David Hockney Rain, from The Weather Series (NGA/Gemini 23.4), 1973 Color lithograph and screenprint on Arches watermarked paper; signed 'David Hockney 73' in green pencil along the lower edge
RIP David Hockney
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
RMH
Show & Tell

No title available
dirt enthusiast

Kiana Khansmith
Misplaced Lens Cap

No title available

JVL

Janaina Medeiros
AnasAbdin
i don't do bad sauce passes
ojovivo

#extradirty
YOU ARE THE REASON
h

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
d e v o n

No title available
almost home

seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from Netherlands

seen from Türkiye
seen from Germany

seen from Indonesia

seen from United States

seen from Sweden
seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom

seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from Netherlands

seen from United States

seen from Germany

seen from United States

seen from Netherlands
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Argentina
@verdantsloth
David Hockney Rain, from The Weather Series (NGA/Gemini 23.4), 1973 Color lithograph and screenprint on Arches watermarked paper; signed 'David Hockney 73' in green pencil along the lower edge
RIP David Hockney
Stories of Elf World
Katharine Hepburn in HOLIDAY (1938) dir. George Cukor
Ellsworth Kelly, “Black Curve I,” 1970.
a little two-parter sneakret update has dropped at Doomsday, My Dear!
didn't wanna make a big ol production over what's essentially two panels, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway :V
we're getting clooooserrrrr to the ennnnnd
Colored sketch commission for VerdantSloth!
Won't you sacrifice your livestock to her?
Today, critics—and maybe the art-viewing public, too—are still unable to prevent themselves from understanding blackness as, in the first order, political. This phenomenon has been exacerbated by writing that overstates the political significance and social power of art, and of the work of black artists in particular. In the past decade, the absence, and moreover the failure, of progressive and leftist political formations—membership organizations, political parties, mass-mobilization campaigns—has placed a great deal of pressure on cultural production and consumption. This has generated significant investments in representation as a meaningful and efficacious form of political activity. The work of black artists—and indigenous artists, other artists of color, and queer artists—has been asked to redeem audiences, institutions, and buyers, with its patronage, purchase, and display to serve as reparative gestures. This framework, which suggests that the consumption and assessment of black artists always carries political stakes, is not one that easily accommodates negative judgments.
from Black Block, by Rachel Hunter Himes, for Triple Canopy [via]
la la la Jacinthe
Dress designed by Alessandro Trincone. Worn by Young Thug on the cover of his 2016 mixtape.
Trans women getting arrested for petty crime.
On my mind while reading on Liddy Bacroff, of Hamburg, who went through multiple Weimar/Third Reich prisons and passed at Mauthausen concentration camp. Also: Medical pathologization, disability, masquerading, anti-disguise laws, criminalizing poverty.
(From "Liddy Bacroff [...], 1908-1943," Room of Names, Deceased of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Mauthausen Memorial.)
Man-Woman's theft, crossdressing, trespassing, homosexual acts, and forging of papers to avoid police surveillance (nice).
But what ultimately got her killed was that bar incident in March 1938. Some onlooker reported her for being "a man in women's clothing." For sitting at a fucking table.
And a diagnosis ("death sentence") from a doctor:
"Tranvestite to [her] core."
The "denunciation" and the diagnosis. She passed in that camp.
Thinking on dress/gender transgression from 1840s onward in US and Europe, often penalized and prosecuted via "anti-disguise" laws.
Explicit outlawing of crossdressing came with anti-crossdressing laws of St. Louis in 1843, Columbus 1848, and Nashville 1850.
What of the anti-disguise laws, though? Also referred to as "anti-mask" or "anti-masquerade" laws.
New York, in 1845, passed what would become the template for anti-disguise laws.
About the same time. Why? What else was happening?
Consider the spectacular anti-rent riots of 1839:
And then consider New York's anti-disguise laws:
And now we have stuff like this:
(From 2025.)
And then take a look at how Clare Sears frames this development in the 1840s:
["Several states did, however, pass anti-disguise or masquerade laws that encompassed cross-dressing when enforced. In 1845, for example, New York’s state legislature passed an anti-disguise law that made it a crime to appear in public with a painted face or when wearing a disguise designed to prevent identification. Passed in response to rural workers who wore women’s dresses and masks while participating in anti-rent protests, the law was later used to criminalize a wide range of cross-dressing practices. Similarly, in 1874, California’s state legislature passed a masquerade law [...]. As with New York’s anti-disguise statute, local police repurposed California’s masquerade law to arrest multiple people for public cross-dressing over the next one hundred years." (Sears, from March 2023, in Jacobin)]
