#read up on queer history

[diazsdimples]

Now see what you did! This is what you represent to me with your multishipping! Do you understand how upsetting this is?? You lot are destroying everything we've fought for! You don't think Tim cares! Well he will fucking leap with joy bc then he doesn't have to bother with buddie. I don't understand how you can't see what you're doing

"Did you see on twitter Lou is asking 9-1-1 fans to make him a regular. I can't with this fandom. They are ready to throw away a story of six years and settle for a random shitty character as Buck's partner just because he's a man. The actor knows how to play and use them to get what he wants. And they're not realizing that they're hitting the nail in the coffin of buddie themselves by asking for Tommy to stay."

Are you really this desperate for queer representation to just ship any queer characters together? Pls think.

Ngl I am praying a little that this is satire cause mate, if it's not, go touch grass dfkjfd

"Are you really this desperate for queer representation to just ship any queer characters together? Pls think."

Yes. Yes I am. And if you have ever experienced being a minority and seeing yourself represented in media then you should also be delighted by this. This never happens in media. I'm fucking thrilled.

We aren't "throwing away years of story" or settling for a random shitty character, we're fucking delighted that Buck is exploring himself and that this is being represented in mainstream media! If you see a problem with that then I suggest you 1. check yourself and 2. have a real good look that you're not fetishizing Buddie cause if a ship matters more to you than queer representation... that's a little gross.

And finally, for those of you (yourself) who seemed to have not quite understood it, I STILL SHIP BUDDIE AND WANT THEM ENDGAME BUT SEEING BUCK HAPPY RIGHT NOW IS IMPORTANT!!! I'm a Buddie writer, I do Buddie edits and I will go into full mourning if Buddie doesn't end up being endgame. But that doesn't mean I can't be over the moon about Buck having a boyfriend and being happy with someone that isn't Eddie.

Anyways, you're going to find little to no sympathy here, if you'd like to whine I'm sure there's many other blogs who would willingly get all up in arms about this with you but I'm currently being fed by this beautiful thing called Buck's Sexuality Arc and will be riding this high for years.

[haridraws]

Excuse the format (I made this for instagram since that's what the publisher wants, rip) but this is basically a shorter, easy-to-read version of the history section at the back of my new book. (Part 1 || The book)

More about my relationship with queer history (& section 28) under the cut

Looking up history to make a fun queer historical rom-com opened my eyes to how my entire idea of the past in this country was way off.

It also made me realise that part of the reason queer history felt like such new, revelatory information was a law that banned it, which was still in place when I was at school.

Section 28 was put in place by Margaret Thatcher in the 80s, banning "promotion of homosexuality" in UK schools and local authorities. Local libraries were forbidden from stocking anything with LGBT content, and it effectively stopped teachers mentioning any queer history, leaving them scared to even accidentally mention a same-sex partner.

-

just want to add a quote from that article:

legends.

-

Although the law was finally repealed in the 00s, it cast a long shadow. Older teachers were used to it, history books conformed to it, and new teachers still feared homophobic backlash.

Today there's a huge and disturbing rise in anti-trans rhetoric and legislation being attempted in schools and beyond, and it mirrors the homophobic conversations of the 80s. The truth that we've always been here gets met with vitriol - and to be honest, also just outright surprise even by well-intentioned, otherwise widely-read cis and straight people I know, especially in older generations.

I feel like there's also the flipside: once I listened to a podcast where two american women, older than me, were both SHOCKED that anyone was ever executed in Britain for being gay?? For me the threat of execution (before 1824), exile or imprisonment (the two years of hard labour that famously lead to the death of Oscar Wilde) were the main, only things I grew up aware of about queer history.

At best, the queer history I saw growing up was absolute tragedy. Part of what was such a revelation when researching was reading historical accounts that hint at hidden queer histories, secret joys and long, complex lives.

So by the time I finished researching my historical romance book, I'd decided to make an illustrated history section at the back too - these pics are a mini version.

I wish more people knew about the real history we have and how far back it goes - I hope someone unfamiliar might be able to get get a tiny introduction, and recs for ways to get a clearer view of our past.

