you're just as sane as i am

like I don’t think they meant to create the epitome of the queer gaze but here we are

Ed Teach + neck 👀

“matthew, it is with heavy heart i say goodbye. the times we had together are honestly among the favorite times of my life. it was an honor to share the stage with you and to call you my friend. i will always smile when i think of you and i’ll never forget you. never. spread your wings and fly brother, you’re finally free. much love. and i guess you’re keeping the 20 bucks you owe me.” - matt leblanc

“i am so grateful for every moment i had with you matty and i miss you every day. when you work with someone as closely as i did with matthew, there are thousands of moments i wish i could share. for now here's one of my favorites. to give a little backstory, chandler and monica were supposed to have a one night fling in london. but because of the audience's reaction, it became the beginning of their love story. in this scene, before we started rolling, he whispered a funny line for me to say. he often did things like that. he was funny and he was kind. 🤍🕊️" - courteney cox

“oh boy this one has cut deep... having to say goodbye to our matty has been an insane wave of emotions that i've never experienced before. we all experience loss at some point in our lives. loss of life or loss of love. being able to really sit in this grief allows you to feel the moments of joy and gratitude for having loved someone that deep. and we loved him deeply. he was such a part of our dna. we were always the 6 of us. this was a chosen family that forever changed the course of who we were and what our path was going to be. for matty, he knew he loved to make people laugh. as he said himself, if he didn't hear the 'laugh' he thought he was going to die. his life literally depended on it. and boy did he succeed in doing just that. he made all of us laugh. and laugh hard. in the last couple weeks, i've been pouring over our texts to one another. laughing and crying then laughing again. i'll keep them forever and ever. i found one text that he sent me out of nowhere one day. it says it all. matty, i love you so much and i know you are now completely at peace and out of any pain. i talk to you every day... sometimes i can almost hear you saying "could you BE any crazier?" rest little brother. you always made my day... ❤️🕊️” - jennifer aniston

“matty, thank you for ten incredible years of laughter and creativity. i will never forget your impeccable comic timing and delivery. you could take a straight line of dialogue and bend it to your will, resulting in something so entirely original and unexpectedly funny it still astonishes. and you had heart. which you were generous with, and shared with us, so we could create a family out of six strangers. this photo is from one of my favorite moments with you. now it makes me smile and grieve at the same time. i imagine you up there, somewhere, in the same white suit, hands in your pockets, looking around— "Could there BE any more clouds?” “ - david schwimmer

“shot the pilot, friends like us, got picked up then immediately, we were at the nbc upfronts. then... you suggested we play poker and made it so much fun while we initially bonded. thank you for that. thank you for making me laugh so hard at something you said, that my muscles ached, and tears poured down my face every day. thank you for your open heart in a six way relationship that required compromise. and a lot of "talking." thank you for showing up at work when you weren't well and then, being completely brilliant. thank you for the best 10 years a person gets to have. thank you for trusting me. ghank you for all I learned about grace and love through knowing you. thank you for the time i got to have with you, matthew.” - lisa kudrow

He is played obviously camp and dramatic, for a start, and there is the aforementioned "hate your hair/not likely/yikes yikes yikes/let me guess you have a great personality" summary dismissal of all his potential brides. Then he spends dinner asking Yzma about Kronk ("so he seems nice? He's what, in his late twenties?") and otherwise being slightly obsessed with him.

Then there is the whole Adventure of Doom with Pacha, him being ever huffy about the Kiss of Life, and then the restaurant gag where Kuzco takes to playing Pacha's fake wife and dressing up in ladies' clothing with great gusto (reinforced by the waitress' "bless you for coming out in public" remark when Pacha says they're on their honeymoon). Then when he is finally de-llamafied, we don't see him paired off with the obligatory girl from the lineup earlier, as might otherwise be expected in a Disney movie. Instead he is still single, but goes to found family it up with Pacha, Chica, Kronk, etc, which dare we remark is a very queer trope.

In short, I have no idea how a Disney movie with no white people (all the characters are Indigenous/people of color), a gay king, cross-dressing jokes, and the most offbeat plot of all time actually ever got made (can you imagine the Family Friendly Mouse doing that today? Let us also talk about Kronk because he is a brilliant deconstruction of both toxic masculinity and the musclebound henchman stereotype.) Other than that this was the Chaos Hour of animated movies in the late 90s/early 2000s, and yes.

Please, read this article if you have some time. This story is wild, and involves directors being pitted against each other Bake-Off style and a shockingly intimate documentary created by the wife of Sting who, himself was heartbroken by the decimation of the songs he wrote for the film including cutting a fantastic Yzma villain song sung by Eartha Kitt that is SO DAMN GOOD but would not ever have fit the more nailed-down Yzma we would eventually come to know and love. It’s so catchy though, I’m doubling up on calls to action but please listen now:

I got radicalized into the far-right on TikTok.  Well, technically I didn’t, but an account that I made did, and this is a graph of what that looked like.  I just published this study, and I’ll link it in the comments, but I’ll also break it down right now, here.

So I wanted to examine whether or not transphobia is a gateway prejudice that leads to like, broader far-right radicalization.  It’s been pretty clear for a while now that the far-right is transphobic, but we wanted to see whether being transphobic alone was enough to lead you to the far right.

So I made a brand new TikTok account and followed 14 creators known to post transphobic content.  Then I started scrolling my ‘For You’ page, and I started exclusively engaging with transphobic content, and I documented the main narratives of the more than 400 videos recommended to me.  We also double-blind coded this, meaning that another researcher also watched every video and coded the narratives, and then if we ever disagreed, more researchers would come in and perform a tie-breaker.  Once we removed sponsored videos and videos that had been taken down before they could be double-coded, we were left with 360 videos.

Of the 360 total videos, 103 were homophobic or anti-trans, 42 were misogynistic, 29 contained racist narratives or white supremacist messaging, and 14 endorsed violence.  Obviously, TikTok didn’t just like give us neo-nazi content immediately.  I actually didn’t get my first Nazi symbol until video 141.  But the more I interacted with transphobic content, the more I was fed not only more transphobic content, but also homophobia and misogyny and racism and antisemitism.  So I didn’t actually have to interact with racist content to be fed white supremacist content, I just had to engage with transphobic content.

What you see in this graph is the TikTok algorithm starting off with a normal feed — memes, recipes, whatever — and then going “OHH, you’re transphobic!  Have you tried hating the gays?  What about women?”

So, it appears that transphobia can radicalize a TikTokker.

Around video 400, you’ll notice an interesting spike in far-right figures, hate symbols, antisemitism and calls to violence.  That’s when I reached fascist TikTok and set my phone on fire.  400 videos might sound like a lot, but if a user watches each video for an average of 20 seconds, they would end up watching 400 videos in just over 2 hours.  So, a user could basically download the app at breakfast and be fed the overtly white supremacist, neo-nazi content before lunch.

-pauses, purses lips-

That’s not good!

/ end transcription]

Link to the study: