MYSS VAN DER ROHE

Ants are a form of thing, known for travelling in cliques. They are small in size, unknown in color, and bashful in temperament. Every ant has two appendages they use to hurt other beings, and four appendages for other activities. Scientists have discovered many types of ants; gay, Protestant, electric, and chill. Their wealth is considered low.

All stories are real

FICTION = REALITY

ancient peoples loooved a flood narrative it was kinda like their beatles

efforts towards a "positive vision of masculinity" or whatever are so funny because what these guys are trying to figure out is literally "what's a way of being a good person that's Not For Girls™"

But like genuinely. "humans have an innate need for spirituality" should be pretty transparently a reactionary opinion. It's simply not true and equates something that some people get benefit from with it being a fundamental aspect of being human (and one that is missing it most people today). You gonna start arguing "children *need* fathers or they grow up broken" next?

Queer people do not need to get into norse gods, queer people need dialectical materialism.

To be entirely honest I find the idea that queer people need spirituality at all quite insulting, and the unfortunately widespread insistence that there's some metaphysical spiritual element to queerness is rather counterproductive and (to put it bluntly) really fucking annoying.

but can we TALK about the racialized subtext of "his wife has filled his house with chintz" linking together femininity, indian export goods, commercialism, and superficiality vs "to keep it real I fuck him on the floor" linking together masculinity, AAVE, authenticity, sexuality, and vulgarity? if our aim as critics of poetry is to reevaluate this text and arrive at a feminist interpretation then we must also consider the poem's vexed relationship to race so as to not be anti-black in our criticism of the piece's presentation of masculinized sexuality nor uncritically reproduce and elevate its image of orientalized femininity.

also, from looking at the original post (non-explicit gay sex photo but still a gay sex photo so you've been warned): there isn't even any chintz in the photo. the design elements in the room all look broadly western european with the exception of a tall ceramic vessel that may be decorated with a reproduction of a chinese ink painting. chintz is an indian textile pattern, you'll see it on dresses, bedspreads, wallpaper, tapestries, upholstery, etc., but nothing like that is in the image. to imply that the house's interior design is frivolous, artificial, and unusable, the poem utilizes "chintz" despite the obvious lack of chintz because "chintz," as a popular asian export good that went on to be imitated by european manufacturers, is considered kitsch, cheap, and womanly. and, though the angle partially obscures them, the two men in the photo both appear to be white, so the poem uses the AAVE phrase "keep it real" despite the lack of black people to invoke the perception of AAVE as raw, crass, and primal. in both cases, the racialized language is being ascribed to european/white subjects to impart the white subjects with different moral values.

Online Imagined Black English by Manuel Arturo Abreu re the last point!