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gummybearattacktheworldofdespair

paintingispoetry

Gustav Klimt, Death and Life, 1915

sexhaver

fisherfurbearer

fruityogurt

lord help me because i can’t stop saying “i may have girlbossed too close to the sun” to myself whenever i do literally anything

kiefbowl

okay well now I will be too

damienhaaas

artchiculture-deactivated201901

FAMOUS AUTHORS

Classic Bookshelf: This site has put classic novels online, from Charles Dickens to Charlotte Bronte.

The Online Books Page: The University of Pennsylvania hosts this book search and database.

Project Gutenberg: This famous site has over 27,000 free books online.

Page by Page Books: Find books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, as well as speeches from George W. Bush on this site.

Classic Book Library: Genres here include historical fiction, history, science fiction, mystery, romance and children’s literature, but they’re all classics.

Classic Reader: Here you can read Shakespeare, young adult fiction and more.

Read Print: From George Orwell to Alexandre Dumas to George Eliot to Charles Darwin, this online library is stocked with the best classics.

Planet eBook: Download free classic literature titles here, from Dostoevsky to D.H. Lawrence to Joseph Conrad.

The Spectator Project: Montclair State University’s project features full-text, online versions of The Spectator and The Tatler.

Bibliomania: This site has more than 2,000 classic texts, plus study guides and reference books.

Online Library of Literature: Find full and unabridged texts of classic literature, including the Bronte sisters, Mark Twain and more.

Bartleby: Bartleby has much more than just the classics, but its collection of anthologies and other important novels made it famous.

Fiction.us: Fiction.us has a huge selection of novels, including works by Lewis Carroll, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Flaubert, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Free Classic Literature: Find British authors like Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus other authors like Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and more.

TEXTBOOKS

Textbook Revolution: Find biology, business, engineering, mathematics and world history textbooks here.

Wikibooks: From cookbooks to the computing department, find instructional and educational materials here.

KnowThis Free Online Textbooks: Get directed to stats textbooks and more.

Online Medical Textbooks: Find books about plastic surgery, anatomy and more here.

Online Science and Math Textbooks: Access biochemistry, chemistry, aeronautics, medical manuals and other textbooks here.

MIT Open Courseware Supplemental Resources: Find free videos, textbooks and more on the subjects of mechanical engineering, mathematics, chemistry and more.

Flat World Knowledge: This innovative site has created an open college textbooks platform that will launch in January 2009.

Free Business Textbooks: Find free books to go along with accounting, economics and other business classes.

Light and Matter: Here you can access open source physics textbooks.

eMedicine: This project from WebMD is continuously updated and has articles and references on surgery, pediatrics and more.

MATH AND SCIENCE

FullBooks.com: This site has “thousands of full-text free books,” including a large amount of scientific essays and books.

Free online textbooks, lecture notes, tutorials and videos on mathematics: NYU links to several free resources for math students.

Online Mathematics Texts: Here you can find online textbooks likeElementary Linear Algebra and Complex Variables.

Science and Engineering Books for free download: These books range in topics from nanotechnology to compressible flow.

FreeScience.info: Find over 1800 math, engineering and science books here.

Free Tech Books: Computer programmers and computer science enthusiasts can find helpful books here.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

byGosh: Find free illustrated children’s books and stories here.

Munseys: Munseys has nearly 2,000 children’s titles, plus books about religion, biographies and more.

International Children’s Digital Library: Find award-winning books and search by categories like age group, make believe books, true books or picture books.

Lookybook: Access children’s picture books here.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

Bored.com: Bored.com has music ebooks, cooking ebooks, and over 150 philosophy titles and over 1,000 religion titles.

Ideology.us: Here you’ll find works by Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, David Hume and others.

Free Books on Yoga, Religion and Philosophy: Recent uploads to this site include Practical Lessons in Yoga and Philosophy of Dreams.

The Sociology of Religion: Read this book by Max Weber, here.

Religion eBooks: Read books about the Bible, Christian books, and more.

PLAYS

ReadBookOnline.net: Here you can read plays by Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and others.

Plays: Read Pygmalion, Uncle Vanya or The Playboy of the Western World here.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: MIT has made available all of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, and histories.

Plays Online: This site catalogs “all the plays [they] know about that are available in full text versions online for free.”

ProPlay: This site has children’s plays, comedies, dramas and musicals.

MODERN FICTION, FANTASY AND ROMANCE

Public Bookshelf: Find romance novels, mysteries and more.

The Internet Book Database of Fiction: This forum features fantasy and graphic novels, anime, J.K. Rowling and more.

Free Online Novels: Here you can find Christian novels, fantasy and graphic novels, adventure books, horror books and more.

Foxglove: This British site has free novels, satire and short stories.

Baen Free Library: Find books by Scott Gier, Keith Laumer and others.

The Road to Romance: This website has books by Patricia Cornwell and other romance novelists.

Get Free Ebooks: This site’s largest collection includes fiction books.

John T. Cullen: Read short stories from John T. Cullen here.

SF and Fantasy Books Online: Books here include Arabian Nights,Aesop’s Fables and more.

Free Novels Online and Free Online Cyber-Books: This list contains mostly fantasy books.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Project Laurens Jz Coster: Find Dutch literature here.

ATHENA Textes Francais: Search by author’s name, French books, or books written by other authors but translated into French.

Liber Liber: Download Italian books here. Browse by author, title, or subject.

Biblioteca romaneasca: Find Romanian books on this site.

Bibliolteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: Look up authors to find a catalog of their available works on this Spanish site.

KEIMENA: This page is entirely in Greek, but if you’re looking for modern Greek literature, this is the place to access books online.

Proyecto Cervantes: Texas A&M’s Proyecto Cervantes has cataloged Cervantes’ work online.

Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum: Access many Latin texts here.

Project Runeberg: Find Scandinavian literature online here.

Italian Women Writers: This site provides information about Italian women authors and features full-text titles too.

Biblioteca Valenciana: Register to use this database of Catalan and Valencian books.

Ketab Farsi: Access literature and publications in Farsi from this site.

Afghanistan Digital Library: Powered by NYU, the Afghanistan Digital Library has works published between 1870 and 1930.

CELT: CELT stands for “the Corpus of Electronic Texts” features important historical literature and documents.

Projekt Gutenberg-DE: This easy-to-use database of German language texts lets you search by genres and author.

HISTORY AND CULTURE

LibriVox: LibriVox has a good selection of historical fiction.

The Perseus Project: Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library features titles from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in English and original languages.

Access Genealogy: Find literature about Native American history, the Scotch-Irish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, and more.

Free History Books: This collection features U.S. history books, including works by Paul Jennings, Sarah Morgan Dawson, Josiah Quincy and others.

Most Popular History Books: Free titles include Seven Days and Seven Nights by Alexander Szegedy and Autobiography of a Female Slave by Martha G. Browne.

RARE BOOKS

Questia: Questia has 5,000 books available for free, including rare books and classics.

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Books-On-Line: This large collection includes movie scripts, newer works, cookbooks and more.

Chest of Books: This site has a wide range of free books, including gardening and cooking books, home improvement books, craft and hobby books, art books and more.

Free e-Books: Find titles related to beauty and fashion, games, health, drama and more.

2020ok: Categories here include art, graphic design, performing arts, ethnic and national, careers, business and a lot more.

Free Art Books: Find artist books and art books in PDF format here.

Free Web design books: OnlineComputerBooks.com directs you to free web design books.

Free Music Books: Find sheet music, lyrics and books about music here.

Free Fashion Books: Costume and fashion books are linked to the Google Books page.

MYSTERY

MysteryNet: Read free short mystery stories on this site.

TopMystery.com: Read books by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton and other mystery writers here.

Mystery Books: Read books by Sue Grafton and others.

POETRY

The Literature Network: This site features forums, a copy of The King James Bible, and over 3,000 short stories and poems.

Poetry: This list includes “The Raven,” “O Captain! My Captain!” and “The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.”

Poem Hunter: Find free poems, lyrics and quotations on this site.

Famous Poetry Online: Read limericks, love poetry, and poems by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Lord Byron and others.

