot - China 

[septemberjoon]

Remember all that energy fans had defending Harry Styles in a dress? Let’s repeat that for Lil Nas X.

If you’re only saying Black Lives Matter at a protest and when they are dying you’re a tourist.

Black art matters. Queer Black art matters.

But we cannot not only say Black Lives Matter in response to what Black creatives provide because that is also tourist energy.

Lil Nas X needs our energy and love because he is a goddamn person.

[septemberjoon]

king king king

[septemberjoon]

Alec Secăreanu in the upcoming ‘The Bike Thief’

[septemberjoon]

why were they trying so hard to invalidate peoples identities like it’s so weird.

anyways, if you’re unlabeled, you’re valid. them trying to actively erase and ignore the existence of people who identified under other sexual orientations of LGBTQIA+ was wrong of them. but i guess ignorance is bliss.

[septemberjoon]

lil nas x having the quotes ""so in the beginning, they were cut in two; they longed for their other half" from Plato and "they condemn what they do not understand" from Quintilianus in the Montero video....the iconicry

[septemberjoon]

I'm SCREAMING!! GET EM