An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 12/15
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Thomas Barrow/Tom Branson
Characters: Thomas Barrow, Tom Branson, Mary Crawley, Sybbie Branson, George Crawley, Phyllis Baxter, Anna Bates, Elsie Hughes (Downton Abbey)
Additional Tags: Romance, Drama, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Happy Ending, Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, dark humour, Slow Burn, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, Sexual Tension, split POV, Thomas and the children, Weekly Updates
Summary:
When Tom finds Thomas and assists after his suicide attempt, a bond forms between the two men, one that is built upon a mutual need for one another. As their friendship grows, the bond develops into something deeper and much more abiding.
Chapters: 11/15
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Thomas Barrow/Tom Branson
Characters: Thomas Barrow, Tom Branson, Mary Crawley, Sybbie Branson, George Crawley, Phyllis Baxter, Anna Bates, Elsie Hughes (Downton Abbey)
Additional Tags: Romance, Drama, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Happy Ending, Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, dark humour, Slow Burn, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, Sexual Tension, split POV, Thomas and the children, Weekly Updates
Summary:
When Tom finds Thomas and assists after his suicide attempt, a bond forms between the two men, one that is built upon a mutual need for one another. As their friendship grows, the bond develops into something deeper and much more abiding.
things that always make me happy: serial commenters. there are three types
1) reading a longfic chapter by chapter, leaving an increasingly emotional comment on every chapter, descends into keysmashes near the end: outstanding
2) read one fic by accident, clicked the author name, now working steadily through the backlog and commenting on everything, I wake up to an AO3 inbox full of enthusiasm: precious beyond words
3) the longterm serial commenter whose comment begins with I don’t even know this fandom but because they have followed me from somewhere else: stunning. humbling. magical.
these are all *chef’s kiss* and I want to add one more:
4) left a comment a while ago, comes back and leaves another comment on the same fic, telling you that they’re coming back to reread the fic: angels. blessings. lifesavers.
Chapters: 10/15
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Thomas Barrow/Tom Branson
Characters: Thomas Barrow, Tom Branson, Mary Crawley, Sybbie Branson, George Crawley, Phyllis Baxter, Anna Bates, Elsie Hughes (Downton Abbey)
Additional Tags: Romance, Drama, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Happy Ending, Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, dark humour, Slow Burn, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, Sexual Tension, split POV, Thomas and the children, Weekly Updates
Summary:
When Tom finds Thomas and assists after his suicide attempt, a bond forms between the two men, one that is built upon a mutual need for one another. As their friendship grows, the bond develops into something deeper and much more abiding.
Like they tried to change Reblogs and people rightfully got up in arms, this is a LOT worse. In order to have access to any sort of thing dubbed mature, and We haveALL seen what they think is mature, Everything from a black and white photo of a black woman's arm, to posts about IUD recalls, to a nude painted by a 17th century artist, to anything involving the word Trans; you have to send your personal information to a third party site that WILL get hacked, and you will be doxxed. And they can say "Oh shit, well it wasn't us who sent your name address and gender identity to Moldovan teenagers, here's a couple extra minutes in the ball pit.
That's bad enough!!!!!!!! But the entire idea of needing permission from state authorities to access anything labeled mature by our friendly AI overlords is some fucking Boll shit. Die Gedenken Sind Frie baby. This is all a reaction to people getting uppity about their lowly lowly rights and is being propped up by the same bad actors tht have made life unlivable. Fuck that shit.
"Well it's only being rolled out in Brazil and UK" Yeah, to start. "Well they're being forced to do this by laws." YOu know it's always really funny when these tech giants (Or whatever you call owning tumblr dot com) get really antsy about laws considering they pick and choose which ones they abide by.
This is a breaking point and it's going to be very interesting to see how we proceed from here.
Personally I hate AI because it uses slave labor, is killing the planet and is making people stupid, but that's just me. The soulless art aspect is just one little piece of my grander disdain.
wait how does AI use slave labor? Do you mean the human works that are stolen and not credited or compensated? Because technically under capitalism everything is exploited but there are varying degrees
Aside from the scraping, AI tech companies, including openAI/chatGPT, have outsourced training their models to countries in the global south, specifically Kenya in openAI's case. These workers are working in sweatshop conditions for less than 2 bucks USD per hour. I'm on mobile, but if you search 'openAI Kenya slave labor' and related keywords, you can find multiple articles about it.
