Works insipired by Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead”
Suehiro Maruo, 2013
Philippe Caza, 1989
Philippe Druillet, 1976
Milo Manara, 1998
H.R. Giger, (right image from the series “Passages”) 1975
…and the original, Arnold Böcklin, 1880
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(clears throat) "Born down in dark drearburh, where the skeleton plows/came the cavalier prim'ry of our humble house." With some very minor adjustments, the Ballad of Chavo Guerrero fits Ortus Nigenad's hero worship and father issues perfectly. "He was my hero back when I was a kid/You let me down but he never once did."
Artist credit Pierogish
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“a ghost story they’ll hardly believe”, 2022, acrylic
this painting got a lotta love on my instagram (@gracie._draws), so i thought i’d pop it here too!
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Pietro Persicalli - The Mermaid, 1915 c. Gouache and watercolour on beige cardboard / 394 x 430 mm.
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Small vase, 1880s-90s, Japan.
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Johan Krouthén (Swedish, 1858-1932), Tannefors. Oil on canvas, 74 x 43 cm.
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Linocut prints by William Hays.
~ Dawn
~ After the Storm, 2016.
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"Validity" as a concept is antithetical to queerness as an academic or political tendency. If you take validity to mean "let's all be nice to each other" then sure, I'll link arms and frolic around right with you. Instead, validity is shorthand for expertise or speaking authority. It's something ontological to you and your identity, and no amount of learning or life experience is required for your credibility. You might then be drawn to queerness as a tendency because it is open-ended, but the open-endedness of queerness in this view begins and ends with the idea that "LGBT" just doesn't have enough letters. I am not going to debate who formally belongs; that is not the point I want to make, and it's an argument that queerness as a tendency circumvents. Some don't even view it as an identity to begin with! But queerness as a tendency is, almost definitionally, critical of ontology and the reification of identity over behavior. It is very deliberately not a closed identity politics. Some have argued that conceiving, say, homosexuality, as an abstract identity rather than behavior, leads to a politics that is euphemistic and apologetic about the very sex that first defined the concept. Love the sinner, hate the sin.
And so I see a subset both online and off that is both singularly concerned with "validity" and proudly Capital Q Queer. Not gay as in happy but queer as in "has a vague understanding of who Marsha P Johnson was," et cetera. They are unsatisfied with the limitations, real and perceived, of LGBT activism. Yet their solution is to go through the same legitimizing plots for newly minted identities that stifled LGBT activism to begin with! You are valid, you were born this way, your credibility comes with the territory of your identity alone. Everyone is deserving of kindness, and belonging should not be held ransom until you fulfill some expected milestones. I think even cis straight people can belong in queer spaces (whatever we mean by this), if they're respectful. Your local drag performers need the tips anyway. But if you are not reading, if you are not engaging with queer culture, if you are not connected to any scene, then I'm not sure why you would expect to be treated as an expert. People without these perspectives and experiences, even if they belong to a particular identity, will not see a broad picture. Look no further than statements that begin with "as a queer person" and end with some diatribe against kink at pride or whatever the outrage du jour happens to be.
Before the obvious hypocrisy of my statement comes up, I want to acknowledge that I've been there. Like any other Tumblr-riddled individual, I've been obsessed with blogging about queerness for years without living it or learning about it in any meaningful way. To this day I am very uncomfortable with being treated as any kind of expert. But I wonder: was being told I don't need to do this or that to be valid helpful? I'll extend it beyond queerness: "you don't need to read theory to be a leftist," et cetera. We were railing against gatekeepers: not institutions with the power to gatekeep in any meaningful way, but people with no real power of their own. Was I doing myself any favors by not doing anything to broaden my perspectives but still demanding to be taken seriously? So, you don't need to do this, you don't need to do that, but you can, and you might enjoy it. Queer activism and literature defend ways of living, pleasure seeking, and saying yes to life. If you want to do all of this for clout or "validity," start over. Do it because you can.
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