#was talking to someone the other day who is nonbinary and a drag performer

[chriswaddell]

BLOG 5 - September 16, 2023: “Nice Guys Finish Last.”

I feel weird writing this and if anyone saw it, it might be hard to understand with no context… but I have to get it out.

The last couple days have been pretty heartbreaking as I continue to make choices that I deem the “right thing to do” but have had significant consequences on my mental health. I’ll try to explain a couple of instances.

A few nights ago I had a conversation over the phone with a guy that I had been talking to and going on dates with. He’s from Atlanta. We’ll call him Dee. Dee wanted to know why I was being a bit more distant. I was guilty of putting a bit more space between us because I knew Dee was building stronger feelings for me and the vast distance between us would never allow for a successful relationship. So, I cleared the air with Dee that a relationship wouldn’t happen between us and that I had been sexually active with others and had been on other dates. There was no commitment between us, nor had anything became official… but in a weird way, it still felt like a break up. It hurt me so bad to break the heart of someone who had never wronged me in any way. But, despite my own sadness, I felt like it was the right thing to do.

Over the past month or so I’ve been talking to a person we’ll call Cee. Cee is nonbinary and a drag performer. An artist for whom I really enjoy the company of. Every date or hangout we shared together felt like the beginning of the rest of my life. Finally I can move on from the trauma of Logan’s death. The insecurities and feelings of worthlessness and most importantly, this dark, spiraling belief that I am destined to be alone forever. It was all letting go of it’s grip.

Every one of those giddy feelings and actions have been taking over my life. The feeling of being young, the flirting, the texts, the way we share a glance. The way their lips feel pressed against my own. The ability to relate on our lines of work. Everything has been feeling right.

Over the last couple of weeks, a few red flags were visible. “If into (their Twitter) you go, only pain will you find.” As I steal and alter one of my favorite Yoda quotes.. I’ll try to explain without great detail. On Cee’s Twitter, I found pornographic videos of them in sexual acts with men along with quite a bit if messaging spelling out the seeking of sexual attention. Knowing that someone you’re interested in has had or is having sex with other people is one thing… seeing it is one of the loneliest feelings I’ve ever had. However, the last post ask the readers something along the lines of “Have you ever had someone treat you so good… you’re waiting for something to happen (to ruin it)?” Something like that anyway.

It made me happy to read that because I realized that Cee liked me and recognized that I was trying my hardest to be so kind to them. I feel a similar way about nervousness regarding anything potentially blossoming from this. So, I wanted Cee to know I felt similar without knowing I found their Twitter. So I sent a message after a concert I took them too where I said it makes me nervous because good things have a way not working out, etc. Cee, interestingly, instead of telling me they felt the same… argued against that stance, interestingly, because that was their stance.

It was in that concert date where I had mentioned having gone on a bad date in Nashville a while back and Cee got upset with me. Said I wasn’t doing a very good job making them feel special. (I took them to see what they professed to be the greatest concert experience they’ve ever had.) So I don’t know. It was this same trip, where again, Cee reminded me that they were afraid that I had not moved on from feelings for my (dead) ex. That is a very valid fear.

All of that sets the tone for tonight’s adventure. Last night, Cee messaged me they were freaking. Out because their ride had canceled. Leaving them without a ride to a very important booking. I stepped up. The drive is more than four hours from my house. So, I stayed up all night with a headache getting what work I could get done as I had a show this weekend. Plus, early the next day, I had to go set up for it. I moved worlds to help Cee. I got two hours of sleep before rushing to get as much set up done as possible. I ran and rushed harder than ever to get Cee to their show. I pumped more than $120 worth of gas into the truck and suffered two headaches. But it was all worth it when I saw their face again. I swooned again.

About halfway through the trip, we switched time zones and I realized my calculations were off. They would be late. As I tried to explain what I had done, Cee interrupted and said “just tell me when I’ll be there so I know what to tell them.” This hurt me honestly. I was trying my best. Now I’ve been stricken with this unimaginable guilt. I shut down temporarily. I kept mentioning the time change and apologized at least three times, never to be met comfort or even a “it’s okay.”

Those feelings let up once we were at the show. I helped them pack all their stuff in and felt VERY out of place. It was no time that Cee asked me to help put together their props and if I would help set up the stage before their set. I obliged. When this eventually happened, I felt a weird sense of anxiety. That turned out fine. At least in a couple occasions while helping set up the props or running upstairs 3 different times to help Cee, they made statements that sound in tone and context like they were giving directions to a child. I still don’t know how to feel about this.

While downstairs, before the performance, Cee alluded to my being kind to them was an act. I very seriously said it’s not and noted how difficult keeping up an act like that would be after all this time. No statement was made further about that unfortunately. Before the performance, two of Cee’s drag companions were in the bathroom talking to Cee about how good looking I am and making what I thought were funny quips about “liking me.” I just ignored it. Cee hugged me with their body pair on and I reached up and dusted my shoulder off. They saw me and claimed that that’s a test. I guess insinuating that their significant other must not have to wipe away the flakey leftovers from their body paint??Later, after the performance, we were leaving I had both hands and arms filled with Cee’s belongings. It was loud due to a performance, it was dark and the walkway was extremely cramped. As we were going through Cee stopped for 2 seconds and said goodbye to a drag Queen that looked like the person that booked them to be in the show. I heard the booker thank Cee and Cee back. As I was walking by them, they patted me on the butt and said thank you.

I told Cee about it. And Cee brought up these people flirting with me and how I should’ve done something about it. Claiming again that I had failed this test. Going as far to say that their ex, Kevin “even knew to stop it.” What was I supposed to do? I was walking out the door. Following Cee. Hands full. And to bring up how your ex passed this test that I somehow failed… comparing my actions against his, while voicing how fearful you are being put up against the memory of Logan?! That’s not fair to me. At all.

Tonight, I was shown a side of Cee that not empathetic, not understanding, not gentle and showed no gratitude whatsoever. It frightens me. I really like them. Please tell me this is an off day and not an ongoing personality trait of them. I fall fast and hard and I don’t want to be broken again.

(I’m sorry for the longest run on sentence ever. I needed to write this and get it out. I have no one else to vent to. I’m alone.)

[just-your-average-tangerine]

I am, once again, amused by how much transphobia against trans men from within the queer community is based in denying our transness while simultaneously using our agab against us.

[olderthannetfic]

Now I'm at the point where I think if someone in the queer community is trying to tell women, femmes, afab people/whoever to stop enjoying BL, they also need to be consistent and tell all queer men to stop doing drag because they both engage with gender in the same way.

Everything those folks tell afab people [they're 1) capitalizing on male queerness without any of the struggles that come along with it or 2) depicting x identity without authenticity or 3) it's not #ownvoices/representation or 4) it's using stereotypes of x group that have historically harmed them] also apply to queer men who do drag in terms of them exploiting women for entertainment. Women are a marginalized group in society; that's a fact. A cis queer man will never truly understand what it's like to be a woman. A cis drag queen will likely never have to know what it's like to be constantly told from infancy your body and sexuality just exist for men. Your interests in fashion or makeup or academics are just for men. [By this logic, a cis woman could reasonably find an issue with a cis man then taking this aspect of personal and societal struggle and bastardizing it for entertainment/humor when women every day are killed, harassed, and attacked for not performing femininity for men.] Cis drag queens also use stereotypes of femininity as punchlines or jokes in this escapism when the ones who have to deal with the fallout in society are women. Drag queens are no more "representation" for women than BL characters are for queer men. No one goes to a drag show if that's what they want, and drag queens shouldn't be expected to do that, just like afab BL creators shouldn't be forced to conform to what anyone thinks is "good representation" for queer men. No queer man has been hurt by BL, just like no cis woman has been hurt by drag. Let's be consistent.

Now, is it also true that there are a lot of nonbinary and trans women who do drag as a way to express their gender? Yes. Are they likely the majority of drag queens? No. So, how would we decide who can appropriate aspects of the female experience? We can't. The same goes for afab BL fans and creators. Yeah, lots are trans or nonbinary, but it's ridiculous to expect everyone to out themselves or write a biographical manifesto to justify their tastes in entertainment. Are there drag queens who are misogynistic? Yes, the most famous example is RuPaul. Does this apply to all? No. Just like BL fans and homophobia.

However, everyone knows that talk of getting rid of drag queens is a common talking point of conservatives. This talk around afab BL fans should be considered in the same way.

--

Huzzah!

I've pointed this out many times. Hell, I've seen a blog post from a BL type author who is leery of women writing BL that pointed out the same thing and came to a similar conclusion.

One of the more interesting commentaries on the cis gay male culture aspects of all this was in David Halperin's How to be Gay. Either I'm misremembering, or the kindle price has dropped from academic book horror levels to something more acceptable, at least to my US eye. ($14.16 currently) I highly recommend it.

He uses the word 'appropriation' to talk about what drag queens do, though he doesn't mean it in a "and that is obviously universally bad" way. He explicitly addresses the fact that some women will find drag misogynist, and that's okay. It's okay that they feel this way. It's okay that a subculture makes art for a particular audience that may be offputting or disturbing to other audiences.

The book is about a lot more than just drag. It goes into all of that cis gay male culture like loving The Golden Girls and venerating tragic women of classic Hollywood. I have sometimes, as a woman, felt almost like I was tresspassing on gay men's territory to love Joan Crawford and her ilk. Which, if you think about it, is fucking nuts.

Halperin doesn't talk about BL at all, at least not in that book, but his observations are like a mirror of fandom and inform a lot of how I look at #ownvoices.

The book is based on a class he taught with that same joke title. The point was that he did not find the performance of normative US cis gay male culture ("What a dump!", Golden Girls love, etc.) to be at all natural. He had to learn it. All his friends laughed about how he was the last guy to teach anyone "how to be gay".

Anyway, as he taught the class, he noticed something that shocked him: students were connecting with The Golden Girls and campy, queer-coded old Broadway plays much more than with the direct, literal representation, even when that representation was on Broadway in a similar tone and type of media.

The book is his exploration of why. To boil it down: gay men were seeking things that felt true internally, not externally. They were often identifying with situations and dynamics or with all of the characters. They didn't necessarily want to be told "Here's your self insert! Now relate!" It's full of the same kind of talk of critical distance that oldschool slash meta engages in.

I actually have a whole long meta piece about this: What I Want is To(o) Direct.

I got the idea after reading Halperin and bounced up to Francesca Coppa at a con to blather about it. She was like "Oh, I just wrote a book chapter on that." That chapter is: Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton. You can find it in A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies.

Drag is great, but I hate the misogynist attitude that men can borrow from women to express their oppression or their interior worlds metaphorically, but women cannot borrow from men for the same purpose.

The inevitable transphobia that comes with strict policing of either is just the cherry on an already towering shit sundae.

[teonys-jf]

my friend picked sasha so guess who it is!!

sasha sàmhach, she/they {paragraph order} nonbinary, homoromantic asexual, 23 when shadow knighted/supposed to be 26

although her memories are spotty, she remembers two other kids with white hair. their names are smudged but the visuals are blocked in color. green, purple, and pink hair were strong as well as the greenery, summer air with ocean waves rolling. green hair would always be dragged away by the end from a tall dark purple being. afterwards she would swim back onto a random coast, with the help of being part merperson, and enjoy life as long as possible until it was time to go

sasha’s favorite flower is violet because pink blob used that and a magenta to get a brighter color

{13} eventually they found a little swamp-side town called meteli. they met a man named joh who was welcoming, he gave them a house and food and sasha was hesitant at first but eventually began to think of joh as a father

{15} when laurence showed up into town she was the one to open the door for him. joh was the first to give him a hug. the two never thought of each other as siblings but both called joh their dad

during the annual metelian swimming competition they would root for whoever was in the lead during the home stretch, usually a girl named cadenza whose hair would look like fire because she never put it up, and return home to practice magick. there were potions and natural magick to try and use

{17s, 16k} one sunny day while walking through the town she bumped into kenmur, who had rumors floating around about being related to the late duslach’dearg kingdom and had an obsession with red-dust, and the things he was carrying exploded out of their arms because he was trying to read while walking fast. sasha helped them up and started to help pick up the papers and books when she noticed that they were having trouble talking to her and looking away. sasha knew that kenmur was going to be loved so deeply he wasn’t going to know what to do

{23} after being told they had to accompany laurence and joh to the nether for business with the help of a friendly neighboring village, secretly a week before kenmur was going to ask to marry them, and after a goodbye filled with promises and quick kisses sasha was off

as the ‘chicken shaman’, which he demanded to be called, sat by the opening the trio went into the nether for warts. in the middle of collecting, they were ambushed by guards in dark armor, sasha was pushed to the ground and dragged into the lava. joh tried so hard to help his daughter before getting shot through the heart. sasha can still hear the scream she let out and the bloodshed before it faded to black. if her body would have been left to the lava her magick would have brought her back as a banshee, but thanks to someone who had taken her body and performed the ceremony she gets to ‘live’ on as a shadow knight

gene was the first of their new brethren they would meet. zenix was a close second, as well as vylad when getting the tour. sasha would have to make trips back through any portal they could find for water, thanks dad.

some of the only people she can remember are laurence and joh, along with the pink and green blobs from youth. being dead isn’t that great for memory retention, but at least she was heat resistant because of her new title

[swanlake1998]

Article: Ashton Edwards Is Breaking Down Gender Barriers in Ballet

Date: July 1, 2021

By: Marcie Sillman

When Ashton Edwards was 3 years old, the Edwards family went to see a holiday production of The Nutcracker in their hometown, Flint, MI.

For the young child, it was love at first sight.

"I saw a beautiful, black Clara," Ashton says, "and I wanted to be just like her."

Ashton has dedicated 14 years of ballet training in pursuit of that childhood dream. But all the technical prowess in the world can't help Ashton surmount the biggest hurdle—this aspiring dancer was born male, and for the vast majority of boys and men, performing in pointe shoes hasn't been a career option. But Ashton Edwards, who uses the pronouns "he" and "they," says it's high time to break down ballet's gender barrier, and their teachers and mentors believe this passionate dancer is just the person to lead the charge.

A Childhood in Motion

Ashton's mother, Latisha Edwards, says for as long as she can remember, Ashton, the sixth of seven Edwards siblings, has been in constant motion, dancing on any flat surface in the house. "He'd crash into plates in the kitchen," she laughs. She knew she had to find something to focus all that energy.

The year after the family trip to Nutcracker, when Ashton was just 4 years old, Latisha signed them up for a dance class offered through Flint's Head Start program. Karen Jennings, now chair of the dance division at the Flint School of Performing Arts, ran the Saturday program at the time.

"There was this little guy out in the hallway," Jennings remembers. It was Ashton, and Jennings saw the child was copying the students in her intermediate class.