Chapters: 9/12
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Thomas Barrow/Tom Branson
Characters: Thomas Barrow, Tom Branson, Mary Crawley, Sybbie Branson, George Crawley, Phyllis Baxter, Anna Bates, Elsie Hughes (Downton Abbey)
Additional Tags: Romance, Drama, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Happy Ending, Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, dark humour, Slow Burn, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, Sexual Tension, split POV, Thomas and the children, Weekly Updates
Summary:
When Tom finds Thomas and assists after his suicide attempt, a bond forms between the two men, one that is built upon a mutual need for one another. As their friendship grows, the bond develops into something deeper and much more abiding.
Thomas Barrow begins Downton Abbey as one of the sharpest sources of friction downstairs. He's ambitious, status-conscious, resentful, and quick to look for advantage, and the early seasons let him occupy a fairly antagonistic role beside O'Brien. He wants promotion, security, and some form of control in a world that offers him very little genuine safety. The series never builds him as a simple schemer, though; even at his worst, there's always something defensive and hungry underneath the nastiness, as if nearly every act of aggression is also an attempt to stay one step ahead of humiliation.
As the series goes on, he becomes one of its clearest studies in loneliness. Thomas is a gay servant in a world where that leaves him vulnerable to blackmail, disgrace, social isolation, and the constant need to monitor himself. The show uses that reality in ways that are sometimes blunt and sometimes surprisingly sensitive, but it's central to the whole arc. His manipulativeness, watchfulness, careerism, and the almost constant edge in him all make more sense when you keep in view how little room he has to be openly known without risk.
He also carries a very particular kind of class pain. Thomas is intelligent and capable, but most of his life offers him no respectable way to convert those qualities into freedom, and that tension shapes a lot of his bitterness. He can see more than people assume he can, he often wants more than his station allows, and he lives in an environment where a servant's mistake or scandal can permanently narrow his future. Much of his cruelty grows out of that, and so does his drive.
By the final seasons, the show shifts him out of pure antagonism and into something sadder, more exposed, and more adult. His failed 'cure', his professional dead ends, the loss of the few attachments he'd managed to form, and his suicide attempt all push the character away from the old role of house villain and toward a fuller portrait of a man who's spent years making himself difficult to wound and still ends up deeply wounded anyway. That later version of Thomas doesn't erase the earlier one, but it explains more of him.
Psychology
Depression fits Thomas very well, especially once the series stops treating his misery mainly as abrasiveness and starts showing what daily life feels like from inside it. He spends long stretches of the show isolated, joyless, resentful, and visibly cut off from any stable sense that life might improve. He can still be active, spiteful, and ambitious inside that state, which is part of why the depression is easy to miss if someone expects it to look quiet or passive; with Thomas, it often looks like chronic dissatisfaction hardened into temperament. By the time he attempts suicide in Season 6, the hopelessness is no longer subtext but the plain emotional truth of his arc.
Shame is just as central; Thomas lives with the constant pressure of concealment, and the show keeps returning to how damaging that is. His sexuality leaves him exposed to danger in ways the people around him can rarely understand fully, and it teaches him to treat vulnerability as something that can become catastrophic very quickly, which helps explain why he's so defensive, why he often strikes first, and why his moments of tenderness are usually followed by some attempt to regain control of himself. The series even gives him the awful storyline where he goes to London for treatment meant to 'cure' his homosexuality, which says a great deal about how desperate and self-loathing he's become by that point.
There's also a strong pattern of social hypervigilance in him. Thomas reads hierarchy, mood, and weakness quickly; he notices who has influence, who's slipping, who can be manipulated, and where a person is most likely to crack. That doesn't make him more emotionally healthy than the people aruond him, but it does mean he's rarely socially unaware. He's often very aware, and he uses that awareness to protect himslf, improve his position, or wound first when he feels threatened. The problem is that this habit leaves him trapped in a very adversarial relationship with other people; he spends so much time scanning for danger and leverage that simple trust becomes almost impossible for him.
