♰

Fontainebleau State Park, Louisiana by Lana Gramlich

ibuprophet

thinking about middle aged gay love is like. we have a future and we have time

my mother divorced my father when i was 7. it wasn’t because she was gay, though she did discover this later (another reminder that it’s okay to find out who you are at 40, at 50, etc, and also for who you are to change) but because she had thought he was the great love of her life and he turned out to be a shitty person.

my mother married my ma when i was 11. i think they do have a great love. i think they love each other the way you can when you’re middle aged – having seen the world, being able to see each other’s flaws, knowing themselves. they see each other in full, and they love each other and the world for it. 

they dance on the street to buskers (very embarrassing when you’re twelve; very cute when you look back on it as an adult). i shit you not – they pass me their purses and dance on the sidewalk, laughing. i thought was something that only happened in movies.

my ma makes my mother eggs every morning because my mother can’t cook for shit. my mother presses my ma’s work blazers for her because my ma still can’t figure out how to work the new iron. 

when it was warm, high-school me would wake up on the weekends and wander downstairs to find them sitting in the backyard in the sun, drinking coffee together and splitting the newspaper in a surgical, exact process since they’d worked out who wanted which sections years ago. 

my mother is happier than she’s ever been. my ma, too. there is a future out there for every gay person who’s always known they’re gay, like my ma, and for everyone who figures it out later, like my mother. there’s time. 

they’re growing old together. i cannot express to you how much they are leading happy lives, loving each other, with a huge family surrounding them. i cannot express to you how much they have this beautiful future that they are living and will live. 

i want you to know, if you don’t have any older gays in your life: they’re out there. and they’re living these full, happy lives.

sometimes i look to my moms and i think, i want a life like yours. and looking at them makes me believe i will get it. 

i come from an area in the USA where people meticulously plan out what they would do if someone robbed their house. then they gleefully describe how they have their gun under their bed and will shoot the robber if they “dare” enter into their home. and remember saying to someone “i rather not become a murderer to defend my fucking t.v. i’d just let them have it. whatever. its a fucking t.v.” of course i just got a blank stare.

i am a pacifist, but i have some sympathy for people who decide to use violence for certain circumstances. i understand self-defence. i understand defending your loved ones or even using violence to defend a stranger. but i will never fucking understand using violence to defend property. because.... its a fucking t.v.

Nina Simone photographed in Central Park NYC by Chuck Stewie, circa 1958.

Photos from this collection were used as the artwork for Nina's first album, 'Little Girl Blue/Jazz As Played in an Exclusive Side Street Club,' released in February of 1959 by Bethlehem Records.

You gotta walk in rooms like God sent you

Franz Wright, from God’s Silence

— Luke 23:46 (trans. Sarah Ruden)

Simone Weil, “Detachment” (trans. Emma Craufurd), Simone Weil: An Anthology

[“A basic premise of straight culture is the idea that gendered bodies, especially women’s bodies, require purification and modification to be desirable—shaving, perfuming, toning, refining, shrinking, enlarging, and antiaging. But in queer spaces, it is often precisely the hairy, sweaty, dirty, smelly, or unkempt gendered body that is most beloved. I recall the first time I entered a gay men’s sex shop, in the 1990s in the Castro district of San Francisco, and encountered a barrel full of lightly stained and dingy-looking “used jock straps” for sale. It was my introduction to the fact that there were people in the world who desired men’s bodies so much that they wanted deep, intimate, and seemingly unconditional contact with them—even and especially the parts of men’s bodies that straight women seemed to want to avoid.

Most straight women I knew, no doubt due to their socialization as girls and women, appreciated men’s bodies for their sexual functionality but not as a site of objectification that they were excited to dive into and explore—to smell, taste, or penetrate. Similarly, I have been to dozens of dyke strip shows, burlesque shows, drag-king shows, and sex shows in which women’s armpit hair and leg hair and facial hair or their body fat or their genderqueer bodies have been precisely the objects of the audience’s collective lust. Fat bodies and hairy bodies are also staples of queer dyke porn, not relegated to a fetish category. In other words, queer desire is marked by a lustful appreciation for even those parts of men’s and women’s bodies that have been degraded by straight culture. Like a food adventurer who delights in those parts of the animal or plant deemed undesirable by the narrowing of mainstream tastes, queer people’s desire for the full animal has been less constrained. Recognizing this suggests that gay men may have a deeper or more comprehensive appreciation for men’s bodies than do straight women, just as lesbians’ lust for women is arguably more expansive and forgiving than straight men’s. But most importantly, because queer circuits of desire do not rely on the erotic encounter of “opposites” embedded in a broader culture of gendered acrimony and alienation, queer lust need not reconcile a conflict between wanting to fuck and generally disliking one’s fuckable population.”]

Jane Ward, The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings (via kxowledge)

GB. England. Bristol. Garden open day. From ‘The Cost of Living’. 1986-1989 © Martin Parr

Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

Philip Pullman, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Peruvian boy and his alpaca, Google search

My absolute hottest take is that, from a culturally relative perspective, no food is bad. None of it. It's an expression of culture, art, history, ecology, material conditions, subjective taste. It's all inedible pap to somebody and the taste of childhood for someone else. Americans be eating cheesed burger. Pea wet is as good as gravy in Wigan. The French eat snails and the Inuit eat seal, the Germans eat sauerkraut and the Russians drink kvass, the Inca ate cavy and the Romans ate flamingo. People around the world have been eagerly awaiting their serving of simple bread or thin porridge or fermented milk product or pickled whatever-the-fuck since we learned to cook food over fire. We all love the slop we grew up eating. Food is a reflection of millennia of culture and loving human artistic expression. Attempting to extrapolate largely harmless online food banter into actual serious comparative rankings or half-baked critical analyses of cultures based on how much you subjectively don't like what they eat is a miserable way to live. Live a little. Peace and love on the only planet with food.

This is a post of critical support for bland English cuisine and unhinged Brazilian pizzas and everything else I don't understand. Turning food, something literally every person on earth enjoys, into a moral or cultural judgement is, well, if it's not full-blown reactionary and parochial... then it's at least kind of nasty, huh?