Google Poetry: Google Books has a large selection of poetry, fromThe Canterbury Tales to Beowulf to Walt Whitman.

QuotesandPoem.com: Read poems by Maya Angelou, William Blake, Sylvia Plath and more.

CompleteClassics.com: Rudyard Kipling, Allen Ginsberg and Alfred Lord Tennyson are all featured here.

PinkPoem.com: On this site, you can download free poetry ebooks.

MISC

Banned Books: Here you can follow links of banned books to their full text online.

World eBook Library: This monstrous collection includes classics, encyclopedias, children’s books and a lot more.

DailyLit: DailyLit has everything from Moby Dick to the recent phenomenon, Skinny Bitch.

A Celebration of Women Writers: The University of Pennsylvania’s page for women writers includes Newbery winners.

Free Online Novels: These novels are fully online and range from romance to religious fiction to historical fiction.

ManyBooks.net: Download mysteries and other books for your iPhone or eBook reader here.

Authorama: Books here are pulled from Google Books and more. You’ll find history books, novels and more.

Prize-winning books online: Use this directory to connect to full-text copies of Newbery winners, Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer winners.

rarestcat-deactivated20150809

Thank you, angel who made this.

amor-intellectualis

YOU GUYS THIS SO BEAUTIFUL I WANT TO CRY THIS MAKES ME SO HAPPY. IT MAKES ME SO SO SO HAPPY.

madness-and-gods

Important post for fuck’s sake!

glasswaters

i’m thinking tonight about masterpieces. michelangelo looked at the sixtine chapel and saw; nothing to preserve. virgil wanted his aenid burned and forgotten; only to be saved at the behest of an emperor who thought it flattery. kafka instructed his friend to burn everything he’d ever written - too personal was it, too unfinished.

they were ignored.

instead, their work was taken and held and published and thrown to be gawked at. instead, an emperor, a pope, a friend, took from within the cavities of them their choices; their art.

tumblr rolls out post+. twitter rolls out tip jars. youtube takes half of what creators earn. on social media, there is a ko-fi or a patreon and a polished face in every bio. i show my poems to my mother and she asks if I will publish them before she says anything else. emily dickinson instructed her sister to burn her poetry.

her sister did not listen.

we are a community, says tumblr, we should give back to creators. my last poem had 50 notes. six of those were reblogs that weren’t mine. i lie in bed at 2am and stare at my bright phone screen and the way netflix’s library grows thinner and thinner. the first ad on tumblr that i can reblog is for amazon. amazon takes more than half of what authors earn.

kafka’s friend took barely finished work and hammered it into structure. he is the only reason we know of him.

my father wrote a book and a play when I was barely big enough to reach his knees. when i try to talk to him about writing, he shrugs.

no one wanted to publish it, he says. so i don’t write anymore.

i am filled with poems I have never published, books I haven’t written. There are little snippets of them scattered throughout my life. I link to my ko-fi on my tumblr.

asked capitalism of the artist: what is art, if not for consumption? who does art benefit, if it is not consumed? why create at all if you do not market it? who are you, frothing at the mouth about someone publishing someone else’s poems? who are you to hate your magnum opus? what is art, if not in relation to its reception? if no one sees it, how is it art?

said the artist, baring their teeth: it’s mine.

deirdreskye

The entire concept of "camp" and its relationship to gay people is hilarious. like yeah gays have just always loved lame shit that sucks

riben-deactivated20230922

I don't know if you know what camp is

cowboy

obviously it's lame shit that sucks

$eternal-fractal blog's avatar$

eternal-fractal

Is camp a fandom I should be glad I missed out on?

mxflint-original

It's a 'fashion' movement lol. It's about wearing big things that clash with each other, kinda. (Think about drag queens, they're kinda camp, i think)

im-the-punk-who

Loving all these white gays erasing the history of queerness because they think it’s edgy.

Drag queens are not ‘kind of camp’ - drag queens invented camp. Drag queens are camp. Camp is how gay men (and women! lesbians and wlw can also be camp!) expressed themselves and learned to love themselves in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the crackdowns on homosexuality made those things dangerous.

Camp is meant to be queer, subversive.

