perpetually nasty

My father finds gay men uncomfortable.

He's told me before that it's like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn't consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.

In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn't homophobic. He wouldn't participate in insulting queer people, he didn't care if someone was gay, he wouldn't have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That's how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.

When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.

My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn't believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.

He taught me that just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don't understand this.

I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.

Iceland to Svalbard by buen viaje on Flickr.

Embroidered Sculptures Recreate Lifelike Mushrooms, Lichen, and Fungi in Thread

by Grace Ebert - Colossal, February 25, 2022

Amanda Cobbett suspends a singular moment in the fleeting lives of fungi by stitching their likeness in thread. The textile artist photographs and gathers specimens that she brings back to her Surrey Hills-based studio, where she finds fibers to match pale green lichens and golden chanterelles. Using a free-motion embroidery technique on a sewing machine, she then stitches multiple layers onto a piece of dissolvable fabric that, once the organism is complete, is washed away to leave just the mushroom or mossy bark intact. As a scroll through her Instagram reveals, the resulting sculptures are so realistic in color, shape, and size that it’s difficult to distinguish the artist’s iterations from their counterparts.

Currently, Cobbett is preparing a collection that will head to the Artful Craft exhibition at Make Southwest, which opens on April 2.

Feral Hearts