"I was afraid he was going to fall and crack his head open," she says. "So, I invited him into the studio."

Jennings recognized Ashton's natural flexibility, rotation and body proportions, the physical assets that often propel a hopeful ballet dancer to success. Beyond these gifts, Ashton had what Jennings calls a "spark": the enthusiasm and self-discipline to devote to regular ballet classes. Once the Edwards family decided Ashton would continue ballet training, Jennings was happy to place them in her classes with the more advanced students. She kept a close eye on the aspiring dancer throughout their 12 years in the Flint School of Performing Arts program—though Ashton's journey there wasn't always easy.

Ashton was one of only a handful of boys in the school, and one of very few Black students. And though Ashton never felt treated differently, their keen awareness of being Black in a room full of white dancers created a pressure to excel.

"I've had to be 12 times better than everyone else my whole life," Ashton says. "We have no choice but to be the best if we want to be treated equally."

Finding a Dance Home in Seattle

By the time Ashton was 11 or 12, it became clear they had the raw skills to pursue ballet seriously, and Jennings met with the Edwards family to spell out what that would mean: leaving Flint for more rigorous pre-professional training. Latisha Edwards worried about sending her child out of town, but she supported their decision to enroll in summer classes at both Chicago's Joffrey Ballet and then at Houston Ballet.

Although Jennings believed the Joffrey would be a good long-term fit, at age 16 Ashton decided to audition for Pacific Northwest Ballet's summer intensive. They traveled to Chicago where the Seattle-based dance company was holding a large, regional audition. PNB artistic director Peter Boal says managing director Denise Bolstad spotted Ashton before he did.

"Her eyes got bigger, then she pointed to the name and audition number on the card." Boal immediately saw what Bolstad had noticed in Ashton. "His lines, his energy, his placement."

But something even more special struck Boal: This teenager had the kind of stage presence that's difficult to teach. "There are dancers that you just look at them, and they have their own special spotlight."

Boal offered Ashton a summer spot; despite their mother's qualms about the distance from Flint to Seattle, she let her son travel west, where they fell in love with both PNB and Seattle. After the summer, Boal accepted Ashton into the company's Professional Division training program.

Chasing the Dream of Dancing On Pointe

While the move to PNB made sense in terms of preparation for a professional ballet career, it didn't ensure that Ashton could immediately pursue gender-blind ballet training. In fact, the teenager didn't even consider it at first.

"Growing up I always knew all the choreography for the female roles," Ashton says. "I learned everything, but those were unreachable dreams, just insane fantasies." So, when Ashton first arrived at PNB, they focused on traditional men's classes, and on building strength, to develop into what they call a "man's man."

But the pandemic hit midway through Ashton's first year at PNB. When the ballet school shut down, Ashton had time to reflect on their efforts to fit the male ballet dancer stereotype. At 5' 6" with long, slender limbs and androgynous facial features, they didn't necessarily resemble a Romeo or an Albrecht. And deep down, they still harbored the dream of dancing Juliet or Giselle.

So, during quarantine in the spring and summer of 2020, Ashton embarked on a rigorous self-directed training program. They sought out online pointe technique videos, studying them carefully. A friend gave Ashton her old pointe shoes, and every day they'd go outside to the patio to practice what they'd seen in the videos.

"I was out there for six hours a day, as soon as the sun came out," says Ashton. "And I realized, maybe this dream is possible."

So, last fall Ashton approached Boal and Bolstad with a proposition: The dancer would continue with the official men's curriculum if the school would allow them to pursue pointe classes, as well. And they showed the teachers what they'd learned over the summer.

"I had no hesitation," Boal remembers. "If anyone had said to me 'This student has danced on pointe for just nine months and this is what they're able to do,' I wouldn't believe it!"

The Lewis and Clark of the Ballet World

Since classes resumed last September, Ashton has juggled a rigorous schedule: two days a week they take pointe class with their Professional Division female colleagues; the other three days they're working with the male students, although sometimes they take that class in pointe shoes as well.

Former PNB principal dancer Jonathan Porretta, one of Ashton's instructors, says he never knew his student wanted to dance on pointe until last fall, when Ashton started posting photos to their Instagram account.

Porretta says he has always approached teaching his classes outside male and female roles. For him, ballet is about working toward technique and developing the artist.

For his part, Porretta calls Ashton a "star," someone he believes can help pave a new future for men, and women, in ballet. Porretta says it's time for the art form to loosen its hide-bound gender roles.

"There will be some companies very ready to be thrust into the future of dance, while others are more set in their ways," Porretta says. "But art is here to push boundaries and possibilities."

PNB soloist Joshua Grant agrees. Years ago, when he was a young student, Grant's ballet teacher suggested he take pointe classes to help strengthen his ankles. He loved dancing on pointe, but professionally it didn't seem like an option for him. In 2006, after stints with both PNB and National Ballet of Canada, Grant auditioned for, and was hired by, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the all-male troupe known for its campy send-ups of classic ballets.

"I was told it would be career suicide," Grant recalls, because "men on pointe? That's either drag or comedy."

After five years as a principal dancer with the Trocks, Grant returned to PNB, where he's back to performing traditional male roles and developing his own choreographic career. He's currently creating a dance for Ashton and some of their fellow students, for Next Step, PNB's choreographers' showcase. Ashton will be on pointe. Like Porretta, Grant is excited that a young dancer like Ashton is eager to push to transform a centuries-old art form.

"I told Ashton, 'You're like Lewis and Clark, making your own path,'" Grant says. "'There's no precedent, so do what you want to do.'"

Looking Ahead

Ashton is hoping to embark on a career dancing with companies that will cast them not only in gender-blind contemporary work, but in the traditional roles from ballet's classical canon, everything from Odette/Odile in Swan Lake to the long-coveted Clara in The Nutcracker.

"I want to be part of changing, evolving those traditions to modern day life," says Ashton. "We can preserve those ballets, those classic works, but also make them reflect our modern world."

Boal believes in Ashton's ability to be a ballet change-maker; more than that, he's convinced that ballet has to welcome gender-blind casting and men performing on pointe as more than a novelty act.

"We're not going to laugh at this or point at it," Boal says. "We're going to admire it, and eventually we're not even going to talk about it as something out of the ordinary, as it continues to evolve."

Despite the support Ashton has received in their quest to be a nonbinary professional dancer, landing a job is tough for any ballet student, let alone for a Black dancer. But Ashton professes faith that they can make their dreams come true.

"I just decided, my entire life, this is what I'm going to do. This makes me happy, so I have to do it," Ashton says. "There is no other way I can exist."

[starsbythepocketful12]

headcanons cause i’m in flarrie hours

they are THE couple when it comes to halloween costumes

all their outfits for big events (parties, gigs where dirty candy and/or jatp perform) are coordinated

carrie my femme queen & flynn my nonbinary lesbian darling

go to protests & marches together

flynn lends carrie books by her favorite Black female authors & carrie lends her books by her favorite sapphic poets

they make playlists about each other but the other doesn’t know they do it (julie & kayla are the only ones permitted to know of the existence of these playlists & have been sworn to secrecy, though julie has a strong suspicion carrie also makes playlists about flynn and vice versa)

have a joint pinterest account for their wedding moodboard

carrie adopted a tiger cub and named it flynn for their three month anniversary

they go to the mall together every other weekend and shop, which they both love to do and when they get home they always model the new outfits they bought

flynn squeals every time they see a dog in public and always runs over and asks if they can pet it and carrie always watches her with such a fond look that the owner almost always makes a comment on what a lovely couple they are or asks how long they’ve been together (something that has actually been happening since even before they were dating, and back then you can imagine the flustered ness it caused)

flynn often comes to watch dirty candy rehearsals, cheer them on, make sure they’re staying hydrated/taking snack breaks and that carrie’s not overworking herself

carrie is the first person that flynn tells she wants to DJ professionally and carrie gets her her first gig

eventually flynn gets into producing as well and ends up making a track for carrie, who writes lyrics to it and it becomes dirty candy’s most successful song to date

carrie says i love you first one saturday afternoon while they’re watching a movie on flynn’s computer in her room. flynn laughs at a joke and carrie looks over at her, her beautiful, incredible girlfriend, and simply can’t resist the urge to say it

flynn’s shocked into silence so carrie panics and leaves and doesn’t answer flynn’s messages

that night flynn shows up at the wilson mansion and throws rocks at carrie’s window until she comes out

flynn is upset with carrie for running out and ghosting her and carrie’s trying to defend herself so they argue but then flynn interrupts carrie by kissing her and breathlessly saying, “i love you.” carrie kisses her and not another word on it is said

carrie steals flynn’s hats

they’re not really PDA-y, they just happen to engage in a lot of unconscious, casual affection, like flynn often absentmindedly intertwines their pinkies and carrie doesn’t realize her arm is around flynn’s shoulders until she’s doing it

even after months of dating will still flirt like they’re in their enemies who are secretly very attracted to e/o era

flynn really loves art, particularly murals, so she drags carrie to a lot of gallery openings and museums

at one point when flynn’s going through a hard time carrie enlists all their friends for help making a giant mural full of drawings of things that make her happy

flynn happy cries when she sees it and is pretty much always seen hugging carrie for the rest of that night

only really cuddle when one (or both) of them is sleepy, though flynn does often sit on carrie’s lap

before starting to date, carrie would tease flynn for having stuffed animals during their sleepovers at flynn’s until they started dating and flynn started spending more time at carrie’s and flynn discovers that her girlfriend’s a little hypocrite

flynn has a younger sister and brother (sister is six, brother is four) and they absolutely ADORE carrie and think she’s the coolest and carrie thinks they’re the cutest

flynn’s like no they’re little demons and carrie’s says who says demons can’t be cute? you once called me a demon right, and im cute, aren’t i? and flynn rolls her eyes and fights back a smile

flynn also has a college aged older sister who she looks up to a lot, like that’s her hero and absolute role model, so naturally carrie’s terrified to meet her, and though she tries to appear intimidating at first, she can’t keep up the act for long and starts being friendly with carrie pretty much right away

one day they’re supposed to go on a date but carrie’s sick and forgot to text flynn telling her not to come so flynn shows up at her house but stays anyway to look after her

flynn reads to her and makes her soup

trevor & flynn play video games while carrie naps

flynn makes jewelry in her free time and consults carrie for her thoughts on every piece (in junior year she starts selling them at school & turns out to be quite the entrepreneur)

they have an inside joke about cosmo and wanda

a couple of the dirty candy members sometimes jokingly flirt with flynn and are like “watch out! we’re gonna steal your girl!” and carrie gets possessive and apologizes for it pretty quickly but flynn thinks it’s hot so it works out pretty well

will watch bad rom coms to make fun of straight people and throw popcorn at the screen when they get together

pet/nick names: care, baby, babe, love, (from carrie to flynn who shuts down upon hearing it) honey, (flynn to carrie, who becomes very giddy the first time flynn says it in a text message) sweetheart

if you couldn’t tell before they ofc have an enemies to friends to lovers arc

move in together after graduating, neither planning on going to college (julie goes to berkeley and nick some other place in california where they have lacrosse cause that’s the sport he plays right) and their parents think it’ll be a disaster but it actually goes really well

the first couple of weeks they fight more, all petty arguments mostly out of the stress of moving, but they always talk it out

it doesn’t take long for them to be happy they’re living together and feel really glad they took that step

two years after graduating flynn gives her a promise ring

carrie cries her eyes out and replies “of fucking course, you dumb fuck” when flynn asks if she’ll take it

ten years later carrie’s a successful pop star/choreographer & flynn’s a record breaking producer/DJ and they’re about to buy a house when they realize they never got married

it’s just a moment where they’re relaxing together on the couch and suddenly are like. oh

and proceed to burst out laughing

it’s a small ceremony, thrown together in just three weeks

carrie wears a short, light pink dress with a heart cutout in the back that would probably be more suited for a high school sophomore’s spring fling but no one cares

flynn wears a suit, and is walked down the aisle by her older sister

they both tear up upon seeing each other and sob through the vows (the traditional pre written ones, they wrote vows for each other but they recite them to the other when they’re alone, so it’s something special only they can share)

julie & kayla are the maids of honor, nick and alex are the best men

julie & luke’s five year old hernando is the ring bearer & alex and willie’s three year old umi is the flower child

trevor, flynn’s older sister and parents cry

even flynn’s now teenage younger siblings, who as of late have often been stereotypically cynical and moody shed tears

jatp perform at the reception (they have also become a hit band at this point)

when they get back from the honeymoon the first thing they do is get a dog

they adopt a golden doodle rescue named stella

a couple years later they start talking about kids and look into getting a sperm donor

because they love being competitive they do little games to decide who will be the one to carry the baby

it’s all jokes though, they decided at the start of the process that it would be flynn for the first kid and carrie for the second

but then SURPRISE flynn has twins

a boy and a girl named tyler and ollie (who’s who i won’t tell you cause fuck gender)

they don’t even talk about carrie getting pregnant now cause they’re busy with the babies and trying to manage their careers but one night, when the kids are eight, and flynn has just flopped onto the couch with a dramatic sigh after putting them to bed, carrie puts down her kindle and quietly says that she wants another kid.

they talk for hours because while flynn wants another kid too, when you’re both celebrities with demanding jobs and people constantly trying to peer into your life, that decision involves even more factors

they decide to have another kid and carrie chooses to take a step back from her career for now-she’ll return to it eventually but for now she wants to be able to just be a parent without worrying about work and not have to deal with the guilt that comes with working when she feels like she should be being a parent

though the kids have always been their main priority and they have done quite well dividing their time between work and being with them, and have done decently shielding them from the public eye (majority of the pictures of ollie & tyler that the public has are blurry candids, and the few high quality ones are from when they were three and they no longer look like that anyway so it’s all good)

it’s a harder process for carrie to get pregnant as she’s almost 40 and flynn was 31 when she had tyler and ollie

but it happens though they’re careful about choosing the sperm donor-even briefly consider asking reggie or nick-because with this kind of thing there’s always the risk that other parent could track down where their kid ended up and want to be a part of that kid’s life later on which is uber complicated for many reasons so they get those scary possibilities out of the way by just finding someone who they know wants to be in the child’s life

preston choi, a thai & korean american mathematics professor ends up being their guy

he’s immensely genuine, sweet, respectful, polite, and gentlemanly

when he came out at fifteen his parents kicked him out of the house

it was a long and difficult journey but they’re in a decent place now

but it’s not the family he wants to have and he’s tried but has yet to find a partner

but doesn’t want to wait to have kids so here he is, more than happy to co parent with flynn and carrie

so that’s what they do! tyler and ollie become big siblings to miles wilson-choi on december 10th, 2044

miles grows up in the most multicultural home ever, being fluent in 4 languages (English, AAVE, Spanish thanks to their tia julie, Korean, and Thai) all their life

tyler & ollie welcome preston and miles into the family with open arms, as well as the addition of korean and thai cuisine to the already amazing dinner tables they had of soul and caribbean food

when miles is seven carrie goes back to work full time, with preston’s assurance that he’s got this when her and flynn are busy and tyler and ollie (who are now fifteen) promising they’ll help out as well

at that point the long awaited julie and the phantoms/carrie and flynn wilson collaboration FINALLY happens

flynn wins her 28th grammy for it, leaving her tied with beyoncé for most grammys won by any woman ever (its julie’s 14th, luke’s 6th, and carrie’s 12th, and the band’s collective 10th cause alex never did any solo projects and reggie released one country album but it didn’t win any grammys rip though it was nominated for 2 CMAs)

[unambiguouslybi]

Hello! I hope you're doing pleasant today, or tonight- or afternoon- or noon? And Happy Pride!! 🎉🎉🎉

So I'm kinda nervous about talking about this mostly because I feel like I'm disappointing my family again hHHh (I came out to being Bisexual last month and they've just been in denial and it's like it didn't happen-)

But it's just that I was born female and that's okay, but on some days I feel very masculine and want to be addressed and represented as such

My friend suggested that I might be Bigender but I just want to be sure about it, it just feels like I'm switching between masculinity and feminity very often

Hi!