“Camp is, or should be, by its very nature, political subversive, and revolutionary.”

Camp is not your tackyness. Camp is not for you to denegrate. Camp is where the drag balls in Harlem originated, Camp is where gay men learn to love themselves for being completely out of the norms of what traditional heteronormativity wants from them. Camp is where we try on and take off genders like they’re fashion trends we don’t have time for.

softbrah

The lack of care that a lot of people have on here for queer history drives me up the fucking wall.

septembriseur-deactivated202502

Camp is also about drawing attention to the demanding categories of identity that we are expected to perform, and that we often accept without question. What is high art, and why are some things “tacky”? To whom are they tacky? What do we gain by seeing aesthetics through a gaze other than our own?

Drag specifically is not really about impersonating females, but about impersonating The Female— exploring and performing the very height of this stylized, ritualized womanhood. Or, in the case of drag kings, doing the same with stylized ideas of what it is to be A Man. The campness is in the head-on refusal to take as given any definition of what is acceptable.

canadianwheatpirates

In some places, "camp" also occupies the semantic place that "femme" does, including its link as the aesthetic opposite to "butch". So it's real great that everyone is like "femme is a lesbian only term" (tell that to the "no fats no femmes" guys on grindr lol) and then also making shit up about the term that comes from mlm to describe the phenomenon. Almost like these people just don't give a shit about mlm or our place in LGBT+ history at all.

mysticspiralonthehalfshell

I'm living for @theorangedead 's tag

neotrances-deactivated

bananahomo

bestie is just becoming the chiller version of comrade

bananahomo

we have nothing to lose but our chains, bestie

lemonsharks

My ancestors, watching me dump an entire stick of cinnamon, two cloves, an allspice berry, and a generous grating of nutmeg into my tea, sweetened with white sugar and loaded with cream, while I sit in my clean warm house surrounded by books, 25+ outfits for different occasions, and 6 pairs of shoes, in a building heated so well I have the windows open in mid-autumn:

Our daughter prospers. We are proud of her. She has never labored in a field but knows riches we could not have imagined.

sighinastorm

I like this so much better than the idea that our ancestors would be embarrassed or ashamed of us for being “soft” or some crap like that.

therinde-dreams

My ancestors, watching me stuff my face with fried chicken while studying: She eats like an imperial concubine and can afford to study like am imperial scholar. WE MADE IT

idhren

She eats like an imperial concubine and can afford to study like am imperial scholar

villainous-queer-deactivated202

My ancestors watching me use my stand mixer while living in a small apartment and attending university: Thou hast kneadeth bread in FOUR hail marys??? FOUR??? And thou ist poor as a churchmouse, yet liveth in a fine cottage with four pounds butter and fresh berries in thy larder!! And two featherbeds! And thou attendeth the King’s college, as a lord!!

star-anise

My girlfriend and I talk a lot about our different generations of queerness, because she was doing queer activism in the 1990s and I wasn’t.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

“Excuse us,” she said bitterly the other day, not at me but to me, “for not laying the groundwork for children we never thought we’d have in a future none of us thought we’d be alive for.”

freedom-of-fanfic

“the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.”

aphilologicalbatman-deactivated

thank you for giving me a good reason to finish my dissertation and try to make it in the academy

brs-love

Wait, idk LGBTQ+ history, but they died of AIDS cause, what, hospitals refused to treat them or…?

star-anise

Oh heck yeah.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad). Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill.

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.

I mean, people who will talk about how homophobia led to neglect of AIDS still find ways not to mention that AIDS isn’t just sexually transmitted; it’s hugely a disease of drug addicts, because sharing needles is a huge way the disease spreads. But because society always thinks, oh, drug addicts are bad and disgusting people and of course criminals, that often gets neatly dropped from the histories, and it’s still hard to get people to agree to things that keep drug addicts alive, like needle exchanges and supervised injection sites. But if you want my rant about how the war on drugs is bullshit used to control poor people and people of colour, and drugs shouldn’t be criminalized, you’ll have to ask for that separately.

elfwreck

They died of AIDS because

Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.

Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.

Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.

Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.

