CHILIGOAT

An actual male-focused feminism-style movement that was about more than just enacting misogyny would focus on:

dismantling toxic masculinity

ending the devaluation of femininity that causes 99% of the issues specific to men

ending homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, intersexism, and cissexism among men

providing resources to young trans, gay, bi, and nonbinary guys

ending mental illness stigma among men

teaching about consent, abuse, and how to spot it and what to do

acting as real allies to feminists by spreading feminist ideals among men

“i couldn’t help it, i was having a bad episode” is a justification, not an apology.

“i’m so fucking sorry, i fucked up, i don’t deserve to live, i should stop talking to anyone ever, i should die” is a second breakdown and a guilt trip. it is not an apology.

when you apologize, the focus should be on the person you hurt. “i’m sorry. i did something that was hurtful to you. even if i was having a rough time, you didn’t deserve to hear that,” is a better apology. if it was a small thing, you can leave it at that.

if you caused significant distress to the other person, this is a good time to talk about how you can minimize damage in the future. and again, even if it is tempting to say you should self-isolate and/or die, that is not a helpful suggestion. it will result in the person you’re talking to trying to talk you out of doing that, which makes your guilt the focus of the conversation instead of their hurt.

Shout out to socially anxious people who talk too much and regret every word they say

Shout out to socially anxious people who have a habit of word vomiting because they’re nervous

Shout out to socially anxious people who plan out exactly what they’re going to say but get too excited and end up going overboard

Shout out to socially anxious people who get in fights and arguments but later feel ashamed for showing so much passion and scared that people with differing opinions will target them

Shout out to socially anxious people who try to listen and be a good friend, but they talk so much that no one acknowledges that they listen, too

Shout out to socially anxious people who boldy dance in front of people or wear what they want or express themselves, only to get overwhelmed and go hide later

Shout out to socially anxious people who have a constant war in their heads because they both love and hate being the center of attention

Shout out to socially anxious people who are well aware that their voice is really loud, thank you very much

As most of you have probably heard, Marvel Comics is “paying tribute” to classic Hip-Hop with a set of 50 new variant covers blending Marvel Comics characters with Hip-Hop inspiration making comic covers that “riff” on albums that have been released over the last 30 years or so.

The thing about it all is that nothing about this tribute that EIC Alex Alonso of Marvel Comics is trying to push out there is new at all. If anything, this newest campaign from Marvel Comics is more of a shark-biting campaign attempting to use and cash in on the popularity of Hip-Hop and Black culture while at the same time excluding most, if not all of the people of Hip-Hop culture and those that contribute to it.

Years ago, artists and creators such as Julian Lytle, Sean Causley, Ron Wimberly, Michael Axt, Jared K Fletcher, JC Etheredge and others were part of the Longboxes on 22’s Tumblr (created by Sean & Julian), where they merged their love of Hip-Hop and comic book culture to make amazing album covers. My involvement with the site was in creating track-lists for the album covers and surreal “Source-style” reviews for said albums. Over 50,000 followers. Massive visibility. Take a look at it: http://longboxeson22s.tumblr.com/page/20

Also, artist Kenny Keil had been making fantastic mashup covers for the longest time as well. He’s also did artistic work for Big Boi and 2Chainz. Take a look here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/47140275@N05/sets/72157623207329307 and here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/47140275@N05/sets/72157628350347643

These creators spoke to an audience that felt alienated by most of the geek crowd when they went to comic cons or comic book stores because of their love for Hip-Hop and the culture. It helped others relate and bridge a gap with others between Hip-Hop & comic books. It brought folks together. There was a love in the creation of these covers.

And all the covers these artists created MADE SENSE. There was a rhyme, reason, and purpose behind every piece of art and cover.

All of these talents of various ethnicities, which have had their work seen to and from across an internet of millions over these last five years were simply shark bit with Marvel’s latest cash grab.

I’m sure there’s other artists out there that got bit too, but I can only go from what I know of and have record of. These folks did hot covers for YEARS before anyone at Marvel gave one damn about cashing in on this.

