the visioner will die

(she/her, poland

[sacredwhores]

Elaine May - Mikey and Nicky (1976)

[muzantropic]

Abandoned Planetarium (Pink Planet House) Solnechnoye Sanatorium. Leningrad Region, Russia

Lenproekt, 1965

[forest-woman]

[chantssecrets]

Carlos McClendon, back to window, 1947, 📸 by George Platt Lynes

[imyselfamthesun]

[profeminist]

"You've got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble."

- James Baldwin

[chantssecrets]

[flowerytale]

James Baldwin, from Giovanni’s Room

[ireadvintage]

This month, in celebration of Pride and James Baldwin’s crucial contributions to queer literature, we have commissioned Emily Paik, @emilypaik, an illustrator based in South Korea, to create a Tumblr-only, reimagined cover for Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room. The illustration captures the turmoil of the novel’s protagonist, David, as he is faced with his unavoidable reflection in a darkened room.

“The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation.” —James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

This year marks 100 years of James Baldwin, an iconic writer and activist whose work explores the complexities of race, identity, love, and class with searing foresight. The digital-only artwork was made exclusively for Tumblr and is not featured on any purchasable edition.

[undue-traveler]

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

- James Baldwin

[karinyosa]

love him. love him and let him love you. do you think anything else under heaven really matters? and how long, at the best, can it last? since you are both men and have everywhere else to go? only five minutes, only five minutes, and most of that helas! in the dark. and if you think of them as dirty then they will be dirty—they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. but you can make your time together anything but dirty; you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe...you play it safe long enough...and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.

james baldwin, giovanni's room

[rubypomegranates]

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

James Baldwin “The Fire Next Time”

[wildspringday]

via fossilisedflowers

[orpheuslament]

you want to leave giovanni because he makes you stink. you want to despise giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. you want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. and you— you are immoral. you are, by far, the most immoral man i have met in all my life. look, look what you have done to me. do you think you could have done this if i did not love you? is this what you should do to love?

[mysharona1987]

James Baldwin, 1979.

[thoughtportal]

[theimpossiblecool]

"The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light."

James Baldwin.