i was brought in on a palanquin

It’s totally fine if you’re talking about him being a sparkly yaoi blorbo of gay representation when you’re talking about certain specific adaptations of Greek myth that lead with that aspect of his characterization. But I think there’s something missing if you assert that he is a sparkly yaoi blorbo of gay representation in the Iliad and ignore that his establishing scenes set him up as someone thoroughly bought into an honor culture where you earn your positive reputation through the conquest, murder, and enslavement of people, and that includes completely disregarding the bodily autonomy and consent of women and treating them as war-prizes/objects in a gross scorekeeping game.

Like Achilles does end up questioning that system maybe the tiniest bit by the end of the Iliad but not enough to stop doing war and conquest and enslavement and war prizes about it. He will continue to attack Troy even after his temporary truce with Priam reminds him of his own father grieving at home. And I do think the Iliad depicts him as Loving Patroclus This Big, but I feel like part of what makes Achilles compelling is that how that love coexists with his capacity for rage and violence.

I’m also not saying that the Iliad is the one “true” or “original” depiction of Achilles but it is a highly influential early depiction that lays the groundwork for how his story is understood. (And look. I also think we need to talk about depictions like the one in Statius more—or at least know what comes from Statius vs Homer—or like, I think we should also pay attention to the version of Achilles we find in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and other depictions of Achilles in tragedy.) But I do get frustrated when people take the “Achilles was just so in love with Patroclus, omg OTP, ancient gay icons!!11” and see it as the defining feature of these ancient texts where we should probably also be talking about how that intersects with the misogyny and the desecration of corpses and the war crimes.

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

Dir. Luca Guadagnino

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"