Picture from 1993:

We lost basically a whole generation of the queer community.

psychoactive-teratogen

As a current AIDS survivor, this is really important information. I was diagnosed not only HIV positive in 2014, but I had already progressed to an AIDS diagnosis. Knowing how far we’ve come with treatment and what the trials and tribulations of those who came before cannot and must not ever be forgotten. Awareness is the number one goal. I often speak to the microbiology students at my university to explain what it’s like to live with, how the medications work, side effects, how it’s affected my daily life, and just raise general awareness.

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

I believe it’s time for us as a society to start better education of this disease. The vast majority of the people I’ve spoken to are receptive to the knowledge of my status, and I’ve received lots of support from loved ones, friends, and total strangers. It’s time to beat the stigma.

smallswingshoes

This is slightly off-point, but as for the cost, I wanted to mention that some pharmacies have specialties that let them get special coupons/programs and stuff to save money.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

If you’re on HIV meds and they’re ludicrously expensive, ask your local pharmacy manager if there are any local HIV specialty pharmacies that they know of. They might be able to help.

mycroftrh

I think it’s important to emphasize that, while the diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, it is also true that people dying of AIDS because of homophobia is not history only.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died. He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

AIDS is not just history. Neither is homophobia.

madgastronomer

Back to history: When AIDS patients held die-ins, they went to hospitals, lay down in front of them, and literally waited to die.

specificfuckery

carnivalseb

If you’re young & either queer or queer-adjacent, think about the number of people out of the closet you know your own age & think about how many you know your parents age. They’re not stamping us out of the mould any quicker these days than in the ‘60s, except in lockstep with population growth. I think, growing up, my picture of relative numbers of queer people & straights was unavoidably impacted by the number of empty seats at our table. That might be the case for you too. The number of elders you never got to meet.

Remember this when people talk about how small the LGBTQIA+ population is. That it’s “such a small percentage of the population to be catered too”. Remember this and tell them, “that’s because homophobia killed them”.

purplepints

This picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is often included with the “The men facing the camera/in white are the surviving members” but it leaves out something extremely important:

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

Sing for two.

mg-dl

My fave part of this post is the repeated usage of the word “queer”. In a discussion about the hatred of LGBT people and how they were left to die by the government, it’s always a great idea to call them all a slur. Can you switch it up a bit and use “fag” next time?

star-anise

There’s a really obvious reason why we’re using “queer”.

When talking about LGBTQ+ history, often we have to be really careful with the language we use, because how we understand things now is not how the people we’re talking about understood themselves at the time. We end up using phrases like, “People who we would now understand as gay or lesbian” or “experiences which modern transgender people often identify with”.

In this case? It’s because that’s the word they used.

(Many of them also used the words “fag” or “dyke”, but “queer” is more inclusive.)

When I talk about “the leading lights of queerness” I mean Queer Nation. I mean the people who contributed to Queer Theory. I mean people who deliberately chose to use that word. I mean me and my ex-girlfriend. We exist.

During the AIDS crisis especially, homophobia was so bad that a lot of people didn’t want to be known by any word associated with the gay community: Not gay, not homosexual, not queer, not anything. Epidemiologists had to create the category of “men who have sex with men” because there was literally no existing term that didn’t carry the weight of a slur. The purpose of using the word “queer” was for people to say, “Let’s stop running from the things society is calling us; let’s pick up the weapons they’ve hurled at us and start hurling them back. There is no level of socially acceptable we can be that will make them suddenly decide our lives matter. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” It meant very specifically embracing and defending their/our marginalized position.

Every word we’ve ever been known by has been a slur. We all have our own histories and flinch reactions. I grew up with “gay” and “lezzo” being used really hatefully around me, as well as “queer” and “dyke” and “fag”, and I have different comfort levels with all those different words.

