we deserve much better than we've had

Laura, 21, film enthusiast and penis trees blogger.

"it just does not seem like your kind of thing at all. there's no queerness or romance or class issues or history or religious junk!!!!" -tumblr user rubikovs on my narrative priorities

"YOU ARE MY LITERARY SIREN. sitting on the rocks warbling “you should read this booooooooooooook it’s really queeeEEeEeEEeEEEEerrrr” melodically" -tumblr user softkneesdeepedges

"if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,
my god that’s plenty
my god that’s enough
my god that is so, so much for the light to give" - Andrea Gibson

I have a weird relationship with dudeslash shipping in that it has so many issues, w/r/t fetishization and erasure and misogyny AND YET when I was a bbqueer and didn’t yet realize it, gay male pairings in the media/fandom were the most representation I was GETTING. And even now, when I have access to stories about queer women, I still feel a kinship with queer male characters- they’re not like me in that they’re … well, men, but they’re like me in that they mirror the issues I struggled with. I also got really attached to pairings like e/R and Jack/David because a) I was, and am, really into history and so their existence was like “look! People like me in the time periods I’m reading about!” rather than “look! people like me in novels/TV/movies about the endless suckage of life as a queer person, with which I am already accquainted with!” and b) their stories were about revolution and social change at a time when I was just starting to become aware of the fact that I could wield political power if I wanted. I’m not going to argue that dudeslash should be FREE FROM CRITICISM just because it meant/means something to me, or that non-canon dudeslash counts as representation, but I also feel like- and I made a similar post last week- there should be a balance between “m/m isn’t representation” and “m/m is so totally representation! we should have NOTHING ELSE!”