sorreh

(The best of this post and its reblogs, but with links that work)

Here is a website where you can scroll down to all the different levels of the ocean 

Here is a website where you can see the future of the universe

Here is a website where you can press a ‘make everything okay’ button, over and over, until things really are okay

Here is a website that you can read if you feel like a burden

Here is a website where you can look at strobe illusions (TW strobe/flashing)

Here is a website where you can cut stuff up (TW blood/sh)

Here and here are websites where you can play with sand

Here is a website where you can draw with macaroni and other fun foods

Here is a website where you can paint someone’s nails

Here is a website where you can grow a garden with emojis

Here is a website with hundreds of videos of people hugging you (rightfully dubbed ‘the nicest place on the internet’ because it really is, y’all, it made me cry)

Here is a website that will take you to other useless websites

Here is a website where you can make a tiny cat play bongo drums (and other instruments!)

Here is a website to help give you gentle reminders <3

Here is a website where you can grow a tiny farm

Here is a website where you can take a bunch of scientific personality tests

Here is a website of calm rain noise

He was born in 1919 and he was gay.

Everyone in the family knew. It became an unspoken secret. And here’s the part people don't really say about the past: he wasn’t cast out. He wasn’t beaten. He wasn’t disowned.

They loved him. They were a close‑knit family.

What they did instead was play a game called pretend.

They never said it out loud. When the family gathered for holidays, his siblings brought their spouses. Uncle Bill came alone. His partner wasn't invited, of course. They didn't even want to know he had a partner. When children asked why Uncle Bill wasn’t married, the adults smiled and said, “He’s just a bachelor.”

That answer was given to my mother in the 1950s. To my sister in the 1970s. And to me in the 1980s.

People like the Duffer brothers seem imagine that the past was only made up of violent, cartoonish homophobes. And sadly, there were a lot of those, just like there still are today. But some families were “fine” with gay people—as long as they were quiet. As long as they didn’t ask for the same things. As long as they didn’t bring love to the table.

Uncle Bill was accepted on one condition: He sat alone.

So when a modern show frames a gay boy’s arc as “learning to accept himself without expecting love in return,” that’s not radical. That’s not brave. That’s not new.

That story is over a hundred years old.

It’s the story of being tolerated, not chosen. Of being loved in theory, but denied in practice. Of being welcome—so long as you don’t make anyone uncomfortable.

My Uncle William lived that life in 1919. We don’t need to keep calling it progress.

I know a lot of people on here are young. So take the pain you're feeling now and remember it as you get older. Write your own stories that embrace what this show denied. Write the story you wanted Byler to be. Be the generation that stops telling this tired old story.