I can relate to you when you say you came out and it's like your family's in denial. When I first came out as bisexual and for a couple years after, a lot of my family and friends acted like it never happened and that I was straight. Then when it came to being bigender, I was even more nervous to come out bc my family went through this big ordeal when my brother came out as trans and I was afraid they'd think I was 'influenced' by him and I felt bad for not being the 'normal one' like they thought I was. But luckily, the more my family gets educated, the more they understand and accept who I am. I do think it's important to have resources you can point to in case someone is ignorant on the subject bc a lot of the times, they just don't understand things properly and if they learn about it, they can be more accepting of it (of course, some people will be anti-LGBT+ no matter what unfortunately).

I can't say for sure whether or not you're bigender as figuring out gender is more personal, but I would say it's definitely plausible! I do feel very similarly to you and identify as a man and a woman.

-Mod Kitt

Below is an answer on another ask from one of our mods about multigenders:

Hello yes anon are you me XD But for serious I recognize some of those gender feelings. Since it sounds like you’re right at the start of your gender journey, I’ll simply provide some definitions in the context of possibly being some flavor of multigender~

Nonbinary: An umbrella term for a gender identity that is not 100% man or 100% woman. Some people just identify as nonbinary as well. Many people see this as a neutral third gender or a lack of gender entirely, but the reality is that there is a wide spectrum of nonbinary identities, including bigender.

Bigender: Identifying as [at least] 2 genders. While man/woman pairing is common (like yours truly) you can also identify as a binary gender + nonbinary gender, or as two nonbinary genders! Sometimes the ratio of gender 1 to gender 2 can shift, or sometimes it’s more like preferring to wear blue one day and green the next.

Genderfluid: Similar to bigender, but distinguished from it by being more, well, fluid! People who choose to identify as genderfluid rather than bigender are more likely to experience a changing, shifting gender as a defining feature rather than something that happens occasionally.

Genderqueer: Like I’ve said before, I see this label used most often by people who know that they’re non-cis in some fashion, but don’t particularly care to put a hard and fast definitive label on it. Or, their gender expression is such that they are “queering” their otherwise cis gender. I’ve seen a few crossdressers and drag performers use genderqueer in this way.

Regarding coming out to your family (or even just getting the chance to process this with them rather than more or less on your own), I’ve seen the suggestion to test the waters and see how they react to the concept of other nonbinary or trans folks (celebrities, friends of yours, people that your family may know, etc) and if that’s favorable then to try coming out to them. If another mod or a follower want to chime in with more specific advice please do! My “coming out” is less in the sense of leaving the closet and more in the sense of just opening the closet door, so I don’t have much experience there!

- Eli

hello hello i wanted to add my 2 cents too

as far as coming out is really theres no right way to do it. coming out as queer was easy because i have family members that are open members of the lgb community but coming out as trans/enby was alot more.... difficult. for me i had to ease them into it slowly over the course of months. i probably could have (and honestly, should have) done it all at once but i had never given myself the chance to fully explore who i was when i first did it so they learned about me as i learned about me.

if you want your family along for the journey i suggest that, telling them that your questioning your gender identity and that your thoughts and feelings are subject to change as you learn (of course in a more natural sounding way x3). if you want to kind of leave them in the dark as you explore alone thats also fine! just be sure to have a friend for support as you explore because otherwise it tends to feel very alienating and very lonely. this friend doesnt have to be in the community (but its very nice if they are!) so long as they love and support you and encourage you in your journey.

and most of all remember you dont have to tell your family anything you dont want too. if it makes you too uncomfortable or you feel too unsafe then you can keep it from them. its your life and you get to pick and choose who gets to see and know which parts of you.

-ky

[beyondthetemples-ooc]

1, 27, 40

Ooh, thank you for the ask! It's gonna get heavy though, because that first one is a Very loaded question, whew. ;; I'm actually gonna put this under a cut.

01: Do you have a good relationship with your parents?

Hahaha ha haaaa.... about that. It depends entirely on which parent.

I was raised in a split-custody situation, and grew up mainly living with my father and stepmother (often called "stepmonster"). I only got to see my mother every other weekend, on certain holidays, and for a few weeks in the summer. I wish I could've seen her more, but now we go to lunch/dinner at least once a month and we'll just talk for hours.

My stepmother.... well, I'm in a decent mood and don't want to ruin it by going into Deep Details, but she was viciously and relentlessly emotionally abusive from the day we started living together, and the older I got and the more I started realizing that she was hurting me, the more I started asking her to stop and tell her she was hurting me, the worse she treated me. It wasn't always, but it became physical often enough that I'd flinch when she raised her hands. So needless to say, I don't have any warm, fuzzy feelings towards her.

I acknowledge that she "tried to be a good parent" (or at least, I acknowledge that she SAYS that's what she wanted), but she has never once apologized for hurting or screaming at me. She has never once taken steps to stop it. No matter how many times I asked her to stop, or take a moment and breathe, or think about how what she's saying is making me feel. Hell, she VERY recently told me "I don't have any regrets" (about how she raised us). And even when I pressed, hesitantly, tentatively, "Nothing? Not one thing?" and she said "Nope." I just. What. How do you claim to love someone and then say you don't regret screaming at them, calling them names, pinning them in corners, smacking them, making them cry on a weekly basis?

So, honestly, fuck her with a saguaro cactus.

My father is... really complicated. We were very close when I was little, but he was always away working and we were lucky if we got to give him a hug before bedtime, so we rarely got to Actually Do Bonding Things. I tried going to him about the way stepmonster was hurting me three times, and each time he yelled at me for being ungrateful and selfish and whatever else he could come up with to make it my fault I was being abused. Yeah.

And just... The older I've gotten, the more I've realized that his actions are a result of his choices. He has a temper that is frankly terrifying, he has roared at me to "shut the hell up" more than once, when I was very little he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of bed, trying to force me to stand when I was crying because I had a vasogaval syncope episode (read: I was about to pass out and told them I couldn't stand up to get ready for school), and he makes little-to-no attempt to control it. The older I get, the less I can tolerate the things he does, or did.

It would be different if he apologized, or acknowledged that he hurt me, or frankly even ever listened to me when I went to the parent that prided himself on being my ~protector~ and did a single damn thing to ACT on it, but he refused to even acknowledge that I was hurting. But he never has tried even talking to me about these things, and frankly I can't forgive someone who never apologizes. I miss when we were close, but now I don't have any desire to try rekindling that relationship, because whenever I try to address my pain or fears, he turns that anger on me and it's just not worth getting verbally abused.

My mother is the only parental figure I'm close to. She also had a temper when I was super little, but at least she would address it with us and try to talk it through, and she has gone to greater and greater lengths to control it and understand why we argue and communicate with me and mend the parts of us that were broken by those things. She has pointed me to resources and family history and therapy and she was the very first person who ever told me, at age fucking 19 (after having been diagnosed since I was SEVEN YEARS OLD) what ADHD actually MEANS and how it impacts my life and that it might be why I struggle so much with simple chores and memory.

Even though she's homophobic and transphobic, at least she's not cruel about it. I would hesitate to even call her judgemental, because she thinks it's "maladaptive", but doesn't think it makes someone a bad person. (Hell, stepmonster and father and at least two of my siblings know I'm nonbinary too, but they won't use the right pronouns or non-gendered language for me either.) She's also of the "monotheistic triumphalism" mindset in her Christianity and used to try very hard to convert me away from paganism until, ironically, I moved in with her for that year. So I can't really talk about those things with her.

But other than that, I can talk to her about ANYTHING. I can ask her questions on anything from a vulnerable personal place in my heart to a vulnerable place in my body to relationship advice, she has a great wealth of knowledge on health and financial things and resources provided by the state and county, she has also had to heal from parental abuse and has had a ton of therapy for depression and PTSD so she helps me with mine too, and she's a genuinely kind and witty person who cares about ME enough to address when something she said or did hurts me, and she genuinely tries to help and be a comforting presence.

Like, my bar for "good parenting" isn't very high honestly, but she really is a wonderful parent and I wish I'd had more of her influence in my life.

27: Have you ever broken someone’s heart?

Not that I'm aware of. Not really, anyways. I've had at least 3 people over the age of 40 tell me "I think I'm falling in love with you" just because I talked to them, but like. I'm still in my 20's? Why even?? A lot of people have asked me for my number, and I've turned them down. (I'm taken, first of all. I don't want to be anybody's side-squeeze. And I'm frankly not interested in somebody who only wants my number because my butt is cute. Whatever.)

But the relationship I'm in now is the first serious one I've ever been in, and maybe it's because I'm demi, but I can't imagine anyone's heart being broken if they're not in a truly serious relationship.

40:Have you ever walked outside completely naked?

Oh man, this is a fun one! In chronological order:

- When I was about... 14? I performed my first Wiccan ritual "skyclad" in the backyard. (It's a full moon thing, so I figured I should be under the light of the full moon. And also nude because, you know. Wiccan.) There was a privacy fence, but it WAS outside, and I WAS naked.

- I didn't properly "walk" outside for this one, but I did once open the door to a pizza delivery guy, take the food, and pay completely naked. It was basically a dare. Easiest $100 I've ever made.

- I did once walk several blocks through downtown Canton with absolutely nothing on but a cloak. That one was because I heard the shopkeep saying "Anyone who comes in on a Sunday in their pajamas gets a surprise." And I'm deathly curious, okay. I wanted to know what this surprise was. But I utterly lack pajamas. So I asked her, "What if you sleep naked?" And she said "Then I dare you to come in naked!" So I came in one Sunday wrapped in a cloak, asked her if she remembered the conversation, and when she asked "Are you naked under there?" I essentially flashed her.

- I went to an outdoor nudist resort in Bath, Ohio. We didn't stay long though, maybe two hours tops, because it was almost autumn and the other two I was with were too chilly to enjoy it. I was fine though? It has to be like 50 degrees or cooler for me to be chilled. But because they were too cold to be nude, we left.

Nudity has never fazed me, and if it was socially acceptable, I'm walk around EVERYWHERE naked.

[cattytransboy]

Introduction

Making a new tumblr after years away. Wanted to make this blog as somewhat of a personal memo book of my journey of self-discovery.

For context, for the past couple of years, I’ve taken a lot of time being introspective of feelings I fear I’ve felt for years, but have repressed them for so long, I’d nearly forgotten they were there.

I always thought that the “I’ve always known from a young age I was trans” was such a silly trope. Surely, no one knows who they are that young? But it turns out, that that, too, was a sign that I wasn’t cis. Because indeed, children do have a strong sense of identity with their gender. I kept waiting and waiting to finally “feel like a woman”. To know what “womanhood” meant to me. And yeah, I kinda do know now. And I know that it doesn’t fit me.

But did that mean I desired manhood then? That’s a lot harder to say. There are aspects of myself that may make me a man, and aspects that may make me a woman, or even the taboo word I heard growing up- nonbinary. The spooky word for SJWs and confused lesbians that even in a liberal city, liberal town, they always seemed different from anyone else.

Probably because they were, and as I began to realize, I was too.

Questioning

I thought I had had it figured out. I had felt disillusioned from womanhood, estranged, and felt scared— no rather, terrified of manhood, so surely! Nonbinary must be the answer! But life isn’t so simple. Because nonbinary, on its own, isn’t some singular gender identity in the way that “woman” and “man” are. But rather, an entire category of genders that are “not the male-female binary”. Even still, there are people that wholly sit outside that binary— maveriques and agenders and rather more still.

Was that me? Well not quite. Truth be told, even now, I’m afraid that I’m just a trans man in denial. That the way my dysphoria is manifesting is held back by quite literally “transphobia”— afraid of being trans. Certainly plenty of people believe that. That enbies are merely trans people too afraid to switch to the other gender. But no. I don’t think that’s true. Maybe, genuinely, for some people. But not for me.

I feel stuck, trapped, in an endless cycle between man, and woman. Sometimes, it will last for days— where I feel truly, simply, like a man. And others, where I am but a woman again. But, those days are bad days. Horrible days when I *hate* feeling like a woman and yet I still am. This visceral anger at myself that why can’t you *just pick*. “Pick, and you’ll be happy. Pick, and people might believe you.”

And yet I never do. Even the username of this blog— “cattytransboy” it feels like a lie. Am I even *really trans*? I certainly know I’m not cis. Where does that leave me?

Identity

Some labels try to solve the problem of “not able to pick”. The bigender, trigender, polygender, pangender. The genderfluid, genderfaun, genderfaunet, and its sisters the genderfae and genderfaer. When I try talking about them to non-trans people or allies, they look at me like I’m insane. Maybe I am.

And while it would be simple to just say “genderfluid” and be done with it, even that label, feels like I’m lying to myself. That *surely* there is a concrete feeling of gender I can grasp. That myself as a man, or maverique, or woman can be who I am.

They all feel like costumes. That no matter what I wear, it feels like drag. No matter how I speak or talk— all of it is an act. My life is a stage and the characters I play— I am those characters. But behind the stage? After the curtains have closed? Who is left?

Sometimes, I feel like a nobody. The Jack, or, as I had been teased in my life, the “Jill” of all trades. The master of none. Can’t pick a gender. Can’t pick a sexuality. Can’t even pick a career. The fear of stagnancy. The fear of being *the same*. I wish to ascend it all. I wish that I could shed my fears and allow myself to believe “No, I don’t have to pick!”

