2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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RMH
Andulka
will byers stan first human second
art blog(derogatory)
Product Placement
One Nice Bug Per Day
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if i look back, i am lost
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Sade Olutola
DEAR READER
JBB: An Artblog!
cherry valley forever
Today's Document
titsay
Janaina Medeiros
YOU ARE THE REASON
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@we-arenot-things
not to sound like a christian facebook mom but some of yall need to have grace in your hearts for the people in your lives or the people you pass once on the road and never see again like you literally need to stop assuming the worst of everyone and their intentions it is poisoning your brain. you can be careful and responsible without being a miserable person. it is possible i promise
you are a tar pit and you live this way because you choose to.
more singers should add gut wrenching screams in their songs. for me. on my behalf.
I freehanded this stitchery in about 7 hours today for a pal:
It was, of course, inspired by this post:
if you hold on to that yearning for too long it becomes indistinguishable from cowardice
embroidery from peacockandpinecones my friends and I have been losing our minds over all morning.
Counter argument: Immortal, invisible, malevolent mouse
Ring slips around mouse’s neck and is gone.
The rest of the movie is just the 9 Nazgul trying to capture the mouse while the eye of Sauron watches an extended game of Mouse Trap unfolding before him.
this is so funny.
the nonbinary icon i did not know i needed
[IMAGE ID: a large, silver, clipart-like spork over top of the nonbinary flag /END ID]
WHAT GENDER IS KNIVES
agender, they stabbed gender when it got too close
fun fact, but forks actually DID used to be considered a utensil of the devil, and it took a lot longer for them to be accepted as an eating utensil because of this
I know it is my father's first time on this Earth, too. And I know He had it worse when he was little.
But I was little too.
— Franz Kafka, from letters to his father
HANK!! HANK THIS IS NOT A KAFKA QUOTE! THE DARK ACADEMIA BLOGGERS TOOK IT FROM A TIKTOK POEM AND DECIDED SINCE IT MENTIONS FATHERS IT WAS WRITTEN BY LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY WRITER FRANZ KAFKA DESPITE THE STYLE VERY CLEARLY BEING FROM 2022 #INKSPILLED INSTAGRAM POETRY HANK! WHY WOULD HE EVEN REFER TO HIS FATHER IN THIRD PERSON IN A LETTER TO HIS FATHER WHEN THEY ARE ALL IN THE SECOND PERSON!! HANK LISTEN TO ME!!! HANK!!!!!
an asparagus looks on in horror as their four adopted children encourage his tomato husband to commit mass suicide
why is this bplowing up again
Still collecting the full alphabet of the “live, laugh, love” variants if anyone has some good examples.
Bonus if they can fit the “We can’t ___, _____, ____ our way out of this.”
compilation of the comments’ best hits + some of mine own.
Do you write music with the view of being politically active and delivering a message or does it just happen and the rest follows?
#this is a perspective I’ve only seen from people who truly think broadly and sympathetically about life#like he’s literally right I’m sorry and people who aren’t white or cis or straight learn so so SO early that your existence is political#not inherently but because white cishet men have crafted society in a way it’s impossible for it not to be#and ignoring that isn’t going to make you ascend above it god I’m so tired of having to explain that to people#I’m tired of people’s experiences in both places of privilege and place of oppression being used to scapegoat what we all can see#like look at his example!#‘going out for a dance on a Saturday night’ means something different if you’re poor if you’re gay if you’re a racial minority#’walking into a shop’ who owns it how often do you go is it a big box store or a small owned business is it walkable#there’s pOLitiCs in all of that! in ever aspect of your life!#ESPECIALLY if you take your life experiences and turn them into art of any form (via @twentyfour-mp3)
Friendly reminder that Hozier’s first music video, in 2013, involved him literally taking his life savings and using it to make a protest video about anti-gay actions in Chechnya. This was not a popular position at the time, to the point that damn near every interviewer asked “so, are you gay?” because they literally could not figure out why he cared so much.
