echoes of you

WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME (it's not out yet)

And it was a treat to watch them grow together and on their own. And watch them lean on each other and take from each other and uplift each other. It was amazing to watch them go from casual lovers, to friends, to something in between, and then to boyfriends all without things being fully labeled until the last episode. It was just them choosing to spend more and more time together. It was just them wanting to see each other and talk to each other and eat with each other and have sex with each other.

And also even how the knowledge of their sexualities was refreshing to see. Azuma only told people he wanted to know about him being gay, coming out to the world was not something he wanted. But also being gay was not something he was actively hiding either.

And I do love the full circle moment we get for Kuji from ep 1 to ep 10. The regret he felt for leaving Azuma after their first night together and how happy he was to have found Azuma again. He never stopped thinking about Azuma and the night they shared and I'm glad he decided that this time around he was going to stay with Azuma for himself.

As a person in her mid-30s I relate to Azuma a lot. You're never too old to pursue something new. It's never too late to change trajectories and do something else. It's okay to waffle between interests and jobs until you find something you want to stick with. And it's never too late to go to school if you want to.

There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.

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.