#on queerness

[judas-redeemed]

the last of us, episode 7 (2023) ➢ you are jeff, richard siken

[glasswaters]

on slurs. on pride.

"it is quite important", he says, his lips stretched over dull teeth, "to show gay characters on screen. We are honoured to do you justice."

i think i have long since pulled my mouth into a scowl. i think, by the time i reach you, that i could tear the world from where it sits in your palms. on screen, the moment has passed. unnamed and unimportant, everything remains the same.

a neat cut is all it takes, see. they might as well not be there at all.

the first gay character. the first gay scene. the first gay kiss. and nothing queer about them at all. is this not a riot? is this not a beating, bleeding heart? is this not-

*

i check my notes. i clench my teeth.

#q slur

some people don't like it, see. so fit yourself into their mould. come, let me pull all the teeth from your mouth. give me that brick. it will do you no good.

don't call yourself queer, child. file down your teeth. all this anger will do you no good.

*

i am a slur, frothing at the mouth. if i closed my eyes and sleepwalked into their world, i would wake up screaming. white picket fence. two children. where have you been? where is your phone?

(in a bar, i sit in someone’s lap. she buys me a drink and a lipstick, and when her lashes come undone, she laughs. her cheek bones are contoured, and her lips are overlined. when she looks at me, i see the world in her eyes.)

*

her mouth curls. his eyes are cold. those people, after all, are nothing like us.

*

i am queer.

where is the riot we were born in? where is your grief, pressed in between old photographs? where is your rage, filling queer lungs and trembling papers? where is the queerness in the unnamed? give me one word that was not spit back at us, blooming rot.

how long have you spent ironing out your wrinkles until you sat, smooth and palatable, neat against their shoulders? are you not, still, under that needle, fraying at the edges?

your seams are still jagged to them. your world still tilts wrong, and no matter the fences you put yourself in, they won't sit clean enough. you will always be bent.

to the boots you grovel to, we are all the same gay plague.

*

come. look at me.

i will tear their tongues from their mouths. i will smash windows and bite flesh until i taste blood. fence posts make good weapons once uprooted.

i am queer. i am a slur. i am spitting bile.

i am a riot, see. and this is mine alone to wield.

[lena-oleanderson]

The Failed Sainthoods of My Lesbian Adolescence from Side Wounds

TW: ED talk

fasting - once you start, you get why the saints and monks and whatnot do it. it's that kind of self-flagellation. it makes you feel holy and pure and above it all, it being the animal of your body

but if you want to live, you have to stop. and i wanted to live. more than anything i wanted to live. i've been in recovery from AN for 3 years now, and i've never been happier

[rockfordpeachpie]

jess mccready - there's no crying in baseball!

1. medea, euripides // 2. the civil war, anne sexton // 3. something that may shock and discredit you, daniel m. lowry // 4. a league of their own (2022) // 5. platonic love, rose mannie // 6. the transgender prophet, matthew merrick // 7. foreigners god, hozier // 8. a league of their own (2022) // 9. stone butch blues, leslie feinberg // 10. euripides, anne carson

[ca-ravaggio]

for my bilingual, trilingual or polyglot trans/non binary homies, is it just me or is it common to feel comfortable with a certain set of pronouns in your non-native language but not in your native language? /gen

[v333rbatim]

thinking about that one ethel cain ask about religion and queerness and coming to terms with the notion that it was never my queerness vs religion and that it was my queerness vs organised religion. it was my identity vs a congregation of individuals who used the guise of christianity to condemn my existence. my existence isn’t something which can be diminished by something bigger than myself otherwise i wouldn’t exist this way. idk i have more thoughts but i’ve never been good at articulating my thoughts. maybe one day i’ll talk about it more. maybe one day i’ll let myself believe again.

[fr0gg13b413]

