deadbodyonline @thisistrueevil - Tumblr Blog

There are people who could probably put it in better words than I (though I did try with a lesson!) but one thing I love about being Black and Queer is that once you reject all of the internalized hate that your society has forced onto you, that being Black and being Queer are aberrant, sinful, inferior, something to abhor... It's really fucking awesome. Go together like whipped cream and a sundae fr. I love being me.

I haven't loved myself more than I have accepting myself and how my experiences cannot be separated. I'm not just Black and just Queer, the way I think many queer white folks struggle with (how Whiteness affects even your queerness and understanding of gender experience).

I'm both, they're together and inseparable, they make for something that frankly, is clear everybody Wants because otherwise we wouldn't be the queer pop culture creators and innovators we continue to be.

Idk, I just love it. I love knowing that I'm an existence that was meant to die out or be crushed or wilt under pressure and I'm still standing (ha!) I want that for all of us, fr. Self love won't stop systemic oppression, but it sure helps when you're sure of who you are when you're fighting.

herpsandbirds

Phainopepla (Phainopepla nitens), male, family Ptiliogonatidae, order Passeriformes, Sacramento, CA, USA

photograph by Michele McCormick

notbecauseofvictories

A few weeks ago, I visited my parents out in the suburbs---and, as any dutiful granddaughter would, I also trekked over to my grandparents' house to bow obeisance and exchange polite small talk.

(To be really clear, I don't actually object to this. Their world is small, hemmed in by my grandfather's profound memory loss and my grandmother's mobility issues, declining cognition---visiting with them costs me nothing and makes them happy. But....well. Getting old is not for the faint of heart.)

Anyway, while I was there, my grandmother pulled out an old photo album of hers. There are a handful of pictures from her and her siblings' childhood, others from the brief period when she was a single gal in the city (she interned for a branch of a federal agency, spent time in Washington DC); plus a handful from her marriage, and when she was a young school teacher. She can name every person in every photo, even the schoolkids! It's an amazing map of her memory.

But what stuck out to me---and sticks out to me now, as I look through/edit my sister's wedding photos---is that the less-than-perfect feels realer, truer, and more emotive than the perfectly staged shots. I have lovely shots of my sister and brother-in-law, perfectly posed; but what I love is the slightly blurred, too-flushed photo of them about to kiss. I like the photos of my grandmother poised and well-dressed at someone's wedding---but I love the photo of her with her girlfriends, perched on a wooden fence beside a cliffside and them laughing, squirming, faintly fuzzed around the edges.

"Grandma," I said to this 80+ year old woman who only mostly remembers who I am, "you're so cute!"

"Oh, well..." she tried to demur, though I could tell she was pleased.

My mother likes posed phone camera pictures---everybody smile, hold it! type shots. What I love are the photos where the subject has not figured out that you're about to immortalize them. They're just laughing, or teasing; their mouth is open, things are flushed, there are folds. To look at images of human beings being human is worship, in my opinion. It doesn't make a difference whether that image is a bunch of 20-something women in 1950s Washington DC or a 20-something Midwestern couple in the 2020s. Either way, the humanity is unchanged.