/shrug emoji You can dislike the word all you like and ask that it not be used for you. But historically and today, a lot of us do use it for ourselves, and we constitute “the queer community” or “queerdom”. Which we don’t think is a bad thing. If you don’t want to join us, fine, but that doesn’t make us stop existing, and any other word you can call us would also be a slur, because our community is predicated on saying, “We are that thing you’re so afraid of. Get used to it.”

jackalopiel

I love people with obscure knowledge or useless academic insights. I want to hear your analysis of lighting in Ratatouille. Tell me about the history of soda pop or the references to classical mythology in Macbeth. I want to know about the underlying homoerotic context of that 1930s sci-fi paperback. I think all knowledge is worthwhile knowledge. Explain to me the ecosystems that komodo dragons inhabit. Don’t be afraid to learn for the sake of learning.

hydroxianchaos

i wanted to respond to this post with something crude, crass, and subversive like “what people shouldn’t be afraid of learning is that my ass is tremendous” but this post was made really earnestly so I haven’t the heart to trample on its sentiment or crush it under the weight of something like, say, my enormous asscheeks, as that would be very meanspirited, like someone breaking someone’s bones with their gigantic buttocks just to prove that their dump truck of a rear was truly one of a kind in girth and force

jackalopiel

why don’t you go ahead and shatter my quivering heart under the sheer mass of your dump truck of an ass babe

chaandajaan-moved

what do you think dark academia could look like in Asia, both visually and academically? also, here's a bad pick up line: are you rice? cos you get me up in the morning

Firstly, bad pickup lines are literally my thing so thankyou.

so I can only really speak to south Asia but i hope there something in there for everyone.

sliced fruits and tea while you study

takings rikshaws to class

bleached white uniforms and polished shoes

studying on the roof on a sunny day listening to the street noises

street food with friends

fountain pens and perfect handwriting

late nights studying without coffee

studying through repetition and reading

teachers who point with their middle finger

full bookshelves of textbooks and class readings full annotated

hanging out with local stray cats

caappuccino

as a pretentious Bengali, please allow me to add

richly annotated books of the poems of Tagore

exchanging political ideas with friends over cigarettes

a big book that’s falling apart that you carry anyway

taking breaks from studying to watch old black and white movies by Satyajit Ray

protesting in university campuses

waking up late on a Sunday to the smell of food cooking after a long night of studying

spending afternoons buying second hand books

absorbed in reading on an old tram in Old Calcutta

words can change the world

yeahboiislay-deactivated2021030

Hey! Pretentious Pakistani here:

Listening to Noor Jahan on your grandad’s radio from the 70′s

Reading Faiz Ahmed Faiz while sitting on a charpai that’s on the roof

Drinking Chai in a white cotton shalwar kameez

Secretly smoking at the Quaid’s Mazar

Attending a political rally or sit-in

Digging through your great-aunt’s storage to find a copy of the Pakistan Declaration in perfect condition.

reading Keat’s while balancing yourself on your brother’s motorcycle while he weaves through Karachi’s traffic, trying to get you to university on time.

‘Borrowing’ your grandma’s pillazo pants and Granddad’s shirt from the 70′s and then ‘borrowing’ their Volkswagen beetle

jaane-ghazal

As a super pretentious indian muslim, here is my input:

•going to the anti NRC-CAA rallies and sit ins regularly.

•wandering in the dusty book filled lanes of college street.

•sipping sweet tea, at dawn, while reading the Quran.

•"borrowing" Baba’s bottles of ittar.

•reading Tagore, Begum Ruqaiya, the communist manifesto, the Hindus:an alternative history among banned literature.

•sitting in your grand dad’s library, every time you visit his place, even if it has not changed one bit in the past 16 years you’ve been visiting him.

•sipping bhaad wali chai after your routine morning walks.

•taking the tram to school/university.

•wandering around the national library after sunset( it’s supposed to be haunted).

•carrying a copy of the Quran EVERYWHERE.

•discussing politics over cigarettes.