Reality

But that’s not true. In day to day, moment to moment, how I feel matters not to the people around me. They clock me how they see me and things like pronoun preference, gender identity, even chosen names, fade away. And all I’m left with is the mask the world sees. The mask the world chooses to see. I have to pick, so that when someone sees me, they *know* who I am. Who I’m trying to be. I so desperately try to perform a gender for which I have no words.

Some might read that and say “aha! That’s quoigender!” But still, yet still, that doesn’t feel right too.

Resolution

So, for right now, I call myself a nonbinary trans boy. Not a man. Not a woman. It feels apt for how juvenile I feel trying to work this out.

This blog will be used intermittently to catalog new rants.

[boopypastaissalty]

We Are Not Broken

The Session

Dr. Flemmings cleared his throat. “Now that all of you are here, let’s begin. The first thing I want you all to do is tell everyone what happened to you. It’s okay that you are here and you all have had similar experiences. This is a LGBTQ+ safe zone, so don’t be afraid. Who wants to start?”

Everyone looked at each other, none wanting to go first. After a few seconds of awkward silence, Logan took a deep breath, “I was kidnapped and tortured because of my gender and sexuality, along with Roman and Remus,” the twins both flinched at the statement, remembering all too well what had happened and what they had all been through together, “I have scars all over my body from the various weapons and beatings. It was hell, we were all malnourished and suffering, and I remember having to watch our kidnappers beat the everloving, pardon my language, f*ck out of Roman and Remus, I don’t remember the times I was beaten all too well, but it was all because some people thought not being cishet was a crime, found the twins and then found me.”

Dr. Flemmings nodded, “Use whatever language you need to, Logan”

“Does Spanish count?” Roman piped up, both twins were multilingual, both parents being native spanish speakers, their father from Spain and their mother from Mexico, in high school Roman took French and Remus took German and begrudgingly, at their parents request, taught each other and had become proficient in both languages. Sometimes the twins talked to each other in a strange mix of English, Spanish, French, and German, something they called Enspanchan.

“Preferably a language we all can understand, Roman”

Roman slumped a little, “Ay, lo siento” he said under his breath.

“Logan, do you have anything else to say?” Dr. Flemmings asked.

Logan shook his head and fidgeted with his hands, he had never been good at processing strong emotions, he usually distracted himself by researching and educating himself on random topics, incorporating them into his Sign Language lectures at the school he worked at.

“Uh well, I guess it’s my turn,” Patton said, interrupting Logan’s train of thought, “I was taking a walk, and some guy noticed the strap to my binder and commented on it. I didn’t think much of it, I ignored him and kept walking, but then he grabbed me and started calling me… horrible things and he dragged me into the nearby woods and…” Patton took in a deep breath, trying to calm himself down, “He took off all my clothes and destroyed my binder. He told me I’d be beautiful if I didn’t try so hard to be a man. He called me an ‘exotic beauty’ and kept asking me what kind of asian I am. And then he started touching me and…” Patton started full fledged crying, not wanting to say it. He got quieter and almost whispered, “He r*ped me… And now I’m pregnant.”

Everyone was silent for a few long seconds, Virgil finally broke the silence “That’s… horrible. What are you going to do with the baby? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Patton took another deep breath and said “I’m probably going to put them up for adoption. Someone out there probably really wants a baby and can’t have one themselves. I’m not saying everyone should do that, though, I mean everyone’s different.”

Dr. Flemmings took note of how much Patton was crying, “You feel broken, don’t you?”

“I feel broken, violated, I wish time would just stop for at least a little while. I wish I could turn back the clock to last month and tell myself to not go on a walk that day, but I know I can’t. I feel like I’m not trans enough, like maybe I’m not actually a man.”

Virgil looked at Patton, “Bullsh*t. You’re trans enough. You are just as manly as you need to be. You’re f*cking valid.” He clapped for emphasis. This was unusual behavior for him, as he didn’t like to have attention drawn to himself, but he hated it when other trans people didn’t feel valid, mainly because he knew how it felt.

“Well, kiddo, I don’t know about all that, just look at me”

“You. Are. A. Man. And. That’s. What. Matters.”

“Fine, you win”

During this exchange, Janus had been writing out their story and held up their hand in a sort of “Stop dooting your horns, you middle school band class” gesture. Everyone looked at them, they just seemed to have that presence, the type that made people shut up and pay attention without really trying. Janus passed around the notepad, which said: After a concert, a lady came up to me, nothing new there, and was haggling me about being nonbinary and how I’m just a “broken man” and then all of a sudden, I don’t really remember this well, I felt something swipe across my throat and there was a strange warm liquid coming from my neck and then it started to hurt. The next thing I knew, there was yelling and I was on the ground with my friend Ethan, he’s the drummer, Hel, pressing down on my neck. Lola, our bassit, Truth, was calling 911. I think I passed out, and when I woke up in the hospital, I was very confused. I was on so many painkillers that I was basically high out of my mind and the most important thing to me at that moment, for some reason, was chocolate chip cookies. I specifically remember being distraught that no one would bring me cookies because I couldn’t communicate that I wanted some. Anyways, that’s not important. This person probably ended my career, the one thing I actually wanted to do with my life, and I don’t know what to do about it. I might never be able to talk, let alone perform, ever again. Also some dumb*ss took a video of it and put it on YouTube and so the whole world knew before I had even arrived at the hospital.

Once everyone had read what was on the notepad, they all stared at Janus. They looked down at their legs. After a moment, Patton got up and walked over to Janus and touched their shoulder. “What else do you like to do?” he asked.

Janus shrugged.

Virgil suddenly blurted out, remembering the chaos after that concert a few weeks ago, “Wait someone put that on YouTube? How has that not been taken down?”

Janus shrugged, not knowing why either, and pulled out their phone. They found the video and played it, looking away. Patton and Virgil looked away from the video, while Logan and the twins watched, all three feeling bad that they couldn’t seem to pull away from the chaos happening on screen, like some sort of morbid scene in a TV show.

When the video finished, Logan, Roman, and Remus were in stunned silence while Janus fumbled to keep the next video from playing, the “What’s in your pants?” meme, which was when one time Janus and the rest of Duality were on a talk show, all in costume, and the host asked Janus the dreaded question, “What’s in your pants?” and Janus had immediately responded by pulling things out of their pockets and listing them, the items getting more obscure as they went “Phone, wallet, keys, worm-on-a-string, tiny rainbow plastic babies, a dead mouse, Quetzalcoatl? [Quetzalcoatl is Janus’s pet hognose snake], and a barbie head.” the clip had spread like wildfire and had become a large part of what Janus’s stage persona, Deceit, had been known for. Everyone in the band had their own costume, usually involving half of the face being different from the other, Janus’s Deceit costume had a Jack the Ripper vibe and they had makeup to look like scales on the left side of their face. Ethan’s Hel was an all black suit and the left half of his body was made to look like dead, rotting flesh. Lola’s Truth had a black and white lace dress and her makeup was meant to make her look inhuman and had several extra eyes on the right side of her face. The final member, Tori’s Valhalla looked like a norse warrior, the right side of their face looked scarred and they wore an eyepatch over their right eye, like Odin.

“That kind of reminds me of what happened to me,” Virgil said with a shudder once the video was over. “I was hanging out with my friend, May, after your,” Virgil pointed at Janus, “concert and ended up crashing at her place. I tend to sleep pretty heavily, so I was surprised when I woke up on the autopsy table for the mortuary science program at the college I used to go to. I had barely woken up before I felt something that felt like a punch in my abdomen. I saw May, she had a knife and looked angry, she stabbed me four more times, repeatedly calling me a dirty tr*nny. I don’t think she realized I was awake. Thing is, she was the one who supported me the most during my transition and always had my back when I had first come out. That’s what hurt the most. She had apparently secretly hated me all these years and just now was releasing all that. I didn’t dare move until she had left and I started to crawl towards the desk phone at the professor's desk. I was almost there when I passed out. I woke up again to the professor shaking me, he��d always liked me and was concerned about me. He told me he had called 911 and shortly after I was hauled into an ambulance and carted away to the hospital, swimming in and out of consciousness. I think May was planning on killing me and having me be found dead on the autopsy table as a morbid surprise for the mortuary science teacher and his first period class of that day.” He was trying to control his breathing and he felt his heart rate speeding up. Virgil hoped that no one would notice and call him out on it.

Janus started writing and then showed Virgil: Was May at the concert too?

“Yeah why?” Breath, dammit, breath. Virgil chided himself

Janus scrunched their eyebrows and started writing again: What does she look like?

“Do you think-” Virgil cut himself off, took in a deep breath, and found a picture of May on his phone. She had a black bob with straight bangs and wore dark makeup.

Janus looked at the picture, That’s her, they wrote. One thing I didn’t mention before was that she had gotten away.

Suddenly Remus started talking “I’d stim and they’d hurt me.” Roman looked at his brother, remembering how Remus would make weird sounds, start shaking his leg, or drumming his fingers on whatever surface he could get to, and after a while their kidnappers had realized that Remus’s fidgeting and sounds were him stimming, one of his ways to try and calm himself down, started beating him more when he did. “And it started happening more and more because I was more stressed and then I had to force myself to not and I had so much pent up, that everything was a million times louder, even the smallest touches were too much, and my head felt so light and it was like I was feeling everything and nothing all at once, like I was both on fire and numb and I don’t know how to describe it.” Even now, Remus was trying to keep himself from stimming, he had his hands firmly grasped together and his legs were crossed unnaturally tight and he was visibly getting upset.

This was the first time Roman had even heard Remus talk about it. He hadn’t realized how much Remus had suffered and how different it was from how Logan and Roman had suffered. No wonder he was so despondent. He was overloaded in every way. Roman noticed how tight Remus was wound up and pulled something out of his pocket, a long, green silicone fidget toy that had small bumps on it for texture. “Hey,” Roman addressed his brother and handed him the fidget toy, “breath.” Remus took it and fidgeted, reminding himself that it was safe to stim now. “You never said how bad it was for you.” Roman said quietly.

Remus nodded, “I didn’t know how to say it.” He had nothing else to say.

Roman looked around after a long moment of silence. “I felt powerless. I’m almost always able to help, but I couldn't do anything. It was so awful only being able to watch, almost worse than getting beat regularly.” Roman fell silent again, not knowing what else to say.

“You feel like you have to be the hero, don’t you? You feel obligated to do it?” Dr. Flemmings asked. Roman thought for a moment and then nodded. “Since we’re coming to a close, I want to tell you all that you all did a good job today. Here’s what I want you all to do: Patton, read Galileo by Pual Tran, I think you’d benefit from it. Janus, I want you to write, I don’t care what you write, whether it be a song, a poem, a backtrack, whatever, as long as you express yourself with it. Virgil, I want you to use methods to regulate your breathing like the 4, 7, 8 technique and I want you to try carrying around a stress ball, same goes for you, Remus. Logan, I want you to express yourself more and come up with a way for you to get your feelings out in a safe manner. Roman, I want you to think about why you feel obligated to be the hero. And lastly I think you all can benefit from each other, as you have all had similar experiences. Thank you all for attending.”

Everyone started saying their goodbyes and started leaving. Janus met up with an older guy in the lobby who nudged them and said “Happy birthday, kid.” The older guy looked a little sad, like he was remembering something tragic. Everyone heard him wish Janus a happy birthday and started wishing them a happy birthday as well.

Patton looked at the guy and said “Is this your dad, Janus?”

Janus shook their head no and at the same time the guy said “I’m their brother. John, by the way.”

“You guys are siblings? Wow! I never would have guessed!”

Janus looked slightly embarrassed, everyone always confused John for their dad, which wasn’t too far off as John and his wife had raised them. “Yeah the twenty-one year age gap doesn’t help,” John said, lowering his gaze somewhat, just wanting Patton to change the subject.

Janus broke off from John for a moment, wrote something down and handed it to Patton. It said: He’s a little sensitive about family history. Mom died while having me and we don’t know who my dad is, so he had to raise me. That’s why he looks a little sad today.

Patton’s mouth formed a silent “O” as he slipped the paper into his pocket and waved goodbye “Have a nice day!”

John looked at his sibling, “What did that say?”

I said you were having a bad day.

“Oh, okay” he believed the white lie.

Logan was on the phone “I know dad, you’ve told me the story every year for as long as I can remember. I’m about to get in the car, so I’ll call you back”

John looked at Logan and whispered to Janus “What are their pronouns?”

He/him Janus wrote

“He looks and sounds a lot like the doctor who delivered you.”

Janus shrugged and started walking towards their car, a black Jeep, and got in, deciding to go to the cafe that John worked at, knowing that John had to go to work, and besides, they were hungry.

Masterpost

[probskay]

Silence in the Air

The silence in the air is tangible. It is long past midnight. All 3 people in the room are staring each other down. There are two others, just outside the door, discussing things in private. 

This is going to end with someone dead on the floor.

Elizabeth, wearing a brisk evening gown and her hair up in a shoddy bun, is openly brandishing a knife. She twists it back and forth between her hands, eight inches of steel blinking continuously in the light. She’s convinced she’s going to be the reason someone dies tonight, and she wants it to be known to everyone else that this is her intention.

Mack desperately doesn’t want to be here, and yet here they are. Mack is just a butler. They’ve never seen more than a thousand dollars in their savings account at any given moment, but this gig was finally giving them the chance they needed to save up and transition. They aren’t out to Elizabeth about being nonbinary yet, and their bowtie is getting tighter and tighter around their neck with every passing minute.

Arthur is here because he tried stealing a single pendant from Elizabeth’s well guarded safe. He was nearly successful, but Mack fucked up keeping watch, and they both got caught in the safe. This whole gig took two fucking years to set up and put together, and it was ruined because some dipshit kid couldn’t keep their hands off the gold. Arthur told them, numerous times, We’re in here for one thing and that’s it. It will make us a fortune.

Outside, Officer Du Bois is talking to the person who caught Mack and Arthur; Elizabeth’s secret lover, Anna. Du Bois can clearly tell Anna is nervous. He has ideas about why- besides the presence of a police force he knows isn’t quite friendly to queer people- but holds his tongue. Right now his job is to listen. He’s trying to get all of the details, and he doesn’t have anyone nearby to help him.

Anna is fucking mortified. She’s dead and she knows it. Elizabeth has a knife and she plans on using it. This pig doesn’t even have a fucking gun, and she knows he isn’t going to put himself in front of a knife for some dyke he doesn’t even know. Elizabeth’s husband is going to find out about this, and Elizabeth doesn’t want Anna to have the chance to come clean about this. Oh, but the way Elizabeth’s hair gleamed in the gentle moonlight...

“Anna,” Du Bois snaps his fingers. “Anna, I know you’re going through a lot right now but I need you to stay with me.” She’s barely in her underwear and a night gown. She’s probably freezing. Du Bois watches her shiver. Offer her your coat.

