Mei is a Mistake

She/her 20s

[messsssmer]

"Whimsy" is truly a wretched term. What maketh thee so carefree?

[fireknightqueelign]

thy mother

[messsssmer]

Art thou for fucking real

[dontbelasagnax]

Mentioned to my mom I'm asexual a couple months ago and today.... we got into the car and she hit me with, "So you use they/them pronouns now?"

I went, "What. no. she/her."

"How does that work? With she/her/hers and they/them?"

I stared at her. "What are you talking about?"

"Well you came out as-" and I said, "I'm asexual."

She replied, "Like an amoeba, I know."

"Oh. My god. No. Mom. It doesn't- it's not the asexual you learned about in biology. I didn't come out as a single celled organism."

With heavy relief, she said "Oh, it has a different meaning?"

"Yes, mom."

[savetheworldkissaplushie]

[thatsoup]

The light inside an oven is crucial to getting breads to rise. Without the light inside simulating the sun, the bread can't tell which way is up, leaving it twisted and ruined.

[admircot]

interesting kinship i noticed

[happyt-r-ail]

[therabbitthatpostthings]

I will never relate to a character harder than I do Howl Jenkins-Pendragon.

He had a choice: Give your heart to a Fire Demon and live in an ever moving castle as you are being hunted by a vicious witch who wishes to consume you

OR

Pay back your student loans

And he chose the former. So real of him. I would done the same, no second thoughts.

[elodieunderglass]

@mmarycontrary spotted you being hilarious exactly one year ago!

[elodieunderglass]

No but for real, his undergrad would've been virtually free, in the 1980s in the UK. For the sake of the bit, he likely did not do much teaching at all to support himself in grad school, let alone taking a part-time job, and would've been cobbling together some grants for his tuition and "research," but would have taken some loans for buying books, paying rent, eating, and living on. On the one hand, he went to Swansea, at a time when rent was cheap, and his car is garbage; on the other, he spends all of his money instantly on fabulous outfits, skincare products and instruments he can't play, so he probably could rack up debt in a really impulsive irritating way. Megan does imply that he received more financial support than he deserved, and squandered it.

His student loans were probably £65.73, and he wouldn't have even had to pay them back until his income was high enough, but that concept probably freaked him out, because it implied he might get a job

[obsob]

new painting!! kitties!!

[girlblocker]

by 2026 the average tumblr post about gender and interests will be like ‘dont ask me why but having a job is sooo boycore and cooking at home is so girlcore’

[melodiesblue]

[cowboybrunch]

listen i'm not here to tell you how to live your life nor how to title your novel. but can we please move on from a blank of blank and blank. we have so many a blank of blank and blanks. the shelves are full of a blank of blank and blanks. it's enough. can we do something else now

[vintagewildlife]

French grunt changing colors by day (left) and by night (right) By: Walter A. Starck II From: Life Nature Library: The Fishes 1963

[andreii-tarkovsky]

To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

Dir. Beeban Kidron

[brehaaorgana]

This was such a formative movie

[musicalhell]

This shit was revolutionary for the mid-90s. Among other things it helped me understand that transgender and cross-dressing were completely separate things.

[aqueerkettleofish]

To this day, I am in awe of the fact that Patrick Swayze not only campaigned hard to get the audition, not only auditioned in dress and makeup, but spent most of the day leading up to the audition walking around LA in dress and makeup.

This was a man who could sing, dance, act, ride a horse, fight, and walk in heels, he had nothing to prove to anyone, and he is MISSED.

[aqueerkettleofish]

Okay, I’m not done feeling about this.

If you’re younger, you may not know Patrick Swayze; he was Taken From Us in 2009. But Patrick Swayze was an icon of masculinity. Men were willing to watch romantic movies because Patrick Swayze was in them.

Patrick Swayze was fucking beefcake.

And this man didn’t just agree to do a movie where the only time he’s not actually in drag is the first three minutes, which involve stepping out of the shower, doing make up, and getting Dressed. He has ONE LINE that is delivered in a man’s voice, and it’s not during those three minutes.

And if you watch those three minutes, you see a stark difference between his portrayal of Miss Vida Bohéme and Wesley Snipes as Noxeema Jackson. (I am not criticizing Snipes’ performance. They were different roles.) Noxeema was a comedy character. Chi-Chi was a comedy character. But Miss Vida Bohéme was a dramatic role, played by a dramatic powerhouse.

When Vida sits down in front of the mirror, she sees a man. And she doesn’t like it.

Then she puts her hair up, and her face lights up.

“Ready or not,” she says. “Here comes Mama.”

And while Noxeema is having fun with her transformation (at one point breaking into a giggling fit after putting on pantyhose), Vida is simply taking pleasure in bringing out her true self. And when she’s done, she sees this:

And you can FEEL her pride.

All of this from an actor who, up to this point, walked on to the screen and dripped testosterone.

[impossiblemonsters]

the fact that some of you history-ignorant children in the notes are trying to shit on groundbreaking historical queer cinema because it doesn’t meet 2021 standards is infuriating. sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to the elders in the room for fucking once

[darkshrimpemotions]

This. If you have never lived in a world where queerness was universally pathologized and criminalized to the point that even IMAGINING a world where it wasn’t constituted a radical and potentially dangerous act, you don’t have any business judging those of us who have for how we survived it and how we found (or still find) comfort in the few imperfect representations we got.