my college essay i wrote about queer religious trauma

- @/finchmoment on tiktok

Growing up religious, the realization of your own queerness is also the realization of a betrayal. It will be argued two ways- either you are betraying God, or He is betraying you. Either way, you lose. When you are both the Betrayer of God and the Betrayed by God, you will, inevitably, become the Exiled too.  Is it my fault? When Judas only played the cards he was dealt, is he really to blame? Is there something we could have done, something to change the course of time, to write ourselves out of condemnation? And would we have done it, if there was? I was young when I was eviscerated. Foolish, too.  To this day, I still don't know why I expected things to be any different. I was raised this way, after all. I was raised knowing queer was a synonym for wrong, knowing gay was a synonym for sin. And still, when I realized that I was a synonym for all those things too, my entire world fell away from me. Daughter turned disappointment. Classmate turned outcast. Friend turned disgrace. Human turned abomination. I found myself alone, not for the first time, but for the longest time. Nothing would ever be the same, and I have spent my life since reeling with it. The church will argue that I betrayed God and I won't disagree with them. It's true- that I was His once. That I made promises to Him I couldn't keep. That I swore my life to someone I would later abandon. But it is also true that I am human, and I am small, and by saying I betrayed God you are either handing me supernatural power or shrinking God down and admitting to His weakness, admitting to His fallibility. Maybe those are the same thing.  If at the end of my life I am wrong about my beliefs, I hope He is as merciful and forgiving as they say. Because I tried. Because I spent my childhood trying. Because I need those years to matter. God, I am sorry for growing weary and giving up. I am sorry for pulling away and choosing myself, my little life. Call that betrayal if you will. In The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Judas asks, "Why... didn't you make me good enough... so that you could've loved me?" I see myself in him, then.  I've never understood how it was fair. Being born this way, having no say in the matter, doomed from the start. If God truly is omniscient, if He truly cares about his creation, then why were my pleas for redemption met with a deafening silence? Why did God make me so unrighteous that He could not bear to be in my presence? Isn't that betrayal? Promising everything, ripping it away? Why did He choose Judas for the role of the traitor? Why did he choose me for the role of the pariah? Why weren’t we good enough? I have been reborn since. Not in the way of a baptism, but in the way of a phoenix. Deconstructing your religion will turn your anger biblical. It will send everyone running and leave you standing alone, spark turned flame, burning yourself and everything familiar to the ground. You will be alone, smoking, until your body returns to the dust from which humanity was made. It will be up to you to recreate yourself, then. To craft your bones from the wreckage. To make a clay to smooth on like skin. In the church, a burning is a death. But wasn't hellfire always my fate? Here's the Truth— the fiery furnace is the ultimate act of faith. Faith not in Him, but in me. I am reborn in these flames. Belonging to no one, owing Him nothing. Yes, I was His once. But I am Mine now.

[marthammasters]

Lucie breaking into the house — and promptly dispatching the family that lives within it — is also deeply violent, though in many ways it pales against the rest of the film. The Belfonds are initially introduced as a familiarly tropey, nuclear, white heterosexual family. There’s a mom and dad, two kids, sibling squabbles, parents getting a little fed up with their willful elder son, etc.

It isn’t long before they’re thrown into dealing with the intrusion of an “outsider.” The presence of said outsider already begins to expose some of the fault lines in a family that, in another film, would be a “perfect ideal.” This is a familiar storyline from many a slasher and home invasion film — I’d be here all day if I talked about the implicit queerness of slasher villains — as it’s the entrance of the “other” that starts to expose the rot lying underneath the “perfect” family.

— Zoe Fortier, Women and Queerness in Horror: Martyrs (2008)

[whimsy-wallfish]

{ white noise }

— 10. 9. 23.

am i too much of 

a douchebag or a doormat?

assessing how assertive

I should be, unsure.

- what would keep me secure?

my looks, too loud.

i'm exposed, yet unable

to imagine dressing more demure.

just let me be white noise!

tune me out!

--------------------------------

prompt - white noise + doormat

𖦹⭒°｡⋆

[judas-redeemed]

they want to crucify me: make me a villain, make me a martyr, make me an other. but the only thing i am interested in being is yours. remember me down at the river, ankles in the water while we dance on the shore. remember me laughing. i think you were the only one who really liked my laugh── too big, too loud, too often. take it now, and carry in the space between your ribs. hear it everytime you hear something i would find funny, and know that this isn't goodbye. they will burn me as a witch, but it won't mean a thing. not to me. not if i get to feel your hand in mine one last time. before they take me── i love you, i love you, i love you. there's never been enough time to say it as much as i felt it. maybe in the next life, i will have the honor of loving you without hiding behind closed doors. maybe next time, i will get to hold your hand anywhere i want and it won't burn. not even a little. until then, know that there were people like us before, and before, and before. and there will be people like us after. the fire's starting, my love. let go of my hand. but please do not let go of me.

a lover's hand before the burning - judas h.

[liliesbythewater]

In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado

[raraeavesmoriendi]

*ralph wiggum voice* ‘queer people of different genders can’t be in a queer relationship bc ablpblpblpblp’

so -

a. how is this not the cis people thing of reducing people to their genitals again. like, you get genitals that don’t match and suddenly how people understand their own interior life and desires is thrown out the window? is that how this works? are we really gonna be stopping couples that show up to a Queer space while not performing gender the same way and go “hey excuse me can you list off your respective relationship histories so we know you aren’t just hets that have gotten cozy in our midst?” who is that for? no, really, who is that for??? If I’m dating a woman as a non-binary person, do I have to recite Halberstam bc we don’t match gender-wise? Or bc it *looks* like one of us needs a strap to have “traditional” penetrative sex, we’re in the clear. In which case, again, stop trying to figure out what’s in people’s pants, buddy, that’s rude.

b. does this mean Queerness is conditional? does this mean we’re back to box-ticking performances based on seeing Str8ies as Default? “You must be this Queer to ride” well shit. well fuck. who’s gonna tell all the single gays that just like one flavor? how do they tick the box? do we have Gay-approved sex toys they can walk in with to show they’re definitely gay without a relationship? are we printing ID cards or something? does this mean I’m on a probationary period every time I date someone who isn’t my specific shade of genderqueer? fuck’s sake, I don’t have time for all that paperwork. god knows how many Queer Validity hearings I’ve missed by now. fuck me, the census is gonna be a nightmare this year. Does everyone have to stand in front of the Queerness Measuring Tape, or just the people who don’t pass narrow ideas of what Queerness looks like? When did we vote on that? Who wrote this fucking manual anyways?? How do we amend this shit, bc this sounds like someone didn’t read past Queer Theory 101, and we’ve got more to think about here.

c. do people not hear how gender binary-reinforcing this sounds?? “well they don’t LOOK like they’re Queer—“ buddy, I don’t bind bc I get overheated easily where I live and I can’t decide if I can even afford to get my tits removed yet. Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I don’t want bottom surgery. If I tell you I don’t identify as a woman or with the experience of womanhood, are you going to accept how I’m describing my own experience and perception as accurate? Or are you gonna ‘Or/But’ me into the ground until I perform an absence of gender that meets whatever your arbitrary-ass (pretty cis-sounding ngl) standards are? Why are we then saying that if a couple doesn’t “perform”/conform to your narrow-ass caricatured expectations of Queerness that say it can only look like people with matching AGABs, then clearly that overrides everything else about these people’s understanding of themselves? The the way they define their own experiences and their attraction to various genders is suddenly rendered Str8? Is it bc one of them maybe has a penis and the other one doesn’t? Is that why they’re not Queer?? Man, first of all that’s not how dicks work, and second of all, you have got to stop trying to x-ray people’s pants, what did I just say—

d. I am holding your face very gently in my hands. Some of us are more than one thing. Some of us are not cis and like more than one kind of person. It’s not as simple as “Do our genders match? Okay great, we’re gay!!” Some of us have to navigate a few more variables, okay? Trying to police Queerness based on a “same-ASAB only” definition is not only constricting for all the people who have other things going on, it’s reductive to the idea of Queerness as a whole. There’s so many different ways it can look. It’s beautiful, buddy, you just gotta trust me on that. Trying to keep people out of the community bc they don’t match your black and white definition of “You Are or You Aren’t” doesn’t benefit anyone. It genuinely does not. We’re either building a home for all of us, or we’re just doing to other people what the Str8ies did to us the first time. Read a book, hell, read two. And if someone doesn’t match whatever your internal horse-blinders expectations of External Gayness, remember, it doesn’t affect you and it’s not your fucking business, okay? just drink your little mineral water and live your life, you’re gonna be fine, I swear 🖤

eta, nov. 5 - the people who can’t read found this post so I’m taking it away and putting it up on the closet shelf until they learn to leave queer people be. Taps sign, etc.

[lena-oleanderson]

Queer Kid from Side Wounds

to queer kids in the places people think queer kids don't exist.

queer kids in the deep south, like my friend mack, who helped me write this poem, used to be. queer kids in entire countries, hell, entire continents, where people seem to think they don't exist

like the country where i grew up, thinking i was the first of my kind.

and like the country some people are excusing a genocide of, with the flimsy excuse of homophobia/transphobia. as if that isn't everywhere. as if queer people aren't, either.

none of us are free until all of us are.

[chaosandwolves]

hey, i read your hearstopper post and comments on being alone and realizing stuff about oneself while being older. just wanted to pop up to say you seem like a very good person. i hope you feel valid and loved, you are the best. have a good day <3

Hey there

Oh... This is so very sweet of you.

Like, this really made me smile.

Thank you so much for taking the time to send this wonderful message.

I hope you, too, feel valid and loved.

And I hope you'll always have your favorite drink at hand and lots of little wonders in your life

💚🍂

[cogandstar]

i think there are similarities between the discourse about calling historical figures gay/lesbian/trans/whatever and the discourse about describing historical literature as fanfiction.

in both cases, people are applying terms and definitions which only really make sense with our modern day conceptions of sexuality/gender/intellectual property to people and things which did not exist and were not made in the context of those conceptions.

in both cases, the reason why people are applying those terms is generally because, regardless of how much research they've done about the conceptions of sexuality/gender/intellectual property at the time and place relevant to the specific person/work they're talking about, they have noticed similarities between them/their work and the historical person/work.

in both cases the more nuanced phrasing of "x person/work is gay/trans/fanfiction" is generally something along the lines of "if x person/work was alive/made today, they would probably identify/be identified as queer/fanfiction."

the point of the claim is not to erase the differences between history and the modern day. the point of the claim is to highlight the similarities between history and the modern day, generally with an eye towards helping people and works who are broadly considered lesser (be that in the form of slurs, hatred and discrimination or in the form of being reduced in the popular consciousness to trashy smut) be validated.

it is people saying "hey, there have been people like us, or who have been writing like us, for a while. we are not the first. we are not worth less, look at how many important historical figures or works considered classics are like us or like our work."

so i'm on those people's side, not the people who are telling them to stop saying that.

[scretladyspider]

“If you have time to watch Netflix you have time for a side hustle” my side hustle is relaxing so that my body and brain can heal from by this nose-to-the-grindstone bullshit. I refuse to feel guilty for being a human with the need to relax sometimes. my side hustle is no.