“Oh. Of course, officer,” she says. “Where were we again?”

Du Bois slides off his coat. “Here,” he says, “Put this on. You’re freezing out here.” Good thing he’s got a jacket underneath as well.

She takes the coat and wraps it around herself. She’s surprised. She’s not sure if this cop is putting on an act to gain her trust or if he legitimately cares about her well being. “Thanks,” she mutters.

You can’t just dodge around the issue. She’s in danger. Du Bois knows this, but he doesn’t legitimately think asking her about her danger will help her in anyway. A different voice speaks up: You might not, but it could lead her to open up more. 

Anna stares into the pig’s eyes. There’s something going on behind that lid of his, and she wishes she had any idea what it was. She can watch the gears turning in his head, but she can’t see the hands of the clock turn.

Du Bois sighs. “There’s something more troubling you, isn’t there?”

Anna tenses up. She’s glad the large coat is hiding her body enough so that he can’t see the motion. “I don’t know what you mean, officer. I was just cold.”

He does see her tense up, however subtle that might be. He’s had that coat for five years, he recognises when every single wrinkle in that battered old thing shifts. There it is. Strike the heart. “Don’t worry, once this is over you and Elizabeth will be able to rest in peace.”

Anna shuffles in place, trying to keep from wincing. Barely a moment has passed, but she can tell there’s so much going on in the officer’s head. His eyes, almost imperceptibly, are scanning every inch of her.  “You think Elizabeth is going to kill you, don’t you?” he says.

Her eyes widen. Nail on the head, chief. “She’s got a knife, and she hasn’t stabbed anyone else in that room yet. If she wanted the thieves out of the picture, she would’ve done it. You think she’s waiting for you, because you were the one who ran and left to get a police officer. This encounter is the only thing extending your life, because once I cuff those two and walk away, you’ll be alone with Elizabeth, and that’s the last thing you want right now.”

If Anna wasn’t scared of this cop before, she sure is scared of him now. How the hell did he figure all of that out so quickly? She’s barely told him anything. She was going to try and run away- no, sneak away- when the chance arose, but there was no chance. This cop is never going to let her go now.

The first voice speaks again. You were completely correct. Now she’s even more scared, though. You shouldn’t have pressed further. If you leave her here alone, her blood will be on your hands. Her death will be your fault, whether or not you arrest Elizabeth afterward. Du Bois thought about this. 

“You’re right!” Anna suddenly cries. “Elizabeth is going to kill me. She’s been cheating on her husband with me for seven months, and she’s going to end my life. He can’t find out about me, do you understand? She can’t let him find out about me. I’m just supposed to be some eye-candy maid for him, and just dust the corners. I know I should’ve left so long ago, but the money was decent, hormones are expensive, and- and-”

Harry nods. He doesn’t say anything. She’s already opened up. Like a shaken up can of pop, she’s finally burst.

“I love her!” She proclaims. “I loved her so fucking much, even though I knew how much of a risk it was. I knew that I wasn’t going to make it out of this relationship safely. I held out hope that one day Elizabeth would sweep me off of my feet, take me out to her boat, and we’d sale off into the pale ocean and onto other land. We’d be safe, and it’d just be her and I. We’d be alive and okay and her husband wouldn’t seek us out.”

Anna is crying at this point. Du Bois wants to cry, too, but he knows he can’t. He can’t just break down in front of a witness. He can’t just let her die, either. He has to make a tough choice, though: keep her here while he sorts out everything between everyone here tonight or let her run away and find new safety right now.

Anna is sobbing and she can’t stop. This is the last night she will ever see the sun, and it wasn’t even between the legs of an older woman. An older, graceful, beautfi- no no no! Those thoughts won’t do at all. She can’t rely on Elizabeth anymore. Elizabeth isn’t her love anymore. She’s alone in this world- again.

Du Bois takes her hand. He knows this is the greatest risk he’s ever going to take on his job, even greater than the time he was shot twice- though both shots only tore some skin off of his side- leaping from the cover that was about to collapse on top of him and the cover that was barely holding itself up during a firefight nearly eight years ago, but it was one he was willing to take. He slips her a business card. “Get out of here, Anna. Call me in 6 hours. We’ll figure this out.”

Anna takes the card, and she runs. She isn’t coming back. She doubts she will call this cop, either. One mercy doesn’t mean a fucking thing.

Du Bois turned back inside. There were still three more people he needed to deal with. He was sure he knew the whole story at this point, no one had lied to him about anything so far, but he still needs to figure out what to do about this whole situation.

“Officer Du Bois, you’re finally back,” Elizabeth chides. “I’m certain Anna treated you well.” Elizabeth digs the knife into her table and drags it down, leaving a sizable mark in it. This was the fifth one she had made so far. Mack winced every time they saw it, and Elizabeth relishes their fear.

Mack, despite every muscle in their black ass telling them otherwise, stares in the cop’s eyes. They need to show they aren’t afraid. This cop couldn’t do anything to them. Mack would get out of here just fine. They knew it. Whatever prison this cop would put them into couldn’t be worse than what they knew Elizabeth desperately wanted to do tonight.

Arthur rolls his eyes at Elizabeth’s statement. “Yeah, alright your highness, you’re rich and your servants,” he put a lot of venom into that, “are well behaved. Are you going to let us go or what?”

Elizabeth huffs, indignant. “You think you get to just leave? After breaking into my home? Attempting to steal my family heirlooms?” She scoffs and shakes her head, looking at Officer Du Bois. “Can you believe this officer?”

Du Bois nods. “I can. Although, according to this lad, the pendant isn’t actually yours. It was stolen from another family who wants it back. He was hired to get it back.” This was what Arthur had told him earlier, and it checked out later when Elizabeth let him examine the amulet. It didn’t actually bear her family crest, but the DuFrasne crest. “It’s a surprise to me that they only requested the pendant be stolen back and not anything else as revenge.”

Mack looks over at Arthur in shock. Why hadn’t Arthur told them this? Arthur shuffles in his seat. “Yeah, so really I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was basically a subtle repo-man. That’s allowed, right?” It’s a cheap excuse, he knows, but it’s better than nothing.

“No, it’s not,” Du Bois says. “The DuFrasne’s should’ve contacted the police about the theft, and had us perform a proper search and investigation. Taking the law into your own hands is also a crime, and they will be investigated as well.”

Arthur shifts in his chair. He really wasn’t in the mood to deal with the pigs for however long that would take. This was supposed to be an easy job, in and out, and then he was going to take a long trip out to some nice little island and lay low for a few years. Now he’s stuck playing footsies with “the law.” He had a plan B, cold against his leg, but he really didn’t want to have to use it.

Elizabeth scoffed again. “You have absolutely no proof I stole that pendant in the first place.” She couldn’t believe she was being accused of such things. She was rich, no one was supposed to question her. This cop was just supposed to clean up after her, not do whatever he’s doing.

Mack noticed the tight grip Elizabeth had on the dagger. Her knuckles were white.

Du Bois crossed his arms. “Elizabeth, you’d best put that weapon away. You’re in the presence of a police officer, and that can easily be read as a threat.” Elizabeth laughed. “You don’t even have a gun,” she said. “How do you plan on enforcing any law if you have no weapons to do so?” 

Arthur did his best to avoid laughing, too. It was obvious the cop didn’t have a gun. His holster was empty. There’s not a cop within a hundred miles who conceal carries. If this one was the exception, he was probably breaking some rule himself.

Mack’s eyes shifted to the holster. They hadn’t even thought to see if the cop had a gun. You always presume they do, because if you look at their hip they’ll think you want to steal their gun and shoot them. They weren’t willing to take that risk, but they did just now anyway. Now they know this cop can’t do a thing to stop from leaving. They could stand up and walk away right now.

The knife digging into the table was more audible than any previous dig before. Elizabeth made sure it was deeper, too. “So what are you going to do tonight, officer?” She followed this up by tossing the pendant onto the table. The clatter of its chain was suddenly subdued when contrasted with the knife.

The pendant released some sort of black mist upon hitting the table. Mack saw it, and looked around to see if anyone else did. No one even looked at the thing. They were all too busy staring each other down. Mack returned their eyes to the pendant. They couldn’t see the mist anymore.

Du Bois straightened his shoulders. He knew what Elizabeth was trying to do, and he wasn’t going to let it happen. He’s avoided corruption and bribes for the last six years at least, and he wasn’t in the mood to break his streak as the cleanest cop in his precinct. “I’m going to put all three of you under arrest for further investigation. Come quietly and we won’t have any issues.”

Arthur’s eyebrows rose. The pig was going to arrest the wife of a rich man? That was a bold move, unheard of until today. He had no intention of being arrested, but he was tempted to stick around just to see what would happen. Of course, that would void his deal with the DuFrasne’s, and a bit of fun at the expense of Elizabeth was not worth giving up that money.

Elizabeth stood up, holding her knife at her side. “Fuck you!” she shouted. “I know my rights. You have no precedent to arrest me.” This cop was either stubborn or stupid, because no one arrested Elizabeth. She had every cop in a twenty mile radius under her thumb. What was this bastard doing?

Du Bois briskly reaches a hand into his jacket. He didn’t have his gun, but he thought this bluff might do something worthwhile.

Arthur sneaks his hand down the legs of his pants and reaches for the gun he took. A six barrel revolver, incredibly uncommon in these areas. More fire power than most of the handguns that people could get. Of course, the one cop hiding heat had to show up tonight.

Mack’s eyes scanned everything, as if in slow motion. Elizabeth was standing at the ready, waiting for the chance to strike. Arthur was reaching into his pants, and the bulge of a pistol was suddenly apparent. The cop was also reaching for something in his jacket- wasn’t he wearing a coat earlier?- but they doubted it was actually a gun. Du Bois was bluffing.

Mack lastly, glanced at the pendant again. It looked malevolent. Something wicked was surrounding it, and no one else was paying attention.

Du Bois felt the danger. He carefully eyed Elizabeth- he could probably take her if he had to- then glanced at Arthur and Mack. Mack was slowly scooting his chair sideways, away from everything. That was a reasonable response. Arthur had a hand down the leg of his pants. It was clear he had a gun. Du Bois began to calculate actions within his head.

Elizabeth’s gaze darted amongst everyone in the room, too. Du Bois remained focused on her. Arthur was staring immediately between the two of them, as if planning an escape. If Elizabeth attacked the cop, she knew Arthur and Mack would flee while they struggled. She couldn’t have that.

Elizabeth took a sharp step toward Arthur, and Arthur knew who he was going to point his gun at. He immediately stood up and pointed the gun at Elizabeth. “I don’t make a plan without accounting for all the risk, madame.”

Mack could see the amulet becoming more and more volatile with every passing moment. He carefully stood up, getting ready to run the moment it was convenient- or possible, honestly.

The room was standing still once more. Du Bois still simply had his hand in his jacket, and he knew at this point he didn’t have a bluff worth anything. He slowly pulled his hand out of his jacket and prepared to tackle whichever of those two made the first move.

That’s your gun! A voice spoke to Du Bois. Shit in a biscuit, it was indeed his gun. He recognised the barrel, with a small inscription on the side. It was illegible at this point, but it used to say “Lady Death.” The owner before him was a bit gruesome. He’d been missing this gun for a year and the precinct refused to issue him a replacement. He thinks he lost it during a chase, where he must not have closed up his holster properly. Someone must’ve snagged it during the in-between.

Arthur has 2 bullets in the gun. If he makes a shot, he needs to make it count. He stares down the barrel of the gun, straight at Elizabeth. He takes a second to glance at Du Bois, who he notices has not drawn a gun but has his hands out his coat. The pork chop bluffed.

Elizabeth is sitting in silence as well. So much for that idea. She’s fuming. She was going to fucking kill these god damn thieves and that god damn cop and the god damn girl. She’s done playing games. She’s done playing around with everyone. That amulet deserves to be with her. It’s her amulet. It was always meant to be her amulet. “Fuck it,” she says, before grabbing the necklace and running.

Arthur is surprised. “Wha-” is all he manages to say before realising he doesn’t know what he’s watching.

Mack sees the mist wrap its way up Elizabeth’s arm. It has a vice grip on her flesh. Her skin color is becoming paler, and her veins are darkening.

Du Bois rushes her. He charges directly at her. He can tell she’s running toward the window, and he has to stop her before she jumps. This is only a second story, but that fall would certainly break a bone, at least. 

Elizabeth is almost there. She’s nearly there. The window is right there.

Mack watches the mist take over more of her. Are those three not seeing this? Arthur suddenly notices what’s happening and takes the chance. He whispers to Mack “Let’s bounce.”

Du Bois grabs Elizabeth’s arm. She turns and stabs at him with the knife. Du Bois steps aside and uses her own momentum to throw her back into the main room.

Elizabeth somersaults back to her feet and leaps at Mack, who was following behind Arthur. She raises the knife with her hand in the air and shrieks. Arthur turns around at the sound of the shriek and sees this. He fires.

Mack’s ears are ringing.

Du Bois is running to grab Elizabeth again.

Elizabeth no longer has a knife curled between her fingers, but instead carries four fingers and a thumb. This means nothing.

Du Bois sees Elizabeth is preparing to jump off of Mack’s back. He tries to grab her ankle, but she’s already airborne. “Shit!” he cries.

Arthur sees her gliding toward him. There is no blood leaking from her palm. She’s looks sickly, like death. Her hand is wrapped around his throat, and her nails are digging into his skin. Nothing about this is right.

Du Bois shoves Mack out of the way and assesses the situation. Arthur dropped his gun. Elizabeth is tightening her grip around Arthur’s throat. He’s bleeding.

Mack fucking knew it. Mack fucking knew there was something wrong with that fucking pendant. She’s a fucking monster now. She’s being possessed by some kind of fucking demon. She’s covered in that mist now- there’s absolutely no way everyone else hasn’t seen it by this point- and she isn’t bleeding. She’s about to strangle Arthur to death, and she isn’t even human anymore. This is fucking bullshit.

Elizabeth grasps even tighter. Arthur gurgles. Her thumb touches her ring finger. She pulls, lifting her hand above her head. The smell… it’s delicious.

Du Bois already dove for the gun. He’s already crouched and aiming the revolver at the back of her head. She cackles and let’s go of Arthur’s windpipe.

Du Bois steadies his hand. He breathes out. He fires.

Elizabeth was right. She was the reason someone died tonight, technically. Consciousness returns to her for just long enough to witness Arthur’s corpse on the floor before she, too, fades from this existence.

Du Bois sighs. He checks the chambers of the revolver. It’s completely empty. He got lucky.

Mack sees the black mist swiftly retreat back into the pendant. That can’t be a fucking good sign.