Incidentally, after the first few times of saying “no, I’m straight but it’s important,” he started saying “you can think that if you want.” ALSO not a popular position at the time. Adam Lambert’s entire career had been derailed only four years before because he dared to be openly gay and sexual about it.
He literally came out swinging like Muhammad Ali and has not stopped. And he finds it odd that people find it odd! Like he was asked if he was aware of his “lesbian cult following” and seemed genuinely puzzled why he has a lesbian cult following (and, later, just a massive queer following in general) and it’s like. Honey. You loved us first. You loved us more and harder than most people were willing to. When it was unpopular to even whisper about how maybe queer people shouldn’t be seen as inhuman actually, you grabbed a megaphone and screamed. You risked not just losing a career, but never having one at all, to stand by us. You loved us. We’re just loving you back.
I got so wound up writing how much I agreed, @prismatic-bell, and mentioning enough events that were happening in 2013, that it occurred to me that some of y'all poking around in Tumblr might not remember 2013 too well, what with it being ten years ago. I’m gonna assume that those of you who were under about nine or ten at the time might not remember it viscerally, so I’m linking a bunch of things I mention for further reading if you weren’t living in it as a queer person. (Also if you weren’t raised rather intensely as an Irish-American person and aren’t viscerally familiar with that context, I’m adding some links on that too.)
It’s worth noting that “Take Me to Church” was popularized in a viral video of ballet dancer Sergei Polunin interpreting the lyrics (as directed by David LaChapelle). That routine is–“gay and sexual about it” is a really good phrase, especially since Polunin is performing in a pair of tights the same color of his skin, a dance belt, and absolutely nothing else. The choreography emphasized the vulnerability of the lyrics, the importance of sex and love, the pain inflicted by marginalization and homophobia, and the transcendence of queer affirmation among ourselves. I remember it being almost impossible to avoid that video, although I never did–I watched it over and over, transfixed, for weeks. And the thing about that routine is that it draws a lot of its strength from using the dancer to highlight the emotional punches in the lyrics, so you can hardly avoid listening to the lyrics and processing what they mean.
Those lyrics were also unapologetically unflinching in dissecting the pain and ambivalence inflicted by chronic, pervasive homophobia–especially through the Catholic Church. The man is Irish. The Catholic Church is his local religious and moral authority, and it carries a weight there that it does not have in the US. Even writing 20 years after Sinead O’ Connor (may her memory be a blessing) famously tore up a photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992 to protest Church abuses, the Catholic church casts a long shadow over Ireland. It’s all bound up in nationalism and resistance and culture and centuries of English occupation and poverty and the Church providing many social services in times when no one else would, and then using that position to commit atrocities it then immediately tried to deny. (It has taken as much as 20 years to even get an apology.) And of course Ireland was on the front of the wave uncovering abuse within the Church; the Magdalene Laundries had been Found Out starting in 1993, and that particular vein of anger smoldered for a long time on top of the sexual abuse. (There’s a Joni Mitchell song about that one, even, the world was watching Ireland so closely in those days.) I don’t think there’s a nation in the world that is as keenly critical of the Catholic Church as Ireland; it and the US are still the only nations that have dedicated formal governmental inquests into priestly abuses, and quite a few of the dioceses involved in the US were parts of the Irish-American diaspora.
Besides the Catholic Church at the time was directly opposing LGBTQ rights everywhere. Just five years earlier in 2008 the Church and the Knights of Columbus had donated a massive amount to the campaign for California’s Prop 8, which banned gay marriage in California–an outcome that felt, at the time, like a blow. If you couldn’t keep gay marriage from being explicitly banned in California, what hope was there for anywhere? So Hozier is really staring down that legacy when he’s writing these lyrics–and, importantly, he’s not focusing on the powderkeg image of the closeted gay priest who molests little boys to express his sexuality. That was pretty much the only context in which gay Catholicism was getting discussed anywhere I could see in 2013. Sure and away that shit wrought so much harm but no one was talking about the chronic damage that comes from being told that you’re inherently unclean and sordid.
