gayfireflies

there are a ton of wlw nb’s who are sometimes men there are a ton of mlm nb’s who are sometimes women there are plenty of nb’s who are both mlm AND wlw either interchangeable, fluidly, or at the same time.

NOTE: everything i know about music theory i learned from the internet so it very well may all be nonsense; take what i say with a grain of salt. this is long as hell and mainly my ramblings about a song i love with all my heart by one of my favorite artists. all under the cut.

I saw that there were some things that you weren't quite sure about, for example why Sufjan uses she/her pronouns for the wasp. So I thought I might give you my two cents on that, too! My hypothesis for why he chose to do so is solely based on my native language German and I could be totally wrong. I tried to research what kinds of languages Sufjan knows but I didn't get far and I must admit that I only just now discovered his music, so I don't know too much about him and his background yet. Anyways, in German, French, Italian and Spanish (and probably a lot of other languages, too) - which are all languages with a grammatical gender - the wasp's noun marker is the 'female' one. Also, in fables or old literature, animals that were metaphors for certain behaviours or groups of people were sometimes explicitly gendered as 'male' or female', at least in the German translations I know. To me, Sufjan makes it clear that the wasp is a metaphor by using she/her rather than 'it'; had he used 'it', the wasp would have probably been interpreted more often as an animal than as the intangible threat that it is by people who just skimmed over the lyrics und didn't think about them that deeply anyways.

The next thing I want to touch on is the line 'Lamb of god, [...] unto us your ghost is born'. I probably understand it the way I do because I'm translating it wrong but I dOn'T cArE. The word ghost in German has two main meanings, one being a phantom, yk, the supernatural kind, and one being the essence of a person, their wit and mind and esprit and stuff like that, maybe even their soul. I know you said that maybe someone who is more well-versed in interpreting religious imagery will know more about this line and I also know that I really don't know a lot about the bible and it's imagery, but I'm gonna give you my point of view on it anyways, lol. I think that the ghost of the lamb of god is born unto Sufjan and his friend, just like you do, but I see that as being Jesus's 'essence' in a way, i. e. his unconditional love for people. What I'm trying to say is that Sufjan might be comparing the love between him and his friend to Jesus's love, a very strong and pure one. But, I really have to say, I don't know that much about Jesus and the way he loved the people he came in contact with, I'm just basing this on him not judging anybody and living with the leprous and prostitutes.

Also: don’t stigmatize HIV+ individuals because they all have different circumstances and might’ve  gotten the virus from a variety of sources (sex, occupational, birth, blood transfusions in other countries). 

HIV-related stigma remains a huge barrier to preventing HIV, and is linked to a low level of people testing for HIV.