Mar 31, 2025
is there hope?
YES!!!! always. i swear.
seen from Switzerland
seen from Germany
seen from Lithuania
seen from China
seen from Netherlands
seen from Netherlands
seen from Netherlands
seen from Spain
seen from Serbia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Singapore
seen from Türkiye
seen from China
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Italy
seen from China
seen from Switzerland
is there hope?
YES!!!! always. i swear.
dirty
Dear God, qu'est-ce que c'est? We talked in private box pews of "Justice." the tongue in which Adam wooed Eve. No one hearing. No one noticing, one more kid hiding one less shade expressing itself, like a colour, falling off the colour wheel. Lord, I'm sure you're right but they dance in the street crashing their necks out the cigarette box Dear God, I'm sorry, but I need to consider myself one more survivor of the massacre before I'm dead.
“Living as LGBTQ+ in a Refugee Camp”
Life in Musenyi Refugee Camp is already hard, but for LGBTQ+ refugees it is even harder.
We are attacked, insulted, and excluded because of our identity.
Some of us sleep outside. Some go days without food.
Many suffer in silence because speaking out can cost us our lives.
We are human. We deserve safety and dignity.
Read Stone Butch Blues in these trying times. Seriously.
Other Women by Lisa Alther, too. So many books that depict living as a queer person before things started getting “better” are going to become our roadmap for survival.
The only way we can prepare for the possibility of queerness being illegal again is just being ready to fight.
I want to be optimistic that there are people in our government fighting for our rights, but I’m done feeling foolish for having high hopes. I need to learn how to protect myself and loved ones. I need to learn how to resist.
Check out my friend Jamal's LGBTQIA+ support orgs in East Africa. Plz share so the orphan refugee camp can make their rent this month.
Platform for queer refugees in East African refugee camps like Kakuma & Gorom.
Where is gender kept?
Not in the genitals nor the brain:
in the claws,
in the teeth,
in the piercing-gaze and the reflex strike,
in the hunt-tuned ears,
in the venom sac,
in the shadow.
-
Where is gender revealed?
Not in balloons and colour-coded rooms:
on night walks,
in wars fought
through the payroll and the picket line,
in preventable pain,
in the youthful dead
who nip at the heels of the living.
Look I hate to do this to y'all, but if you're not gonna survive the election for yourself, do it for me 🥺.
No, seriously, do not strand me in a republican led administration, please stay. This is your sign.
Meditio is a free meditate app on Android and How We Feel also does stuff for mental health on Android for free. Finch costs money, but it has some exercises and stuff for free.
If you're in Maryland, the 221md.org has a directory of resources and findhelp.org lets you sort by zip code.
My DMs are open! Discord, shit if you're in America, we can start a wellness check-in server and look after one another.
Please don't kill yourself. Hope is not lost until we lose it.
Fannish proximity across time and space
Sedgwick wrote on the transformative potential of queer reading practices in ways that, to me, also describe fannish modes of attachment: "I think that for many of us in childhood the ability to attach intently to a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed for there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and with love." In the same passage, she writes of “a visceral near-identification with the writing I cared for”: not with one or more of the characters, but with the writing; “on the level of sentence structure, metrical pattern, rhyme.” This fannish merging with the text – with its aesthetic form – was “one way of trying to appropriate what seemed the numinous and resistant power of the chosen objects.” Meanwhile, Carolyn Dinshaw, a medieval scholar and one of the founding co-editors of the journal GLQ, was writing about the “queer ... touch across time”: the intense affective attachments, including identification, which produce queer – that is, oblique, resistant and desiring – relationships to the medieval past, which exceed and refuse normative trajectories and linear histories, and find in medieval pasts and texts that “numinous and resistant power” that makes certain art objects, for their fans, potent “resources for survival.” Finding in the distant past another way of organising sexuality, selfhood and experience, which we somehow recognise, which we somehow need – the “defiant and confused” feeling of knowing, without knowing how we know, that this book, this person, this artwork, is “one of ours,” as Alison Hennegan describes in “On Becoming a Lesbian Reader.” The queer touch across time retrieves though this is too passionless a word – it rescues artworks and archives from the dustbin of history, resonating with Taylor J. Acosta’s characterisation of fandom as “a historiographic approach in the Benjamanian tradition, not as an explicit critique of history, with its pretences to critical distance, total understanding, and specificity, but rather as an alternative practice in which an art produced of love and affect can function historically.” The queer or fannish touch across time produces “worthless knowledge”: knowledge that has no value that can be registered by neoliberal-capitalist metrics and that is for that reason invaluable. (It strikes me that my desire to quote from these texts, to show them to you, is itself fannish. Look! Look at this thing that I love! It says something to me that cannot be said in any other form. Does it speak to you too? What does it say?)
WILLIS, I. ‘AFTERWORD: FAN THEORY/THEORY FAN OR I LOVE THIS BOOK’. FANDOM AS METHODOLOGY. LONDON: GOLDSMITHS PRESS.