What keeps the character from becoming one-note is that he's deeply susceptible to kindness, attention, and belonging when he actually believes they're real. He responds strongly to being chosen, trusted, or wanted, and some of his worst collapses follow moments where those things appear possible and then vanish again. That's one reason the depression reads so convincingly - Thomas isn't someone who never wanted connection, he wanted it very badly, he just lived in circumstances that made wanting it humiliating, dangerous, or both, and he built a personality around managing that contradiction badly.
Strengths and Flaws
Thomas is highly perceptive. He reads class dynamics, interpersonal tension, and weakness quickly, and that makes him one of the most socially alert people in the house. Early on, he often uses that perception for petty or destructive ends, but the perception itself is real and consistent. He knows how people work, he notices what they're hiding, and he's very rarely naive about how power moves through a room.
He's also competent in ways the household repeatedly ends up relying on. Thomas works his way through several positions at Downton, serves in the war, understands the rhythms of the house, and by the end is considered fit to succeed Carson as butler. That progression wouldn't be possible if he were merely malicious or opportunistic; the series is clear that he's difficult, but it's just as clear that he's capable. He knows the job, takes professional pride in it, and has the discipline to carry responsibility when it's finally placed fully in his hands.
Another strength is that he can change, though never quickly and never in a sentimental straight line. Thomas isn't one of those characters who becomes soft once enough people are nicer to him - his growth is slower and less flattering than that. He remains prickly, proud, and capable of meanness even late in the series; what changes is his ability to let care in, to feel gratitude without immediately poisoning it, and to stop treating every human interaction as a contest he has to win.
His first major flaw is cruelty. Thomas can be petty, vindictive, and extremely willing to exploit someone weaker or more trusting than himself if it improves his position or relieves his own bitterness for a moment. William, Bates, and Baxter all get some version of this from him at different times; his pain often sharpens him into somebody who knows exactly where to aim.
He's also deeply defensive. Thomas has trouble accepting help cleanly, admitting hurt before it curdles into hostility, and trusting affection unless it arrives in a form he can control, which makes him harder to reach and also leaves him constantly misjudging which relationships are actually safe. He often ruins or strains the very connections he most wants because he cannot tolerate the vulnerability they require.
A third flaw is that he can become trapped in grievance. Thomas has many real reasons to feel angry, but he also has a habit of arranging his whole emotional life around injury and exclusion. Once he's fixed on the idea that he's been wronged, he struggles to loosen his grip on it, which makes him tenacious but also exhausting. He can stay psychologically pinned to an insult, slight, or lost possibility long after someone healthier would have redirected that energy elsewhere.
Relationships
SARAH O'BRIEN
O'Brien is Thomas' most important early ally and one of the clearest expressions of who he is in the first half of the show. Together, they form a defensive, poisonous little unit built on class resentment, opportunism, and mutual recognition. O'Brien understands Thomas' sharpness and uses it, and Thomas understands hers and works alongside it. Their bond is never warm in any simple sense, but it is real; for a long time, she's one of the only people in the house with whom he doesn't have to pretend to be softer, duller, or less ambitious than he is.
JOHN BATES
Bates brings out the ugliest, most competitive version of Thomas. Bates arrives carrying moral authority, experience, and a kind of quiet self-possession that Thomas immediately dislikes and tries to undermine. Some of this is careerism and some of it is personal resentment; Bates has a steadiness Thomas lacks, and Thomas seems to react to that like a threat. Their dynamic is one of the best eaxmples of how Thomas' perceptiveness can turn nasty very quickly when it's driven by envy or fear of displacement.
JIMMY KENT
Jimmy is one of the relationships that most clearly exposes Thomas' vulnerability around desire. His attraction to Jimmy is genuine, and so is his terrible judgment around it; the whole arc is painful because it shows how little room Thomas has to pursue closeness safely and how quickly longing can turn into danger in his world. Jimmy also brings out Thomas' immaturity; around him, Thomas becomes hopeful, foolish, defensive, and then humiliated in a way the show rarely allows him elsewhere, and that humiliation reverberates for a long time.
PHYLLIS BAXTER
Baxter is one of the best later relationships in Thomas' story because she gives him a form of patience he doesn't know what to do with at first. Their history is complicated, and he treats her badly more than once, but she still continues to see the misery under the malice more clearly than most people do. Her response isn't indulgence, but a steady insistence that he's capable of being better and that his pain doesn't have to be the only thing organising his life. Her role in finding him after his suicide attempt says everything about how that relationship develops.
