Jes The Pendragon @jesthependragon - Tumblr Blog

Henryk Hektor Siemiradzki (1843-1902)

Finally got around to finishing this one up! I went super heavy on the red ink and as a result never really dried and smudged everywhere while I was doing the illumination. Oh well. Calligraphy and (somewhat) design based on the Book of Kells. #calligraphy #illuminatedmanuscript #art #medieval #celtic

#art #illuminatedmanuscript #celtic #calligraphy #medieval

Here's a boring selfie in a messy bathroom to celebrate feeling right in a button up shirt for the first time ever! I'm so excited to be post-op and on the mend! #ftm #ftmtopsurgery #nonbinary #selfie

#ftm #nonbinary #selfie #ftmtopsurgery

When recovering from top surgery, will take on crazy projects. Full disclosure, this is traced to some extent, it's mostly meant to be a colour study. #art #medieval #utacodex #ithink

#utacodex #art #medieval #ithink

Spoiler alert for my Lions Gate Arts and Sciences entry? These are just my secondary entry anyway. Medieval apothecary jars, based on existing artifacts. Swipe to see references and what the (thrifted) jars originally looked like. #SCA #artsandsciences #medieval #apothecary #painting

#artsandsciences #apothecary #sca #painting #medieval

High tea at Fry's Corner Beestro, at the @honeybeecentre. 😛🐝💛 (at Honeybee Centre)

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Look at this book I got at the thrift store for $1.99 I'm so chuffed! I love Mucha! 😍😍😍

Practice makes perfect... Been thinking about doing something like this for a while now. This is a very rough first draft. I may add some colours, although it is just done on tracing paper. I need to make a lightbox at some point... #calligraphy #illumination #tarot #threeofswords #art

#tarot #threeofswords #calligraphy #illumination #art

unpretty

you’d think “magical man who takes at least three hours to get his hair and makeup done in the morning and also can turn into a bird” would be too specific to be a type

unpretty

it really says something about us that the primary response to this seems to be “please list all of the ones you’re aware of in case i missed one”

enoughtohold

it’s interesting learning which homophobic ideas are confusing and unfamiliar to the next generation. for example, every once in a while i’ll see a post going around expressing tittering surprise at someone’s claim that gay men have hundreds of sexual partners in their lifetimes. while these posts often have a snappy comeback attached, they send a shiver down my spine because i remember when those claims were common, when you’d see them on the news or read them in your study bible. and they were deployed with a specific purpose — to convince you not just that gay men were disgusting and pathological, but that they deserved to die from AIDS. i saw another post laughing at the outlandish idea that gay men eroticize and worship death, but that too was a standard line, part and parcel of this propaganda with the goal of dehumanizing gay men as they died by the thousands with little intervention from mainstream society.

which is not to say that not knowing this is your fault, or that i don’t understand. i’ll never forget sitting in a classroom with my high school gsa, all five of us, watching a documentary on depictions of gay and bi people in media (off the straight and narrow [pdf transcript] — a worthwhile watch if your school library has it) when the narrator mentioned “the stereotype of the gay psycho killer.” we burst into giggles — how ridiculous! — then turned to our gay faculty advisors and saw their pale, pained faces as they told us “no, really. that was real” and we realized that what we’d been laughing at was the stuff of their lives.

it’s moving and inspiring to see a new generation of kids growing up without encountering these ideas. it’s a good thing. but at the same time, we have to pass on the knowledge of this pain, so we’re not caught unawares when those who hate us come back with the oldest tricks in the book.

bogleech

Even in the 90’s I met people who believed, with the utmost sincerity and a sense of sheer terror, that gay people were agents of Satan who chose to become gay so they could deliberately spread STD’s, deliberately die of AIDs as part of their “fetish” and deliberately offend god into accelerating the end of the world. This does sound like absurd cartoonish nonsense to most people just a little younger than me but I heard it and worse growing up. Millions of people completely, totally believed that kind of thing with the most dire certainty. Today’s lizardman hollow earth anti-vaccine theories actually kind of pale in comparison.

That is what LGBT people were up against not long ago and the remnants of that fantastical-sounding hysteria and fanaticism are not only still here but regaining power again in the U.S. pretty rapidly.

…and I don’t think people should forget that for all I just described and all OP just described, the hatred for trans people was several times worse. Their very existence was treated as UNSPEAKABLE by even the Satanic HIV Apocalypse theorists. This is why it’s so bizarre and ridiculous to see people today whining about “PC culture” like that’s the problem, like people who were condemned as loathsome hellspawn within most of their own lifetimes somehow have it “too good” practically overnight.

disease-danger-darkness-silence

do you have any idea what the AIDS funerals were like back then

I will harp on this until the day I die. It’s not information that people have nowadays both because it’s not really needed - thank GOD - and it’s been erased - not so cool.

pastors would take payment to perform the ceremony and then not show up. crematoriums would sometimes refuse to handle the bodies; funeral homes were no better, and my dad once walked in on a mortician dumping rubbing alcohol all over himself after he’d BEEN IN THE SAME ROOM as the body of one of my father’s dead friends. the funerals were held in people’s basements, the very very few churches at funeral homes willing, meeting halls, and in the homes of lesbians, who were some of the most steadfast allies during that time period. The few straight allies pitched in where they could – like that one woman who buried a lot of them herself, in her own cemetery, because their families wouldn’t come claim the bodies – but it was awful.

my dad was a reformed catholic but he knew the words and twice he had to perform the funerals to lay these people to rest because he was the most qualified. I stood next to him as he tried not to cry over his dead friends and to let them rest in peace. I watched my mother, at the back of wherever she was, quietly sobbing, and her lesbian friends who had ACTUALLY watched the person in question die, still comforting her.

