#but if you needed it to

[thebisexualwreckoning]

Assorted thoughts on culture, generational trauma, racism, queerness and where they intersect for me

My family is from Bangladesh. Or they used to be. All of my great-grandparents were born there. At least 3 of my grandparents were born there as well. My mother travelled there on the back of trucks transporting hay. The town, practically the village, my father grew up in, is in Bangladesh.

There's this story my mother tells me. When I was around three years old, we were in a Bengali restaurant in New York and I was so happy to meet fellow Bengalis that I immediately started to speak Sylheti. They gave us a discount for that. called me Khuki and told my parents how nice it was to speak in the language of their home with someone once again.

Another time, another restaurant. This one is in London. I'm not three anymore. I don't speak Sylheti anymore either. They say I forgot because I had no one to speak it with. I don't even speak proper Bangla. It's now Bengali with a dash of Hindi. This time when we enter the restaurant, I don't approach the servers. They approach us and say how nice it is to find a fellow Bengali in the wild. We complain about how we're tired of white people food. My mother wishes she had macher jhol. The servers tell her to wait and bring out a plate of their own dinner. She cries as she eats it. Tears of joy and solidarity.

I'm twelve years old and for the first time, I decide to relearn my culture. I join a summer class, pencil in hand, ready to learn how to read and write all over again. I want to read my mother's magazines, the Feluda comics that she read out loud to me as a child. It paid off, but not in the way I expected, my mother fighting with my father, grabbing hold of my hand two days later as we boarded the aeroplane back to her father's house.

I'm 13 years old, on anti-depressants that I forgot to take some days, neurodivergence diagnosed, and learning more about myself each and every day. I come out as bisexual to my mom but do not tell her about my genderfluidity. Afraid of what she'll think when the daughter she always desired turns out to not be her daughter at all. We call my brother in Canada. He tells us about the people who shout slurs at him in the metro. We do not tell him that we are afraid that someday the slurs will turn into bullet wounds.

I'm fourteen years old, and my father's come to visit. It's his birthday so we travel to his parents' house. more than 4 hours away from ours. They greet us with barbed wire words on my grades, my brother's weight, my mother's inability to be a good wife. We smile through it all. I wonder how they can be so cruel. The people who cared for me when I was a child. The woman who named me now my worst enemy.

I'm fifteen years old now. My Bangla is clearer. Sharp vowels and clear consonants. It will never be rounded syllables of my childhood ever again. I learn of the Bengal partition in school. Learn how people killed each other in the name of freedom. I want to scream, "Amra shobai ek." We are all the same. We share the same culture, the same language but in different dialects, the same history. Stop killing, please. I'm tired of the violence and hatred, I say. This war started before I was born, will it continue after I'm dead as well?

I gathered the courage to google LGBTQ+ laws in Bangladesh today. And I realised something. I love my culture. I love my roots. I love this language, my ancestors, and every family member, even though sometimes I feel like there are too many to count. But I do not love what they have made of it. I saw the words splashed across the newspaper headlines, Anti - Queer laws still in place, Being gay is punishable with a life sentence in prison, a gay man is stoned to death in public and no one does anything to stop it. I do not cry. I've been doing nothing but crying for too long now.

Instead, I'm writing this. I'm writing this to tell everyone that it isn't over. I'm writing this to tell everyone that if I'd been born 413 km to the west exactly, I wouldn't be alive to write this post right now. I'm writing this because I am tired of our stories going untold, buried under layers of propaganda and zealotry. I'm writing this because people think my being Hindu, my being Indian, my being Bengali means that I cannot be queer.

Well sorry to prove you wrong. Because I'm still here. And I'm still kicking. And as long as I'm alive, I'm not going to stop. Neither will the thousands of others like me, telling their stories in a thousand different ways, fighting for their people in a thousand different ways.

So this one is for those still kicking.

We're Here

We're Queer

And we're ready to fucking fight.

[catlaila]

justice for kabru. they put my man in the wrong genre. bro was meant to be playing psychological games with light yagami and instead he’s playing yaoi mind tennis with a blonde himbo

[prettyboykatsuki]

touch-starvation needs to be written with emphasis on the starving part. you are hungry to be touched. so hungry that even the very taste of it makes you nauseous. it has been long since anything has ever touched you, ever fed you - that your body has grown more used to that gnawing emptiness more than anything else. it's better for you to be held, to eat but it makes you sick to try. you know

[sheepydraws]

The secret Dungeon Meshi sauce that's getting people to eat better is that it's so non-judgmental. Senshi and the rest of the gang never talk about what not to eat besides things that taste bad and literal poison. They don't even talk about "health" that much besides the importance of a balanced diet. It's so much easier to eat well when you think of food simply as something your body needs, and that it's often worth the extra effort to make it taste good, especially when you understand how to connect "things your body needs" with "things that taste good"

[bonesandthebees]

one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method

[3liza]

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/theyre-not-human-how-19th-century-inuit-coped-with-a-real-life-invasion-of-the-walking-dead

Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.

“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.

And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.

Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.

“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.

Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.

“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”

Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.

By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.

“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.

The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.

“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.

The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.

But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.

The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.

When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.

Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.

Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.

“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.

But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.

The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.

The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.

[kochei0]

I turn to Ares.

Thanks to Tyler Miles Lockett who allowed me to draw inspiration from his ARES piece for page 2! Look at his etsy page it's SICK

⚔️ If you want to read some queer retelling of arturian legends have a look at my webtoon

[sunbentshadows]

Hey all, you know how internet searches suck now? When the results are awful, full-of-AI, death-of-the-internet levels of bad?

Start appending date constraints to your searches - "before:2023".

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.

[fosliie]

College roommates, lab partners, to basically married pipeline

[queenofthequillandink]

Where's my Jewish phrase for when you people are being irrevocably horny?

[vamprisms]

adhd will have you fighting for your life to do beloved hobbies that bring you nothing but joy

[shadow-queens-blog]

hey does this make sense? am i reaching?

[junglejim4322]

Something that I have noticed is I know almost nobody my age that goes to a food pantry. I know people who regularly run out of money for food and in general have to eat an unsuitable diet because that’s what they can afford and they still don’t go to a food bank, im not sure if it’s because they’re embarrassed or maybe if you didn’t grow up going you don’t know much about it but if you’re financially struggling I really recommend it. And look into other options for food assistance too like community fridges and gardens and other programs that can assist you, where I live Salvation Army pays for an allotted amount of grocery delivery for low income people every month, in the summer farmers take excess produce to the library to be taken by anyone who needs it, etc. There are a LOT of resources for free food that you can look into especially if you are literally not eating because of your financial situation

[beaft]

google help me

[wheatormeat]

I made a little zine!

You can download and print it yourself for free here