Not queer as in “queer is not a slur” but queer as in “I do not give a fuck if its a slur, you don’t get to censor my identity regardless”. Queer as in “I HOPE my identity upsets you”. Queer as in “my identity is not only a slur but a threat”
i love you walkable cities i love you pedestrian-centered infrastructure i love you bikeshares i love you free public transit i love you separated bike lanes i love you mixed-use urbanism i love you car-free streets
an 1800s royal navy captain attending a pride parade
as generated by neural network AI midjourney using the above text prompt
I’m still thinking about this painting so I am (gulp) actually going to write some actual art analysis, because… yeah??
The way the captain is faceless, looking out to sea, and the way that echoes how queer men in the time period in question would have to hide their identity to avoid charges for “buggery,” “sodomy,” and possible execution. The way the style is fairly appropriate to 19th-century pastoral romanticism, but the captain’s coat is patterned in rainbow colors, solemn and strikingly defiant at once. The way the British Royal Navy was simultaneously known as a haven for gay/queer men seeking to avoid family pressures to marry, but was still technically bound to severely and legally punish anyone who was actually caught having same-sex relations. The way the strength of the Navy was also the chief driver of British colonialism, imperialism, and expansion (because think about it, how did a relatively small island in the North Sea exert so much force on global geopolitics?) The way that the captain’s race is ambiguous; we aren’t sure if he’s a white man making a calculated and cynical political statement about “tolerance,” like modern-day rainbow capitalism. Or perhaps he is a mixed-race captain like John Perkins, who rose in the ranks despite prejudice, and is silently displaying the intersectionality of his own identity (queer AND a person of color working within a system that generally hates him and wants to erase him, even as it makes ruthless use of his talents).
It’s an image that is at once one of both openness and secrecy, tolerance and oppression, the upholding and the dismantling of patriarchal imperial power, the comfort of the anonymous safe haven and the courage of exposing who you really are to an unsympathetic heteronormative world. And it was made by a neural network and could have been entirely goofy or anachronistic or otherwise strange, but instead created this absolutely devastating piece of art that actually speaks strongly to the real queer experience at this point and place in history. Bravo.
hey uhhh but fr the concept of fallen angels existing but risen demons being an impossibility is kind of a great summary of sin in christianity
holy shit
no, no, come back here and tell me how stupid it is to talk about how the power dynamics inherent to christianity are built upon the rhetoric that failure is unavoidable and there is never enough you can do to make up for it
I attended Catholic school for 11 years as a child, even though Neither I nor my family are Catholic, for complicated reasons, and I’ve blogged before about how Catholicism teaches its practitioners that “Jesus died for your sins” in a way that is particularly designed to engineer survivor’s guilt.
ALT