[makingqueerhistory]

Sacrament of Bodies         

Romeo Oriogun       

In this groundbreaking collection of poems, Sacrament of Bodies, Romeo Oriogun fearlessly interrogates how a queer man in Nigeria can heal in a society where everything is designed to prevent such restoration. With honesty, precision, tenderness of detail, and a light touch, Oriogun explores grief and how the body finds survival through migration.

[grassbreads]

I’d love to know about Yulma and how important it is to representation in shounen manga

This has been sitting in my askbox for a couple months (because I am incapable of punctuality), but anon sent this to me back when I was talking about Yulma over on my vnc blog. For those unaware, Yulma refers to Yu Kanda and Alma Karma from the manga D.Gray-man.

So the thing is, to be honest, I don't know if you can say Yulma is/was important for representation. They don't tend to get brought up as an example of representation (except by diehard d.gray-man fans like me, lol) in shonen, and their whole thing is complicated enough that I feel like the queerness of it all flies over a lot of people's heads.

However! They're very important to me personally, and I do think it's kind of remarkable their story came out in like 2010. Because even though their queerness gets overlooked a lot, it's like. really there no matter how you interpret it.

The short version of their very complicated story is that Kanda and Alma are a couple who were resurrected into new bodies. Alma was a woman when they were originally together in their past lives, but is physically male in the present. Kanda is still very much in love with them by the end of their story, which, depending on the reading, makes Kanda very bi and/or Alma very trans.

This sound like something you want details on? If so, let's talk about how D.Gray-man's fan favorite edgy badass toughguy character briefly became the star of his very own heart-wrenching tragic queer romance.

Here's a brief crash course in Yu Kanda and Dgm for the uninitiated:

D.Gray-man is a manga about a group of exorcists (in the loosest and most anime sense of the term) in the 1890s fighting a holy war against mechanical demons powered by the souls of the dead. There are two things you need to understand about this plot for me to explain Yulma:

The Black Order, the secret branch of the church that exorcists work for, has a long history of committing horrific human experiments to further the war effort.

Due to complications of world building, only a tiny number of people can become exorcists, and tracking down new ones is extremely difficult.

Yu Kanda is one of the exorcists, and though not the actual main character (that's the lad in my icon), he's a very important secondary character. Arguably he's the most important secobdary character, since he's the main guy's biggest foil and the first character to play deuteragonist in a major story arc. He's also a huge fan favorite. The character popularity polls that Jump used to do always had him and the mc going back and forth over who won #1 most popular.

Kanda was also a classic edgy toughguy character. His first two scenes are him almost murdering the main guy because he thinks he's an intruder, then complaining about people grieving for their friend too loudly. He never smiles. He argues with the righteous mc about wasting time/energy protecting civilians. He threatens (and delivers) violence on anyone that annoys him. He looks like this:

TLDR; Kanda was an adored-by-fans mean badass archetype in a 2000s shonen manga. Not generally the guy you peg for starring in a piece of queer romantic storytelling.

And for the entirety of the original anime adaptation's 103 episode run, for the first 188ish chapters of the manga, you do not learn a single thing about his early life. You learn he joined the Black Order very young, and you meet the mentor that took him in at that point, but although there are little hints, a couple cryptic mentions of him searching for a certain person, his early origins remain a complete black box.

Then came the Alma Karma arc.

This is the point where I start getting into spoilers.

To make a very long story short, the Alma Karma arc reveals that Kanda is one of the Black Order's human experiments. The Order ran a secret project 9ish years before the start of the series in which they essentially tried to re-use dying exorcists (since finding new ones is so hard). They took the bodies of dying or recently deceased exorcists and harvested their brains, implanting those brains into new magically grown child bodies.

Key to this project—the second exorcist project—is that these newly grown second exorcists were not supposed to remember anything from their previous lives. Kanda, however, recovered a few hazy memories from his past self. Most importantly, he can recall an unclear image of the woman that his past self was in love with. This memory gradually becomes Kanda's reason to live. He wants desperately to find and meet that person.

Now, aside from Kanda, there was one other successfully revived second exorcist. This was a boy named Alma Karma.

Over the course of their brief shared childhood, Kanda and Alma become extremely close. However, due to a series of horrible events that I'll spare you the details of, Alma is eventually driven to murder-suicide. He wants himself and Kanda to die together to spite the Order, and Kanda almost lets him do it.

The one thing that keeps Kanda from letting Alma kill him, the thing that drives him instead to kill Alma, his most beloved and only friend, is that he can't bear to die without finding that woman again.