I got told by other adults that my entire family was going to hell because we deigned to care for queer people (and my dad especially, as a nurse, deigned to “waste” his knowledge and time and energy on easing suffering).

I was six years old. Freddie Mercury hadn’t even died yet.

recently a friend and I formed a queer social group/activism group and some older gay men came. And they cried, because, and I quote

“This is how it started, back then. we just got together, ten or twelve of us, and decided we were going to do something about it. And we made it out, despite everything, despite AIDS, despite the stigma. And you will too.”

And I had to respond, because I was little, but I was THERE for that, and I grabbed his hands and told him that his history is our history and we need to learn it.

we need to remember. the dead, the living, and their stories.

if you know an older queer person, inquire if they’d be interested in writing down their memoirs. If they’re not writers but want to tell the story, hit me up – I am, and I am absolutely willing to do a living memory.

they’re the only history books we have.

inspirationawe

THEY ARE THE ONLY HISTORY BOOKS WE HAVE! It’s so important to record them at last.

Because lgbt+ history hasn’t been recorded, nor told forward by others. What we learn we learn from morgues, criminal records etc. Only ‘unlucky’ persons have been recorded in any ways and most of happy couples, lives and tales have been lost to history as they were not spoken about.

enoughtohold

okay listen, i get what you guys are saying about the importance of listening to older lgbt people, obviously, that’s very right!

but you guys gotta know… they are NOT “the only history books we have.” because… we have actual history books. just because they are rarely taught in schools does not mean they don’t exist!

i’ve been keeping a list of all the lgbt books i want to read or reread, which are mostly history, and it is, at this moment, 239 books long. and that’s excluding quite a few that i was less interested in.

obviously, it can’t cover everything; obviously, it is skewed toward white american experiences; obviously, we should always be supplementing it by talking to older people in our community as much as we can. but it does us no favors whatsoever to pretend that all the knowledge in these books is lost to history, existing only in individuals’ minds, when actually so many people have taken great pains to write it down and make it available for us to explore!

so yes, meet older people and talk to them and take them seriously! but also please, i beg of you, read a book.

p.s. a note because i regret not making this clear enough in my original post: there is absolutely nothing wrong with gay men having many consenting sexual partners! homophobes’ statistics are obviously falsified for bigoted purposes, but that doesn’t mean those gay men who do have large numbers of partners are any less deserving of dignity and life, and they too deserve our defense.

thecoggs

I agree with all the above, but also if you are someone who wants to record history or hear more oral histories there are a few oral history archives dedicated to doing this already! It’s possible to engage in that history right now:

Here are all the transcripts for the NYC Trans Oral History Project

Here’s the ACT UP oral History Project which has videos and transcripts

Here’s a list of a bunch of known oral history projects

And this is the podcast Making Gay History, which is taped interviews done for the book of the same name (with a bit of context added beforehand)

Snow visitors! ❄️❄️❄️

reylohues

“We don’t have epic space battles here on planet earth, but he (Adam Driver) said ‘A lot of kids can relate to having parents who are really devoted to like a political cause or to a business, or to their faith, their church. And that devotion sometimes makes the kids rebel against it, rebelling in this case against the actual rebellion.’“ - Anthony Breznican on how Kylo Ren is relatable

leupagus

Okay so this is why I’ve had a huge, huge problem with Kylo Ren this whole time: because even in The Force Awakens, it was clear that we were supposed to blame his parents, his uncle, Snoke, literally everyone else for his turn to the dark side. And it looks like Johnson didn’t do a whole lot of work unpacking that, which is frustrating.

Ben Solo is in his early twenties, perhaps mid-twenties, when he joins Snoke officially; he is about 30 during the events of TFA. That is, frankly, way too fucking old to not be responsible for your own actions. We’ve seen this sort of thing too much in real life—Don Jr. being called a “good kid” when he’s in his late 30s comes to mind—for me to have a lot of patience for it in fiction. Plus, while the idea of a distant mother (and come on, they’re talking about Leia here, Han’s about as “devoted to the rebellion” as a cat) being a catalyst for men’s shittiness is a very, very worn-out trope, it’s not actually a valid reason to become a terrible person.

So this is the opposite of relatable—it makes me less empathetic for Kylo Ren’s struggle, which I’m sure is meant to be compelling, because I know of so, so many people who’ve had genuinely abusive and harmful and neglectful parents who are good and kind and work to make this world better. While I can very much imagine that Leia would be a tough mom to get along with, to frame Kylo Ren’s behavior as “youthful rebellion” instead of what it is, a conscious and adult choice to kill innocents in a quest for power, is to once again woobify a male character at the expense of any woman nearby.

madamebadger

Yyyyyep.

I get that having parents who are seriously into their politics can be difficult; lord knows I’m glad I wasn’t born to politician parents. But “mommy had a career that was important to her” (because, yeah, who thinks this is really about Han?) is a pretty crappy motivation for becoming a mass murderer, and I think it is worth dragging that into the light.

mayalaen

I’ve been asked many times what someone should look for when trying to find a good artist. The best way you can do this is to look at their portfolio, whether it’s in a book at their shop or online. If they don’t have good work in their portfolio, they’re probably not good artists.

The shop may be clean, the people there might be nice, and the design they draw up for you might be exactly what you want, but if your artist doesn’t stand up to the points listed above, then you’re going to get a bad tattoo.

It’s okay to walk into a shop, talk with an artist for a while, and decide you don’t want a tattoo from them. Even if the artist has a bad attitude about it or tries to convince you to just let them do it, remember this is going to be on your body for the rest of your life.

unforth-ninawaters-deactivated2

This is fucking fantastic thank you!!

supervillainny

So important. I had an apprentice tattoo me once without any supervision - wound up with a blurry tattoo, and a messed up tendon for a while after >:(