Let's have cake
55 votes and 2 comments so far on Reddit
@crimsondoom39
Sade Olutola
Peter Solarz

titsay

JVL
Cosmic Funnies
$LAYYYTER

#extradirty
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
noise dept.

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
hello vonnie

Kiana Khansmith
Misplaced Lens Cap

tannertan36

shark vs the universe
styofa doing anything

Love Begins
Monterey Bay Aquarium
tumblr dot com
One Nice Bug Per Day
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Netherlands

seen from Australia

seen from Canada

seen from South Korea
seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia

seen from T1
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Morocco

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States
seen from Germany
@chaoticnaturelover
Let's have cake
55 votes and 2 comments so far on Reddit
@crimsondoom39
This person has to much time on their hands
a friend of mine tried to sell his soul on ebay and the starter price was $10 and people were bidding on it but before anything happened ebay took it down and sent him an email explaining that if he was selling a soul that didn’t actually exist then it was against their policy and if he was selling a real soul then that is a human body part and it is also against their policy
tag by @ilthit
[Image Transcription:
#well done ebay for solving that philosophical conundrum
/end transcription]
Damn...
Not even your dad, just any
Damn, I didn't realize this was this widespread. Just figured my dad was particularly bad at anger management.
Korra and Asami only held hands because Nickelodeon wouldn’t let them do more. Nick infamously cancelled Korra and put out the rest of season 4 as a webseries only.
Marceline and Princess Bubblegum only kiss in the very final episode because Cartoon Network wouldn’t let them do more. There are a ton of interviews with Pendelton and with the voice actresses where they talk about the CN censorship.
Steven Universe got as far as it did because Rebecca Sugar fought tooth and nail, and risked the show getting cancelled (which it did in many countries, if not heavily censored), because Cartoon Network wouldn’t let her. Ruby was often dubbed over with a male voice, and Pearl/Rose interactions were completely cut.
She-Ra managed to do it largely because it was specifically on Netflix only, and even then, Noelle has said they had to build 4 seasons of storyline very subtly around it so they had enough ammo to convince the execs that Catradora was the only logical conclusion to this show they had already aired. She didn’t just go in on Day 1 and make it gay; she had to plan many years in advance for how to set up her argument. Her argument, y’all.
And now we have The Owl House. Which is an absolutely wonderful show. And it’s so amazing that we actually get to see queer characters get the kind of representation that so many straight characters get. And it’s amazing we get to see the romance build up, instead of just a quick peck in the series finale!
Let’s not forget that in the US, it was illegal for gay people to get married until 2015. Korra aired in 2012. In Texas, it was a punishable felony to even be gay until the mid-90s. No, literally. Just being gay was an arrestable offense here in Texas until 1993. We have come a really long way in 20 years!
But don’t fucking dare disrespect any of these other shows by saying they didn’t try, or that their representation didn’t matter. The Owl House is standing on the shoulders of giants. Lumity is only where it is because Korrasami and Bubbline helped get them there.
Fantasy binder.
can you imagine how freaky shark mermaids would be like unlike sharks, shark mermaids would have actual arms/hands and could rely on touching things with their hands to see if they’re prey rather than having to bite like sharks do. like youre just swimming in the ocean and suddenly you feel a strong grip on your leg, you freak the FUCK out because uh what????? the fuck??? youre swimming alone in the ocean??
a head pops out of the water, dorsal fin pointed from its back and it just points at you and says in a low whisper: “i thought you were a seal. please dont swim alone like this, im sorry i scared you i just wanted to see what you are” and then disappears back into the depth. what the fuck.
no come back ma’am
*under my breath* underwater girlfriend
underwater wife
Underwater love of my underwater life
Underwater girlfriend, underwater wife underwater love of my underwater life she creeps in the deep with an underwater knife she’s a smooth-skinned terror causing underwater strife
She’s had underwater strife in her underwater life So I serenade her with my Mariana fife She drags me down to live an underwater life Underwater girlfriend, underwater wife
If you ever spanked an adult without consent, this would be labelled as assault (or at the very least harassment).
Yet, in a lot of places, it is not illegal to hold a child down and spank them?
“Corporeal punishment” should not even be called that. It should be labelled as abuse. And yes, it can be traumatic and leave lasting effects.
If your trauma comes from being punished as a child, you’re valid and allowed to say you’re traumatized.
𝖜𝖉𝖙𝖍𝖙𝖉𝖜𝖈
Never forget that the War on Drugs was fabricated to criminalize certain communities.
Some facts:
1) Black Americans created jazz. 2) Jewish Americans created comic books. 3) These things are said to be the only original American art forms.
4) black Americans invented rock and roll.
5) Black AND Jewish Americans created musical theatre.
{Image Transcription:
The handshake meme that shows two different groups as the hands with that group’s common ground where the hands meet. One hand is labeled “black people”, the other is labeled “jewish people”, and the part where they meet is labeled “creating america’s original art forms and getting zero credit for it”.
/end transcription]
Good.
Parenting tip #1: Don’t hit your fucking children, you scumbag cunt
The number of people in the notes defending hitting their children is fucking horrifying, along with a bunch of people saying shit like “I still flinch when my parents raise their hands”
Don’t fuckin hit your kids, jesus fucking christ
seriously i wish people understood that queerbaiting has almost nothing to do with the actual content of a story. two men can gaze soulfully into each other’s eyes for 45 minutes straight and then at the end be like “oh yes my good pal friend no homo” and its still not anything more than homoerotic and kind of stupid writing.
