Kiana Khansmith
Keni
Monterey Bay Aquarium
noise dept.
if i look back, i am lost
Origami Around
trying on a metaphor
JVL
almost home
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Mike Driver
izzy's playlists!
Xuebing Du
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
šŖ¼
Peter Solarz
Andulka
sheepfilms
#extradirty
tumblr dot com
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@notprettyugly
I always wondered about this room. Where is it?
Whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it.
behind the garage
And thatās the end of that mystery
why the simpsons got a bigger house than my parents
Homer is a nuclear engineer
This post made me realize that Homer is in fact a Nuclear engineerā¦
āhellrooā ???
This is so cute that my friend cried when I showed it to her
guys my momās new boyfriend is trying to be supportive of me being a trans guy and he said āi got you a gift, a boy giftā
itās a mountain dew nascar trucker hat. i wanna scream, like itās nice he got me a gift and itās nice heās trying butā¦. I wanna Sc r EAM
Guys drink MOUNTAIN DEW
And drive
N ASC AR
And wear
Tr u ck hA ts
guys my momās new boyfriend is trying to be supportive of me being a trans guy and he said āi got you a gift, a boy giftā
itās a mountain dew nascar trucker hat. i wanna scream, like itās nice he got me a gift and itās nice heās trying butā¦. I wanna Sc r EAM
Guys drink MOUNTAIN DEW
And drive
N ASC AR
And wear
Tr u ck hA ts
A must-watch: MSNBCās Stephanie Ruhle reminds everyone of the known sexual assault accusations against Donald Trump, one by one, in detail.
āFor one thing, thereās Didoā fetishization by the two Ashford brothers. While one brother sees her simply as an exotic āotherā whom he can bed without forming attachments ā very different from the attitude toward white women of the same time period, whose virtue was unequivocal and untouchable ā the other is downright violent in his conception of Dido, calling her ārepulsiveā but still expressing a desire to rape her. The scenes in which that older, more violent Ashford brother addresses Dido directly, giving voice to his unbridled racism and at one point assaulting her, are indisputably disturbing, not just because they represent a disgusting and brutal history but because I see remnants of those attitudes today in the way the world perceives the bodies of black and brown women: exotic, sexual, sensual, different objects. We see it in the way Miley Cyrus and almost any given white pop star (Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke, for example) use black womenās bodies as props in music videos: as something to be appropriated and used for oneās own pleasure and then cast off in pursuit of the next trend. In addition, the rape of black women still does not seem to carry much horror in 2014; it was most recently a punchline on Saturday Night Live, and last year Russell Simmons was forced to apologize for his highly offensive āHarriet Tubman Sex Tape.ā None of this is too different from the way the Ashford brothers perceive Didoās body: as an exotic āotherā not worthy of love or respect but merely of lust, and lust framed in a particularly problematic racism.ā
Ā Belle: A Lesson in the Timelessness of Racism and Misogyny Against Black Women byĀ Olivia ColeĀ
A must-watch: MSNBCās Stephanie Ruhle reminds everyone of the known sexual assault accusations against Donald Trump, one by one, in detail.
180218 SHINee World 2018 : Kyocera dome : MINHO & ONEW
eveOnew
170218 Day 1, Kyocera Dome
while it was such an emotional concert and may seem like it was all a very somber affair, it didnāt take away from the fact that this was very well-thought of and it demonstrated how amazing SHINee is and how much hard work they put into it.
that setlist took me for a ride. amazing vocals, powerful choreographies, the handsome costumes, the way they interacted with the audience from all levels and distances within the dome, the honesty and sincerity of it all. i have nothing but utmost pride and respect for them.
the concert started with a short vcr. the sea, then a big moon came into view. we all pretty much lost it right there and then. colors of the season played, and then jinkiās voice. the last time i heard and saw him was 6 months ago, so to hear him again, his voice so strong and clear, clutched at my heart and suffused it with so much joy. i missed him so much. and then the stage cleared to reveal them. they were wearing bejeweled rich velvets. they looked so princely!