•dressing up in a lehenga at home, just because you felt like it.

ryns-ramblings

@theparistimes

theparistimes

Love this!! As someone who has only experienced academia in the western world, these are so fun to read.

ceres-xf

a somewhat pretentious and chaotic indian hindu here (i’m new to tumblr, sorry if there are any formatting errors :/)

pulling all-nighters for days and making yourself a cup of “adrak wali chai” at 2 am.

embracing your dark circles (because you can’t be bothered trying to hide them anyways)

no playlist is ever complete without kishore kumar, mohd rafi, rahat fateh ali khan and lata mangeshkar. “khoya khoya chaand” at 3 am? yes pls.

opting for stem majors because your parents wanted you to but secretly having a “love affair” with history, politics and literature.

wearing your mother’s saree and finding comfort and warmth within its drapes.

incarnate mehendi designs on your hands.

having read the geeta, mahabharata, ramayana, vedas and the upnishads and analyzing it so many times that now you know it better than your grandma.

philosophizing about the meaning of life, about karma, about religion, about everything.

tagore. everything about tagore.

getting into heated political debates with friends.

knowing at least 2-3 languages before you start primary school.

studying sanskrit. that in itself makes you feel connected to the world of academia. imagine learning a language that was spoken by our ancestors, thousands of years ago. the language of history. amazing.

wearing your dadi’s jewelry for the sake of nostalgia

oh and wearing your mother’s watch because “sentiment”

speaking of nostalgia and sentiment – going through old photo albums still saved in your mother’s almirah.

white kurtis and pashmina shawls in winter is a mood.

knowing a great deal about architecture, thanks to being surrounded by historical monuments all around.

ipitara-studyblr

I don’t if I would fall into the category of dark academia but here I would like to include (Indian girl adding some extra points):

Walking on the old streets (some second hand book market, whoever is from Delhi must be knowing Daryaganj) and looking for cheap and old second hand books. The yellow pages and the peculiar smell 😍 wondering how many people would have read it

Dressing up in kurta or cotton tunics with jeans

Hair in a bun or loose, whatever, you will look nerdy all the time. With jooti or my favourite sneakers .

Chai all the time

Going and visiting old monuments and learning about their history

You can probably hang out alone or with a few people who really enjoy your conversation

Reading mythology books and sankrit @caelesti-x Indeed yes!

Learning about as God and goddesses we have and why we celebrate the particular festival ( I am still not able to understand everything)

Opening the old cartons full of your highschool books and college books as well as extra novels ( I don’t have a separate cupboard for so many old books ofcourse so i keep them in carton on top storage shelf 😬

You cannot run away from tje political talks. If something is happening somewhere, discussio can start anytime, anywhere and with anyone.

In winters, you sit on the terrace in sun, with peanuts and salt, tea and a book! I even study like that during exams.

My bagpack is always heavy like I am carrying two lehninger everytime.

You read tagore, gulzar, kabir and so many other good written works out there.

And read about Indian scientists like CV Raman, Ms swaminathan, SN Bose, Hargobind khorana

Handwritten notes and the fright of spilling water over ink pen written notes.

I guess yes, That is all. But no idea if that is a bit off track answer. I am mixed academia. 🌼😊

the-secret-historian

Love this! As a Bengali who grew up in different parts of India, can I add

Learning to read and write English and Hindi before being taught Bengali by your mother

Carrying around Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol anyway, just to feel closer to the words you couldn’t yet read

Going back to hometown on holidays and realising you speak a weird mix of Bengali, Hindi and English.

Books being an integral part of your upbringing. Perks of having bookish parents and grandparents

Spending afternoons in a room full of people, everyone reading something different, occasionally reading a paragraph aloud for everyone to listen.

Cha. Just so much cha. With adda of course. It may or may not take a political turn. Just kidding, it always takes a political turn.

Studying history and feeling goosebumps when visiting old monuments in Delhi

Inheriting books and saris from your grandparents. Seeing annotations your grandfather made on a book he read when he was your age or draping your grandmother’s sari to your graduation to feel connected to her.

Explaining to your parents you want to study history and not science and getting emotional when they are fully supportive.

Explaining to your other family members that no you don’t want to sit for UPSC just because you studied Humanities

(Forced) music lessons and thus growing up with a love/hate relationship with Tagore until reading his books as an adult and grumpily admitting that yes, he’s actually brilliant.

Durga Pujo starts with a string of Pujobarshiki. Waiting a whole year to read what Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and Nobonita Deb Sen have cooked up for you this year.

Embracing both the tweed jacket and the kashmiri shawl in winters.

Boroline. The magic ointment that heals everything. For the things that boroline doesn’t heal, there’s Tagore.