louisa may alcott, w. h. auden, jane austen, james baldwin, charlotte brontë, lord byron, truman capote, willa cather, emily dickinson, e. m. forster, langston hughes, christopher isherwood, henry james, federico garcía lorca, christopher marlowe, herman melville, edna st. vincent millay, wilfred owen, marcel proust, mary renault, arthur rimbaud, siegfried sassoon, william shakespeare, gertrude stein, alfred lord tennyson, henry david thoreau, walt whitman, oscar wilde, tennessee williams, virginia woolf
what do all these beloved classic authors have in common? that’s right. none of them were straight. not a one. every single author on this list experienced same-gender romantic attraction during their lives. literary tradition is a hundred times more queer than what your high school english class would ever let you know
i have thought a lot about censorship and what is “appropriate”. not a lot of people know this, but lolita was written to show what we allow on our bookshelves: there being no swear words in it meant it was free from censorship. a book about child molestation was allowed because it didn’t explicitly use the word “fuck”. he wrote it to show we don’t really care about protecting children, and it ended up being seen as a romance.
someone once told me – actually, many people have – that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”
at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.
someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.
i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me.
how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex – sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.
i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that!
but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think – but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.
i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” – feels naughty, illicit. not for children.
the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.
oh.
lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution.
i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults.
i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.
fuck. i love women. which one makes this only for those over eighteen.
Ok so I already head canon that Percy is sort of this enigma at school because he disappears for months on end, has been expelled from multiple previous schools, has weird scars and a tattoo, rarely talks in class, has a brooding resting face and looks like a trouble maker, and is just kinda known as this intimidating guy (but is super friendly if you actually talk to him) etc etc etc.
But I was rereading the Lightning Thief and it suddenly occurred to me that Percy could possibly have this huge rep as someone you definitely don’t want on your shit list and is seen as highly highly intimidating because now all I can imagine is some kid at his high school going “You know, Percy Jackson sounds really really familiar” and looking his name up on google or something and-
“Oh wow he was that kid that went missing with his mom a couple years ago”
“And there was nation wide man-hunt for them and he was all over the news”
“And… he fought a bus driver for control of a bus and… basically just caused this mile-long pile up to get away from his captor… who then exploded the bus”
“…And then this guy exploded the Gateway Arch. The Gateway Arch.”
“And holy shit this kid finally got away from this psycho after having a shotgun-to-rifle gun battle in Los Angelos which ended in this huge explosion that destroyed five police cars oh my god”
“and hE WAS TWELVE”
“WHAT”
I can imagine someone asking him about this and him being 500% done and just saying something like ‘go big or go home’ bc that’s the kind of sarcastic lil shit he is
Transcript: “We are dying here. And I cannot fathom the thought that the greatest nation in the world cannot figure out the logistics for a small island of 100 miles by 35 miles. So, I am asking President of the United States to make sure somebody is in charge that is up to the task of saving lives. If anybody out there is listening to us: we are dying. And you are killing us with the inefficiency and the bureaucracy. We will make it with or without you because what stands behind me is all due to the generosity of other people. Again, this is what we got last night: four pallets of water, three pallets of meals and 12 pallets of infant food which, I gave them to Comerío, where people are drinking out of a creek. So I am done being polite. I am done being politically correct. I am mad as hell. So I’m asking members of the press to send a mayday call all over the world. We are dying here. And if we don’t stop and if we don’t get the food and the water into people’s hands, what we we are going to see is something close to a genocide.“
Psst, hey, Marilyn Monroe’s image as a freewheeling sexpot was a carefully constructed lie. The real Marilyn Monroe was a roiling tragedy and her life was an indictment of our society as a whole. She was orphaned after her mother had a schizophrenic breakdown, bounced around between foster homes where she was sexually abused, and married a 21-year-old at 16 to get out of being sent to an orphanage. Hugh Hefner published nude photos of her without her consent that were taken when she was 23 and desperate. She suffered severe anxiety and depression, which she coped with by drinking and using barbiturates, and was already a full-blown addict when she became famous in the mid-50s. Her career was one of exploitation, condescension and alienation, and she killed herself at 36. That Hugh Hefner, a man who was at best an unpleasant footnote in her life, felt entitled to be buried next to her is one more humiliation in a pop cultural landscape we should all be ashamed of.
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 