queerbaiting is a marketing technique to get gay people to buy a ticket. it’s hemming and hawing whenever someone asks about subtext, giving long answers that don’t mean anything to sort of imply “maybe you just need to wait and find out. ;)” it’s interviews where the actors talk about how much they love that particular relationship, and they think they will ~surprise~ you with how it turns out. it’s every single trailer showing these two people almost kissing, even as the creators talk about how offended they are that anyone would think it’s gay. it’s disney’s 65th First Gay Character that they sort of imply might actually be a main character this time but is yet another nameless asshole. it’s evil, because it’s completely deliberately misrepresenting the actual media just to make a buck.
my night manager (who is a gay man) and i sometimes sit down and exchange stories and tidbits about our sexuality and our experiences in the queer cultural enclave. and tonight he and i were talking about the AIDS epidemic. he’s about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, “yeah, i’ve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,” and he was like “2 or 3? if you went to any bar in manhattan from 1980 to 1990, you knew at least two or three dozen. and if you worked at gay men’s health crisis, you knew hundreds.” and he just listed off so many of his friends who died from it, people who he knew personally and for years. and he even said he has no idea how he made it out alive.
it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.
and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and that’s the outrageous thing - every queer person you meet over the age of, what, 40? has a story to tell about aids. every time you see a queer person over the age of 40, you know they had friends who died of aids. so idk, i feel like we as the first generation of queer people coming out of the epidemic really have a responsibility to do justice to the history of aids, and we haven’t been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.
The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.
Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.
They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.
HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.
The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.
There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.
Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.
I was there, though, for a tiny piece of it. And even that tiny piece of it left its stamp on me. Deep.
2011
A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall
I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:
And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts is a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.
AIDS at 30: A History by Victoria Harden
The Origin of AIDS by Jaques Pepin for the science of it all.
Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS.
The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America.
Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaust collects his writings on AIDS.
I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:
The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience
The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project
Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub
Borrowed Time: And AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette
Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.
Some documentaries:
Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) [hard to find]
How to Survive a Plague (2012)
We Were Here (2011)
Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.
Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
They’ve recently digitized the Quilt as well with a map making software, I spent about three hours looking through it the other day and crying. There are parts of it that look like they were signed by someone’s peers in support and memoriam, and then you realize that the names were all written in the same writing.
That these were all names of over 20 dead people that someone knew, often it was people who’d all been members of a club or threatre group.
Here’s the link to the digitization: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/aidsquilt/
As well, there are numerous people who were buried in graves without headstones, having been disenfranchised from their families. I read this story the other day on that which went really in depth (I would warn that it highlights the efforts of a cishet woman throughout the crisis): http://arktimes.com/arkansas/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/Content?oid=3602959
I’ve had several conversations recently with younger guys for whom this part of our history isn’t well known. Here are some resources for y'all. Please, take care of one another.
http://www.aidsquilt.org/view-the-quilt/search-the-quilt
Updated link to the quilt
this is so hard to read or even think about but… it’s so important. it’s so important to understand just the …overwhelming SCALE of this. how many people died while the government did NOTHING.
Reblogging for pride
Never forget your fallen. Your people were nearly annihilated in an epidemic. Never forget how lucky we are, never forget how they tried to let us die.
I grew up hearing about the Quilt all the time and this post reminded me how long it’s been since I’ve heard about it. Kids, go out and learn your history.
I’m a trans woman and I’m 38 now. My grandfather was a gay man living in Florida and he died of AIDS in the mid 90’s. He was in his 50’s.
My parents took care of him as he died, but they go to church 5 times a week to this day and though grandpa died saying he had no regrets my parents still insist that he must have “repented” for his “sin” before he died. The thought comforts them, apparently.
Meanwhile I’m in Florida right now for the first time in a decade and I can’t visit grandpa’s grave because I don’t remember where it is and I can’t ask my parents because they disowned me for being trans. 30 odd years after the crisis began and we’re still dealing with the trauma of it. The response to the AIDS crisis was practically genocide against the queer community.
The shows do be doing a better job
I feel that
I want one