DADA LIFE

A fun little project from a while ago :) by franny294

There was an arrest across the street from my place in Oakland one day – three cop cars with a bullhorn and guns out – and before I could even get out the gate there were a couple people posted up and one of them was filming and another one was narrating in a calm but very loud voice, just

“HE IS COOPERATING! HIS HANDS ARE EMPTY! HE IS DOING WHAT HE IS TOLD TO DO! HE IS HOLDING STILL! HIS HANDS ARE EMPTY! HE IS NOT BEING THREATENING! HE HAS PUT HIS HANDS BEHIND HIS HEAD AS ASKED! HE IS NOT RESISTING!”

and that was something I hadn’t thought to do before. It certainly let the cops know what the narrative of eye witnesses was going to be. 

I especially liked “his hands are empty” because this statement would still be true and a witnessed reason the police should not become violent even if it turned out he had a weapon on his person somewhere.

I see people in NYC stop and record a lot. Even if they are just being nosey, that’s still witnesses if shit goes down.

We must be vigilant.  The New Solidarity.  You might just save a fellow human being.

If you don’t feel comfortable with doing the narrating thing (which really is quite clever), even just standing around and blatantly staring actually legit helps immensely.

There are studies that show that even an image of someone looking can be effective to change people’s behaviours.

Sidenote: If you see a cop stopping an Indigenous person, the same protocol applies.

I did this in a parking lot when I saw a group of Black men and teens being harassed by a cop. Stayed in my car, but whipped out my phone and started to record, pointing out via narrative when I could hear the cop contradicting himself and changing his story. At the eight-minute mark, when I knew he was past the reasonable-stop guideline time (thanks, legal tips side of tumblr!), I flipped on my dome light.

Fam, what happened next was INCREDIBLE.

The cop had been gesturing in a wild way, almost flailing, like he was actively trying to get these guys agitated. He saw my dome light, saw a white face with a phone, and suddenly his hands came to rest on his vest. Within 90 seconds he’d packed his shit up and gone.

The most outspoken gentleman in the group came up to me and went “whatchu doing in there?” So I straight-up told him “it looked like you were being harassed, so I was recording.” The whole group recognized someone who was on their side, and started venting about the shit that had just gone down.

Turns out the asshole had had them stopped for a good five minutes before I pulled in. That means they were stopped, with no probable cause and a cop changing his story no fewer than three times, for AT LEAST THIRTEEN MINUTES. While chatting in a parking lot. One car had pulled in next to another that turned out to belong to one of his buddies and they were just shooting the shit when Officer Bacon came by.

Want to know the kicker here? One of the cop’s stories was that a group “matching their description” had been reported by the grocery store security guy for shoplifting. Black man, red shirt with a sports logo, jeans. Know what this convenient report didn’t mention?

HIS HEIGHT.

This guy was, without exaggeration, at least 6’10”. I assure you any report of him would have mentioned his height FIRST. And you’d best believe I pointed that out in my narration.

Cops WILL try shit. You CAN stop them. I did it and it was as simple as having some patience and a camera.

Same for muslims!

Look out for your fellow marginalized people!

Honestly, this applies to everyone. It’s a higher priority for the aforementioned groups, but nobody is safe around the police. The police are the enemy.

We Take Care of Each Other.

shoutout to the lord of the rings lighting directors. bold move to let the audience see what's going on in nighttime scenes. i miss that.

Hey, don't cry. A single thread in a tapestry, though its color brightly shines, can never see its purpose in the pattern of the grand design, ok?

he'd be on here with a lana del rey profile pic and if it didnt say like 48 in his bio he'd just be instinguishable from any other type of tumblr mutual and he'd come on here every day posting like "still havent fucked that old man" and we'd be like nooo 😭 dont give up king 🥺

So I’ve been enjoying the Disney vs. DeSantis memes as much as anyone, but like. I do feel like a lot of people who had normal childhoods are missing some context to all this.

I was raised in the Bible Belt in a fairly fundie environment. My parents were reasonably cool about some things, compared to the rest of my family, but they certainly had their issues. But they did let me watch Disney movies, which turned out to be a point of major contention between them and my other relatives.

See, I think some people think this weird fight between Disney and fundies is new. It is very not new. I know that Disney’s attempts at inclusion in their media have been the source of a lot of mockery, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that as far as actual company policy goes, Disney has actually been an industry leader for queer rights. They’ve had policies assuring equal healthcare and partner benefits for queer employees since the early 90s.

I’m not sure how many people reading this right now remember the early 90s, but that was very much not industry standard. It was a big deal when Disney announced that non-married queer partners would be getting the same benefits as the married heterosexual ones.

Like — it went further than just saying that any unmarried partners would be eligible for spousal benefits. It straight-up said that non-same-sex partners would still need to be married to receive spousal benefits, but because same-sex partners couldn’t do that, proof that they lived together as an established couple would be enough.