Rent. About affording your shelter. And laws which essentially targeted the already-precarious, pre-empting future dissent or defiance. Those laws then conveniently were also mobilized against gender transgression.
Notably, the 1845 New York law which was wielded as an anti-crossdressing rule was actually more directly an anti-vagrancy law.
1830-ish to 1840-ish: Something of a climax for "Industrial Revolution" in Britain and US's Northeast which coerced laborers into industrial work and compelled housing loss.
Sorry for (what is, coming from me, now becoming) the refrain, always pointing out the entanglement of medical pathologization, crushing labor dissent, vagrancy concept, and criminal-making legal devices.
Like, in just five years' time:
1834: Slavery Abolition Act comes into effect (but slaves required to continue laboring as "apprentices" for four years) as Workhouse Act/Poor Law Amendment Act requires "vagrants" and the poor to work minimum number of hours. 1835: Municipal Corporations Act requires nearly 200 English boroughs to establish police forces. 1836: Thuggee and Dacoity Suppression Act in British India targets "any gang of Thugs" with life imprisonment. 1837: Establishment of Irish Constabulary, "Britain's first national police force". July 1838: Vagrancy Act makes "joblessness" a crime. five days later in 1838: technical legal emancipation of Black slaves under "apprenticeship" in British Caribbean. 1839: County Police Act and Rural Constabulary Act encourage judges to establish local/rural police forces.
Conflates a lot.
Of course, race. Peter Boag examines crossdressing law in the western US in the nineteenth century; see his chapter “”He Was a Mexican”: Race and the Marginalization of Male-to-Female Cross-Dressers in Western History."
Sears also authored Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. They describe a continuum of the policing of "public visbility of problem bodies."
Apt setting, since San Francisco passed the 1867 "Ugly Law:
“Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares or public places in the City of County of San Francisco, shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view.”
Pop media making a game out of deducing "the truth," inviting everyone else to play along. From San Francisco again:
"Can You Tell at a Glance Which Are Men and Which Are Women in These Pictures?" (The San Francisco Call, 21 May 1911)
Imperative: becoming co-conspirators.
Regarding the anti-"ugly" and anti-vagrant law templates from California, here's a headline:
("Strangest Union in the World Uncovered Here: League of Beggars, Crippled, Sightless, Epileptic and Deformed," Los Angeles Times, 1913. A "great association of mendicants" and "defiance to efforts to drive them from the streets.")
Today, we've got San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland--the whole US--crushing "vagrancy" and severely punishing the homeless. Outlawing of "disguises"/masking at public demonstrations. Sweeping "anti-drag laws" and "bathroom bills" reasserting crossdressing/predator-in-disguise stuff.
Disguise, duplicity, masquerading, eluding, evading, fugitivity, disobedience, etc.
Maybe I, Transvestite-to-Her-Core, do support subterfuge broadly. (Subterfuge Broad, name for life-affirming persona?)
Thinking about whoever it was in the Hamburg tavern who reported Liddy for sitting at a table. Should've shut the fuck up.
“Crystalline Light,” reduction linocut, 2025. By William Hays
12/31/2025
forgot how white this website is and expected there to be more uproar about the US bombing my home country, nigeria, on christmas day. my mistake!
Sokoto state, a majority Muslim state in north-west Nigeria was bombed on Christmas day. It is still unclear how many bombs were dropped and where. Confirmed is a bomb dropped on a Mosque in Jabo, killing 5 people.
Trump has claimed that this is in retaliation of the "Christian genocide" happening in Nigeria, committed by "radical Islamists" of the ISIL (ISIS), and the specific choosing of Christmas day was to reify that this is a religious based retaliation.
This Christmas, I am in Nigeria. My family is majority Christian. We are without fear of being persecuted on the basis of our religion. So, what is going on?
There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria. Nigeria is a complex country that faces a lot of violence, exploitation and subsequent neglect from our government. But it is not Christians being targeted in our country. This insidious piece of misinformation has been dutifully organised by US officials for months and gained steam on platforms like X and Truth Social.
I do not believe though, that this action was done to fight Islamic terrorists or protect Nigerian Christians. The reason being:
Sokoto state is not a state with ISIL activity.
This is another display of US throwing its weight around, conveniently, onto the most oil-rich country in Africa.
Do not believe everything the US tells you about its foreign affairs. The US will gladly spill blood on the flimsiest of justifications just to continue gorging its empire.
Please keep love in your hearts for the Nigerian people.