antti

Spent a solid five hours on this chainmail piece to put on the panel around the enzyme patch. Didn’t look up how to do it in the most effective way so it took way longer than it needed. Counting, recounting, fixing mistakes, opening and closing ten million little rings with the wrong pliers…. I have never been this angry at a craft before. Currently doing some tests on how to age the rings so they wont be as clean and shiny looking. How I will be attaching them to the jacket is a problem for later…

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 1989. 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.

I Want You To Quiet Down by Patrica Grullon

2011, acrylic and ink on wood

Like yes, dumbass, “men aren’t allowed to cry” because crying is seen as feminine and feminine is weakness, because they hate women and see women and everyone resembling or “reminding” them of women as lesser than. Also that statement as a “hurdurdur men suffer too” token is stupid as fuck. Women aren’t allowed to cry either, when they do they’re sent to psychiatric hospitals and called overly emotional and hysterical, erratic, crazy.

Feminine gay men / also feminine straight men get mocked, abused and harassed, stalked and murdered for looking feminine, for being “womanly” , for being too weak and for not acting like a Man. Why? Because they hate women.

URREEGHHHHHHHHJJJJJJJHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGHHDHHHHHHH