#no one in the institute is cishet

[halion-halion-aito]

screaming at how the whole concept of bully revolves actually around hubris

you know how it all started because gary’s plan was to take over the school, about jimmy progressively taking over each and every clique of the school, enjoying the more power and control he’d get, ending up tripping when gary took it all from under his nose and finding out that he was nothing all along, and then about gary thinking he won over everything and was now unstoppable, standing literally on top of the world, but jimmy had climbed it over just as he did, just behind him (again literally and metaphorically), and it was found out that gary was not a king but just a delusional fifteen years old with need for control in his life and no support system behind him

[edrec]

just spent 7 minutes typing out a big angry rant about a quote that hit too close to home, looked up the context of the quote, it didn't mean what i thought it meant, so now i sitting here still really angry but nowhere to direct it

like if you read the tags

[ebp-brain]

academics can be shitty but there’s no need to dismiss them automatically: queer theory edition

look I’m not going to reply directly to the post I’m responding to because I’m not trying to “call out” anyone and I don’t need a bunch of angry responses. but I’m so frustrated so HERE GOES.

there’s a post with about 75k notes making the rounds that says something along the lines of “no matter what, 18 yr old LGBT people know more about being LGBT than cishet gender studies professors.” and then some dig at judith butler. and I think that while parts of this are valid, on the whole it’s a disturbing dismissal of a field built through queer blood sweat and tears, and a troubling refusal to accept any challenge to one’s sense of self.

should ANY professor make you feel stupid or invalid for not having read or studied things? no! that sucks and is terrible!

do 18 yr old LGBT people have more direct lived experience of being LGBT than their cishet professors? sure! (although probably not more than most of the people who wrote that queer theory their professors want them to read.) however, there’s a pretty good chance that your cishet gender studies professor has been on the front lines of feminist and antihomophobic activist movements, and has lived with and loved queer people in complicated messy intimate ways, and probably experimented with sexuality and gender even if they landed on a cishet identity, and has fought to keep queer performance art spaces open and shouted down homophobic colleagues and worked to make their university safer for queer students and faculty. they’re probably deeply enmeshed in their queer communities.

are there things they’re still missing because they haven’t directly experienced life as an LGBT person? probably! do they have nothing to teach LGBT students? that’s absurd!! WHY WOULD YOU DISMISS AN ENTIRE FIELD DEDICATED TO UNTANGLING HETERONORMATIVE SYSTEMS OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY AND ARTICULATING QUEER PLEASURE AND PAIN? WHY WOULD YOU AUTOMATICALLY DISMISS SOMEONE WHO HAS DEDICATED THEIR LIFE TO QUEER THOUGHT?

look, if your professor is condescending and mean, that’s different. and queer studies professors can be as shitty as anyone else. but if we agree we’re not only talking about those shitty professors...look, many queer studies professors and scholars, regardless of who they sleep with and how they identify, have found the existing structures of gender and sexuality stifling and oppressive and have spent years and years working towards something better for personal AND political reasons. academics don’t just train their binoculars on their objects of study and jot down notes, if they’re doing things right. academic work can absolutely participate in systems of oppression, but it can also do incredibly useful work examining and undermining those systems. why NOT take advantage of the collective work of antihomophobic, antiracist, feminist scholarship to articulate things about gender and sexuality so ingrained in our culture we sometimes don’t even notice they’re there? if someone who is so intensely intimate with queer history and community and thought questions an assumption or gently pushes back against an opinion, they’re not necessarily right, but it’s generally worth engaging with them, at least for awhile.

you know things your professors don’t. they also know things you don’t. judith butler is hard to read. judith butler is a genius. judith butler makes mistakes. judith butler frequently blows the minds of queer 18 yr olds when they give her a chance. your professor can help you understand judith butler. you do not have to like judith butler, but it might be worth trying her out, especially if you are in a gender/sexuality studies class, where the point is to read and think about work by people like judith butler. (and audre lorde and gloria anzaldúa and bell hooks and josé muñoz--if your professor is only giving you white queer theorists, that’s a whole different story and you should probably run.)

(also, judith butler is queer so if that’s your only criteria for listening to someone...???)

[britneyshakespeare]

i’m not even really a believer but sometimes you just read a man’s opinion on the internet and you think: “okay, atheist”

[linkedsoul]

Vanitas no Carte was made for queer people. Women with swords and big weapons? Men with long hair? The true enemy is the institutions/government?? One of the main characters has a dangling earring? The other main lead is a kind gentleman with a cat? Found family? Everyone seems to be a little in love with one another? Color coded chara designs? Everyone is a drama queen? Do you really think this was made for the cishets?????

[silvermoon424]

When I hear one more time that we aros/aces are not "oppressed enough and therefore don't belong into the community" I will explode.

Don't we all love good old aphobia?

I'm honestly getting really depressed seeing all the casual aphobia from my own community, as if we don't get enough from cishet people. The "ace discourse" isn't rancid as it was years ago- which, btw, was a big part of kept me in the closet and from identifying as asexual- but there are still a lot of out-and-proud exclusionists on this site.

I was just on the "ace exclusion" tag because I thought it would be mostly people against aro/ace exclusion- which there were posts about that, but there were tons of proud aphobes talking about how aro/ace people are "cringey," how we're "cishets infringing on gay spaces," how we're "not oppressed enough to be a part of the community."

Like it's so wild how these people will say "aro/ace people don't face any oppression" and then will go on to bully and exclude us with zero awareness. I'm not claiming that aro/ace people face the same institutional discrimination and vitriol that gay and trans people do (because we don't), but amatonormativity is a very real thing and single people are often stigmatized. Aro/ace people are often seen as freaks because of our lack of romantic/sexual attraction, to the point where some people claim that we are "broken" and "missing something that makes us human." Not to mention that, with stagnating wages and increased cost of living, it's becoming harder and harder to get by as a single person.

Aphobia and discrimination against ace/aro people absolutely exists and exclusionists can get fucked. The torchbearers of the queer rights movement fought so that we could all have rights and have a community where all are welcome, and these people want to turn around and exclude us because we're too "cishet" for them or whatever. It's bullshit.

Thank you so much to all the LGBTQ+ people who stand up for aro/ace people and make us feel welcome, you guys are awesome and I know you outnumber the exclusionists!

[edelegs]

a very unfocused analysis on why edelgard stans are mostly lgbt

I am constantly thinking about how Edelgard just doesn’t seem designed to appeal to cishet men. Like the joke is that Bleagles is the Gay House, but everything about her feels deliberately non-hetero. She’s dressed in sharp outfits covering her upper body, with proportions that don’t seem exaggerated. Her poise and the way she effortlessly flourishes her axe exhibits an air of coolness. While titties out =/= character of no substance, Edelgard being dressed more modestly suggests that she wasn’t designed with male-centred fanservice in mind. And she still looks absolutely stunning in her more modest attire (like seriously, I haven’t felt the need to return to cosplay in years but I want to do her academy look so bad). 

Edelgard is intense. She does not mince her words and she is constantly evaluating you. Though she tries, she has a difficult time understanding her peers initially. Early on, she talks about how she would sacrifice herself and others in the name of some greater good. She is terrible at communicating with her peers. She has to be seen as infallible. Her heart has been hardened for years and she assumes she has to stay that way. She also assumes everyone mourns the same way she does - which is why she (kind of insensitively) insists you move on when Jeralt dies. Because to her, grief has to be channeled towards action, or else you’ll get lost in it. This attitude is demonstrated time and time again as she presses on. It can make her come off as cold and unfeeling - but look closer, and she’s anything but. Her story is ultimately about her realizing that to achieve her goals, she needs to let people in and allow herself to want things like cakes and tea parties and lazy days in peace. The game leaves the player guessing as to how involved the Flame Emperor was in each Part I event, makes you feel hurt by her betrayal, and leaves you with a choice: do you follow the orders of the woman who tried to make you a god without your consent, or a young girl with questionable morals about to throw the world into upheaval?

Choosing her of your own volition (not for completionist reasons) requires the basic ability to sympathize with a woman’s pain. It also requires the player to read beyond her unwavering will and dubious methods to get a sense of how deep that pain goes and how the theme of humanity relates to her differently in each route. The player must be able to see a young woman’s desperate resolve to change the world so it stops exploiting people and ruining lives. They must be able to accept the fact that women can make the same morally wrong and ambivalent decisions that complicated male characters get to make all the time and still be the one to root for. This is not unique to LGBT+ people, but this population is likely to understand why Edelgard feels so strongly about why she has to change the system. 

I don’t think “Edelgard gets undue criticism because she’s a woman” captures the full picture. An important aspect of her treatment by certain parts of the fandom is that she’s a radical woman. Her hatred of the Church and the Crest system resonates way harder with people who have been hurt by institutions that are deeply engrained in our society. Siding with her means siding against the Church - which, while different from real world religious institutions, still invokes language about “sin” and “punishment. Choosing Edelgard will likely hit different if homophobic and transphobic Christians used that rhetoric against you. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that the reason F/F Edeleth is the more popular iteration of that ship because most people who would choose to S-support Edelgard are LGBT+ themselves. This is not a revelation. To anyone in the community, it’s fairly obvious. 

Crimson Flower was my first route. I went into the game knowing absolutely nothing. I played it during the last week of 2020 and hoo boy was it cathartic. I felt like I was living out a gay revolution power fantasy, where I could truly change systems of oppression while fighting alongside a group of troubled students I’d shaped the lives of. Through your unwavering support, Edelgard learns that she needs to be human, that she must listen to her friends, and that she’s allowed to enjoy the world she’s creating. I love this character so much. It has been six months since I first played and I am still analyzing her, because there’s so much depth. Yet so many people fail to see that depth and dismiss her as evil, because they never had the will to understand complicated women in the first place. 

[gatheringbones]

i just wanted to say i love your blog, genuinely its a salve (especially the literature you post) and has helped me look forward to writing again. im not sure if this is something you talk about but for me grad school depleted my ability to write - something about writing queerness for a cishet audience for 6+ years just wears you down. youve posted a lot about killing your inner editor, but do you have any advice for killing editors that dont even belong to you? how do you stop hearing the voice that keeps saying, "this is stupid and self indulgent"? of course feel free not to answer if this is presumptive but i was interested in your thoughts.

oh that voice gets to join the crowd. it can sit there with the inner white supremacist, the inner homophobe, the inner woman hater, the inner cop, and the inner neglectful/frightening caretaker whose approval and interest you need to gain to survive. they’re there, they’re always going to be there. they’ll say exactly what they’re going to say, but just because someone is speaking does not mean that what they are saying is pertinent or valuable. you get to interrupt and talk over them. you don’t have to sit there and get dragged into their nonsense.

once you identify one of those voices, a mean dragging shaming voice like that, great. put another voice next to them. not yours, but someone who believes in you and despises bullying in all its forms. listen to what they have to say.

starhawk made most of my thoughts on this text for me when she talked about the inner self-hater, where it comes from, and what its needs are. so did jordy rosenberg— confessions is absolutely about the humiliating exercise of vivisecting the trans experience for institutional academia.

you spent two years putting every idea you ever had through a gauntlet of shame, of course that left some marks and echoes.

[satanfemme]

Hi! May I ask why you dont identify with the term queer? I'm just kinda confused, sorry

why is this like the second ask I've gotten mentioning this subject within the past 24 hours. it's been months (at least) since the last time I've actually mentioned not id'ing with that word. like genuinely is there a callout about me getting passed around lgbt discourse tumblr rn, hello? I'm not intending this response to be standoffish towards you btw, just confused why people I don't even know are suddenly so interested in this personal detail about me, a real life gaytrans person, who you don't know? also maybe it's the paranoia speaking but I get the sense this is a bait ask. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt rn, and assuming you've just genuinely never heard of anyone disliking the word before, but please understand why I don't really feel comfortable getting asked this by a complete stranger unprompted.

and to be frank it's no one's business why an lgbt person might prefer one word or dislike another. no one needs a moral reason to not identify as a label? you might as well start going up to binary trans people asking them why they don't id as agender. like, cause they aren't. lol. and I'm not queer.

but to answer your question, here's a quick history: "queer" was a word that historically (and still in the present!!!) means "weird", "strange", "eccentric", etc. basically "not quit right; a little off-putting". at one point (in the ~late 1800s) cishet people began using the word to describe feminine and gay men (who are, to them, very weird and wrong). it was used especially with reference to gay men's "sexual deviance", and alongside other 'fun' pejorative words like "fairy" and "faggot". it became a slur invented by cishet people, and used by cishet people, to describe gay people as something other, different, strange, not-like-us. as fucking WEIRD. said in the same breath as calling us faggots. and said in conjugation with homophobic harassment, oppression, hate crimes. over time, lgbt people began to reclaim and adapt it into our own slang, just like we have with similar words like fairy and faggot and etc. and in the ~1980s there was a notable movement of people reclaiming the word en masse -- because lgbt people needed power and there's a power to slur reclamation! "you think I'm fucked up and disgusting? ok, watch me!!!" is a political message with bite to it. "not gay as in happy, but queer as in FUCK YOU" was subversive and radical as hell. instead of assimilating to what pop culture wants from you, stand your ground and turn whatever terrible thing they see you as into something you're proud to be! when fighting oppressive institutions for rights and respect, why beg those oppressors to see you as a respectable "keep it in the bedroom, blend into normal crowds, never ever mention your perverse homosexuality in front of any impressionable children" kind of gay person, when you could instead DEMAND the respect you deserve not "in spite" of who you are but BECAUSE OF IT.

however the point of slur reclamation, such as described above, imho is that the slur has teeth to it. and despite modern liberal movements attempting to file down and smooth out and commercialize "queer", it was picked out for it's teeth and those teeth are still there. even if they've been shoved away under the rug for a lot of people. the slur never left cishet people's pejorative lexicons. so I get that in some areas, in lucky contexts, it genuinely does just mean "lgbt" in the most neutral sense possible. but outside these hyper-specific settings, it's still a slur. for a lot of people, it's still a slur they get called by homophobes/transphobes/etc. it's still used by cishet people, for irl harassment and irl hate crimes. and its history is still embedded into the word itself (you can't separate the word from "weird and strange" when dictionaries still define it as "weird and strange"!)

I'm not explaining to you why I, personally, as a real life femme homosexual with a job and bills to pay don't want to get called a queer by anyone.

but if you use your critical thinking skills, I'm sure you could take a fucking guess????! :)

also, on an ending note: "why don't you id with the word queer?" why would I. I have no reason to reclaim a slur that so many people want to ignore the history of, both past and present. there's hardly anything revolutionary about a word Target™'s trying to sell us on fast fashion t-shirts. if I'm gonna stab myself to prove a point, I'm not doing it while goddamn corporations cheer me on.

at least when I call myself a FAGGOT cishet people WINCE! but if I call myself a queer... they just nod their head and agree.

[boydykedoctor]

The Vanishing of Will Byers and 1980s Stranger Danger

Alrighty, this is part one of many Stranger Things analysis posts.

content warnings: kidnapping, true crime, homophobia, transphobia, 1980s AIDS crisis, discussions of pedophilia (nothing explicit), academic use of the "Q slur"

Quick preface

all of this analysis was originally done for a Queer Theory class, and use of the word "Queer" in this context differs somewhat from its casual use. what even constitutes "Queerness" is something that theorists in this field argue about. LGBT studies and Queer Theory are both legitimate approaches to subjects like heteronormativity and cisnormativity, but they differ because LGBT studies suggests that sexual and gender identities are stable. meanwhile, Queer Theory makes its home in fluidity between and outside of identity and emphasizes the importance of "performance" as something that creates identity—not the other way around.

i will be applying the term "Queer," meaning anything that is out of the accepted norm of white American cishet nuclear family formations, to this analysis. i'll also be using the term to talk about Will Byers as a gay child, a figure that was totally unacceptable in the 1980s (and to a lesser extent, today). i'm prefacing with this warning because i realize that some people don't want to see this term applied in a generalized way, and that's totally valid. but the field of Queer Theory just does that, so this is your warning and your chance to click away.

Lee Edelman

I'm gonna try my best to make this post accessible, and this very famous theorist Lee Edelman makes that very hard, so bear with me. (seriously, this guy's writing style is......so stupid difficult. i'm not even sure i understand him completely and i've taken classes on him twice.)

he's most famous for his argument that Queerness is inherently negative--not negative like bad, but negative in that it negates what is commonly accepted as "right" or "moral." i like to picture this in terms of space:

it's important to be in this negative space rather than absorbed into mainstream culture because if you're a part of mainstream culture you have a harder time criticizing it.

to Edelman, what counts as queer changes over time because different identities and performances become more or less acceptable over time. one example you're probably familiar with is ancient Greece: because homosexual relationships between men were common, legal, and non-stigmatized, they aren't something that counts as "queer" to that geographically and chronologically-specific society. obviously, this is not the case for homosexuality between men in other times and places.

my professor's favorite example of the way that the Queer vs. the normal changes over time is former US presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. he's a clean-cut rich white guy, a former member of the military, and incredibly neoliberal. he also "happens to" be gay, and has taken part in the governmental institution of same-sex marriage with another regular, clean-cut white guy. he became high-profile as the first serious gay contender for US president. however he chooses to casually identify is up to him, but in the eyes of most famous Queer theorists, Buttigieg is pretty far from being Queer despite the fact that he's gay—but why? because he's otherwise assimilated to everything that Queerness is supposed to stand against as a revolutionary movement. however, if Buttigieg had run for president at basically any other time in United States history, he would have been berated, abused, and suppressed on a mass level.

The Symbolic Order

psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is famous for a lot, but we're gonna focus on The Real and The Symbolic.

The Real is the natural and chaotic state that we’re closest to when we're babies before we enter language. before you have language, everything is just kind of a blob, and you can't distinguish between concepts. communication narrows our experience of the world and our needs so that we can express our experiences to other people. however, this makes each person appear to be a single, uniform subject rather than an endlessly changing, amorphous assemblage of perception and need.

language and narrative, or The Symbolic Order, organizes this chaos into something we can understand. but The Symbolic will never be able to capture The Real, which is too multidimensional to ever describe.

Stranger Things is an example of The Symbolic because it's literally a narrative: it's not real life, but it condenses a lot of the human experience into smaller bites with relatable characters, emotional arcs, and a historical setting that looks backwards at the 1980s from the current moment and political reality.

i like to examine Stranger Things through the lens of the horror genre because horror usually attempts to get as close to describing the visceral fears of The Real as it possibly can. Sci-fi horror specifically is often about the unknown and the unknowable, and ST is no exception.

drawing on Lacan's ideas, Edelman writes,

“queer sexualities, inextricable from the emergence of the subject in the Symbolic, mark the place of the gap in which the Symbolic confronts what its discourse is incapable of knowing” (No Future, 2004).

now you may ask, "Lee, pray tell, the fuck?"

what he's saying is that Queerness is a threat to The Symbolic Order because it refuses to be defined. you can't put Queerness into clean, separate boxes and you can't sanitize it. institutions that affirm cishet-normativity can't define Queerness or acknowledge it because that would acknowledge that the whole system of forcing people into boxes, expecting them to self-identify, and monitoring how they express themselves is fucked up.

what can't be defined or acknowledged is the natural home of horror because, according to Lacan, facing The Real (the meaningless blob of reality) is traumatic if we don't rely on The Symbolic (again: language and narrative that provide meaning to our lives) to soften the blow. something that goes undefined is "strange" because we don't understand it. in this context, the "strange" and the "queer" are synonyms.

The disappearance of Etan Patz

now, let's look at "stranger” as a noun.

the figure of “the stranger” and, more specifically, “stranger danger” was a frenzied preoccupation for the USA during the 1980s. It's not a coincidence that the story of Stranger Things—a young boy going missing—is particularly resonant because of its historical setting.

in 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared in New York and was never found. Photos of Etan taken by his father—a professional photographer—inspired widespread panic. now, i have no idea if it's a coincidence that Jonathan Byers is into photography, but this hobby of his is VITAL to the plot—especially in season 1. he and Nancy only team up over Barb's disappearance because he took photos of Barb on the night of the pool party, and Nancy sees the photos. his photography is also the reason that the Byers have a recent photo of Will that gets put up on his missing posters.

it's theorized that the Etan Patz case only blew up because there were clear, professional portraits of the missing child which made him easily recognizable, and he's a regular-looking white boy. if Jonathan hadn't been a photographer, the first season of ST would be entirely different.

By 1983 (the year when Stranger Things begins), Ronald Reagan had dubbed Etan the official poster boy for the missing child campaign, bringing national attention to a problem that would soon be used to stoke moral panic throughout America. in Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State, Paul Renfro writes, “Etan’s photographs helped buttress such exaggerated claims [that approximately fifty thousand children are kidnapped by strangers each year] and the broader child safety cause by inaugurating a new cultural form: the image of endangered [white] childhood.”

Lee Edelman and the image of "The Child"

Edelman (that fucking guy again) argues in No Future that “the child” represents not just the literal child but also a figurative image of the future of society and the nation. the term "reproductive futurism" refers to the idea that we should always reproduce the current values of our society, maybe with minor changes. for example, sure! let same-sex couples get married (after decades of fighting for it)! BUT we're still going to expect them to live up to the nuclear family model. only two people can be married, they should never have relationships outside of that marriage (even consensually), they should refrain from showing their relationship out in public ("think of The Children!"). oh, and people with disabilities can't get married at all. ~LOVE WINS!!!~

reproductive futurism wants to preserve heteronormativity or patriarchy, recreating the same oppressive systems in every generation. the child represents the future generations, so whatever the child is learning or not learning will decide what the future looks like.

politicians and news outlets made Etan’s disappearance into much more than an isolated tragedy: it became a symbol for the destruction of innocence, ramping up national fear. kids everywhere drank milk cartons printed with the faces of missing children, watched PSAs by McGruff the crime dog, and attended cautionary school assemblies.

Stranger Things is heavily associated with the nostalgia of 80s era toys, video games, and film, but what is rarely mentioned is the show’s use of anti-nostalgia. “Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers” dredges up chilling memories of a time when kids and their parents were convinced that lurking in the shadows everywhere were strange adults looking to snatch them away. but these weren’t just any adults; they were adults who matched racist and homophobic profiling.

1980s homophobia and the stereotype of the gay pedophile

there was no evidence that Etan’s case, or many other cases of child kidnapping around this time, were sexual in nature. but during a police raid of the North American Man/Boy Love Association’s headquarters (big warning for discussion of pedophilia in that link. i don't endorse NAMBLA, and you shouldn't either.), photos of a young boy who looked like—but importantly, was not—Etan were found, and all kidnapping cases then onward were presumed not only sexual, but specifically homosexual.

gay pedophiles presented the right wing’s greatest feared threat to white, straight childhood, so they became the dominant narrative (Renfro). this stereotype was so common that it permeated at least into the early 2000s. hell, i remember being told to steer clear of gay men as a child because they were assumed to be pedophiles—never mind the fact that i was AFAB and presented as a girl!!!

similar stereotypes stick around today. for example, transgender women and other transfem people are viewed by conservatives as threats to childhood innocence, especially for young cis girls. If you can convince parents that their white cishet children are in active danger, then you can frighten them into supporting discriminatory measures against the Queer Other.

"99 out of 100 times kid goes missing, the kid is with a parent or relative."

Paul Renfro writes the following:

“Anxieties about feminism, gay rights, and sexual permissiveness nurtured the idea that children within the American family household faced intensifying threats from strangers and other malevolent actors outside the home. Concerns about crime and moral decay, exacerbated by the mid- to late twentieth-century rights revolutions, pivoted on the image of endangered white childhood” (Stranger Danger, 44).

outsiders and the unknown are treated as the main threat even though the overwhelming majority of kidnapping and sexual violence cases against children are not committed by strangers, but rather by people already close to the child in question.

the family is almost never afraid of what trauma it can cause the child, but instead afraid of the child becoming corrupted by outside influences. this concern comes up in the first episode of Stranger Things. when Joyce goes to Hopper to ask for help, he says, “ninety-nine out of a hundred times kid goes missing, the kid is with a parent or relative.”

despite what an absolute piece of shit Lonnie is, Joyce doesn’t believe that he could have anything to do with Will’s disappearance.

“What about the other time?” she says. “You said, ‘ninety-nine out of a hundred.’ What about the other time? The one?”

because this is a sci-fi show, she happens to be right. Will is the special, highly dreaded missing child case in which the adults who know him are not to blame. instead, it's the unknowable stranger, the horrific thing that marks the gap between language and experience, that is responsible.

maybe the upside down and all of its creatures symbolize Queer corruption, endangering yet another young white boy. but such a reading is too simplistic. Stranger Things criticizes Reagan-era authority as well as the marginalization of those who shirk norms.

Will is not the perfect straight victim. his gay-coding exists years before his disappearance.

if the stranger danger movement’s biggest concern was "corruption" of the youth, then Will Byers was already "corrupted."

something that i'm going to stress over and over again in this post and later posts is that ST is about THE FEARS of the 1980s and the Reagan era, not necessarily THE REALITIES.

in my next installment (jesus that sounds fancy), we'll talk about Will and the way that ST subverts the trope of the "Ghostly Gay Child."

[foulserpent]

what i think is most interesting in terms of true crime fans is that the ones who arent men tend to be motivated by a desire for safety. like the stated reason is that they want to educate themselves on how to stay safe, which is an understandable impulse considering that you at least Somewhat risk of targeted violence living as anything besides a cishet white man

but like true crime media actually gives you such a warped view of reality, bc if you base your view of reality on it you think youre living in a world where like. white women are the predominant victims of abduction and murder, and well connected upper middle class white girls are the victims of human trafficking, and children are more likely to be harmed by strangers than by family, or that most rapists are strangers. bc those are the cases that the media cares about, or are the most shocking or interesting cases in terms of the "stranger" component. like you arent actually learning anything about the world youre living, in youre just reinforcing pre-existing biases

and even in terms of how they analyze these outlier cases, its really skewed. like they tend to immediately look for evidence that murderers are biologically/psychologically predisposed to violence ('psychopaths') rather than fully engaging with the realities of intimate partner violence, or how most serial killers target vulnerable groups and are often motivated by bigotry. or how if you look into almost every serial killer case, the ONLY reason they get away with it is police indifference or active hostility to their victims. like a lot of them will pay lip service to it, or even explicitly acknowledge how cops dont care about black or indigenous communities or sex workers or etc, but when push comes to shove their conclusion is always "these cops just arent doing their job" rather than "the institution of policing is not about protecting people"

[iamthestrangerinmoscow]

It’s so funny to me that my parents don’t understand how much it helped me to know that I’m autistic cause yeah maybe the formal diagnosis did shit but like... four years ago I was a miserable human being incapable of going to school at all and now I am a full-time student in the best university in the country with a 4 out of 5 grade average and zero failed classes/exams and do they really see no fucking difference?

[unslicited]

roasting the shit out of you based off your aot ships

but it's actually not all aot ships because i'm lazy. also if you're easily offended and would cry yourself to sleep, scroll past. i don't want to see you complain in the comments, you baby

eremika

━⠀you either don't contribute/participate a lot to the fandom or you defend the shit out of your ship. either way, you're so basic, get well soon xx

━⠀there's a 99% chance that the reason you like the ship is because your favorite character is eren and you don't give a single fuck about mikasa which is also a disease. get well soon xx (2)

━⠀you either treat armin like garbage or he's your scrunkly son, there's no in-betweens

━⠀if you're a cishet male and this is your favorite ship, please stay at least 50 miles away from me. you fucking suck

━⠀if you have twitter account dedicated to them also stay 50 miles away from me. i just know the purpose of you creating those account is to shit on another people's ship which is so fucking embarrassing. get help bae

aruani

━⠀oh my god. you're the most basic human to ever exist that you're so boring

━⠀mmm another 99% chance that you're white or straight. or even worse; both. get well soon xx

━⠀you cannot see two people of different genders looking at each other or you would ship them even though they have no chemistry, also a disease

━⠀i literally don't know what to say anymore, that's how bland you are

erehisu

━⠀what does it feels like to be the stupidest person with the worst reading comprehension ever?

━⠀yeagerist. /neg

━⠀you are a walking red flag. please don't interact with a real human, you would send them to a mental institution just by talking to you

━⠀you hate the ending which is fine BUT you're the mf who makes cringe alternate endings with the whole “historia is pregnant with eren's kid!” ordeal. which is a bad thing btw

━⠀historia is not pregnant with eren's kid and she's a lesbian. get over it, you redditor

ereri & rivamika

━⠀oh what's this? why did i put the two of these shippers together, you ask? because they have something in similar! mental illness.

━⠀you are the one of the worst person to ever exist in the aot fandom. you make the fandom a worse place. stay unsafe, i'm hunting you down

━⠀“b—but, fiction doesn't affect reality! 🥺” it sure as hell doesn't, but you're just straight up being a fucking weirdo. please never speak to another human being, they would absolutely hate you

━⠀you are a cringe levi fangirl, but this time, with even more mental illness!

━⠀genuinely, get help you weirdo. incest and pedophilia is not sexy, you sad and pathetic excuse of a monster

levihan

━⠀if you see hange as a nonbinary then i have nothing bad to say to you, you're okay & you don't have to read this <3. but if you see them as a “female”, you're the worst kind of human to ever walk on this planet and that's the nicest way i could word it

━⠀you're a cringe 13 years old straight levi fangirl... i don't know what could be worse than that

━⠀your ideal partner is someone who genuinely hates you and would beat the shit out of you, but you take that behavior as a “tsundere uwu” shit...

━⠀your understanding of erwin's character is totally off and you purposely think that way because you're in denial that erwin is the most important person to levi, not hange. get over it

━⠀looking for drama with eruri shippers is your hobby, you are a horrible person

eruri

━⠀you are the saddest person to ever roam the earth. are you okay? do you need my therapist's number?

━⠀delete those shit tons of sad playlist, it makes you look like a loser

━⠀you make liking eruri your whole personality which is a horrible thing btw. get over it, erwin is dead, they will never be canon

━⠀you overanalyze every fucking thing to the point you just become paranoid over small things. you should just become an english literature teacher at this point

━⠀there's a 70% chance that you're a lesbian who watched aot because you wanted to see the lesbians, but end up getting obsessed wih erwin. you relate to him in a certain level, but you don't know how to word it. btw relating to erwin is /neg

━⠀your ideal relationship is something really tragic and sad, you want to have some kind of impact to your partner for the rest of their life. you are not right in the head

yumihisu

━⠀okay 99.9% chance you are a sapphic yearning for love

━⠀you either have never been in a relationship or is a fucking whore—you've been in so many relationships, you lost count of your exes. btw, that's because you hold way too high expectations for your partner. get well soon xx

━⠀you either didn't expect aot to have lesbians or you watched aot BECAUSE the lesbians. there are no in-betweens

━⠀you're tired of the fandom's bullshit and just want to enjoy some cottagecore lesbians content of yumihisu. and honestly, i can't blame you

━⠀okay this wasn't really a roast since most of yumihisu shippers are the most wholesome people in the fandom so. yeah. you're safe, bae <3

are you offended now?

no? good.

yes? even better.

[rosethornewrites]

TERFs be like: You insulted the TERFmother by pointing out her racism, you must be a terrible teacher!

Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Die mad about it. /blocks

The sheer peace of never dealing with them again is delicious. But lol, based on one conversation with one student, mmkay. You must be a barrel of laughs to attempt to have a conversation with.

Back when I was a grad student, I went to a Halloween party. It was the year all the professors dressed as Joe the Plumber. Ran into someone there who went to my undergrad institution, which was unusual since I was 2000 miles from there.

The conversation was going well until she mentioned her favorite professor. This was a professor I knew, first from leftist organizations and second from a frankly terrible class I would’ve dropped if not for the fact it was required for my minor.

This professor tried to tell us that war is a result of patriarchy because violence is a masculine tendency, showed documentaries with misinformation, etc. AKA shit a freshman might buy, but I’d taken classes on hate and violence, stereotypes and prejudice, and I mostly learned how not to teach. In essence, she was indoctrinating, not teaching.

I’m honest, so I told this fellow alum that I was part of several organizations with the professor but had not enjoyed the class I took with her.

Just like with certain authors who shall not be named, daring to say anything negative about the professor this woman idolized was a cardinal sin.

The conversation devolved to the point where, when I used the word “brotherhood” in reference to human unity and also referring to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she outright called me sexist.

I was not drunk enough to bother with further conversation, so I turned on my heel and walked away, never to return to ever speak to her again.

My project for one of my grad courses that year was researching and analyzing a knock-down-drag-out vitriolic academic fight in an English scholarly journal, wherein an academic wrote an article about the problems of indoctrination in college composition courses by professors who abused their power, and several academics felt called out and responded in a knee-jerk way with what were essentially academic diatribes.

Interesting project, but exhausting. I can, as a teacher, have social and politics opinions. If I make parroting my opinion part of the course requirement? That’s when I’d be a shitty professor. A conversation with a student that is unrelated to course material and is not figuring into the grade in any way is innocuous compared to the truly ugly shit I’ve seen in academia. (And if I’m honest the ugliest shit I’ve seen in academia is from either white cishet males or rad-fems. Equally, so I guess congrats on shattering that glass ceiling.)

I will never be drunk enough to put up with “gender critical” “rad-fem” TERFs. They will always go on my block list, and their opinions on my life have no value.

I don’t babysit toddlers, either.

[wind-on-the-panes]

June is around the corner and I'm here to say to whoever wants to hear it: There are no rules to queerness, only the ones created to bind us. There are cishet drag queens. There are kinky and leather aces. There are vanilla married white-picket-fence aros. There are gays and lesbians who kiss and date and fuck and are often attracted to people who present and/or identify as a woman or man, respectively. There are people who are strongly attracted to people of one gender only and are bi or pansexual. There are trans people who do not care about changing their official documents, or even their presentation. There are non-binary people who will look and act into very binary roles and pronouns and presentations. There are intersex people everywhere. There are people who are comfortable with certain labels only within their cultural structure (i.e. someone may not see themselves as a "woman" but see themselves as a "Latina woman"). There are SO MANY cultural identifiers and idiosyncrasies around the world, even within different communities, and if you don't understand them it doesn't make them less in any way. There are people who only use macro labels such as "queer". There are people who aggressively refuse labels at all. What I'm saying is: if you want to say that x people aren't allowed under the rainbow, you better have x be oppressive institutions such as the police and the State and corporations and institutionalized religion. Otherwise you're doing them a service.

[nerdygaymormon]

Lately I’ve been having such an internal crisis about being in the church. I’m young, still a teenager, but as a queer person who is very left leaning it feels impossible to stay in the church permanently, however much I want to.

The issue is: I BELIEVE in the gospel. I believe that Jesus Christ is my savior and He loves me. I believe it with my entire heart. I believe the Book of Mormon is true. I believe the Holy Spirit speaks to me and I believe in baptism and other ordinances. I believe in temple work. I believe Heavenly Father sees all and knows everything about me, and that He is always watching over me.

I believe in all these things, but going to church gives me panic attacks. Church leaders continue to marginalize me and demonize me as a queer person, as well as demonize women for wanting control over their OWN lives (being mothers, dressing a very specific way, etc.). I believe that we should dress how we want. I believe that queer people should be allowed go get married and trans people should be allowed to transition. I believe that I should be able to live authentically as myself, because being queer was not a choice. Pretending to be cishet would only damage my mental health and probably cause my depression to consume me.

And if I leave the church, my baptism will no longer be valid and I will not be a baptized person when I die. I want to already be baptized and sealed when I die more than anything but I am only able to do that if I stay in the church, and I feel like I may not be able to stay my entire life because almost everything the church as an organization involves outside of the actual gospel makes me upset and hurts me.

Did you ever struggle with a similar feeling? Knowing you couldn’t leave because you have faith and want to be saved, but also knowing it would cost you your mental health and personal happiness/identity? If so, how did you deal with it? How did you adjust??

<3

Thank you for sharing all of this. I have a few thoughts I hope are useful.

A person can believe in the gospel, believe that Jesus Christ is their savior and He loves them. They can believe the Book of Mormon is true and read from it every day. They can believe the Holy Spirit speaks to them. They can believe in baptism and other ordinances and in temple work...and not attend church at all, or not attend this church.

Why do you say your baptism will not be valid if you leave this church? If you leave for decades and then later return, you don't get rebaptized, your original baptism is still in effect.

Maybe you won't be able to get sealed to your spouse, but if your parents are sealed to each other, you're already sealed...to them.

In other words, even if you don't attend church another day in your life, you will die being baptized and sealed.

I don't believe loving Heavenly Parents or the Savior would require us to remain in a situation that is harmful to us. We are told we're to have joy in this life, and being miserable for church just doesn't fit with that.

It is truly sad that an institution which claims to represent Christ can have such harmful policies towards certain of God's children. These are policies and teachings which non-queer people would NEVER accept for themselves. Yet queer people are singled out in order to keep non-queer people comfortable.

I believe one day the Church will change on many of these issues, it pretty much has to, but I don't think it will be anytime soon. Meanwhile, you and I have our life to live. Waiting decades for change while listening to hurtful words doesn't feel great.

You get to partner with your Heavenly Parents in navigating your path forward. I think you'll be surprised where that path will lead you.

Best to you!