You don’t have to like it. You probably aren’t capable of “getting” it. And to be honest, I don’t want you to! I am glad that young queer people will never know exactly what it was like “back then.” But what you also will not do is refuse to learn your own history and then shit on everything that came before you, because like it or not what came before you is the reason you will never have to get what it was like back then.

[hussyknee]

On Wesley Snipes’s role Noxeema and John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.

“I grew up in the ‘70s and even within the street culture, there was a lot of flamboyancy,” Snipes told TODAY of his perception of drag before filming. “Pimps wore the same furs as theprostitutes wore.

“Some of the great musicians of the world, like Parliament-Funkadelic, were very androgynous. So it wasn’t really new for me to see men dressed as women or men dressed as drag queens.”

Snipes attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and then State University of New York at Purchase. He wasn’t a dance major, but most of his friends were. “That exposed me to the world of glam, vogue, drag, transgender and gay people, LGBTQ… but it wasn’t in fashion those days. But it existed and I was around it.”

Not only did “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” pave the way for “To Wong Foo,” so did films like the 1968 documentary “The Queen” and “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 doc that chronicled ball culture of New York and the various Black and queer communities involved in it.

Even though he was known for his action roles, Snipes’ portrayal of Noxeema wasn’t the first time he played a drag queen. In 1986, he made his Broadway debut in the play “Execution of Justice,” playing Sister Boom Boom, a real-life AIDS activist and drag nun who acted as the show’s voice of conscience. Snipes pointed out, “Sister Boom Boom did not have Noxeema’s makeup kit.”

On whether he got any pushback for stepping into Noxeema’s pumps, he said, “Not so much professionally but the streets weren’t feeling it, and there were certain community circles. The martial arts community… they were not feeling it at all.”

“In fact, when the movie came out and they would come down the street, I would see them in Brooklyn sometimes, they started listing all my movies. I noticed they would always skip that one. I would correct them, ‘Now you don’t got the full count!’”

Lesser-known than his co-stars at the time, Lequizamo didn’t really anticipate becoming a transgender icon, but he did know that they were working on something special when they started filming.

“Drag didn’t really exist in movies,” Lequizamo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, told TODAY. “There were straight men pretending to be women to get out of trouble or into trouble but this was not that. I was trying to make Chi-Chi a real life trans character and Patty and Wesley were trying to be real drag queens.” Never fully articulated in the film, Chi-Chi Rodriguez has always been perceived as transgender, something that ending up making an indelible mark on LGBTQ people in the late ‘90s as trans representation in media was limited.

“Chi-Chi was a trans icon, but she also showed us that gay men and trans women can both perform and work in drag side by side, and that those relationships are symbiotic,” Cayne explained.

“It was a powerful thing. I get lots of fan mail from LGBTQ teens telling me how my character helped them come out to their parents,” Leguizamo said. “They didn’t feel like they were seen, so that was a beautiful gift from the movie.”

Lequizamo also articulates that if “To Wong Foo” were cast today, a trans actor should be cast in his role. (And that just may happen, since Beane is developing a musical for Broadway.) “Anybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way,” he said. “Not everybody is allowed to play everything. So until we get to that place, it is important for trans actors to get a chance to act which they don’t. In the project I’m doing, I’m making sure that the person playing trans is a trans person so we can make it legit, make it real. That just needs to be done right now.”

Source: How Hollywood heartthrobs and Steven Spielberg helped make a drag queen cult classic

[fedorahead]

a monumental film in the library of queer history.

it was formative for modern society, too.

there are a lot of action fans out there who learned from their idols that respect doesn’t cost a damn thing to give. i know plenty of people who aren’t queer saw trans women and drag queens presented as people to them for the first time in wong fu. suddenly, strange and foreign queer identities that had only been presented to them as jokes if they’d even heard of them, seemed a little more relatable, and very human.

we’re all just people.

snipes, swayze, and leguizamo were willing to play people a lot of their fans didn’t respect yet or didn’t even know how to respect and demand they figure it the fuck out.

[leonbutchkennedy]

[tastefullyoffensive]

[tpwrtrmnky]

the real answer to almost every "does [identity A] belong in [identity B] spaces" question is actually just "these spaces are informal social groups and if you're cool you can hang, don't worry about it"

[tpwrtrmnky]

You can be Homer Simpson at the lesbian bar. It's fine. Don't worry about it.

[lizardlicks]

not without those fire exits I'm not. have fun in your death trap, ladies

[mrsandman42069]

[animentality]

[henbased]

injecting people with hrt and testosterone with blowdarts just as god wouldve wantedd

[lokaror]

GOUGAR CLAIMS COOL ROCK

[ubersaur]

God forbid women do anything

[justpastsaturn]

She had a good time, too

[wertfi-penguin]

Maybe the most damming thing about Nolans odyssey is i haven’t seen a single gifset from it

[geekyhistoriansunite]