My lover’s the giggle at a funeral. We were born sick–you heard them say it.
I mean, I met a dude in 2012, when we were all freshmen in college, who told me that because of his strong Catholic faith and his gayness, he had chosen to reconcile that by simply remaining celibate forever. And in some religiously Catholic circles that was progressive at the time. The best I was seeing from mainstream Catholic theology was that gays could frame themselves as a lay person called to celibacy while also being openly gay, just as long as they never engaged in any kind of sexual activity with anyone. After all, sex was only acceptable within the bounds of marriage, and that sacrament wasn’t open to the gays, so your options were real limited if you wanted to obey the rules. In a very real sense, you were formally treated as if you were an unfortunate perversion of healthy sexuality which you could only make the best of by inventing a celibate calling.
So it is intensely, intensely meaningful that Hozier takes this whole framework of context and association and marginalization and transcends it into a viciously, sickly joyful piece of art that frames queer expression as holiness and the Church as an agent of sickness, of hunger, of pain. He is unsparing in the text as he equates his lover with holiness and ecstasy and life (only then I am human / only then I am clean; I was born sick / but I love it) and the church’s teachings with slow poison (a little poison each week), rejection (my church offers me no absolution), and the dull pain of internalized shame.
Offer me that deathless death, o good god! Let me give you my life! Command me to be well!
Again, of course we queers love you, man. We were introduced to you by the lyrics of a piece of art directed towards our very souls, affirming the life-giving connections offered by queer community (through the heavily implied metaphor of sex with the narrator’s lover) as wholly human. You started out by emphasizing how much that background radiation can hurt. Your first masterpiece sensation, which brought us to know you, was a delicately crafted powerhouse of validation and joy in a shared, bitter history. It is pain twisted into defiance, loneliness turned into a bond.
No fucking shit that was not a popular sentiment at the time. I was completely stunned and astonished when DOMA went down in 2013 with Windsor–it felt wholly surreal, especially as I’d been in Georgia and Texas where you were lucky if legislation didn’t go out of its way to kick you in the nuts on its way by. Kids, “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” fic was almost a subgenre in the enormous Stargate: Atlantis fandom at that time; when DADT went down in 2011 as it was winding down, people wrote whole fests specifically considering the characters processing the transition and coming to terms with what it meant.
DADT meant that almost all serving military members who were queer* had to remain at least publicly in the closet, and that if they were found to have been too publicly out–well, they could and often were drummed out of the service for it and lost their careers over it. Again, DADT came down in 2011. You’d get discharged and not honorably, which means you lose all your benefits and employers can see that and wonder why for the rest of your life. It was not fucking great, especially for women–there is an enormous lesbian/bi culture among women in service–but it was still slightly better than before, inasmuch as they were no longer allowed to trigger investigations to drum you out on suspicion of homosexuality just for being inconvenient or too suspiciously gender nonconforming for whatever piece of shit decided they didn’t like the look of your face. And that was seen as like, a little outdated, but not the perversion against human rights it feels like today.
Two years before. I think this came down right after Windsor hit the pike. What a year that was. Remember the brief period of heady joy after Obergefell, before Pulse, when we felt for a moment that we were marching along a path to queer acceptance across even and clear ground, and the world was on an uncomplicatedly positive trajectory? Remember optimism? But of course we all had the scars. No one casts off that much explicit shame from our communities that quickly.
In this, one of the great flowerings of transphobia as a moral panic, rising out of previous moral panics centered on homosexuality and gender conformation, it’s easy to lose hope and worry that there is no way out. Remembering the visceral context as recently as ten years ago, and considering how much of the landscape has changed, is a useful reality check. We made huge strides back last time, and we’ll do it again.
*you actually could be openly trans if you were straight, and there were definitely at least a few openly trans straight women out there exploiting that loophole in protest over the homophobia inherent in the law. My, how times have changed.