It upsets me heavily. Especially since not one of these talents were even involved in Marvel’s latest endeavor. It feels as if Marvel, Axel Alonso and whatever editor wished to push this forward saw all these works over the years, waited for things to cool down a bit and jacked the concept without a care.

And as the press releases continue to flow amongst the geek sites regarding these Hip-Hop covers Marvel is doing, you’ll read of people praising Marvel for their continued “Columbus-ing” of a culture that they don’t really mess with.

Let me correct myself, they mess with the “culture” but they stay away from most, if not all of the people who are a part of said culture that build this creative cool stuff. Marvel takes what they need, and then they jet.

Speaking of culture, remember that Marvel Comics is the same publisher that has damn near 50 new comic book series on the way and not ONE BLACK WRITER on the current roster. They have Black characters and Black team books, but no Black writers. Again, they love the culture and push diversity strictly on the page and next to never behind the scenes.

So the shark-biting that is currently being done here is not surprising. I guess Marvel Comics is doing these Hip-Hop variant covers to back up all that street cred they’ve been building for years while hiring a multitude of Black writers, artists and people of color… <side-eye> <sarcasm>

And yes, I do sincerely understand that Hip-Hop is mainstream now. But the comic book business on the regular loves Black culture but rarely involves Black people and people of color in it. They just bite the creative works of the cultures and sell it to white audiences.

This is much deeper than just remixing a comic book cover.

When you look at the first wave of Marvel hip-hop joints, outside of the A$AP cover, from an art direction stance, nothing else really makes sense. If anything, most of those covers that Marvel is putting out mocks hip-hop in some cases rather than embracing it. And that’s no offense to the artists that created their covers. If an editor told you to do it, I get it. If that’s what you felt, cool.

But they don’t reach a true potential.

This stuff isn’t made in a vacuum. And this isn’t the first time something like this has happened before w/ Marvel: http://longboxeson22s.tumblr.com/post/108268088667/so-about-9-months-or-so-trill-believers-my-friend

And then to top it off, there are 50 covers and only three Black artists have been allowed to play in Marvel’s sandbox for this project (Sanford Greene, Khary Randolph, and Brian Stelfreze).

THREE.

Respect to the few Black artists that are working at Marvel right now. We see you. I know there’s not many (because there’s not), but we love y'all.

After October passes, these Marvel hip-hop variant covers will disappear and it’ll be on to the next thing for them. After they’re done with those 50 covers, Mr. Alonso will just look at the culture, wave & say “Bye, Phylicia” then move on to the next thing without a care.

But I won’t forget this.

And neither should you.

But will the fans care? I don’t know. For most, as long as they get their stuff it doesn’t matter to them.

Equality and true diversity in comics doesn’t matter to them as long as they get their stuff.

So don’t ask me about the next Marvel movie, comic, cartoon, synergy-filled whatever because I don’t ride with Marvel when they shark-bite my friends.

And remember, Black people and People of Color, here’s what Marvel (or one of the most influential people at Marvel Comics) thinks about YOU: http://brevoortformspring.tumblr.com/post/124153395043/can-you-explain-why-marvel-thinks-that-doing-hip

I’m done.

*Side note #1: It appears that since I wrote this piece, Marvel Editor Tom Breevort replied to the masses with a response that sounded like it came from the mouths of press release firms and lawyers. It rings empty and hollow: http://brevoortformspring.tumblr.com/post/124165794638/how-do-you-not-see-the-connection-between

*Side note #2: Since the release of my post, plus the tumblr posts of David Brothers, artist Kenny Keil and many other media side regarding Marvels 1-way relationship w/our culture, Marvel Comics EIC is saying that the cover artist list of 50 Hip-Hop variant covers is not complete and on his twitter feed displayed a Keron Grant Wolverine cover based off of DMX’s “Flesh of my Flesh, Blood of my Blood” followed with “12 down, 40+ to go in coming weeks.” 

https://twitter.com/axelalonsomarv/status/621431873026326528

Ehdrigohr is nothing like those haphazard fumblings. Designed over the course of several years by black, American Indian game designer Allen Turner, Ehdrigohr filters Dungeons and Dragons-style roleplaying experiences through a distinctly Native cultural lens rather than a European one.

“Ultimately it came down to wanting [a game] that spoke to me, where I could see myself and my friends as characters or heroes, and feel like they belong,” says Turner. Although he’s a big fan of table-top roleplaying games, he made Ehdrigohr precisely because he couldn’t find anything that integrated Native culture into its play and treated Natives as equals.Dungeons and Dragons may have some Indian-inspired tribes in its expansions, but they are always treated as different or inferior. Indigenous weapons do less inherently damage than an equivalent weapon wielded by a dwarf or elf, not to mention the gross depiction of Natives using primitive clubs. In all cases, we’re treated as intrinsically lesser.

[…]

Ehdrigohr starts from the base assumption that there are no colonizers. There are also no dwarves, orcs, elves, or gnomes. It’s a world populated by nine nations of humans, inspired primarily by Native cultures and mythologies. They’ve learned to coexist with spirits and natural forces around them, but must also contend with monstrous creatures called “Shivers” that emerge at night from dark places inside the Earth. It’s a black-and-white mythos that reflects many of the values inherent in Native culture—at least as I’ve experienced it.

It’s an incredibly broad and flexible game, one where you can create almost any character imaginable, or even choose to play without any combat at all. You won’t need a vast array of multifaceted dice in order to play, and where Dungeons and Dragons has very exact and specific rules about how far you can move each turn or how many items your character can carry, Ehdrigohr lets you do whatever seems reasonable. Like Indian time, it sounds like a shortcut or a recipe for disaster, but in practice it allows people get deeper into playing their roles—to focus on the experiences in front of them, rather than externally imposed systems.

it was really interesting because he said before the aids epidemic, being gay was almost cool. like, it was really becoming accepted. but aids forced everyone back in the closet. it destroyed friendships, relationships, so many cultural centers closed down over it. it basically obliterated all of the progress that queer people had made in the past 50 years.

and like, it’s weird to me, and what i brought to the conversation (i really couldn’t say much though, i was speechless mostly) was like, it’s so weird to me that there’s no continuity in our history? like, aids literally destroyed an entire generation of queer people and our culture. and when you think about it, we are really the first generation of queer people after the aids epidemic. but like, when does anyone our age (16-28 i guess?) ever really talk about aids in terms of the history of queer people? like it’s almost totally forgotten. but it was so huge. imagine that. like, dozens of your friends just dropping dead around you, and you had no idea why, no idea how, and no idea if you would be the next person to die. and it wasn’t a quick death. you would waste away for months and become emaciated and then, eventually, die. and i know it’s kinda sophomoric to suggest this, but like, imagine that happening today with blogs and the internet? like people would just disappear off your tumblr, facebook, instagram, etc. and eventually you’d find out from someone “oh yeah, they and four of their friends died from aids.”

I’m 36. I came out in 1995, 20 years ago. My girlfriend and I started volunteering at the local AIDS support agency, basically just to meet gay adults and meet people who maybe had it together a little better than our classmates. The antiretrovirals were out by then, but all they were doing yet was slowing things down. AIDS was still a death sentence.

The agency had a bunch of different services, and we did a lot of things helping out there, from bagging up canned goods from a food drive to sorting condoms by expiration date to peer safer sex education. But we both sewed, so… we both ended up helping people with Quilt panels for their beloved dead.

Do the young queers coming up know about the Quilt? If you want history, my darlings, there it is. They started it in 1985. When someone died, his loved ones would get together and make a quilt panel, 3’x6’, the size of a grave. They were works of art, many of them. Even the simplest, just pieces of fabric with messages of loved scrawled in permanent ink, were so beautiful and so sad.

They sewed them together in groups of 8 to form a panel. By the 90s, huge chunks of it were traveling the country all the time. They’d get an exhibition hall or a gym or park or whatever in your area, and lay out the blocks, all over the ground with paths between them, so you could walk around and see them. And at all times, there was someone reading. Reading off the names of the dead. There was this huge long list, of people whose names were in the Quilt, and people would volunteer to just read them aloud in shifts.