CHARLES CARSON
Carson is one of the authority figures whose opinion matters most to Thomas, which is a large part of why their relationship carries so much hostility. Thomas resents him, pushes against him, and often seems to take satisfaction in provoking him, but there's also a strong sense that Carson represents the kind of legitimacy Thomas has always wanted and rarely been granted. Carson sees the worst in him for many years, and responds from a moral framework Thomas doesn't trust but still can't entirely dismiss, which gives their dynamic a lot of bite. Thomas doesn't only hate Carson's judgment - he's also stung by it. By the time Carson's position eventually opens to him, the promotion carries extra weight because it comes from a standard Thomas has spent years resisting while still wanting, on some level, to meet it.
Just for Fun / Typology
MBTI - INTJ
Ni fits the way he thinks in patterns, leverage, and long-term positioning. Thomas isn't somebody who mainly responds to the social moment in a spontaneous or improvisational way; he watches, stores information, anticipates outcomes, and often acts according to a larger private read of how the house works and where he can move within it. Even when his plans are petty, they usually have design behind them.
Te also makes sense; Thomas is pragmatic, strategic, and strongly oriented toward results. He's often willing to use systems rather than merely live inside them. Promotion, security, influence, useful alliances, small manipulations that produce a larger shift in status - all of that has a very Te quality. He's also much more comfortable acting decisively once he's settled on a conclusion than he is lingering in open emotional uncertainty.
I can see why some people land elsewhere, especially with how emotionally wounded and socially reactive he can be, but the core of him still feels more like a private strategist than a feeling-led or perception-led type. The emotional life is intense, but the operating style is much more controlled, goal-aware, and guarded than the more diffuse INFP or INTP readings usually suggest.
MORAL ALIGNMENT - True Neutral
His choices are rarely governed by a stable commitment to doing good, and they're not governed by a love of harm for its own sake either. Thomas is usually acting from self-protection, ambition, resentment, loneliness, desire, or the need to preserve a place for himself inside a hostile world, which leaves him capable of real nastiness but also loyalty, gratitude, and care when those things finally feel safe enough to express.
Lawful doesn't fit cleanly because he has too little reverence for rule, hierarchy, or propriety as moral goods in themselves. He uses those structures when they help him and undermines them when they don't. Chaotic misses the amount of control and calculation in him.
On the moral side, Good gives him more consistency than he's earned, while Evil flattens the very real attachment, growth, and vulnerability that keep surfacing around the edges of his worst behaviour. He's too self-interested and too hurtful for a genuinely Good alignment, and too emotionally alive and changeable for Evil to feel complete.
Conclusion
Thomas is one of the richer characters in Downton Abbey because the show never fully lets him become either the house villain or the house penitent. He's cruel, lonely, ambitious, ashamed, funny in a dry and often nasty way, and far more fragile than he wants anyone to see. The series gets a lot of its sharpest downstairs material from letting those traits coexist in one person without smoothing them into something easier to forgive.
So much of his later arc is organised around hopelessness, isolation, thwarted attachment, and the collapse that follows when even his defensive routines stop keeping him upright, which doesn't replace the manipulativeness or the damage he causes, but places them inside a life built around concealment, class vulnerability, and repeated emotional dead ends. Thomas remains difficult nearly all the way through, but he also becomes one of the clearest examples in the series of what prolonged loneliness can do to a person who has almost nowhere safe to put it.
currently maybe possibly single-handedly crashing whatever servers eton hosts its archived student newspapers on because me and a friend are getting obsessed with a single outspoken prefect from 1883
@queenlua Happily! This is going to be long, so here's some set dressing first:
Eton College, for anyone unfamiliar, is a prestigious boys' school in England that has famously educated MANY MANY politicians, royals, nobility, and other assorted famous people. All you really need to know about it is that's it's incredibly posh and expensive and exclusive
The Eton Society (called “Pop” internally) is a self-selecting body of senior students at Eton that have historically held a decent amount of power at the school. If you’ve ever attended a school with a prefect system/house system etc you probably know a little bit about how obnoxious this kind of group can get. Now imagine they're all called Lord Godfrey Pickerington or something. Are you getting it? Is the set being dressed? Good.
