We Should Talk About Water More Often That Shit Is Crazy

we should talk about water more often that shit is crazy

i have been constantly in tears over this newly hatched duck i found on instagram last night

can i also be beautiful if i am dangerous?

Some Cool Facts I learned from Queer, There, and Everywhere: 27 People Who Changed the World by Sarah Prager:

Bisexuality and polyamory were the norm in Han Dynasty China, with many empowers having a female wife and an official male companion. It only ended because Emperor Ai of Han had wanted his male partner, Dong Xian, to succeed the throne.

Queer people had their in own country in Oceania from 2004-2017: The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands

Abe Lincoln had a male “intimate friend” called Joshua Fry Speed

Albert Cashier was a trans Irish immigrant who fought for the Union. His fellow soldiers from the Ninety-Fifth made sure he was buried as a man

Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok were lovers, their correspondances shared after their deaths.

"Are you a boy or a girl?" I'm a punchline.

Ok I've had enough of this "Alastor doesn't know about gay stuff" I keep seeing around. As a history nerd I honestly can't take it anymore.

Kiddos it's time to learn you a few things. First of all, compared to subsequent decades,

The 1920s were incredibly gay

Was it still illegal to perform homosexual acts, yes. Were gay people still abused and lost jobs for being gay, and were even socially excluded from cishet white society? Oh absolutely. Did most individuals have to stay closeted? Duh. But you know what wasn't a wide spread thing yet? The medicalization of homosexuality. Conversion therapy wasn't fully approved of by psychiatrists until the 40's. Crossdressing wasn't considered mental illness, scandalous, yes, but not mental illness. The haze codes were not implemented yet, and the combination of prohibition, the two decades prior of progressivism, and the horrors of world war one left the youngest generation with a rebellious spirit and a desire for breaking the law. And if you lived in a big city, being LGBT in the twenties was often better than being LGBT in the 30s, 40s, or even 50s.

Young rich kids would seek out queer cruising spots in cities as a form of tourism. Harlem was famous for it's yearly drag balls, and many of the most famous black artists at the time were infact lgbt. Broadway and Hollywood were full of individuals who people knew were not entirely straight. Hell, jazz was born in red light districts home to black queer people. In places like New York there were people famous for being openly gay and despite sodomy laws police would not care in the slightest about them.

And though the South was as fucked as it ever was with Jim Crow Laws and the race riots, New Orleans has always been one of the more progressive cities in the South and has always had a very large gay community. Between the inherit campiness and debauchery of Mardi gras to being the birth place of jazz, to new Orleans being the easiest place to get away with breaking prohibition laws in the south, Alastor as a mixed race black radio host playing jazz in New Orleans in the 20s ABSOLUTELY is familiar with the LGBT community of the time.

The thing is, the language used by the community at the time was so fundamentally different that alastor would not know what you are talking about if you spoke to him about modern LGBT issues. The pride flag did not even exist yet. Gay still meant happy to him in his age. "Bisexual" at the time was more akin to the term "trans" than being attracted to multiple genders, and transgender didn't exist yet as a word. But if you called yourself "a confirmed bachelor" he would understand you were a man who liked men. If you called yourself a "fairy" he would know you weren't cis. If you were a woman and told him you liked sapho or Peter pan, he'd know you liked women. And if you were wearing lavender, or a green carnation, a red bowtie, a violet (if you were a woman), or were a man with a peacock feather in your ensemble he would give you a knowing nod. He's not ignorant of the lgbtq. He's a man out of his time. He speaks a different language entirely to modern gay slang, so it seem he doesn't know anything about it. But he does. Gay and trans people have always been a thing and as a radio host, literally being on the forefront of mass media at it's beginnings, in arguably the best decade to be gay in the 20th century before the 60s, in a city so comfortable with what was considered debauchery that it gave birth to "devil music" and embraced it before anyone else, yes he knows what they are. He just doesn't have the modern language to express it.