then it was one intense performance after another. stranger, everybody, evil, juliette. there was a dance break before everybody i think (or was it stranger? i canāt remember) and it was sooooo good! they were on the platform stage at that time so i couldnāt see how it looked like as a whole, but they all were going hard at it. evil was on the extended stage. they used these long, red fabric for prop. their dance and facial expressions were so intense!
everybody was.. hard. iāve been wondering if theyāll ever do this song again or how, but they did so now and when the concert just began too! i think there are already accounts of how they did this, like minho pointing the remote upwards when it was jjongās turn. or that part when minhoās in front and the four were in pairs carrying each other, but now, while one pair was doing it, one person was facing them (his back to minho).
throughout this, and probably most of the concert, jinki was always on the side nearest our area. so while he naturally takes all my attention, him always facing us/near us made it easy and i couldnt see some of the boys sometimes unless they rotate positions.
after that strong set, they played a vcr - the end of the day and then pictures of jjong. it wasā¦ tough.
then the boys sang the ballads. they started with love. jinki was so near, i could see his left fist clenched so tightly. and then the whole set, his voice was breaking, and sometimes, he couldnāt stop himself from crying. jinki crying tears my heart. the sheer will power it is taking our boys to do this is so palpable.
after a break (they played songs like RDD, colorful etc.), they came back on stage and started with the more upbeat songs. i donāt know how jinki did it, but contrary to earlier, jinki was all smiles and so playful. and he was so full of energy. is this him, showing how much he missed the stage too? seeing him like that warmed my heart. felt like a lifetime, that iāve longed to see his smile. this was when they rode the carts around the dome and minho/taemin went up in the balloons.
okay, enough for now. my hands are frozen from typing while in the queue.
in case i donāt get to finish this, i just want to say that iām glad iām here. i needed this. it felt to me like we were working through our grief together and keeping a promise to each other. but i know too that we have different ways of dealing with this and thatās perfectly okay. no one should dictate or judge how we deal with this.
i hope our darlings will continue to take care of themselves. i love SHINee.
& then this happened..
@jong-fetti
heheheā¦Jinki stumblingš
Anne Hathawayās character in Devil Wears Prada literally just starts dressing better and taking an interest in her work and her friends act like sheās an awful person who has āchangedā. Like bitch THIS IS NOT A LINDSAY LOHAN MEAN GIRLS MOMENT all she did was get the new Chanel boots.
@whisperjohn (instastory): so close TT_TT
So much preciousness ;;Ā ā”Ā Ā
š
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. heās about 50 years old. talking to him about it really hit me hard. like, at one point i commented, āyeah, iāve heard that every gay person who lived through the epidemic knew at least 2 or 3 people who died,ā and he was like ā2 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 menās health crisis, you knew hundreds.ā 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, itās weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldnāt say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, itās so weird to me that thereās 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 itās 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 wasnāt a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know itās 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 youād find out from someone āoh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.ā
so idk. it was really moving to hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand. and thatās 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 havenāt been doing a very good job of it.
Younger than 40.
Iām 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, soā¦ 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, 3āx6ā, 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. Theyād 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 Iād 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. Iād helped him with his partnerās panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldnāt 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. Donāt 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 ā 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 ā marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.
OK, thatās it, thatās all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Donāt watch fictional movies, donāt 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. Iām 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what Iāve 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. Itās chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virusā 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 UPās 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 heās polarising for a reason: heās the epidemicās Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaust collects his writings on AIDS.
I donāt think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I canāt read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list:Ā
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 itās also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. Itās 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. Thereās a film of And the Band Played On but JFC itās 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 canāt understand here and now if we donāt know about then.
*there are just SO MANY people I want to punch in the throat.
Theyāve 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 someoneās 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 whoād all been members of a club or threatre group.
Hereās 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
Iāve had several conversations recently with younger guys for whom this part of our history isnāt 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 butā¦ itās so important. itās so important to understand just the ā¦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.