Now that the scene is set, here’s our tale!!
I stumbled into Eton’s archives while doing research for a fanfiction and we’ll just leave that admission where it is!! It was in reading old issues of their student-run paper, The Chronicle, from 1883 that myself and @carebewear started becoming fixated on one guy in particular.
Cecil B. Gedge (from this point on known as Gedge) was a member of the Eton Society in 1883/84. He won a few Science awards during his time there (Biology!!) and seemed to like rowing during school sports events. He went on to become a barrister, which will make sense once you know more about him.
The best part of Gedge, though, is his appearances in the minutes for the Eton Society meetings. At least at Gedge’s time, the Eton Society seemed really fond of staging debates (more like loosely organised discussions) on a wide variety of topics.
Here are some of the riveting questions they discussed!
And my personal favourite: "Are Ghosts Real?"
(They were very divided)
Gedge first came to our attention in debate about the annexation of New Guinea, in which he apparently started an "abusive attack on the British army and missionaries":
Wow! Based Gedge!? He continues to spit period-typical truths about things like how we shouldn't tax bicycles actually because it would disproportionately affect poor people. YIMBY Gedge?? He would've loved light rail.
The final nail in our Gedge obsession was a debate on women's suffrage, in which Gedge vehemently advocates for women's right to vote and then gets no supporters at the end of the meeting. But I appreciate that he said it anyway and kept saying it. He is more persecuted that Christ, to me.
Here are some more, from anti-conscription sentiment to indirectly calling his classmates stupid to weirding everyone out by saying he wants to donate his body to science (his friend dissecting him for fun):
We started getting the feeling people might not have liked Gedge that much, mainly since one of the Society members wrote a poem about all his friends and Gedge isn't in it.
In 1884, there was some extended drama in the Chronicle where someone whom I groundlessly suspect was Gedge under a pseudonym ("A Socialist"), wrote to the editor complaining that the "debates" published by the Eton Society were "bad" (genuine quote) and that they should make a REAL debate society at the school that ALL boys, not just the self-selected seniors, could participate in:
To make a long story short most of the vocal members of the Eton Society threw up their hands at this and refused to do anything, basically boiling down to "Just because we're the prefects of the school doesn't mean we should have to actually DO anything!! Unfair!!" and also this quote which reads exactly like at least a thousand real tweets I've seen in my life
Liberal. Gedge, of course, was there giving practical suggestions, but the discussion was ultimately cut short because their principal died and they had to push a memorial issue of the paper. We have a working theory that the staff might've used that interruption as an opportunity to get the boys to cut it the fuck out.
Anyway it's a little unclear what happens to Gedge after that. He isn't credited as being in the 1884 Eton Society in the larger school register but it's unclear if that's because he wasn't re-elected or if he just graduated. Either way, he went on to become a barrister in London, which makes a lot of sense. Sadly though, he passed away in WW1, which we were really normal about
Thank you Lt. Gedge, for truly embodying the eternal spirit of an outspoken debate-kid, a friend to the lefties, a proto-yimby, a terminal back-talker, and the kid in a biology class that's a little too excited for the dissections. I hope your life, however short, was a rich and bright one. Thanks for the incredibly entertaining afternoon, brother 🫡
Okay,I just want to share the super cool fucking site I found
Ever wanted to exercise more, but didn’t know how/didn’t have a plan/were overwhelmed by the insane number of choices online/no money?
Look at darebee. All of their workout plans are FREE, come with timers and checkboxes right on the page, and even better, ARE OFTEN RPG THEMED so you can fucking role play while you exercise wtff (and yes, the story and the workout changes with your choices)
They have programs for if you only want to do seated exercises, programs if you don’t want to get on the floor, and programs for ALL levels of fitness, including injury recovery.
Plus, if like me, you get anxious about making sure you’re doing it right, they have a full free library of videos for each exercise.
