lesbians, mostly

[“This new community Gloria and Cherríe and Audre opened through their writing made room for a multitude of lesbians, and also the multitude that existed within Gloria. My college linguistics professor shared only one part of the woman when she handed out xeroxed PDFs that described how Gloria was punished in grade school every time she spoke Spanish—three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler, like what the nuns would give my father when he spoke out of turn. We analyzed how Anzaldúa mixed languages, one of the first to capture the way her community spoke, without ever translating for her audience. The professor chose which parts of her to share and excised the rest.

this is like. genuinely the absolute best thing ever

“Shaving for men is not the same as makeup for women, you know, even though they are similar rituals on the face of it, so to speak. Shaving is a revelation, a paring off of layers of dirt, dead skin, and unwanted bristle. It lays bare the man, and he can’t hide from himself. But makeup is a pasting over of the cracks, a concealment— not a conceit, because makeup can only work with what you’ve got in the first place. It’s a guessing game, but one that intrigues me. I love women in makeup. I want to know what’s underneath but without removing the pancake, mascara, lipstick. No, they’re not dolls. They are actors in an ancient theatre, real people playing fantasies, actors playing characters wearing comic or tragic masks. I am as fascinated by the mask as I am curious to remove it. So I stroll up to that unisex hairdresser someone recommended. I want a short back and sides like my dad; I want it really short, so short that no one will be able to resist running her hands over my hair, against the direction of growth, to feel it bristle busily under her palms. No one, thank god, can resist that bristle. Yeah, I want it to cut and bristle; I want clean straight lines. Then up the West End. Oxford Street, New Bond Street, Knightsbridge? Yeah, let’s go to the posh places, get good clothes with a good cut, dole out a bit more dosh because it’s going to be worth the extra. I want to cut a clean straight line. I want a suit, a nice tailored sharp man’s suit, and a smooth pair of boots I can see my face in. I want a crisp shirt that feels like it crackles when I move. Listen to me: sharp, cut, bristle, crisp, crackle; like breakfast cereal. I’ll make so much noise that they’ll hear me coming before I arrive. I want to cut a clean straight line.”

white man moments in the pitt's writing:

sometimes i think about how samira's dad dying launched her career into an endless loop of being extremely thorough to prevent mistakes like the one that killed her dad -> being told she's too slow -> speeding up to be a good resident and ending up making a mistake -> making herself feel incredibly guilty for her mistake because in her head that means she's causing someone the same grief that she's felt since she was 13 -> deciding that she has to be better to prevent this from happening -> becoming more thorough to prevent mistakes -> figuring out that it's impossible to prevent mistakes and that any attempt is futile -> beating herself up over it and trying anyway -> ♾️

Again, inspired by the comment section in this post