Fundamentally human

“I don’t like…” no one asked go complain in dms

It has been since the very beginning.

NG (fuck NG) thought of a book plot where a demon finds himself in The Omen movie. But he screws up the baby switch. And the Antichrist grew up as a character in a Richmal Crompton novel. He didn't know what to do with it next. TP offered to buy the story. He changed the demon into a demon and an angel defying their bosses on the earth they both loved. He added his smart whimsy and gave the story a moral core far beyond a silly spoof. When the story was written, queer kids saw themselves in the angel and demon based on the subtext. Because they lived in subtext. Gender fluid and trans readers created stories about an angel and demon for whom gender was a choice depending on how or whether they decided to make an effort. The strangeness of fitting into a planet dominated by beings the angel and demon differed from spoke to neurodivergent readers.

Religious readers found healing after years of struggling to make sense of doctrine divorced from morality. Some ace and aro readers saw the deep and meaningful relationship beyond romance between a pair together over 6000 years. And tons of horny people from all walks of life poured their hearts into smut that made the most of beings whose bodies allowed for a range of sexual practice that would never be realistic for humans.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.