Chapters: 8/12
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Thomas Barrow/Tom Branson
Characters: Thomas Barrow, Tom Branson, Mary Crawley, Sybbie Branson, George Crawley, Phyllis Baxter, Anna Bates, Elsie Hughes (Downton Abbey)
Additional Tags: Romance, Drama, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Happy Ending, Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, dark humour, Slow Burn, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, Sexual Tension, split POV, Thomas and the children, Weekly Updates
Summary:
When Tom finds Thomas and assists after his suicide attempt, a bond forms between the two men, one that is built upon a mutual need for one another. As their friendship grows, the bond develops into something deeper and much more abiding.
Hot take: there is no valid reason that official government ID should have either a sec or gender marker on it. First name, last name, dob + up to date image will suffice. Address, if relevant.
Look I work in emergency medicine, and I feel like people are confusing "medical history" as a concept with "crucial life-or-death information."
Like yeah it's nice to have medical history, it will come up at some point, there are things we would LOVE to know right this second when a person is wheeled in, like "do you take blood thinners? have you ever had pain like this before? is your facial paralysis new or has it been like that for a long time?" but besides "are you pregnant" none of of those immediate questions are sex-dependent, and, crucially, we can proceed WITHOUT all those pieces of information if we need to, even though they would be great to have. Pregnancy can be determined with a quick blood or urine test.
There are situations where providers want to know a person's sex assignment at birth, but none of those are life and death emergency situations, they are situations where you're sitting down and talking with the patient, where aspects of a person's medical history can be discussed, ie "I smoked for 60 years and have a history of COPD, so actually that oxygen saturation is totally normal for me," or "I am a daily consumer of alcohol and it's been 6 hours since my last drink; I have had seizures in the past when I go into withdrawal," or "I have an allergy to penicillin," or "I have a uterus even though my external genitalia would not lead you to assume that." Please note that all of the previous examples are more important to know than the uterus one.
We do not keep medical history on our IDs! That's all sex assigned at birth is; medical history. It's not crucial information, and it's not anyone's business unless you choose to disclose it.
If doctors are genuinely unsure of a patient's sex at birth and aren't sure if they're pregnant, you know what happens if you run a pregnancy test on a cis male? The testing machine blows up taking the whole hospital with it!
Just kidding, you get a negative test result, and you can proceed in the knowledge that the patient is not pregnant, just as you would if the patient were a sexually active cis woman of childbearing age who is also not pregnant.
Knowing that trans women of color started the movement in the united states and were literally immediately erased and excluded from what they started is the most deeply jading knowledge.
It is the original sin of the so-called queer community and it damns it from the cradle.
Without Stonewall, without the efforts of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the LGBTQ Community wouldn’t be where it is today. Don’t forget the roots, don’t forget the catalyst.
and then TERFs wanna be like, “hmm well the LGBT community existed before Stonewall!”
but like…Becky, of course LGBTQ+ people existed before Stonewall. We’ve all existed since the beginning of time. But the movement got a shock to its senses, a jump-start, a rocket-into-space when that glass shattered via Marsha P. Johnson, and when Sylvia Rivera was up on-stage protesting guess who was on the sidelines heckling her?
The same fuckers who won’t ever reblog or acknowledge this
My apologies to the original poster as I photo captured this post to add to the thread-I reposted this last year for pride and expect to repost it every year I have left-it’s our history people.
Marsha P. Johnson allegedly died of suicide in 1992, and her death was never investigated. Even I, a mere prole, could catch the “she was murdered” vibes from the circumstances surrounding the discovery of her body.
Without a trans black woman, LGBT+ rights would not exist. Never forget. Never “pay it no mind”.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 7/12
Fandom: Downton Abbey
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Thomas Barrow/Tom Branson
Characters: Thomas Barrow, Tom Branson, Mary Crawley, Sybbie Branson, George Crawley, Phyllis Baxter, Anna Bates, Elsie Hughes (Downton Abbey)
Additional Tags: Romance, Drama, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Happy Ending, Suicide Attempt, Suicidal Thoughts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, dark humour, Slow Burn, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, Sexual Tension, split POV, Thomas and the children, Weekly Updates
Summary:
When Tom finds Thomas and assists after his suicide attempt, a bond forms between the two men, one that is built upon a mutual need for one another. As their friendship grows, the bond develops into something deeper and much more abiding.
baratheonpilled
dededos
pixelskylines
jacobvanloon