Du Bois gets up and begins to assess the damage. The first thing he does is try to pull the pendant out of Elizabeth’s hand. It’s much easier to do before rigor mortis sets in.

Mack witnesses the fucking cop go for the amulet. They lean over and pick up the knife. “Don’t touch that fucking amulet,” Mack says.

Du Bois stops. He looks at Mack, and sees that they’re currently armed. “What do you know about the necklace?”

Mack curses. “Are you fucking dense? Did you not see the black mist that possessed Elizabeth? And how it disappeared the moment you killed her? Back into the amulet?”

Du Bois didn’t see any of this. Though, glancing at her hand, he does now see that she only just started bleeding. That is strange. “Hand me the knife, then,”

Du Bois instructs Mack.

“What? Mack asks. “What do you plan to do?” This cop is loose as hell. What would the knife do to the amulet?

Du Bois holsters his gun, only just realising he was still carrying it. The weight is simultaneously comfortable and burdensome on his hip. “I’m going to cut off her hand and place it into an evidence bag.”

Mack eyes Du Bois. They sigh. Du Bois still has the gun. There isn’t a damn thing this knife would do anyway. They hand the knife over, and Du Bois takes it. Du Bois saws her hand off. He then slides the entire thing into an evidence bag he took from his jacket.

He stands up. “Will you wait here, Mack, while I radio my precinct and let them know about this, or do I have to arrest you?” Du Bois is done. This is only the fifth person he’s killed during his 21 years of police work. He wants to go home and be fucking done with this case for the night.

Mack shakes his head. “I- um-” They don’t even know where they would go or what they would do. Their plan was to get paid by Arthur and then leave this place for a long time, probably forever. 

He gets into his buggy. He radios his precinct and tells them to get over here. He’s exhausted.

Mack sits in the hallway, alone. If they wanted to, they could probably go back into the safe and take some valuables and run away. They don’t think they should, however. Whatever was going on with that amulet only they could see. They don’t really want to be working with any cops, but they need to figure out why they could see it but no one else could.

Anna is cold. She stole Elizabeth’s purse from next to the door before leaving, and it had a lot of cash in it. She ran for a long while into the night. She paid for a hotel room at least two miles away, and she lies in bed, on top of the blankets, still wearing the officer’s coat. She would need to buy some clothing tomorrow. Or send someone else to do it, more likely.

She sighs. She isn’t sure where she is going to go from here. She at least has enough money for the next two weeks, if she’s careful. What will she do after that?

She reaches into one of the coat pockets and finds the business card the cop gave her. She pulls it out and looks at it. “OFFICER DU BOIS,” it says. It has a phone number, too. Phones are wildly expensive, even Elizabeth didn’t have one. If you wish to make a phone call, you usually have to wait in line at a payphone.

Anna thinks about the card long and hard. Maybe she’ll give him a call. She doesn’t know what else she can do.

[sarcasrnspasrn]

the homestuck epilogues are a big mess: a masterpost of what the fuckery

I read the epilogues all in one day and here I am three days later someone who is two seconds away from becoming an ex-homestuck fan because.... yikes. I recently reblogged two other posts calling out most other homestuck things. Some I agree with, some I think are more “sometimes characters are problematic” but you can’t really ignore how fucked up everything is a whole. And nobody seems to want to unpack the epilogue which i understand because guess what every single tag listed in the prologue happens which is pretty sucky.

Anyways I’m gonna go tag-by-tag to talk about the things and then talk about other general shitty stuff about the epilogue. Here we go lads.

Oh boy here come some disclaimers - I’m white and I’m cis and also I was an active editor at the MSPA wiki! I’m going to retire soonish, probably. If I can. I don’t know if you can self-retire from a leadership role on a wiki. Which means I might have missed some things that weren’t obvious to the me who is white and cist.

The Tags

Graphic Depictions of Violence – The Meat route features the fight with Lord English and definitely has a lot of beatups. We then see John slowly succumb to his injuries over time and eventually die. The descriptions are definitely very very graphic.

Major Character Death – As mentioned above, John in the Meat route. Some characters get sucked into a black hole in the Meat route, though in Candy route it’s revealed they just ended up in Candy’s timeline. John meets up with younger versions of the Beta kids, and they all die by Lord English’s hands. Davepetasprite^2 sacrifices themselves to drag Lord English into the black hole, and Meat Rose’s body ends up in a sorta-dead state where her soul is now in a robot forever as her physical body sleeps. In Candy, Dirk graphically hangs himself, and Vriska chokes Gamzee to death.

Rape – In the Candy route Jane gets drunk and has intercourse with an equally if not more drunk Jake, resulting in her pregnancy.

The Economy – Throughout the Meat route, Dave works to try and get Karkat to be president specifically due to the other candidate’s (Jane) questionable economic opinions. Neither run in Candy route, but Jane ends up influencing the presidency behind the scenes and Dave discusses similar themes, often through Obama.

Xenophobia – The main conflict in Jane’s candidacy is her xenophobia, as she wishes to restrict troll reproduction, eventually leading to complete oppression of the troll race by the end of the Candy route.

Pregnancy – Jane and Roxy get pregnant with Jake and John’s kids, respectively, in the Candy route.

Alternate Universe – The whole fic seems to be vaguely non-canon, particularly the Candy route.

Mind Control – Dirk takes over the narrative in Meat route and uses it to influence the other characters’ motives and thoughts.

Non-Con – See Rape.

Breastfeeding – Roxy is shown breastfeeding her and John’s son (Harry Anderson Egbert. I’m not joking.)

Misogyny – Gamzee is basically awful.

Sexism – See Misogyny

Transphobia – Roxy and Calliope begin transitioning (but only in the Meat route), where they both start using they/them and Roxy eventually begins using he/him at the end. As the narrator, Dirk frequently refers to transitioned Roxy with she/her pronouns.

Misgendering – See Transphobia.

Canon Compliant – The meat timeline, arguably.

Canon Divergent – The candy timeline, arguably.

Redemption – The candy timeline starts of with Calliope insisting it’s time for “Gamzee’s redemption arc”, so John pulls him out of the fridge and he becomes this weird messiah. It’s not really much redemption though and he’s still a creepy fucking clown.

Dubious Consent – See Rape.

Mind Break – Meat Rose slowly becomes overwhelmed by all of her alternate timeline selves and suffers from headaches. She eventually becomes persuaded by Dirk to completely let go, and she gets her consciousness transferred into a robot body.

World War – Jane’s xenophobic actions against trolls eventually lead to a world war between her faction and Karkat’s faction.

Political Intrigue – Meat route focuses a lot on Jane and Karkat’s political campaigns for president, and Candy route features Jane’s meddling in government affairs that eventually leads to Karkat and others to lead a rebellion.

Robots – Dirk and Jake fight robots on reality TV in Meat, and Dirk later transfers Rose’s consciousness into a robotic body in Meat’s postscript. Dave similarly gets transferred into a robot body in Candy by Obama. (I’m still not joking.)

Child Abuse – Jane and Jake’s son, Tavros Crocker (I’m not joking) is implied to be heavily mistreated and neglected by Jane, as well as their third partner, Gamzee, who is also somehow in the mix.

Rough Sex – 

Child Neglect – Tavros is seemingly largely ignored by his parents, and John leaves Roxy and Harry Anderson for most of his adolescence.

Alcohol Use – Jane and Jake get heavily inebriated in the candy route, resulting in pregnancy and marriage.

Breastmilk – Gamzee utilizes breastmilk throughout the Candy route as some way of baptizing people and completing their redemption arcs.

Death – Other than those mentioned in Major Character Death, many other side characters are also mentioned to die during the Candy route’s oppressive regime.

Incestuous Undertones – Briefly discussed by a group during the Meat route while considering the implications of Dirk and Rose flying off from Earth C.

Mental Illness – Rose struggles with visions during Meat, and John questions if he has depression in both routes.

Suicide – Dirk hangs himself in Candy.

Polyamory – Gamzee somehow joins the relationship between Jane and Jake in Candy, eventually resulting in Gamzee auspisticing the two.

Clown Dynamics – Gamzee fucking Makara.

Meta – I think it happens a lot in general.

Abuse – Jane’s relationships with Jake, baby Tavros, and Gamzee are not anywhere near healthy.

Fridging – Dirk’s death sort of helps kick off the plot in Candy.

Genocide – Discussed as a possible outcome of Jane’s presidency, specifically to the trolls.

Diapers – For some reason on Jake’s reality TV show, it’s a thing to throw diapers on the stage.

Murder – Vriska kills Gamzee in Candy.

Honk – Gamzee.

Children – Jane and Jake have Tavros Crocker, John and Roxy have Harry Anderson Egbert, and Kanaya and Rose adopt a Vriska descendant.

Gender Transition – Roxy and Calliope question their gender identities in Meat, leading to Roxy using he/him and changing his hairstyle, and Calliope using they/them. This does not happen in the Candy route.

Depression – John questions if he suffers from this throughout Candy as he continues to feel estranged from his friends.

Toxic Masculinity – I guess Dirk in general?

Sexual Abuse – Whatever was going on in Jake Jane and Gamzee’s relationship in Candy isn’t healthy.

Friends to Lovers – Roxy and John as well as Jane and Jake.

Speciesism – See Xenophobia.

Babies – See Children.

Manipulation – See Dirk.

Gore – See Graphic Depictions of Violence.

Infidelity – Jane starts a relationship with Gamzee while married to Jake.

Marriage – Jane and Jake marry, as well as John and Roxy.

Nonbinary Character(s) – See Gender Transition.

Milking – See uh, Breast Milk and Breastfeeding?

Identity Questioning – See Gender Transition.

Feet – After arriving in Candy route, Vriska finds Gamzee and in her rage, kicks him to the ground. Gamzee starts licking Vriska’s foot. This eventually leads to some sort of weird hate makeout/sex.

Political Rebellion – See Political Intrigue.

Fascism – See Political Intrigue.

Rapping – Dirk and Jake’s TV show in Meat features the two performing rap battles at each other, among other things.

Drug Use – Jane and Jake get drunk in Candy, and Jane starts utilizing the Trickster Lollipop in Meat.

Funerals – In Candy, funerals are held both for Dirk and for a dead Jade from Meat that falls out of the sky.

Religion – Gamzee’s weird cult to help give dead trolls redemption arcs.

Eating – I don’t know why this is on the list.

Food – This is just a thing.

Aliens – Sure are trolls and cherubs here.

Possession – Alternate Calliope uses Jade’s alive body in Meat and an alternate Jade’s dead body in Candy to control the narrative.

Light BDSM – I guess this is whatever is going on in Candy Jake, Jane, and Gamzee’s relationship. As well as the apparently rough sex Terezi and John had in Meat.

Theft – Meenah steals an extra Ring of Life John pilfered in Meat.

Furry – Jade, who is heavily implied to have gained some of Bec’s, um, biology after the sprite merge, which was. Information nobody needed to know.

Anthropomorphic Characters – Jade and Davepetasprite^2.

Power Imbalances – Candy Jane/Jake/Gamzee’s relationship.

Blood – Extreme violence tends to result in this.

Trickster Mode – Jane starts utilizing it in Meat in an attempt to help her campaign.

Body Horror – See Graphic Depictions of Violence.

Gerrymandering – Mentioned by Dave as a tactic utilized by previous presidents in regards to the consorts voting power.

Starvation – Meat John finds Terezi by the black hole, slowly starving to death.

Cuckolding – Candy Gamzee basically cuckolds Jane and Jake.

Interspecies Relationships – Kanaya and Rose, as well as Meat Gamzee/Jane/Jake.

Guns – Jake sure has that.

Vore – I think this is mentioned as a joke somewhere.

Assassination – Dirk pretends to attempt to assassinate Jake in Meat timeline, only to tranquilize the Alternate Calliope-possessed Jade.

Alien Biology – A joke is made about how trolls apparently do not have two dicks.

Detransitioning – Roxy and Calliope are implied to have begun their gender exploration in Candy route, similarly to Meat, but stick to using she/hers throughout the route.

Chronic Illness – Rose is suffering from mental illness that is giving her headaches.

Vomit – After the battle with Lord English in Meat, John barfs all over himself. It’s gross.

Drugging – In Meat, Dirk slips Rose drugs in a drink to induce her into a sleep. He uses a similar drug on the Alternate Calliope-possesed Jade.

Cannibalism – During Candy’s postscript, The Alternate Calliope-possessed Jade devours Lord English’s body.

Unhealthy Relationships – John and Roxy have tensions in their relationship during Candy, as well as the weird cuckolding situation with Candy Jane/Jake/Gamzee.

Capitalism – See Economy.

Eggs – In Candy we see the Mother Grub release eggs that later give birth to baby trolls.

Slut Shaming – In both timelines, Dave and Karkat do not approve of Jade’s apparent promiscuity.

Black Romance – Candy Jane and Jake seem to settle into a kismessitude auspisticed by Gamzee, and Vriska also has a hatemakeout with Gamzee in the same timeline. It’s not clear where Terezi and John’s relationship in Meat laid.

Kidnapping – John attempts to kidnap Tavros Crocker from his abusive parents, eventually leading to a broken relationship with his wife and friends.

Faygo – Gamzee continues to drink the soda and seems to also give some to baby Tavros.

Bimboification – Throughout the Candy arc, everyone seems to slowly lose their character development.

Poisoning – See Drugging.

Teenagers – See Children.

Domestic Abuse – Candy Jane/Jake/Gamzee.

Reality Television – Jake continuously stars in ridiculous reality TV programs in both timelines.

Ovipositioning – See Eggs. I promise it’s not sexual.

Ghosts – The ghost army is seen fighting Lord English in Meat only to be sucked into the black hole, and these ghosts later start dropping out of the sky in the Candy timeline.

Revolutionary Rhetoric – See Political Intrigue.

Self-Sacrifice – Davepetasprite^2 sacrifices themselves to trap Lord English inside the black hole.

Propaganda – Candy Jane pushes propaganda material through the government.

Super PACs – Candy Jane is mentioned to utilize these to influence the government.

Pica – Meat Terezi in her starvation begins eating tobacco and shaving cream.

Early 20th Century Dance Movements – Jake does some of these for some reason.

Prison Camps – In Candy, captured members of the rebellion are mentioned to be sent there.

Existential Crisis – Candy John has one throughout the story, thinking that his reality seems fake.

Xenophilia – See Interspecies Relationships.

Daddy Issues – Tavros Crocker, presumably, and Candy Dave talks about his adoptive dad/bro at Dirk’s funeral.

Bad Parenting – See Child Abuse.

Addiction – Meat Jane appears to develop one to the Trickster Lollipop.

Clown – Gamzee.

I might have missed some on this list because my brain is fuzzy but that’s the general gist.

