Cheat on each other or anyone else (especially not if the cheating is portrayed as romantic).
Die tragically, violently or AT ALL.
To all the people in the notes going “but but tragedy is a valid form of…” Yeah, sorry, straights broke it with decades of nothing but tragedy for LGBT characters. This is a moratorium on all such tragedy films with tragic endings for at least the next 50-75 years at which point there will be a review to determine if mainstream media has EARNED it.
From 1922 to 1968 the Motion Picture Production Code(commonly known as the Hays Code) enforced rules regarding the treatment of gay characters in tv and film. Homosexuality and gender nonconformity could be acknowledged, but it had to be punished to show that consequences would come from such “immorality.” Showing these characters as creepy, predatory, unfaithful, etc etc was common, and for decades pretty much every queer or queer coded character was brutally murdered. The homophobic tropes born from the Hays code are pervasive in media today. The sheer amount of tragedy and violence written into queer media in the last century has in the long term damaged people’s perceptions of what queer stories are “supposed” look like.
New Bechdel-like test for gay/lesbian romance films: If your queer piece of media complies with the Hays code, start over.
Except a lot of those tragedies, the best of them, the absolute classic masterpieces that are among the greatest works of art ever created and you will pry from my cold dead hands, are written by queer people about their experiences and the experiences of those around them and that came before them (including a very recent god damned plague which still hasn’t actually ended). Even when it’s sci-fi, it comes from somewhere real.
Art is not math; you cannot just look at a synopsis and add up the plusses and minuses. You are free to decide what you want to consume using any criteria you want, but you cannot decide whether a piece of art is worthwhile without experiencing it, and if you’re sitting there with a checklist you’re going to miss a lot. What is being suggested is just another Hays code, and I thank all the gods that none of you have the authority to enforce it and I’m still getting beautiful, nuanced queer works of art that are often tragic because they’re about life which is often tragic.
You don’t have to like tragedy. But it’s not something you can just lock us out of because it’s not what you like or you find it upsetting or you have decided that there’s “enough”. It isn’t a zero sum game. People writing tragedies doesn’t prevent other people, or even the same people, from writing things that are more to your tastes. I have my own rules about what I will and will not write about and what do and don’t like to read or view and that’s all they are, rules for me, which I’m free to break whenever I want to.
I don’t want your whitewashed ‘positive’ depictions of our lives or your opinions on what is creepy or what is romantic or what fidelity means. I don’t want your respectability politics. You don’t get to tell queer artists, or anyone actually, what is allowed. You don’t get to tell us we can’t write about death, the only truly universal human experience. You don’t get to tell me what depictions of my life and our shared history and future are “supposed” to look like.
(Apologies to person I reblogged this from, this is an attitude I’ve seen on here for years and I thinks it’s one of the worst possible ways to think about art and representation and stories and every once in a while it just boils over)
guy who stands on street and spins sign for quiznos
being spider-man
and thats IT i dont want any of this “hes a genius tech ceo making millions” SHIT. Spider-man is BROKE and he missed rent this month and he has a tiny apartment and thats how its MEANT TO BE. he doesnt make money because he is our Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-man and not fucking Tony Stark.
how about dog walker while in spiderman costume
you. you get it
im imagining “being spider-man” as his full-time gig and i just
he has a patreon. the description is just the words “I’m Spider-Man” and all he ever posts is specifically-requested selfies from people who want to be sure its really him. pinned to the top of the page is a picture from the top of the empire state building (not the observation deck, the real top) of his spider-gloved hand holding a bagel that is on fire, with 34th street in the background
i just saw someone completely seriously, without a hint of irony, refer to it as “Q-slur Eye” and my intestines started melting like so many Salvador Dalí clocks
I’ve seen “don’t call the show Qu**r Eye if you’re a cishet and can’t reclaim the q-slur” so nothing surprises me anymore.
“Don’t normalize this word that people fought really hard to normalize! Let it keep its oppressive power because I don’t understand queer history”
God I literally fucking hate this rhetoric. It’s exclusionary, gatekeepy, TERFy, and supports a totally revisionist queer history that erases so many marginalized people, especially people who are marginalized on multiple axes.
“LET IT KEEP ITS OPPRESSIVE POWER BECAUSE I DON’T UNDERSTAND QUEER HISTORY”
Wow that really sums it up.
I lived through the “take back the word queer” movement, so let me further sum it up
The entire point was to strip the word of the power to hurt us. We embraced it by refusing to be offended by it. We were saying “you can’t hurt us with that word, we now feel empowered when we hear it.”
During this time I saw an interview with a gay man who’d been arrested while wearing a “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used To It” t-shirt. He was put into a holding cell with other detainees who tried to verbally abuse him. They started out by calling him queer but after seeing his t-shirt, and him not reacting to that word, they started stumbling over their words trying to find a name to call him. They finally settled on repeatedly calling him a “sissy” which, by the late 90s, had become a very out-dated slur toward queer men and was a laughable effort by these hyper-masculine and sexist bullies
When they tried to call him a queer it had no power because embracing the word, no matter who said it, had taken away that power
tl;dr We took back the word Queer with the intent of it no longer having the power to hurt us, but people now calling it the Q-slur are giving power back to the people who hate us
ppl are so annoying “you can’t paint ur bedroom pink you’re an adult” i did not spend my entire life waiting to grow up and control my life to paint my bedroom beige
I had a sales woman in furniture store try and tell me not to buy a hot bubblegum pink loveseat because she wanted me to “think about the future”
Bitch, I am thinking about the future. I already got a hot bubblegum pink couch at home and now I need a loveseat to go with it.
when I first bought my house, I announced my decision to paint my bedroom purple. I had wanted a purple bedroom for thirty damn years, you fucking bet I was gonna have one now. My friends decided, for some reason, that I meant what one of them referred to as “14 year old girl purple” (through what’s wrong with the colors a 14 year old girl chooses, I don’t know, even if they’re not what I want as an adult). They didn’t believe me until they saw the color on the actual wall, even thought they helped me pick out paints. My mother, meanwhile, decided to get worried that if I painted my bedroom a “dark purple”, it would be “depressing”. As if, with an entire house to live in, I would spend all my time in the bedroom, which I wanted to be dark because I would be sleeping in there. In the damn dark.
I had like one, maybe two friends who were all like FUCK YEAH YOU PAINT IT WHATEVER COLOR YOU WANT, PURPLE BEDROOMS ARE AWESOME.
But when they actualy saw the finished bedroom, every single one of them was like, “Oh yeah, that’s really pretty.” (Well, the ones who supported me from the beginning were more like WOOHOO.)
And the moral of the story is: Fuck ‘em, please yourself. Either they’ll come around, or you can safely ignore every question of taste they opine about for the rest of time.
This applies to other adulting activities, too. When I was a kid, I decided that I wanted to have a wedding cake made of doughnuts. When I got older, I figured that I would be “mature” about it and get a traditional cake, which the older adults approved of. Now that I’m 25 and facing the possibility of actual marriage in the near future, I’m just like “marriage is a social construct but it comes with tax & insurance benefits, so just give me that goddamn doughnut cake.” If they don’t like it then they don’t have to come to my wedding.
