Fish Tank Lad

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

One of his students finds out about the "human no see plant get sad" phenomenon and gets the class together to make him lil plants for his bubble so he doesn't become sad.

They're children, so the plants are not even vaguely plant shaped. They're mostly just rocks that have been painted with something they're are pretty sure is "green."

Anyway he loves them so much he starts leaking everywhere and puts them in special places all over his bubble. He's incredibly protective of his lil "plants" and is completely devastated when they get confiscated for being accidentally suuuuuper poisonous to humans. So the Eridian scientists make green paint that won't accidentally kill him and his students redo them.