HIV- people would come in to work on panels, too, of course, but most of the people we were helping were dying themselves. The first time someone I’d worked closely with died, it was my first semester away at college. I caught the Greyhound home for his funeral in the beautiful, tiny, old church in the old downtown, with the bells. I’d helped him with his partner’s panel. Before I went back to school, I left supplies to be used for his, since I couldn’t be there to sew a stitch. I lost track of a lot of the people I knew there, busy with college and then plunged into my first really serious depressive cycle. I have no idea who, of all the people I knew, lived for how long.

The Quilt, by the way, weighs more than 54 tons, and has over 96,000 names. At that, it represents maybe 20% of the people who died of AIDS in the US alone.

There were many trans women dying, too, btw. Don’t forget them. (Cis queer women did die of AIDS, too, but in far smaller numbers.) Life was and is incredibly hard for trans women, especially TWOC. Pushed out to live on the streets young, or unable to get legal work, they were (and are) often forced into sex work of the most dangerous kinds, a really good way to get HIV at the time. Those for whom life was not quite so bad often found homes in the gay community, if they were attracted to men, and identified as drag queens, often for years before transitioning. In that situation, they were at the same risk for the virus as cis gay men.

Cis queer women, while at a much lower risk on a sexual vector, were there, too. Helping. Most of the case workers at that agency and every agency I later encountered were queer women. Queer woman cooked and cleaned and cared for the dying, and for the survivors. We held hands with those waiting for their test results. Went out on the protests, helped friends who could barely move to lie down on the steps of the hospitals that would not take them in — those were the original Die-Ins, btw, people who were literally lying down to die rather than move, who meant to die right there out in public — marched, carted the Quilt panels from place to place. Whatever our friends and brothers needed. We did what we could.

OK, that’s it, that’s all I can write. I keep crying. Go read some history. Or watch it, there are several good documentaries out there. Don’t watch fictional movies, don’t read or watch anything done by straight people, fuck them anyway, they always made it about the tragedy and noble suffering. Fuck that. Learn about the terror and the anger and the radicalism and the raw, naked grief.

A visual aid: this is the Quilt from the Names Project laid out on the Washington Mall

I was born (in Australia) at the time that the first AIDS cases began to surface in the US. While I was a witness after it finally became mainstream news (mid-85), I was also a child for much of it. For me there was never really a world Before. I’m 35 now and I wanted to know and understand what happened. I have some recommendations for sources from what I’ve been reading lately:

And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts is a seminal work on the history of HIV/AIDS. It’s chronological and gives an essential understanding of all the factors that contributed to the specific history of the virus’ spread through the US and the rest of the world, the political landscape into which it landed (almost the worst possible)*. Investigative journalism and eyewitness account. Shilts was himself an AIDS casualty in 1994.

AIDS at 30: A History by Victoria Harden

The Origin of AIDS by Jaques Pepin for the science of it all.

Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS.

The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America.

Larry Kramer is a pretty polarising figure and he had issues with the sexual politics of gay New York to begin with (see: Faggots) but he’s polarising for a reason: he’s the epidemic’s Cassandra. Reports from the Holocaust collects his writings on AIDS.

I don’t think I can actually bring myself to read memoirs for the same reason I can’t read about the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia any more. But I have a list: 

The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience

The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project

Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub

Borrowed Time: And AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette

Read or watch The Normal Heart. Read or watch Angels in America. Read The Mayor of Castro Street or watch Milk. Dallas Buyers Club has its issues but it’s also heartbreaking because the characters are exactly the politically unsavory people used to justify the lack of spending on research and treatment. It’s also an important look at the exercise of agency by those afflicted and abandoned by their government/s, how they found their own ways to survive. There’s a film of And the Band Played On but JFC it’s a mess. You need to have read the book.

Some documentaries:

Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989) [hard to find]

How to Survive a Plague (2012)

We Were Here (2011)

Everyone should read about the history of the AIDS epidemic. Especially if you are American, especially if you are a gay American man. HIV/AIDS is not now the death sentence it once was but before antiretrovirals it was just that. It was long-incubating and a-symptomatic until, suddenly, it was not.

Read histories. Read them because reality is complex and histories attempt to elucidate that complexity. Read them because past is prologue and the past is always, in some form, present. We can’t understand here and now if we don’t know about then.