The Other Things Not Mentioned In The Tags That Are Also Bad

Remember how I mentioned how Gamzee’s back in Candy? While he’s apparently “not sixteen” when he shows up to meet the rest of the gang who is 23, it’s still iffy on what’s going on. And sixteen years later, when he is definitely an adult, he meets up with the definitely 16 year old Vriska, where the two begin some weird blackrom courtship, before she murders the clown. Any way you look at it, Gamzee’s at least twice Vriska’s age. Yuck. Similarly, the dying 23 year old John meets Terezi in the Furthest Ring, where she is apparently also “not 16″ but it’s not really specified how long it’s been from her perspective. And then the two end up having sex. Another notable mention to Candy Karkat and Meenah, who end up in a relationship when Karkat is into his late 20s and Meenah is only 19.

Speaking of sex, in general there’s just a lot of smutty things described in the epilogue. And while all of the characters sans the exceptions mentioned above are 23 or older, it’s still vastly uncomfortable to see characters getting their sex on when we first met them at thirteen.

There’s also all the transitioning tags up there because Roxy and Calliope transition - but only in the Meat timeline. While we only see like one year of Meat, we see sixteen of Candy. I’m not really qualified to comment more about the awkward implications of all this as a cis girl, so I’ll end this segment here.

The thing I think I am qualified to talk about was the furry tag up there. There’s a conversation where Candy Jade is talking to Karkat and Dave (the three vaguely have some sort of polyamory going on, maybe) and talks about having a baby. Jade reveals that she can’t get pregnant due to “biological reasons” and that the possible father of their surrogate baby won’t be Dave, so uh. It’s pretty easy to connect the awful dots. Which is just. What the fuck.

And here’s a whollop. In the characters, Barack Obama was tagged. At first I thought it was because of all of Dave’s references to him, but nope it turns out Dave actually has a conversation with Barack Obama. Basically Dave goes into what was once the white house and finds his way to some sort of weird bunker where he meets Magic Ghost Obama who tells Dave about various things. The worst part is definitely where Obama says he seemed to end up in some sort of relationship with Dirk Strider at one point. He also references things that were first mentioned in the Skaianet Systems Incorporated leaks, you know the ones where Hussie made it Einstein’s fault the holocaust happened? So like, oof. And I’m not sure I can construct a logical timeline in my head based on the information said in the Epilogues and in the leaks to when Obama and Dirk could have met at an equivalent age rather than Obama being an adult and Dirk... not being one. So uh. Yay.

I can’t think of anything else, but I almost definitely missed some stuff since it’s been days since I read those cursed epilogues and I might not pick up on more nuanced things. Basically the epilogues are bad!! And that’s why I’m probably gonna bow out of the Homestuck fandom soon. The comic has not aged well and this was just the icing on the shitty cake.

And if you’re still a Homestuck may I recommend not doing that. Find something else to invest your time into. Please. I know it might have been a big part of your childhood (it was a big part of mine), but it’s time to realize that maybe we’ve been looking through rose-tinted shades for longer than we should have and it’s time to put shitty things in the crapper.

[rivertate-blog]

i wanted to be tall // self para - summer break

tw: misgendering, verbal and physical abuse.

As long as River keeps moving, they’re fine.  

 The routine they’ve fallen into is simple, easy, familiar, just a few steps removed from what their life looked like in high school.  They work as many hours as possible, waiting tables with an artificial smile and a voice that doesn’t sound like their own (because there’s nothing like working in the service industry to make you hate most people), gritting their teeth and staying quiet when they’re referred to as the wrong gender because they need this job.  They paid for a YMCA membership for the month so they’d have someplace to train and practice, and they use it as often as possible, even if getting to the closest one means taking the subway.  When they aren’t doing either of those things, they’re taking over the brunt of cleaning the apartment, going grocery shopping, dragging things to the hole in the wall laundromat the next block over, or hammering out random drawings for strangers on the internet for a little extra money.  Anything to be out of the house as much as possible, because where their sister’s cluttered apartment with too many people crammed into it used to feel comfortable it now feels claustrophobic.  Anything to avoid stopping, because as long as they’re busy, as long as they keep moving, the their past experiences and lingering present fears can’t get their claws in and drag them down.  

Tonight, though, they’ve broken that routine, taking a day off from work for something they didn’t think they’d end up doing.  After all but being run off their team in Indiana, River had been wary of forming new friendships at their much larger high school here in Brooklyn, wanting to balance embracing a newly accepted identity with personal comfort and safety (they’re also self-aware enough to know that they were sort of a paranoid, anxious wreck at 16, even more than they sometimes are now).  Keeping to themself during junior year had been simple; the size of the exy team had allowed them to fade into the background outside of the times they were active on the court, when no one would care what their pronouns were or ask invasive questions.  

 Senior year had been a different story, the school’s dropout rate meaning they’d been one of five 12th graders left on the team.  Their overworked but supportive coach had made it her goal to try and encourage them to be friends.  Maybe she’d been hoping it would help their performance in class and on the court if they had each other’s support. To River’s chagrin, their four former teammates had started going out of their way to do things together and invite them.  They’d been desperate enough for some semblance of social interaction that they’d ended up going along with it, spending what scant time not spent in school, practice or work at each of their various houses or apartments.  It had been more of a glorified study group than actual friendship, or maybe River just hadn’t put in enough of an effort to get to know them, with their sights already set on trying to get good enough for Palmetto State.  Even so, they must’ve left enough of a mark on the group that their former team captain had gotten in touch and invited them over for a class reunion of sorts.

 That’s how they ended up here, upstairs at the house where said former captain, Nakia, lives with her grandparents, playing some weird multiplayer fighting game they don’t remember the name of.  Only four out of the five of them are present; Fransisco landed himself a scholarship to the University of Michigan of all places, and is staying there this summer, but Jade and Rafi had both been around.  The conversation flows easily around them, River only sort of participating in favor of listening.  Nakia and Jade both ended up at NYU and Rafi’s at Syracuse, and they’re honestly happy to know that all of them have made it to college.  They’re quickly reminded of the downsides of interaction with people from high school, though, when Jade tries to get their attention and the wrong name comes out of her mouth, makes their skin crawl.  They glance over at her, raising an eyebrow.

“Who?”

“Fuck, I’m sorry.” she shakes her head.  She looks genuinely apologetic, but it isn’t her first time slipping up with their name today, even after they’d had to spend a decent amount of time explaining everything earlier and their patience is starting to wear thin despite themself. “River.  You want a break from the controller?”

They hadn’t really realized they’d been hogging it, too preoccupied in losing the last few rounds spectacularly to Rafi.  They quickly hand it over.  

“Jade…” Nakia sighs, glancing away from the screen for a second to look at her while she reaches for Rafi’s controller, “you’re gay, you should be better at, like, remembering this kind of thing than any of us.”

“Being gay doesn’t cure my shit memory,”

“Apparently not.”

“He got his name changed in the middle of senior year, dude,”  Rafi chimes in, reaching across River to lightly punch her in the shoulder. “Get with the program.”

They don’t even say anything, just look at him in a sort of bemused fashion until the realization dawns on his face.  “Shit, sorry.  They got their name changed. I’ll get there, I promise.”

“I know you will, it’s fine,” River says, even if it isn’t.  It’s hard to be patient with people when patience is exactly what they’ve been denied in the past, but it doesn’t feel worth the energy to stay upset with the ones who are genuinely trying, not when they can still hear the faux-friendly voice of a journalist asking them if their gender gets in the way of their relationships with the other Foxes.  Still, going back to being misgendered is hard after a school year of it not happening more than a few times early on (they probably have Paxton being a year ahead of them to thank for that).  They miss being in a group of people where being nonbinary doesn’t make them the weirdest or most fucked-up person in the room, as awful as it feels even thinking about it that way.  

They pull out their phone to check the time, deciding that it’s probably getting late enough that they can leave without feeling awkward about it.  “I should probably go,” they say, standing, “I don’t feel like walking home in the dark.”  It’s sort of a lie, they did it all the time in high school, and Nakia probably knows that, but she doesn’t say anything about it.  She smiles at them as they’re making sure they have everything.  

“Need me to walk you out?”

“I’ll be fine.  Thank you, though.  It was good seeing you guys.”

****

Dana’s sitting at the kitchen table when they get back to the apartment, a cigarette dangling loosely between two fingers.  She’s staring out of the window, which is opened just a crack, probably to try and make the smell of smoke less obnoxious, but it isn’t really working.  They should know better than to say anything; she doesn’t do it very often, and almost never inside, and she looks more tired than she usually does.  But they’re still a bit frustrated from Nakia’s place, and even if being a Fox gives them plenty of exposure to cigarette smoke the smell still makes their skin itch and crawl.  “Do you have to do that inside?”

She doesn’t even glance at them, exhaling a heavy breath.  “Fuck off.”

They resist the urge to roll their eyes, even if she isn’t looking.  It’s apparently been that sort of day.  She probably had an audition or something they forgot about.  They pass her to head into the living area, toeing off their shoes next to their small pile of bags, before walking back into the kitchen.  If nothing else, they can make dinner tonight in an attempt at a peace offering to improve her mood.  If it doesn’t help they can just ignore her until she sleeps again.  

Perhaps foolishly, they try to make conversation as they forage for a clean pot and the last box of dry pasta from their shopping trip earlier in the week, mentally adding ‘dishes’ and ‘grocery shopping’ to their to-do list.  “Bad day?”

“Had an audition and choked. Again.”

“I’m sorry.  You’ll get the next one, I’m sure.”

“I’ve been at this for almost five years now.  I think I’m running out of next ones.”

“It takes lots of people a while to get their break,” River shrugs, filling a pot with water and hefting it onto the stove.  “Not getting a few parts doesn’t mean you won’t get there.”  

“Does your crowd of rejects down south buy that nice-guy positive-attitude act? Because I don’t.”

It stings, but they know she’s trying to provoke them.  This particular dance is years old.  They keep their voice level when they turn around to face her. “What do you mean?”  

“You know exactly what I mean. You always talk like everything is going to work out in the end if you just try hard enough, but it doesn’t work like that  If it did, I wouldn’t be here.”  She discards the butt of her cigarette on the tile floor, stubbs it out with the heel of one sandal, crosses the tiny kitchen in only a few quick strides until she’s in their space. “And you don’t have to pretend that you care what happens to me, because I know you only put up with me because you don’t have anywhere else to go until school starts.”

“That–that isn’t true! None of that is true.”  River feels like they know exactly where this is heading, but they also feel helpless to stop it.  “You’re my sister, of course I care what happens to you.  I could stay at Palmetto all year if I needed to, but I don’t.  I come back because I want us to be siblings.  I want to be better than I was when Mom and Dad were pitting us against each other.”

“Is that the sob story you sold your coach? The only reason anyone thinks you’re worth their time is because you’re decent with an exy racquet.  What are you planning on doing when you aren’t an orange charity case anymore?  You think the pros want someone with your team’s reputation on them?”

She’s just trying to get under your skin, River thinks, but they can’t even bring themself to care because it’s working. “It’s happened before. I have to try, Dane.  I’m a Fox for a reason. This is the only chance I have.”

“You and the rest Class 1.”

“Okay, you know what? You’re right. I’m just one person in a sea of hopefuls.” Their volume is rising, but they don’t care.  “But so are you! Just because you’re struggling doesn’t mean I will.” River sees her hand before it moves, and it’s probably a good thing they do, otherwise she probably would have broken their nose. As it is, flattening themself against the fridge means her right hook catches them across the side of their face instead. For a moment, they don’t do anything, just bracing for another impact, pushing past her out of the room when it doesn’t come. They lock themself in the bathroom, exhaling a shaky breath, and they don’t let them self think about the horrified look on Dana’s face or the rust taste of blood in their mouth because it isn’t even about being hit, they’ve taken worse on the court. If they think about it they’ll think about how badly they had wanted to hit her back, and that’s not who they thought they were. “River?” They hear her voice, slightly muffled on the other side of the door, but they aren’t in the mood for it, they aren’t going to try and play nice right now when she’s the one who started it. “I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay? We can talk in the morning.”

[blackbird-brewster]

I had two profound experiences today, extremely unrelated in context but both thought provoking after the fact. The first experience had to do with me getting my first library card in 18 years and how I was very anxious to go into the library for any reason other than to print something.  I will detail this experience in a different post but long story short, all of the embarrassment and shame I felt because of my learning disability melted away and I ended up spending nearly two hours just browsing books. I left feeling to included and happy, I actually cried tears of joy.  Fast forward to the second notable experience of my day. Tonight I went on a date with my flat mate to “Naked Girls Reading: The Feminist Propaganda Edition”. Naked Girls Reading is apparently a sort of “brand”, started in the US as a protest against the ways women’s bodies are usually sexualized when naked. The theory is exactly what it sounds like, performers are completely nude and read aloud to the audience.  I had never heard of this amazing concept, so I jumped at the invitation. ESPECIALLY since tonight’s theme was feminism. I figured naked women reading feminist works sounded AUHMAZING.  [Rest behind a cut for length and transphobia]

The event was hosted by a popular personality in the New Zealand LGBTQPIA scene. They are a self labeled transvestite that MC’s events as their drag king persona, Hugo Grrrl. I assumed, if it was hosted by a gender diverse person it was going to be fairly inclusive.  Welp, you know what they say about assuming. 

Things started promising as Hugo opened their monologue with my favorite greeting “Guys, gals and nonbinary pals”. Hugo then went on to talk about some of the topics of the night including body positivity, body hair, porn, sex work, sex positivity, etc. It sounded really exciting and inter-sectional, I was pumped.

Within the ten minute monologue there was also the disclaimer that “Although this is called “Naked Girls Reading”, gender is a spectrum and the binary is bullshit.” (woo, yeah!!) ”...We only call it that because it was started in America and we didn’t come up with the name.” (Wait, what?)

Ok... but you could literally just call it “Naked People Reading” or “Naked Folx Reading” or ANYTHING else if you want to TRULY be inclusionary. I wasn’t even concerned about the title UNTIL Hugo made the point to say gender binary is bullshit... but then to say “meh, we didn’t come up with the title we’re just being complacent in it” Was sort of shitty.  If you are trying to include people, then INCLUDE them. Don’t say “Hey I’m not transphobic, BUT....” There was no point of this disclaimer other than to point out you recognized a problem but would rather go along with it than change one word of the title of the show.  Things only went down hill from there. A few minutes later as Hugo was wrapping up the monologue they wanted to get the crowd pumped before introducing the performers for the evening. To do this, Hugo had “all the women cheer!” (which they did) then followed by “now all the men!” (which they did). It turned out it was just a set up to make the men a punchline of a very stereotypical “feminist hate men” joke. These jokes are always obnoxious and yes, I recognize Hugo was trying to connect to the large feminist audience so we could all laugh at how society views us...but again, we were back at only acknowledging the gender binary. 