In other words, it put long-term same-sex partners on a higher level than opposite-sex partners who just weren’t married yet. It put them on the exact same level as heterosexual married partners.

They weren’t the first company ever to do this, but they were super early. And they were certainly the first mainstream “family-friendly” company to do it.

Conservatives lost their damn minds.

Protests, boycotts, sermons, the whole nine yards. I can’t tell you how many books about the evils of Disney my grandmother tried to get my parents to read when I was a kid.

When we later moved to Florida, I realized just how many queer people work at Disney — because historically speaking, it’s been a company that has guaranteed them safety, non-discrimination, and equal rights. That’s when I became aware of their unofficial “Gay Days” and how Christians would show up from all over the country to protest them every year. Apparently my grandmother had been upset about these days for years, but my parents had just kind of ignored her.

Out of curiosity, I ended up reading one of the books my grandmother kept leaving at our house. And friends — it’s amazing how similar that (terrible, poorly written) rhetoric was to what people are saying these days. Disney hires gay pedophiles who want to abuse your children. Disney is trying to normalize Satanism in our beautiful, Christian America. 

Just tons of conspiracy theories in there that ranged from “a few bad things happened that weren’t actually Disney’s fault, but they did happen” to “Pocahontas is an evil movie, not because it distorts history and misrepresents indigenous life, but because it might teach children respect for nature. Which, as we all know, would cause them all to become Wiccans who believe in climate change.”

Like — please, take it from someone who knows. This weird fight between fundies and Disney is not new. This is not Disney’s first (gay) rodeo. These people have always believed that Disney is full of evil gays who are trying to groom and sexually abuse children.

The main difference now is that these beliefs are becoming mainstream. It’s not just conservative pastors who are talking about this. It’s not just church groups showing up to boycott Gay Day. Disney is starting to (reluctantly) say the quiet part out loud, and so are the Republicans. Disney is publicly supporting queer rights and announcing company-supported queer events and the Republican Party is publicly calling them pedophiles and enacting politically driven revenge.

This is important, because while this fight has always been important in the history of queer rights, it is now being magnified. The precedent that a fight like this could set is staggering. For better or for worse, we live in a corporation-driven country. I don’t like it any more than you do, and I’m not about to defend most of Disney’s business practices. But we do live in a nation where rights are largely tied to corporate approval, and the fact that we might be entering an age where even the most powerful corporations in the country are being banned from speaking out in favor of rights for marginalized people… that’s genuinely scary.

Like… I’ll just ask you this. Where do you think we’d be now, in 2023, if Disney had been prevented from promising its employees equal benefits in 1994? That was almost thirty years ago, and look how far things have come. When I looked up news articles for this post from that era, even then journalists, activists, and fundie church leaders were all talking about how a company of Disney’s prominence throwing their weight behind this movement could lead to the normalization of equal protections in this country.

The idea of it scared and thrilled people in equal parts even then. It still scares and thrills them now.

I keep seeing people say “I need them both to lose!” and I get it, I do. Disney has for sure done a lot of shit over the years. But I am begging you as a queer exvangelical to understand that no. You need Disney to win. You need Disney to wipe the fucking floor with these people.

Right now, this isn’t just a fight between a giant corporation and Ron DeSantis. This is a fight about the right of corporations to support marginalized groups. It’s a fight that ensures that companies like Disney still can offer benefits that a discriminatory government does not provide. It ensures that businesses much smaller than Disney can support activism.

Hell, it ensures that you can support activism.

The fight between weird Christian conspiracy theorists and Disney is not new, because the fight to prevent any tiny victory for marginalized groups is not new. The fight against the normalization of othered groups is not new.

That’s what they’re most afraid of. That each incremental victory will start to make marginalized groups feel safer, that each incremental victory will start to turn the tide of public opinion, that each incremental victory will eventually lead to sweeping law reform.

They’re afraid that they won’t be able to legally discriminate against us anymore.

So guys! Please. This fight, while hilarious, is also so fucking important. I am begging you to understand how old this fight is. These people always play the long game. They did it with Roe and they’re doing it with Disney.

We have! To keep! Pushing back!

Someone reblogged this saying they'd never heard any of this before and they didn't even know how to begin verifying it, so let me help!

Here's a 1995 article from the NYT about Disney putting this policy into effect after promising to do so in 1994.

Here's a wikipedia page about Disney's unofficial Gay Days and how they've been protested by Christian groups.

I tried to find the book I read, but honestly so many different weird evangelical anti-Disney books came up when I was googling that I can't be sure which one it was. 🙃

I can't help you with sources other than the fact that I too am an exvangelical kid whose parents went on-and-off banning Disney movies from the house as I was growing up. ("On" when the pastor got on a tear about the evils and how the movies had gay propaganda in it and ~witchcraft~ and my mom would obediently remove anything from my reach that had the concept of "magic" in it - and then "Off" when the pastor hadn't said anything for a while and my mom got sentimental about how much she loved Winnie the Pooh and The Aristocats.)

