Guava gay

If you’ll all pardon my Americentrism for a moment, the amount, visibility, and flamboyance of Pride merch available in clothing, home goods, and comestibles stores is a DIRECT reflection of how safe it is to be queer in public in the United States.

How? Simple. Out groups aren’t profitable. If you’re not “acceptable” in the current social climate, big franchise businesses will not market to you. (Prime example - Look how quickly Target dropped all their Pride merch after having been wall-to-wall rainbows every June for almost a decade prior.)

Sure, capitalism sucks and being viewed as an exploitable marketing demographic isn’t a fun concept.

HOWEVER.

The grim truth is that being normalized enough to be considered profitable by corporations IS A GOOD THING in terms of the barometer of social acceptance.

Same thing goes for smaller businesses that throw kitschy Pride events or even just put a token rainbow flag in the window or somewhere inside the shop. That’s a level of acceptance that DID NOT EXIST thirty years ago, and I can tell you because I was there.

The fact that we can scoff and bitch about being an exploitable marketing demographic nowadays means we have made GIGANTIC strides since the 1990s. It also speaks to the fact that the drive and the conversation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance are continuing. And getting louder.

You can be cynical about it if you want. But I will take a store that puts out lip-service rainbow merch over a world that pretends we don’t exist any day of the week. Because that will always mean something.

Yet, when they start being included, they are like “well, that’s just capitalism taking advantage of us, so it doesn’t count.” Like, you can’t use your EXCLUSION from something as evidence of general societal marginalization and then claim that once you’ve started to be included, it is politically meaningless. You don’t really get to have it both ways. That’s moving the political goal posts.

I get that we shouldn’t consider Target pride merchandise as like the pinnacle of queer politics or even the pinnacle of queer inclusion. I get that inclusion in capitalist intuitions is a very ambivalent form of social progress. But the truth is, capitalism is a big part of what creates our social reality right now (unfortunately).

Capitalism makes TV shows, and movies, and books, and ads, and greeting cards, and toys, and clothing, and, and…

When every single aspect of commercial social reality excludes queerness, that DOES create a real sense of social alienation. I don’t love that capitalism is responsible for creating so much of our collective social reality. But granting that it does, I think we’re forced to accept that our inclusion in it IS politically and socially important.

This is the school lunch they served us when I was in middle school. I took these photos in 7th grade.

The only thing that changed when I went into high school is that now we're not allowed to use our phones at lunch.

To most American public school kids, this doesn't seem so bad. But the fact that this would be considered a decent lunch in most schools is disgusting. I once found a piece of tape in the "Dominoes" pizza they give us. A nail clipping in mashed potatoes, a hair in the corn. For some kids, school lunch is the only reliable meal of the day, and they're being fed cardboard pizza and soggy mystery slop mixed with a side of trash.

Most people started bringing their own lunches from home freshman year. The kids who couldn't didn't eat anything at all.

Oftentimes, some of my friends beg me to share my lunch with them. It seems light hearted and silly, but I know they're actually hungry. I remember convincing my friend to let me pack her extra food because she was skipping lunch and breakfast, since she had no time to pack anything for lunch or eat breakfast in the mornings, and the school lunch was too gross. She thinks it's normal to constantly be hungry, and her family is pretty well off, so she at least gets a good dinner when she gets home. Some kids don't even have that.

I skipped breakfast one time and I was so hungry I couldn't get anything done at all in my first 3 classes. Then I got to eat lunch. My friend didn't. People go in the lunch line just to have something to do. So much food gets wasted each day. Most of it gets thrown out. Kids play with their food, because the "food potions" we made when we were 5 are just as appetizing as the food we're served now. Some people eat the plastic tasting chicken nuggets, drink the expired milk, because we need food to get us through the day. So we can learn as well as possible. So we can keep up our grades. So we don't get yelled at for falling asleep in class from our 5 hours of sleep and empty stomachs.

It doesn't ever seem like that big of a deal. It's normal now, almost comedic, to have such horrible food. Everyone brushes it off. "Oh yeah public school lunches suck, haha."

But guys. People need food, especially children, to function properly. Eating shouldn't be a privilege.

He loves horror, and creepy things! I KNOW he feels maternal towards the eraserhead baby, and he probably had a small crush on a few horror movie slasher characters, namely Michael Myers or Candyman if I had to guess.

He canonically owns his brain scans from when he was possessed (Via Hopper getting them after he asks him too), A photo of a demogorgon (Via Jonathan after Will asked.), and a skull anatomy photo (Via Mr. Clarke).

He should have more creepy and off putting Headcanons about him.