Strangetree - Et In Arcadia Ego

Eastern Prickly Pear Cactus Flower by Neal Linebaugh

Via Flickr:

Ohio's only native cactus

Portraits challenge what it means to be LGBT

These are just some of the many ways members of the LGBT community identify themselves in a beautiful photo series from San Francisco-based photographer Sarah Deragon.

Deragon’s “The Identity Project” has taken her around the country as she “seeks to explore the labels we choose to identify with when defining our gender and sexuality.” Her portraits show the amazing diversity and vibance of a queer community that for too long has been defined by outsiders.

See more and quotes from Deragon

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Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House

Immortal Hulk: queerness, duality

Re-reading Immortal Hulk for my master's thesis and, like. This thing is so queer on every level.

And I'm not talking just about the openly queer characters (Charlene McGowan you'll always be famous), it's more about how Ewing's general obsession with breaking the illusion of duality in his comics sinks in in a way it hadn't when I first read this thing, before transitioning.

Banner is neither man nor monster; he's both. Gamma is neither a wave nor a particle; it's an emanation. It reminds me of Ewing's rejection of Loki being a single immutable entity in Agent of Asgard and canonizing their gender fluidity to make sense of their different identities in a way that's satisfying to both the reader and the character. Ewing is all about breaking the limits and looking further, because staring at the same two things for too long is just going to lead you back to where you started. It's an ouroboros.

The idea that things are only categorized as they are because of the limited scope of the human mind and the fact that this comic's cast is largely made of dysfunctional, peripheric characters who are forced to choose between survival and morality blend seamlessly in very profound ways. Very queer ways.

And this is not on accident; Ewing tends to play around and introduce trans and nonbinary characters in his stories in the same way that he keeps playing with the limits of the Marvel canon. It's like he sees queerness as something logical and inevitable, something that breaks the limits of what was previously established because what was previously established was undeniably limited and single-minded. Limits are not natural, duality is not natural. Seeing past both and looking beyond, however, is.