I remember the first "Gay Days" and how they put up signs around the park saying that it was unofficial and not affiliated with Disney, and how that didn't stop the evangelicals from foaming at the mouth, and the groups had to change it to "Friendship Days" to keep from getting gay-bashed... and I also remember how the last time I went to Gay Days (2019) they had fucking Pride merch in the stores with signs saying that proceeds from the sales went to GLSEN to prevent gay kids from being bullied at school.

Disney has done a LOT to normalize queerness in the mainstream - and I know it's a joke, blah blah, first canon Disney queers being a new minor character every year, but outside of the movies, in the real world where real people live, it has done a LOT.

And yeah. You want Disney to wipe the floor with these dudes. Because as evil as some of their business practices are (capitalism sucks, man, and there's no getting around that) - I HAVE to emphasize that they have been curating a safe space for real-life queer people for decades. And we want that to win.

Unfortunately, I need Disney to crush DeSantis, completely and utterly. Because if it isn't a complete rout, then other companies without the Mouse's resources (so, almost all of them) won't pick the fight in the first place and will back down the next time a DeSantis tries this.

Disney wants your money.

Fascists want you dead.

Also, pragmatism aside, Disney is just objectively right here. Desantis very very very very very very clearly broke the law to go after a minority. The fact that Disney is defending said minority because they see it as a source of money doesn't change the fact that Desantis broke the law to go after a minority. Like, wider context of Capitalism aside, what we have here is a very specific case where one side is illegally going open season on vulnerable kids, and the other side said "hey, don't do that."

i’m just saying aragorn son of arathorn oh im sorry STRIDER (one of them rangers what his right name is i never heard etc etc) didn’t need to be that sexy at the prancing pony. like ostensibly he’s trying to lay low but even dipshit little [relatively] eighteen y/o frodo is like hey what’s the deal with that extremely ostentatiously sexy man in the corner

“you draw far too much attention to yourself ‘mister underhill’” if i were frodo i wouldve snapped. jesus christ. i can’t help that i’m two feet shorter than everyone else in this definitely definitely 100% a gay bar but at least i didn’t lurk in a sexy corner making eyes at everybody from under my cloak at least im TRYING to pretend i’m not a protagonist you fine ass idiot. i KNOW i’m being pursued by the black riders which is why i didn’t SERVE CUNT from the SHADOWS. the fellowship of the nerve of this bitch

If "all it takes is a hairy chest" then, hey wait- are you even listening to me?

This post is sooo stupid AND I literally spelled propaganda wrong and no one noticed lmao STOP sharing it PLEASE 😭

Let’s take it to 10k, folks!

Somewhere in Superhell:

Castiel: So. What are you in for?

Derek: Being in secret gay love with my friend for years. You?

Castiel:

Castiel: uh...

Hanging out with old people rules because after a while they trust you enough to confess to murder totally unprompted

Wait what.

Sometimes old ladies had to kick the ladder out from under their stepfathers when they were girls and that’s valid

oh, my little old lady murder story was her replacing the medication in her abusive husband's capsules with rat poison.

"back in the day, our grandmothers worked on their marriages and didn't get divorced!" nah, friend, they COULDN'T get a divorce so sometimes they killed their fuckin husbands. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My grandma murdered her first husband the first time he beat their daughter.

My college was next to an assisted living facility and one time we went over there to draw people’s portraits so we could get practice drawing older people. The lady I was drawing idly told me that she "dealt quite handily with her first husband” while making a stabbing gesture. Five minutes later she requested I make sure not to draw her double chin. I honored that request.

So when I was a child my grandmother told all these great stories about growing up in the Alaskan wilderness. Amazing bad ass stories about her and my great-grandmother. I recently asked my mom why my great-grandmother moved from Texas to Alaska in the first place. Turns out my Great-grandfather was abusive to my great grandmother for years and she lived with that until the first time he hit my grandmother, who was like three at the time, my great-grandmother got him very drunk and beat him to death then moved to Alaska to hide from the cops.

Men don't realize their life expectancy went up thanks to divorce.

Hi honey how was your day at the gaslighting factory?

ive never worked there. stop saying i work there

Frog and Toad

By Kristina Ingrid McGowan

Theres "being the bigger person" and there's "not having the energy to be a cunt right now"

MAKE IT POP DJ BLOW MY SPEAKERS UP 2NITE IMMA FIGHT TIL WE SEE DA SUN LIGHT 

when you’re second hand experiencing a fandom through your mutuals and you start to pick faves even though you have no idea who any of these people are