a dragon's hoard

my HEAD and i cannot BUILD

IT. snage and snatred

Except I accidentally captioned it, “guys check this out, I’ve got the one and only AO3 grandfather cock.”

Except I accidentally captioned it, “guys check this out, I’ve got the one and only AO3 grandfather cock.”

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 1989. 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.

the most frequent reactions are from people from Not America agreeing that the cultural force of american pride has detracted in some tangible way from their knowledge or recognition of their own history. there’s so many links and references in the notes now, for so many different places. i had a scroll through some of them, that i could find versions of in english. the world has such a rich queer history, and i am inspired by all of the people saying they’re going to go and research more of their own histories. there have been resources shared from all six permanently inhabited continents (none from antartica, yet…), including a lot (relative to the usual zero) from the regions most frequently glossed over in our global queer histories; africa, the middle east, southeast asia, the pacific, and south america. every single person who’s shared a queer historical figure’s name, or a book or other source, or a historical event from their country or culture is doing an important thing by helping to dismantle the US pride hegemony.

the next most frequent reactions are from americans pissing on the poor, and claiming that either it’s not their fault individually because [nebulous reason missing the point] and/or that i’m racist (someone even said fascist lmao?) because the two people i mentioned were Black and latin american… it’s not the fault of those two women nor myself that americans have chosen their faces and names to put at the front of their imperialist pride. cultural imperialism doesn’t have to LOOK racist! you can be unintentionally culturally imperialist and look woke! a lot of the people who do this are queer and liberal or even leftist. the problem is forcing american queer history on the rest of us. shoutout to the Black and latine people in the notes who’ve rightfully pointed out that that’s a bullshit rebuttal. I’ve also noted the autocorrect typo on Marsha’s name, and fixed it, thanks for the heads up.

sort of the point of cultural imperialism is that the people doing it don’t notice it on an individual level. of course you don’t feel like you’re responsible! of course you struggle to see it when the rest of us point it out! that’s by design! if the rest of the world is saying something is a real experience that they’ve had, and you say “well i don’t see it / i’m not responsible for it,” that is blatant denial of a very real issue.

finally, for the love of god, stop using they/them for me, a trans woman who exclusively uses she/her. my pronouns are front and centre on my blog! funny how the people calling me racist and transmisogynistic for Using Examples are also frequently degendering me in the process, huh?

For anyone interested in modern queer Greek history, I’d highly recommend you check out @kaliarda! It’s an archive of queer Greek articles, texts and excerpts, mostly from the 20th century. The name of the blog comes from a queer Greek cant spoken in the 20th century. Finding this blog was very validating for me, as a Greek person.

And also, to anyone who’d read a book about this, a professsor at Columbia, Nikolaos Kakkoufa, is currently working on one! I’ll include an excerpt from his website as a classics professor:

“Titled A Queer History of Modern Greek Writing (1821–2021), it combines cultural and literary history as well as queer theory and reception theory to tell a different story of the birth and evolution of the Greek nation. Through a comparative reading of the work of a range of writers the book examines key elements of the modern nation—race, religion, and family—and traces not only continuities within the history of queer writing in Greece, Cyprus, and their diasporas but also ruptures with the dominant exclusionary narrative(s) of Greekness.”

it’s gotten to the point where i can no longer contain my insanity of it and have to share it with the world, which THEN led to:

a pinterest acc with 200+ followers and counting mainly for jackson’s diary

me getting involved in multiple jackson’s diary discord servers

having 2 rp blogs on tumblr

having a ao3 account just for reading jd fics

anddddd TRIED making edits for it on insta and tiktok

so i’m active on a lot of different platforms, right?? so that means i have a lot of different friends from different apps and fandom backgrounds! and i’ve noticed a pattern:

WE ALL HAVE OPINIONS OF PEOPLE FROM OTHER PLATFORMS

and by platforms i mean pinterest, discord, insta, everything. i tend to hear “oh jd tumblr is so weird!” “jackson’s diary pinterest is cringe!” “the discord server is full of drama!” and im SICK OF IT

YOU ALL LIKE THE SAME PIECE OF MEDIA

SO STOP FIGHTING!!!!!!

anyways that’s it lalala this fandom is a prison and the comic has me in a death grip i can never be free

- 🐸

when my cat got deadly sick she refused to eat a single thing and it had been days but when i started crying she ate just a little bit, and upon seeing how happy it made me, kept doing it whenever she could.

now whenever im sad or crying she finds wherever i am with a mouthful of food and eats the pieces one by one, every time looking up at me making sure i was watching her eat it all because she knew it made me happy. and it DOES make me happy

They look like ship names

“Octopus,” she said, all curls and smiles.

“And what kind of animal is an octopus?” I asked.  I was looking for “fish” or “sea creature” but I would have accepted almost anything–”weird,” “gross,” even “slimy.”  “Underwater” or “it lives in the ocean” would have also been acceptable. 

She looks me right in the eye and says, happy as a clam, “It’s a cephalopod.”