Have you figured out the twist yet?

9 years later, in the present, Kanda discovers that he didn't actually quite kill Alma. The Order kept Alma secretly half-alive in order to do more dubious experiments. And, more importantly, when they meet again, Kanda discovers the truth. The woman that he's been searching for his whole life, the woman he's in love with, the woman he tried to kill Alma in order to find, was also killed and made into a second exorcist. And her brain was placed into the body of Alma Karma.

After quite a lot more violence and tragedy, Kanda and Alma end their story arc by running away together on their deathbeds. Alma dies, for real this time, in Kanda's arms, and his last words are to tell Kanda he loves him. These words are presented as something Kanda hears from both the boy and woman versions of Alma's soul.

So! At the end of a very long and complicated story, one thing holds true: Kanda and Alma are in love. As passed down from their past selves, they are specifically in romantic love. They were a couple. And to speak as a fan, the sheer absolute devotion to how Kanda's love for Alma is presented is seriously intense and moving.

Now, given the absolute hell that is Alma's life, gender identity is frankly the last thing they have time to worry about, so it's hard to say how the whole "literally a woman's brain in a male body" thing might have settled for them if given time to think about it. But that is inherently a pretty trans narrative. And given the whole Alma gender situation, there's simply no reading of their whole situation where neither of them is queer.

If you take present day Alma as a guy, which is more or less how he's presented in canon (though again, who knows how he would've felt about that male body in different circumstances), then congratulations! You've got mlm in your shonen manga. They were straight in a different life, but now one of them's a dude, and they are still deeply in love with each other. They've even got not one but two "let's forget it all and run away together" scenes, just as every mlm couple seems to have.

On the other hand, if you go with the angle that Alma's still a woman based on her mind/soul, even in her new body, then Kanda may not be canonically queer, but Alma is inarguably trans. Again, literally a woman's brain in a male body. It may not be how most people end up trans, but that doesn't change the facts of her situation.

You see what I mean about how they're undeniably queer, but also kind of easy to miss? There's so much other insane shit going on in their story that Alma's whole gender situation can get passed over. Plus, you can look online to this day and find people arguing that Kanda's not "technically" explicitly in love with the present day male version of Alma, since he doesn't 100% unambiguously say as much. I love reading comprehension.

Also! As a possible extra reason for why people don't talk about them much, the official English translation of the manga translated Alma's final "I love you" very differently. There's always a lot of nuance and argument when it comes to translating "大好き" into English, but given the full context of their relationship and the scene it's in, Viz's handling really sets off the censorship bells in my head.

Here's the different versions (Japanese then fan then official), if you want to compare:

Nothing more classically queer than censorship by way of questionable translation 🙃.

At the end of the day, Kanda and Alma are in kind of a strange middle ground. They're each in love with the other one, but the whole second exorcist brain transfer situation makes it complicated enough that people argue their feelings aren't explicitly romantic (and thus not gay) in the present. Alma is literally a woman's brain implanted in a male body, but we don't have time to dwell on the gender complications of all that because of the hell that is the rest of their life. They're canon but not canon—queer people whose stories don't have space for them to be queer.

However, given that all this messy, tragic ambiguity was published in a fairly popular shonen manga back in 2010, it still feels kind of remarkable to me. Alma is somewhat an antagonist (it's complicated), and he dies at the end of his arc, but once again, Kanda was/is the fan favorite! And when he re-enters the main story after Alma's death, he's more important than he's ever been, and his history with Alma continues to be a huge part of his character.

Katsura Hoshino took the much-beloved edgy toughguy character from her long-running shonen series and, after keeping his origins secret for such a long time, confirmed that his whole life has revolved around love this entire time. Almost every facet of his character can be traced back to his love for his lost best friend or his yearning for his past life's missing partner. And then she reveals that the best friend and the partner are one and the same.

You can go back and forth about the degree to which they work as representation, but in any case, I think their story is something people ought to know about. It's romantic and it's heart-wrenching and it's fucking wild, especially given the context in which it was published (a Shonen Jump spinoff in 2010). I never see anyone besides the few remaining hardcore dgm fans talk about them, and I think that's a shame.

So anyway, that's tale of one of the most insanity-inducing romances I've ever seen put to paper. I love queer people.