Now I realize many people right now will think I’m being extremely cynical. “Kit, you can’t say someone is being trans exclusionary if they are a queer that self identifies as a transvestite!” But I can because they were.  If you are going to mention nonbinary people. If you are going to make a point of talking about how the binary is bullshit. If you want to have a disclaimer that gender is a spectrum. It’s ALL or nothing.  Inclusion isn’t “I acknowledged you, you should be happy” it’s “I acknowledged you AND included you with everyone else as if we’re all the same.

The monologue is over, I am properly uncomfortable and agitated, the performers come out. From the promises of topics, I expected diversity. Again, that nasty assuming sure got the better of me.

Instead I get two skinny women and one average sized woman. They all appear to be white (although one was painted head to toe in blue and pink body paint as a My Little Pony...and later I learned she isn’t actually white.) They’re naked. So I can tell body hair isn’t really happening. A bit of bush but perfectly smooth everywhere else. All have shoulder length or longer hair and present very feminine.  Idk, again, maybe I was just so cynical by this point that I let my critic get away with me. I just wonder how hard it would be to find a more diverse cast? Am I just too deep in tumblr culture to expect to see different size bodies at a feminist reading? Or people with actual body hair, especially since there was a point of mentioning it in the monologue? Tattoos? Scars? Short hair? Disabilities? More racial diversity? (Again, the one woc was painted blue. And I feel shitty for thinking she was white but they could have included dark skinned people too.)  Introductions are done. The de-robing has happened. We now have three naked women sitting on a couch. Let’s read “feminist propaganda”! Some pretty typical stuff, Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, big names of the feminist movement. There was a reading of an MRA’s post from some MRA website. (Why are we giving MRA’s an audience at a FEMINIST reading?!) Intermission.  During intermission, I got up the courage to go speak to Hugo and mention why I was peeved at the start of the show with the women/men division of the audience. They shrugged and said “well it was a set up to a punch line” I smiled and replied, “I realize that but don’t you think trans folks are the punch line enough?” They tried to back track but it got awkward and I walked away. Hugo does some “feminist” trivia during the break. Throwing prize bags of tampons and chocolate to whoever shouts the correct answer. 

One question asks what does “SWERF” stand for. A woman yells the answer and Hugo repeats it back to the audience and says “Sex work exclusionary feminism isn’t feminism. Sex work is real work!” It would have been so easy to also educate about TERFs. They don’t. The irony is not lost on me. 

More trivia. I win one. I’m told, “Here enjoy these tampons!” I catch it and yell back, “Not all women have vaginas” I turn to the women at our table and say, “Hello, I don’t need tampons and I hate chocolate. Enjoy” They gladly accept. Back to the readings... A dramatic reading of Spice Girl lyrics. Some very heteronormative erotica. A reading of a radfem manifesto of the 70s (that included very acephobic commentary) And then, the woman painted as a MLP says she’s going to read Ivan E Coyote.  Now, for those of you who haven’t been blessed with reading their works or seeing Ivan perform (I just saw them again last week!), they are a trans writer from Canada. Very well known in LGBTQPIA circles. AMAZINGLY pure and moving stories and poems and “literary Doritos”. They are an amazing human being and have quickly become one of my favorite queer authors.  SO I AM STOKED!! This night has been so cishet heavy and I’m crank, I am READY to end it with Ivan. Ivan has written four of five books, has mountains of published poetry and she chooses to read a piece that is so personal to me. She prefaces this with a quick word about Ivan being an LGBTQ author. But fails to mention they’re a trans masculine person who identifies as a Tom Boy.  The piece starts out as a love letter to femmes who are often erased from Queer culture because they are “assumed” to be straight. But then turns to Ivan’s journey through figuring out they were trans and how they became jealous of femmes sometimes and how they will never be seen as who they are. How they will always be coming out of the closet over and over and over. Because their identity isn’t “visibly recognized” because it’s outside the binary.  I sob every time I hear this poem because it is so personal to me. The first time I heard it was when Ivan performed in Chch last August. I was in the midst of struggling with how the world saw me and this poem touched a part of me I thought no one would <i>ever</i> understand.  I sobbed again tonight. My flat mate patted my hand. She sobbed too for the same reasons. The journey to figuring out your identity can be so isolating, terrifying and lonely. But when you hear your story being told by someone who is on a stage, with an audience, talking as if your journey was the most normal and natural experience....it’s an emotional time.  After she finished, the performer stated “As a cis woman, I obviously do not identity with the narrator. I do however think this poem speaks to me as a femme. Because we are often overlooked.” (This gets cheers from the audience) I feel sick inside. This cis woman just spoke the very personal words of a trans person bearing their soul and claimed it as a poem for her.  No. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to bend it to your whim. If you want to include poetry or stories about the trans experience, YOU FUCKING INCLUDE TRANS PERFORMERS.  Thank god the night was over.  My flat mate and I are sitting at our table deciding how to make our own event called “Naked Queers Reading” and how much better it would be. We’re minding our own business when out of the corner of my eye I see a crowd around the stage area.  Of course. There’s a man who has taken off his shirt to pose with the naked women so he can get his buddy to take his picture. Of fucking course there is. That’s when we left.  I don’t know if I am just lucky to live in such a comfortable Queer circle of friends that I’ve become blind to the world of heternormative, patriarchal bullshit or if I am truly too fucking cynical to go out in public...but fuck was I disappointed with tonight.  Anyway, if you made it through this entire post, thank you. I promise I’ll post a really lovely story about the library tomorrow. Right now I want to watch Ivan E Coyote performances on YouTube and drink my tea from my Unicorn Elixer mug. 

[squireofgeekdom]

Okay so trans Tony Stark. I want to know ALL your thoughts.

mairi you are truly. the best for sending this ask. Okay so I can’t talk about Trans!Tony without linking to This fic: http://archiveofourown.org/works/7506574 which is part of a series that’s rad as hell - heads up that the first one is in significant part a sex scene, and the last one is cacw era and makes me sad and frustrated - not because the fic is bad, it’s very good, it just. makes me sad and frustrated for many of the same reasons that cacw itself makes me sad and frustrated. But this fic - the one I just linked to - is Good and Pure and features AFAB trans-Tony who initially comes out as a trans man but in this fic discusses nonbinary identities and the idea that maybe he tilts a little more in a nonbinary direction. Some quotes:

“ Things were different now. He was Iron Man; he was on the Avengers – with Captain America, no less. He was trying to quit drinking. Kids were using all kinds of new pronouns, some of which made Tony feel strangely at home, when he looked at himself in the mirror and thought of them. Back when he was transitioning, there was a certain amount of waffling in between, of not minding terribly about not being open, that curious thrill when people gave him a double take, uncertain. In-between hadn’t been a permanent option back then, not to his recollection, but it didn’t seem such a terrible place to be.”

“Hell, sometimes I think science is my gender.” #relatableAnyway I love this fic and everyone should read it.But like okay apart from that??? Please talk to me about Tony fcking Stark, who has been trained to play a role in front of crowds and pose for magazine covers since he was TINY, who has cultivated a persona that has never fully been *him*, let’s talk about the IM1 deleted scene of Tony playing pre Afghanistan Tony and reputations that are so hard to shake once you have them, and all of that and gender? And how Tony’s two main male role models are howard ‘toxic masculinity’ stark, and edwin ‘hang on let me finish baking this souffle for my wife who i love’ jarvis, but we know who’s expectations hang heavier, whose shoes Tony has to step into? Like? Talk to me about Tony who doesn’t quite Get binary trans-ness at first, because it’s not like *anyone* ~really~ has an intrinsic connection to their gender, like, that sounds fake, gender is just something that you perform because people make you, isn’t everybody else just acting? like, someone trying to explain the difference between drag queens and trans women to Tony (and yes, I know that’s complicated and a blurry line, especially historically) but just like - the difference between performing a gender and being a gender just Does Not Make sense because isn’t *everyone* just performing a gender. And then it’s just like - oh god no, other people really do Feel an internal sense of gender, (even if cis people don’t always think about it much) and everyone really *isn’t* just lying and rolling with the act. 

And like? Agender Tony who doesn’t exactly have body dysphoria, who still likes pants and flats because they make sense in the lab, but who is like - holy cow, i can paint my nails red and gold to match the suit HELL YEAH I’m doing that. Agender Tony who makes his tech bracelets and watches - sleeker but more colorful, adds rings and occasionally earrings, bright broaches loaded with tech, ties in the color of the trans pride flag, another tie in the colors of the nonbinary pride flag, that one time some asshole was being a dick on Fox News and Tony spent the whole week saving the day in a suit painted in the colors of the trans pride flag and skywrites ‘protect trans kids’ outside their offices when he’s done because go big or go home, fuckers, Stark Industries with a scholarship for trans kidsAgender Tony is so good is what I’m saying here thank you for asking

[chelseawolfemusic]

Chelsea Wolfe interview ahead of GIRLSCHOOL performance // Lenny

photo by Kristin Cofer // words by Dianca Potts

Last January, GIRLSCHOOL, an LA-based collective dedicated to supporting women in music, celebrated its inaugural music festival at Bootleg Theater. Featuring acts like Gothic Tropic and Maria Taylor, GIRLSCHOOL's first festival confirmed that powerful things can happen when women collaborate for the greater good. This year, founder Anna Bulbrook and co-founder Jasmine Lywen-Dill hope to conjure a similar spirit of solidarity and community. "It's my ultimate dream to have a nexus of incredible women thinkers and doers around us," Anna says. This year's lineup is not only intersectional but also sonically diverse. "In today's political climate, it especially matters to have these outlets that unify and celebrate women," Jasmine says. "I hope [we] can be a vehicle for change and for raising awareness of girl-positive organizations in the arts." Set to kick off this Friday, GIRLSCHOOL's weekend extravaganza is exactly what we need right now. I was lucky enough to catch up with the festival's headliner, the forever busy and immensely talented Chelsea Wolfe. Best known for haunting dirges like "Dragged Out" and hypnotic ballads like "Mer" and "Feral Love," Chelsea's fusion of folklore, Jungian theory, and gothic motifs is as beautiful as it is brooding. A week before the festival, I chatted with Chelsea — who's currently working on a new album — about the importance of taking credit for your work and why darkness isn't always a bad thing.

Dianca Potts: What did music mean to you when you were growing up?

Chelsea Wolfe: When I was a kid, my parents divorced, and my mom was always a creative person herself, making clothes, drawing, and painting, and she'd listen to great music like Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt. On the weekends I'd go to my dad's house, where he had a home studio for recording and practicing with the country band he had with my stepmom. Hearing them harmonize and work on Fleetwood Mac covers was my first inspiration to write my own songs.

I really connected with Lindsey Buckingham's voice. I think I took some vocal styling from him back then that I still use today. Over the years, I've been drawn to singers and bands with androgynous voices — Nina Simone, Placebo, and bands who go to extremes musically, like Sunn O))) and Swans. I find some comfort in things that aren't easy to define, maybe because I always felt like I was an in-between myself.

DP: In a feature for Under the Radar, you mentioned that in the past you haven't given yourself enough credit for the work that you do. I feel like this is something that a lot of creatives, especially women, struggle with. What advice would you give to younger creatives who feel hesitant to celebrate their accomplishments in fear of coming off as prideful?

CW: I'm glad you're bringing that feature up. I spent a lot of time doing a full interview about "sexism and misogyny in the music industry" and they only used that one line from it, of course. I do think there's kind of an unspoken societal thing where we're not supposed to talk about our accomplishments very much. I always felt like my work spoke for itself, and I wanted people to be able to relate to it in their own way, without everything being over-explained. But as I slowly gained more of an audience, someone's gonna be offended by what you're doing, and there was a person who tried to start a campaign against me, making false claims of what I was inspired by or what my music and videos meant. I didn't fight back publicly because, well, I'd rather spend my time on music than Internet drama, but all my friends in real life and in the music industry who knew about this reached out to me with messages of love and support and reminders that they know I've always followed my own path and been true to myself. That was really heartening when I was bummed about being attacked like that. I learned that I need to take credit for my work more publicly, and be a little more outgoing with what I share about myself and my music.

My advice to younger female and nonbinary artists is this: take credit for your work, always and rigorously, otherwise some jerk might come along and try to take the credit for you, or they'll say that a man wrote your songs for you. Fuck that. I think Grimes is a great example of someone who makes sure it's known that her work, ideas, and production are her own. Follow her lead.

DP: Your music is often described as dark. What do you feel is the value of exploring the dark side of emotion and human experience?

CW: From a young age, I wanted to know both sides to every story. I used to have these recurring nightmares of macro and micro. I would be in a white room with an object in the middle, like a book or a telephone, and the object would grow really, really large and fill the room, smashing me against the wall, and then the object would grow small again, back and forth. It was maddening, but I think it kind of represents how I approach writing songs. I'm hyperaware of the macro, the world as a whole, and all the fucked-up things that are happening at the same time: bombings, rapes, suicides. That is all really dark stuff to write about, but it's not like I'm making it up. At the same time, I'm also able to focus in on my own life or community and write a song that comes from there. It's all a contrast of the hideousness of life and the beauty of life. My first album, The Grime and the Glow, was kind of the beginning of this exploration in contrasts.

DP: How did you get involved with GIRLSCHOOL?

CW: Through the Echo Society, which is a group of composers who put together this great night of original music with an orchestra and guest collaborators each year. They reached out to me to compose a piece, which I did with the help of my bandmate Ben Chisholm, since he's a master of arranging string samples and percussive elements. Anna Bulbrook was running the Echo Society show in LA. On day one of the rehearsals, I was in the wrong place at the right time, and Anna was so kind as to relocate me to the place I was supposed to be.

On the drive there, we got to know each other a bit, and she told me about GIRLSCHOOL. I had heard of it before and was blown away to be talking with the person who started it. My drummer Jess Gowrie and I had just been talking about how inspiring it is to see women musicians onstage when you're a young, aspiring female musician, and we were hoping that we could help do the same for the younger generation. So when Anna said there was a festival involved, I was like, "If you'd ever want my band to play, I'd be honored."

DP: What makes organizations like GIRLSCHOOL so vital?

CW: They normalize the idea of an instrument in a young woman's hands, or a woman being the leader of a band. And of course they encourage young people to explore music and the arts and gain confidence and self-acceptance through that. I know I grew up feeling the pressure to be society's typical, subdued definition of "feminine," even though I never felt that way inside, and my body type has never represented that either. It was difficult for me to assert myself as an artist when I was starting out. I'm here representing for the late bloomers. Nowadays I think a lot of younger folks are moving past all those antiquated gender restraints much quicker than I did, which is great to see.

(via Lenny)