Here's some choice pages if you want to cry with me (the last two are a sequence):

[ao3userforgets]

i need to mutter into the void so i’m going to post under the cut the trials and tribs of my current clegan fic writing experience so no one including (especially) me has to make eye contact with it. it’s basically a diary entry. god bless anyone that reads it lol. love and light 🫶

goddamn writing this fic is kicking my ass. it was just meant to be an angsty gale introspective. then i started another and that was meant to be them just fucking absolute nasty style. now i fear they have combined, morphed, metamorphosed, and it’s becoming a monster. goddamn. what does one do in this situation? it would be my first time posting in this fandom and my second time posting fic at all. i’m shaking in my boots about it. there is so much wonderful fic being posted for this pairing and so many approaches and styles. i would love to get mine out and see it amongst those works. i’m just not sure how to go about constructing this fic and how to post about it. i’d like to post some bits and pieces and maybe someone will see it and tell me it’s worth it to finish it but first and foremost i’m really writing this for myself, because it’s the type of fic i love to read and also i feel like i need to be writing it so my mind is creating something. and it would feel like a waste to me and a let down for myself if i never post it. also i’m projecting very hard onto it and onto gale as a character, so it feels kind of personal in some parts? which can’t totally be avoided but because of that and because the way i write is also very personal to me it’s making something that should be fun to post about feel quite daunting. but i want to push myself so badly because it’s been years since i’ve done that, maybe i’ve never done that. and Of Course it’s wwii yaoi that’s gotten me to this point.

anyway, y’all ever think about gale identifying as a more feminine being than is expected for a man like him in the time he’s in, thus manifesting itself into years of repression he’s not entirely aware of until he meets and grows closer to bucky, and how he comes to terms with being awakened in such a way that has laid dormant until he’s in the literal u.s. military, and eventually in one of the least survivable theatres of the war, and in suffocating proximity day in and day out with one john bucky egan? and how he navigates his bond with marge, now in contrast to how he feels for john? and how even his childhood and the lives of his parents is being pushed forwards in his consciousness in relation to his sense of self and his place in the lives of others? oh and also how absolutely Biblically he wants john, in the most unconventional and all encompassing ways? all while he has no context for queerness and sexuality as it relates to himself? i dunno what freak would be into writing or reading that 👀 🚬💀

[kukuruz]

Here's all the fiction I read this year :)

I was super busy with work and life and had to read a lot of non-fiction for work and university, which is why I read significantly less than I usually do. But honestly, I don't really mind. This way everything I did read in my free time feels a lot more memorable.

Favourites include Under the Whispering Door, Payback's a Witch, Mexican Gothic and Dark Heir. I also re-read one of my all time favorites; The Secret History, and it held up amazingly.

Hope everyone got to enjoy some good books this year 💜💜💜

[onmyliteraturebullshitagain]

"Yet I really prefer the word 'queer', because it's edgy, artistic, outside of the mainstream of mediocrity. Queer is powerful. Queer captures my attention. I get to pucker my lips when I say it. Queer has a kiss in it. Queer is anarchic, and against the grain. Queer is unexpected, a pretty surprise, and lots of laughter amidst the ruins and the pain. Queer is tough and witty and odd. Queer is my spirituality and the manner in which I organize love.

Winston Wilde, "Legacies of Love: A Heritage of Queer Bonding"

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Sir Callie and the Champions of Helston & The Dragon’s Roost

first two books in a middle grade fantasy series

following a nonbinary tween who wants to be a knight when they move to a kingdom with strict gender roles, and struggles between realising their dream and the rules they have to push against

especially when they meet other kids who don’t want to fit into the roles given to them - and learn that many things about the kingdom are a lie

dragons, shapeshifters, and witches, lots of queer & trans characters, nb/f

[variousqueerthings]

the funny thing about the obsession with "why" james barry lived as a man his whole life, is that people will go out of their way to invent reasons that just aren't documented anywhere -- anything from "running away to be with a soldier" to "dreading the confines of womanhood in that era and simply having no other option" to "actually it was all the rich dudes in barry's life who made it happen, without barry having any say"

and really the only stuff we have on it is that 1. barry at one point (pre-transition/as a kid) wrote in a letter that if he weren't a girl, he'd be a soldier, 2. that at some point barry began -- with support in high places -- to present and pass as a man throughout medical school and the army and 3. that barry was very insistent on his manliness -- specifically his gentlemanliness -- throughout his life

there aren't clues in there that he secretly missed being a woman, but simply had to go on for the sake of career, that he couldn't consent to his own lived experiences (the whole great-to-read-about thing about him is that he was so stubborn in his ideals that he frequently got into trouble), and the only person he may have slept with according to any evidence was the Lord Somerset of Cape Town, after they'd known each other for a bit (also Somerset called him "the most wayward of men" which is charming + speaks a bit to some of the political tensions in their relationship as well, and despite those they remained very very close up until Somerset's death)

what there are plenty of context clues for is that he really quite enjoyed being a man. he consistently described himself as a gentleman, apparently enjoyed very nice and polished uniforms, and wasn't shy about being seen and heard in terms of the work he did, the ideals he held, and simply the cultural spaces he was invited to (especially around Cape Town)

(there's also something in there about how he feels medicine ought to be practiced, which is a different post, but the way he -- somewhat snobbishly, but understandably, given the context of both his own life and the lack of oversight about medicine in Cape Town -- talks about himself through the lens of having studied medicine, also speaks to a pride in himself as a man who has forged his own destiny... this is me writing it a little over the top, but the suggestion is there in at least one of his letters. he doesn't sound upset/regretful about his choices, he sounds proud to have done the work that he did, and to be the person he is. if anything, barry's gender is specifically: 1. gentleman and 2. medical man)

like. it's wild that it's so difficult for so many writers to believe that barry liked being a guy, when that is the most obvious image that presents itself, based on his own letters and the way others described him while he was still alive

[athymelyreply]

Hob “queer as in fuck you” Gadling from @moorishflower ‘s fic Those who have yet to decide is making me so emotional

also Hob in corset. Mmmmmmyes.

fic can be found here :)

[shitpostingkats]

Wheel of Time had to be written in the nineties because if the characters were allowed to flex even a quarter of their polyamorous power it would have led to another breaking of the world.

[allbeendonebefore]

"man ive been doing this research for a year and im making such slow progress what gives" i say as i go back to my research and remember how it deals with extremely heavy topics and involved reading a hell of a lot of obituaries so shortly before and after i lost a family member

[yearning-butch]

My brain has been so Gender Hyperfixated recently. Not in a confused way but just in a Wow I Love Being Butch and I Want to Look Butch way

[cakerollk]

Labels r great and stuff esp if it makes u feel like u belong somewhere and it validates u.

But by god the mindless discourse I've seen about sexual identities + misinformation these past few years amongst the younger gen gives me brain damage.

It's why I just say I'm queer n unironically call myself a faggot if asked what my sexuality is. It does two things: 1. Tell ppl I ain't straight 2. Shuts them up from shock that I used a slur on myself

[amphibious-thing]

"Under the head of beneficial effects, no rational accountant can refuse to insert the enjoyment. 'Enjoyment? and from such a source?' exclaims the man to whom it really is, or to whom it seems good to represent it as being to him, a source of disgust and horror. But unless it were really an enjoyment, all the effects of which history and observation join in shewing it to be productive would be effects without a cause. Beholden in the character of an object of sexual appetite, that sow is to me an object of abhorrence: therefore so she is and always has been, and always will be, to the father of her pigs. Of this stamp is the logic, which should make a merit of denying the name of a source of enjoyment to an appetite the gratification of which has been and continues to be sought by such multitudes constantly at the risk and frequently to the sacrifice of life. Whether he be or be not the proper judge, every man is in fact the judge, and, to the purpose of his own conduct, the sole effectual judge, of what is agreable or disagreable to himself. If pleasure be not a good, neither is any thing a good: pleasure and exemption from pain, the one the only positive good, the other but a negative good—these and the causes of them, in so far as they are causes of them, are both good, or there is nothing good in the world: nor will any thing else be found that can with propriety be ranked under that name. And if in this shape pleasure be not, so far as it goes, a good, neither is it in any other."

~ Jeremy Bentham on the beneficial effects of sodomy in Of Sexual Irregularities or Irregularities of the Sexual Appetite

[coffeeworldsasaki]

Hey isn't it great how literally nothing is different after 40 years